Aayushi Munjal, Co-Founder of DreamtoRank, appeared for UPSC six times, faced repeated failures, self-doubt, and emotional pressure, and turned every setback into a teaching career that now helps thousands of aspirants build strategy, resilience, and the mindset to keep going.
Aayushi Munjal: What 6 UPSC Attempts Taught Her That No Book Ever Could, A Story of Failure, Resilience, and the Courage to Keep Showing Up
What does it take to keep chasing one dream after failing again and again?
For Aayushi Munjal, the answer was never simple. It was never inspiring in the moment. It was never the kind of strength that looks beautiful from the outside. It was the quiet, unglamorous, daily decision to sit back down at the desk after yet another result that did not go her way. To open the books again. To revise the strategy. To ask herself the hardest question any aspirant ever faces: should I continue, or should I stop?
Aayushi Munjal chose to continue. Six times. And what she built from those six attempts is something that no single success could have created.
The UPSC Dream and the Reality That Followed
Aayushi Munjal’s UPSC journey was never a straight road to success. Like the vast majority of civil services aspirants in India, she entered the examination with clarity of purpose and the willingness to work hard. What she could not fully prepare for was the reality of what multiple attempts actually feel like — the long preparation hours that stretch across years, the changing strategies, the emotional lows that settle in after each result, and the constant internal negotiation between hope and exhaustion.
After appearing for the UPSC Civil Services Examination six times, Aayushi Munjal experienced firsthand what many aspirants quietly go through but rarely talk about openly. The pressure was not just academic. It was personal, social, and deeply psychological: the weight of family expectations, the self-doubt that grows louder with each unsuccessful attempt, and the uncertainty of not knowing whether the next attempt will be different.
For Aayushi Munjal, those six attempts were not six failures. They were six intensive courses in the most important subjects that no coaching centre teaches: strategy, consistency, resilience, and the mental strength to keep showing up when the journey demands more than you thought you had.
What Multiple Attempts Actually Teach You
The most significant insight that Aayushi Munjal carries from her UPSC journey is one that challenges the conventional narrative around competitive examination preparation: sometimes, changing your strategy is more important than studying harder.
Most aspirants who face repeated failure respond by increasing the hours they study. Aayushi Munjal learned that this instinct, while understandable, often misses the actual problem. The issue is frequently not the quantity of preparation but the quality of the approach, the way information is processed, retained, and applied under examination conditions.
Across six attempts, Aayushi Munjal developed an understanding of the UPSC examination that goes far deeper than the syllabus. She learned where aspirants make their biggest mistakes, how self-doubt derails preparation in ways that are invisible until you are inside them, and what it actually means to stay consistent during a preparation journey that can stretch across years of a person’s life.
That accumulated wisdom is not something that can be found in any standard preparation resource. It is earned through experience the kind of experience that Aayushi Munjal paid for with years of her time, her emotional energy, and her willingness to begin again, even when beginning again was the last thing she wanted to do.
Turning Failure Into a Teaching Career
Instead of allowing failure to define her, Aayushi Munjal made a decision that transformed both her own life and the lives of thousands of aspirants who would come after her. She turned her experiences into learning and her learning into teaching.
Today, Aayushi Munjal is a UPSC educator and Co-Founder of DreamtoRank, where she uses her own journey to help aspirants understand the examination in a way that goes beyond books and coaching. The lessons she shares are not theoretical. They are drawn directly from the six attempts, the failures, the strategy changes, and the emotional struggles that shaped her understanding of what the UPSC Civil Services Examination actually demands.
In her Josh Talk, Aayushi Munjal opened up about the difficult phases of her preparation journey with honesty and transparency that resonated deeply with aspirants who recognised their own experiences in her words. She spoke about the reality of preparing over multiple attempts, the importance of managing self-doubt and emotional pressure, the mistakes that unnecessarily cost aspirants, and the practical mindset shifts that separate those who eventually succeed from those who give up too soon.
The Message That Matters Most
At the heart of everything Aayushi Munjal teaches is a message that applies not just to UPSC aspirants but to anyone pursuing a long and difficult dream: setbacks are not the opposite of progress. Sometimes, they become the biggest part of it.
The UPSC examination is one of the most demanding in the world. The preparation it requires is not measured in months but in years. The emotional cost of repeated failure is real and significant. And the question of when to continue and when to stop is one that every serious aspirant eventually faces.
Aayushi Munjal does not offer easy answers to that question. What she offers instead is something more valuable — her own story, told honestly, with all the difficulty and doubt and determination intact. A story that reminds every aspirant sitting with a result they did not want that their journey is not over. That the experience they are building through struggle has more value than they can currently see. And that the decision to keep showing up, even when it is hard, is itself a form of progress.
Whether you are preparing for UPSC, SSC, state PCS, or any other competitive examination, Aayushi Munjal’s journey is a reminder that dreams worth chasing are rarely won quickly. And the people who eventually reach them are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who refused to stop when stopping felt like the only reasonable option.
Aayushi Munjal refused. Six times. And in doing so, she built a career, a platform, and a voice that is now helping thousands of aspirants find their own reasons to refuse as well.
