Learning Bits

CURE yourself of "excusitis "
from Magic of Thinking BIG by David J Schwartz

Unsuccessful people suffer a mind-deadening thought disease. We call this disease executive. Every failure has this disease in its advanced form. And most "average" person have at least a mild case of it.

The more successful the individual, the less inclined he is to make excuses.

But the fellow who has gone nowhere and has no plans for getting anywhere always has a boxful of reasons to explain why.

Persons with mediocre accomplishments are quick to explain why they haven't, why they don't, why they can't, and why they aren't.

Like any disease, excusitis  gets worse if it isn't treated properly. A victim of this thought disease goes through this mental process: "I'm not doing as well as I should. What can I use as an alibi that will help me save face?  Let's see:

• Poor health?

• Lack of education?

• Too old?

• Too young?

• Bad luck?

• Personal misfortune?

• Wife?

• The way my family brought me up?"

Once the victim of this failure disease has selected a "good" excuse, he sticks with it. Then he relies on the excuse to explain to himself and other why he is not going forward.

And each time the victim makes the excuse, the excuse become imbedded deeper within his subconscious. Thoughts, positive or negative, grow stronger when fertilized with constant repetition. At first the victim of excusitis  knows his alibi is more or less a lie. But the more frequently he repeats it, the more convinced he becomes that it is completely true, that the alibi is the real reason for his not being the success he should be.

Procedure one, then, in your individual program of thinking yourself to success, must be to vaccinate yourself against excusitis , the disease of the failures.

excusitis  appears in a wide variety of forms, but the worst types of this disease are healthy excusitis , intelligence excusitis , age excusitis , and luck excusitis .

FOUR MOST COMMON FORMS OF excusitis

1."But My Health Isn't Good."
Health excusitis  ranges all the way form the chronic "I don't feel good' 'to the more specific 'I've got such-and-such wrong with me."

"Bad" health, in a thousand different forms, is used as an excuse for

• failing to do what a person wants to do,

• failing to accept greater responsibilities,

• failing to make more money,

• failing to achieve success.

Millions and millions of people suffer form health excusitis . But is it, in most cases, a legitimate excuse?

The perfect specimen of adult life is non-existent. There is something physically wrong with everybody. Many surrender in whole or in part to health excusitis  but success-thinking people do not.

"I'm going to live until I die and I'm not going to get life and death confused. While I'm on this earth I'm going to live. Why be only half-alive? Every minute a person spends worrying about dying is just one minute that fellow might as well have been dead."

"It's just an arm," he said. "sure, two are better than one. But they just cut off my arm. My spirits is 100 per cent intact. I'm grateful for that."

"Well, it's my experience," he said, "that the right attitude and one arm will beat the wrong attitude and two arms every time.

 LICK HEALTH excusitis
The best vaccine against health excusitis consists of these four doses:

• 1. Refuse to talk about your health. The more you talk about an ailment, even the common cold, the worse it seems to get. Talking about bad health is like putting fertilizer on weeds. Beside, talking about your health is a bad habit. It bores people. It makes one appear self-centred and old maidish. Success-minded people defeat the natural tendency to talk about their "bad" health.
   

• 2. Refuse to worry about your health.
   

• 3. Be genuinely that your health is as good as it is. There's an old saying worth repeating often. "I felt sorry for myself because I had ragged shoes until I met a man who had no feet." Instead of complaining about "not feeling good," it's far better to be glad you are as health as you are. Just being grateful for the health you have is powerful vaccination against developing new aches, pains and real illness.
   

• 4. Remind yourself often, "It's better to wear out than rust out." Life is your to enjoy. Don't waste it. Don't pass up living by thinking yourself into a hospital bed.

2."But you've got to have brains to succeed."

Intelligence excusitis  or "I lack brains" is common. Unlike most other types of excusitis , people suffering from this particular type of the malady suffer in silence. Not many people will admit openly that they think they lack adequate intelligence. Rather, they feel it deep down inside.

Most of us make two basic errors with respect to intelligence:

• 1. We underestimate our own brain power, and

• 2. We overestimate the other fellow's brainpower.

Because of these errors many people sell themselves short. They fail to tackle challenging situation because it "take a brain." But along comes the fellow who isn't concerned about intelligence, and he gets the job.

What really matters is not how much intelligence you have but how you use what you do have. The thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than the quantity of your brain power.

Interest, enthusiasm, is the critical factor even in science!

With a positive, optimistic, and cooperative attitude a person with an IQ of 100 will earn more money, win more respect, and achieve more success than a negative, pessimistic, uncooperative individual with an IQ of 120.

Just enough sense to stick with something-a chore, task, project-until it's completed, pays off much better than idle intelligence, even if idle intelligence be of genius calibre.

Stickability is 95% of ability.

Why some brilliant people are failures:  Negative thinking.

• He has a very mediocre job (he's afraid of responsibility).

• He has never married (lots of marriages end in divorce).

• He has few friends (people bore him).

• He's never invested in property of kind (he might lose his money).

 This man uses his great brainpower to prove why things won't work rather than directing his mental power to searching for ways to succeed.

Another person was inducted into the Army shortly after earning the Ph. D. degree from a leading New York university. How did he spend his three years in the Army? Not as an officer. Not as a staff specialist. Instead, for three years he drove a truck. Why?

Because he was filled with negative attitudes towards fellow soldiers
("I'm superior to them"), toward army methods and procedures
("They are stupid"), towards discipline
("It's for others, not me"), toward everything, including himself
("I'm a fool for not figuring out a way to escape this rap").

We can't do much to change the amount of negative ability, but we can certainly change the way we use what we have.

Knowledge is power- when you use it constructively.

• 1. Never underestimate your own intelligence and never overestimate the intelligence of others. Don't sell yourself short. Concentrate on your assets. Discover your superior talents. Remember, it's not how many brains you've got that matters, rather it's how you use your brains that counts. Manage your brains instead of worrying about how much IQ you've got.
   
• 2. Remind yourself several times daily: "My attitudes are more important than my intelligence." See the reasons why you can do it, not the reasons why you can't. Develop an "I'm winning" attitude. Put your intelligence to creative positive use. Use it to find ways to win, not to prove you will love.
   
• 3. Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts. Use your mind to create and develop ideas to find new and better ways to do things. Ask yourself, "Am I using my mental ability to make history or am I using it merely to record history made by others."

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  3."It's No Use I'm too old (or too young)."

Age excusitis , the failure disease of never being the right age comes in two easily identifiable forms: the " I'm too old" variety and the "I'm too young " brand. How old we are is not important, it's one's attitude toward age that makes it a blessing or a barricade. 

Cursing yourself of age excusitis  often opens doors to opportunity that you thought were locked tight. Old age is a failure disease. Defeat it by refusing to let it hold you back.

Remember 3 points ( to a person who thinks too young):

• First: don't be age conscious.

• Second: don't take advantage of your new gold bars.

• Third: get used to having older persons working for you.

What matters really is how well you know your job. If you know your job and understand people, you've sufficiently mature to handle the job.

Age has no real relation to ability, unless you convince yourself that years alone will give you the stuff you need to make your mark.

The cure for age excusitis  is:

• 1. Look at your present age positively. Think "I'm still young," not "I'm already old." Practice looking forward to new horizons and gain the enthusiasm and the feel of youth.
   

• 2. Compute how much productive time you have left. Life is actually longer than most people think.
   

• 3. Invest future time in doing what you really want to do. It's only too late when you let your mind go negative and think it's too late. Stop thinking " I should have started years ago." That's failure thinking. Instead think, " I'm going to start now, my best years are ahead of me." That's the way successful people think.
   

4. "But my case is different: I attract bad luck."

There is a cause for everything. Nothing happens without a cause. There is nothing accidental about the weather outside today. It is the result of specific causes. And there is no reason to believe that human affairs are an exception.

If luck determined who does what and who goes where, every business in the nation would fall apart.

People who rise to the top in any occupation- business, management, selling, law, engineering, acting or what have you- get there because they have superior attitudes and use their good sense in applied hard work.
 

Conquer luck excusitis in two ways:

• 1. Accept the law of cause of effect. Take a second look at what appears to be someone's " good luck." You'll find not luck but preparation, planning and success- producing thinking preceded his good fortune. Take a second look at what appears to be someone's " bad luck." Look, and you'll discover certain specific reasons. Mr. Success receives a set back; he learns and profits. But when Mr. Mediocre loses, he fails to learn.
   

• 2. Don't be a wishful thinker. Don't waste your mental muscles dreaming of an effortless way to win success. We don't become successful simply through luck. Success comes from doing those things and mastering those principles that produce success. Don't count on luck for promotions, victories, the good things in life. Luck simply isn't designed to deliver these good things. Instead, first concentrate on developing those qualities in yourself that will make you a winner.
  
  Think Confidently - ACT Confidently