कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥
karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācanamā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ’stvakarmaṇi
Word by word
The verse says
Your claim is on the action alone, never on its fruits. Do not let results be your motive. And do not let that become an excuse for doing nothing.
In plain words
Krishna draws a line through the middle of every task you will ever do.
On one side is the part that is truly yours: the effort, the attention, the care you put in. On the other side is the part that never was: whether it works, who notices, what it earns. Most of our suffering comes from quietly claiming that second half as ours.
Then, before Arjuna can take the easy way out, Krishna shuts that door too. Letting go of results is not the same as not caring. You do not get to sit down. You still do the work — you just stop holding it hostage to how it turns out.
Where you've felt this · at work
You prepare for months for an interview. You control your preparation, how you show up, how you answer the hard question. You do not control that the job was promised to someone inside the company before you walked in the door. If your peace depended on the offer, you staked it on something that was never yours to hold.
Going deeper
This is the hinge of the whole Gita, and it has a name: niṣkāma karma — action without craving for the fruit.
Notice what it does not say. It does not say results are unimportant. It does not say aim badly, or stop planning. It says results must not be your motive — hetu, the cause that drives the act. That distinction is psychological, not practical. It changes where you are standing, not what you do.
Here is why it matters. When the fruit is the motive, the work in front of you shrinks into a toll you pay for a future you cannot control. So you are never really in it. You are leaning past it, tense, checking. Take the motive away and something odd happens: the work gets better. The attention that was leaking into worry comes back to the task.
So Krishna is not asking Arjuna to give something up, which is how this verse is usually read. He is describing freedom, and pointing out that it also happens to be more effective. Those are not two separate claims. They are the same one.
And this is the direct answer to Chapter 1. Arjuna froze because he ran the outcomes — he saw the dead, the ruined families, the years after. Krishna hands him back the only thing that was ever actually his.