“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.”
Excuses appears in a wide variety of forms, but the worst types of this disease are: health excuses, intelligence excuses, age excuses and luck excuses.
Vaccinate ourselves against excuses:
1. “But My Health Isn’t Good” Health excuses ranges all the way from the chronic “I don’t feel good” to the more specific “I’ve got such-and-such wrong with me”, bad health in a thousand different forms, is used as an excuse for failing to do what a person wants to do.
Four things you can do to defeat health excuses:
- Refuse to talk about your health. The more you talk about an ailment, even the common cold, and the worst it seems to get. Talking about bad health is like putting fertilizer on weeds. Success-minded people defeat the natural tendency to talk about their bad health.
- Refuse to worry about your health.
- Be genuinely grateful that your health is as good as it is. There’s an old saying, “I felt sorry for myself because I had a ragged shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
- Remind yourself often “It’s better to wear out than rust out” Life is yours to enjoy. Don’t waste it
2. “But You’ve Got to Have Brains to Succeed”
Intelligence excuses or “I lack brains” is common (95% of people). Not many people will admit openly that they think they lack adequate intelligence, rather, they feel it deep down inside.
Most of us make two basic errors with respect to intelligence.
- We under estimate our own brain power.
- We over estimate the other fellow’s brain power.
What really matters is not how much intelligence you have but how you use what you do have. The thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you may have. Interest, enthusiasm is the critical factor.
Three Ways to Cure Intelligence Excuses.
- Never underestimate your own intelligence and never overestimate the intelligence of others. Remember, it’s not how many brains you’ve got that matters, it’s how you use your brains that counts.
- Remind yourself several times daily “My attitudes are more important than my intelligence.”
- Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts.
3. “It’s No Use. I’m Too Old (or Too Young)”
Cure for age Excuses is:
- Look at your present age positively.
- Compute how much productive time you have left.
- Invest future time in doing what you really want to do.
It’s too late only when you let your mind go negative and think it’s too late. Stop thinking “I should have started years ago.” That’s failure thinking, Instead think “I’m going to start now, my best years are still ahead of me” that’s the way successful people think.
4. “But My Case Is Different, I Attract Bad Luck.”
Two Ways to conquer this Excuses:
- Accept the law of cause and effect,
- Don’t be a wishful thinker, Instead, just concentrate on developing those qualities in yourself that will make you a winner.
