Thursday, July 14, 2016
How I've Trained Myself To Avoid Making Excuses
Fast Company | Business + Innovation: I’ll never forget a tense conversation I had with my leadership team about the launch of a key tech product. We were discussing why we weren't getting broad adoption among our users. One of my team members in the company, which operates in the home-improvement sector, offered this explanation: "This industry is just slow to adopt new technologies."
I’ve been thinking about that comment ever since. But not because it’s accurate.
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3 comments:
This article brings up so many good points about working in a collaborative job of any kind in so many ways. The idea that you must take at least some responsibility for things that most people take for granted or take as outside factors affecting them is, as the article says, one of the only ways to come to a successful, aware career. You decide what you want to see in your industry, and you need to be the one to make changes, inventions, etc. happen. Without taking these responsibilities and instead making them the fault of some arbitrary concept, thing, or group that in no way leads you to any sort of direct responsibility, nothing happens; it only makes you feel mildly okay with yourself. Because working in theatre in any capacity relies so heavily on the collaboration with different artists, and more importantly different types of artists, a responsible mentality is key to becoming a successful theatre worker, designer, actor, etc. Without taking responsibility for your own work or for peoples' responses to your work, you will never grow as an artist or a collaborator. This concept can also allude to a much deeper, more spiritual concept that goes along with the idea that you get and see what you want to get and see. This law of attraction can help you in careers of any sort as well as the concepts and morals that people live by everyday.
I really struggle with this sort of mechanism and it is an ongoing battle with myself. Overall, I have found that while it is easy to be proactively thinking about how I think about a thing that I created in a way that permits me to avoid making excuses, I also find that it is very easy to slip into the mindset where it's okay to make excuses, either for the sake of myself or others. This is really hard for me, particularly because I know it colors other people's views of me the same way that My views of someone who makes excuses is colored. An interesting thing that I have found though, Is that when I avoid making excuses I am able to more quickly move on from mistakes that I make, an example of this was when I was building a structure for a show a few months back that failed fairly comprehensively the first time, and by not making excuses I found that I was quickly liberated of the anger and frustration that normally comes with a failure of that type. It is certainly an ongoing struggle, but one that I find can radically improve the quality of my work and my life.
This I a very interesting article and is very relatable. There are many times throughout the week where I see myself making excuses. Anyway I can. Which is a terrible thing to do considering it ultimately will give a poor representation to the person/people you are giving those excuses to. I also realized that the work and ideas I create never get developed fully based off of excuses which happens more than I would like it to. I like how this article mentioned that the one way he prevented the art of excuses is being at the dinner table arguing fully on one side of the spectrum. Our family tends to do that on accident almost every night and it really helps in the long run. However, this only really helps when I'm with my family. Once I'm outside of my family, everything suddenly stops and I go back to my old ways. This article is refreshing to know I'm part of a large amount to tends to make excuses but pushes me to stop doing it immediately because it is very beneficial in the long run.
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