Many times we focus on building good habits and to shred away the poor habits that we have already developed in due course of time. Parents, in many families, pay extra attention to ensure that the kids imbibe good habits from the early childhoods. It is generally believed that it’s difficult to give up an old habit. Good habits usually add colours to one’s personality. Regular reading of newspapers, devoting time to exercise, being punctual, keeping stuffs clean are some of the habits all of us value. These habits are very basic tenets of life and carries lots of importance.
Given a chance all us may like to improve upon out habits. Many times we fail to identify the demerits of our own habits. The feedback of friends and family helps us to act upon our not so good habits. Sometimes we manage to change some of these habits and sometimes we don’t. As I had understood two things are crucial for acting upon old bad habits. First you need to realize which habit you need to act upon and second improving an old habit requires conviction. My friend Anuj made me believe that many times just realizing that you have a bad habit is enough. Conviction is not that important. I had to agree with him after hearing his experience.
Anuj was in a B School. He was an electrical engineer and had around 4 years of work experience prior to joining the B school. He had reasonably good understanding of subjects and was doing well in tests. Finance was his Achilles' heel. The difficulty was not in his understanding, but because of his “silly mistakes”. He used to commit small mistakes in addition/deletion and used to land up in wrong answer that brought him poor marks. Later Anuj managed to overcome his tendency of committing silly mistakes. How? Anuj says he just realized that he had developed a bad habit. That’s it. He further explains how this realization came.
In a fine evening he was discussing different issued with his professor. During the conversation the issue of silly mistake propped up.
Professor: What about your studies?
Anuj: It’s going fine.
Professor: How are you doing in finance papers?
Anuj: ummmmm……fine….ummmm
Professor: Come on! You don’t need to think to answer this question.
Anuj: In fact, going by grades my performance in finance paper has been the worst.
Professor: Why so? Do you find it difficult?
Anuj: No, rather it’s easy and logical. There is no issue with understanding. I goof it up because of silly mistakes.
Professor: Ohhhhh! I see. The problem then is in your understanding. Right?
Anuj: Errrrr…..Ummmmmm……No I have got a clear understanding. It is silly mistake.
Professor: That’s what I am saying. You have termed certain mistakes as silly mistakes. That’s the problem. How do you decide that these mistakes are silly mistakes? These mistakes in real life applications might have large scale implications. The moment you use the term silly mistake, I got sure the problem is in your understanding. The term silly makes you feel that these mistakes are small errors and you have become habituated to accept these. Once you start accepting the mistakes you stop acting upon it. Once you stop acting upon it, it starts increasing in scale and magnitude.
Anuj: I am getting your point. I have made it a habit to commit these mistakes. And the feeling that these are silly mistakes has prevented me to rectify them.
The discussion with the professor made Anuj realize that it’s his habit that he needs to change. Once he felt that the mistakes are not silly ones rather serious mistakes, he stopped accepting such mistakes. Automatically he started focusing on not committing such mistakes. To his pleasure he saw substantial improvement in his accuracy level and attention to small details.
