thoughts on goal setting
This post is a reflexion on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 5, where Arjuna is a bit confused. Krishna says that you have to renounce all work, but then again, you are also supposed to work with devotion. He is asking which is better: renouncing all work or working with devotion.
What Krishna says is that both renouncing work and working with devotion are good for liberation of the soul, but working in devotional service is better than renouncing all work. The objective is not to be attached to the results of any activity, but to just do them. Such a person will overcome the material bondage. The objective here is to not be bound to this world, but all the work comes from this world, so we should do them but should not be attached to the outcomes of the work.
For example, if you are working in the office to get a promotion, you should work, but you should do it for the importance of the role, not for the outcome of the role. The more you are attached to the outcome of the role, the more you are entangled with this world. The idea is to be disentangled from the world.
The analogy offered is the sun. The sun doesn't need to rise in the morning and doesn't need to set, but if the sun doesn't rise, the whole world will fall into chaos. The sun just does his job. Of course, we know that it is a celestial body and that the bodies are moving in the solar system, in the space around the galaxy, and other things. They have been set up in such a way that they happen.
The idea here is that the sun is an example of how one should perform their duty. Ultimately, you are supposed to just keep doing your duty, maybe just guide people. That should just be the objective, or even to just think about the key outcomes of the work. If you sell more products and then your company grows in market share, that alone should be the objective: to grow the market share, not that if you grow the market share, you will get a percentage of profits, and then if you get some profits, you can buy a better car. These will entangle you with this reality. If you just think that, as a salesperson, you're just supposed to expand the market share of a product, then that's it, that's the job. If you're able to do that and then guide others in how that is done, that is more than enough.