人们为什么总是粗心大意？

Why Are People Always Careless?

> By Li Xiaolai · 2009-07-17 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113113036/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/7116.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Everyone knows the importance of good habits. Yet it seems not many people really care about cultivating good habits. For example, no matter who you are, you know and agree that "being conscientious and careful" is a very important habit, right? But how many conscientious and careful people are there, really? Without exaggeration, over 99% of people are almost never conscientious.

I myself am not a very conscientious person. The typos that keep appearing in my blog posts are clear proof of this (I use a pinyin input method, and almost every day readers come by to kindly point them out). Whenever I discover I've made a mistake, I always find that when I trace the cause there is only one: at the time I wasn't conscientious and careful enough. And what's more vexing is that I always find, at the same time, that before that I had actually always felt I'd already "done my best" quite thoroughly; only after the result came out did I understand that I hadn't done enough.

When I was very young, my mother planted a seed in me. She told me to read books without missing a single character, and moreover to read them several times without missing a single character. As for when I asked her, "Isn't it enough just to roughly look through some books?", she just said softly, "A book that's fine to roughly look through—why would you read it?" Strangely enough, I, who had never been very obedient, remembered these words, and even now I remember my mother's expression at the time very clearly.

Before I was 26, there was only one kind of time when I was conscientious and careful: when reading books and looking at words. Thinking of this many years later, I don't know how to thank my mother enough. Of course, [she always seems not to remember these "important" moments.](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/68.html)

The year I was 26, I took a hard look at my painful lessons and resolved to form a consistent habit of being conscientious and careful. More than ten years of experience come down to one word plus an interjection—hard, ah! If I'm allowed three words, it's—really hard, ah! If I'm allowed to talk freely, I'd say—really fucking hard! [Translator's note: the original escalates from 难啊 to 真难啊 to 真他妈的难, the last with the curse 他妈的, "fucking."]

Once you start demanding of yourself that you be as conscientious and careful as possible, you find that so-called **"conscientiousness and carefulness" is, in a certain sense, an ability**; or, put the other way round, the degree to which a person can be conscientious and careful is limited by their own ability. For example, a couple of days ago a colleague of mine, translating a sentence, rendered "striking home" as "打击家庭" ("attacking the family") (it should have been "hitting the vital point, achieving a marked effect"). And this colleague's conscientiousness in doing things is acknowledged by everyone, and has even, in a certain sense, reached the point of being neurotic.

So, as for my own "carelessness," if I'm allowed to describe it precisely, I think it might be more appropriate to put it this way: "I have not yet acquired enough ability to be 100% conscientious and careful."

Being conscientious and careful is an ability. And the so-called habit of being conscientious and careful can't necessarily guarantee not making mistakes, because this habit is always limited by ability. But fortunately, this habit promotes the cultivation of this ability. And conversely, *carelessness is a bad habit, and moreover may be a bad habit that sooner or later ruins a whole life.*

But why is it that so many people seem to know this perfectly well and yet don't care at all? Bad habits are like chronic diseases—sooner or later fatal, only not right away; it may even be years, a decade or more, decades later. So, although patients with chronic diseases know perfectly well that their illness was caused by unhealthy living habits, such as lack of exercise, irregular living, smoking and so on, they would rather keep their original way of living—with complete disregard for the fact that the state of their body is actually getting worse at an accelerating rate.

"Not immediately fatal" is precisely the most frightening thing about bad habits. The bad habit has clearly already started to take effect, the situation has clearly already started to deteriorate, yet the person concerned feels "it's nothing," or "it's not much of anything," or even flatly "there's nothing wrong at all."

When I was little, in the countryside, I once saw people in the Northeast boil toads to eat in winter. The hibernating toads were dug out of the soft mud, put into hemp sacks and taken home, and then dumped plop, plop into a big pot. Compared with outside, the water in the pot, although not yet heated, was very "warm," so the toads one after another "slowly woke up." When boiling toads you can't use a big fire; instead you use a few thin sticks of firewood to "stew slowly over a gentle fire." The toads keep feeling "it's nothing," "it's quite nice," even "comfortable"…… By the time they realize they can't stand it and want to jump out, the flesh on their bodies has long been cooked, and then……

I think bad habits are just like this.

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