The Mechanics of an Excuse: How This Nasty Habit Nearly Cost Me a $3000 Writing Project
There’s a much more sinister layer to this nasty habit
Excuses have never helped anyone …..ever, no one likes hearing them, and they make it very hard to get things done.
Excuses masquerade as insightful facts, only to steal your energy and stab you in the back.
But those are really just the surface problems when it comes to making excuses.
There’s a much more sinister layer to this nasty habit.
But before I go into how it nearly cost me a $3000 writing gig, it’s important to understand the mechanics of an excuse.
The Mechanics of An Excuse
At any given second there are millions of external signals bombarding your senses.
To perceive everything around you would be impossible, so your mind has to filter.
I won’t get into the full mechanics of how this works now, but the main thing to understand is, you don’t see everything around you.
You only see what your mind has filtered and deemed relevant.
This filtration process is almost entirely subconscious, but you can direct it with conscious thought.
For example, if you tell yourself that freelancing is the best way to make money, your mind will start filtering on that premise.
You’ll notice more freelancing gigs online while being blind to other opportunities in the space..
You might have a conscious thought that people in better shape get more opportunities.
So your subconscious mind will start filtering for that, and you’ll notice more instances where fit people get opportunities.
And you’ve probably noticed this in your own life.
Like when you buy a new hoodie or start looking for a specific car, then you start to see it everywhere.
In this way, our conscious thought sets the limits through which our subconscious brain starts to filter the world.
This is the same mechanism excuses are built on.
Your conscious mind puts an excuse out there and then the subconscious mind gets to work finding reasons to justify it.
Saving my $3000 copywriting project
I experienced this recently while working on a freelance project for a high-ticket client.
It was one of my biggest projects to date and I’d hired another freelance web designer to assist me with some design elements.
What I thought was a simple job turned out to be a nightmare.
The freelancer messed me around and kept extending the time to get the project submitted, meanwhile, I’d done everything on my end.
I had to keep extending the project deadline with my client from 2–3 days to weeks and weeks.
It was fine for the freelancer, I’d just met them. But this was a client I’d worked with previously and built a good relationship with.
My goodwill was dwindling.
It got to the point where I’d made one last extension of a week.
But rather than giving another extension to the current freelancer who has let me down, I got in touch with 7 others.
I’d been communicating the specs of the project I needed and it ended up being a lot more complicated than the original freelancer had said.
It had to do with the number of members my client had on his site who were making recurring payments.
Because of that, they would have to export those members or put the site on maintenance mode (which we couldn’t do).
I had 3 days to get this project completed which had already been running over by weeks.
The new batch of freelancers I was speaking to all told me me it would take another 1–2 weeks and cost about triple what I’d originally budgeted.
I was stuck, frustrated, and battling a ton of negative thoughts.
“These freelancers screwed me over.”
“I’m gonna have to refund the client.”
“There’s no way for me to get this project finished on time now, and I can’t even afford it.”
All these excuses running through my head a million miles an hour.
Then I remembered a video by Brandon Carter about excuses and accountability.
At that moment I was blaming my circumstances, blaming the freelancers, and making a bunch of excuses.
I was putting all the responsibility on other people and taking all the power out of my hands own hands.
Then I thought, what have I done wrong to create this situation?
And I remembered a quote by Brandon Carter:
“Losers put in the amount of effort they think is required to try and accomplish the goal. Winners put in the amount of effort that will make failure impossible.”
I was blaming the freelancers, but how many had I reached out to?
Maybe 12–14 in total over the last 2 months.
I thought, “What if I reached out to another 100 tonight?”
Maybe one will be able to give me some solution the others haven’t.
I didn’t quite hit the 100, but I did manage to reach out to 50 freelancers that night.
I found a guy who did website design but also had experience coding, so he was able to meet my specific requirements.
We finished the project, my client was happy, and the final payment was made.
When I was making excuses the thought to go and message 50 freelancers didn’t even pop up, because my subconscious was filtering.
The excuse was programming my mind to look for reasons to support.
So I wasn’t truly considering all the options that were in my power.
The moment I let go of the excuse, not just intellectually, but in my heart, my mind opened up to the droves of solutions that were lying around.
Closing Doors
At any given point in time, there are good things and there are bad things.
Light and dark.
Both reasons for failure and reasons for success.
What do you want to filter for?
An excuse will block your mind’s ability to see the opportunities starting you in the face
Opportunities that are titering just outside the scope of your awareness.
The ones you can’t even imagine right now because you’re wearing excuse blinders.
They may be blocking clear solutions to problems you’re having emotionally, financially, with relationships
A ton of people love to blame others for their problems, and I’ve been the same:
- Government
- Friends
- Spouse
- Parents
- Influencers
And it’s not that the blame is always unjustified.
It’s just not helpful to make excuses.
And sometimes you’ve gotta ask yourself if you wanna be “right,” or if you want to solve the problem.
Again, it’s not that your excuses aren’t factual.
It’s not that bad things haven’t happened.
And it’s not about trying to deny or ignore them, because you need to accept them in order to overcome them.
It’s just about understanding those facts we base excuses on are only part of the story, not the whole truth.
And they program your mind in a way that’s not useful.
The sooner you can let go of those excuses you’ve been cradling for so long, the faster you can start unlocking the gifts God has left for you.
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