Excuses are like A$$holes.. Everyone has one!

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Excerpt -  “....Maybe success can be as simply to stop using excuses and accept and admit that they are uninterested in the hard work that is required to achieve it....”

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I expect that this topic is in a dead heat with my thoughts on religion, with reactions from those who fall victim to my ranting. Both seem taboo, and unless one tows the accepted lines, you are misguided and / or doomed to spend eternity with a guy with rather red skin, horns and a pitch fork and sweltering heat.

I enjoy the heat, so I will enter into a sharing of my thoughts on “excuses”

Let’s start on the easy ones..  I have no time in day to day life for excuses for failure.. if you take the time.. it will only require  moments recollection to think of a conversation that you have had, and heard statements such as “I would have but (insert excuse here)..” or “I am sorry I could not have completed what you asked because (insert excuse here)” or “if it weren’t for (insert excuse here).. I would have been able to...”.. I think you get the idea, and I bet you can picture a recent conversation you may have been part of... or maybe these words were excepting from your mouth.

In existing in today’s world, a long list of reasons as to why we fail are exceptionally simple to draw from. BUT... in the end, regardless of the reason.. There was failure. And we own these failures. So I am a firm advocate of cleaning out the clutter and own the failures.. It is irrelevant in EVERY case as to why we fail. We fail. There is not a valid reason in the world for failure. Maybe a reader of this is sitting back and thinking bullshit!.. “I failed last week because my co-worker did not complete the proper paperwork so I was working with the wrong information.”  - a good reason to be incompetent right? In my opinion – NOPE.. I hear that and all I hear is “I failed, blah, blah, blah”

What a more efficient world we would live in if conversations were more precise and accurate..”I failed, but I know what happened and it won’t happen again”.

There is NOTHING wrong with screwing up, or taking the fall for someone else’s lack of brains.. OWN the issue, fix it, and don’t repeat it.. No one really cares why the mistake happens, or who the cause was. But they DO respect a person accepting ownership of an error and committing to fix it.. Very simple actually. Try it.

Well that was easy.. But my true issue is a bit more Macro in scale.

Daily, in the news, and in our worlds, we find situations where meathead’s commit more that mistakes, more than simple failures, or are burdens on the taxpayer populous in one way or another. We have jails overflowing, people living in the street, throngs of welfare recipients, who exist in this state based on long lists of excuses, and “reasons” for their failed existence.

The list of excuses is a taboo one, and the core of why we accept them.. they are terrible things that have been endured; broken homes, learning difficulties, abuse, poverty, alcohol and drug addictions, trauma, PTSD and so on.

Almost always more masked or discretely reported, but to edit out the pretty words. We hear so much of : “I abuse because I was abused as a child”, “I needed to break into that house, because my parents were alcoholics”, “I can’t work because I was thrown out of school”, “they live in poverty because that is all they know”, “I lost my job because I have PTSD”. I have NO question that they are all indeed facts, and are terrible things to overcome. But we live only once, and living, failing, being a burden under the umbrella of these excuses is unacceptable.

For those that have these hurdles to overcome, it is their responsibility (unfortunately) to have to work a little harder than others to find whatever they see as success. Maybe success can be as simply to stop using excuses and accept and admit that they are uninterested in the hard work that is required to achieve it. To walk by a homeless person holding a cup for money, the situation just oozes with a long story of excuses that has that person in that state. But, he/she came into this earth in the exact same way that ever other citizen in the world, but as they faced hurdles to overcome (some bigger than others) they chose not to overcome them with hard work, but adopted them as reasons for not succeeding.

Maybe next time you see or watch the news reporting a reduced sentence on a criminal because of a trouble childhood, and having all of the cards stacked against him.. flip the TV channel to look for “Special Olympics” or “Paralympics”.

How dare I suggest that an ADHD child of a broken home, alcohol ridden family, peer abuse, family member suicides, job losses, financial distress have to deal with all of these hurdles, and “buck up” and be a productive member of society. This child/adult cannot be expected to succeed.

I did.