How to Stop Making Excuses and Keep Small Promises

“There is a lie in between a promise and many excuses.” — Toba Beta

That is the line that opens Pitfall 4 of my book Unshakable Self-Esteem — and it is an uncomfortable line, because most excuses do not feel like lies.

They feel reasonable. Sensible, even. I was tired. The timing was wrong. I will start properly on Monday, when I can do it justice.

But look at what is left behind each time: an incompletion. A small, unfinished thing sitting quietly in the corner of your life.

And incompletions, the chapter argues, are not neutral. They cost you something every single day.

The Excuses That Sound Reasonable

The chapter begins with a fair concession. Creative procrastination and some amount of avoidance are one thing — every human being delays, dodges, and puts things off sometimes.

But it asks a harder question. Is your life punctuated with excuses and incompletions? Are excuses bringing you down, not once, but as a pattern?

Because a habit of excuses works on you quietly. Incompletions as a result of excuses lower your energy. They decrease your levels of self-confidence. They erode your belief and your self-efficacy — your basic sense that you can finish things and take responsibility for your own life.

That is why this is a self-esteem pitfall and not just a productivity problem. Every excuse leaves a small piece of evidence behind, and the evidence always argues the same case: my word does not quite mean anything.

Live with that evidence long enough, and you can end up moving from crisis to crisis — not because life is unusually cruel, but because so many small things were left unfinished until they became urgent.

Comfort Borrowed Always Sends a Bill

The chapter’s Going a Little Deeper section puts it plainly. Every excuse begins as a small comfort.

It protects us from a moment of discomfort, an awkward conversation, or a task we do not feel ready for. In the moment, the excuse works. The discomfort goes away. Relief arrives immediately.

But comfort borrowed this way always sends a bill. The price is a quiet one: a little of our trust in ourselves.

Here is the beautiful turn in that same reflection. The opposite is also true. Every small promise you keep to yourself is a deposit in that same trust. You do not need to finish everything today. You only need to show yourself, in one small way, that your word means something.

Read that again, because it changes the whole fight. You are not trying to become a different, more disciplined person. You are trying to make one small deposit today — and let the deposits, not the excuses, become the pattern.

In Real Life: The Woman Who Took No Excuses

Florence Nightingale is quoted in this same chapter, and her life shows what the sentence looks like in action.

“I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.” — Florence Nightingale

In November 1854, during the Crimean War, Nightingale arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari with a party of 38 nurses. Britannica’s account of what she found is blunt: conditions were filthy, supplies were inadequate, the staff were uncooperative, and the overcrowding was severe.

Those were real obstacles, not imagined ones. There were excellent reasons why nothing could be done — reasons any reasonable person might have accepted.

She did not accept them. She bought equipment with funds provided by the London Times. She enlisted soldiers’ wives to help with the laundry. The wards were cleaned, and basic care was provided by her nurses. At night she made her rounds through the wards with a lamp, giving personal care to the wounded — the rounds that made her known as the “Lady with the Lamp.”

Notice the shape of it. She did not begin by transforming the whole hospital system. She began with what was in front of her: supplies, laundry, clean wards, one patient at a time. It is the chapter’s own method, at hospital scale — start with the incompletion you can actually touch.

Her later work formalised nursing education itself, including the Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, opened in 1860. But it started the way every escape from excuses starts: with action taken inside conditions that gave her every reason to wait.

Going Deeper: Three Moves Out of the Excuses Habit

The chapter gives three moves, and their order matters.

First, recognise the procrastination and avoidance mechanisms that have transformed into the excuses habit. Name the pattern, not just the incident. Not “I missed Tuesday,” but “I tell myself I will do it properly later — and later keeps moving.”

Second, begin with a small incompletion and complete it — or let it go. That “or let it go” matters. Some unfinished things no longer deserve your energy. Releasing one honestly is not an excuse; it is a decision. What drains you is the third state: neither doing it nor releasing it, just carrying it.

Third, take prompt action and call out excuses. When you choose to get things done, the chapter says, you get a massive boost of self-esteem. Action is not just how you finish things. It is how you rebuild the belief that you are someone who finishes things.

If these three moves are the part you need, the full chapter — with its reflection questions and exercises — is here: Unshakable Self-Esteem.

One Small Addition: The Two-Column Honesty Check

Here is a small practice I would add alongside the chapter, for the excuse that still sounds completely reasonable to you.

Take one excuse you used this week and write it in two columns. In the first column, write the excuse exactly as you said it — to someone else, or silently to yourself.

In the second column, write what the excuse protected you from. Not what it claimed to be about — what discomfort it actually spared you. The awkward conversation. The fear of doing it badly. The tiredness you did not want to admit.

Most excuses change completely when the second column is honest. “I did not have time” becomes “I did not want to feel how far behind I am.” That second sentence hurts a little more — and it is far more useful, because now you know what the ten minutes are actually for.

You are not shaming yourself. You are translating. An excuse translated into its real discomfort becomes a task small enough to begin.

Try This Today

The chapter’s own exercise is deliberately tiny, and the tininess is the point.

Choose the smallest thing you have been putting off — the tiniest incompletion you can find — and give it ten honest minutes. Not to finish it perfectly. Just to begin.

Then notice how light you feel when the ten minutes are done. That lightness is not a small thing. It is a deposit.

And sit with the chapter’s closing question, the one on today’s card: What is one small promise you have been postponing — and what would it feel like to simply begin it today?