Why do you do what you do?

Is it a habit or is it done with meaning?

I recently came across this story that put our habits into perspective.

One evening, a man was making a roast beef dinner for his family. After watching him cut the ends off of the raw slab of meat before placing it in a roasting pan, his wife asked why he had done that.

“That’s the way my mother always did it,” he replied.

A few weeks later, at a family gathering, the woman observed her mother-in-law preparing a roast the exact same way.

The wife asked her, “Why do you cut the ends off of the roast before you cook it?” The mother-in-law had the same response as her son.

“That’s the way my mother always did it,” she said. Conveniently, the husband’s maternal grandmother also happened to be at this family function.

Her curiosity now piqued, the woman approached the grandmother and said, “Your daughter and your grandson both said they learned how to prepare a roast from you. May I ask you why you cut the ends off of the roast before you cook it?” The grandmother looked at her and laughed. “When I was raising my family”, she explained, “I only had one roasting pan and it was very small. Sometimes I had to cut the ends off of the roast to make it fit.”

The point of the story is that you occasionally have to ask yourself whether your approach to a particular task actually makes sense or if you’re just blindly doing it “the way it has always been done”.

Can I ask you a favor?

The next time you are doing something ask this question; I am doing this because it is a habit or is it effective?

Your perspective on your actions could change, couldn’t they?