There are things that I just don’t want to do. For whatever reason. Sometimes because they take me outside of my comfort zone, other times they are mundane tasks.
And, when I’m not being honest with myself, I’ll use the excuse, “I don’t have the time.”
It was a World Wide DreamBuilders (WWG) seminar, led by Amway Executive Diamond Howie Danzik, where I first heard this description of an excuse: “The skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.”
Hearing this truth made me get honest with myself (or, as Amway Crown and WWG leader Brad Duncan would say, “Stop lying to yourself!”). It really forced me to look at my “I don’t have the time” excuse. One aspect is poor time management.
Another aspect is building something up in my head to the point that I make it way more time-consuming and labor-intensive than it actually is.
Like the other night, I discovered a two-inch tear in my son’s brand new sweatshirt. I immediately decided that I didn’t have the time to fix it. But about an hour later, remembering that an excuse is the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie, I confronted my procrastination.
Out came the sewing box. And, along with it, out came my stopwatch.
Eight minutes. That’s all it took. And looking back on that hour between discovering the tear and starting to repair it, I know that it consumed more of my mental energy than the action it took to actually make the fix!
Just one tiny, innocuous example, illustrating the fruitlessness of the habit of telling myself this little lie: “I don’t have the time.”
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