4 Toxic Behaviors Stopping Students from Business Success
We students are full of potential. We are young, energetic, full of time and dedication to change the world.
Despite that, we often feel lost and quite unmotivated to start working on ourselves and finding our passion. I get it, it’s overwhelming to go out in a world full of the unknown and sit there, thinking about serious stuff.
I now realize that my lack of vision and direction came from continuous inaction.
I always questioned myself, which didn’t give me the confidence to even get to the starting phase. Too much doubt doesn’t do good, especially if you are a student without experience.
However, my take on this is that feeling uncomfortable is necessary for our own realization that we can be more of what we currently are.
It’s useful to know what barriers are stopping you from execution. Most of those barriers I experienced happened to be on a psychological basis.
If you are a student without much experience in business (pretty much like me), knowing what stops you from success will give you a better understanding on what you need to change in order to reach your goals.
Let’s get to the best part.
1) Being Pessimistic
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” You decide for yourself which one you’ll choose to follow.
In the starting phase, the whole world is against you. So if you are also against yourself, you are not standing any chance.
Many times, I refused to give myself a chance but not because I had an unattainable goal. I used pessimism as a disguise for my insecurity and fear of failure. In a field full of opportunities, my mind would always find a reason and tell me it’s not going to work.
Pessimism goes hand in hand with excuses. You’ll never achieve success if you don’t let go of excuses and face your fear of failure.
Give yourself a chance to see how far you can get. Chances for failure are very high, so there is no need to get pessimistic about it. Be grateful for the opportunity and just think about how much knowledge you can attain along the way. Once you do that, you’ll start looking up to yourself as a person of value. A person who started from 0, overcame obstacles and moved on to the next challenge.
Once you replace pessimism with optimism, you realize the value of perspective.
Gary Vee has tons of content that personally helped me think in a slightly different way. Check it out! I am sure it will serve a beneficial purpose.
2) Being too normal. It’s boring
“The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who actually do”
I always thought I should fit into people’s expectations about me. To make sure I am “normal” while hiding my real character. One word for that. Toxic!
My toxic desire to fit in and be “normal” didn’t go on as I expected. While I enjoyed being accepted and praised by my peers, I left out a huge chunk of myself. It was the miserable form of my identity, which was battling to survive, my authentic self, I would say. At some point, I became the dullest person in the pursuit of being normal. A great example of how to completely undermine your creative endeavours and passion just to fit in the structure of “normal”.
Don’t take it personally if people put you in categories you don’t belong in. The only thing that matters is your own perception and the actions supporting your vision. Make an attempt to fit there and don’t be afraid to express your weirdness. Open some space for inspiration and exploration. People will always judge. Opportunities come once in a lifetime. As we grow old we mostly regret things we didn’t do. It’s worse to be helpless than to fail.
James Altucher perfectly describers the topic of regret. His thought-provoking story gave me a deeper perspective on the dangers of regret and how to deal with that.
3) Putting high expectations on yourself
If you are a student without any experience, having high expectations would only distort your reality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge advantage to be passionate about what you are doing. However, there is a difference between passion and unrealistic expectations.
My own experience taught me good lessons on distinguishing expectations from reality. I used to thoroughly plan everything out. Just to find almost nothing go as I expected. I was dissapointed to realize my plan sucked. My first thoughts were: “Am I really that stupid” ?
To avoid the dissapointment, I stopped expecting big results. What I cared about is moving forward with small steps. In the end of the day, every beggining is a mystery. You can’t predict what’s going to happen.
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Embrace the journey. Go for the adventure. Be passionate about your goals. You’ll soon see yourself appreciating the small achievements and become satisfied with yourself.
4) Complaining about difficulties on the way
“Why me?!” That was a fairly common response when something went wrong. Plus the never-ending whinning how unfortunate I am and how others were doing better than me.
Soon enough, people around me started to avoid me. Complaining is a sigh of weakness and inaction. Circling around your problems without addressing any of them will make you stuck and helpless.
I couldn’t embrace the opportunities . I thought about how toxic is complaining and how it led me to self-sabotaging. Followed by “legitimate” reasons I didn’t dare to start anything related to business. Even if I managed to make the first step, I ended up on the finish line right after the difficulties came along.
I’ll use myself as an example to show you why complaining will get you into a pretty bad place.
Complaining was just an excuse to hide my failure. Hiding behind excuses indicates low levels of confidence. My low confidence formed a belief that I was not capable of doing anything useful or productive. Because of that, I stopped relying on my own skills and abilities and didn’t dare to take any responsibility. Repeat that a couple of times and voilà… it’s now the reality.
Final Point
You don’t need to change yourself completely. You just need to take a step back, evaluate your actions and distinguish good from bad.
Stop doing what you already know is keeping you from starting. Make some space for progress by removing the trash around you. Take advantage of you existing abilities and use them for your advantage.
Focus on what you can control. There are circumstances we can’t change. Instead of dwelling on them, accept it and move ahead.
A failure is better than no attempt. Take a chance and make use of your potential. Dive into an adventure. Fail and learn along the way. Cherish the small achievements.
Look within yourself. Make the first step and see how it goes. Who knows, perhaps your attempt will succeed and you’ll live up to your potential.
