Make Adjustments, Not Excuses

Make Adjustments, Not Excuses. I was a young pastor the first time I heard the words but they stuck like glue in my mind. It would still be nearly a decade before they took any kind of root, but the phrase was retained all the same.?

One thing that I’ve learned to be true is that life is hard. Like really hard. In my career, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals who would describe their life as anything but easy.?

At one point in my life, I sincerely believed that true purpose in life was found in those things which came easy. Of course, I didn't articulate it that way. Instead, I would have called it doing those things which came naturally, like singing and speaking.?

The problem with this approach for me is that it kept me from embracing new challenges and led to an extremely limited view of myself. Looking back on years before, I’d have to admit that I lived as a person who saw himself as fragile. As if every hint of bad news or betrayal could possibly lead to my ultimate and complete downfall. A little dramatic, right??

But even worse than that, it excused me from exploring my own capacity and exercising new muscles that could enable expanded capacities.?

I had a lot of reasons for believing that, though this is not the forum for that discussion, but those beliefs ultimately did not serve me well.?

I had to realize four things:

1. Life is Hard?

And it’s not just that life is hard for me. It’s hard for everyone across the globe. Even the ones you envy have to get up everyday and face hardships that some of us would crumble at the thought of. I often find that we don’t like to think of it that way because we really want to believe that someone else has it easier than we do. But the truth is that what is hard is relative. It’s like time, there is truly no escaping it. Every new day you choose to embrace is an acknowledgment that anything can happen and you’re capable of rolling with the punches. Not one person on this planet is exempt from this. Sure someone out there may have absolutely no difficulty with covering their basic expenses, but at the same time may be a balancing budget where any shortcoming would equate to immediate disaster.?

2. Life Has Gotten Easier?

I know that’s a hard pill to swallow because we’d all like to believe that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but hardship is the world that we were born into. And unfortunately, because hard is relative, it’s difficult to recognize that even in our current difficulties, life has indeed gotten easier. Whatever bad news you’ve received in the first quarter of the year, imagine what the relative equivalent of that news would have been 100 years ago. Or a thousand years ago. I don’t highlight this to minimize our contemporary complications but rather to provide context. Because even as difficult as life was before, we found a way to make it through.?

3. Complaints Don’t Construct

Those who wrestled with the hardships of yesterday empowered those of today with much more comfortable challenges to face. And while those challenges still pain us, imagine how much more progress we can make for those who are still to come. If we find any amount of discomfort unbearable then we should, in my opinion, do everything we can to rob the next generation of it. And that is not something we can accomplish by shielding ourselves from discomfort. Like those of the past, we must throw ourselves head first into the challenges of today in order to give birth to the solutions of tomorrow. It is easy, and definitely tempting to choose our excuses and latch on to our complaints, but the problem is…they don’t move us further. At least not in my experience. So even when my excuses were valid, I had to still recognize their futility in producing the results that I wanted. I needed to make adjustments.

4. Humans are Progressively Capable?

We’re not as fragile as we like to treat ourselves. But outside of the military and competitive sports, we rarely witness the diverse capacities of the human spirit. But it should be well noted that every record that we have set for ourselves, we have broken. I do not believe we have yet seen the full capacity of the human species but it will surely require more people who envision themselves as capable to even broach the subject. That’s one of my passions, is reminding us that based on the record, we are capable of things today that are beyond the imagination of yesterday. In my humble opinion, it is time that we see ourselves as capable and dare to stretch ourselves even further for the benefit of human progression. We have come so far and I do not believe that this is our resting place. As a species, we have not met a challenge that we have not been able to expand ourselves to accommodate, and, to me, that is a legacy worth passing on.?

I have survived a lifetime of stories that would break your heart and piss you off at the same time, but at some point, I decided to do more than survive. I chose to thrive. Not because I’m special, but because as a human being, I’m capable. So yeah, I get it. Life is freaking hard, and it never really feels like it gets easier. That’s that relativity issue I mentioned and don’t even get me started on entropy. But let’s place some intention on the narrative. Yes, life is hard, but it has been getting progressively easier because we are progressively capable. We cannot change the world that we have today, but we can generate new possibilities for the world tomorrow by recognizing our own capacity and refusing to get stuck in today.?

Don’t make excuses, make adjustments.