Most people are lazy, weak, and unmotivated. They constantly complain about their life, indulge in destructive habits, and never stop making excuses.
If you clicked on this article, you are one of these people, or at least used to be like them. You desire to know how to beat the weak voice inside your head and make a change.
Once you cease making excuses, you’ll become bold, decisive, and confident, and live life on your own terms. While everyone else will keep blaming each other for their failures, you’ll thrive and work on more important things.
In this article, I want to tell you why excuses are bad for you, how they restrict your potential, and how you can eliminate them for good. Let’s begin.
Why You Need to Stop Making Excuses
Excuses are nothing more than a means to help one stay in the comfort zone and avoid experiencing the pain.
Sure, they may make your life “easier” and protect you from having to deal with immense pain. But they slowly destroy your life and entrench you deep in mediocrity.
1: They Keep You in Mediocrity
The first reason why excuses are bad for you is that they eliminate progress.
All people come into this world with dreams. They want to be great writers, musicians, businessmen, actors, but the world tells them: What makes you think you’re good enough?
Their environment feeds them lies about how they’re supposedly too dumb, inexperienced, and irresponsible to achieve these dreams, and then plants limiting beliefs inside their heads.
Unfortunately, most people fail the test. They allow the system to crush them, back down in fear, and give up on their dreams without even trying. They get a mediocre job, an incompatible partner, and live every day with regret that they numb with bad habits.
Such people rarely achieve anything exceptional or make a great impact on the world, because they justify their failures with bullshit excuses. And that leads us to the next point.
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2: They Slowly Make You Depressed
Excuses drain all progress and exciting moments out of your life, replacing them with endless routine and repetition. People who make excuses regularly forget about their dreams, indulge in meaningless pleasures, and witness their lives deteriorate slowly.
Why should you push yourself past the limits and go to the gym regularly, when you can just waste time watching Netflix instead?
Yes, instant gratification does provide some comfort, and excuses make sure that you stay in this comfort. But where does this lifestyle lead in the long run?
Excuse-makers slowly, but surely, become obese, lazy, unmotivated, depressed, weak, and easy to manipulate. Years of “playing it safe” and putting in mediocre efforts result in stagnation, which often turns into long-lasting decay.
The main reason people become depressed is that they see no good future or possibility of progress. And what causes these things in the first place? Excuses.
3: They Create Limiting Beliefs
Almost every human has some limiting beliefs planted inside them. The sources are different: maybe your parents screamed at you and said that you’re worthless, or your past teachers told you that you cannot achieve anything.
It isn’t hard to discard negative beliefs created by other people, as, with enough effort, it’s easy to prove that they’re wrong. However, limiting beliefs created by excuses are even more dangerous. Why?
It’s because such beliefs and their origins are solely inside the person’s head. There is no one to challenge them, and there is no outside proof that the information is false and damaging.
Limiting beliefs create a fixed mindset – the assumption that one is born with limited capabilities and unable to grow them, no matter how hard they try.
If you repeat a lie long enough, it turns into truth. That’s what happens to millions of people on this planet, and if you’re one of them, do some introspection to find out the roots of it.
4: They Make You Unreliable
People like those who are reliable and trustworthy. After all, they offer value because they mean what they say and execute their responsibilities with quality.
However, when you’re an excuse-making person, you frequently break promises and fail to meet expectations. While it is true that you shouldn’t focus only on helping others, you must not neglect keeping promises you make.
When you say that you will do something and don’t do it, you become unreliable. Other people trust you less, and you end up with self-doubt.
This self-doubt later transforms into low self-esteem, which causes you to stay inactive more, which makes you even more unreliable in the long run.
One broken promise can quickly spiral into a cycle of self-destruction, self-hatred, and doubts. That’s why you need to learn how to stop making excuses.
Related article: 7 Signs You Hate Yourself (& What to Do About It)
7 Strategies to Stop Making Excuses
The most important thing you need to do is take responsibility. Recognize that your life and its outcome are dependent on you, and that you’re the only one who can fulfill your dreams.
Once you realize this, you will waste much less time on justifying your failures. There are other important things you need to do, though. One of them is cultivating self-reliance.
1: Recognize the Need for Self-Reliance
We all like to feel safe and secure, believing that someone else can save us in times of need. Humans are social creatures, and we absolutely need cooperation to thrive.
However, when you put responsibility for your life in the hands of other people, you inevitably face disappointment. Other people have their own responsibilities and problems, and they cannot solve all the problems you have.
The universal truth of life is that, in the end, we’re all alone. Nobody will save us, and nobody will solve our problems except for us. That’s why you need to learn how to do things by yourself.
Find out who you are, and what you want from this life. Recognize that the only person who can achieve this is you. Cultivate self-reliance by consistently completing small tasks, like cooking your own meals, doing chores, and cleaning up the house.
Do what is necessary every day, no matter how you feel about a particular action. This will be highly uncomfortable at first, but over time, you’ll get used to it and stop making excuses.
The next essential step to remove mental barriers and stop excuses is to challenge your internal negative beliefs.
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2: Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs
We discussed how excuses can cause limiting beliefs and keep your thinking in a box. It can also go the other way around: limiting beliefs can force you to create excuses.
When you believe that you cannot achieve anything, your mind will say that you’re too young, inexperienced, or dumb to start. When you believe you cannot attract women, you overindulge in porn, justifying it with “Everyone does it” and “I can’t improve my looks.”
Does it sound familiar? Then you need to do introspection, identify where these beliefs came from, and think about whether they’re actually true or not.
In 99% of cases, limiting beliefs are nothing more than lies perceived as reality. When you no longer believe in things that held you back, you eliminate reasons to come up with excuses.
No matter what you want to do, you absolutely must master your mindset, since your thoughts shape your reality. The first step of this journey is killing the parasites inside your mind.
3: Find a Reason to Change
One of the biggest reasons most people fail in life is the lack of goals. Their lives are located in between 2 points. They don’t really like how they live, but they aren’t too uncomfortable either.
That’s why they stay in the state of mediocrity and make excuses: there is no reason to change, no goal to pursue, no possibility for progress to appear.
If you want to achieve real results, you need to find a reason to change. Maybe you want to get financially independent and live life freely. Maybe you want to leave a deeper impact on the world that goes beyond your current job.
Find reasons to make the initial change. Realize that your current situation sucks, and that you can achieve more than you think. Once you make this realization, you’ll cease making excuses.
Achieving ambitious goals requires consistency and patience. The best way to cultivate both is to start things small.
Related article: How to Develop Patience and Self-Control
4: Start Small to Stop Making Excuses
It can be hard to quit degenerate stuff like porn, video games, and social media when you’re only starting. However, these are the necessary steps to take next, for quitting these bad habits will help you waste less time and spend it on meaningful activities.
After you’ve gained the motivation and are ready to change, you need to start making small lifestyle changes. Learn about good habits, how you can build them, and do them in small amounts every morning.
Begin by meditating for 3 minutes, writing 3 gratitude statements, doing 10 push-ups, and reading 3 book pages. Is it easy to do? Yes, it is. And that’s the point:
First, you need to do tasks that are so easy that you don’t have any excuses not to do them. A few weeks later, you’ll get used to these habits and want to increase the daily efforts.
This is how slowly, but surely, you’ll change your life, dump excuses, and start making progress. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Remember this.
5: Push Forward When You Hear Excuses
When we encounter danger, we usually want to back down and stay in our comfort zones. Going to the gym, for example, is extremely uncomfortable: you tear your muscles, and it hurts a lot.
You need to lift weights for months before you start seeing any significant results. Many people don’t understand this, and quit watering the plant before they can harvest the fruit.
Any significant achievement requires you to push through discomfort, fatigue, be disciplined, and do hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it. Therefore, you need to keep watering the plant and doing necessary work, even when you see no progress.
If you improve yourself by 1% every day, you’ll grow by 365% by the end of it. Whenever you hear doubts and excuses popping up in your mind, treat them as signals to push forward even harder than before.
When you feel like jacking off, sit down to work on a project or go to the gym. When you feel like playing video games, grab a book instead. It’s hard, but it’s worth it in the end.
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6: Value Your Time to Stop Making Excuses
Millions of people see money as scarce. They believe that it’s hard to earn, and so they hustle on low-paying jobs and save every single penny whenever possible.
Often, these money savings cost time – a lot of it. But what’s the point? Why would you stand in a queue for hours to get a free chicken burger when you can just purchase it for $5?
There is no point. Money is abundant – there are millions of dollars you can earn if you do the right things. But time is scarce – you can’t earn more of it, and you only have a few decades before you die. Therefore, time is more valuable than money.
Your time and attention are the things you use to accomplish things and live through experiences. You should value every hour of your time as an extremely valuable asset.
Stop being lazy, cultivate better habits, spend free time productively, stare at your screen less, and experience the world. Once you realize that your time is limited, you’ll no longer want to waste it on irrelevant things, including excuses.
Related article: How to Improve Your Character: 10 Ways to Become Virtuous
7: Take a Cold Shower to Stop Making Excuses
Finally, the last thing you can do to stop making excuses is take a cold shower right after reading this article. Once you read it to the end, go to the bathroom, take off your clothes, switch the water to cold, and embrace the flow.
Cold shower is extremely uncomfortable, even painful for some. Your mind is already making excuses for why you supposedly don’t need to take it:
- “But it’s winter outside!”
- “I can get a cold!”
- “Why do I need to do this?!”
Remember Strategy 5: push forward whenever you hear excuses. This is a test to see whether you will change or stay the same. You can keep being a weakling who jacks off and does nothing with his life.
Or, you can decide to break mental barriers and step outside of comfort. Once I finish writing this article, I’ll hop into the icy flow. Will you do the same?
If you need more reasons to take cold showers, research shows that they can boost your immune system, improve blood flow, reduce muscle soreness, and even combat depression. So stop making excuses, slap yourself in the face, and make the first step to change.
Stop Making Excuses
Most people are excuse-makers. They are immature and can’t accept their mistakes. For this reason, they blame other people, circumstances, and other things to justify their failures.
Excuses keep you in mediocrity, kill your dreams, create a fixed mindset, and make you an unreliable person. They slowly destroy you while people you look up to keep getting better.
If you struggle with making excuses and want to take responsibility for your life, use these strategies:
- Cultivate self-reliance;
- Question limiting beliefs;
- Find a reason to change;
- Do good habits and start small;
- Push forward when you hear excuses;
- Value your time and use it wisely;
- Take cold showers regularly.
It isn’t hard to become a better person. The hardest part of self-improvement is starting. After you start and do the necessary things for a few weeks, you form new habits and do them automatically.
Some time later, you’ll forget what excuses are entirely and push through discomfort without complaining. Do the hard work and grind, especially when you don’t feel like it. Good luck, reader.
If you liked this article and found it valuable, make sure to share it on social media and leave a comment below. See you next time.