Reasons Are Bullshit: The Achievement Habit By Bernard Roth

Reasons are Bullshit Bernard Roth is the author of the book called The Achievement Habit, and is a professor of engineering, the co-founder and academic director of Stanford design school, and has been teaching for over 50 years. The reason Roth published The Achievement Habit is to help people achieve their goals and not make excuses, his audience could be anyone, but focusing more on college students making goals and students just graduating either high school or college. In chapter two Roth states, “reasons are bullshit,” and the problem with most is they are excuses prettied up. Roth makes a great point when he says reasons are excuses prettied up because he also says many reasons are simply excuses to hide the fact that we are not

The chairman always told him at least he got there safe and the other members who arrived on time always had to wait. He said the meeting was not a high priority in his life so he didn 't have the motivation to be there on time or early so finally he thought to himself everyone else had to deal with the same traffic and other excuses as he did so he decided he wasn 't going to be late anymore. This happens everyday in life and it takes people like Roth to have the motivation to change it. Roth creates a sense of trustworthiness by in the story above he told his boss he wasn 't going to be late anymore and his boss trusted him and Roth was never late after that. Roth connects to his audiences values and interests by talking about everyday things that happen in life and what you can do to solve the problems you face with them. He establishes relationships and common ground by gaining trustworthiness. Roth makes it very convincing that the excuses or “reasons” people make are because of themselves. Like in the example above everyone had to deal with the same problems Roth was facing before the meeting and Roth blamed the traffic for being late and then realized it was his own