You Aren’t Successful Because You Keep Making Excuses

My favorite book is The Martian by Andy Weir. The premise of the novel is this: on a Mars mission gone wrong, NASA mission specialist Mark Watney became stranded on the foreign planet alone. He only has enough food for 150 days, the only spaceship capable of making it off-planet is 2000+ km away, and it won’t have enough fuel to make it off-planet for at least 400 days, and his only available method of overland transportation (a rover) has a maximum travel distance of 20km before it needs to be recharged at his base, and everybody on Earth thinks he’s dead already. This impossible circumstance gives rise to the most famous line in the book:

“So yeah. I’m fucked.”

Most people would have chosen at that point to mercy kill themselves. Mark Watney decides to engage in a Macgyver-like campaign to use the materials on hand to engineer a functional martian potato farm and long-distance space RV. While doing this, he faces several nearly fatal setbacks, any of which could have killed him if fate cut the wrong way.

Most people love Weir’s book for its fast-paced sense of adventure and Watney’s acerbic, vulgar sense of humor, but that’s not what keeps me obsessed with this book. What keeps me obsessed with this book is Watney’s relentlessness. He never at any point gives in to self-pity, wallowing, or worrying about how things will turn out. He never justifies inaction by assuming his action won’t matter, and he never waits for “the right time” to do anything. He just asks himself what he can do now with the resources he has and gets it done.

Unfortunately, this attitude is pretty rare. Like Watney, everyone has a dream, whether it’s to become a digital nomad or merely to learn how to paint. But instead of figuring out what needs to be done and getting it done, most people don’t. They do nothing, because…

• they are waiting for “the right time”
• they think they need something (time, money) that they don’t
• they conclude it can’t be done before they even try
• they are afraid that if they try, they’ll fail (and feel really embarrassed)

Even if they do manage to get started down the path of their dreams, even more people stall out, because…

• when things don’t start working immediately, they assume it will never work
• they realize the work is hard and they stop doing it consistently — and then they stop doing it altogether
• nobody is congratulating them, complimenting them, or making them feel good

What is so difficult is that most of these reasons are legitimate. They are not fabricated or blown out of proportion — they are exactly as real and as challenging as people say they are. If someone says it would be easier to start with a couple thousand dollars, or that it would be easier if they waited for the right time to start, they are right.

It also doesn’t matter. Watney’s challenges were legitimate. They were not fabricated or blown out of proportion. But Watney recognized it just didn’t matter. Either he got it done, or he would die. Really good excuses weren’t going to keep him alive.

When it comes down to action, the only choice you have is: are you going to act or not? Results don’t care how legitimate your reasons are. Results only care about action.

“The cowards never started & the weak died along the way. That leaves you.”

— Anthony Moore

You might say that this is unfair. That some problems are massive and systemic, adding enormous challenges to the lives of millions of people all across the nation. That racism, sexism, ableism, and a million other systemic problems oppress people all around the world.

I would agree. There are a lot of resources in this world, and most of them is hoarded by the top 1% of our population. It’s fucked.

But it doesn’t matter. The circumstances you have, whether fair or unfair, are the only circumstances you have. No amount of agonizing about how unfair it is will change that. The only thing that will change your circumstances is action.

Watney understood this. Watney would have given his left arm not to be stranded on Mars, but he was. He could have sat around and agonized about it, but he didn’t. He knew the only way he could change that was action, so he took action.

What will you do? Will you allow adverse circumstances to keep you from your dreams? Or will you take action? The choice is yours.

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