What the Bhagavad Gita says about failure
Arjuna asks the question most books of this kind avoid. In 6.37 he wants to know what happens to the person who tries sincerely, does not manage it, and dies having fallen short. Not the wicked. The one who put in the work and failed.
Krishna's answer in 6.40 is one of the warmest lines in the book: no one who does good comes to a bad end, here or anywhere. 6.43 adds that the effort is not lost, and that a person picks up where they left off, which treats progress as something that accumulates rather than something that resets.
18.26 supplies the practical version for ordinary setbacks. The clear worker is unchanged by success and by failure, not indifferent to them but not altered by them, and the test is what a bad result does to the next attempt. And 18.48 is the line to keep when something you chose turns out to have a flaw in it: every undertaking is wrapped in some fault, as fire is wrapped in smoke.
The verses 10
2.38
Treat pleasure and pain as the same.
2.47
Your claim is on the action alone, never on its fruits.
6.37
Arjuna said: One who has trust but does not strive, whose mind wanders from the practice - failing to reach completion in it, what road does he go, Krishna?
6.40
Krishna said: Partha, there is no destruction for him, not here and not beyond.
6.41
Reaching the worlds of those who did good, and living there for endless years, the one fallen from the practice is born again in the house of the honest and the prosperous.
6.43
There he regains the connection of understanding that belonged to his former body, and from there he strives further toward completion.
12.18
The same toward enemy and friend, the same in honour and dishonour, the same in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, free of clinging…
18.26
Free of clinging, not talking about himself, full of resolve and energy, unchanged whether it works or fails: that doer is called clear.
18.48
The work you were born to should not be given up even though it has faults in it, Arjuna.
18.58
With your thought on me you will get past every hard place by my grace.