Acharya Prashant addresses the issue of overcoming rejection and failure, particularly among young people. He begins by using an analogy, asking the questioner about a sport he is not interested in, which is basketball. He then posits a scenario where the questioner is pushed hard to become the top basketball player in the country, trains for six months, and then gets rejected. He asks whether this rejection should be a cause for depression or celebration. The speaker suggests it should be a celebration because the rejection frees the individual from a path they had no heart in. This is how one should deal with rejections concerning things one never truly wanted in the first place. He extends this logic to real-life situations, such as the many people who take competitive exams like the UPSC. He states that the fact is, most of them never actually wanted to clear it in the first place. They were pushed into it by family, societal pressure, or because they had nothing better to do. For such individuals, getting rejected is a blessing, not a reason for depression, because they were never truly invested. He quotes the saint-poet Kabir Saheb: "It is good that my pot broke; I am now free from the chore of fetching water." This verse illustrates that being freed from a needless, externally imposed burden is a cause for celebration. The rejection is a defeat of an artificial duty, not of the self. Conversely, when one pursues something out of deep love and conscious choice, the dynamic of failure and rejection changes entirely. The energy needed to uplift life can only arise from a loving core. Love, he explains, is very hard to defeat. When your target arises from your core, from a conscious choice based on the criterion of freedom and betterment, the pursuit becomes a lifelong, eternal project. In such a journey, there can be no final failure or rejection because the process is continuous. The problem, therefore, does not lie in the defeat or rejection itself, but in the initial choice of the goal. If the choice is not conscious and does not come from a place of love, it is like a random toss of a dice, and failure is symptomatic of this inner sleep. However, when you make conscious targets in love, there can be no failure.
