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Jul 13 • 39 tweets • 19 min read
Rewriting my thread on #karmanyevaadhikaraste because it is important enough to get right

The first few tweets are a simple introduction and you can skip those because it will be familiar to most Indians

But the rest of the thread, the example applications, are the good stuff
Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 47:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेसषु कदाचन
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते संगोसत्वकर्मणि

You have the right to action alone, not to its fruits
Don't be motivated by the fruits, and don't get attached to inaction either
The first part is famous and everybody quotes it: focus on your actions, not on the outcomes.

The second part is rarely quoted: don't use this as an excuse to not do anything. Do the right thing (even if it sometimes might seem pointless.)
When I first heard karmanyevaadhikaaraste, it seemed almost like a platitude to me: one of those statements that sound nice but are not really that useful in life. (Like "we believe in customer delight"; who doesn't?)

I later realized how wrong I was
The reason karmanyevaadhikaaraste is so important to me is because it actually helps me decide when facing difficult decisions. (And prevents negative spirals when things don't go right in spite of best efforts.)

With the rest of this thread, I hope to illustrate some of this
It is amazing to me how often advice by modern thinkers (in India as well as the west) boils down to #karmanyevaadhikaaraste:
Analyze the quoted tweet and you'll note that "do chase" correspond mainly to actions/processes and "don't chase" are results
Here's @ShaneAParrish (of the excellent Farnam Street Blog: fs.blog) rephrasing #karmanyevaadhikaaraste

Students today are excessively focused on jobs/salaries, says @DheerajSanghi (VC JKLU, ex-prof/dean/director at IITK, IIIT-D etc)

This is a result of the entrance exam culture and is bad for their long-term career. They should focus on learning
Richard Feynman was one of the greatest scientists and teachers of the 20th century. Here is some advice from him. Notice how #3 is a corollary of #karmanyevaadhikaaraste

Billionaire Investor Howard Marks: "The quality of a decision cannot be judged based on the quality of the outcome. Good decisions can result in bad outcomes, and vice versa."

(Earlier I talked about preventing negative spirals when things to wrong? This is how you do it)
From @JamesClear, best selling author of Atomic Habits (a book I've recommended to so many people!) adds these nuances to understanding #karmanyevaadhikaaraste:
And @JamesClear also emphasizes the often missed second line of the #karmanyevaadhikaaraste shlok, the one on not getting attached to inaction:

And here's @AdamMGrant organizational psychologist, best-selling author, the youngest tenured professor at Wharton, on understanding success:
Any success involves getting lucky. This means that anyone can get unlucky and fail. This is why #karmanyevaadhikaaraste is important.

Here's @bhogleharsha, famous cricket commentator on this topic:
Any fans on Hamilton (the Broadway hit musical) here?

@Lin_Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, also channels #karmanyevaadhikaaraste:
The main message of #karmanyevaadhikaraste is to shift you from outcome thinking to systems thinking.

OUTCOME MINDSET prevents you from making that ONE mistake again.

SYSTEMS MINDSET prevents you from using the mental models that caused that mistake.
And @MSDhoni says the same thing:
Instead of simply saying "the effort is more important than the outcome" a better phrasing comes from @patrissimo

"Effort is the dial you can best turn."

(See the full thread under the quoted tweet)
Use long-term thinking to decide on the "right" process to follow, then stick to that, even if it doesn't work in the short-term.

Following the process is deterministic, success is probabilistic. Do not modify the process based on short-term results.

A variation on this.

Long term thinking (hard) vs long term commitment (easier).

In fact, #karmanyevaadhikaaraste thinking is so important to a successful marriage that it deserves a thread on its own. One-of-these-days™...
A different way of using #karmanyevaadhikaaraste is when looking at others: do you admire/focus on their achievements or their process?

So, for example, what you should admire about Jeff Bezos isn't his achievements, it is his systems:
As you should have gathered by now, #karmanyevaadhikaaraste is closely intertwined with luck and probability. @anafabrega11, an educator, has a great thread analyzing this and what it means for kids and parenting and teaching:

The Gita wouldn't approve of you playing poker (tamasik) but if you did #karmanyevaadhikaaraste teaches you how to play well:

A while back, I wrote an article on #karmanyevaadhikaaraste. Some of it is material from this thread, but it contains other material too:
futureiq.substack.com/p/karmanyevaad…
Success vs happiness and how #karmanyevaadhikaaraste helps you there:

Kobe Bryant, one of the greats of basketball, talks about success and failure and following the process: pretty much #karmanyevaadhikaraste (h/t @kshashi)
Yesterday, I wrote a thread on best practices in hiring from a Harvard Business Review article by @tylercowen et al. See how one of the top recommendations there is also a variation on #karmanyevaadhikaaraste:
Another one from @ShaneAParrish (via @docbhooshan):
And this one from @docbhooshan from his own medical practice and the importance of #karmanyevaadhikaaraste for the doctor as well as the patient:

As @hcvwarrior indicates, some people misinterpret #karmanyevaadhikaaraste to mean that you should ignore goals/outcomes completely. Don't do any goal-oriented planning. That is INCORRECT.

You can (and must) do goal-oriented planning to choose your actions, but don't get *attached* to the goals:

- Make sure to use long-term goals
- Realize that outcomes are probabilistic, so correct-action-wrong-outcome is NOT a failure
- But wrong-action-correct-outcome is wrong
#karmanyevaadhikaaraste is important when giving advice: Most advice is not taken. But don't stop giving advice when asked for it. Focus on improving the advice you give and how you give it, but remember that you're not entitled to it being followed:

#karmanyevaadhikaaraste really helps me in day-to-day life when I do something for family/friends and it is not well received because of miscommunication or due to a bad outcome via bad luck or something else. They're angry/disappointed/sad in you based on outcomes.
In such cases, it is easy to get stressed/angry/anxious about what your friend/family is thinking about you. Often attempts to mollify them are rebuffed or cause other problems.

This is when you use #karmanyevaadhikaaraste
Did you do the right thing at the time, given what you knew? If yes, then you can sleep easy. Keep doing this and over the long-term things work out. The real picture comes out ultimately

As @Makarand_S points out "all you can do is <act> with integrity"

Important parts of the famed Japanese TQM (Total Quality Management) philosophy are also #karmanyevaadhikaaraste:

see the whole quoted thread:

Karmanyevaadhikaaraste in cancer treatment
Quoted tweet shows why karmanyevaadhikaaraste is important while tweeting too.

Focus on easily measurable outcomes and you end up focusing on the wrong tweets. Instead, focus on tweeting right and trust that the right outcomes will occur in the long term.

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More from @NGKabra

Navin Kabra Profile picture
Jul 12
Good HBR article (by @TylerCowen et al) on reducing wastage and useless bureaucratic overhead from your hiring process.

Quick overview: /1
Do not have more than 4 or 5 "rounds" of interviews/interactions with a candidate. A study (at Google) showed that the first 4 gave 86% of the value. After that, the value diminished rapidly. /2
For each role, have one person who is the primary decision-maker. Unnecessary democracy and consensus results in worse hires.

A committee will hire a camel when a horse is required. /3
Read 8 tweets
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Jul 12
Voluntary student participation in your classes is higher if you're known as a teacher who randomly picks students to answer questions even if their hands aren't raised.
Some students don't participate because they're shy. Others because they have social anxiety.

This technique will work well for the former but ss Meeta points out, might make class worse for the latter

The research quoted in the first tweet measures aggregate class participation but that doesn't necessarily mean that all the students are better off
Read 5 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Feb 7
Did you know that a lot of hotels in India refuse to let a couple rent a hotel room if they don't look married? (i.e. if last name on Aadhaar card doesn't match).

For example, see:
thequint.com/lifestyle/taki…
The problem appears to be widespread enough that a couple of hotel chains have made it their primary marketing pitch that they have no problems renting to unmarried couples. (Even OYO was using this line for a while)
Y'all follow me because I tweet important and relevant information like this, right?
Read 7 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Feb 2
1. Yesterday's budget announced that India will have a digital Rupee or a CBDC (central bank digital currency)

However, nobody really knows what India's digital Rupee will really be

A thread on why governments all over are considering CBDCs and what options RBI has looked at 🧵
2. First, what's a CBDC? Unfortunately, this is not a well-defined term and means different things to different people. But the basic idea is that it is a form of currency inspired by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin but actually issued by the government and hence is "legal tender"
3. Why CBDC? Because governments all over the world are getting worried about the increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies (which have a market cap of about $2 trillion).

Cryptocurrencies: can't live with them and can't ban them!
Read 36 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Jan 16
If you know someone on Twitter who:

1. Lives somewhere other than India/US/UK
2. Has >1000 and <10000 followers
3. Doesn't primarily tweet politics, and
4. Isn't a media person

Please let me know. I want to follow more such people. Expand my horizons.
Reasons for the conditions:

1. Too much of my Twitter is focused on India/US/UK. Want to know how the other three quarters of the world lives
2. >1000 followers means they have interesting things to say, <10000 means they're not bland
3. Politics is boring to me
@NGKabra Clarification: by "interesting things to say" I meant "likely to be interesting to me even though I don't live in the same country". Didn't mean to disrespect the tweets of people with fewer followers.
Read 4 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Jan 15
I'm not going to explain the meaning of IYKYK to you.

If you know, you know.
Do you feel left out when people around you use acronyms like FOMO and you don't understand what they're talking about, and you worry you might be missing something interesting?
And an addition to this thread by @dileep31
ngl, idk what he's talking about.

Read 4 tweets

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