Or maybe they silently care and hope for your company to fail. Many people love watching other people fail, especially if those people have high status.
This as true for a CEO as it is for an entry-level employee. If you don't hit your deadline, your manager doesn't want to hear excuses. That doesn't solve their problem. They want to hear how you're going to fix it.
Yoda logic might work when preparing your run-up in the Olympic long jump, but in a business environment it remains in the realm of office banter and who has the best Yoda voice.
Comparing real life with Star Wars got way out of hand years ago.
"The Hero's journey - is what we're living!"... Yep. Okay. Good luck with that. Me, I'm stuck on "tempted by the dark side" and kinda liking it there to be honest.
You could have said, "This deadline isn't reasonable" and pushed back then, but you didn't. You agreed to the deadline. And so your team expected you to be finished by then and you weren't, so the entire project and company are hurt because of it.
When times are tough, it's very easy and very common to bury your mind in a blanket of worry and excuses. These activities can absorb a large portion of your time and mental energy. But, they have no return on that investment.
Better to devote all of your energy to doing better. Even if you still fail, you'll fail no worse and probably a fair bit better if you stay focused on the work rather than the excuses.
I think there is a better way to put the message than "nobody cares." You might have many loved ones who care.
The better truth is "reality doesn't care." When deciding how to act, the reason you got to where you are is irrelevant. Reality doesn't care about fairness or justification. It just is. You can only move on from where you are, so focus on that.
Related aphorisms/folk concepts include: no use crying over spilled milk; the serenity prayer; you're only as good as the last thing you did, and no one gives a shit about the last thing you did. It's not a crazy unique or new thought, but it's a good one to be reminded of from time to time.
Fundamentally you have an objective (win games, get more clients, raise money, whatever) and the things you can control to get that objective.
Once something moves out of the set of things you can control[0], no one cares about that thing even if they care about you reaching your objective. If a meeting with a client goes way south and they'll never talk to us again, that client is no longer in the set of things we control. It might suck, but the path to our goal of more revenue no longer includes them, so focus on getting the next client right.
I think you can apply this on an individual level. Sometimes it can be easy to get slowed down or even paralyzed by loss, regret, anxiety, etc. Our brains are wired such that it's easy to mistake wallowing in those feelings as doing something but it's really not. Energy is better spent on deciding what to do going forward instead of torturing yourself re-litigating the past.
[0] Really meaning controlling its impact on you. The fact that you can't control the weather does not mean that no one cares that you decided to send a boat out in a storm it's not suited to handle. No one cares that it's stormy, they care that you make the right decision not to send out a boat.
"""you're only as good as the last thing you did, and no one gives a shit about the last thing you did"""
I'd say the second part of this isn't true in general. You'll often be judged by past success weather that's a good metric or not as long as it roughly fits the domain. The mentioned NFL is a great example of this. Coaches that have won stuff get better job offers. It may or may not be a good indicator but that's how it is. Similarly if you've worked for Google it'll probably be easier to land jobs elsewhere (I'd argue even if the reason for your departure is that you'd be considered a mishire in retrospect).
In the domain of startups, if you've done one somewhat successfully funding gets a lot easier (which is a good advantage since you won't waste much time on it). A16Z are on record saying they'll fund people that have done startups before more liberally (in the Stanford video series).
It's a cheeky way of saying don't rest on laurels. So you landed that client? Great, now let's never speak of that again and move on to our new targets! Success or failure, there's very little profit in dwelling on things.
I think he could've done a little bit better job of tying the Parcells story with his actual point unless I was reading it wrong. For a while I really thought he meant people don't care when things go wrong and I kept saying "the hell they don't, that's when they care the most!"
But then it turns and he's saying nobody cares about the story of why things are going wrong. That makes more sense.
Yeah, exactly. It's like what Steve Jobs used to tell newly minted VPs: once you reach a certain rank in the company, reasons don't matter anymore, and only results do.
What also matters are expectations. If you have mediocre results, but everybody expected much worse, then you still are a hero (example: Paralympics). This is relevant when dealing with clients. Keep expectations down and then over-deliver. Much better than promise a dream and then (only) deliver something great.
Sometimes expectations are everything that matters. For example, elections. Turns out, you can get a Nobel Peace Prize, before you really do anything as president.
2. You obviously missed the lesson of this story, which I won't repeat b/c other commentors here have done a great job explaining it. There is actually a valuable lesson to be learned that you can apply to your life to achieve better results. As an entrepreneur, when I came across this story a year ago in the book version, it was a huge insight and relief. I used to wallow in self pity about all the crap I had to suffer through, but after I read it, I stopped worrying about those silly things and just focused instead on executing. It's a night and day mental shift and it has not only massively reduced my stress level, but also resulted in better performance.
Furthermore, even if you already know this lesson, hearing it again can help you get into the same mindset. Kind of like listening to Eye of the Tiger to do a workout.
I think the takeaway was that nobody cares about the excuses, or reasons for the failure and not the failure itself. Investors, board members and employees would obviously care about the failure.
Your customers don't care. Customers don't care that you only have two engineers. Customers don't care how little time you had. Customers don't care how you did so much with so little. Customers don't care that you're losing money every month. Customer's don't even care why you made a decision that negatively impacted them. Customers don't care about you. They care about the end result in their hands and nothing else.
You're right, and I'd call that a correction not extension.
Bens Blog says: "When things go wrong in your company, your employees don't care... Nobody cares." Sounds like a false statement. Employees are not customers, they have a stake and interest in healthy operation of the business. If they don't, then the company culture must be crap.
Looking closely at reasons for failure is about learning lessons and avoiding similar trouble in future. At the last two companies I worked for, there was a constant drive and focus on "moving forward" - literally that phrase would pop up in emails and meetings, and too frequently the same mistakes would be repeated.
I got confused when I read that section, I realized what he was trying to say was, "When things go wrong in your company, your employees don't care about your excuses... Nobody cares about your excuses."
And that's true, if my company stops giving me a paycheck, I will be gone very quickly. No reason to stay around that kind of company. I doubt you are much different.
I'll go one further and say even if you have something amazing, nobody cares unless you can actually take a big market share - whether in niche or otherwise.
I see this a lot, and have done it myself. You will frequently see someone with "better" technology than the leader or "the best" [insert thing] - but because they were too early, too late, didn't have enough PR, or the right connections etc... can't take market share and inevitably closes down.
I read a great quote from a rolling stone article, about Trump that I think is somewhat applicable to my point[1]:
Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she's fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.
"We need someone who is just going to look at what's best for us," she says.
I mention that Trump's plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt's idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn't like that idea then.
Why not?
"I didn't like him," she says.
"Nobody" cared, about the Gephart's plan - and it even tanked him - but with the right spin and shine or however you want to put it, it sells.
I play a college sport, and our coach pushed our team to adopt this exact mindset this past year. It completely changed our team culture and performance. Cold weather, injuries, lack of facilities, etc. previously served as excuses for why we weren't achieving our goals. Once we started focusing on the controllables and working around our challenges rather than hiding behind them, our performance drastically improved. We also started enjoying our training and time together much more.
I think people who just "get things done" are ones that possess this mindset, whether they know it or not. Instead of "I couldn't do X because of Y," they tend to say "I originally couldn't do X because of Y, but by doing Z I was able to make significant progress regardless."
The part that makes this kind of crap so infuriating is that there's usually a large group of people that, despite what the author casually claims, do care: the people on the payroll. The people about to lose their jobs.
But of course, in the Horowitz's world only investors and entrepreneurs matter, not the little people. They're not part of the game. They are literally nobody.
Excuses can be identified as anything said that has no consequence. And to anyone focused on only the consequences, not a single one of those words matter. They could be true, they could be false, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares, because nobody's listening.
An excuse is the very act of disowning a consequence, and those who are responsible for consequences, can never disown them. Anyone who recognizes this never has an excuse. They just fix things, which often can be done silently. Entrepreneurs, like coaches, have no excuses.
Excuses arise from the need to dodge responsibility. But the catch is, if you've got responsibilities you can dodge with excuses, you never were truly responsible for them anyway. You never had full ownership. If you give your boss an excuse that they are okay with, it either means the work didn't matter, or they had backup, aka, they expected you to fail. When a kid has a doctor's note that excused them from a field trip, it's okay, because the kid's presence doesn't matter that much. They just need a "good excuse". It's a true shame schools are so full of good excuses.
The true worthlessness of excuses can be demonstrated by the fact that anyone smart enough can come up with an infinite number of them. Allow lies, and you've got even more. If you ask nicely, in a bureaucracy, your boss may even come up with an excuse for you. Ya, "he's got your back." Except, that won't change the fact that you're all full of shit. And by shit I mean excuses.
But this has dire consequences beyond mere work. The same applies for excuses to be happy, and excuses to be sad, and for anything else. In other words, those who make a habit of making excuses can make an excuse for anything if they're smart enough. They will claim them all as "reasons" but the truth is, they're just doing whatever they want. A person that wants to be happy will have every excuse to, and vice versa. But excuses have no consequence. That person was already happy to begin with! (and vice versa). You see happy and depressed people with great excuses all the time. They're just happy or depressed. And if you need an excuse to be kind, you're an asshole already.
As a business owner, and as a parent, there will be no excuses. Instead, tell me how you could have not failed. Better yet, implement something that will prevent it from ever happening again. And that's what everyone cares about.
Excuses go well with dodging blame, but the greater issue there is that there is someone blaming you. You assumed I blame people. I don't.
From the article, the coach made an excuse because he was expecting to be blamed. Instead, he was only expected to do the best he could given the circumstances. No one cared about his excuses because no one was wasting time blaming him.
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