Champions Don't Make Excuses

Growing up, my family was a tennis family. We played every week: singles, doubles, mixed doubles, dad-versus-the-kids battles that never really ended. If there was an open court, we were on it.

My father ran the games, and he did it like we were on Wimbledon center court: no trash talk, no theatrics, respect for the game above all else. That didn’t mean we went easy on each other, far from it. Dad taught us to be quick, or get hit. We played to win, every time.

One of my childhood heroes, and still one today, is Rod Laver. He was ranked as the number one player in the world in the late 60s and continued to be a dominant player well into the 70s. It was an era of great Australian players, and Laver set the bar for sportsmanship in the sport. He never made excuses, not for a bad day, not even for playing hurt. If you were good enough to be on the court, he reasoned, you owned whatever happened. I’ve never forgotten that. The game was always bigger than any one player.

I saw that spirit again a couple of weeks ago in the first round of the US Open. Novak Djokovic — I call him Novak even though we’ve never met. I like to think we’d be friends. Well, Novak was up against a tough young Argentine, Mariano Navone. Novak clearly wasn’t right physically. He was slow out of the gate and became sick during the match. At one point he threw up on the back of the court. Somehow, he battled his way back and even led two sets to one. But majors are best-of-five, and eventually his body had nothing left to give. Navone won it in five sets.

Afterward, Novak was candid about how sick he had been, but he didn’t use that to diminish what Navone had accomplished. He stayed on the court, finished the match, and gave his opponent his due. I was impressed by his heart. He’s a true champion.

It’s easy to be gracious when you win. When you can do it after you lose, that’s class.

We see the opposite play out at work all the time. We complain that a deadline was unreasonable or the quota too high; that we didn’t have enough resources. Maybe the customer was crazy. The one I dislike most of all is this: We were priced too high.

Excuse after excuse, and the moment they start piling up, you already know how the story ends. The project fails or the deadline is missed or the customer chooses another vendor.

I’ve also seen the other side of the coin firsthand. Adrian Gostick and I built a leadership training team early in our careers, and our trainers were constantly on the road. One night, bad weather canceled our number-one trainer’s flight the evening before a big session. Scott Christopher didn’t call back to say he couldn’t make it. He rented a car and drove eight hours through the night, and through a storm, to make it. He got to the hotel in time to shower and then walked straight into the conference room. He nailed it, got a standing ovation, and then went back to his room and slept like a dead man.

No one on earth would have blamed Scott for canceling. The weather was real. The canceled flight was real. Scott simply decided those things weren’t going to determine what happened next. He found a way.

I’ve had my own version of that lesson, and mine cost me. I was on my way to a speaking engagement in Turks and Caicos and discovered, too late, that my flight was canceled. There were no other flights that night. So I chartered a plane. It cost a significant part of the fee I was there to earn and was an expensive lesson, but I’d made a promise and keeping my word was worth more to me than the money. My dad had a saying for moments like these:

Excuses, even when valid, are never impressive.

Take a moment to think about that. My dad was not saying our excuses are wrong. The weather may really be bad, the flight canceled. There really may be no other connection to Turks and Caicos that evening. Sometimes the quota is too high and the resources too thin. Those circumstances matter. But explaining them won’t solve the problem; what impresses people is what we do next.

Taking ownership doesn’t mean pretending that obstacles aren’t real, it means refusing to let obstacles control our response. Maybe we find another way, maybe we ask for help, or maybe we fail despite giving it everything we’ve got. Champions own their part of the outcome and learn from it.

No one remembers the person who gave the best explanation for why something couldn’t be done; but we do remember the person who did everything possible to make something work out. That’s who earns our trust and gets the next assignment, who earns our repeat business.

Remember the words of my dad and take excuses off the table at work and in life. Play hard. Play fair. If you win, be gracious. If you don’t, tip your hat to whoever won, learn something, and get back to work. There will always be circumstances beyond our control. The question is what we choose to do about them.

That’s the kind of champion we should all want to be.

I’d love to hear your stories about the champions in your life, the people who refused to make excuses and found a way forward.

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This article was firstly published on Chester Elton's LinkedIn.

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