कर्मणैव हि संसिद्धिमास्थिता जनकादयः।लोकसंग्रहमेवापि संपश्यन्कर्तुमर्हसि॥
karmaṇaiva hi sansiddhim āsthitā janakādayaḥloka-saṅgraham evāpi sampaśyan kartum arhasi
Word by word
The verse says
Janaka and others reached the goal by action alone. You should act too, if only for the sake of holding the world together.
In plain words
A precedent, and then a second reason.
Janaka was a king who is remembered as fully realised — a man who ran a kingdom and was also completely free. He did not withdraw.
And then the phrase that carries the rest of the chapter: loka-saṅgraha, holding the world together.
Where you've felt this · in community
The senior person on the ward keeps doing the unglamorous rounds. They could delegate all of it. The reason they do not is visible to every junior on the floor, and none of them could put it into words.
Going deeper
Loka-saṅgraha is one of the Gita's most quoted phrases and one of its most useful. It means gathering the world, holding it together, keeping it from coming apart.
It is a second, entirely different reason to act, and Krishna offers it precisely because the first one has been dissolved. If you need nothing, you still might act because other people are watching and the fabric is thin.
Janaka matters as an example because he was a king, not a renunciate. The tradition remembers him as someone who reached the end while fully occupied with administration, war and family. The Gita keeps reaching for figures like this.
And there is something in the api — even if only for the sake of holding the world together. Krishna offers this almost as a fallback. If none of the other reasons move you, there is still this one.
Which is a realistic piece of teaching. Sometimes the only reason left to do the thing is that other people are relying on it.