Dear friends,
My post last week about karma yoga and Voltaire’s Candide made me think about my own karma or work life over the past three decades. Particularly, I thought about what fallback principles helped me tide over the more challenging moments of my career. Like most of us, workplace woes plagued me from time to time—to put it mildly—when I held conventional corporate jobs before settling into the life of a consultant, thankfully.
I tend to think more with my heart than with my head, much like St. Exupery’s character, The Little Prince, and that’s mostly a disaster in the conventional corporate world. The Bhagavad Geeta entered my life around 12 years back and was a welcome change, as it seemed to have practical nuggets of wisdom to address every conceivable situation in life. What I had thought growing up was a bunch of theory, was anything but—it was better than any best-selling life manual on the market today, and it’s free! Often, I found myself falling back on two core principles for workplace issues, both of which are interlinked. I’ll explain each in a separate post.
Let me start with the famous verse 47 from the Chapter 2 of the Geeta. It offers a wealth of wisdom applicable in every aspect of life, not just work.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
Karmanye vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana
mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ’stvakarmaṇi
Literally translated, it means:
Your right is only to work, but never to its fruits
Let the fruit of action be not your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction
Simply put, your duty is to do your work, and never to focus on the results.
What? Is that possible? Yes, not only is it possible, what a relief it is, if you think about it.
Why?
Just imagine for a moment, the gargantuan weight we carry on our shoulders from expectations. Yes, the “e” word! Expectations from anything and everyone—a project we are leading—may it be a success, please; an Instagram reel you are working on—will it get any likes or will I look like a fool?; a fiscal end-of-year presentation to senior management—will they be impressed, will I get that fat raise? Or in life, we have expectations from our spouse, partner, and of course, our kids, oh my gosh!
Now, just for a second, set those mental expectations aside. Imagine yourself just in the moment, doing the work you are supposed to, still marching towards your goal, mind you—enjoying a weekly Teams project meeting with colleagues, or just pouring your heart out into recording the reel on mindfulness; or creating a fun snazzy slide with annual work accomplishments—boy, I did do well this year!
Don’t you feel a 100 lbs figuratively lighter right away? Doesn’t work become more fun, almost like a walk in the park, if the outcomes don’t matter? Doesn’t time feel suspended?
Don’t fall for the saga of your misplaced imaginations.
That’s what verse 47 from the Chapter 2 of the Geeta is about—it explains that we expend endless energy worrying about a task at hand either because (a) we are afraid to fail at it or (b) because we might just not get the expected result. All our energies are focused on the aftermath of the work at hand. The Geeta explains that our worries about results come from misplaced imaginations, because that’s all our worries about the future results are at the end of the day—figments of our imagination construed in full artistic steam. The bane of life and all failures in life can be directly traced to this lack of mental poise, a feeling of nervous energy, triggered by our fear of failure.
How then do you avoid this mental dissipation of energy?
By crisply focusing on the action at hand. Not only do you then get the job done, but doing the action well, is in fact our reward!
Let’s think about that again—our action itself is our reward.
In last week’s post on Candide, we met the Turkish gardener, who simply chooses to cultivate his garden. No, he has no interest in national affairs or the politics of his state. He simply focuses on the action of tending to his garden. We must all be that gardener in our life, simply repeating meaningful actions in the present leading us to our end destination, without thinking about the destination itself or its results. Taking the gardening analogy further, practically speaking, when we dig the ground, we can’t be thinking about weeding the garden well, and when we pluck out the weeds, we can’t focus on how much more or less we must water the garden. Or they’ll all be somewhat done—weeding, watering, digging—and the garden will be far from being well cultivated. In fact, we might not get a harvest at all!
Swami Chinmayananda notes in his introduction to the Bhagavad Geeta, that “The past is dead; the future is not yet born. If one becomes unhealthy and inefficient in the present, certainly he has no reason to hope for a greater future.”
It’s in the present that the future is born. If we don’t perfect our present actions, we might as well abandon any hopes for a bright future.
Our action itself is our reward
Reward is not an airy-fairy distant recognition from someone saying, hey, job well done, or that was a brilliant presentation, or giving yourself a pat on the back. Those don’t hurt certainly, but they are simply words or gestures of recognition, not actions—definitely not your actions, and in that sense, they are somewhat meaningless. The actions leading you towards the successful completion of a task are yours, so take pride in them, as they are your ultimate reward. The pride, logically, must come from completing your own action, isn’t it?
Reward for an action therefore is nothing but performing the action itself because it gets the karma or the task accomplished, setting you up for success! When I transitioned to the life of a consultant, I left a well-paying full-time career for only ten days of consulting in hand at an organization I had always dreamed of working at. Ten days versus benefits, a regular salary, and security. It was a huge leap of faith and scary, but it was a chance I had to take, dictated by a (very) long time pondering my swadharma (post coming soon on this sparkling concept). Rather than get paralyzed by fear at my new life and lifestyle, I stayed focused on my doing my karma well, and not getting consumed with the what if’s—what if this consulting career does not take of? What if I get no other clients? What if my work is not appreciated? The ten days were focused on what I loved to do—write, and about the far corners of the world and its development, and to kick off, about my birth country of India. And it came with flexibility that would afford me better health and balance in life. Two years later, I am in a much better place physically, mentally, and financially, available to my son till he heads off to college, and my good karma fetched me more clients.
To sum up, the Geeta attributes four characteristics to a true karma yogin or someone who does their work well:
1) Shows concern about the action alone
2) Shows no concern about the results
3) There is no motive of gaining a specific reward for an action.
4) There’s no room for inaction. We have to continue to do our karma or work.
So, let’s forget ourselves in our action. Let’s just do it, shall we?
Do you find the advice in the verse 47 as practical in its wisdom as I do? It’s precisely this brilliantly utilitarian value of the Geeta that had me hooked. What do you think? Please do share your thoughts.
Meaningfully yours,
Anu
I just loved reading this Anu!! This is very timely read for me. Thank you for writing and sharing!
Love
Padmini