मुक्तसङ्गोऽनहंवादी धृत्युत्साहसमन्वितः।सिद्ध्यसिद्ध्योर्निर्विकारः कर्ता सात्त्विक उच्यते॥
mukta-saṅgo ‘nahaṃ-vādī dhṛty-utsāha-samanvitaḥsiddhy-asiddhyor nirvikāraḥ kartā sāttvika ucyate
Word by word
The verse says
Free of clinging, not talking about himself, full of resolve and energy, unchanged whether it works or fails: that doer is called clear.
In plain words
The three kinds of doer. Here is the first.
No clinging. No talking about himself. Resolve and energy, both.
And then the last and hardest: unchanged by success and by failure. Not indifferent to them. Not altered by them.
Where you've felt this · in sport
A long jumper you know has been competing for nine years. After a good jump she walks back and checks her run-up. After a bad one she walks back and checks her run-up. Her coach says this is the whole reason she is still improving at an age when most people have stopped.
Going deeper
Resolve and energy appearing in the same list as non-clinging is the detail that corrects a common misreading.
Letting go is often pictured as a kind of softness, a stepping back, a reduction in drive. This portrait has none of that. Dhṛti is holding firm and utsāha is active zeal, and both are listed as marks of the clear doer alongside the absence of grip.
So the opposite of clinging is not limpness. It is more like a person who can push hard without the push being about them, which is why it does not collapse when the result goes the wrong way.
The test is in what a setback does to the next session. For most people a failure costs a day or a week of altered behaviour. The person described here loses the result and keeps the practice, which over nine years is an enormous difference.