A year before coming back to Oxford as a Smithies Lecturer, my colleague asked me ‘what would you like to see at the end of your life?’ This question struck me since I never really thought about it until that point. Indeed we would never be asked this question in university evaluation, conference, publishing nor job market. Value of being an academic is very diverse which really depends on how a person lives. However as I discussed this with various other leading academics during my sabbatical year 2023, I realised that this question is extremely important for all researchers and scholars so that our academic work produces something valuable for society, not just a pile of papers that few people will ever read, or just to keep somebody’s career going, or to fill a personal satisfaction. Being aware of the real value of academic work will also be important in fostering future generations, thereby building a healthy society as a whole. Starting from Max Weber’s famous thesis ‘Science as Vocation’ (1922), I would like to discuss this with all of you, giving a viewpoint of ‘super minority’ – somebody who has never been in a majority in any of the societies that she has belonged to – as a food for thought.