Stop Saying You "Couldn't Do It"

This is probably the nerdiest pet peeve you’ve ever heard. I don’t know if I’m just a stickler, someone who is extremely intentional and wants to represent things accurately, or somewhere in between… But there’s something people stay all the time that I just can’t stand.

When someone says they were going to do something or be somewhere, and they didn’t, sometimes they say “I just couldn’t do it”.

“I wanted to be at your birthday, but I just couldn’t be there because I was out of town.” 

“I was going to get a workout in before getting on the road, but I just couldn’t make it work.”

I understand that people can’t be in two places at once. I get that there’s a lot going on. But 99% of the time, saying they “couldn’t do it” is flat out wrong.  If they were considering doing it, it’s very likely they are capable of doing it, but they didn't because something got in the way.

What they should say is “I chose not to”... Because that’s really what happened.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t be at the birthday, they chose to be somewhere else. Or that they couldn’t exercise before leaving, but that they didn’t plan well enough to accommodate it. 

The truth is no one can make us do anything. We have complete free will. The challenge is that our free will exists within environments where there are consequences to our choices. So while we don’t choose exactly what we want, we can choose exactly what we do after taking all conditions into account.

This is often a hard way to deliver information. Telling someone you’re choosing to miss their big event seems harsh, so we give power to our circumstances. But don’t let that disconnect you from the internal agency you live with every day. 

There’s a layer of this that’s a social norm, and then there’s a layer that generates an internal interpretation that shapes your belief system. My point here is to not neglect the latter, and recognize that you aren't doing something because you’re choosing to do something else.

This makes us live hyper-intentionally. When we’re in the driver seat of our lives, we get to go wherever we want. If we let others’ desires and demands speak loudest, then we’re just on a track lying to ourselves that we’re in control just because we have our hands on the wheel.