Table of Contents
With the following keynotes, you can avoid a massive number of mistakes that could hinder your progress. These keynotes are basically deadly pitfalls. People spend a large part of their life in these pitfalls and remain unsuccessful.
False Hope Syndrome
It is where you overestimate the changes you can make. You set unrealistic expectations for what you can do. When you can’t accomplish everything on your list of desired changes, the disappointment causes a powerful backlash that will cause you to give up hope.
Even if you have extremely strong self-discipline and desire to change, you will still fail if your expectations are too high. Plan for proper expectations and figure out what you can actually hope for. Learn to let go of hopes that are not realistic and to set expectations that you can actually obtain or meet.
One example of this might be thinking that you will magically be able to change your work habits, even though you have tried doing the same things in the past and have failed. You can have realistic hopes that you can actually achieve. This leads to confidence, competence, and skill development. Anything else is just setting yourself up for heartbreak and failure. Don’t shoot too high, but don’t shoot too low; otherwise, you’ll grow bored and unengaged.
Overthinking
“Put your thoughts to sleep. Do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.” – Rumi
It is a silent killer of joy, hope, and reason. It kills your positivity and desire to carry on. Overthinking is silently hampering you and it is another classic instance of mere motion versus actual action. You are considering too many options and doing too much research, which limits your ability to make an executive decision. You are wasting time doing research and forming plans for things that don’t really matter.
By overthinking, you freeze your ability to make decisions. Psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that a paradox of choice is harmful because it leads to analysis paralysis. His studies reveal that having more choices actually causes people to develop anxiety and avoid making a choice in the long run. Having fewer present choices helps people narrow it down.
Consider when you go to an electronic showroom and you are faced with buying a new printer for your office. Standing before the wall of printers, all of which have great advertising and boast so many features, you find yourself overwhelmed and can’t settle on a printer. You panic and buy the first one you see. (Or you go home without buying one even though you needed it.)
You wasted so much time deliberating over printers and you ended up not even using the information you gained because you got overwhelmed. You can’t decide because there is too much information overloading your brain in the process. This is a perfect illustration of how overthinking kills your ability to follow through and execute.
You can limit the choices you give yourself. Focus on the main things you need, and find the easiest choice. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of researching obsessively on Google or comparing thousands of brands to find the best one. Chances are, 90% of them do exactly what you want with little variance. So what are you really deliberating over?
If you are tasked with buying the new office printer, determine three traits your office needs in a printer. Then go to the electronic showroom and buy the cheapest one that meets all of those needs.
Worry
“Stop worrying about what can go wrong, and get excited about what can go right.” – Anonymous
It is closely related to overthinking and it is the third powerful deadly pitfall. Worrying is when you ponder on problems, real or imagined. This takes you out of the present, which you have control over, and puts you into the future or past, which you have zero control over.
Worry steals your control but it is the action-oriented focus that empowers you to get the things done. Try to switch your mindset toward action and solutions rather than problems and mistakes. Furthermore, worrying makes you focus on things that may not even be real and that you cannot change. You devote time and energy to these worries that you could be spending on work instead.
Worrying causes you to suffer twice—once during the worrying and again if the dreaded event actually occurs. And if it doesn’t occur, you’ve just suffered for no reason at all. Focus on what you can control and do something about. Focus on things that are real and have happened, not imaginary outcomes or scenarios that may never come to pass. Do what you can do at the moment because that’s all you can control.
Knowing Yourself
The final major deadly pitfall is failing to get to know yourself. Knowing yourself enables you to figure out how to work best and create the most beneficial environments for yourself.
Not all people work the same way. One woman may need a quiet environment where she can work alone while another woman needs friends and a social work environment to thrive in.
Find what is best for you and then implement that to thrive. You can only work best if you are in your best environment. Find what that environment is instead of forcing yourself to conform to something that does not suit you and instead makes you miserable and hinders your productivity.
When you use your preferences and strengths to your advantage, you are more likely to succeed. This is because you are allowing yourself to work at your best, at your very peak. You’re not fighting yourself and are instead working within your flow and accessing your strengths. You are not making yourself miserable by following someone else’s formula for success. (Inspired from ‘Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline’ by Peter Hollins)
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