Excuses that Derail Progress - Valuable Things are Hard

We at Barbell Logic value voluntary hardship. Simple, hard, effective training brings you toward your goals. Voluntary hardship is refining, whereas involuntary hardship may or may not refine someone who experience the difficulty.

As we grow and encounter growing challenges, common pitfalls or excuses arise, where people can sabotage themselves, their goals, or their businesses.

You may have all or some of these to differing degrees, and even if you improve yourself in mastering them they do not completely disappear.

The Excuses that Derail Progress

Matt discusses the following four excuses:

1. fear
2. chaos
3. self-medication
4. stubbornness

Fear

We often consider the approaches to the flight or fight response. Maybe this excuse is someone who freezes.

Matt identifies 3 types within fear: the staller, the saver, and the micromanager.

The staller hesitates to make decisions, putting off the hard decisions as long as possible (or longer).

The saver never spends money or invests in needs of the business.

The micromanager lacks trust in his or her staff to get the job done correctly.

All these stifle and potentially end progress, maybe even to the point of failure.

Chaos

Maybe chaos is someone who fights in response to fear. Without consultation or consideration, he immediately makes the easiest, quickest decision.

This person often drowns in urgency, and whereas they do not stall, they also do not think very much. Some time, reflection, and discussing things over is warranted for most decisions. You have to spend time on the important.

Self-Medication

The third excuse that derails progress is self-medication.

Self-medicators rely on pleasurable activities to ignore or bury the stress. They may dive deep into vices such as gluttony, drugs, sex, or other pleasurable pursuits,

These behaviors can often wreck people, families, and business. Important, they do nothing to deal with the issues at hand.

Stubbornness

The stubborn fail to take personal responsibility, own up to their mistakes, and say "my fault."

If you're a business person, you have to be learning, and learning, often times, is painful. Yes, much of it is reading books and listening to podcasts and seeking out those more experience than you.

Ultimately, though, even with reading books, you have to see that a recommendation approach to solution in the book is better than what you are currently doing.

Many times, learning comes in failing or stumbling. You cannot ignore these. They hurt. They're not fun. Learning opportunities, however, exist from reflecting on these failures.

Excuses that derail progress abound, and we can't let these derail progress or lead to failure.