Today is October 11 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you give or take an excuse?”
As someone who navigated the chaos Florence Nightingale noted “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.”
From a very young age, Nightingale cared for the ill and poor people in her village. By the time she was 16 years old, it was clear to her that nursing was her calling.
When Nightingale was 17 years old, she refused a marriage proposal and, despite her parents’ objections, enrolled in nursing school. In the early 1850s, Nightingale returned to London, where she took a nursing job in a Middlesex hospital for ailing governesses.
The position proved challenging as Nightingale grappled with a cholera outbreak and unsanitary conditions conducive to the rapid spread of the disease.
In October of 1853, the Crimean War broke out. Thousands of British soldiers were sent to the Black Sea, where supplies quickly dwindled.
By 1854, no fewer than 18,000 soldiers had been admitted into military hospitals. At the time, there were no female nurses stationed at hospitals in the Crimea. The poor reputation of past female nurses had led the war office to avoid hiring more. That attitude changed, however, when England was in an uproar about the neglect of their ill and injured soldiers.
In late 1854, Nightingale received a letter from Secretary of War Sidney Herbert, asking her to organize a corps of nurses to tend to the sick and fallen soldiers in the Crimea. Nightingale rose to her calling.
She quickly assembled a team of 34 nurses and sailed with them to the Crimea just a few days later.
Despite the hospital sitting on top of a large cesspool and other horrid conditions, the no-nonsense Nightingale quickly set to work. She procured hundreds of scrub brushes and asked the least infirm patients to scrub the inside of the hospital from floor to ceiling.
Nightingale herself spent every waking minute caring for the soldiers. In the evenings she moved through the dark hallways carrying a lamp while making her rounds, ministering to patient after patient. Her work reduced the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds.
Nairo Alexander Quintana Rojas is a professional Colombian racing cyclist known for his ability to launch sustained and repeated attacks on ascents of steep gradient, high power output and great stamina to react and endure others attacks.
American statesman Benjamin Franklin noted “He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” Quintana had many reasons to make excuses but choose not to do so.
As a result he worked his way to the top of the cycling world. His best career results are winning the 2014 Giro d'Italia and 2016 Vuelta a España, as well as a 2nd place overall in the Tour de France of 2013 and 2015. When he was young his family did not have much.
According to Quintana “we didn’t have a lot of money. My parents worked extremely hard for many hours to support us and the bicycle became an important utensil to help them in our shop and farm.”
His parents taught him and his siblings the meaning of responsibility as they worked in his parent’s shop while doing homework after school. When he was 16 years old, he used to drive his father’s car working as a taxi driver to raise money for the family so his father could rest.
As Quintana said “Sometimes things have been really hard for all of us because of bad luck. My father suffered an accident at the age of 8. He was in a truck which overturned. Since then he had 14 operations on his spinal column.”
Quintana himself was involved in an accident when he was out riding on his own. “A taxi hit me when I was 15. I was in a coma in the hospital for five days. I was very lucky to survive. “Thinking about the past helps me to realize how hard everybody worked in my home so I can be where I am now.”
Mexican author Don Miguel Ruiz wrote "Always do your best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.”
Ruiz knows a thing or two about doing his best as he went from being a doctor to an award winning writer.
He attended medical school, and became a surgeon. For several years he practiced medicine with his brothers.
A near-fatal car accident changed the direction of his life. He promptly returned to his mother to acquire greater moral understanding. He then apprenticed himself to a shaman, and eventually moved to the United States.
While the Toltec culture left no written records, Ruiz employs the word Toltec to signify a long tradition of indigenous beliefs in Mexico, such as the idea that a Nagual (shaman) guides an individual to personal freedom. After exploring the human mind from an indigenous as well as scientific perspective, Ruiz combines traditional wisdom with modern insights.
His most famous book, The Four Agreements, was published in 1997 and has sold around 5.2 million copies in the U.S. and has been translated into 38 languages.
The book advocates personal freedom from beliefs and agreements that we have made with ourselves and others that are creating limitation and unhappiness in our lives.
The Four Agreements are:
1)Be impeccable with your word;
2)Don't take anything personally;
3)Don't make assumptions and
4)Always do your best.
Ruiz did not make excuses. He did his best as often as possible. Are you?