Ten Gita Lessons for Daily Decision Making

The setting

Seven hundred verses after he puts it down, Arjuna picks his bow back up and fights. That is where this conversation ends, and any list of lessons drawn from it has to survive the destination.

What produces those seven hundred verses is a refusal. At Kurukshetra, with his teachers and his cousins arrayed against him, a warrior decides he cannot do it, and Krishna spends the rest of the poem explaining why he should. The questions raised on the way are larger and stranger than the ones we bring to the text: what the self is, what survives death, what makes an action bind us to its consequences. Lifting a verse out and setting it beside an ordinary decision — whether to speak up in a meeting, whether to leave a job — is something the Gita tolerates rather than invites. Often it fits. Where it doesn't, the misfit teaches as much as the fit.

Ten teachings follow, each with a verse behind it, a plain gloss, and the part that is harder than it sounds. All 701 verses sit in the Gita text on this site, and nearly every one of these means something slightly different once you have read the ten verses on either side of it.

1. You have a claim on the work, not on the fruit (2.47)

The most quoted line in the book: your authority extends to action alone, never to its results; don't let the fruit be your motive, and don't let that become an excuse for inaction. Karma here means both the deed and what the deed does to you.

Harder than it sounds: this is not permission to stop caring whether the work is any good. Krishna is describing a change in what you are gripping, not a drop in standards. Most of us can't tell the difference between caring about an outcome and being owned by it until long afterwards.

2. Equanimity is what yoga means here (2.48, and 2.55)

The next verse defines the term. Act while established in yoga, having let go of attachment, the same in success and failure — samatva, evenness, is what is called yoga. Not the postures. The evenness.

A few verses later Arjuna asks the practical question — what is such a person actually like, how do they sit and speak and move — and the answer comes entirely by subtraction: when a person lets go of all the desires that arise in the mind, and is content in the self, by the self, then they are called sthita-prajna, one whose insight is steady (2.55).

Harder than it sounds: evenness is not flatness. The text never claims the pleasant and the unpleasant stop feeling different; it claims you can stop letting the difference decide for you. That is slow, it can be convincingly counterfeited by numbness, and the description at 2.55 gives you nothing to work at directly — only a way to recognise the thing if it arrives.

3. The chain runs from dwelling to ruin (2.62-63)

Two of the most clinical verses in the text. Brooding on the objects of sense produces attachment; from attachment, desire; from desire, anger; from anger, delusion; from delusion, the failure of memory; from that, the destruction of buddhi, the discriminating intelligence — and then the person is lost.

Harder than it sounds: it reads like a description of what already happened rather than a brake on what is happening. The only place to intervene is the first link, dwelling, which is the quietest and easiest to miss.

4. What comes and goes can be borne (2.14)

Contact with the world produces cold and heat, pleasure and pain. They arrive and depart; they do not last; bear them. Titiksha, endurance, is offered less as heroism than as accuracy — you are being asked to notice the coming and the going.

Harder than it sounds: as general advice this is sometimes wrong, and the text seems to know it. Enduring a fever is not enduring an injustice, and a book that is about to argue for fighting a war is plainly not counselling that you put up with everything.

5. Do your own work badly rather than another's well (3.35)

Better one's own dharma — duty, the thing that is genuinely yours — done imperfectly, than another's dharma done well. Another's dharma carries danger.

Harder than it sounds: this verse has a history. In classical usage sva-dharma is bound up with birth, station and stage of life, and the line has been used to tell people to stay exactly where they were placed. Many readers now take sva-dharma to mean the work truly one's own, chosen or discovered. That reading is defensible, but it is a reading, and it is worth knowing you are making it.

6. You are your own friend or your own enemy (6.5)

Lift yourself by yourself; do not let yourself sink. The self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is its enemy. The verse that follows adds the condition: a friend to the one who has mastered himself, hostile to the one who has not (6.6).

Harder than it sounds: no rescuer appears here. The whole weight lands on the person least able to carry it at the moment they most need to — bracing or brutal, depending on the morning.

7. Not too much and not too little (6.16-17)

Yoga is not for one who eats too much or refuses to eat, who sleeps too much or stays awake too long. For the one measured in food and recreation, measured in effort, measured in sleep and waking, practice becomes the destroyer of sorrow.

Harder than it sounds: this is the least glamorous instruction in the book and the first one skipped. Excess looks like seriousness. The Gita says it is a mistake.

8. Practice, and letting go, repeatedly (6.34-35)

Arjuna objects that the mind is restless, unruly, as hard to hold as the wind. Krishna does not argue. He says it is held by abhyasa, repeated practice, and vairagya, dispassion.

Harder than it sounds: no shortcut is offered and no duration is given. Sadhana, spiritual practice, is by definition the thing you return to after it did not appear to work.

9. Speech that does not agitate (17.15)

Among the forms of tapas, austerity, is one of speech: words that cause no agitation, that are true, and that are both pleasant and beneficial, along with regular study.

Harder than it sounds: the four conditions come apart under pressure. True and beneficial is often unpleasant; pleasant and calming is often untrue. The verse gives no rule for which to give up, and most real conversations force the choice.

10. And then it is handed back to you (18.63)

At the end of eighteen chapters Krishna does not issue an order. He says he has declared to Arjuna the knowledge more secret than any secret, that Arjuna should reflect on it fully, and then do as he wishes.

Harder than it sounds: this is the only verse in the poem explicitly about deciding, and what it says is that the deciding stays with you. The teaching does not close the question, and neither does any list drawn from it. Whoever acts carries the weight of having chosen, which is exactly what a person hoping for instructions came here to put down.

Where readers part ways

Near the end Krishna tells Arjuna to abandon all dharmas and take refuge in him alone, promising release (18.66). Traditions read this very differently. Vaishnava lineages, including those following Ramanuja and Madhva, treat it as the summit of the text, the teaching of sharanagati or self-surrender to a personal God. Advaitin commentary tends to read the surrender through knowledge — the dissolving of the sense of a separate doer rather than a relationship between two parties. Both readings are old and seriously argued. Anyone who tells you the Gita has one settled meaning is describing their lineage, not the text.

After the conversation

Arjuna's last words are that his confusion is gone, his memory recovered, and he will do as he has been told (18.73). The text does not tell us he was right. It tells us he was persuaded. Sanjaya, who has narrated the whole exchange to a blind king waiting for news of his sons, closes by saying that where Krishna and the archer are, there is fortune and victory (18.78) — and then the war begins, and by its end almost everyone on that field is dead.