Taking Responsibility and Its Reward

As a restaurant owner, I was always in the kitchen, making sure things were OK.  One day I went back there, tasted my Italian tomato sauce, and found it to be too spicy--there was too much black pepper in it.  When I asked the cook what had happened he replied, "A little extra pepper slipped off my hand on me!"  I wasn't buying that!  No, I retorted.  It didn't slip off your hand, you put it in there."   I was holding him responsible for making the sauce wrong.  He hadn't been careful and, even if it was a mistake, he should have corrected it.

Parents, isn't this like when your youngster comes home and tells you your car's smashed and he explains, "Dad the car ran away on me."  Oh sure.  The car decided on its own to run off the road and hit a tree.  Our language allows us to try to shift the blame on another and not take the responsibility ourselves. 

An Italian friend of mine who lives in Italy tells of the time that he scratched someone else's car when he was parking his own.  He didn't do anything about it, not taking responsibility for the damage.  Well, a while later, he came back to find a damaged mirror on his car.  He got the message that he should have done something about the damage he caused because the law of cause and effect came back to bite him and he had to pay up.  Well, after that, when he again accidentally damaged a car, he left a note with his name and phone on the window.  

When the owner, a businessman, found it, he just couldn't believe it!  He was so impressed by my friend's honesty that he offered him a position with his company!