Don’t Cut Corners

A woman making funeral arrangements for her husband requested that her husband be buried in a dark blue suit.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just bury him in the black suit that he’s already wearing the funeral director asked. But the woman insisted that it must be a blue suit, and gave the funeral director a blank cheque to buy one.

When she returned for the wake, she saw her husband in the coffin wearing a beautiful blue suit. She complimented the funeral director on his choice of outfit, and asked how much it cost. He said, “Actually, it didn’t cost anything. As soon as you left, another corpse was brought in and he was wearing a blue suit. I noticed that they were about the same size, so I asked the other widow if she would mind if her husband were buried in a black suit. She said that was fine with her. So I switched the heads.”

Besides supreme insensitivity, this funeral director shows us how shortcuts are in bad taste. To do our jobs properly, we must do them completely. We must learn to take pride in a job well done. If we stick to shortcuts we can never progress.

What’s the problem with cutting corners? Take a piece of paper. Look at its four corners. Now cut one corner and notice what happens. You’ve cut away a corner but you also wind up with an extra corner to deal with. The more corners you cut, the more work piles up. Taking shortcuts and cutting corners is not good for your character, either. You become impatient to reach the top, and are arrogant beyond reproof. This greedy rush towards success can only result in an eventual crash and burn.