The first step is to seek help from an expert, who has experience in mental health.
What you will do about being a laggard depends on the reasons for wanting to abandon this title.
Question: How can I kick out this bad habit of being a laggard? I don't want to push myself too hard or transform into somebody I am not but I greatly feel frustrated by my situation.
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The question you have put before us today is an interesting one for a number of reasons. The first and the most important is the fact that you have for whatever reason decided that the status quo is no longer tenable, and that change must come, sooner or later. The life of a laggard is no longer an option for you.
A question: For how long have you been a laggard, and what is it that has drawn your attention to the need to change? To put this question slightly differently, what factors have come into play to force this change in your life.
A related though in substance a different question touches on the duration you have been a laggard, and the origins of the description laggard. Is it for example a description you have of yourself or are others who look at you and opine that yours is a life of a laggard?
These, as you will see are not academic distinctions and will in many ways determine what you might do if you are to turn into a new, hopefully, better leaf.
To get the basics out of the way, a laggard is one who lags or lingers. It is one that is slow when compared to others of the same ilk. In this regard, a company can be described as a laggard if it is slow to adopt new technology.
In this narrow respect, I know a number of people who fit this description. They hold that technology is not for them and, therefore, the mobile phone for example is only for receiving and making calls. Complicated things such as SMS and WhatsApp are not for them.
They can all afford the latest smartphones but in the case of a number, they stick to gadgets they are familiar with and that go back more than a decade.
These are true laggards or technophobes, which are those who fear technology. In a similar vein, there are people for whom the computer is a gadget for youth and things like Google and worse concepts like Google maps are simply too much for their brains.
This however is not to say that the state of laggards exists only in the technology space. Those who work in the field of marketing live in fear of laggards.
Whether it is with respect to a new ice cream flavor or the entry to the market of a new model of car or the entry of a new hospital, laggards will always be the last to consider changing from the comforts of the well known and trusted products.
The greater the number of laggards in a community the greater the resistance to any form of change.
That, however, is not your question, and what you want to know is what you can do to change your current lifestyle which is no longer acceptable. The first step is to seek help from an expert, who has experience in mental health.
If, for example, the life of the laggard you now describe is of recent onset, then it is possible that you have a depressive illness, which in your case means that a period of rest must be followed by more rest as happens in the case of persons with depression.
If that be the case, the expert will soon restore you back to health and the label laggard will no longer apply to you.
It is, on the other hand, possible that the same expert will diagnose the condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), whose symptoms include procrastination, which might as in your case attract the label, laggard.
If that be the case, then the expert will offer you appropriate advice. The same expert might, in the alternative find that this label of a laggard, describes a personality trait about which he can do little.
Whatever the case, now that you have decided this life must change, the first port of call is to the experts.
On a different note, and relevant to your desire to change, the circumstances that you now find yourself in are very significant.
You might for example have fallen in love with a girl who has made it a condition of your continued relationship the fact that you depart from the ways of laggards.
On the other hand, this determination might come your way following the death of your parents and discovering for the first time that you are the new adult in the room.
As you can see what you will do about being a laggard depends on the reasons for wanting to abandon this title.
