Are you always hearing excuses from others about why they didn't get something done? Or, are you coming to terms with making excuses yourself for commitments you are making and breaking? In this cast, we discuss the particulars of excuses (and making justifications, and perhaps appropriates "reasons") for not getting a task or project completed.

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In this Cast | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

The Difference Between a Reason and an Excuse (Because the world does not need another thumb sucker)

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein

“Responsibility” - Werner Erhard

Dunning-Kruger Effect

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Gallup and Marcus Buckingham

Raw Text Transcript | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

And we are back this week to talk about a topic that we have been really excited about, or I've been really excited about talking about, which is the idea of excuses. So many times, we ourselves experienced the idea of making excuses for getting things done. And we hear excuses from others about what they should have, would have could have done and didn't. And so I know that Augusto Francis and myself, we hear this quite often in our world of dealing with people in their productive lives. And so we've heard a lot of excuses. That's, that's all we're going to say there. And so what we wanted to do in this episode was to talk about the idea of what is the difference between excuses and reasons for not getting what you said, you're going to get done, done. And then talking about some of the excuses we we do internally, that is the excuses that we give ourselves when we are not getting things done, and how to overcome those, hopefully, a couple of tips on how to do that. And then how to deal with excuses from others, whether they be at home or in the workplace, how do we respond to excuses so that we can all be more productive along any project path, whether or goal that we might have. So let's get started with the idea that there is a difference between reason and an excuse. I'm going to start off with an interesting gentleman, he wrote a medium article called the difference between a reason and an excuse because the world does not need another thumb sucker by Gary Ryan Blaine. And I'm not going to fully read all of these. And but the the the gist of it is actually encapsulated in the quotation that he starts with, and it's by Mark Twain, and and it says, quote, there are 1000 excuses for every failure, but never a good reason. And the quote, in Blaine's definition here, he basically says that the the difference he believes between a reason and an excuse is that a reason takes accountability for one's actions, where as an excuse is an attempt to diffuse or deflect that blame, that accountability, that responsibility from the thing that you didn't get done. And he uses an interesting health related example here. And he says, quote, a reason for not going for a run is I have a broken leg. And the excuse is, I don't have the time. And I'm, I'm curious from you, gentlemen, do you agree with Gary Ryan Blaine's perspective of excuses, being a personality defect, character flaw? Or is it as an excuse something else?

Francis Wade 3:27

To be honest, I think reasons are what I give and excuses are what other people do.

Ray Sidney-Smith 3:36 fair, fair enough, fair

Francis Wade 3:38

say it, that's the reason you see it as an excuse. But that, you know, if I just look at what happens in my life, though, if I take a look deeper, and I get suspicious about my motives, I could see that this is somewhat true. Because when someone shifts from giving reasons, and I've worked with people I'm sure everyone has, where there's some point at which they go from being on the team on the same side trying to accomplish their goal. They are hell bent on achieving it, nothing can stop them. And when there's hiccups along the way, they give reasons, and then something happens. And it shifts and all of a sudden, they go into giving excuses. It's as if the tone of their and the mental model has changed. So they go from being someone who was on our side trying to make it happen to arguing why it can't happen, arguing why they're not at fault, and why they can't be counted on. So it's a it can even happen with the same person on the same project. It's just a subtle, he can't, you can't quite put your finger on it usually. But what you know, in your gut, if you've haven't had enough experiences that they're no last to you. And as they move into the world of deeper and deeper excuses, trying to bring them back into the world of reasons just doesn't work. It's very hard to do like it's possible. But it's very hard work to do. So I think in the very beginning, there is understanding that there is an end for me, there's it over the years of sort of thinking about this particular issue, I think of it like Latin and French. But when you're in the world of of reasons. It's like you're speaking speaking French, and you and I are communicating. And then when that shift happens, it's like I'm speaking, I'm still speaking French, but you've moved on to Latin. So although there is words being passed back and forth, because we're coming from these two different worlds, we aren't really communicating and no progress is being made. And until we get back on the same page, and hopefully it will be on the page of the French speaking reason giving kind of world until we get back onto the same page as no progress possible.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:04

I think I look at it a little bit differently. But I don't think we end up at the at different locations, I think we end up at the same location, which is to say that, for a person who feels like they are making excuses, on a consistent basis, you know, I think, you know, giving giving a reason for something not getting done, can be looked at as an excuse from the other person. And I think you're absolutely right there, you know, when, when I give a reason for me not getting something done, that's very different than when I hear excuses from others for not getting things done. But when I give a reason for something not having gotten done, I do recognize that it's because of the locus of control, that is I had control over the situation, and something beyond me, created, perhaps something that didn't allow me to be able to get something done. But I've taken full responsibility for whatever that is. And I take this into perspective a lot. Because as the as the owner of the company, I'm, I'm the I'm My head's always on the chopping block, right. And I very much believe in that perspective that, you know, I'm not going to throw my other people under the bus, I'm the I'm the front end of the business. And so when someone has a problem, I'm going to take, take it on the chin, so to speak. And because mistakes happen, no matter how good everybody is, you're always going to have mistakes that happen. And so the idea behind giving an excuse to me is throwing one of my staff members under the bus, as opposed to me just saying, you know what, I'm really sorry, this is my company, it's my responsibility. How do we fix this, there's a connection between a reason being something where you're taking responsibility and accountability, personal accountability for the situation, and you've decided to do something about it with that person, or, or, or with that organization, versus an excuse, kind of giving up control and saying, Okay, well, it happened to me. And so therefore, there's nothing I can do about it. And I think that I think that's where the author of the article, and I put a link to that in the show notes for anybody who who does want to read it. And that's where I think the author was coming from, although I don't particularly think that he articulated in a very, in a very compassionate way. That's that's kind of where he was, he was coming from. I will note to folks that when I was very early on, in my studies of personal productivity, I came across a very short book called question behind the question by john G. Miller. And it had a market impact on me in many different ways. And the QB Q, the question behind the question,