Be sincere even with your wrong choices

Acharya Prashant
5 min readMar 1, 2020

Whatever you are doing, there has to be honesty in that. What is important is: you cannot say one thing and do another thing.

If you look at the great scientific discoveries and inventions, the scientist or the explorer would be busy in his chosen area of pursuit, having disregarded everything else.

Columbus set out for India. And you very well know for how long a period was he on the seas. And he was not reaching anywhere. Certainly, he was not reaching India, because he was not even headed towards India.

Now, in that period if you would have gone to him, and looked at him: the food material, the ration, as well as the motivation, all were in short supply. You would have said that this fellow is a fool, he has left everything. In fact, he has left the entire continent for the sake of nothing. Not only that, he is going in the wrong direction as well. But look at what he got. He got America.

He got America because what he was doing was not a pretense. He was doing it sincerely. At times there were rebellions on his little ship, people even thought of killing Columbus. They said that let us get rid of this man, throw him in water, and return.

But he persevered.

It doesn’t matter what you are chasing.

Be very-very sincere.

You must know that you are committed to it.

And you must be very-very assured that you are not blindly chasing something. You understand that, that which you are looking for is important.

Discovering an entire continent is important. Finding a new sea-route to India was important. So, if this fellow feels that there is something very important that he must discover, let him get into it. Let him plunge into it.

The only condition is: if you are doing it, do it fully.

Do it completely, do it honestly.

If you have left behind one kind of life, if you have left behind one kind of job, at least do the other job honestly, diligently.

Work really hard.

You have all the right to make a choice. But if you make a choice and don’t do justice to it, then that is very bad.

Acharya Prashant