We All

By Joshua Clayton

We all love to win, but who loves to train? We all love the glory, but who loves the work to get it? Oh, I could come up with at least one hundred to two hundred excuses like these. What is the use though? We all deeply come up with more in our lives than I could mention in my paltry philosophical article. I remember what my Dad, Joseph Clayton, used to say about that kind of thing: "Do something, but, do not play!"

I took out a book from the library that I loved in paperback when I was a boy, it was by Dr. David Joseph Schwartz, Ph.D. It was a bestseller when it came out as a paperback in the 1950's, but now it is a hardcover classic. It is called "The Magic of Thinking Big". I chiefly remember this book telling us all and meaning that excuses are miniature mental diseases or "excusitis", as in a sort of "mystical measles of the mind", so to speak.

Everyone can make excuses, but nobody genuinely actively wants to be a loser or a procrastinator, even those who claim that they want to "do nothing". As far as I am concerned, retirement is the grave, death, or genuine end of it all. In short, genuine retirement is "that is it, and it is not going any further." With the nature of thought, energy, physics and all, that is a genuine impossibility in every way and if this article can be a miniature "Ivy Lee, the efficiency and procrastination stopping expert of the 1920's", so be it. In the early twentieth century many industrialists and thinkers asked that man Ivy Lee how they could increase their productivity and he said "make a list and do each thing on that list until it is done and you can check it off". In a rational way, I agree there with him. In fact, Dr. David Schwartz said something about active and worked on lists being the cure for the disease of excuses or "excusitis".

Excuses are the great barrier between the ears and getting things done really. That is genuinely the size of it. And I call this article "We all" in honor of the greatest bureaucracy of all, the excuse not to say and mean I will do it, like the Ayn Rand novel "Anthem", that "we all have to agree with what "should happen" or it will not be done in any way" is the ultimate bureaucratic excuse, really. After all, we all have a choice to initiate or follow anyway.

My name is Joshua Clayton, I am a freelance writer based in Inglewood, California. I also write under a few pen-names and aliases, but Joshua Clayton is my real name, and I write by that for the most part now. I am a philosophical writer and objective thinker and honest action taker. I also work at a senior center in Gardena, California as my day job, among other things, but primarily I am a writer.