Will Chou

“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” -Benjamin Franklin One common, frustrating theme I have found when talking to people who have mediocre lives is that they’re all excuse-generating machines. Every time I try to give reasons that their obstacles are solvable and tactics to do so, they come up with a mediocre excuse so that they can remain where they are. I recently had an especially frustrating case of this recently with an Indian man I met who had trouble making friends. After hearing about my own struggles with this, he came up to me and told me he had similar problems but he was over a decade older than me. He also had insecurities with his race because most of the people he met were white and he thought he couldn’t relate to them. But as I dove into the issue, my eagerness to help quickly turned into frustration as I discovered he was immovable as a rock with his beliefs about the world…