I spent almost my entire professional life in sales. My career began by selling consumer durables across small towns — heavy travel, meeting new people every day, explaining again and again why they should buy what I was offering. Fear of failure keeps us cautious; fear of ignorance rarely gets the same attention, even though only one of them can actually be corrected once you see it.
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Roughly ninety percent of my sales calls ended in rejection.
In the beginning, I thought people were rejecting me. Some days passed without a single sale, and I went home questioning my own ability, occasionally wondering whether I was even meant for the profession at all.
Fortunately, my seniors had already walked this road. They never taught me how to avoid rejection — they taught me how to observe it. What they were really teaching me was human behaviour: the assumptions I didn’t know I was carrying into every conversation. Most of my eventual efficiency came not from the sales I made, but from the ones I lost.
Fear of Failure vs. Fear of Ignorance
I started storing every rejection deliberately. Each conversation became information. Information slowly turned into patterns. Patterns turned into understanding. I began talking more with the customers who refused to buy than with the ones who said yes right away. Rejection stopped looking like failure and started looking like an opportunity to reduce my own ignorance.
Failure, I realised, is visible. It tells you exactly where reality disagrees with you. Ignorance doesn’t announce itself the same way — it stays silent, sometimes for years, while you keep believing you understand something you don’t.
Most of the lessons that actually mattered to me never arrived through success. They arrived through outcomes I didn’t want, outcomes that forced me to look more carefully at what had actually happened.
Only later did I come across another verse from the Gita that described, almost exactly, what I’d already been living through in a sales territory that had nothing to do with scripture.
सुखदुःखे समेकृत्वा लाभालाभौ जयाजयौ ।
ततो युद्धाय युज्यस्व नैवं पापमवाप्स्यसि ।
Sukha-duhkhe same krtva labhalabhau jayajayau;
Tato yuddhaya yujyasva naivam papam avapsyasi.
“Treat pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat alike. Then engage in your work, and in doing so you shall not incur bondage.”
For years, I measured every effort by success and failure. My attention was never fully on reality — it was on protecting myself from the failure part of that equation.
Turning Rejection Into Understanding
Years later I understood that my sales career had been teaching me the same lesson in a completely different language. The moment success inflated me, learning slowed down. The moment failure discouraged me, learning slowed down again, just as much. Both were emotional distractions from the actual work, which was observation.
Only when the mind stayed available for observation could feedback become understanding, and only then could understanding improve the next decision.
The real danger was never failure. Failure was simply reality correcting an assumption I’d been carrying. The greater danger was ignorance — because ignorance lets you repeat the same assumption indefinitely, without ever being forced to question it.
I no longer see failure as the opposite of success. I see it as one of reality’s most honest teachers. The real danger was never failing. It was staying comfortably unaware — and that comfort, I would later learn, is a much harder thing to outgrow than any single failed call. In the end, choosing fear of failure over fear of ignorance is choosing the easier discomfort.
— Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice.