Make Progress or Make Excuses

Every day hands you the same quiet choice. Not a dramatic, life-altering decision with music swelling in the background — just a small fork in an ordinary moment. Do the hard thing, or explain why you can’t. Make progress, or make an excuse.

And here’s the part we don’t like to admit: an excuse is a cover-up for fear.

Look closely and you’ll see the pattern. Where there is a void — a goal you haven’t reached, a call you haven’t made, a skill you haven’t learned — there is an excuse standing guard in front of it. Where there is a lack of fulfillment, there is a reason we’ve told ourselves for why it isn’t our fault. And the real danger isn’t the single excuse. It’s that excuses, repeated often enough, stop being sentences and become a mindset. They become your thought pattern — the default lens you view every opportunity through. Once that happens, you don’t have to talk yourself out of growth anymore. You just… don’t reach for it.

What if they had made an excuse instead?

Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio had every reason to quit. No engineering degrees. No funding. No aviation industry to learn from — because it didn’t exist yet. The brightest minds of the era insisted human flight was impossible. The Wright brothers could have said, very reasonably, “We’re not qualified for this.” Instead, they made progress. Now picture the world if they had made the excuse: no overnight flights home to family, no medicine rushed across oceans, no astronauts, perhaps no space program at all. A century of human connection — delayed, or handed to someone braver.

An out-of-work cook in his sixties had every reason to quit. For years his little roadside restaurant had thrived — until a new interstate highway rerouted the traffic and dried it up almost overnight. At 65, Harland Sanders was starting over with little more than a Social Security check and a fried chicken recipe. He could have said the most reasonable thing in the world: “I’m too old to begin again.” Instead, he loaded his car with a pressure cooker and his seasoning and drove town to town, cooking for restaurant owners and asking them to franchise his recipe — hearing “no” far more often than “yes.” Today, Kentucky Fried Chicken serves millions of people in more than 140 countries. Had “too old” won that argument, the Colonel dies an anonymous retiree, and one of the greatest second acts in business history is never written.

An inventor failed thousands of times trying to make a light bulb work. Every dead filament was a perfect, airtight excuse to stop. Thomas Edison refused to call them failures; he called them ways that didn’t work — and kept going. Imagine the excuse winning that one. Imagine the rooms we’d still be sitting in the dark of.

None of these people were free of fear. That is the entire point. Progress has never required the absence of fear — only the decision to act in front of it.

Now let’s bring it home.

We’ve made these excuses too — right here, in our own agency. “We don’t have time to learn a new system.” It sounds practical. It sounds responsible. But if we’re honest, that was never the real reason. The real reason was quieter and harder to say out loud: we were afraid of the change. Afraid of looking slow while we learned. Afraid the new way might expose the old one. Afraid, plainly, of the discomfort that always shows up right before growth.

Naming it changes everything. Because “we don’t have time” is a wall — there’s nothing to do with it but stop. “We’re afraid of the change” is a door. Fear, you can walk through. And fear, it turns out, is usually a signal pointing straight at the thing that would move you forward.

So the next time the excuse shows up — and it will, dressed up as logic and good timing — ask it one question: What am I actually afraid of here? Answer honestly, then take the smallest possible step toward the fear. Learn the system. Make the call. Have the conversation. Build the thing.

Greatness was never the absence of available excuses. The excuses were always right there, reasonable and waiting. Greatness was simply choosing progress instead — one ordinary moment at a time.

That choice is in front of you today. Make progress — not because you aren’t afraid, but because the people counting on you are worth more than the comfort of standing still.

Let’s help people win.