Why Do I Burn Out Chasing Results?

A friend of mine runs a small studio. Last year she hit every number she'd set in January. Revenue, students, the lot. She told me this in October with the face of someone describing a funeral.

She'd spent twelve months with her eyes on the scoreboard. When the score finally came up, there was nobody home to enjoy it. So she set a bigger number for next year, because what else do you do.

I've done a worse version. A few years ago I lost a client because I couldn't stop arguing with her. By the time I wanted to repair it, she had thrown up her hands and walked.

That night I wrote in my journal that it was my fault, and went straight to the next problem. I needed someone who paid every month, and any client would do for a while. A few lines on, I wrote that it's extremely hard to look after yourself and hold a hectic job at the same time. In the line after that I planned a two-kilometre run for the next day, in a mask, because of the dust.

I had described burnout in one breath and a fix in the next. I kept going because stopping felt like falling behind. It worked about as well as a car running on its last litre.

That's the chase. The result you haven't hit yet always looks like a reason to push harder, and it never looks like a reason to stop.

The most quoted verse

The Bhagavad Gita has one verse that even people who've never opened it have heard. Your right is to the work alone, never to its fruits (2.47). It's on posters. It's on the wall of at least one gym I know.

It's also widely misread as don't care about results, which makes it sound like advice for people who'd rather not try. Read the whole verse and it says something stronger. Let not the fruit of action be your motive, Krishna says, and don't be attached to inaction either.

So two things are ruled out. Working for the scoreboard, and not working. What's left is the thing in the middle: full effort, with the scoreboard turned to the wall.

Swami Sivananda spells out the middle in Practice of Karma Yoga. You have to combine energy in work, he writes, with indifference to the result of the work. Then he puts it in a way I find almost funny. Work as those work who are ambitious. Just don't be one of them.

Why the scoreboard tires you

Here's what the chase does, and it connects to the energy week.

When the result is the motive, every hour of work is also an hour of wanting. Wanting is a thought, and thoughts spend energy. Sivananda says in the same book that the worldly-minded person works with the idea I am the doer and with expectation of fruits, and that this is what brings bondage. In office terms: it's what brings the Sunday dread.

The Gita adds the second cost. A few verses later Krishna describes the person whose mind is on the fruit as tossed about, pulled many ways, never settled (2.44, 2.49). Every result that hasn't arrived yet is an open loop, and we saw last week what open loops do to a day.

My friend was tired from twelve months of running the studio and wanting the number at the same time. Two jobs. One of them invisible.

What you actually control

The verse works because it's true. Sivananda says that in ordinary work you can plough and manure the field and still get no harvest if the rain fails. The result was never in your hands. The ploughing was.

So the Gita's instruction is about accuracy. Put your motive on the part you control. The sentence written. The class taught properly. The call made. Those are yours. The response is not, and never was, and you've been spending yourself on it anyway.

Krishna then defines yoga itself in terms of this. Established in yoga, do your work, letting go of attachment, the same in success and failure. This evenness is called yoga (2.48). I read that verse last week with the inbox open and it still holds. Yoga, in this definition, is just a way of working.

It is not the same as not caring

I want to be clear about this because the misreading does damage. Sivananda warns against it directly. You must not say, what's the use of working if I get no fruit, I'll do nothing. That, he says, makes you dull and tamasic (heavy and inert). And he describes the probationer in karma yoga (the yoga of selfless work) as someone who tries to do their very best and only then lets go of how it lands.

So the order is: care completely about the work. Then release the result, the way you release a letter into a postbox. You wrote it as well as you could. The postbox does the rest.

Vishnudevananda adds the attitude in Meditation and Mantras. You regard yourself as an instrument, serving with no thought of credit or blame. Credit and blame are both scoreboard. The instrument just plays.

What to do with this

An experiment for this week, borrowed from how the studio turned around.

1. Split the page. Draw a line down a sheet of paper. On the left, what you control about the next piece of work: the hours, the care, the standard. On the right, the result: the sale, the reply, the number. Look at how much of your worry has been living on the right.

2. Move your motive left. Set one target for the week that's entirely on the left side. Write for two hours a day. Teach each class as if it's the only one. Call ten people, properly. A target you can hit by Friday regardless of what anyone else does.

3. Check the right side once. Once a week is plenty. Pick one time, say Friday at 5, to look at the results. Sivananda says to check the feeling of elation if success comes and not let depression master you if it doesn't. Easier to do once a week than fifty times a day.

4. Notice the energy. Write your 4 pm score as before. Most people find it rises within days, because the invisible second job has stopped.

My friend's version was simpler. She took the revenue figure off the wall and put up a list of what a good week of teaching looked like. The number came back on its own, and this time she was there to see it.

Another way to look at it

Sivananda says there's no loss in karma yoga. Even a little of it, done in any form, saves you from a great fear (he's quoting Gita 2.40). I used to think the fear was something grand and spiritual. Now I think it's the ordinary one: the fear of the number not coming up. Work done for its own sake is work that can't be taken from you, whatever the scoreboard says.

Tomorrow: why self-improvement plans never stick, and the three stages I think they're missing.

Where to read more

The Sivananda-tradition books behind today's piece:

• Practice of Karma Yoga, Swami Sivananda (yoga of service; no loss in karma yoga)

• Meditation and Mantras, Swami Vishnudevananda (on kriya yoga and surrendering the fruit)

• Bhagavad Gita, 2.40 and 2.47 to 2.50

If this helped, subscribe to Yogic Productivity on Substack for a new piece every day this month. And if you'd like somewhere to think out loud about the work you actually want to do, an Explorative Letter is a pen friend who writes back.