Excuses are the DNA of underachievers, and pretty much guarantee that you will spend a lot of your work life, and life overall, in caretaker status. Excuses are just a plea offered to explain away a fault or failure. They are an absolution of responsibility. Excuses make you common, undesirable, and ultimately average, ordinary, and not outstanding. If I may be so blunt, they also make you repulsive. No one wants to be around someone who makes excuses —NO ONE.
Johnny Gyro is my karate instructor and has trained me to the rank of second-degree black belt. Master Gyro is a ninth-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do karate who has trained in the martial arts for five decades. He dominated the 1980s as its top-ranked fighter, is in martial arts halls of fame, holds black belts in five additional martial arts, and has been an instructor for more than three decades training and developing hundreds of black belts. Master Gyro was a member of the United States Fight Team for six years, and its captain for three years. His 29-time winning record of the annual International Karate Championship stands in a league of its own. This unstoppable game changer decided early on that excuses were the language of mediocrity – a futile exercise he wouldn't stoop to engage in. That decision was a catalyst in separating him from the hordes of caretakers in his field, and in elevating him to the eventual status of game changer.
From the start, I refused to waste my time making any excuses for myself and I rejected the option to fall victim to useless “reasons” why I didn't win a fight if I lost. Instead, I remained fixated on focusing on my direction. I always had my target in sight. It was always on my mind and I kept that tunnel vision in the forefront of my thoughts to keep my drive alive on what I planned to achieve. It didn't matter who I fought or where I fought because I competed across the USA and through Canada, Mexico, and Central America. A second-place victory was not a victory in my mind. While some gifted karate fighters considered second place a win, I did not because, in my mind, first place was the only win that mattered. Anything less was merely participating in a fight, because coming in second wasn't going to get me where I needed to go. I was not willing to settle for second best, and knowing there were no shortcuts was fine with me. I wanted to earn my titles because I wasn't interested in finding ways around that. I went about learning how other tough fighters trained, how they prepared for the ring. If a winning fighter trained by doing 500 kicks a day with ankle weights on, I did 1,000 kicks with ankle weights. Fighting was as much a mental game as a physical game. Strategy mattered, knowledge mattered, and I learned how to become a smart fighter. Physical training can only take you so far. The mind drives the desire and the body follows. The true definition of a fighter is one who understands his challenge and knows how to simultaneously train the mind and the body to conquer the challenge (Johnny Gyro, pers. comm.).
To change your results, change your behaviors. To change your behaviors, change your thinking. To change your thinking, change what you think about. To think about the right things, renounce excuses and focus on what you can control.
Seven Caretaker Symptoms
So how much of your day, week, month, year, or life do you spend in maintenance mode – in caretaker status? Here are seven symptoms to help you identify and correct the mindsets, habits, and behaviors that are causing you to miss your best possible life while on the job, and away from it.
1. In caretaker status you will excel at finding problems without offering solutions. You add little value to current situations. Instead, you just “hold down the fort.” A game changer, on the other hand, is a value adder.
Jeff Cowan's Pro Talk is a 29-year-old premier training company in automotive-related fields that over three decades has served 3,000 clients. A key principle that Cowan's training teaches not only his own team, but his clients as well, is to leave situations better than you found them. Cowan notes:
A game changer is someone who makes significant contributions to an existing situation, sometimes so much so that a transformation takes place and a new norm is established. One of my main objectives when searching for a new hire is to identify an individual who possesses a skill set that will enable him or her to infuse something new and innovative into our existing business culture. In short, I only look for and bring in new team members that I believe have the potential to be game changers. These are people who demonstrate that they have the desire and ability to elevate themselves and our company. Our hiring process is extensive and comprehensive and I take great pride in acknowledging that to date I have been extremely successful in fulfilling that goal (Jeff Cowan, pers. comm.).
Caretakers point out problems like there is a reward for it. Game changers point out problems as well, but offer solutions to remedy and fix them, and move forward.
2. Whereas game changers measure their impact by how high they lift others, when you are in caretaker status you will be so wrapped up in yourself that you will not have time to help or elevate teammates.
The legendary Bill Russell is an 11-time NBA champion, five-time MVP, and 12-time all-star. Despite his immense personal accomplishments, his philosophy on impacting teammates is a mindset that caretakers – and even most playmakers – do not understand, value, or aspire to: “The most important measure of how good a game I played is how much better I'd made my teammates play” (Bill Russell, AZ Quotes 2017). That brings up a couple of important questions: How much better do your teammates play because you are working with them? Does the impact you have on teammates – for better or for worse – even matter to you?
You don't have a neutral impact on your team. You are either adding value or subtracting value by default. Doing less than you can do subtracts value.
3. When in caretaker status, you will not initiate or risk, but will instead tweak, react, maintain, defend, entrench, and pledge allegiance to tradition, old times' sake, and sentimentalism. Game changers attack the status quo, and when things do not turn out as planned, they never look at failure as fatal.
Allistair McCaw, of McCaw Method Sports Performance, is recognized as a world leader in the field of sports performance and athlete development. The author of 7 Keys to Being a Great Coach, he has worked with an array of top sports stars, including tennis player and former Women's Tennis Association World No. 1 ranked Dinara Safina, two-time Grand Slam Champion Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia, current Olympic gold medalist Monica Puig, two World No. 1 ranked men's and women's squash players (Ramy Ashour and Nicol David), and many more.
In Coach McCaw's observation, top performers initiate and take risks because even in failure they become better: “Game changers love to compete and are fueled by the thrill and challenge of testing themselves every time they step out to perform. These performers have a growth mindset, meaning they are not afraid to fail or take risks. They see failure only as a better way to learn and do better next time” (Allistair McCaw, pers. comm.).
If everything you do is a matter of life or death, you are going to be dead a lot. When game changers hit a wall, they bounce; they do not splatter. This makes them unstoppable.
4. When in caretaker status, you will lack having a standard for yourself that is so high that it would require you to show up, be your best, and prove yourself over again each day. Instead you will require excessive amounts of external motivation to perform at better-than-expected levels; and often, you will need to be given a deadline, a financial incentive, or a threat to trigger above-average urgency.
Sony/ATV Music's Troy Tomlinson makes this insightful observation:
In music, elite performers aren't on a field competing against another team. What makes them elite is that they play against themselves. They play to improve themselves.
