“Ninety nine percent of failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses” states George W. Carver.
Perfection comes to those who learn from their failures and mistakes and not from their excuses for perseverance, brings perfection. Practice makes thing perfect and everyone desires to be perfect in everything. Everybody wants to be a person of wit and wisdom. Many of us would like to be a scientist, a doctor, an engineer, an army officer and so and so forth. To achieve this stage of life we must strive to burry all our lame excuses and alibis. Notwithstanding our failures we should not give up, for success belongs to those who toil hard and judiciously plan ahead. It goes without saying that hard work never goes without reward.
The wild fire is destructive by nature, so does excuse. A celebrated writer John Manson inscribes in his book “The impossible is possible” that “Excuses are the tools a person with no purpose or vision to build great monuments of emptiness.” “I can’t” is the worst excuse and is the foremost enemy of success. Let us, therefore, stop saying “I can’t” and also stop “blaming others”. If we give in easily to excuses then we won’t be good in anything. To quote J. Manson, “You have never failed until you begin to blame somebody else.”
There is always an excuse and alibi saying that, I am perfect, and the others are not so perfect like me. We live in the illusion that we are perfect and this is the beginning of our downfall. We are accustomed to point at others with a finger and tend to justify ourselves as perfect. But ironically while pointing at others with one finger, the rest of the fingers are pointing at us.
Here is a short story. A man drives on a lonely road a midst a heavy rainfall. As he reaches a curve, he sees an old farmer surveying the ruins of his barn. The driver then stops his car and asks him what happened. “Roof fell in” said the farmer. “Leaked so long it finally just rooted through!” “Why in the world didn’t you fix it before it got that bad?” asked the stranger. “Well, sir,” replied the farmer, it just seemed I never did get around to it. When the weather was good, there weren’t need for it, and when it rained, it was too wet to work on!” So if we make endless excuses we too will be caught up in web of problems and troubles. Proverbs: 28:13 reminds us, “A man who refuses to admit his mistakes can never be successful. But if he confesses and forsakes them, he gets another chance.”
There are generally three types of excuses:
1.The excuse that we use to defend the truth
2.The excuse that we go against the truth
3.The excuse, which we neither defend nor go against it, but just emerge out of our habitual practices.
Those who use excuse to defend the truth are often regarded as perfectionist. They are always willing to learn and understand their failures. They know what Vernon Sanders observes, “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” But those belonging to the second and third category are not willing to burry their excuses. They think more about their false egos and capabilities without actually realizing that, the truth has to surface some day and when it emerges; their explanation will have no meaning at all.
Our lives are filled with excuses. The quality of our lives depends on the way we choose to live with the truth. Does the truth actually exist today? Yes it exists. If we wish that, the truth should rise in every situation of our lives then we need to burry our excuses.
Nowadays, we discover that, the truth is buried and the excuses give the opportunity to rise in every situation of our lives. Blames, accusations, corruptions, exploitations, extortions have become the order of the day.
I have come across several people who just keep covering up with one excuse or the other to justify their incompetence and satisfy their egos. This is because we live in a world where everyone wants to be a master and not a leaner. If everybody were to be a master then we will have no learners. Let us not postpone but do things one day a time so that we can transform the world we live in.
St Paul in his letter to the Philippians rightly reiterates that; “In everything you do, stay away from complaining and arguing, so that no one can speak a word of blame against you (Philippians- 2: 14-15) .” When a winner makes a mistake, he says, “I was wrong” when a loser makes a mistake, he says, “It wasn’t my fault.” Do you admit, “I was wrong,” or do you say, “It wasn’t my fault?” A winner explains; a loser explains away. Proverbs says that “work brings profit; talk brings poverty.”
We have many explanations for failure this is a sheer mechanism of escapism. “Excuses always replace progress.” says R. W. Emerson. We need to decide now about the excuses that we continue. We need to nurture hard work and perseverance if we want progress in society. If we are to strive for perfection then we need to acknowledge our failures and not our excuses.
Excuses should be reduced to ashes, not embalmed. A person, who justifies his or her own delay or excuses, is just uprooting his or her own future. If we deny a responsibility we are denying the very foundation of our own existence.
