- Always Finish
- If a task is once begun,
Never leave it till it's done.
Be the labor great or small,
Do it well or not at all.
-- Anonymous
So it's Labor Day weekend! Peter and I will be working. What will you be doing?
I have mixed emotions about Labor Day. On one hand, I greatly respect the world's workers, and everyone who goes off to do their job every day. I am sympathetic to the union organizers of the last century -- there were serious abuses that needed to be stopped. I'm less sympathetic to organized labor today, though. When the grocery store workers go on strike because they have to pay for some portion of their health care coverage, I find that I can't feel sorry for how oppressed they are. Maybe I'm just naive because I've always had pretty good jobs with fair pay and benefits -- or if they weren't fair, I quit because I knew I could get something better. Maybe if the unions went away, employers would really start oppressing people again. I don't know.
This poem is short and to the point. It reminds me of something Polonius might have said, or maybe something stitched into a sampler.
Hmm. That's pretty much antithetical to my motto:
ReplyDeleteIf something is just barely worth doing, just barely do it.
The first 80% of a task only takes 20% of the work. So that's a good place to stop.
-Doug