6 Bad Habits That Can Stifle Your Success

 

Too often, our habits control us and determine whether we succeed or not. It is imperative that we change out our bad habits for good disciplines. To do this, however, we must first identify those habits that are limiting our success.

 

False Limitations

 

Ask a writer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves words. Ask a designer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves visuals. Ask a blogger for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves a blog.

 

We’re all a product of our experience. But the limitations we have are self-imposed. They are false limits. Only when you force yourself to look past what you know and feel comfortable with can you come up with the breakthrough ideas you’re looking for.

 

Be open to anything. Step outside your comfort zone. Consider how those in unrelated areas do what they do. What seems impossible today may seem surprisingly doable tomorrow.

 

If you recognize some of these problems in yourself, don’t fret. In fact, rejoice! Knowing what’s holding you back is the first step toward breaking down the barriers of creativity.

 

Lack of confidence

 

A certain level of uncertainly accompanies every creative act. A small measure of self-doubt is healthy.

 

However, you must have confidence in your abilities in order to create and carry out effective solutions to problems.

 

Much of this comes from experience, but confidence also comes from familiarity with how creativity works.

 

When you understand that ideas often seem crazy at first, that failure is just a learning experience, and that nothing is impossible, you are on your way to becoming more confident and more creative.

 

Instead of dividing the world into the possible and impossible, divide it into what you’ve tried and what you haven’t tried. There are a million pathways to success.

 

Information Overwhelm

 

It’s called “analysis paralysis,” the condition of spending so much time thinking about a problem and cramming your brain with so much information that you lose the ability to act.

 

It’s been said that information is to the brain what food is to the body. True enough. But just as you can overeat, you can also over think.

 

Every successful person I’ve ever met has the ability to know when to stop collecting information and start taking action. Many subscribe to the “ready – fire – aim” philosophy of business success, knowing that acting on a good plan today is better than waiting for a perfect plan tomorrow.

 

Fear of failure

 

Most people remember baseball legend Babe Ruth as one of the great hitters of all time, with a career record of 714 home runs.

 

However, he was also a master of the strike out. That’s because he always swung for home runs, not singles or doubles. Ruth either succeeded big or failed spectacularly.

 

No one wants to make mistakes or fail. But if you try too hard to avoid failure, you’ll also avoid success.

 

It has been said that to increase your success rate, you should aim to make more mistakes. In other words, take more chances and you’ll succeed more often.

 

Those few really great ideas you come up with will more than compensate for all the dumb mistakes you make.

 

Two Lines of Thought at Once

 

Like driving a car in first gear and reverse at the same time, it just can’t be done.

Likewise, you shouldn’t try to use different types of thinking at the same time. Just like in the transmission in your car going two directions at once, you’ll strip your mental transmission as well.

 

Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities.

 

Evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and bad, useful and useless.

 

These two types of thinking work together, but not at the same time without causing some issues; one will lock up the other.

 

Most people evaluate too soon and too often, and therefore create less. In order to create more and better ideas, you must separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first, and then judging the worth of each later.

 

Keep your ideas written down somewhere and visit them often. There are times when an idea will give birth to new ideas and even if you end up evaluating an idea as not working for you at that time doesn’t mean that it won’t work later.

 

Other People

 

Even if you have a wide-open mind and the ability to see what’s possible, most people around you will not. They will tell you in various, and often, subtle ways to conform, be sensible, and not rock the boat.

 

It’s like going crabbing on an Alaskan Sea Crab boat. They dump the crabs in a small box hold area that the crabs could get out of, but they don’t because just as soon as one starts to get up, others pull it back down.

 

The same holds true for people. There are those out there who find it easier to pull others down than to work on succeeding themselves.

 

Ignore them. The path to every victory is paved with predictions of failure. And once you have a big win under your belt, all the naysayers will shut their noise and see you for what you are — a creative force to be reckoned with.

 

Success is yours to grab, you just have to want it bad enough to overcome the limiting bad habits that keep you from getting it.