one minute blog: excuses

This is the One Minute Blog (OMB). An email of good stuff for you to think about over the weekend, that takes about a minute to read.

Today’s word count: 367

It took me 1 min 22s to read this.

Life changes once you realize everything is an excuse.

Excuses get a bad rap, but they can be positive or negative.

An excuse is simply a reason that you make up and choose to believe in.

Simple example: I woke up tired today. Great excuse to skip my workout. After all, I’m tired! Surely I need rest.

But my trainer would make up the opposite excuse. Wakes up tired. Man, I need to get a quick workout in, get my body moving so I don’t feel so sluggish.

He found an excuse to do it. I found an excuse to not do it. 

Alex Hormozi had a great line about this:

“Heroes and villains always have the same back story—pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. Villain says ‘the world hurt me, I'll hurt it back’ Hero says ‘the world hurt me, I'm not gonna let it hurt anyone else. Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it.”

I once did a podcast with Mike Posner (the guy who wrote “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”) and he told me about the time he decided to walk across America.

His friend Avicii had died, and he used the sadness as an excuse to do something on his bucket list - because life is short.

He walks 2/3rds of the way across America, gets bit by a rattlesnake and almost dies. He was hospitalized, doctors told him he may lose the leg, and he spent a few weeks re-learning how to walk.

Once he could walk again, what did he do?

He went straight back to the spot the snake bit him, and resumed.

Nobody would have faulted him for stopping the walk, after he nearly died. But Mike said it best, “everyone expected me to quit. Either this is an excuse to stop. Or it’s an excuse to restart. So I went back and restarted. And when I did that, I became someone new.”

The things we call reasons are all just excuses.

Once you realize that, you get to decide. Are you going to find excuses to feel shitty, and be shitty? Or find excuses to feel good, and do good?

-Uncle Shaan

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