Top 3 Life Mistakes I Avoided Because of the Gita

There's a meaningful difference between reacting to life and preventing the damage before it happens. The Gita has saved me from more than a few mistakes I might have otherwise made. Here are three of the biggest.

1Thinking Discomfort Was My Enemy

Picture this. You're doing a genuinely great job at your consulting role. Your boss is happy. Your colleagues are happy. Your clients are happy. You're on top of the world.

Then the marketplace shifts. Your client, who originally wanted quiet, one-on-one remote support, suddenly needs you to fly in and lead a major presentation to help them navigate the change. You're terrified. You're flattered that they trust you, but you know you hate speaking to crowds, and you know you'd be operating from a place of weakness rather than strength.

Your boss, who has flagged this exact gap as a growth area for you over the last three years, gives you two options: hand it off to a colleague who's more comfortable presenting, or accept the challenge yourself.

Life brings endless challenges like this, big and small. Often we don't get to choose whether we face them. What we do get to choose is the mentality we bring when we're forced into discomfort.

Arjuna wanted to avoid his battle at all costs. The entire first chapter of the Gita, and the start of the second, is him trying to talk Krishna out of it. The rest of the text is committed to empowering him, and you, to rise to the challenge instead of fleeing it.

The cost of the wrong mentality isn't abstract. It's a missed opportunity for real growth, and often, the very thing you've wanted all along is sitting on the other side of the exact challenge you're avoiding.

2Believing Vulnerability Was a Weakness

It's so easy to become hard-hearted in this world. There's no shortage of examples, in fiction and in real life, where the slightest vulnerability leaves someone exposed to real heartbreak.

I'm a lifelong fan of action movies, and there's a scene in Daniel Craig's first outing as James Bond, Casino Royale, that's always stuck with me. Bond falls for Vesper Lynd, who turns out to be a double agent and ultimately betrays him. He'd been ready to walk away from his entire career for her. The betrayal hardens him, and he shuts down emotionally for good.

I've had my own smaller versions of this. I've opened up to people I thought were friends or well-wishers, only to have what I shared used against me later. It's tempting, after enough of that, to put up walls and keep everyone at arm's length. And with certain people, that instinct is actually correct. Some distance is warranted.

But as a general rule, shutting down emotionally costs far more than it protects.

It closes us off from learning about ourselves and others. It increases the risk of poor mental health. It destroys the possibility of deeper, more fulfilling relationships. It keeps us perpetually on edge, assuming everyone is a threat.

A better approach:

• Learn to pace what you share, with whom, and when.
• Pay attention to people's actual reputations before you open up.
• Disclose real challenges only to a select circle of close friends.
• Build a real journaling practice to process what you're feeling.
• Use therapists or counselors when you need to.
• Find or build genuine circles of trust, the way groups like AA do.
• Pray and meditate sincerely.
• Be a safe haven for others, the way you'd want them to be for you.

Arjuna did something remarkable for a man of his stature and reputation: he humbled himself completely in front of Krishna and opened his whole heart, fears and all. Krishna didn't punish that vulnerability. He rewarded it.

3Thinking There Was Only One Kind of Intelligence

I still remember leaving for college in the summer of 1996, heading to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. We packed our white Ford Escort station wagon with what felt like enough belongings for two college kids, and I genuinely couldn't imagine how it would all fit. My dad found a way. He always did.

He was a blue-collar worker his whole life, especially after immigrating to the US in 1981. He never went to college, and he'd never have described himself as intellectually gifted. But he had an extraordinary knack for practical efficiency and resourcefulness, the kind of real-time problem-solving that gets almost no recognition in how we usually measure intelligence.

Growing up in the West, I saw how narrow our default definition of intelligence really was: almost entirely academic, with emotional intelligence eventually getting some grudging recognition decades later. Vedic culture, by contrast, has long recognized far more categories: intellectual, emotional, social, practical, occupational (including parenting, not just career), spiritual, political, military, athletic. Each of those breaks down even further.

This matters because funneling everyone into one or two categories of "smart" is genuinely dangerous to people's self-esteem and sense of self. As the saying goes, often attributed to Einstein: everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it's stupid.

Most of us spent high school and college almost entirely focused on grades, often at the expense of recognizing the people around us with real, different gifts. Albert Einstein. Richard Branson. Thomas Edison. Walt Disney. None of them fit neatly into the narrow box school tends to reward.

Arjuna was an extraordinarily skilled and intellectually gifted warrior and leader, and yet Krishna spends the overwhelming majority of their conversation on the spiritual dimension instead. That told me something important: we are genuinely unique and diverse as individuals, and we need to be far more careful about how we judge what other people bring to the table.

A Few More, for Another Day