HUKAM Part 2: The Paradox of Effort and Surrender

[This article builds on my first piece in this series, which you can find here.]

I have been challenged on this belief way too many times by my bay area colleagues and friends. They think I have gone soft for accepting this philosophy. That I am taking the easy route. They don’t know, this is the hardest route. The hardest acceptance. Surrender that is.

"Hukmai andar sabh ko, baahar hukam na koye" Everyone and everything exists within the Divine Order. Nothing and no one is outside of it.

"Nanak hukmai je bujhe, ta haumai kahe na koye" If one truly understands this Hukam, then haumai (ego, the sense of "I am the doer") dissolves completely.

Above from Japuji Sahib by Guru Nanak Devji.

If you accept Hukam — that everything unfolds according to a cosmic order — then a very uncomfortable question follows: Why do anything at all?

I've sat with this question. It's the first thing your mind will throw at you when you talk about surrender. It deserves a real answer, not a meaningless spiritual cliche.

The Objection

Let me take the other side for a moment. If everything is Hukam, if you are exactly where you are supposed to be at every moment, then what's the point of effort? Why build a business? Why study? Why get out of bed? If the outcome is already written, aren't you just going through the motions?

It's a fair question. And if surrender meant passivity, I'd agree with the objection. I'd put Hukam on a shelf alongside every other philosophy that sounds beautiful but doesn't survive contact with real life.

But that's not what Nanak taught. And that's not how it works.

The Archer

Think of an archer. She picks up the bow. She nocks the arrow. She steadies her breath, narrows her focus, draws the string back with everything she has. Then she releases.

The aiming is hers. The draw is hers. The discipline behind thousands of practice shots is hers.

But, where the arrow lands? That's not hers.

A gust of wind. A shift in humidity. A twitch. The tiny imperfection in the shaft she doesn’t see. Forces beyond her control converge in the final inch. She gave everything she had up to the point of release. After that, it belongs to something bigger.

This is Hukam in action. Full effort, zero attachment to where the arrow lands.

Now here's what's counterintuitive: the archer who understands this shoots better, not worse. She's not thinking about the outcome, the medal, the ranking, the crowd. She is entirely present in the draw. The anxiety of the result isn't clouding the clarity of the process.

Surrender doesn't weaken effort. It purifies it.

Sri Bhagavad Gita Says It Too

This isn't Nanak alone. Three thousand years before him, Krishna told Arjuna the same thing on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in what’s now known as The Bhagavad Gita.

“karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣhu kadāchana

mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ’stvakarmaṇi”

Translated to English, this means - “You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”

Arjuna was a warrior, not a monk. Sri Krishna wasn't telling him to put down his bow. He was telling him to pick it up — but to fight without the inner war. Act fully. Detach completely. The doing is yours. The result is not. Don’t be attached to the outcome.

Laozi said it differently: the Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. Buddha's Middle Path rejects both indulgence and extreme asceticism. The pattern is universal. Every tradition that has stared long enough at this question arrives at the same paradox: the deepest surrender produces the most powerful action.

What I Do

I'll make this real and practical.

I run a business. I trade financial markets. I write. I build. Every single day involves decisions, risk, effort. Nobody looks at my calendar and sees a man who has surrendered.

But here's what's different. When I lose money on a trade, I don't spiral. Even if I do, I snap out of it very quickly. I am where I am supposed to be.

When a product I'm building doesn't get the traction I expected, I don't question my worth. I review the process, adjust, and move forward. The sting is there — I'm human — but it doesn't linger into a narrative about failure or identity anymore. I am where I am supposed to be.

And when things go well? I don't grip. I don't tell myself I've cracked the code. I don't because I know all this can be taken away any moment. I am simply where I am supposed to be.

The effort is the same whether I accept Hukam or not. The suffering is wildly different.

Before I understood this, every setback carried a second weight — it was the story I told myself about what the setback meant. That I wasn't smart enough. That I'd made a wrong turn somewhere. That I was behind. The weight of that inner dialogue was heavier than the setback itself.

Hukam dissolves the story. Not the effort. Not the ambition. Just the unnecessary suffering layered on top.

Effort Without Ego

Here's the subtle shift I missed when I was younger. Accepting Hukam doesn't change what you do. It changes who is doing it.

When you operate from ego, every action carries a burden. Will this work? What if I fail? What will people think? That burden drains energy, clouds judgment, and makes you reactive instead of clear.

When you operate from Hukam, the burden disappears. You still aim. You still draw the bow. But the trembling stops. Decisions get easier because fear of outcome isn't distorting them. You respond to what's actually in front of you instead of what your ego imagines might happen.

I used to think confidence meant certainty about outcomes. Now I know it means certainty about process — and peace with whatever follows.

The Hardest Part

I won't pretend this is easy. The hardest part isn't understanding the paradox intellectually. You probably already get it. The hardest part is internalizing it and holding it when the stakes are real.

It's one thing to accept Hukam when you're reading about it on a Sunday morning with coffee and your life seems perfect. It's another thing entirely when you're unsure of how you will cover the monthly expenses when the emergency funds run out. It’s another thing when you’re sitting across from someone who just delivered news you didn't want to hear.

In those moments, the ego roars back. Fix this. Control this. This wasn't supposed to happen. And in those moments, the practice is simply to notice the roar and not obey it. Not suppress it. Not fight it.

I have shared it with some of my close friends that there are days when I feel like I am making a huge mistake by declining interviews. There seems to be a path laid out for me. The path almost everyone I know and they know are on but I chose to decline? Why? I am not sitting on any inheritance or personal wealth. I should be on the path that everyone else is on. Why am I fucking this up? There are days that are too heavy to articulate here in this piece. But maybe that is Hukam too.

Nanak didn't promise this would be effortless. He promised it would be worth it.

The Paradox

Surrender is not the absence of effort. It's the absence of the ego's claim on effort. You do everything in your power — and then you release your grip on what follows. The work is yours. The fruit is not.

This is not passive. This is the most active, demanding way to live. It asks you to bring your full self to every moment while simultaneously releasing the part of you that needs to control the next one.

Most people do the opposite. They bring half their effort; hedged by fear, diluted by distraction; and then anxiously try to control the result. Hukam asks for the reverse: fully in, completely released.

The archer who trembles misses. The archer who surrenders strikes true.

Are you aiming, or are you gripping?"