10 Habits that are Easy to Break – Study Edition

Yes, this blog is all about personal development and self-improvement. If you’re a student and you want to embark a journey of self-improvement, improving your study habits does count as self-improvement as well.

I’ve made many mistakes during my first two years of university. Most of it were my study habits. It took me a failure in one class and some slipped grades for me to learn my lessons. Ultimately I’ve learned such a valuable lesson when I failed my university class, and it pretty much forced me to see the bigger picture of failure.

And going through a journey of personal development and self-improvement, changes had to be made. In this particular situation, the changes that I needed to make were my study habits. To be honest, there were more habits that I had to break, rather than try to build… and there is a whole list of them.

Just like what I am about to list… here’s the top 10 study habits to stop doing, now.

1) Skim Reading the Textbooks/the readings

This should be quite an obvious one. For me, I was in denial for a while that I was actually skim reading through my textbooks and notes. Honestly, try your very best to not skim read through those really important required readings.

It’s really important to identify and take in the information for whatever your class is. Read them thoroughly so that you can really consolidate and not miss anything.

Don’t make the mistake of doing the readings, just for the sake of doing them. Just because you’ve done the readings, doesn’t mean that you have studied effectively. If you have done the readings, and someone asks you a question that you can’t answer simply, then that already tells you that you probably haven’t read the readings thoroughly.

That’s the mistake I made. I was tricking my mind into thinking that I was studying effectively just because I was doing my readings really fast. But the truth was, I wasn’t really studying effectively.

So don’t rush through your readings, and also don’t try to miss any of your readings. They can easily snowball really fast and fall behind.

2) Taking Shortcuts

It’s understandable that we want to make life easy for ourselves.

It’s the best feeling in the world to find a shortcut to something if we’re able to do a particular thing faster, and be more efficient at the same time.

But here’s where shortcuts take a downfall…

It’s when the shortcuts make you rush through everything, and you end up missing key points or key aspects.

For example, you have an assignment, it’s a big particular assignment that requires high-level research, critical thinking. It is clear that rushing through it is not going to be the answer.

Even if you find several shortcuts, what are you actually going to be learning from all of that?

When it comes to anything with studying, whether it’d be doing an assignment or studying for an exam, the purpose of that assignment or exam is not just to pass it, but to learn something from it. That’s going to be hard to do if you’re just going through it with shortcuts.

If we want to learn beyond just passing that assignment or exam, we also want to be able to go through it thoroughly, and not take shortcuts, so we can make the most out of what we can with that learning experience.

3) Moving onto the Next Topic before Understanding the One that You are On

I made this mistake so many times.

This was because I never wanted to fall behind on everything. Because again, they can easily snowball.

Regardless on whether I full understood the topic or not, I would just move on to the next week’s one so that I would always be up to date.

I’ll admit, it’s going to be a hard one. It’s understandably going to be hard to make sure that you don’t leave the topic before you move onto the next time, while at the same time, still not fall behind. However, there is a way around this.

If during that particular week, there’s still something about that specific topic that you don’t understand, there’s still opportunities to ask the teachers, friends, and if your school/university offers it, those Q&A study sessions. It’ll give you a chance to ask the questions needed to understand that week’s content, so that you’re able to move onto the next week’s topic.

4) Playing the blame game when I didn’t get the grade that I wanted

In high school, and even in university, I used to do this. Whenever I got a bad grade on an assessment, the first thing I would do is find someone to blame for it. Whether that’d be whoever created the assessment, whoever marked the assessment (blame them for being “too harsh”), I always thought that it’d be someone else’s fault for it.

BUT the brutal truth was that the grade that I got was 100% my responsibility.

Even if there was a rare chance that it may have been someone else’s fault, most of the responsibility still came from me. Because there were still people that got a high grade on that assessment, and what was the difference between them and me? It was our difference in the way that we had approached that assignment. Because honestly, it was every student’s goal to get a good grade on that assessment, but ultimately, the difference maker between the ones who achieved it to the one who didn’t, was the system that they had implemented.

Read this blog post to learn more about why it’s better to focus on systems more than goals.

That’s why it’s important to be more proactive rather than reactive in whatever outcome we get. Being reactive and just finding someone to blame isn’t going to change the outcome, but we can make sure that we don’t make the same mistake over and over.

5) Doing the BARE Minimum

When you think about it, doing the bare minimum is actually a habit.

Because if you aim to just do the bare minimum by just doing the readings, the lectures, and not really go above and beyond to make sure that you do well in the class, you’re going to get used to doing the bare minimum for everything.

How you do one thing is how you do everything. If in the classes you do the bare minimum, you’ll most likely do the bare minimum for all the other areas of your life.

When you think about all that, this is a habit that we wouldn’t really want to have.

So, if you switch your mindset from doing the bare minimum to doing whatever you possibly can to get the grade that you want, that mindset will eventually translate to all the other areas of your life.

Honestly, you can go above and beyond, and still simply pass that class, but as long as you don’t get into the habit of just doing the bare minimum, it doesn’t matter what your outcome is at the end of the day.

Just doing the bare minimum once, or even a few times, isn’t going to be a big difference maker in the short term, but over the long-term, as it is a habit, it would eventually become a part of our lives.

Read this blog post to know more about the compound effect, how the small changes lead to bigger differences.

6) Just aiming to PASS the subject

It took me a while to figure out that if my only purpose in my class was to just pass it, I’m not actually fully benefiting from it. When you think about it, there’s so much more to learn beyond just the content. By me just having the goal to simply pass the subject, then I wasn’t even benefiting from the class that I was taking.

Also, if you want to do really well, but you’re only aiming to pass the subject, how can we really expect to exceed our own expectations, if just passing the subject is our only goal.

It’s just like an athlete who wants to win a race, but his mindset is aiming to finish the race. In that case, his goal is not aligned with what he is going to do. It’s the same with aiming for a good grade. It’s the goal to earn a good game, so our mindset needs to be aligned with that. The mindset needs to go beyond just simply passing the class.

It took me so long for me to learn this, but our classes are not just for passing it and get a good grade. Those classes are there to help us learn, because that knowledge we learn is going to help us after we complete our degree. Regardless on what we pursue after we complete our degree, we’re still going to be learning something valuable from those classes, and it doesn’t just have to be the content being taught.

7) Not looking at the class material ahead of time

Another mistake that I took forever to realise…

It should be common sense, but if you don’t prepare yourself ahead of time with your classes, you’re probably not going to know what is going on.

I used to walk into tutorials unprepared, without looking at the readings, or even look at the discussion questions. I pretty much would have no idea what they are talking about.

The solution to this is read the required readings, look at the activities they’re doing in class ahead of time. What would make life so much more easier is that if after all of that we still don’t understand the content, we can go to our teacher and pinpoint exactly to them what we still don’t understand.

8) Avoiding criticism and feedback

I’m so guilty of this. My mistake was that I was always scared to look at the criticism and the feedback of any of my assessments and exams. This was such a big fat mistake that I did because I would never know what to do for next time, and in turn, I would just repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Just remember that the feedback and criticism is not just going to be beneficial for our future assessments and exams, but also for when we leave university/college as well. If we plan to utilise our degree for our future endeavors, then obviously we want to do everything that we could to always improve.

Because how can we really expect to improve if we don’t take on the feedback and the criticism?

It’s good advice to avoid the criticism from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but if it’s coming from a teacher who is qualified to mark those papers, and even has the experience to mark them, it’s common sense to know that they do know what they’re talking about.

9) NOT Talking to the Teachers

Yes, even though I am an introvert. This still wasn’t an excuse.

One of my greatest downfalls that stopped me from passing one of my classes was the lack of communication that I had with my teacher.

Honestly, it’s common sense, but for me it took me a while to fully realise this. If you don’t understand something, if you’re struggling with something, or you just don’t get what is going on, just ask for help. At the end of the day, the worst thing that can happen is that the teacher is going to say no, or say that they can’t help you. How bad is that actually going to be?

I used to feel embarrassed about asking for help because I was afraid of them saying no. It took me time to realise that I should not let my fear of feeling embarrassed to speak up get in the way of my goal to just pass the class.

10) Multitasking

There’s two types of multitasking here.

The first one is when we study and do something else at the same time. For example, the TV is on, or we’re playing music that is making us listen to it more than doing the actual studying. It’s common sense, but we do need to have our complete and full focus in order to properly comprehend what we are studying, and produce high quality work.

Multitasking for me isn’t my strength. While it can be effective at time, if we want to produce high quality work, we need the focus for it. For example, a surgeon needs to perform a surgery. Obviously, it needs to be a highly effective surgery (otherwise his patient would die). What do you think would happen if he’s doing the surgery while he’s watching TV, or doing something else at the same time? It’s the same with our studies, and in all areas of our life, we can’t expect the best quality result if we don’t have the best focus.

The second one is when we have so many commitments. It’s hard to balance so many commitments, because the more commitments you have, the more the quality of your work goes down… and that goes for all your commitments in your life. For example, let’s say a person wants to make a high quality YouTube video, but that person decided to make several other YouTube videos at the same time. What do you think would happen? If that person is focusing on all of those videos at the same time, then it’s going to be hard to focus. And if it’s hard to focus, it’s going to be hard to produce that one quality video.

Let’s just say they put those number of videos to produce at three. It’s much easier to balance, and it’s more likely that the videos will be of better quality. The less videos there is to produce at the same time, the better.

This is the same with not just for studying, but also for all the other areas of our life. The less commitments that we have, the better. The less commitments we have, the more focus will we have, which in turn will help us produce better quality results.

How you can apply them (not just for study, also in daily life as well)

So these are the ineffective habits that is beneficial to break for the best results in our studies. Honestly, the most effective way to break them is to just do the opposite.

You always avoid feedback and criticism, break that habit by looking at the feedback and criticism.

You always just do the bare minimum, then break that habit by doing the opposite.

You always rushed through the readings and the work? Break that habit by doing the opposite… don’t rush through the readings and the work.

Every habit listed, all you have to do to break them, is do the opposite.

If we want different results, we need to make changes

It’s pretty much common sense, but if we want different results… whether that’d be studying, working, or the other projects that we do, we need to make changes. Whether that’d be building better habits, or breaking the bad ones.

These are the list of study habits that I had to stop doing if I wanted my grades to be different. Ultimately, sometimes the changes that had to be made was mainly just breaking the ineffective habits, rather than just building new ones.

It’s not always going to be easy making those changes, but not making any changes at all and just having those same results is not going to be either.

Because at the end of the day, what would you rather have? Make challenging changes but get different and better results?

OR

Don’t make any changes, but still have those same results?

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Seeing the Bigger Picture of Failure

Turning Losses into Lessons
The Compound Effect – it’s going to change the way you look at your habits!

Systems Over Goals – Why It’s Better to Focus on Systems

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