Anatomy of an Excuse

Mark Brown

May 6, 2022

Any reason used to deflect any level of culpability for something that happened or didn’t happen is an excuse, regardless of its legitimacy. People love explanations for why things happen. It’s a big part of why I ended up with a BA in History with a minor in Rhetoric from Drake University in 2008. Over the last couple years of strength training I have found my standards for explanations versus excuses has changed. I am much more strict in what I deem to be the former and the latter. A large part of that has come from how much more intense my commitment to strength training has become since moving the bulk of my lifting to the garage. In this essay, I am looking at the various “body parts” of excuse and why they are all detrimental to future success.

Anywhere there is success, there is failure. Explanations help us understand why situations turned out the way they did and what we can do next time to either repeat or avoid what happened. Sports in general is a place where that is at its most easily visible because there’s a scoreboard, even in judged sports. For athletes and coaches, explaining failure is something that everyone will experience at some point because nobody is undefeated. For other avenues of life where there’s no scoreboard to illuminate winning and losing, decisions made becomes a way to track success or failure. I would not write that success or failure is a zero sum game because there is always success embedded in failure and vice versa. How one explains what happened, especially failure, is a key component of future success.

Anyone who doesn’t take ownership of a failure damages potential successes in the future because they are missing a necessary part of the examination process. Taking ownership of the failure is the first step towards correcting it. When that first step isn’t taken, the important work of why something went wrong gets delayed. Worse yet it can color how one sees the failure causing them to ask the wrong questions or the wrong people about how to fix it. Deflecting culpability isn’t usually done when being questioned about how to catch or throw a ball better. Failure during training is expected because there is a degree of experimentation being done during it. Examining what works and doesn’t plays an essential role in success and failure.

Deflecting blame away from oneself usually involves defending the decisions one made to cause a failure. We see it in professional athlete’s press conferences and interviews all the time. Some of the more obvious ones are ridiculous at their core. One of the worst is former WBC heavyweight Deyontay Wilder’s blaming his ring entrance attire after his loss to Lineal Heavyweight Champion Tyson Fury in 2021. By his accounts the outfit weighed close to 40 pounds so there could be some legitimacy there, but to use it as a reason for defeat screams “EXCUSE!” in the loudest possible way. Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, lamenting the fact that both offenses weren’t guaranteed a possession in the overtime in the 2018 AFC title game to radio show host Rich Eisen sounds to me like an excuse. Bill Belichik, head coach and general manager of the New England Patriots, using the complicated nature of the NFL salary cap during a radio interview to explain why they only had so little money to pay a quarterback in 2020 is exceedingly legitimate. It is also an excuse.

Decision making is something we do every minute and it shows who we are and what we value much more than words do. I first heard the way Colin Cowherd put it on his radio show a few times: “People tell you who they are all the time, you just have to listen.” When a decision that has negative consequences gets questioned, defending it triggers our fight or flight response. Either of these responses can produce an excuse by the questioned. In my experience, the flight response triggers more of them because it’s easier to give a half hearted reason and figure out the real reason later than taking ownership then and there. Professional athletes and coaches get these questions all the time in post game press conferences regarding decisions made during it. For the rest of us, most of those decisions don’t involve games or training because there are no cameras on us. The same fight or flight response is engaged when talking about not making it to the gym, being late to a child’s ballgame or any of the other things we have to do in our daily lives. The same kind of reflection and behavior study that athletes do applies to us out here in “real life.” The more one does it, the more prepared they will be when called on to explain actions taken or not taken.

The problem with explanations that deflect culpability is that they take truths and/or facts and use them to create false narratives or lead to an intended position, mostly though omission. That makes an excuse a lie or just as damaging as one. The part of an excuse that includes falseness through action or omission is enough to change the meaning of the statement being given. At best, when one gives an excuse they are lying to themselves. This here is why most people don’t make progress in the gym, relationships or at a hobby they take seriously. Things like effort, intensity and focus are all things people, including myself, overestimate in themselves all the time. What these 3 words mean is the key to make progress in whatever it is one does. As a result, a lot of excuses come at the expense of these 3 words. At worst, excuses are lies to other people. Those lies are pretty easily seen through and takes us back to the words of Colin Cowherd. The lies might be done for the sake of public decorum or withholding information but are still damaging nonetheless.

During the summer and fall of 2020, where I work was having an extremely hard time getting people to join the company. They gave a long list of reasons why it was the case, which I’m sure weren’t false, but in saying what they did to us as a group definitely came off as blame deflection to the nth degree. The result of it all was extremely long hours that led to dozens of trained, highly functional people quitting for other jobs along with a total loss of credibility and respect for those in charge. The phrasing I came up with the time with how I felt then and stick by it today is the following: “It’s one thing to fuck me over but it’s another for someone to ask me to fuck myself over.” I wasn’t the only one working at the company who would have respected them more if they just told us to keep doing what we were doing. I’m not the type that needs to be happy or positive to put in the work that needs to be done so when I see someone trying to artificially boost positivity, it fails miserably on multiple levels.

One more important body part of an excuse comes from the fact that vast majority people on this planet are overcommitted. We, as individuals, have been instructed to have select moral values by society at large through school systems, workplaces, among other places and settings. That leads to being committed to a population of people with lots of different goals. They make promises that can’t be kept because there are too many people or things effected by decisions that need to be made. An excuse comes along when someone tries to maintain the relationship they have with it or them through an explanation of what happened or didn’t happen. The major problem in this maintenance is that decisions benefit some parties more than others. The “work-life” balance being thrown around by pundits, bosses, etc is the clearest example of this. Decisions will have to be made that people on both sides will just have to accept them as is and get on with it.

Excuses almost always lead to a lack of respect because they obscure what was legitimate, what got left out and what was made up. Often times excuses are built on the bones of a perfectly good reason of why something happened before being used to deflect some or all of the blame elsewhere. That “something happened” is usually a failure of some kind. The problem occurs when a person buys into an excuse to do something that inhibits their improvement. A simple way to turn that excuse back into an explanation is to take ownership of what happened. Understanding not everyone will be on board with one’s explanation just part of accepting the world around us. Actions always have consequences.