Action, not Outcome

The outcome is never in your hands but the action is always in your hands.

Chapter 2, verse 47 of the Bhagwad Gita says Karmanyevadikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana…

I began my TEDx talk with these words.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

While exhorting Arjun to action, Krishna tells him to do what he must not with the expectation of a result but merely for the sake of performing the act. Performing the act is his karma, the outcome is not in his hands.

I started writing Learning by Proxy in March 2020. I felt the thoughts rolling out of my mind were pearls of wisdom (now that I go back and read some of it, they were not!). Hence I was deeply frustrated when the number of readers did not increase as I had imagined. I wrestled with the idea of continuing to write. I wanted to stop at the time.

Writing two blogs a week without fail is work and I did not want to do that unless I got the desired results.

Somewhere along the way, I decided I would write for myself. I don’t care who reads it, I don’t care if nobody does. It was liberating.

I post my blog on Substack, Medium and LinkedIn. About 500 people read it on Substack regularly, 20-30 on LinkedIn and 10 or so on Medium.

In June this year, I wrote - Why America Loves Israel.

By my standards, it garnered incredible traffic or so I thought. Normally a blog dies off after a few weeks. This one was also headed that way…

And then some Zionists found it!

Streisand Effect followed. They were schooling me on the Bible and how Palestine belonged to the Jews and in the process brought a lot of people from the Middle East to my blog.

I was writing because I wanted to. I did not seek this out. But this was the result I was delivered.

I do not know if any of you are pursuing things with the hope or expectation of an outcome.

Just do it for the joy of doing it. If it is not enjoyable, don’t do it. If it is important for you such as exercise, learn to do it in a way that is enjoyable. You don’t know what outcome will result, so just stop thinking about it.