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Top 10 Stupid Mistakes Smart People Make
I bet you know quite a few capable people who are staggeringly unproductive. They work long hours, stress themselves out and never seem to make any significant progress, right?
Over the course of our lives we all develop unproductive habits that hinder us from gracefully achieving our critical goals. And often, in the fast-paced world in which we live and work we don’t even notice that we’re making the same mistakes over and over again. To live a balanced, beneficial life and engage in a long-term satisfying work, ridding ourselves of these oversights is imperative.
Here are the top ten mistakes smart people often make and how to avoid them:
10. They confuse being busy with being productive.
In his book, The 4-Hour Workweek
Just take a quick look around. The busy outnumber the productive by a wide margin.
Busy people are rushing all over the place, and running late half of the time. They’re heading to work, conferences, meetings, social engagements, etc. They barely have enough free time for family get-togethers and they rarely get enough sleep. Yet, business emails are shooting out of their smart phones like machine gun bullets and their daily planner is jammed to the brim with obligations.
Their busy schedule gives them an elevated sense of importance. But it’s all an illusion. They’re like hamsters running on a wheel.
9. They spend time pursuing bogus achievements.
Personal growth is healthy. Personal growth is an achievement. So long as it’s real. The problem is the pressure to grow brings with it the incentive to make growth easier. Or more precisely, to make growth seem easier.
‘Growth games’ that promote bogus achievements are popping up online at an alarming rate. Many of them are contained within products and services provided by popular brand names like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They each contain a psychological underpinning that supports a growth game filled with bogus achievements – an accumulation of points that’s tied to the intended benefit of the core product or service.
With Facebook it’s friends. With Twitter it’s followers. With LinkedIn it’s connections.
Yes, each of them serves a legitimate purpose if used purposefully in moderation. But most people get so carried away – obsessed – with the growth game’s point system that they completely forget about the legitimate reason they started using the product or service in the first place.
If you’re playing the game simply for entertainment’s sake, and you’re aware of it, great, more power to you. But if you’re striving to achieve more and more friends, followers and connections for the sake of achieving them, your achievements are totally bogus.
This is why it’s imperative to get your mind right about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
8. They stop paying attention to detail.
When you have success early, you get promoted and you get further opportunities to show off what you can do. Very often, you get more responsibility too. If you’re over-confident that your past success will take you on a winning streak, you can stop paying attention to all the details like you used to during the early days. You can start mailing in your efforts, or you simply delegate the details to others and forget to check up on them later. Because you’re still so busy, you don’t realize everything that’s slipping through the cracks right before your eyes. Pay attention! Never let your guard down.
7. They use the wrong measurements to track their progress.
You can’t control what you don’t properly measure, and what you measure predicts your future. If you track the wrong things you’ll be completely blind to potential opportunities as they appear over the horizon.
Imagine if, while running a small business, you made it a point to keep track of how many pencils and paperclips you used. Would that make any sense? No! Because pencils and paperclips are not a measure of what’s important for a business. Pencils and paperclips have no bearing on income, customer satisfaction, market growth, etc.
Let’s use blogging as a real world example. Many wannabe probloggers (folks who aspire to blog for a living) actually view their blog’s RSS subscriber count as their number one measurement of success. They track it meticulously and then freak out when Feedburner (a popular RSS tracking service) experiences one of its frequent hiccups. But what they fail to realize is that their RSS subscriber count is not a crucial measurement for their goal of becoming a problogger because most RSS subscribers have a very low level of engagement with the host site and its various revenue generators. And generating revenue is a must for a problogger.
Once again, what you measure predicts your future. You should be measuring the things that are directly tied to your primary goal.
6. They procrastinate.
Smart people often confuse motion with action. Motion is when you’re preparing for results; action is when you’re producing results. If motion doesn’t yield results, why do we do it? Sometimes we need to plan or learn more. But more often, motion makes us feel like we’re progressing without risking failure when that’s not entirely true. That’s where we hit danger: preparation becomes our procrastination. You tell yourself you’re being productive when you’re not.
5. They wait until they feel 100% ready before acting on an opportunity.
This point is somewhat related to the point above on perfectionism, but encompasses enough on its own to be discussed separately.
The number one thing I persistently see holding smart people back is their own reluctance to accept an opportunity simply because they don’t think they’re ready. In other words, they believe they require additional knowledge, skill, experience, etc. before they can aptly partake in the opportunity. Sadly, this is the kind of thinking that stifles personal growth.
The truth is nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow emotionally and intellectually. They force us to stretch ourselves and our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first. And when we don’t feel comfortable, we don’t feel ready.
4. They inundate themselves with too many choices.
Here in the 21st century where information moves at the speed of light and opportunities for innovation seem endless, we have an abundant array of choices when it comes to designing our lives and careers. But sadly, an abundance of choice often leads to indecision, confusion and inaction.
Several business and marketing studies have shown that the more product choices a consumer is faced with, the less products they typically buy. After all, narrowing down the best product from a pool of three choices is certainly a lot easier than narrowing down the best product from a pool of three hundred choices. If the purchasing decision is tough to make, most people will just give up.
Likewise, if you inundate yourself too many choices, your subconscious mind will give up.
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Go figure, no comments on this article… ah-duh-uh. Good stuff!
The eleventh one should be:
Searching for truthful and useful information in Before its News.
By the way excellent article!