Overall, men are more likely than women to make excuses. Several studies suggest that men feel the need to appear competent in all (26)_____, while women worry only about the skills in which they’ve invested (27)_____. Ask a man and a woman to go diving for the first time, and the woman is likely to jump in, while the man is likely to say he’s not feeling too well.
Ironically, it is often success that leads people to flirt with failure. Praise won for (28)_____ a skill suddenly puts one in the position of having everything to lose. Rather than putting their reputation on the line again, many successful people develop a handicap—drinking, (29)_____, depression—that allows them to keep their status no matter what the future brings. An advertising executive (30)_____ for depression shortly after winning an award put it this way: “Without my depression, I’d be a failure now; with it, I’m a success ‘on hold’.”
In fact, the people most likely to become chronic excuse makers are those (31)_____ with success. Such people are afraid of being (32)_____ a failure at anything that they constantly develop one handicap or another in order to explain their failure.
Those self-handicapping can be an effective way of coping with performance anxiety now and then, in the end, researchers say, it will lead to (33)_____. In the long run, excuse makers fail to live up to their true (34)_____ and lose the status they care so much about. And despite their protests to the (35)_____, they have only themselves to blame.
