Excuses Don't Get Results Quotes

Isn’t it funny how we make rational excuses for being out of alignment? We say, “Well, this ____ and that ____ happened, so it makes perfect sense for me to be feeling like this ____ and wanting to do this ____.” Yet, to this day, I have never met a happy person who adheres to those excuses. In fact, each time I – or anyone else – decide to give in to “rational excuses” that justify feeling bad – it’s interesting that only further suffering is the result. There is never a good enough reason for us to be out of alignment with peace. Sure, we can go there and make choices that dim our lights… and that is fine; there certainly is purpose for it and the contrast gives us lessons to learn… yet if we’re aware of what we are doing and we’re ready to let go of the suffering – then why go there at all? It’s like beating a dead horse. Been there, done that… so why do we keep repeating it? Pain is going to happen; it’s inevitable in this human experience, yet it is often so brief. When we make those excuses, what happens is: we pick up that pain and begin to carry it with us into the next day… and the next day… into next week… maybe next month… and some of us even carry it for years or to our graves! Forgive, let it go! It is NOT worth it! It is NEVER worth it. There is never a good enough reason for us to pick up that pain and carry it with us. There is never a good enough reason for us to be out of alignment with peace. Unforgiveness hurts you; it hurts others, so why even go there? Why even promote pain? Why say painful things to yourself or others? Why think pain? Just let it go! Whenever I look back on painful things or feel pain today, I know it is my EGO that drives me to “go there.” The EGO likes to have the last word, it likes to feel superior, it likes to make others feel less than in hopes that it will make itself (me) feel better about my insecurities. Maybe if I hurt them enough, they will feel the pain I felt over what they did to me. It’s only fair! It’s never my fault; it’s always someone else’s. There is a twisted sense of pleasure I get from feeling this way, and my EGO eats it right up. YET! With awareness that continues to grow and expand each day, I choose to not feed my pain (EGO) or even go there. I still feel it at times, of course, so I simply acknowledge it and then release it. I HAVE power and choice over my speech and actions. I do not need to ever “go there” again. It’s my choice; it’s your choice. So it’s about damn time we start realizing this. We are not victims of our impulses or emotions; we have the power to control them, and so it’s time to stop acting like we don’t. It’s time to relinquish the excuses.

Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing. Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever. Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions. Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them. Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides. Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not. Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to. Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced. Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real. There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body. I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body. And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap. You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real. Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me

SEEK SIGNIFICANT CHANGE       • Never be content with performance or results.       • Remove all excuses for getting to the next level. Don’t say “no”; ask

THE URGENCY ADDICTION Some of us get so used to the adrenaline rush of handling crises that we become dependent on it for a sense of excitement and energy. How does urgency feel? Stressful? Pressured? Tense? Exhausting? Sure. But let’s be honest. It’s also sometimes exhilarating. We feel useful. We feel successful. We feel validated. And we get good at it. Whenever there’s trouble, we ride into town, pull out our six shooter, do the varmint in, blow the smoke off the gun barrel, and ride into the sunset like a hero. It brings instant results and instant gratification. We get a temporary high from solving urgent and important crises. Then when the importance isn’t there, the urgency fix is so powerful we are drawn to do anything urgent, just to stay in motion. People expect us to be busy, overworked. It’s become a status symbol in our society—if we’re busy, we’re important; if we’re not busy, we’re almost embarrassed to admit it. Busyness is where we get our security. It’s validating, popular, and pleasing. It’s also a good excuse for not dealing with the first things in our lives. “I’d love to spend quality time with you, but I have to work. There’s this deadline. It’s urgent. Of course you understand.” “I just don’t have time to exercise. I know it’s important, but there are so many pressing things right now. Maybe when things slow down a little.

You can't expect other people to fix your problems if you don't at least try to fix them yourself first. [...] The solving part should always start with you. This is hard for a lot of people, but not because they are lazy, or they want to make excuses, or they're selfish. No, i think it's because too many people aren't selfish enough. They don't put themselves first, and as result, when things get bad in their lives, they have no idea what to do because it feels like it's happening to somebody else. Or worse, they get blindsided by the problems because they never saw them coming.

An Erudite woman comes out of a stall, and I scramble to my feet, draw the stunner, and point it at her, all without thinking. She freezes, her arms up, toilet paper stuck to her shoe. “Don’t shoot!” Her eyes bulge from her head. I remember, then, that I am dressed like the Erudite. I set the stunner on the edge of a sink. “My apologies,” I say. I try to adopt the formal speech common to the Erudite. “I am slightly edgy, with everything that’s occurring. We are reentering in order to retrieve some of our test results from…Laboratory 4-A.” “Oh,” the woman says. “That seems rather unwise.” “The data is of the utmost importance,” I say, trying to sound as arrogant as some of the Erudite I’ve met. “I would rather not leave it to get riddled with bullets.” “It’s hardly my place to prevent you from trying to recover it,” she says. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash my hands and take cover.” “Sounds good,” I say. I decide not to tell her she has toilet paper on her shoe.

If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from another planet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But it isn’t our skin that is full of wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer. All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that this world is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world for thousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and the psychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but I can tell you it is not normal. When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world. Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painful that for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say “I love you” can be frightening. But even if it’s painful and fearful to have an emotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we get married, and we have children. In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. In that denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lie to ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don’t notice we are lying, and sometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lie to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

LEADING LESSONS Excuses hold you back. Excuses they keep you from doing what needs to be done and from living your truth. When I was making all those lame excuses for why my performance was going to suck, I was refusing to own it. And when you don’t commit wholeheartedly to a situation, you’re always somewhere floating in the middle, never really operating at your full potential. We tend to make excuses when things don’t go according to our original plans. Or we blame something or someone else for our mistakes. You can also make excuses for the things you don’t do--why you haven’t left a job you hate, followed your dream, or taken a risk. In the end, all those excuses add up to the same thing: a smoke screen. When you make an excuse, you’re rejecting the truth and trying to buffer yourself from the consequences of your actions. Leaders own what they do. This was something I had to learn through experience. I saw how pawning off responsibility (like blaming a bad back for a bad performance) was not helping me improve or grow. People who constantly make excuses are often afraid they’re not good enough or can’t live up to others’ expectations. Maybe in the beginning it makes you feel better: “If I just explain it this way, I won’t look so bad.” But the end result is always self-defeating. Excuses will always get in the way of a responsible life.

August 8th START WITH WHERE THE WORLD IS “Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome as a small thing.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.29.(4) Have you ever heard the expression “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”? The idea is not to settle or compromise your standards, but rather not to become trapped by idealism. The community organizer Saul Alinsky opens his book Rules for Radicals with a pragmatic but inspiring articulation of that idea: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.” There is plenty that you could do right now, today, that would make the world a better place. There are plenty of small steps that, were you to take them, would help move things forward. Don’t excuse yourself from doing them because the conditions aren’t right or because a better opportunity might come along soon. Do what you can, now. And when you’ve done it, keep it in perspective, don’t overblow the results. Shun both ego and excuse, before and after.

The University Student who accessed Joy I once asked several university students at a mindfulness workshop why they were so stressed. Below is a conversation I had with a young student: “Why do you get yourself so stressed out?” “Because I have so much work to do in order to pass my masters degree”, replied the student. “Is the degree important to you?” “Of course it’s important. If I pass, I’ll have the chance to work for a law firm and eventually become a junior partner”. “Why do you want to become a junior partner?” “So that I can work my way up the ladder, have more influence and earn a lot of money”. “Why do you want to have a lot of influence and earn a lot of money?” I asked. “If I have a lot of money and influence, I will have enough financial muscle to provide everything for my future wife and children.” “Do you have your own family yet?” “Not at the moment. I’m single but I want to prepare myself”, the student replied. “So, why do you want a partner and children?” “Because, I’ll feel complete and satisfied”, the student replied. “Do you mean that you will feel happier if you have all of these things?” “Yeah, that’s it! I want to be happy and feel good about myself. I want happiness”. “Why don’t you just decide to be happy right now rather than spending most of your time desperately hoping to find happiness in something that hasn’t happened yet? You can still create your own reality and meet your dream partner but you can start to feel happy now before you meet her”. This conversation helped the student to see the futility of booking appointments in the future to be happy, when he could consciously make that choice in the present moment and also that he would have a much better chance of attracting his dream career and partner if he was vibrating joy in the present moment. The wonderful realization of mindful living is that we do not need an excuse to be happy and serene. Being joyful comes as a result of being mindful. Nothing more is required from us apart from honouring the nowness of life. What a startling revelation!!

Want to be a success? You Have to Do the Hard Things. You have to make the call you’re afraid to make. You have to get up earlier than you want to get up. You have to give more than you get in return right away. You have to care more about others than they care about you. You have to fight when you are already injured, bloody, and sore. You have to feel unsure and insecure when playing it safe seems smarter. You have to lead when no one else is following you yet. You have to invest in yourself even though no one else is. You have to look like a fool while you’re looking for answers you don’t have. You have to grind out the details when it’s easier to shrug them off. You have to deliver results when making excuses is an option. You have to search for your own explanations even when you’re told to accept the “facts.” You have to make mistakes and look like an idiot. You have to try and fail and try again. You have to run faster even though you’re out of breath. You have to be kind to people who have been cruel to you. You have to meet deadlines that are unreasonable and deliver results that are unparalleled. You have to keep moving towards where you want to be no matter what’s in front of you.

You have to make the call you’re afraid to make. You have to get up earlier than you want to get up. You have to give more than you get in return right away. You have to care more about others than they care about you. You have to fight when you are already injured, bloody, and sore. You have to feel unsure and insecure when playing it safe seems smarter. You have to lead when no one else is following you yet. You have to invest in yourself even though no one else is. You have to look like a fool while you’re looking for answers you don’t have. You have to grind out the details when it’s easier to shrug them off. You have to deliver results when making excuses is an option. You have to search for your own explanations even when you’re told to accept the “facts”. You have to make mistakes and look like an idiot. You have try and fail and try again. You have to run faster even though you’re out of breath. You have to be kind to people who have been cruel to you. You have to meet deadlines that are unreasonable and deliver results that are unparalleled. You have to be accountable for your actions even when things go wrong. You have to keep moving towards where you want to be no matter what’s in front of you. You have to do the hard things. The things that no one else is doing. The things that scare you. The things that make you wonder how much longer you can hold on. Those are the things that define you. Those are the things that make the difference between living a life of mediocrity or outrageous success. The hard things are the easiest things to avoid. To excuse away. To pretend like they don’t apply to you. The simple truth about how ordinary people accomplish outrageous feats of success is that they do the hard things that smarter, wealthier, more qualified people don’t have the courage — or desperation — to do. Do the hard things. You might be surprised at how amazing you really are

1. A Rich Life means you can spend extravagantly on the things you love as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t. 2. Focus on the Big Wins—the five to ten things that get you disproportionate results, including automating your savings and investing, finding a job you love, and negotiating your salary. Get the Big Wins right and you can order as many lattes as you want. 3. Investing should be very boring—and very profitable—over the long term. I get more excited eating tacos than checking my investment returns. 4. There’s a limit to how much you can cut, but no limit to how much you can earn. I have readers who earn $50,000/year and ones who earn $750,000/year. They both buy the same loaves of bread. Controlling spending is important, but your earnings become super-linear. 5. Your friends and family will have lots of “tips” once you begin your financial journey. Listen politely, then stick to the program. 6. Build a collection of “spending frameworks” to use when deciding on buying something. Most people default to restrictive rules (“I need to cut back on eating out . . .”), but you can flip it and decide what you’ll always spend on, like my book-buying rule: If you’re thinking about buying a book, just buy it. Don’t waste even five seconds debating it. Applying even one new idea from a book is worth it. (Like this one.) 7. Beware of the endless search for “advanced” tips. So many people seek out high-level answers to avoid the real, hard work of improving step by step. It’s easier to dream about winning the Boston Marathon than to go out for a ten-minute jog every morning. Sometimes the most advanced thing you can do is the basics, consistently. 8. You’re in control. This isn’t a Disney movie and nobody’s coming to rescue you. Fortunately, you can take control of your finances and build your Rich Life. 9. Part of creating your Rich Life is the willingness to be unapologetically different. Once money isn’t a primary constraint, you’ll have the freedom to design your own Rich Life, which will almost certainly be different from the average person’s. Embrace it. This is the fun part! 10. Live life outside the spreadsheet. Once you automate your money using the system in this book, you’ll see that the most important part of a Rich Life is outside the spreadsheet—it involves relationships, new experiences, and giving back. You earned it.

1.          They were perfect… initially. We’ve discussed this one, but it’s worth mentioning again. A narcissist wants you to believe they’re totally into you and put you on a pedestal. Once they have you, though, they stop trying as hard and you end up being the one working to keep them. 2.          Others don’t see the narcissist the way you do. It’s hard enough to see it yourself, but when those around you, especially their friends and family, make excuses for them, you start doubting yourself even more. Stick to what you see. 3.          They’re making you look bad. In order to maintain their facade of perfection, they make you look like a bad person. Usually this involves spreading rumors, criticizing you behind your back, or creating lies you supposedly told. The worst part is that when you try rectifying the situation, or laying the blame where it should belong, the narcissist uses your defense to back their own lies. It’s frustrating because the generous, wonderful person they displayed initially is what those around you still see, even if you see them for who they really are. 4.          You feel symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. The toxic person may have caused you to worry about not acting the way you’re expected to, or that you haven’t done something right or good enough. In making this person your entire world, you may lose sleep, have no interest in things you used to or have developed a, “What’s the point?” attitude. You essentially absorb all of the negative talk and treatment so deeply, you believe it all. This is a dangerous mindset to be in so if you feel you’re going any steps down this path, seek outside help as soon as possible. 5.          You have unexplained physical ailments. It’s not surprising that when you internalize a great deal of negativity, you begin to feel unwell. Some common symptoms that aren’t related to any ongoing condition might be: changes in appetite, stomach issues, body aches, insomnia, and fatigue. These are typical bodily responses to stress, but if they intensify or become chronic, see a physician as soon as you can. 6.          You feel alone. Also a common symptom of abuse. If things are really wrong, the narcissist may have isolated you from friends or family either by things they’ve done themselves or by making you believe no one is there for you. 7.          You freeze. When you emotionally remove yourself from the abuse, you’re freezing. It’s a coping mechanism to reduce the intensity of the way you’re being treated by numbing out the pain. 8.          You don’t trust yourself even with simple decisions. When your self-esteem has been crushed through devaluing and criticism, it’s no wonder you can’t make decisions. If you’re also being gaslighted, it adds another layer of self-doubt. 9.          You can’t make boundaries. The narcissist doesn’t have any, nor do they respect them, which is why it’s difficult to keep them away even after you’ve managed to get away. Setting boundaries will be discussed in greater detail in an upcoming chapter. 10.    You lost touch with the real you. The person you become when with a narcissistic abuser is very different from the person you were before you got involved with them. They’ve turned you into who they want you to be, making you feel lost and insecure with no sense of true purpose. 11.    You never feel like you do anything right. We touched on this briefly above, but this is one of the main signs of narcissistic abuse. Looking at the big picture, you may be constantly blamed when things go wrong even when it isn’t your fault. You may do something exactly the way they tell you to, but they still find fault with the results. It’s similar to how a Private feels never knowing when the Drill Sergeant will find fault in their efforts. 12.    You walk on eggshells. This happens when you try avoiding any sort of conflict, maltreatment or backlash by going above and beyond to make the abuser happy.

If you have ever been in a relationship with, or are experiencing narcissistic abuse, then you probably know how hard it is to leave. You know what you need to do, you think about the ways you can escape, and you gain the courage to do it, but then, you don’t. You don’t because something brings you back in. You sit there and think of all the good memories, then think about what would happen after you actually left, then you think about all the things that haven’t happened yet, or maybe if you stayed things would get better due to whatever excuse you come up with. This is another form of fear. Your mind has you trapped as a result of the abuse to the point where, when you do decide to or try to leave, you feel a flood of panic. The fear is something many of us can’t seem to overcome, so we stay in the relationship hoping that things will get better, or that things will be okay. But it never does, so you start from the beginning, getting ready to leave again. It’s a vicious cycle that no one should have to go through. If you find yourself sitting there most of the time asking yourself, “should I stay, should I go,” then you most likely already know the answer to this, and should go. Things don’t get better; they only repeat themselves. The narcissist you are involved with will always make promises they can’t keep, and they will always build you up for the main purpose of thrashing you down.

That had been one of those life-changing moments, a psychological cataclysm, when the trauma of betrayal imprints on the psyche in a way that changes one’s responses to the world forever. I imagined Charles’s brain feverishly rewiring as he lay in bed, morbid and petrified. And the end result: a new association immediately and irrevocably attached to love. Fear. There’s no trauma that affects one quite like betrayal. The aftermath is sort of a relationship PTSD, a fear that now defies all logic, infuses every thought, and generalizes to all women. To survive, Charles rationalized an excuse to avoid the truth: “I’m not good at approaching women, I get too jittery. I still don’t really trust them. I decided they were all duplicitous.” “When did you begin to sexualize being cheated on?

Habits The word “habit” comes from the Old French abit, habit, from Latin habitus “condition, appearance,” from habere “have, consist of.” The term originally meant “dress, attire,” and the noun “habit” meant a monk’s outfit. The habit was an external sign of a monk’s internal constitution, which defined their whole life. Later the meaning of this word drifted to denote physical or mental constitution. Constitution, consisting of, consistency. Habits just scream consistency.[iv] Habits get things done because your mind does not have to focus as much on semiautomatic routines and can therefore conserve energy. It also will spend less time debating with itself about whether to do something. When routines turn into habits, they become the “status quo,” and the rightness of them isn’t debated any more. On the other hand, one-off activities easily generate excuses because it is easier not to do something new than it is to do it. Your mind will think of many reasons for inactivity: Listen to what it is saying . . . • It’s hard, don’t tire yourself. • It’s new, you don’t know the effect or result, so better not risk something bad. • You’ll make a jerk out of yourself, better stay low and enjoy what you’ve got so far. • It’s a lot of fuss, why don’t drink a glass of whisky/play the computer/eat pizza instead? • You have no chance to achieve anything meaningful in a reasonable time (a few minutes); give up, stop wasting the energy. • What? Do you want to do it for years, with no guarantee of success? Are you out of your mind? That’s a lot of energy to commit! • Hey, I love the couch and the TV and there will be less time for that if you commit to this new venture. I protest! You do not consciously think about habits. They are just a part of your constitution. And your mind cannot abandon them once they are a part of you. Any time you install a new activity into your life in the form of a habit, your mind not only accepts it but becomes its guard. Whenever the time or circumstances indicate that the habit should be done, your mind reminds you about it, gently or otherwise.

You have absolutely no respect for my privacy. Now that I know you absolutely are very much capable, you lost all credibility with me. I don't know why I have any respect for yours, after your absolute disdain for mine since day 0. I guess I am not an asshole. I haven't had liquor in a long time, and I'm not an angry drunk. I begged you to clear the air, many a time. Begged, and begged some more. Made sure you knew it was fucking me up mentally, that it was tearing me apart, 'till it made me sick! I backed off early this year to cut you some slack. Hoped you'd extend something I could actually grasp, but nope, there was something better to do. Name one thing you've done for me that wasn't destructive. What you say and do to others can absolutely have a dramatic effect on them. It is written in books and autobiographies. Many celebrated people have died as a result of the evil or harmful acts of others. Let's not forget that you haven't said one nice thing to me all this time. Try doing what you did to me to someone else, how would they react? That's right, fucking run. For years I held the benefit of the doubt, but I know now that you are a fraud. Your own actions and willful lack thereof prove it. You destroyed my mind, my heart, my body, turned everything against me, even fucked with my financials. Yes I let you in for that to happen. But that's still no excuse for YOU to willfully do it. Each step I take forward gets smashed to pieces, every time. Because I don’t know things. That was on you to fix. It's not because you were incapable. You could have changed the trajectory anytime. You chose to do something else instead, every time. Even a sliver of what you give to others would've made a world of difference. You most certainly could have. You chose not to. You chose to let me suffer. There was something better to do. Yes, that is a fact, if that were not true, I would not be here writing this. And you did me this way why? because I desperately sought some sense of community, of which I was in dire need of. Don't ever pretend that you cared for me, ever. It's an insult. A direct contradiction to your own actions. The only thing you care about is the pleasure you get knowing people who suffer and die. That's exactly what this is, and always been. After your handywork, my own life means nothing anymore. I have nothing left because I let you mangle it all to gore. Yeah, I'm a dumb shit for letting you delve deep inside me only to leave behind a grenade. I do not believe I will be alive much longer. No doubt this pleases you. Murderer. I curse you.