Life happens. When it does, you often can’t control the circumstances or their outcomes. You can, however, control how you respond to them.
When life spirals out of control and you miss a deadline, you don’t blame the circumstance even if it’s the circumstance’s fault. You take responsibility. You admit you might have been more proactive in meeting the deadline or in letting people know you would be late.
When, however, you have time to prepare for the deadline and miss it, you shouldn’t blame anything external to yourself. You missed the deadline. It’s your fault. You knew it was coming; you knew the events surrounding that deadline; and you still missed it. You failed to plan. In so doing, you planned to fail.
The same holds true when you submit subpar writing. You don’t make excuses when the work is criticized. You don’t say you haven’t slept well for the better part of a week. You don’t mention your cat has been missing for three days.
You remain professional. You take responsibility for the writing’s failure. You admit your role in it. You then seek to improve. You assess why you haven’t been sleeping or seek the right attitude toward your cat being missing. You renew your mind so that your actions follow. You rest, and you ask for help. You acknowledge you aren’t invincible.
No, when you miss a deadline or mess up or in any other way “fail,” you don’t make excuses. You take responsibility because you are responsible for yourself.
Image: U.S. Army (Creative Commons)
[…] is necessary, of course, but you shouldn’t mistake absence from the writing life as rest. To be absent is to shirk your responsibility. When you do that, you […]