We The People Like to Make Excuses

We The People like to make excuses. Excuses for ourselves. “I don’t have enough time”. “I didn’t know that”. “I’m just unlucky”... The only thing that makes our imagination grow faster than books is finding ourselves in a situation where we need to explain why we didn’t do something.We The People have 3 excuses that we make all the time. The decision of whether or not to continue we make a second before our mouth opens to say one of those excuses is what defines how successful we will be.I don’t have enough time.I The Foreigner was a lucky guy because I was raised in a loving family where my parents always told me to set the bar high and when I reach it - set it even higher. So at the age of 16 I already finished high school and started studying in two universities: college and later law school in the United States and straight to law school in Russia. During the semester I studied in US and when I had holidays in here I went to Moscow to pass exams in the university there. Not only did I studied in two law schools at the same time but from the first year of law school I’ve also started my first company that created educational apps for students applying to graduate schools. For some reason this story impresses some people. Do I think that it is great that I managed to study in two law schools and start a business - sure! Do I think there is anything impressive about it? Of course not! However, the reason why this story works is because I didn’t use “not enough time” as an excuse. Ask yourself honestly - when you were a students were you really that busy with school that you couldn’t do anything else? Are you sure you were studying and working in the most productive and efficient way? Most likely the answer is No. And if so then why are you wasting your time? Why do you play video games that will never make you a better person in the eyes of others and won’t help you succeed in life? Why do you spend time clubbing and partying with people you don’t even know if those are not the people that will make you smarter and perhaps become your partner? There is always a lot of time. So instead of using a self-pity excuse of “not enough time” use the actionable one: I didn’t manage my time properly and therefore I was unable to perform all the work I wanted. If you didn’t manage your time properly that means you can improve your time management and do much better next time. So remember: it’s not about how much time you have - it’s about how you use that time.I don’t know it well enough.Richard The Branson named his first company “Virgin” in large part because him and his colleagues were new to the business and had a very little idea of what to do with it. But they learned as they went. In business it is close to impossible to learn everything about what will happen once you’ll start your own business. There will always be new challenges and it’s never about how much you already know. It is about how you can use what you know already and how fast can you adapt and change. Richard Branson was able to start a record label, a mobile network, an airline and now is working on space travel. It is quite obvious that he was not an expert in all of those things before he started working on them. So if you have new tech idea that you think will revolutionize the market but you have no background in computer science - don’t give up! You can learn to code at a very good level in just few weeks. You can learn to design in less than a week. You can find partners with experience in the area. Studying law my whole life it never occurred to me that I won’t be able to have an app development company. I just decided I can do it, learned as I went along and always looked to for strong experienced people to join our team. And today we have one of the top app development companies in New York and the World. So if you think that your business idea cannot become a reality unless there is an expert in the field - become one. Be that person that your business desperately needs to grow and when you get bigger hire more people to help you. Knowing that if there is a problem that it is within your capacity to find a solution is core to being entrepreneur. It is a fundamental rule of life that will help you innovate and create great things.I am unlucky.It The Lottery is considered to be a game of luck. But is it? Are the odds unknown or stacked against us? There are a million of tickets sold and I buy just one of them. So the chances of me winning are 1 in 1,000,000, right? Before we answer let’s look at it from the other side. The lottery company knows that at least one of the million tickets printed is a winning ticket. So the company is 100% sure there will be a winner. The printer has it recorded in its memory when it printed the winning ticket. So the printer knows which ticket is the winning one. And the delivery truck driver knows where it delivered all tickets. So the company can track and always know where is the winning ticket located at any single moment of time. Do they view lottery as a game of luck? Do they think there are odds? No. Because they know where is the ticket. They know that the person who will buy the fifth ticket at 235 Broadway will be the winner of the lottery. Luck is about math and statistics so all you need to do is minimize the chances of failure. If you have multiple opportunities - pursue them all! Don’t be like that cartoon character who is faced with a decision whether to open the left door or the right one and for some reason is sure he can only open one. When there are two doors in front of you - don’t commit to opening and walking into just one of them. Open both, see what’s inside and then decide which way to go. Minimize the chances of failure by studying consequences of your decisions. Write down on a piece of paper positives and negatives of the decisions you can make. Compare those and choose the one that has the highest upside with the lowest risk. And play chess. Nothing makes you analyze the consequences of your decisions more than chess. So play chess and you’ll get lucky more often.We The People like to make excuses. We like to think that we are so special and so different than everybody else. That we have less time than others. That we faced harsher life circumstances. That the government is not giving us enough. Those are all useless excuses that will never help us be better. Stop making excuses. Stop blaming others. If something goes wrong - blame yourself. And then your life will start being better every day._____________________Vasily Malyshev is a CEO at Messapps, an app development company ranked as one of the top in New York and the world.http://messapps.com/