It is a chilly weekend morning in London, the sound of the gun goes off, not to signify beginning of a war, but the beginning of the 2016 London marathon. The marathon had been going for the last 2 hours. Even though over 39,000 people started the race together, there is a group of elite Kenyan and Ethiopian female runners who have broken off from the rest. They are about six in total, they are now doing their 37th kilometer, and then the worst thing that could happen to an athlete at this point happens.
An Ethiopian runner clips a Kenyan runner’s leg making her fall. The fall is so hard that she hurts her head. In so doing, five other athletes fall and pile over each other. I see five athletes giving up and I understand, because in that process five other athletes zoom past them leaving them hopeless. According to experts, after running for so long the body of an athlete has very little energy left and any distortion in direction leave alone falling can make it impossible to continue charging forward-they have a perfect excuse to give up. But there is this one Kenyan lady, she refuses to give up. She wakes up and begins to build momentum again she charges on and goes past all other athletes in front of her and takes the title. Jemima Sumgong is declared the winner of the 2016 London marathon. She had a perfect excuse to give up but her determination kept her going.
Someone once said that excuses are bricks used to build a house called failure and failures are master masons of laying excuse bricks. As humans when we encounter stumbling blocks we fall into the ever nagging temptation to eat of the fruit of excuses. We embark on a frantic effort to rationalize our lack of ambition and tolerance. We seek to apportion blame so that at least we can absolve ourselves from the burden of responsibilities that follow that failure, this from time to time since the days of Adam has proven to have fetal results. Excuses however genuine they may be may help us to sleep at night, but they do not completely remove the problem of failure from our presence. We still have to at one point deal with our failures in order to move forward and achieve progress.
Excuses are like a man who puts a rag under dripping water to stop it from producing sound, yet the leakage remains unfixed. Soon the rug will soak and begin to overflow. Failures are an opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes. It’s an opportunity to assess how wrong we were in the first place. Excuses will sit in the way of our realization that we have made some errors that we must correct. Mathew Edison had 999 perfect excuses but he kept going. Had he decided to cling on to any of those excuses then may be a tungsten bulb would not have been a reality today. The Wright brothers had 299 perfect excuses but thanks to their stubborn faith the world has been transformed in to a global village by way of planes.
There will be some resistance. There will be some false starts but when we decide to clinch on to every available excuse, we lose focus and we lose our dream.
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