अथैतदप्यशक्तोऽसि कर्तुं मद्योगमाश्रितः।सर्वकर्मफलत्यागं ततः कुरु यतात्मवान्॥
athaitad apy aśakto ’si kartuṃ mad-yogam āśritaḥsarva-karma-phala-tyāgaṃ tataḥ kuru yatātmavān
Word by word
The verse says
And if you cannot even do that, taking refuge in joining with me, then give up the fruit of all your actions, with yourself held steady.
In plain words
The third if, and the last rung.
Cannot hold the mind. Cannot keep a practice. Cannot even dedicate the work.
Then: do what you were going to do, and stop claiming the result. That is the floor of this chapter, and it is where Chapter 2 began.
Where you've felt this · with money
You lend money to a cousin knowing roughly what the odds are. You can spend two years checking whether it is coming back, or you can decide on the day you hand it over that it has gone. The money is identical in both versions. The two years are not.
Going deeper
Giving up the fruit of action is the Gita's most famous teaching, and here it arrives as the lowest rung on the ladder — which says something about how the book is built.
Giving up the fruit of action was the hinge of Chapter 2 and the subject of Chapter 3. Here it arrives as the last resort, offered to somebody who has failed at everything else. That is not a demotion. It means the teaching works at every level, including the level of a person with nothing else available.
There is also something kind in the ordering. Somebody reading from the top has been given three chances to fail before reaching an instruction that cannot really be failed at.
And this is the one rung that does not depend on belief. You can let go of outcomes without having settled a single question about God, which makes it the entry point for a reader who is not sure they are a reader of this kind of book at all.