One of the greatest hindrances in making any progress in life, business or personal, is our lamentable habit of making excuses for ourselves!

Whether it’s a pain in the head, a pain in your heart, or that eternal pain in the butt (!), we almost always have a good reason - and probably several - for why we did not live up to our potential, or achieve the success that we felt we deserved.




However, the sorry fact of the matter is this. Excuses are just excuses, and what was left unachieved remains unachieved. Maybe the excuses make you feel better for a while, and they help you save face in front of other people. However, in the depths of the night, when you are all by yourself and have time to ponder at leisure about all that might have been… what about then?

Life is a contact sport. If you intend to achieve anything worthwhile, you are going to encounter opposition, challenge and frustration. Often, it will be from events and circumstances. Sometimes, it will be from other people. Much of the time, it will seem absolutely insurmountable.

That is the norm in life. The greater and more worthwhile the goal, the greater the level of opposition you will have to overcome. Even a kid playing the latest X-box game knows that!

However, the worst thing you can do in this situation is to make excuses. In doing so, you are giving yourself permission to fail. You are saying that it is okay not to succeed, and here is the good reason why.

Certainly, you can have your excuses if you really cherish them. However, that is all you will have. You cannot achieve the success you wish for AND simultaneously hold onto all those good reasons why you cannot have it.

If you try, you are setting your brain up to go in two opposite directions at once. It simply cannot do that. Yet, people DO try to do that all the time. They insist on secretly (or overtly) creating a safety net for themselves, “just in case”. Yet, it is often that very safety net that assures failure, whereas the absence of it would so often bring a heightened chance of success.

The world-class copywriter John Carlton describes a superb technique he uses upon himself to write great sales copy. He calls it “the gun to the head” approach. He imagines that somebody is literally holding a pistol to his head and will use it unless he produces a killer sales letter. FAST! If that doesn’t work for you, imagine the gun being held to the head of your wife, of children, or mother.

Now, would THAT motivate you to succeed? Would THAT make you drop all your excuses and just go flat out to PERFORM? If your answer is no, you are probably already 6 feet underground… or should be!

Anybody who knows their history knows how the Spanish Conquistador, Cortez, landed in Mexico with just a tiny army of a few hundred Spaniards. What was the first thing he did? He burned the boats! So now there was no way back. The only direction was forward. And that is where they went… up against a nation of hundreds of thousands of souls. The rest, as they say, is history.

Couldn’t there have been a few good excuses there, don’t you think?…

I am reminded of the story from Napoleon Hill’s “Think & Grow Rich”, where he describes a farmer who suffered an enormous injury that left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down. All he could do was lie in bed all day long. He could no longer run the farm anymore. Instead, from his bed, he eventually organized the creation of a meat packing plant. That fledgling company, which would never have begun if the man had not been paralyzed, went on to become the largest meat packing company in America!

Yet, wouldn’t HE have had the perfect excuse to fail, if he had wanted it? Of course.

The question is, do you want to live with your success, or with your excuses? If you try to have both, you will only end up with your excuses, because that is the nature of the way the brain, and life itself, works.

When you have pre-created excuses, you make it okay to fail. You cannot go flat out, because you don’t have to. Your excuses will always bear you up if anything goes wrong, or so you would like to think.

It is far better to decide to take personal responsibility for your results, no matter how they turn out. When you are self-empowered in this fashion, you also give yourself the power to change your circumstances, as and when you choose to do so.

When you act in this fashion, the focus is upon YOU and what you are going to do. When you focus upon your excuses, your focus is upon other people, events, circumstances, and all sorts of other things you cannot change. When the brain focuses on all THAT, instead of the goal you want and the shortest way to it, all it will see are reasons to give up and be dispirited. That is precisely what happens to so many people.

After a few years of living this way, it becomes a way of life. You literally cannot think differently. The brain is very malleable, at least to begin with, and you can shape and form it in the way you wish it to habitually respond. However, after a while it will tend to set that way, either for good or ill. So, the manner in which it becomes set is entirely up to you.

However, when you focus on seeking the solution, the brain goes to work on that instead. It selectively chooses from the whole range of data out there, and brings your attention to those parts of the whole that will further your cause. It also attracts to you the people and circumstances you need to make it happen.

You can train it to always find the easy way out, to moan and grumble, to make excuses. Alternatively, you can train it to find solutions, to take responsibility, and to find the shortest way to your goals and dreams.

The question simply boils down to this. What do you prefer to do? Do you wish to train your brain to succeed and always look for the best and quickest way to your target. Or do you wish to not even bother to try to hit the target in the first place, and wallow in the mire of all the great reasons why you were outgunned from the start.

The choice is really yours.

Copyright 2006. Asoka Selvarajah. All Roghts Reserved.

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