The Worst Habit That Can Delay Success in Your Career and Life

Habits are of several types and among them, a few are unconscious habits. Even among unconscious habits, there is one habit that can wreak havoc on your ambitions to succeed in your career or in life. You may be eager to know what it is. This post will create awareness about the habit and in addition, you will get a few tips to break it as well.

Experts and especially those who have achieved stupendous success in their life consider this as the worst habit that can nullify all your efforts and retard the process of your success. Therefore, if you want to succeed in your career, your entrepreneurial venture, or in your life, you have to take immediate steps to break the habit. Of course, there are no simple ways to get rid of it. But if you make conscious and focused efforts, you can certainly bring about a phenomenal change in your behavioral pattern and reprogram or re-tune your life for achieving success.

Our forefathers were not having habits of this type and that was perhaps one of the reasons most of them could lead a peaceful life. But after the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of different kinds of gadgets and more particularly, smartphones, everyone's life seems to have gone blooey. If it is said that this habit has led to a diminution of focus towards their life's visions and dreams, it may not be an exaggerated statement. Let us now delve into this topic.

Being an unconscious habit, you may not think even for a moment about it before you indulge in it. But unfortunately, its negative nature can sabotage all the efforts you make for having a smooth journey to succeed in your career or life. That is the reason you are advised to break it. As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do – excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The major benefits of dispensing with the habit are that you will become a more attentive and better listener, the prioritizing process you adopt will be better, and the quality of your output will improve dramatically. In short, your efforts-to-output ratio will see a manifold improvement.

The habit we are talking about is stopping whatever you are doing including important tasks and checking your smartphone whenever you hear the noise of a notification or a message. Of course, some of you may argue that you have the habit but despite that, you are successful. It may be true that you could achieve success in spite of indulging in this nasty habit. But if you do not have it or if you get rid of it, you can scale still greater heights. The question now is: How to break this habit?

Know what a human brain likes.

Human brains do not like unfamiliar things. Your brain may have become familiar with your unconscious habit of checking the smartphone whenever you hear the noise of a notification or a message. Therefore, it becomes necessary that you should familiarize your brain with the ways you intend to adopt for breaking this habit. The most effective way to do this is to repeat the process of not succumbing to your tendency to check your smartphone immediately when you receive messages or notifications. By practicing the process repeatedly, you can familiarize your brain with your ways. 

What is the process?

Experts suggest the following process.

You should initially set a short duration, say about 15 minutes, and not check your smartphone during that brief period. Once you succeed in this first step, you can increase this duration to 30 minutes, then to 1 hour, and so on. Very soon, you will reach a stage when you will not feel the urge to check your phone for a whole day. After that, it will become a permanent habit that can positively impact the quality of your output.

You are not advised to throw away your smartphone because gadgets like it are certainly useful in several other ways. But you should earmark a specific time for checking the notifications or messages you receive. Remember that by dispensing with the habit of unconsciously checking your phone whenever you hear the noise of a message or notification, you can prevent distractions from hampering your growth. Distraction-less efforts will do a world of good in fast-tracking your journey towards success.