25.08.2026
You expected something else
You did what had to be done and it didn’t turn out the way it had to turn out.
You worked well and somebody else got the promotion. You raised them well and your son doesn’t call. You were loyal for thirty years and they pushed you aside. You looked after your health and fell ill anyway.
That distance between what you put in and what you got back is where nearly all the avoidable suffering of a life lives.
I’ve sold tens of thousands of books in the street, and the street teaches this better than any teacher. You go out on a Tuesday, you do everything right, you talk to fifty people, and you come home having sold two books. You go out on the Wednesday, in worse shape and with less appetite for it, you do exactly the same, and you sell twenty. Nobody who hasn’t stood on a corner for a whole day believes the difference isn’t down to you.
If you measure it by what you sell, some days you’re good and others you’re bad, and neither of the two is true. The only thing that was really yours is that you went out.
There is a text with an answer for this that is probably the most famous idea and the worst understood:
You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.
Bhagavad-gītā 2.47. 1972 edition.
Almost everybody reads it as resignation. It’s the opposite. A resigned man doesn’t go out on Tuesday.
It’s the only thing I’ve found that lets you keep acting when the results don’t follow, which is exactly when you have to keep acting.
I’ve given forty-five years to this and at sixty I ended up living in a van. If I measured with the yardstick of results, the conclusion would be that I’ve wasted my time. I don’t measure with that yardstick. That’s why tomorrow I go out again.