Excuses

"I attribute my success to this: I never gave an excuse or took an excuse."
Florence Nightingale

The Oxford dictionary defines an excuse as an attempt to lessen the blame attached to a person, act, or fault. I used to think I was giving an explanation for our behavior, only to hear it called an excuse. I would say now that an excuse is our reason why we performed in an unsatisfactory way. All this does however is make sure we will continue to perform in an unsatisfactory way. A much better explanation would be why we will not make the same mistake next time.

We love to come up with any number of explanations for our failure, except the obvious one. We blame the circumstances, or that someone else didn't do what they should have, or "the dog ate my homework". We blame anyone and everyone except the real culprit, ourselves. It is only when we take responsibility for our actions, when we don't run around blaming people, that we have a chance of being successful.

To be successful, we must not take excuses from other people either. If we don't make them responsible for their actions, we won't get satisfactory actions from them. We need to make it clear to others that next time they must do a better job.
Never give an excuse as to why you can't be successful.

Never allow other people to give you an excuse as to why they can't do what needs to be done. With no excuses, performance can only improve.

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