There Will Always Be Excuses!

I was listening to my friend Matt Heinz. He said something obvious, yet profound, “Every day there is an excuse.”

There has always been and will continue to be any number of reasons to make excuses. We’ve seen the rapid change, disruption create new reasons for excuses. This week, we see global economic turmoil. And then there is always AI. More locally, we have or can create many more excuses. Our products aren’t competitive, we don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough of the right people, our pricing is noncompetitive, our goals are unreasonable, we don’t have the right tools and technology. And then the ultimate, It’s the customers! They don’t get it, they don’t understand, they can’t find the money to buy our solutions.

And, every once in a while I hear a sales person saying, “The dog ate my pipeline/forecast report…..”

There is an infinite supply of things that we can blame for not achieve our goals. But spending our time on these don’t contribute to our ability to achieve the goals. There will always be challenges and roadblocks to achieving our goals. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be needed!

Our jobs are to figure the best paths forward. They will seldom be the easiest paths forward. And each presents it’s own challenges! And we will fail, but our resilience will drive us to pick ourselves up and figure out how to move forward successfully.

What do we do? Some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours.

• Focus on what we can control. We can’t change the economy. We have little impact on the growth rates of our markets. We have little impact on our product development plans. We can control who and how we engage our customers, partners, and teammates. So our jobs are to figure out how to do that as impactfully as possible.
• Minimize comparisons with others.  We can learn a lot from what we see others doing, whether they are our teammates, competitors, or others.  But we, also, have a tendency to use these as excuses.  “Well, the same thing is happening to everyone else….”  “They are investing so much more than we are….”
• Try to understand what’s not working.  Rather than spend the time developing excuses, try to understand what’s not working and what you might change.
• If you don’t care, you are in the wrong job.  So many of our excuses are because we simply don’t care.  If you don’t care about what you are doing, if you don’t care about what you can learn and achieve, you are wasting your time and everyone else’s.  Find something about which you are passionate.

Excuses are just that, excuses.  If you want to learn, grow, achieve, excuses won’t get you there.

Afterword:  This AI generated discussion is short and to the point!  Enjoy!