If I Had A Nickel

People with excuses drive me nuts. AAARG!

If I had a nickel for every excuse that I’ve ever heard about why someone failed, or why they can’t make more money; or, why they didn’t or couldn’t do a job that they were tasked with, I would be a gazillionaire. It makes me crazy; I’m telling you! Crazy!

It’s estimated that billions (with a b) are spent every year by companies who stop all progress when something goes wrong. Standard procedure is to do two things. First, they STOP everything and secondly, they form a committee for the sole purpose to discover exactly and precisely who screwed up.

A month or two later the committee reports that they aren’t sure who to blame, or, that the issue really wasn’t as big as they originally thought, but yet they blame some innocent bystander as they need to save face. This process represents thousands of lost work hours for the company and unnecessary budget spent just to find fault.

I guarantee you that you will find no forward-thinking entrepreneurial business who will ever stop progress just to find who they should point a finger at. Instead, they will understand exactly what happened with clarity; then understand why it happened with clarity; and then they decide how this issue will never happen again (learning the lesson), and then, they’re on their way, charging headlong into achieving their goals with this new knowledge.

Life is not about trying to find out who made the mistake. Life is about learning from the mistake and building from there. Life is about taking some chances and at least trying. If the chances don’t pan out then we learn from them, make appropriate adjustments and then charge forward again.  To survive in today’s incredibly fast pace of business and life we simply cannot spend an inordinate amount of time pointing fingers. It’s time to learn, adjust and move on. If you don’t or won’t learn, adjust and move on, you won’t just be left behind, you’ll more than likely be out of business.