श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्।स्वभावनियतं कर्म कुर्वन्नाप्नोति किल्बिषम्॥
śreyān swa-dharmo viguṇaḥ para-dharmāt sv-anuṣṭhitātsvabhāva-niyataṃ karma kurvan nāpnoti kilbiṣam
Word by word
The verse says
Better your own work done imperfectly than someone else's work done well. Doing the work that follows from your own nature, you take on no fault.
In plain words
This is one of the most quoted lines in the book, and one of the most misused.
Your own work done badly beats someone else's done beautifully.
Read as a line about vocation it is liberating. Read as a line about position it has been used to tell people to stay where they were put. Both readings have a long history and you should know both.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
Your cousin trained as an architect because the family expected it. She is good at it and unhappy. At thirty-four she starts making furniture. For two years she is visibly worse at that than she was at architecture. She is also, from the first month, somebody her friends recognise again.
Going deeper
This verse cuts two ways and a reader deserves both, because the gap between them is where the harm was done.
Read as a line about vocation, it is one of the most freeing sentences in the book. The imitation of someone else's excellent life is worth less than your own clumsy one. That stands against envy, against copying, and against the exhausting business of running a life you chose because it looked right.
Read as a line about social position, it becomes an instruction to stay put. Combined with the hereditary reading of the four groups, it told people born into service that their fault-free path was service, and that reaching for anything else was the dangerous option. That reading was dominant for a very long time and it was not an accident; it suited those it suited.
Nothing in the Sanskrit settles which reading is right, but the verse itself supplies the test. It says the work follows from your nature. Work assigned by your parentage is not that, and a reading that cannot tell the difference between what you are and where you were born has lost the thing the sentence is actually about.