The Tell
There is a word that shows up in almost every sentence where a person explains why they are not doing the thing they say they want to do. The word is "but." It sounds like a conjunction. It functions as an exit.
I want to get in better shape, but I do not have time. I want to make a career move, but it is too risky. I want to build something of my own, but it will take too long. The first half of each sentence tells you what the person wants. The second half tells you what they have decided about whether they can have it. And the word connecting those two halves is doing more work than people realize.
An excuse is a form of self-justification. It is the explanation we give ourselves for why we are not living the life we say we want. The dictionary defines it plainly: a defense of some failure to keep a promise. What is interesting about that definition is who the excuse is actually directed at. Not at the world. At yourself. You are making the case to yourself, in real time, for why staying where you are is reasonable.
And the case almost always opens with "but."
The Fear Underneath the But
The most common buts are "it's too hard" and "it's too risky." Both of them deserve to be examined more closely than we usually examine them.
"It's too hard" is rarely an observation. It is almost always a prediction made before the attempt. If you are being honest, have you tried? Have you taken the specific steps required and found them genuinely beyond your capacity? Or have you looked at the distance between where you are and where you want to be, decided it was large, and called that distance "hard?" The label "too hard" creates the useful fiction that what you want is not actually possible. That fiction lets you stop thinking about it without having to say you chose not to try.
"It's too risky," runs a similar program, but the protection is different. A genuine risk assessment looks at the actual downside of a decision: what you stand to lose, how likely that loss is, and whether you could recover from it. A "but" about risk usually does none of that work. It gestures at risk as a category and uses it to avoid a different fear entirely. Usually, the fear is not of the risk. It is of failure. And failure feels more personal than risk, so risk becomes the stated reason.
Time Is Not the Reason
The two buts I encounter most often, in my own thinking and in the people I work with, are "it will take too long" and "I do not have time." They are related, and they are both worth unpacking.
"It will take too long" mistakes a feeling for a fact. Time will pass regardless. The question is never whether something will take time. The question is whether you will be in a different place at the end of that time than you are at the beginning of it. When you say something will take too long, you are usually saying you feel overwhelmed by the gap between where you are and where you want to be. That feeling is not information about the timeline. It is information about how you are thinking about the problem. The real fear is not of time. It is of commitment. And commitment feels permanent in a way that is uncomfortable to sit with. So you call it a time problem and put off the decision.
"I do not have time" is perhaps the most widely used exit strategy of all. I have used it. Most people I know have used it. And it is, if you are willing to be honest about it, rarely true. What is true is that you have made choices about how your time is organized, and those choices have not included this particular thing. That is a different statement. It is also a more useful one, because it returns the decision to you. We all make time for what actually matters to us. The calendar does not lie about what we have decided is important.
Catching Myself
I spent part of 2007 doing exactly this. I was in a situation I wanted out of. The founder's decisions had made the company something I no longer wanted to be part of. The equity was not accruing. The direction was wrong. I knew what I wanted to do. And I had a catalog of buts that kept me exactly where I was.
It was too risky to leave without something already in place. It would take too long to build something new. I did not have time to conduct a thorough interview while managing my current responsibilities. Each one of these felt, in the moment, like a legitimate observation about my circumstances. What they actually were was a set of comfortable reasons to stay in a situation I had already decided was wrong for me.
The shift came when I stopped defending the buts and started interrogating them. Too risky compared to what? Staying was its own risk. Too long? Time was passing either way. No time? I was making time for plenty of things that mattered less. When I held each excuse up against what I actually knew to be true, none of them held. What they held was my comfort. And my comfort was not a good enough reason to stay.
What Is on the Other Side
Dropping the buts does not make the thing easy. It makes it possible. That is the distinction. The hard parts remain hard. The risk does not disappear. The timeline is what it is. What changes is that you stop using those facts as reasons not to move and start using them as inputs to a plan.
The practical moves are not complicated. Organize your time around what actually matters and stop apologizing for what gets cut. Break the overwhelming thing into units you can act on this week, not the whole mountain at once. Change the question from "can I do this" to "what would I do if I believed I could." The last one is the most important. Because the answer to that question usually already exists. You have a "but" standing in front of it.
The life you say you want is almost always on the other side of a sentence that starts with "I want to" and ends with "but." The but is not a wall. It is a choice dressed up to look like one. Call it what it is, and the choice becomes yours again.