तेजः क्षमा धृतिः शौचमद्रोहो नातिमानिता।भवन्ति सम्पदं दैवीमभिजातस्य भारत॥
tejaḥ kṣamā dhṛtiḥ śaucam adroho nāti-mānitābhavanti sampadaṃ daivīm abhijātasya bhārata
Word by word
The verse says
Strength, patience, firmness, cleanness, no ill-will, no swagger. These belong to a person born into the divine share, Arjuna.
In plain words
The list closes with six more, and two of them sit together oddly: strength, and patience.
Tejas is heat, edge, force. Kṣamā is bearing with people.
Side by side they rule out two different mistakes. Strength without patience is a bully. Patience without strength is somebody being walked over. Krishna wants both in the same person.
Where you've felt this · at work
Rekha runs a small printing press, and two of her people are late every week. She does not shout and she does not pretend it is fine. She tells them, the same way each time, what it costs the others. One of them improves over a year. The other does not, and she lets him go without any speech about it. Nobody who works there is afraid of her, and nobody takes her for granted either.
Going deeper
Strength and patience in one list is not a balancing act. It is a claim that they need each other.
Tejas means heat or edge - the force that gets a thing done and does not apologise for existing. Kṣamā means bearing with, enduring, letting an offence go. Alone, each one goes bad. Force without endurance turns into pushing people around. Endurance without force turns into being used, which is not a virtue however patiently it is done.
There is a phrase here worth noticing as well: no over-pride. Not the absence of pride. The absence of too much of it. A person is allowed to think well of what they have done.
That moderation runs through the whole list. Nothing in it asks you to be less than you are. It asks you not to be more than you are, which is a different and far more possible thing.