Debra LaFave, that infamous hot blonde school teacher who had sex with her 14 year old student had a “emotionally absent” father and a boring marriage.

Mel Gibson was drunk.

The Florida ex-Congressman who e-mailed sex-charged communiqués to under-age boys was (a) molested as a boy by a priest, (b) drunk, and (c) gay, and was rushed to rehab upon his outing.

Flip Wilson’s “The devil made me do it” has evolved from joke to strategy.

Unfortunately, nearly universal strategy. Everybody’s got an excuse, everybody heads off to rehab to begin their recovery. Nuts.

Let’s get something straight. There is a Grand Canyon sized difference between an ‘explanation’ and an (acceptable) ‘excuse’.

Hey, I used to booze and I did some really stupid things drunk – some I know about, some I’m afraid I don’t. Being drunk was certainly an explanation. But no excuse. Had I run over a kid driving drunk, there’d be no acceptable excuse.

Everybody’s up to their eyeballs in explanations they want accepted as excuses – they want to say “excuse me” and have that be the end of it.

Vendors: ‘I thought…”, “I assumed…”, “I was busy…”, ‘Mary was supposed to…”, “my equipment broke down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s all irrelevant. You don’t pay a vendor to hear excuses. You pay for performance.

As individuals and as a society we desperately, urgently need to start saying, “No, sorry, but you are NOT excused.”

Teachers and principals who can’t get kids to learn, football players who can’t get along with coaches and teammates, salespeople who can’t sell, employees who can’t do their jobs, elected officials who can’t stop stealing or screwing long enough to do their jobs, etc., etc., they all need to be fired and exiled.

It starts with the person in the mirror. The elite minority of people I work with, who make big money, think, talk and act differently about this . They deliberately and simply accept responsibility. That usually works out better for everybody, by the way.

It’s the mealy-mouthing and stonewalling and lying and finger-pointing that gets everybody in trouble or worsens the trouble they’re in. Own your successes, own your screw-ups – and opt for the swift sword.

Government and big business is paralyzed by people far more interested in covering up their mistakes to cover their asses than in getting anything accomplished, but at the entrepreneurial level we need not follow their bad example. Choose thoughts, language and behavior that gives you the moral authority to demand much of everyone around you.

If you’re busy making excuses, you won’t be making much of anything else.

At least the infomercial industry’s annual awards dinner I attended was honest. Shows nominated were successful.

At the Emmys, Julia Louise-Dreyfuss won an acting award for a truly abysmal sitcom that was cancelled almost immediately upon airing. Other cancelled shows won various honors.

At the Oscars, movies the public hated won awards; movies the public loved were snubbed. All that’s fine as long as everybody admits what they’re up to; gathering in their own little clique and giving each other awards with no relationship whatsoever to the only judgement that really matters: the marketplace’s.

No, I’d rather not say that every movie has to be a blockbuster at the box office to get recognition. And there are movies that have taken off after public attention was drawn to them by such awards. But it does seem sort of silly giving awards to actresses in cancelled shows or actors in movies nobody went to see.

Hollywood, however, is supposed to be about fantasy and make-believe, so maybe none of this matters at all.

What is important is you not falling into a similar trap. In business, in sales, there is only one judgement that counts: the buyers’. Every other opinion, good, like an award, or bad, like your mother-in-law’s, can never be given even the slightest bit of attention.

In the advertising business from whence I came, agencies get away with murdering clients’ wallets and businesses, setting aside market realities, deliberately producing advertising with the top objective of winning awards – which are, in turn, given out with no connection whatsoever to the actual success or failure of the advertising.

This is sick, and sickening.

Usually, by the way, if your peers applaud what you’re doing, it’s an alarm bell warning of marketplace rejection. Peer approval and recognition ought to be AVOIDED.

At the Renegade Millionaire Retreat, a long-time Member who should be much farther head in his business than he is, finally faced the conclusion that he was being handicapped and held back by his deep involvement in his trade association, by his seeking those peers’ approval, by pursuing their awards, by hanging out with a whole crowd of people who desperately seek each others’ approval as a means of being validated and important – because their faulty approach to the business denies them the validation of marketplace success.

If you really need a trophy on your shelf, take a few bucks from the millions you make by not pursuing trophies and buy one for yourself. Your local trophy shop will “give” you whatever award you like.