Stopping Halfway, Never Comes One's Day

In the state of Wei there lived a man with a very virtuous wife.

One day the man found a piece of gold on his way home, he was very happy and ran home as fast as he can to tell his wife. His wife looked at the gold and calmly told her husband, "As you know, a true man never sips stolen water. How then can you take such a thing home with you which is not yours?" The man was so moved by his wife words so he went back and replaced it where it was.

The next year the man went far away to study under a very prestigious teacher. One day while his wife was weaving the man returned. His wife was worried and asked why he came back so soon. The man explained that he missed her. The wife got angry and told her husband to finish his training. The wife took a pair of scissors and cut down the middle of the cloth that she had woven on the loom.  The man was puzzled. "If something is stopped half way it is just like this cut cloth. The cloth is only useful if finished! Now it is worthless, just like your studies" explained the wife.

The man was greatly moved by his wife's words that we went and finished his studies and did not return to his wife until he had completed many great accomplishments.

This fable is supposedly used to admonish someone to finish a task at hand.

Lets first cover the good life lessons here first. See things through to the end.

When we go to college, or pursue a certification all the effort that we put into the studying and schooling only has value when it is finished and the bit of paper certifying that we know what we are talking about is obtained. I can think of a ton of other examples where this rings true, house repairs, clothing, half cooked food anyone? When you hear a story like this and part of it just makes immediate sense you realize something that you already know. That to me is a good morality tale. 

If I was going to hem and haw on this a bit I would point out that you don't want to throw good money after bad. Meaning that just because you started something doesn't mean its worth finishing it if the money to finish it is less than the value of the finished piece. For example if your repairing a sink and your three hours into the project and you break a pipe than it might be time to hang up those handy man tools and call a 'real' plumber. Those three hours in are already spent, you can't get them back, sinking more time into the project isn't going to get you to where you need to be. 

In a project if you were working on something large you would set up 'kill-gates' these are checkpoints for when to stop working on the project, or at least thinking about not continuing. For example if I wanted to do a painting of my kids I might set a time line for 3 years to be able to produce a portrait and set mile stones every so often on what needs to be accomplished to finish the goal. If after 3 months of dedicated work my effort still resembles the drawings we so proudly display on the fridge (you know the ones where the kids made stick figures and maybe there is a sun somewhere in the background) it's time to kill the project and bring in a professional. However don't confuse a kill-gate with just laziness. Such as if I can't get a six pack I'm not going to work out and get a shirt with a six pack stenciled on it. That would be more in lines of what the fable is trying to weed out, laziness.

I don't think of myself as having a western bias but wow when I read fables from other cultures they just don't speak to my personal values at times. The overall message of finishing what you started, that makes sense, good moral stuff that! Putting a gold piece back... That isn't going to happen.

It's hard for me to say how much a gold piece would be worth, was it a bar or a coin? I'm not sure about china but we have wages from Greece (note my horrible western bias) which is about a silver piece a day and a gold piece would be roughly a weeks wages. So basically the wife is saying to put a windfall back. I would at least try and get it back to the person that dropped it, if you found someones wallet wouldn't you return it to them? However if I couldn't find them that isn't getting put back on the sidewalk, no sir re. 

Also after my studies I would return to my wife, being separated from loved ones isn't fun. Great accomplishments are only great when shared.