Rule of Thumb: if you Find Yourself Asking 'Is This Just An Excuse?' Then it is Just An Excuse
First published on April 22, 2020
It's a strange fact that many of us spend years not doing the things that we wish we were doing, that we dream about doing, that are calling us. Songs are not sung, businesses are not started, jobs are not left, people are not asked out, books are not written.
One of the most powerful moments in my journey was reading Steven Pressfield's book, The War of Art. When I read it, I took it to heart. I sometimes say that we only need to find one 'time management' or 'productivity' technique, and then we just need to actually use it. For me, that technique was Pressfield's frame of Resistance.
I was talking to my friend Nicole recently. She said some really nice things about how I put myself out there and am ambitious in how I show up in the world. (Something like that, anyway... Next stop on my internal journey of growth: internalise complements better!) I knew what she had seen from me and what she was talking about. But from inside, that's not where it comes from.
'It's interesting to hear it put like that,' I said. 'But I think really it's just that I have an incredibly low tolerance for my own bullshit.'
And that tolerance is low because I read The War of Art, applied it everwhere I went, and gradually came to see just how much of what I was not doing and not creating was about how I responded to the excuses that appeared in my mind.
I don't blame those excuses. I don't resent them. In fact, I'm glad they are here. They are almost certainly the tendencies which kept my ancestors (and yours) alive through all kinds of challenges. They are fears and habits that keep us away from, even in the modern day, scary things like the risk of social sanction, being laughed at, being humiliated, being rejected and being wrong. In the history of our race, any of those things might have led to abandonment and death, or to a genuinely violent confrontation. The problem is, in this day and age, all they protect us from is the person we could grow to be.
Sometimes, excuses are real. But mostly, 99% of the time (or more), they are Resistance. So it can be useful to remember a rule of thumb: if you find yourself asking 'is this just an excuse?' then it probably is. If all of us lived by that rule of thumb, not tolerating our bullshit nearly as much, not believing it, then far more of us would be stepping into the fullness of who we could be.
Facing the complete chaos of the current world and all that might follow the lockdowns and disruption of coronavirus, we need people to step up and be who they could be. We need a whole army of people acting as their Higher Selves, being their most skilful, wise and noble. And to do that, we need to stretch ourselves. We need to step into the arena. We need to choose the mindsets and beliefs and assumptions that will help us do that.
I stuck a quote from T. S. Eliot on my wall recently: 'Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.'
I think Eliot was right. If you want to stay small, then listening to the excuses is a good way to do that. If you want to find out just how far you can go, then playing by Pressield's rules is a good idea, and the rule of thumb from this article is a good place to start.
That rule of thumb again: if you find yourself asking 'Is this just an excuse?' then it is just an excuse.