Fight hard and forget the difference between victory and defeat

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): Sir, my question to you is that in a lot of your talks and even now, you redirect our focus towards ourselves as living beings. As living beings, all of us seek contentment and happiness. So my question to you is; how does one be content without being complacent? How does one achieve that? Contentment without being complacent.

Acharya Prashant (AP): See, complacency can be there only when you have just not bothered to inquire into the facts of your life. Otherwise, it is impossible to be smug and ultra-confident about your state. None of us, factually, are in a great state internally. It’s an unfortunate fact, but a fact is a fact. So there is sickness; there is incompleteness, there is dissatisfaction and there is psychosis and we are anxious and we are afraid.

When the placement season comes, then we are jittery. When the next fellow gets a higher pay package then we are jealous. We know all these things are there. Knowing all these things if we still certify ourselves to be internally healthy, then there is something very wrong with our compass of honesty.

Either that or we are so afraid that we just do not even want to enquire within, “Am I ok? Why did I…