The Most Common Excuses Holding You Back in Life
According to the guy who made habits popular and became a New York Times bestseller as a result.
I was trapped in my excuses for years.
I wanted to do something creative that would have an impact. Music was the first experiment. Then writing was the second. I always seemed to fall short. It was frustrating. I found it hard to sleep. There were times I took soul-crushing jobs because I didn’t know what else to do. The excuses got trapped in the echo chamber of my head.
A Ted Talk, of all things, changed my mind. It was a talk by Tony Robbins. He asked the audience for a list of their excuses. A gentleman in the front row said, “I didn’t have enough Supreme Court Justices.” That man was former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore. Al was referring to the excuse he told himself after a messy 2000 election, where he lost.
Even the Vice President of the United States is held back by his own excuses.
So don’t feel bad when your excuses get the best of you. After watching Al Gore, I wrote down my own excuses. They’ve stayed with me for seven years.
James Clear made habits popular with his genre-defining book, “Atomic Habits.” His book led me to follow him on Twitter. I recently came across a tweet of his where he listed excuses that held him back from being the now-famous writer he has become.
It turns out, there is a common list of excuses James and I share. You’re likely held back by the same universal excuses.
Not enough time.
It’s easy to blame everything on time. You never have enough time. Between work, family, self-improvement, the books everyone wants you to read, must-watch shows on Netflix and travel, it’s not hard to demonize time.
I get angry at time a lot. I blame her for running out of minutes. It’s not uncommon for me to silently protest by not showing up to work meetings. An underground rebellion forms in my mind. How dare they take my time? The phrase repeats in my head.
You think “if only I had more time then everything would work out.” You delay your goals, thinking you’ll have more time in the distant future. Holidays and the festive season become fantasies of all the time you’re going to have. But those times are for relaxing, not doing work you didn’t have time for. Time escapes you easily.
The problem is you try and do too much in the time you have. I’m guilty of this. I try to write for more than 20 hours per week, work a 9-5 job, be a good partner, spend time with my family (who live far away), answer every email, and post on social media.
It’s not that I don’t have enough time, as you can see. It’s that I’m trying to do too much.
Solution:
Do less. Those two words are all it takes. You find more time when you do less. Plus, it’s what you do with the time you have. Length of time doesn’t matter. It’s the depth of time that progresses your goals in life.
Depth comes down to focus.
Are you disciplined enough to sit down and do the work distraction-free? Can you prepare yourself for work with exercise, mindfulness, and food that gives you energy?
When your warm-up game for work is solid, you can unlock a higher level of focus. Focus leads to flow states. Flow states lead to work that feels effortless and substantially moves you forward in whatever excites you in life.
You have enough time. Subtract, then go deep.
Not enough money.
Money makes everything better, right? Money is seen as the missing piece of your success. With money you can hire more people, buy better tools, work less, attend high-priced seminars.
I have blamed money for my broken dreams plenty of times. The thing is when you get money you can lose it. It takes a lot of time to defend your money. Plenty of entrepreneurs have told me this: You’re one lawsuit away from losing every dollar you have.
As quick as money can come, it can vanish. Money doesn’t hold you back — you do.
Solution:
Not having money forces you to be resourceful.
This is what is missed. When you have too much money you get lazy. You buy resources. But when you don’t have money you have to unlock the ultimate two free resources: 1) Creativity 2) Imagination.
You create the solutions needed to progress in life with your mind. “If you can see it, you can be it,” says House of Cards actress Elizabeth Marvel.
Money isn’t the answer. Learn to be resourceful and you will create limitless possibilities for your life.
Not enough knowledge.
A guy I used to work with is doing his fourth degree. He has achieved none of his goals in life. The university keeps selling him another dream in return for 6-figures of education. He keeps listening to their marketing.
The acquisition of knowledge has become more important to him than putting the lessons into practice and accelerating his future through self-learning, experimentation and real-world feedback.
I dug a little deeper. His parents never saw him as being enough. They thought of him as a Ken doll, living in their plastic house of fake expectations. He’s using education to prove his parents wrong, while simultaneously starving from the progress in life he so dearly deserves.
Solution:
Please don’t overeducate.
You’ll never know enough. There comes a point where you’ve got to take what you’ve learned so far and see where it leads you. What I found is when I applied my formal education in sound engineering, it led me down all sorts of whacky paths.
I studied to become a sound engineer, became an entrepreneur, failed, got a job in a call center, lost my way, found my way, then ended up using most of my time to write. I used to spit in the face of writers. Writers were losers in my mind. Now, I’ve become the thing I ridiculed.
Life lessons are learning that moves you forward in life.
Not the right connections.
“It’s all about who you know.” “Your network equals your net-worth.”
You’ve heard these cliche sayings that fetishize knowing people. Like knowing people is everything. You can know people, but if all you do is use them to progress your life, then where do you think it will get you?
Nobody likes to be brutally used for someone else’s dreams.
The problem is we collect far too many people in our lives. We have lots of relationships but the majority of them are shallow. We barely know the people we call friends. Connections was the word LinkedIn gave to business friends. I fell into this trap.
I have 30,000 LinkedIn connections. I’ve never spoken to 95% of them. I am saving their so-called connection for a rainy day in business. And the times I’ve attempted to ask these shallow connections for help, they’ve ignored my message. You can connect with someone on social media, but if it’s not genuine, then they will forget you. They will ghost you because it’s politer than un-friending you.
Solution:
Connections won’t give you something you didn’t earn.
You work your way to a book deal. You earn your pay rise. You build your business. A connection can’t give you these things. And even if you do get a huge advantage for free, thanks to a connection, you won’t appreciate it. You’ll think you were entitled to it. Flip your thinking.
Don’t wait for the right person. Be the right person.
How can you help those you encounter with their goals? Your life progresses when you focus on what you can give, not what you can get. If all you do is chase selfish desires you’ll exhaust all the right people.
Selflessness is an accelerator of personal growth.
What is missing from your life?
A lack of time, money, knowledge or the right connections isn’t holding you back. James Clear provides a transformative way to think:
There was always a small step I could have taken — if I had the guts to take it.
Courage is missing.
The courage to take a small step. The courage to take a step you know in your mind is worth taking but that you’re afraid to take. You’re fearful of what could go wrong. You’re concerned about how you’ll be judged. You’re obsessing over a backup plan. Courage is what holds you back.
The way to muster up courage is to deploy it in micro-doses.
It’s unlikely you’ll go from being afraid of public speaking, to giving a Martin Luther King Speech in front of a stadium of people. Minimize each step on your roadmap. What’s a small thing you can do right now? Then, what’s another small thing you can do? You don’t need willpower or blind faith when you have small amounts of courage.
Micro-doses of courage give you the evidence to keep moving forward and stomp all over your excuses.
