Stop making excuses

I approached this subject multiple times in the past and for a good reason - we love making excuses. We love blaming everything around us for our problems because it's always easier to make yourself look like you're not in control than to actually take responsibility for your actions and solve everything that's wrong in your life.

I think about this every single day when I feel like not working or do anything productive. There are a lot of factors I could blame that on, like my lack of sleep or the pile of projects I need to work on, but nothing is to blame for anything wrong in my life but myself.

There are people all around the world who have, indeed, really hard situations to deal with, things that are out of their control, like a horrible disease or lack of work in their country. Those are things they cannot solve and they have to find all kind of ways to deal with them or to improve their life.

However, most of us don't have those type of problems and yet we continue to blame everything around us for whatever's wrong in our life, and that's why we are where we are. It's not the people around us, it's not life being unfair and it certainly isn't the lack of resources. It's just us finding excuses to not do something we should be doing. The thing is that if we want to change things, we have to stop making excuses and do what's required.

For example, I met all kind of people in my life that told me how stupid they are and how incapable of learning new things their brain is. They complained how they cannot learn new skills or do well in school because they just can't, or because their brain is not good enough for that.

The thing is that the same people were able to remember all the prices for alcohol in all the bars in the city, all kind of things about cars and women that didn't help them with anything and God knows how many details from video games.

They told me several times that it's impossible for them to learn mathematics or another language, but somehow it was easy for them to remember over 100 different builds in League of Legends, all kind of video game titles and all kind of information about fictional characters they liked in movies.

It's not that they couldn't learn new things. They just didn't really want to, and because of that they decided to put all the blame on whatever they could - school being too hard, them being too stupid, their brain not working as well as it should, teachers not knowing how to explain anything, and so on.

We do this almost all the time as well. Every time there's a problem in our life the first thing we do is search for something else to put the blame on. We don't think about all the ways we can solve our problem. The first thing that comes into our mind is "who's to blame for this?"

That's why we don't make enough progress in life and that's why we are where we are, even tho it's so simple to solve our current situation. All we have to do is to stop complaining and start doing. If you feel like you don't know enough, then start learning new things, if you feel like you don't have enough money then start working, if you feel like you're not a good writer then write more.

It's so easy to solve most of our problems that people should not complain. Ever. But we do it and we love doing it, because it's easy. It's easy and that's all that matters. I can prove to you that we all try to find excuses by making you do a simple thing - write down all the problems you think you have in your life, and then write down the simplest solution to those problems, without thinking about it.

For example, if your problem is the lack of money, then the simplest solution would be "find something to work on in order to get paid". If your problem is the lack of interest then the solution would be "find something you like doing". If your problem is the lack of stability in your life, the solution would sound something like "learn how to find balance in life and how to deal with problems".

That's what you need to do in order to improve your current situation. You don't want to, you don't feel like it or you think you need another option because there's something in your life that doesn't let you use a certain solution? Well, those are, again, excuses. You have a problem and you also have a solution, everything else is you trying to find reasons to not do certain things.

Our life could get better easily if we just learn how to stop finding excuses and how to focus on solving everything that we think is wrong. Once we learn how to do that we can improve everything around us, our current situation and our entire life.

Take some time and analyze your problems. Write them down on a piece of paper and next to them write the simplest solutions you can think about. Then take each solution you don't like and write down the reasons you can't really use that solution to solve your problems. Try to not lie to yourself and if the reason is stupid, just say why.

You will realize that your reasons are, most of the time, not as good as you initially thought and your problems could be easily solved if you would just take care of them.