Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Lately, I've become super sensitive to the amount of excuses people make for not living up to their fullest potential.

I have a friend who is starting out on a new venture. He constantly complains that his new venture is not going the way he wants it to go. But, whenever I give him a suggestion to get around whatever he believes to be an obstacle, he ALWAYS has an excuse as to why my suggestion won't work.

He is selling a product that he designed. He has the product available in a few stores, in which he personally knows the owners. He's also trying to sell it on the Internet. But it isn't selling like he thought it would because he knows nothing about computers or the Internet.

So, I suggested that he branch out and contact all stores in the state and surrounding states, to see if they would be interested in carrying his product.

His excuse is that he doesn't know how he can find all of the stores that specialize in what he sells.

I suggest that he gets a yellow page or business-to-Business book and simply call the storeowners.

He says that his yellow pages only cover his area, and he has no way of getting the information for the other stores.

I suggested that he goes on the Internet, go to www.msn.com or any search engine and type in "directory."

He says he doesn't know much about computers or the Internet.

I then suggest that he goes to the library because they have yellow pages and business-to-Business books available and he doesn't even have to pay-he could Xerox the pages (for 5 cents a copy) or write them down and call the stores later. Or, he could get someone who DOES know how to use the computer and get the information for them.

He shakes his head and walks away. He HAS no excuse for this one.

I started to wonder, "Why is he sabotaging his own project?"

Then the answer came to me--FEAR disguised as excuses.

Excuses, excuses, excuses.

The reason he has a negative answer for everything that I suggest is because, deep down inside of him he is afraid that his vision will somehow fail. He's afraid of being looked at as a failure when and if his venture does not take off. So, he hides behind excuses. Excuses give him something to blame, other than himself, if his venture doesn't do as well as he hopes. He could always say, "Well, I could only get my product into three stores. I wasn't able to cover enough area that's why it didn't jump off the way I thought it would."

This way, he is SAFE. No one would look at him as being a failure. They would just see that it was something that was out of his control.

Fear hides itself in a lot of different forms and comes out in different shapes and sizes. Sometimes we won't ever admit to ourselves that fear is exactly what is stopping us for doing the things that we want to do most. So, we make excuses as to WHY we can't do this or can't do that.

The truth is: THERE IS NOTHING THAT YOU CANNOT DO. My favorite verse in the Bible states it clearly. WITH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE!!

I state this verse, over and over to myself, especially when I find myself thinking of an excuse as to WHY I can't do something.

The truth of the matter is, there aren't any excuses. We are just afraid to take the leap of faith. We are afraid that we might fail. We are afraid what others might think of us. We are afraid of getting hurt or offended. We are afraid of being a success.

If we try it and we fail, "They're ALL gonna laugh at you." (Remember that line from that Carrie movie?) So, if we make excuses, we somehow justify in our minds that WE are not the failure, but outside circumstances has caused us to fail.

But what if you looked at it this way?

What if you didn't accomplish EXACTLY what you set out to do, but you learned from the experience. You learned another way how NOT to do the thing that you are most trying to do. Then, would that be considered a failure? Not at all. It would be considered a success. Thomas Edison failed hundreds of times while trying to invent the light bulb. But he didn't see any of his tries as failures. He saw each "failure" as learning yet another way NOT to create the light bulb. As he crossed off each seemingly failure, it brought him closer to achieving his goal.