What is your excuse?
Is being persistent old fashioned?
As you see, from the week numbers, I have missed 12 weeks. Almost as many as I wrote when I first started my substack. But then I had many voices in my head: ‘I am busy’, ‘I have a lot going on now and this can wait’, ‘I am traveling and I’ll get to this the moment I settle down’, ‘I am sure no one is going to miss my writing for a couple of weeks’, ‘I can’t find anything meaningful to write that everyone will find interesting’, ‘I am not in the right mindframe today’. I felt justified about every passing week until it completely fell away. Well, instead of finding another excuse, I am now starting back again.
This time I’ll tell you a life lesson I learnt. I have been traveling extensively this year, some personal, some work, some for caregiving and some for business growth. Everytime I landed in a new city, I would find my closest gym and sign up. I thought by paying upfront I will commit to the discipline of staying healthy. But in London, in the gym I signed up, you pay a fine (which is almost from 20-25 £) for no-show if you don’t cancel ahead, besides your class fee. So if you attend a class, you pay 25 pounds. If you don’t show up for class, you pay 50 £ . The logic of the gym was that you blocked someone else from attending the class by not cancelling early, and a no-show fee encourages good behaviour. In fact on client request the fee was increased from 15 to 25. I paid this fee once.
Then I found a workaround. Walk in to a class without signing up (and hence don’t incur the cost of cancellation fee) - it worked fine till one day the class I so much wanted to attend got fully booked. It is like waiting to board an aircraft on a waitlist and not knowing you would get in.
For me, there were 2 lessons here:
Lesson #1: Stop the BS on excuses. It got me thinking on how we manoeuvre life, avoiding commitments in the deepest sense and then find reasons and excuses on why we can’t honour it. Are we willing to pay the penalty or are we telling ourselves a clever story? Persistence and commitment are seen as old school. Flexibility and freedom are the new sexy buzzwords. However to me it feels like first principles of living life is coming back in fashion.
Like the Bhagavad Gita teaches us: “शासन से पहले अनुशासन” that translated in English means “Before one can lead or command, one must master self discipline”
Lesson #2: If you can’t persist, get out of the way. Allow someone else to succeed. Don’t be the armchair philosopher. So much easier to talk, and walk away.
Next time you find a reason why you can’t persist, you should ask yourself the real reason. Don’t ask your friends, as they will impress on you to be kind to yourself. The question here is: Are you being kind or are you the best story teller? The answer always lies within.