Always Ask Why

Recently told me the following tale:

A young woman had just completed making her first-ever Thanksgiving dinner. She and her husband had been married that very summer, and it was the first time the in-laws had come over for a meal. The turkey and all the fixings had been good, to be sure. However, the ham had been superior.

As the mother-in-law complemented the ham, she was struck curious buy one thing. The end of the ham had been cut off and removed, and was nowhere to be found. When she why the end of the ham have been cut off, the young woman explained was something that her mother had always done, and she simply duplicated that task.

This got the young woman to thinking. Later, at Christmas dinner with her own family, the young woman passed her own mother why she cut the end off the ham that she prepared for holiday meals. The mother replied that cutting off the end of the ham is what her own mother had always done. The mother had simply repeated the process.

The young woman was now mightily curious. She went to the living room, and asked her grandmother about the habit of cutting off the end of the ham in preparation for family meals. The grandmother replied that her first oven was very small, and she had to cut off the end of the ham in order to make it fit. Clearly, the mother had witnessed her do this, never asked why, and simply duplicated the task. In turn, the young woman had watched her mother do this, never asked why, and duplicated the task.

The lesson in this Parable is clear - critical thinking.

We must always be asking why. We must continue to make hypotheses, and test them using the scientific method. We must never accept the results of a single experiment as absolute truth. But more than anything, we need to continue to ask why. Don't just do something because it has always been done that way.

Many people, in both the martial arts and military communities, will simply repeat what they have learned, never asking why. Overbearing instructors make questioning painful oh, so they accept what is talk to them, without ever looking at it objectively. Furthermore, these people will frequently get very offended if you ask why and challenge the status quo.

Always ask why. Always Be striving towards continual Improvement.