Focus on the journey, not the destination

Day 128 / 365

The Bhagavad Gita has some great quotes, that would surely make you change the way you think about life. The most common one of course that most of us have heard is this little gem —

“कर्म करो और फल की चिंता मत करो”

which loosely translates to — “Keep doing your job, don’t worry about the results”. People might have different interpretations of this quote, but here’s my view on it.

Suppose you want to lose weight, and you decide to go for a walk daily. You reschedule your mornings so that you can take 15 minutes out for a walk. You stick to this plan for a month religiously. But all your motivations just drains away when you look at the weighing scale and realize that you haven’t lost any weight.

“Why am I not seeing any results?”

“Was this all for nothing?”

“If this didn’t work this time, will this ever work?”

With all these doubts in your mind, you might still continue with your original plan, but you won’t have the same motivation again. So what did you do wrong?

The answer is that you were focusing on the wrong thing. You were worried about results, the weight loss instead of the actual exercise.

When you take up a task like this, just focus on finishing the task alone. Showing up everyday in itself should be an accomplishment. There’s no simple formula to success. What worked for someone else might not work for you. So no point in getting stressed if you couldn’t achieve the results that someone else achieved in the same time frame.

Just keep doing your part. Keep up the discipline. The results will get there when they get there.

“No one who does good work will ever come to a bad end, either here or in the world to come”

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

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