How to Overcome Rejections and Failures?
Questioner: Please guide us on how to overcome rejections or failures at a young age. Youngsters are very susceptible to depression, anxiety, stress, and even suicide. What should they do when they feel that they are failing or being rejected again and again?
Acharya Prashant: See, what is it that you love playing? Any sport you are interested in?
Questioner: I love cricket.
Acharya Prashant: You love cricket. Tell me of something that you are just not interested in.
Questioner: I am not interested in basketball.
Acharya Prashant: In basketball. And somebody just pushes you hard to become the top basketball player in the country, and you prepare and train for six months just because you have been pushed to do all that, right? And then you go for the trials and selections and you are rejected there. Now, should you be depressed, or should you celebrate?
Questioner: Sir, in that case I will just try again.
Acharya Prashant: You will try again for something you have no heart in?
Questioner: No, in the first place, I will try something that my heart is in…
Acharya Prashant: Right! So, how do you deal with that rejection you got into? You went to basketball trials, and you went to basketball trials just because, let’s say your family told you that it is a tradition in our family. “We all have been basketball players. That’s your grandpa. Look at the huge thing in his hand; that’s supposed to be a basketball. Then that’s your granny; she too was a basketball player, the top one in her village. So, it’s a tradition. You have to do it.”
So, you go for it and you try for six months and then you get rejected. Apply your wits. Is it a matter of mourning or celebration?
Questioner: Celebration.
Acharya Prashant: That’s how you deal with rejections. You anyway never wanted those things.
So many people write the UPSC. The fact is, they actually never wanted to clear it in the first place. When I was writing one of these exams—I don’t remember which one, one of the all India exams, probably UPSC civil services—I think it was my father, he said, “The number of candidates that are appearing appears to be in several lakhs, but it’s not against several lakhs you are competing.” The number of seats that particular year had been drastically reduced—two hundred or three hundred seats, that’s all. The number of applicants was five, eight, ten lakhs, something.
“But then, you are not competing with those many. For these two hundred seats, you are competing with at most two thousand, four thousand applicants, because the others are anyway appearing for namesake. They have filled up the form because their fathers wanted them to, or because they had nothing else, nothing better to do in life and everybody was all the time poking them, ‘What are you doing? What are you busy with?’ So, they filled out the form and now they can respectfully say, ‘You know, I am a UPSC aspirant.’” If these people get rejected, why must they be depressed? You anyway never wanted it!
It appears amusingly stupid to not want something and then get depressed upon not getting it. Think of the situation. There is something that you never heartfully wanted. Had you heartfully wanted it, there is a great probability you would have obtained it. The fact is, you were pushed into it or you just drifted into it. Knowing nothing else to do, you just drifted into it. Some unconscious type of desire pushed you towards a particular target or object. Your heart was never into it. Your consciousness, your discretion was never into it, and that’s the primary reason you don’t get it.
Obviously, there can be other reasons also, but the primary reason generally is that you never put your whole energy, your entire self into it, because that was not something that you loved from your core. The kind of energy that is needed to uplift life can arise only from a loving core. In some sense, it is only love that can never be defeated or is very, very hard to defeat. That which you call as normal desire is so easy to defeat.
You are desirous of one thing. The salesman displays something more attractive to you. What do you do? Your desire immediately flips, does it not? The same thing does not apply to love because love involves consciousness. You have chosen something after due discretion. You are going for something because you know that the thing is indispensable. It’s not just random, whim, fad, fetish; it’s a thing of the heart. “I know myself. I know what I need, and I have to go after it. Now, who can stop me?”
Mostly your rejections are worth celebrating. Those were needless burdens, responsibilities put upon you by authoritarian and deceptive forces.
Saint poet Kabir Das, there is a beautiful one from him:
“Bhala hua meri matki phooti; ab main pania bharan se chooti (It’s good that my clay pot broke; now I will be free from filling it with water daily).”
He is not getting depressed; he is celebrating.
“And if somebody else had put this pot on my head and entrusted me with the responsibility to daily fetch water from some far away well or tank or something, and my success was to be measured against my quickness in fetching the water and the fullness of the pot—that was supposed to be a determinant of how successful my life is, right? If I can quickly rush and fetch a lot of water and make multiple trips to that well, get a lot of water and do that quite rapidly, then I would be declared successful. But even if the world declares me successful because of all this pot business, does that fulfill my core? Does it? Does it?”
So, one day that pot falls and breaks, and the poet sings, “ Bhala hua meri matki phooti —great that I have now been defeated. Ab main pania bharan se chooti . This was an external imposition; this is not something I was doing out of love. An artificial duty had been imposed on me: ‘You have to be successful this way.’ Great, now I have met defeat. Kindly relieve me. Declare me a failure, tattoo it on my forehead, and let me go. I am okay. Call me a defeat, call me a failure, call me a reject, call me whatever you want to, but spare me. Let me live freely.”
On the other hand, if your target is arising from your core, then it is the love for the target that keeps you going all your life. There can be no rejection because there is always a continuous attempt. So, how can you be depressed? You want something so wholeheartedly that you will never stop trying for it. Now, tell me, where is the rejection? Tell me, where is the final failure?
And that’s probably the only way to live, especially as a young person, no?—to be in love; to do something only because it deserves to be done. And it’s so lovely, so compelling, so beautiful that it becomes irresistible. You cannot not do it. You cannot not love it. Now, tell me, where is failure?
So, the problem does not lie in defeat or failure or rejection; the problem lies in the choice of the goal. The question has to be: Where are your goals coming from? How did something become your goal? How have you started wanting something? How exactly does that happen?
And the quality of your choice depends on the quality of your being, the quality of the chooser within. If you are inwardly asleep, then all your choices will arise from very nebulous, very vague kind of criteria. They would not be choices in the real sense of the word; they would be like the toss of a dice—a three could show up, one could show up, six could show up. Have you chosen? It’s a blind toss. Anything can show up. You have not chosen something; randomly stuff is happening with you.
And in biological life, there is only randomness, just randomness. In conscious life, there is conscious choice arising from a single criterion, and that criteria is freedom. Randomness has no criteria. If there is some criterion, it can no more be called randomness.
In the internal life, there has to be a single criterion, a single criterion against which you determine your choices. What is that criteria? Freedom. Betterment. Liberation. Growth. “Is this making me better? Is this widening, deepening my consciousness? Am I learning something from this? Am I becoming more fearless out of this?” That’s what should determine the choice.
And when your choices come from there, then you can take defeats in your stride. Then you say, “Fine. It’s a lifelong journey. It’s something I have to continuously do. It’s such a humongous project it can never get over.” Will you ever say that your love for something has exhausted? You don’t want to say that, right?
So, the project has to be an eternal one. Now, what is rejection? What is failure? And it’s such an interesting thing, you see. When you make small targets, then you face failures. And when you make huge targets, then there can be no failure. When you make unconscious targets, then there can be failure. But when you make conscious targets in love, then there can be no failure. So, all the failure thing is actually symptomatic of inner sleep.
