PILLAR 16

Executing Instead of Excusing

You can either become a master at making excuses and procrastinating or a master at putting a plan into action and following through with your intentions. I want to encourage you to subscribe to the mindset of someone who executes a plan. Do you want to be a goal setter or a goal getter? Do you want to see results, not just activity?

If you want to make excuses, you will live in the land of those who finish before they even start. That is not where first-generation millionaires live. They decide to do something, figure out how to do it, and follow through. When things get off course due to circumstances outside of your control, you need to know how to get back on track without making excuses to yourself and to others.

I’m not saying that there aren’t opportunities for explanations. But when you explain what went wrong, you have to tell the truth. You are going to have to explain your mistakes or your team’s mistakes to someone one day. The trick is to make sure it’s honest. Don’t embellish, don’t blame others, and don’t make excuses. You will get nowhere fast if you fill up your tank with excuses.

We all make mistakes. Making a mistake doesn’t make us bad or good. It makes us human. When you do make a mistake, go through the following process to get everything back on track:

First: Own it. Acknowledge the mistake. Don’t ignore it. The absolute fastest way to self-sabotage is personal denial.

Then: If it is a public mistake, seek wisdom immediately. Get help in orchestrating your response, and make sure your path of correction is very clear while extending your personal remorse and commitment to fixing the problem. Do not allow any time to go by to allow anyone to dictate a false narrative.

Lastly: Offer something to make up for your mistake because doing so will build trust. Then overdeliver on your offer. Remember, trust is a voluntary bridge that people have to want to cross. Your offering a bonus or free gift and overdelivering is an invitation to return and cross over your bridge of trust.

Doing this will help others restore their confidence in you and the goal you are working to accomplish. If you simply make excuses and walk away, you will leave room for a false narrative to be dictated by anyone motivated to share their opinions. Remember, perception wins over facts in the short run. To win back people’s trust, show remorse, offer a plan and a promise to remedy the problem, and overdeliver on that promise. When things go off course, you need to know how to get them back on. You need to form a plan and execute it. Excuses will get you nowhere.

Making excuses to others when something goes awry is one thing. But what about the excuses you make to yourself? What happens when you find yourself stuck in a cycle of complacently wandering away from the path you set for yourself? Do you try to justify why you aren’t meeting your goals? These excuses and justifications are foes to your goals. Facing the truth about yourself can be hard, but doing so means you are participating in your own rescue, and you are making sure that your actions and attitudes are in the friends category.

I hear my clients give me excuses all the time:

“It wasn’t my fault!” or “I couldn’t finish because life got in the way and I could not find the time!” or even “My car broke down. What was I supposed to do?”

When you find yourself making excuses for your lack of progress, I want you to return to Parts I and III. I want you to revisit your goals. Find your goal ladder. What rung are you on? If you aren’t on the ladder anymore, why not? What in your life took you away from the goals you set for yourself?

Then, I want you to take an inventory of your choices and your actions. Remember, these excuses you are making to yourself are your goal’s foes. Think carefully about why you are making them. Are the excuses you are making now helping your future self? Of course, they aren’t. If that’s the case, why the hell are you making them?

You can master the art of execution and be truthful about what is happening during your moments of setback, or you can be a master of giving excuses. But you can’t execute and give excuses at the same time. Now is the time to build your character by learning how to execute your plans and to give honest explanations if those plans go south.

You are the only one who decides whether you are going to give up and make excuses about it or execute your dream and participate in your own rescue. Most people decide to execute a plan based on dramatic situations. My mother quit smoking because she thought she had cancer. My father quit drinking because his doctor told him if he didn’t, drinking would lead to a certain death. I want you to decide to execute not because you want your life to continue as it has been but because you want to launch your new life.

You have the potential, you have the drive, and now you have the character to build yourself into a first-generation millionaire. Commit to yourself, solidify your faith, know your value. Make it happen.

ACTION STEP

If you are willing to lie to yourself, you will never master wealth. Be honest with yourself. I want you to write down the reasons you have skipped certain assignments in this book. Don’t look shocked! If I were a betting man, I would say that you have probably skipped at least one of the assignments, or you simply did not give it 100 percent, which means you cut corners. Remember, this is your life not mine. If you have skipped assignments, now is the time to look at why you did so and then go back and complete them.

By cutting corners when you begin your journey, you are cutting down your own character. Without a strong character in place, you will never be able to achieve and maintain the first-generation-millionaire mindset. The more times you cut corners, the more times you give excuses, the more times you don’t participate in your own rescue, the more times you don’t inspect what you expect, the more likely it is that you will form the character of someone who is good at giving excuses, at reacting, at embellishing why he or she is failing.

True character is who you are when no one is around. You can act however you want in front of other people, but if you lie to yourself over and over and over again, soon you will have nothing but lies. That is not the foundation of a first-generation millionaire. You can take my word for it, or you can learn it the hard way.

I recommend that you look back at where you cut corners in this book, figure out why, write down those reasons, and then complete the assignments you missed. Once those are done, you can turn the page.

PILLAR 16