Sunday, July 10, 2016

A Good Excuse is Dangerous

When our grandson was about 5, he would ask to play with my “dangerous tool” (a Leatherman multi-tool). It was almost harmless but gave him a thrill because he knew he shouldn't be playing with it.

The “most dangerous tool” for any career is The Excuse, even if it’s a good one. Some examples:

One of our daughters suddenly started getting terrible math grades. Nothing we tried helped until one night she blurted out in frustration, “Girls aren’t supposed to be good in math!”  “Are you insane?” I politely asked. She had seen a TV comedy in which the girl was bad at math and had adopted that bad idea because it relieved her of the responsibility to work hard. To correct her misconception, her mother told her of female math geniuses starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. She led our daughter through the ages to Ada Babbage, Grace Hopper and our good friend and famous engineer Mary Kendrick.

I have heard dozens of people say about someone getting a promotion or a raise,  “She’s so lucky, being in the just right place at the right time,”  or “He only got that job because he takes the boss fishing.” From where I sat, it looked like the "lucky" ones had positioned themselves for success with extra education and hard work over months and years. But for these complainers, it was easier to slack off and complain because they had bogus excuses of bad luck or a refusal to brown-nose the boss.

Even good excuses are dangerous. I worked with a woman engineer who had a serious lisp. It made her seem even younger than she was and would have doomed her to a minor role. Instead of wallowing in "it's not fair." she refused to let her lisp define her, taking speech classes, joining a Toastmasters public speaking club, and learning to express her ideas forcefully. She soon became a lead engineer.

What’s your excuse?

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