The Excuse That Fools Nobody. Except You.

Someone said something to me recently that I’ve heard many times over twenty years of running a business, and every single time I hear it, it stops me in the same way.

“I’ll work on it personally.”

I want to sit with that phrase for a moment, because I think it reveals something important that most people haven’t thought through.

You are paid to work on things personally. That is the job. When you say you’ll work on something personally, you are not making a commitment. You are describing the minimum requirement of your role. It’s the equivalent of a chef telling a customer they’ll personally cook the food. Of course you will. What else would you be doing?

What the phrase actually signals, though nobody says this out loud, is that until this moment, the thing was not being worked on personally. It was being monitored from a distance, or delegated without proper follow-up, or sitting on a list that was reviewed periodically but not actively driven. And now that someone has noticed, the response is to announce personal involvement as if it were a meaningful upgrade.

Here is the harder truth: the person hearing this is not fooled. They can see exactly what the phrase means. The only person being fooled is the one saying it.

I’ve noticed this pattern extends well beyond that one phrase. There’s a whole vocabulary of workplace excuses that share the same quality. They sound like accountability but function as deflection. “I missed that email but I normally respond quickly.” “I wrote it that way because of X but I know I should have done it differently.” “I agree that wasn’t right, I’ll be more careful next time.”

Each of these has the same structure. Acknowledge the problem. Introduce a reason that reframes it as an exception. Make a vague commitment to future improvement. Move on.

The reason this bothers me is not because people make mistakes. Mistakes are part of doing anything real. What bothers me is the instinct to immediately manage the perception of the mistake rather than actually reckon with it. The energy goes into constructing the explanation rather than understanding what went wrong and fixing it properly.

And here’s what that costs. Every time you reach for an excuse instead of an honest accounting, you learn slightly less from the experience than you could have. The mistake doesn’t get properly examined. The real cause doesn’t get addressed. You move on having told yourself a story that protects your self-image, and the same thing is more likely to happen again. Over time, this adds up. Not in dramatic ways. Nobody suddenly becomes incompetent from a single deflection. But gradually, the habit of explaining rather than examining quietly erodes the quality of your own thinking.

The people I’ve seen grow fastest in their careers, inside Ergode and elsewhere, share one quality that I’ve come to think of as non-negotiable: they’re honest with themselves about what happened. Not performatively honest, not self-flagellating, just genuinely clear-eyed. Something went wrong, here’s what I think actually caused it, here’s what I’d do differently. That’s it. No elaborate framing, no defensive context-setting, no announcement of personal involvement going forward.

That kind of honesty is not natural for most people. It requires a certain comfort with being wrong that takes time to develop. But it is the single fastest route to actually getting better at the job.

The excuse doesn’t fool the manager. It doesn’t fool the team. It doesn’t even really fool the person giving it, not deep down. It just delays the moment of honest reckoning.

And the longer that moment gets delayed, the more expensive it becomes.

Regards,
Rupesh