credit: Mykl Roventine
Lisa wrote a post late last week that drove people nuts.
She called us all out on blaming the economy for our failures.
91 people have stopped by to comment so far – many of them angry. Some of them got personal suggesting Lisa is naive and lives too comfortable a life to understand hardship.
It’s easy to feel helpless right now. The pressure is on, people are scared – businesses are closing their doors (some after 75+ years).
But here’s the thing: feeling helpless doesn’t help.
Consider Jon’s story.
Jon is an Associate Editor at Copyblogger – one of the web’s most popular blogs that has about 55,000 subscribers. He also runs a successful blog of his own and launched Partnering Profits with Brian Clark. He is, by any definition, a successful entrepreneur.
Jon’s a fortunate fellow, right?
You might think to yourself, “well, great for Jon, but some people are lucky that way.”
Now consider this: Jon has Spinal Muscular Atrophy. That basically means he has been getting weaker his entire life and is confined to a wheelchair.
Do you think Jon is lucky now?
Think about the hard times of your life – the hardest things you’ve had to go through. Now imagine that on top of all the other hardships you had to deal with you also lost the use of your arms.
That might seem like an impossible burden, unimaginable really, but for Jon that’s reality – and it hasn’t stopped him.
The thing about excuses is that they require you to focus on factors outside your control. You can’t fix the economy, and your sales are dropping. You just launched a website on a shoestring budget, but there are five big competitors who dominate the space.
The Point
The point isn’t that these things aren’t real and don’t effect you – of course they do. But the minute you point to something you cannot control as the explanation for your past or impending failure you’ve started to give up. There’s no faster way to take the wind out of your own sails.
Instead, be stoic.