Chapter 2Verse 47

Give your full effort to the work itself. The outcome is never fully in your hands, so anchoring your peace to it only creates anxiety. This isn't motivation to give up. It's freedom to act wholeheartedly.

Krishna is telling Arjuna to put himself fully into the work and stop fixating on what he'll get out of it. You control the effort. You don't control how it lands, so pinning your peace of mind to the result just sets you up for anxiety. He isn't saying results don't matter or that you should stop caring. He's saying they aren't the part that's yours to command.

The verse draws a clean line between an action and its outcome. The action is yours. The fruit of it depends on countless other things, timing, other people, chance, none of which take orders from you. Treating yourself as the sole cause of results is both inaccurate and exhausting. The last line guards against the opposite overcorrection: using all this as a reason to do nothing. Detachment here isn't withdrawal. It's dropping the anxious grip on the scoreboard so your full attention is free for the work itself.

Think about preparing for an interview or an exam. The preparation is in your hands, how many hours you put in, how honestly you practice. The result depends partly on things you'll never see: who else applied, what mood the examiner is in, which questions come up. If your calm depends entirely on the outcome, you'll be miserable through the wait and shaky during the work itself. Prepare as well as you can, then let the outcome be what it is.