Excuses

A quote that has stuck out to me for a while now is "she realized none of it was real and set herself free." Confession: I have no idea who said this.  But it has still resonated with me.  When I was in the depths of sorrow because of failing out of BYU, I just couldn't seem to get it together. I couldn't take control of my own life somehow.  And I finally decided to read a book my grandma recommended to me called, Excuses Begone.  I probably would have been super reluctant to read this book based on the title alone since it seemed really cheesy to me, but I'm really glad that I did.

The premise of the book is basically that we have these problems in our life and then we have a huge list of reasons why we solve them, or excuses if you will.  Things like, "my family would think less of me," "I don't have the money," "I don't have the time," etc.  And I just realized (over a process of time of course) that when I sat down and looked at reality, there wasn't anything real that was holding me back from succeeding and taking back control of my life.  The only thing that was stopping me, was me.

The book is really good because it goes through all of the excuses and basically debunks them and shows you that most of the time, it is really just all in your head of why you can or can't do something.  And that if you are truly passionate about something, you find a way to do it no matter what.  And that is something that I wanted in my life.  I didn't want to be held back.  I wanted to face the world, full of passion, and not let anything stop me from doing so.

The main one that I think a lot of us deal with is worrying about what other people are going to think if we make a change in our lives.  And this can be anything from a small change to a big change.  But why are we letting that stop us? Why are we letting other people control our lives when we should be the one in charge? And most of the time, the people aren't really thinking what we are so afraid they will think.

The other one is being afraid of hard work.  I limit myself on so many things in life because "Oh that would just be too hard." But why do we do this to ourselves? Aren't we all capable of doing hard things? We tell ourselves that we can't do things.  But guess what? We can! I have learned this over and over and over.  I'm faced with a situation where I just don't think I can do it.  But then I'm forced to do it anyway and somehow pull through. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.  I never thought I'd be doing a lot of the stuff that I'm doing now, but somehow it has worked out.  And I need to remember that as I go into the future.  Hard work always pays off.  Especially if it's something worth working for.

Becoming self aware and aware of reality is a hard, but important thing to do.  It will help you get rid of those excuses in your head.  It will help you take control of your life, and most importantly it will set you free!