Erich Roehl, a fellow Primal Question coach, has a line he says he shares with his clients over and over (I found it recently in a Primal Question newsletter):
Excuses are just reasons you would do it again.
It took me a second to grok that one… In Celebrate Recovery, insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over, expecting a different result. An excuse is what keeps that loop going, like one of those Hot Wheels boosters (the spinning-wheel gadget that shoots the car right back around the loop). An excuse “explains” what happened in a way that puts the cause somewhere outside of me (traffic, my boss, a bad night’s sleep), so there’s nothing for me to change.. and next time around, same situation, same result.
This is very real for me. In my early twenties (and on some occasions since then), when I would drop the ball, I would have a “reason” ready to go: “I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t for this thing or this situation or this person.” (I wrote about that guy struggling with integrity a while back.) Most of those reasons were even true-ish. That’s what made them so handy.. a true reason doesn’t feel like an excuse.
When I stumbled back on this essay I first quoted on my old blog back in 2014, Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia, I thought, hey, this reminds me of Erich’s line, and Erich’s line reminds me of the CR insanity loop.. and one thing led to another, and here we are. Hubbard’s essay is a “no excuses” pep talk from 1899, before the phrase ended up on gym t-shirts, and I’ve posted the whole thing on its own page. But a few things are worth knowing before you read it.
The short version
As Hubbard tells it, President McKinley needs to get a message to Garcia, the leader of the Cuban insurgents during the Spanish-American War, who is somewhere in the mountains.. no one knows where. A lieutenant named Rowan takes the letter, lands in Cuba from an open boat, crosses the island on foot, and delivers it. Hubbard’s whole point: Rowan “did not ask, ‘Where is he at?'”
Then he gives his 1899 readers a test. Ask one of your clerks to look up the painter Correggio in the encyclopedia, and instead of “Yes, sir,” you get a pile of questions. Who was he? Which encyclopedia? Was I hired for that? What’s the matter with Charlie doing it? My favorite is “Shall I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?” It’s so polite. And it hands the whole job right back to you.
We don’t deal in clerks and encyclopedias anymore, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to get the idea.. That list is basically a field guide to excuse-making dressed up as questions. Each one moves the task (or the blame for not doing it) onto somebody else. Some of them are also just motion.. a way to look engaged without ever picking up the letter.
The baggage
Hubbard ran his own print shop and wrote this as a fed-up boss. He figures most workers need “a first mate with knotted club.” He’s got no patience for “maudlin sympathy” toward sweatshop workers. Layoffs are “the survival of the fittest.” And the discontented worker? The only thing that’ll reach him is “the toe of a thick-soled Number Nine boot.” (Yikes.)
Bosses loved it. The New York Central Railroad reprinted it hundreds of thousands of times, and Hubbard’s own press sold copies to the Navy, the Boy Scouts and Wanamaker’s department store. It became the kind of thing management hands out to the “help.”
Hubbard says Rowan’s form “should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land.” The real story is messier. By most historical accounts, McKinley never handed Rowan anything. Maj. Arthur Wagner, who ran the Army’s Military Information Division, picked him for the job, and Rowan’s orders were to travel with the insurgents and send back dispatches. He also spilled the details of his secret mission to an Associated Press reporter in Jamaica on the way. (Not exactly the guy who “quietly takes the missive.”)
So toss out the baggage — Hubbard’s view of the people who work for him (mostly lazy, kept in line by fear of getting “the bounce”), which is the kind of low-trust leadership that tends to produce the very clerks he’s complaining about. But hold onto the principle, be the person who takes the thing and gets it done, without making it harder than it needs to be, and without all the excuses!
Good questions…
One more thing Hubbard gets wrong: he treats every question as a failure. His ideal clerk just says “Yes, sir,” and goes. But asking the right question up front is usually how you get it right the first time.. and getting it right the first time means you do a better job, waste less time, and give more value to whoever’s counting on you. “Which encyclopedia?” and “Is there any hurry?” are fair questions. If I hand you a task and you ask me one of those, I’ll thank you. In my own career, I’ve learned to just say I’m not familiar with something, that I’m willing to learn, and that I’ll have a few questions first. That beats faking it.
The difference is what the question is for. Does it help you get the job done, or is it a polite way of handing the job back and letting yourself off the hook?
So ask the good question (or two), then get going. And if you notice you’ve lined up a whole list of questions for a pretty simple task.. it might be worth asking what you’re protecting. That’s often right where your Primal Question is hiding.
Here’s the whole essay, unabridged. It’s short, and it still has some teeth 127 years later (baggage and all).
