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 just start trembling?” I mean, I am standing in front of that interview room, let’s say it is a Daisy Rowe company and I suddenly find myself weak in the knees and shaking in my trousers; why is that happening? It is a very real happening, it is actually physical. You can’t even say that “It was inside, so I didn’t see it.” It is there in the body. You cannot deny its presence. But having seen all that, if we still want to insist that we are happy and this and that, then there is a great problem.

Now coming to contentment; contentment is just the very last thing. At your stage in life, as a young person, you should have a lot of dissatisfaction. Because if you settle at the point you already are; inwardly, outwardly, within, without; then you would be settling at a very sub-optimal point, your potential is far higher. So there is no point talking of contentment at this stage because being what we are at this age and stage, we do not even know what contentment is…