Your Job Has Two Scoreboards — Most People Watch the Wrong One

Almost everyone has heard the advice: do your work, don't worry about the fruit. On a temple wall it sounds serene. At nine on a Monday morning, with an appraisal three weeks away, it sounds almost cruel.

Because at a job, the fruit is not abstract. It is the raise that will or won't come. It is the promotion that went to the colleague who talks more in meetings. It is the quiet fear, never said aloud, that the next round of cuts has your name on it. How exactly do you 'let go of the result' when the result is your rent, your child's school fee, your standing in your own eyes?

This is where the teaching is most needed and least applied. We file it under temples and battlefields, useful for monks and warriors, not for someone with a laptop and a deadline. But it was always meant for working people. The honest worry underneath is this: if I stop caring about the appraisal, won't I just coast — and won't I let everyone walk over me? That fear deserves a real answer, not a poster.

Notice who Krishna is speaking to. Not a hermit who has left the world, but Arjuna — a working professional at the most demanding moment of his career, asked to do a brutal job he would rather walk away from. Krishna's answer is not 'renounce and go to the forest.' It is the opposite: stay, and do your work.

'tasmad asaktah satatam karyam karma samachara' (3.19) — therefore, free from attachment, keep doing the work that must be done. The key word is asaktah, unattached — not akarma, no-work. He is loosening the grip on the outcome while pressing Arjuna firmly back into action.

This matters because we usually meet karma yoga dressed in saffron, as if it were about escaping responsibility. The text says the reverse. The path it offers is for the person fully inside the world — earning, building, competing — who wants to do all of that without being eaten alive by it. Arjuna's battlefield is not so different from a quarterly target. The advice was field instructions for someone who had to keep performing under pressure, which is to say, for you.

The whole thing turns on seeing that your work life has two scoreboards, and you have been staring at the wrong one.

The first scoreboard shows the outcomes: the rating, the hike percentage, the title, whether your boss likes you this quarter, whether the company hits its numbers. Look closely and almost none of it is in your hands. It is decided by markets, by a manager's mood, by office politics, by a hundred things that move whether you sleep or not. Pour your sense of self into this board and your peace becomes a stock you don't control — up on a good review, crashing on a cold email.

The second scoreboard is small and entirely yours: did I do today's task with full attention and honesty? Did I prepare properly? Did I help the junior who was stuck? This board updates every single day, and your effort moves it directly. Nishkama karma is not the absence of ambition. It is the discipline of putting your weight on the second board — the one you can actually influence — and letting the first board be what it is going to be anyway.

The tempting misreading at work is that detachment means: don't be ambitious, never ask for a raise, accept whatever you're handed, and call your passivity 'spiritual.' By this logic the most evolved employee is the one who lets others take credit and never negotiates. That is not the teaching; that is just timidity wearing a nice word.

The Gita is sharper than that. 'yogah karmasu kaushalam' (2.50) — yoga is skill in action. Not yoga is doing-less, or yoga is being-walked-over. The detached worker is asked to be more skilful, not more limp. You can absolutely ask for the promotion, present your work clearly, set boundaries with a colleague who dumps tasks on you, and leave a job that underpays you. None of that violates anything.

What you drop is different and inner: the trembling. The need to win this round to feel okay about yourself. You negotiate hard and then sleep fine whether the answer is yes or no. You aim high and don't collapse if you miss. Detachment from the fruit is not detachment from doing the work excellently — it is detachment from the fear that was never helping you do it well in the first place.

There is a quieter line that changes how a workday feels. 'sva-karmana tam abhyarchya siddhim vindati manavah' (18.46) — by worshipping, through one's own work, the source from which everything flows, a person finds fulfilment. Read that slowly: your own ordinary work, done well, is offered like a flower at a temple. Not someone else's grander work. Yours.

This lands hardest against the office's deepest poison — comparison. The colleague got the corner project; someone three years younger is now your senior; LinkedIn is a wall of people apparently winning. Tie your worth to that race and there is no finish line, only a faster treadmill. But if the work itself is the offering, the comparison loses its teeth. A clerk who balances his accounts with care and a CEO who leads with care are doing the same spiritual act; the scale differs, the offering does not.

And there is a practical sting in the tail. The grip on the result actively damages the work — the mind half on the appraisal is not fully on the task. Let the result go, give the task your whole attention, and you usually do it better. The fruit you stopped chasing often arrives anyway, as a by-product of work finally done for its own sake.

So what does any of this mean when you are not Arjuna, just someone clearing an inbox with a tight chest? It means the goal was never to want less. It was to move the weight of your wanting off the verdict you cannot control and onto the work you can — and to stop renting your peace to a manager's opinion.

Try it narrowly. The next time the dread rises — what will they think, will I be picked, what if I'm let go — answer with a smaller question: what is the next honest, skilful thing I can actually do in the next hour? Then do that, fully. The appraisal will still come and the layoff list, if it exists, will still be written; but your steadiness no longer rises and falls with each of them like a boat in a storm.

None of this means stop pushing. It means push from a steadier place. Keep asking for the raise, keep aiming for the role — and keep your sense of who you are out of the quarterly result. Maybe the real question to sit with is the one the office trains us never to ask: when the title and the salary are stripped away, what is left of the worker, and is that part doing work it can respect?

Your Job Has Two Scoreboards — Most People Watch the Wrong One

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