I love this quote, “If it’s important, you’ll find  a way.  If not,  you’ll find an excuse.”

It’s similar to this Derek Sivers quote I recently shared,

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

Eight years ago I created an image for a presentation I was doing:

Here is the blog post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog about the slide and the presentation. The concept is simple: If something is important to you, you will find your way and if it’s not important enough, you’ll find reasons not to change. The greater the challenge to change, the more important it needs to be to find your way rather than finding an excuse.

A couple days later, I added two more images and shared them in a post: Leading Change – 3 Images

I think I used these three images in every presentation I did for the next few years. I wasn’t thinking about forced changes like the pandemic created, I was thinking about changes we want to create. I was thinking about the potential we envision, and how we fight the systems and habits that make excuses easier than change.

It’s easy to be a cheerleader for change. It’s much harder to spend the time removing barriers and working with the resistors of change to make it as important to them as it is to the rest of your team.

It can’t just be important to you.