Success Principles

Why People Make Excuses And How To Stop Them

December 18, 2008 , 10 Shawn

One of the most common reasons people fail to achieve their goal is that they make excuses. You and I both know that if we want to achieve something in our life, we must take full responsibility and never to make any excuses.

Excuses are just like desires, both come from within, but the difference between them is huge. Desire will drive you toward your goals, while excuses pull you from your goals. For those who set their goals, as long as their goals are realistic and achievable, the only reason for not reaching them is you.

If your commitment is lacking, you’ll make up any excuse to justify failure. If excuses are not a good thing, then why there are so many people making excuses all day long? The answer to this question is this, all excuses do is help you rationalize in your own mind why you are not doing or achieving something that you’re suppose to achieve or do.

Consider this situation, your alarm clock didn’t work and you oversleep. So you’re late to your workplace. And on the way to your workplace, you get caught in a heavy traffic. As a result, you end up getting no parking spaces because all the parking spaces are fully occupied. So you park your car far away and walk to your workplace. When you reach your office, you tell your boss about all these things that you’ve been through the whole morning. Do you think your boss will care?

No! Why? This is simply because all of these are excuses. And excuses only SOUNDS rational to you. To your boss, it is lousy excuses, not reasons.

This is very true in our life. A lot of people want to be rich. They want to be a millionaire and they want to be successful in their life. However, most of them will never make their dreams come true. They’ll tell you that they lack the money to do it. They’ll tell you that they don’t have the knowledge. They’ll tell you that they just don’t have the time to create an additional stream of income. They’ll tell you that they’re too old or too young for it.

They’ll come up with all kinds of excuses that they THOUGHT are the supporting reasons that could help them feel that it is not their fault. The thing is, when they make excuses, they’re not in control.

“You can make all the excuses you want, but don’t forget that when you make excuses, you’re not in control of the situation.”

If someone tells you, “I could have been a marathon runner, but I lost my leg in a car accident.” Try to tell that to Denny Chipollini of Skippack, Pennsylvania. He was in a car accident that severed both his legs. When you ask him about this he’ll tell you that he refers to this accident as a ‘gift’ because it changed his life for the better. Despite all these odds coming against him, he managed to ran 5 kilometer on his artificial leg. He even found a non-profit organization called Generation Hope and used his ‘gift’ to inspire people to overcome all odds and adversity with his ‘no excuses and no limits’ attitude toward life.

If you study the success stories of people like Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Richard Branson, etc, you’ll find that they faced a lot of obstacles when they’re trying to achieve their goals. However, they never made any excuses, except the ‘excuses’ that keep them going on.

Always remember this, when you give excuses on something, you’ll always lose the power to control the situation. If you fail to achieve your goals, don’t make excuses, instead, give empowering reasons that will keep you moving forward.

Before you can become a millionaire or a successful person, you must learn to eliminate excuses and accept full responsibility for your life. You must learn how to cope with obstacles. You must learn how to go over, under, around or through all the obstacles until you achieve your objectives.

So how can you eliminate the habit of making lousy excuses?

The way to eliminate this habit is pretty simple, desire and commitment are the keys to elimination excuses.

When you are truly committed to achieve something, you’ll never give up and you’ll never give excuses. Just like if you’re someone who likes to play golf, you’ll be able to wake up 6am in the morning and drive to the golf site even if it is raining. You’ll never make excuses for this. Instead, you’ll tell yourself empowering reasons to keep going such as, “my friends are waiting for me at the golf club, I can’t let them down” or “I know it is raining here, but it is not raining at the golf club far away from here”.

This is how you can eliminate the habit of making lousy excuses. It is the same if you want to be a millionaire in your life. If the desire for you to become a rich is strong enough, you’ll never make excuses like “I don’t have the time”, “I’m just too young or old” or “I don’t have the money to make money”.

I bet there must be events in your life where you were so passionate in doing something that you forgot to make excuses, and you end up achieving them. Think about it. Maybe it is a tennis match or maybe it is the mobile phone you’re having right now. When you want something strong enough and if you put in 100% commitment, you’ll never make any excuses.

So I hope that no matter what you do, you’ll be passionate in it and put in 100% commitment. If you’re not committed, you’ll always give excuses when you encounter obstacles.