13.08.2026
Your boss
You work for somebody who decides about your life and isn’t up to it.
He decides badly, he takes the credit for what you do, and on top of that you have to smile at him because whether you get paid at the end of the month depends on him.
I know what I’m talking about from the other side too: I was president of a temple for two years, and I’m sure somebody under me was thinking exactly this about me.
What almost everybody does is one of two things. Swallow the anger until it comes out where it shouldn’t, or leave as soon as they can and run into another one just the same the year after.
The text puts a third option, and it isn’t the one you expect. It doesn’t say put up with it. It doesn’t say leave. The whole sentence ends in an imperative:
Therefore, O Arjuna, surrendering all your works unto Me, with mind intent on Me, and without desire for gain and free from egoism and lethargy, fight.
Bhagavad-gītā 3.30. 1972 edition.
Fight. That’s the last word. It isn’t sending you to resign yourself, it’s sending you to fight, but taking off your back the one thing that makes the fight unbearable: the account of what you’re owed.
A warning, in case it sounds soft: the book is a conversation between two military men on a battlefield. What it does is not calm you down. It’s to separate two things you’ve had stuck together all your life: what you do and what comes out of what you do.
The first is yours. The second never was, not even when it came out well.