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But the behavioral record is messier than that. Some of the habits that reliably separate people who build interesting careers from people who plateau look, in the moment, like bad decisions. They violate the norms of prudence. They make colleagues wince. And they work — not because recklessness is a virtue, but because a certain kind of caution is far more expensive than it appears.

Here are two of them.

Habit 1: Quitting Things That Are Still Working

The conventional read on quitting is that its what happens when something fails. Quit a job that’s gone sour, a project that’s stalled, a plan that’s obviously dead. Walking away from something that is going fine — a steady role, a decent income, a path with no visible problem — strikes most people as squandering something of value.

Psychologists would point out that the opposite error is far more common and much harder to see. A 2018 study published in Academy of Management Annals describes this pattern — known as escalation of commitment — as the well-documented tendency to keep investing in a course of action precisely because so much has already gone into it. The years already served start functioning as an argument for serving more. What’s sunk feels like it should count, even though it can’t be recovered either way.

There’s a second reason “fine” can be dangerous for growth. Decision researchers describe a basic tension they call the exploration-exploitation tradeoff — between sampling new options and squeezing returns from a known one. A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found this exact tension shaping real decisions among organizational leaders, not just abstract models.

Exploiting a good option feels rational at every individual moment, which is exactly why people over-exploit. Every year spent doing something adequate is a year of information not gathered about what else might have fit better, and the cost never shows up on a balance sheet. It shows up as a narrowing sense of possibility.

What looks reckless here is really just a willingness to treat “good enough” as a decision rather than a default. People who leave functional situations tend to do it while they still have energy, options and goodwill, which is the only time leaving is cheap.

Habit 2: Committing Before You Feel Ready

The second habit is saying yes to something one cannot yet do — the talk you haven’t written, the role a level above your experience, the client you’re not even sure you can serve.

The standard objection is obvious: this is how people embarrass themselves. And sometimes it is. But the alternative strategy — wait until the skill is in place, then commit — rests on a model of learning that research doesn’t support. Competence rarely arrives before the demand for it. It’s built by the demand.

Self-efficacy research, one of the most durable areas in psychology, points consistently in this direction. A 2017 meta-analysis of academic self-efficacy, published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, found that belief in one’s own capability is built primarily through mastery experiences — actually doing hard things and surviving them. Confidence isn’t the prerequisite for the attempt. It’s the by-product of it. Which means anyone waiting to feel ready is waiting on a supply that only the attempt itself produces.

There’s a motivational layer here too. A 2023 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior found that people are most engaged in a state psychologists call flow when a task sits just past their current ability — enough challenge to feel like growth, not so much that it reads as threat. Fully comfortable work isn’t safe. It’s flat, and flatness has its own long-term costs.

Public commitment adds one more mechanism, an unglamorous one: a deadline someone else is holding. Most people work differently when a date and an audience exist than when the project lives quietly in a notebook.

The distinction that matters is between a bet that’’ survivable and one that isn’t. Taking on a stretch project is not the same as taking on a risk that would end a career if it broke. Reckless-looking people who do well are usually running small, recoverable experiments in rapid succession, not one enormous gamble.

What These 2 Habits Share

Both are refusals to let short-term comfort make a long-term decision. Staying in the working job and waiting until you’re ready are both locally sensible and globally expensive, and both feel like wisdom while they’re happening.

That’s the part worth noticing. The absence of these habits almost never looks like fear. It looks like patience, loyalty, diligence, even professionalism. Someone can spend a decade being unimpeachably responsible and end up somewhere they never chose.

None of this is an argument for impulsivity. It’s an argument that risk is symmetrical, and most people only audit one side of it. The cost of a bad move is vivid and immediate. The cost of never making one accrues quietly, in a currency nobody thinks to count until much later.

Wonder why some people leap before they feel ready while others have a habit to wait for conditions that never come? Find out how you approach challenges and growth with this science-backed test: Growth Mindset Scale