No Excuse

October 14 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Education, Personal Development

I get Jared’s wire. Some who might read this will know the punch-line. I agree 100% with Jared on this one. mrossol

10/14/2020. Jared Dillian, in The Daily Dirtnap [TDD]

Just a quick story from the old Academy days.  As a fourth class cadet (freshman), you only had three possible responses to a question.

1. “Yes, sir”

2. “No, sir”

3. “No excuse, sir”

That was it. You really weren’t allowed to say anything else.

So if an upperclass cadet asked you why you were late to formation, the answer was “no excuse, sir.”

It didn’t matter if you actually had an excuse. It didn’t matter if your grandmother hijacked a school bus full of penguins. You still had to be at formation on time.

This introduced a sense of accountability into 18-year-olds that can be found nowhere else in society.

I only got chewed out one time the whole time I was at Lehman Brothers. It was the time that I got picked off on RTH and Sears Holdings. It’s a fascinating story, which I think I’ve told in the past, but may tell again. Anyway, my boss sat me down, clearly annoyed (after losing $1mm) and said that we wanted to be on the right side of those trades, not the wrong side. Now, the trade was incredibly complex, and me with my 31- year-old level of sophistication was not going to be able to figure that out. But I simply said, “no excuse,” and resolved not to get picked off again. And I didn’t.

Maybe it’s just my conservative Generation X makeup, but I really would like to live in a world where “no excuse, sir” is the only acceptable response. I was an adjunct professor for five years–I made it clear in the first class of the semester that excuses were not going to be tolerated.

I had a policy that papers had to be handed in on the front table at 6pm, as class started. There was a student who forgot his paper at home. Before the class, I said, can you go print it out? It was on his home computer. He was totally stuck. He had that look. I said, I know how you’re feeling right now, and I know you did the paper, but I can’t make an exception in your particular case. The kid had an A in the class, and ended up with a B.

Won’t make that mistake again. Not in school, and not in life, either. Probably the most valuable thing he learned in class.

My wife constantly complains about students and their excuses. There are legitimate excuses–death in the family, illness, for which you have to provide documentation. If you lead people to believe that there is some wiggle room, they will exploit the wiggle room.

I learned a few things from being in the Coast Guard. That was one of them. The other one is time management. There was one point at the Academy where I was taking 22 credits, on top of athletics and all the military stuff. You get very adept at fitting a lot into a 24 hour day. And if I ever fail to send out an issue of TDD [this is Jarad’s daily market wire], you know what the next issue is going to say: no excuse.

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