Excuses Are The Nails Used To Build A House Of Failure
Don Wilder
DEFINITION: Excuse
- To make apology for not doing what you said you would
- To try and remove blame from oneself
- To rationalize
When we fall into the trap of excuse-making, what we’re really saying “It’s not my fault.”
It IS our fault, but we desperately want to avoid accepting responsibility for our failure, so we make excuses.
Every time we make an excuse we lie to ourselves, as well as to whomever we’re delivering the excuse.
Life is filled with commitments – things we simply must do if we want a roof over our head, food in our bellies and clothes on our back.
Those are real-world needs that simply must be met.
But in keeping those commitments for the benefit of our family and ourselves, it’s really easy to drop some of the most important commitments – those to ourselves.
Commitments to ourselves are the easiest and quickest to break.
They should be the hardest to break, yet far too often we are at the top of the list of people we lie to with our excuses.
If your stated goal is to write and publish a book, making excuses for why you didn’t write today simply guarantees your book will never be completed, let alone be published.
Instead of making excuses for your failure to write, take full responsibility for this failure, then commit to doing things differently next time.
This commitment starts with YOU and YOUR BOOK.
Schedule daily writing appointments on your calendar – even if they’re only 15 minutes long.
Keep the appointment with yourself and write for those 15 minutes.
Every time you fail to keep your commitment, give your partner or your child $20. Better yet, give that $20 to a charity whose aims you don’t agree with, or to a political party you despise.
After handing over $100 or more to the political party you despise I think you’ll find keeping those writing appointments are now extremely important.
And the excuse-making has stopped.
These are both admirable goals in life – whether you’re writing a book or not.
