No More Excuses

“The beauty of free will is that you have the power to change your own life!” Unknown

Have you been enjoying your summer so far? I know I have, even though the weather has been unbearable hot at times. For us that live in Wisconsin, we have to enjoy every minute regardless of the heat because it could snow tomorrow! As summer is coming to a close, those of us who have children are thinking about our kids going back to school. For some parents, that might mean an empty house (you’re smiling right now, aren’t you?). Here’s the question that I want you to think about:

What are you going to do with your extra time?

 A couple of days ago the central air went out in our home, and I have to admit, I whined like a little baby. The repair guy came and fixed the mother board, he turned it on and it still didn’t work. Upon closer inspection he found the problem was the motor and he didn’t have a replacement in his truck. The only thing he could do was to take it and bring it back the next evening.  During the two days without central air the temperature in our house was 88 degrees and I was pretty much an invalid (I acted like one). I know I can admit to you guys that all I did was sleep most of this time. My wife got pretty frustrated with me (she had every right) and asked me to get up and help out. My response was I couldn’t help because of the heat, I told her I just couldn’t handle it (I know what you’re thinking, what a little baby. You’re right, I was).

I tell you this story to illustrate two things for you to think about:

  1. There are no valid excuses you can make anymore, since you have the power to change your circumstances.

I used the heat as an excuses but the truth was, I still could have gotten things down. Have you ever done this in your life? (Be honest!) I had the power to ignore the heat and get on with my life; you have the power to ignore whatever is holding you back in your life from accomplishing your goals.

 -When you use excuses and don’t make progress on your goals, you lose that time and time is the one thing that you can’t get back. As I said in the beginning of this post, some parents will have a lot of extra time with their kids going back to school. 

Have you wasted time by making excuses?

I think we are all guilty of this. For those couple of days, I didn’t make any progress on some things I had to do to get my book out. The result of that wasted time could be less sells, you never know the consequences. Those less sells could mean me staying longer in a job I hate and it would be my fault!

How has making excuses affected your life?

   2. Why haven’t you made any progress leaving that job that you hate?

While the repair guy was working I detected an accent, so I decided to investigate. The repairman was from Nigeria, Africa and had come to this country 16 years ago. In Africa he was an engineer with a higher paying job. However, when he came to the United States, his degrees and experience weren’t accepted. He worked lower paying jobs in hopes of these companies seeing his skills and eventually promoting him. You know what happened right? They loved his work but loved the fact that they had a great worker that they could pay less. After years of this he had enough and decided to go into business for himself, and the rest is history.

Things started off slow but he was able to get a few jobs, and if you remember, he does good work. Word of mouth did all his marketing for him and now he has more work then he can handle. While he was working at our house, his phone was ringing off the hook. That’s what happens when you do good work as a business.

It’s a great and inspirational story, and now the question is: how is your story coming together? He was in several work situations that weren’t right for him so he decided that he had the power to change those situations. Are you at a job you hate? Well guess what, you can change that!

 For too long we have settled for jobs we hate and have made every excuse under the sun, it has to end now. This is exactly what I talk about in my book: Tales of the Everyday Workingman and Woman.

The book will be out August 12 on all the ebook sites and on my website: talesofwork.com. The site will be up within the next week, so look out for it!  If you want to get real life inspiration from someone like you, then buy my book.