Your assignment is to live a charmed life in the midst of people who don’t believe you can do it , and to accomplish this despite them, not to spite them.

Chances are there is at least one significant person in your life who thinks that all this charmed-life stuff is ridiculous. They may have told you to grow up, be realistic, and get with the program. Of course, it’s their program, some variation on the theme of “Very few people do anything exceptional, and you won’t be one of them.”

They might begrudge the time you spend reading books like this one and putting the suggestions you find there into practice. They may cite every time you’ve been sad or angry or things didn’t work out the way you wanted as evidence that you’re deluding yourself.

In my role as a counselor, teacher, and parent, I’ve heard many reasons that people use to explain an unhappy existence . . . and almost all of them inevitably fall into one huge category, which I call “excuses.”

The rest of the chapter will introduce you to 18 of the most commonly used ones, along with a brief commentary about each of them. This will give you a primer before you go on to learn the Excuses Begone! method that’s detailed in the rest of the book.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Your home has become a trash can.  The trash is clutter.  Clutter is anything that no longer supports you.  Anything can be clutter. Anything. Clothes, electronics, books, people, and activities are clutter if they no longer suit you. When there is clutter in your home, the effect of the disorder is chaos.  It affects your peace of mind, health and relationships.

I’m an expert in clutter busting. For nine years, I’ve been going into people’s homes and helping them let go of the clutter in their lives. I’d like to share some insights from the world of clutter and let you know how to get out of that world and into one of clarity.

“To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine that within you was a genie, a veritable creation machine capable of bringing you anything you desired – good and bad. Let’s imagine that you were unaware of this genie within or had heard about it but disbelieved. Perhaps you’d tried to believe and discovered that it was bogus – the whole thing about the genie within was just so much superstitious mumbo jumbo.