5 Things Can Ruin Your Academic Career

1. Listening to critics: Yes, you read that correctly. It can be tough at times when you are the only one in your neighborhood who reads at the first week of resumption or even at night. As you will get a lot of friends and neighbors telling you your reading is too much or any other jargon. ‘Don’t let the bozo grind you down’ is a way one of my mentors will put it. There are people you think know what they are saying who in actual fact don’t. Stop listening to criticism of how much hard work you are doing. Because one thing is always certain: hard work always pay. It has been paying since yore.

2. Reading all night: What put most student in this terrible situation or what make them want to read this long, most of the time, is because they have a test or an exam they haven’t prepared for.
Most students think by reading for the whole night, they are gaining a lot.

Here is what they fail to realize; maximum concentration and assimilation only comes at the first 30minutes to 1 hour of reading, the assimilation rate decreases with time.
The way to stay fit for reading and any other activity is to cultivate the habit of reading early and also breaking your reading into small sessions at a time.

3. Social media addiction: Social media is probably the highest form of distraction when it is not used properly. One of my mentors will put it this way: ‘Use social media, don’t be used by it’.

As a rule of thumb, the maximum number of times you should use social media a day is 3. Three times is enough, each session lasting not more than 20minutes.
The only reason you should spend more than 20minutes is if you are making money from it. In this case, you are ‘using’ social media not being ‘used’ by it. Even with this, you still need to manage how you use social media.

4. Phone addiction: This craziness started at the time of 2go when people, not only student, started operating phones on high ways without paying attention to traffic.

Today, it has even grown to the extent that student in the same room can’t talk directly except by chatting. If student don’t chat, they find a way to ‘burn’ time by playing games that add nothing to their life.
I don’t mean you should not play games, in fact I do, sometimes. But realize that there is time for everything which must properly be quantified.

5. Not setting priority: Don’t think you can be part of everything and still have time to complete important tasks. It doesn’t work that way.

For every task you take, you are taking the risk on doing less of another task. Because part of the time you now have for the task you used to do before is now taken by the new task. So, prioritize by doing tasks that are really important and stop doing those that are not.
I promise you that if you can stop these 5 things, 90% of your problems will be solved.