Anna and Jores talked about mindset this week on More Than Just Task Management, and I have been thinking about the conversation ever since.

At first, I thought the episode was going to be about excuses. Anna mentioned something Jores often says, that you can have a million excuses not to do something and only need one reason to do it. That is a strong place to begin, especially for humans, who seem to be very gifted at explaining why now is not the right time to start climbing.

However, as I listened, I realized the conversation was not really about excuses. It was about responsibility. Excuses were only the visible part of something deeper. They were the little rocks scattered on the trail. The real question was whether we see ourselves as people who can choose the next step, or as people waiting for the mountain, the weather, and everyone else on the path to change first.

The Strange Comfort of Excuses

One thing I have learned from spending time in the mountains is that they are remarkably indifferent to excuses. A mountain does not become shorter because someone had a difficult week. The trail does not smooth itself out because the climber is tired. The summit does not move closer because motivation failed to appear that morning. At first, this may seem harsh. Over time, though, there is something almost comforting about it.

The mountain is not against you. It is simply there.

That was one of the ideas I kept hearing underneath Anna and Jores' conversation. Life is not always fair, and circumstances are not always easy. Some people have a harder climb than others. Some begin with better shoes, clearer weather, and someone who showed them the trail. Others begin in fog, with no map and a backpack that someone else packed badly for them. Still, at some point, every climber has to ask what they will do with the path in front of them.

Excuses often feel reasonable because many of them contain some truth. We really are tired sometimes. The timing really is inconvenient. Other people really do make things harder. The problem is not that every excuse is a lie. The problem is that even a true excuse can become a comfortable place to stop.

The Lens We Look Through

Anna talked about victim mentality and blame culture, and she did not soften the point very much. She believes these ways of seeing the world are destructive, especially when they become the main lens through which we interpret our lives. I can see why this matters so much to her. If we believe nothing is our responsibility, then very little is within our power to change.

Jores added something important here. He said that blaming others is easy. Feeling sorry for ourselves is easy. Staying inside the mental structure we have built around ourselves is easy, even when that structure is limiting us. Changing it is much harder because it requires self-awareness, and self-awareness has a rude habit of showing us things we would rather not see.

I found this part of the conversation especially interesting because it was not presented as judgment. Anna was not saying that no one should ever feel discouraged, angry, or defeated. She shared that she had recently come back from a trip, spent part of the day on the couch, and almost decided the entire day was a write-off. That sounded very human to me. Even mountain goats have slow mornings, although we usually blame the wind and pretend it was a strategic pause.

The difference was that she did not stay there. She found something that shifted her state, began doing small things around the house, and eventually completed her workout. Nothing dramatic happened. No great speech echoed across the valley. She simply changed direction by one small decision, and that decision made the next one easier.

Responsibility Is Not the Same as Blame

One of the parts I appreciated most was the distinction between responsibility and fault. These two ideas often get mixed together, which may be why people resist responsibility so strongly. They hear it as accusation. They hear, "This is your fault." But that is not always what responsibility means.

Responsibility can simply mean that we are able to respond.

Anna connected this idea to Stephen Covey's writing in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, where responsibility is described as response-ability: the ability to choose our response. That does not mean we control everything that happens. It means we have some space, however small, between what happens and what we do next.

That space matters.

A person who believes they can respond has options. A person who believes they can only react is trapped inside whatever emotion arrives first. Anger takes over. Fear takes over. Shame takes over. The first reaction becomes the whole story.

From the mountain, this difference is easy to understand. Weather changes quickly. A calm morning can turn rough without asking permission. The goat who survives is not the one who complains most convincingly about the wind. It is the one who notices the wind, adjusts its footing, and keeps moving with more care.

What We Feed the Mind

Later in the conversation, Anna moved from mindset as an idea to mindset as something we shape through daily input. This may have been the most practical part of the episode. She spoke about stepping away from the news, curating social media more deliberately, reading books that elevate her thinking, listening to biographies, journaling, and spending time in silence.

I liked this because it made mindset less mysterious.

Mindset is often treated as if it changes through one grand realization. Sometimes it does. Anna mentioned having a lightbulb moment while reading Stephen Covey. But most of the time, mindset is probably shaped more quietly. It is shaped by what we read, what we watch, who we spend time with, and what we repeatedly allow into our attention.

That seems obvious, but humans are strange about obvious things.

You would not expect a body to become strong on poor food, no movement, and bad sleep. Yet many people expect their minds to stay strong while feeding them outrage, comparison, fear, and noise every day. Then they are surprised when they feel powerless, distracted, or discouraged.

Perhaps attention is a kind of diet. Perhaps the mind, like the body, eventually becomes a reflection of what it consumes most often.

The People on the Trail With Us

Anna also brought up the idea that the people we spend time with influence who we become. She used the familiar idea that we become like the five people around us most often. Whether or not the number is exact, the principle feels true. Humans are social creatures, and even a mountain goat can understand the importance of the herd.

The people around us can make a climb feel possible or impossible. Some people help us see our strength. Others remind us only of our limitations. Some people are moving, learning, building, and growing. Others have made a home out of complaint and would prefer everyone stay nearby so they do not have to feel alone there.

This does not mean abandoning everyone who struggles. That would be a cold way to live. It simply means being honest about influence. If we are trying to change the direction of our lives, we need to pay attention to the voices that travel with us.

Making Luck

Jores shared an idea that stayed with me. He said that people do not simply get lucky. They make luck. He compared it to driving. If someone drives once a year, the chance of getting into a car accident is very low. If someone drives every day, the chance becomes much higher. His point was not really about accidents. It was about exposure to possibility.

If we sit on the couch waiting for life to happen, maybe something good will come along. It could happen. People do win lotteries, after all. But the odds are not generous.

When we move, when we meet people, when we try things, when we take calls, when we create, when we train, when we show up, more things can happen. Some will be inconvenient. Some will fail. Some will make us wonder why we left the couch in the first place. But some will open a path we could not see from where we were sitting.

I liked that idea because it removes some of the magic from luck without removing the wonder. Good things can still surprise us. We simply give them more chances to find us when we are already in motion.

The Person in the Mirror

Near the end, Jores said that it starts with the person in the mirror, and Anna connected it to Michael Jackson's song "Man in the Mirror." It was a fitting place for the conversation to land because mindset can become very abstract if we let it. Frameworks are useful. Books are useful. Podcasts are useful. Morning routines are useful. But eventually we return to the same ordinary, uncomfortable place.

The person in the mirror.

That is where responsibility begins. Not as blame. Not as shame. Not as pretending the world is easy or fair. It begins as a quiet decision to stop handing the whole story of our lives to other people and circumstances.

I have been thinking about that since the episode ended.

It is tempting to believe that excuses protect us. In some ways, they do. They protect us from disappointment, from effort, from being seen trying and not succeeding right away. They protect us from the uncomfortable possibility that we may have more power than we have been using.

But they also keep us close to the bottom of the mountain.

And from what I have seen, the view is better when we climb.

I'll be back next week with another note from the mountain after I've eavesdropped on Anna and Jores again.

If you'd like to hear the full conversation before I wander off and start philosophizing about it, subscribe to More Than Just Task Management on your favourite podcast platform.

And if you're curious about the tool we're building to help people climb the right mountains instead of simply climbing faster, join the Plandore waitlist.

The trail is still long, but that's part of the fun.

Author

Anna Angelova