Karma Yoga is an idea from the Bhagavad Gita. This page explains what it says, and why a software company is named after it.
The Bhagavad Gita is a conversation of 700 verses inside the Mahabharata, the long Indian epic. It opens on a battlefield. The warrior Arjuna looks at the army he has to fight, sees his cousins and his teachers in it, and puts down his bow.
His charioteer is Krishna. Over eighteen chapters Krishna answers Arjuna’s doubt. One of the paths he describes is Karma Yoga. Karma means action, and yoga here means a discipline, so Karma Yoga is the discipline of acting well.
Krishna does not let Arjuna walk away from the work. He tells him that action is better than inaction, and that no one can even keep a body alive without acting (chapter 3, verse 8). Everyone has to act, so the useful question is how to act. His answer has three parts.
Krishna defines yoga as skill in action (2.50). Whatever the work is, it gets your full attention and your best craft while you do it. A potter throwing a bowl watches the clay the whole time it turns and feels how thick the wall is between finger and thumb.
The best known verse of the Gita is 2.47. In Annie Besant’s 1895 translation: Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits.
You decide what you do and how well you do it. What happens afterwards is out of your hands, including whether people like it and whether it sells. Krishna asks you to stop treating those results as a payment you are owed, and to stay steady in success and in failure (2.48). You still care whether the work is good. You stop letting the reward decide whether you do it.
The potter lifts the finished bowl off the wheel and lets it go. Fresh clay goes on the wheel.
Krishna says action ties a person down unless it is done as an offering (3.9). He tells Arjuna to act without attachment, for the good of the world, the way wise people always have (3.19, 3.25). Work done this way is aimed at someone else, and its measure is whether it helps them.
The bowl ends up on someone’s table, holding water. That is what it was made for.
Making software follows the same steps as making the bowl. We give it our full attention while we build it, then we release it, and it goes to work for someone else.
We use those every day, so we hit their rough edges before anyone else does, and we fix them.
Each product does one job. SleepGuard, our released Mac app, covers your screen at the bedtime you chose. A small tool can be finished properly, so people can rely on it.
Letting go of the result is what lets us ship: when the work is complete and good, we release it without waiting to know how it will be received. Then we start the next one.
A product idea. A tool your team needs. A partnership worth exploring. Start with who it helps.
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