Once again we turn to Napoleon Hill, who studied more than 100 people regarded as failures. He analyzed their personalities and found that they all had the same traits in common. Hill’s study was endorsed by professionals of all kinds and is held up today as an example in psychology departments at universities in the United States.
The main causes of failure listed below can lead you to fail both in business and in your personal life. In other words, they are flaws in a person’s character. The good news is that they can be corrected, all the more so once you know they are part of you.
1. Having no definite purpose in life
There’s no hope of success for someone who doesn’t know where they want to take their life. Without goals, we end up running without knowing where we’re running to. How can we reach a definite destination if we haven’t marked it on our travel plan? This is one of the main causes of failure in general.
Some people tiptoe through life so as not to make any noise, when noise is exactly what we need to say that we’re here.
2. Lack of ambition
As Michael Douglas put it in his role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, ambition, for lack of a better word, is good. Ambition will help you rise above mediocrity.
Success belongs to you, but you have to go and get it. Nobody hands you anything, and everything has a price (sacrifice). Are you willing to pay it?
3. Insufficient education and preparation
Preparation is easy to fix. If you don’t feel prepared, or you come across something you don’t know about, you can always study it and analyze it in depth until you understand it.
As for education, you’ll never find it in a university degree. There are more failures who went to university than successful people who attended it.
Someone with a university degree has… well… a university degree. A prepared person has knowledge, and an educated person is usually someone who is self-made. Education opens many doors that arrogance and conceit close.
If you think you already know everything, you haven’t learned anything yet.
4. Habitual procrastination
Failure’s greatest ally is putting everything off until later. I like this girl, but by the time I make up my mind to tell her, she’ll probably be married. Procrastination shows a lack of drive and a lack of confidence. In short, fear of failure. If you don’t try, you’ll never get a result. Many people drift through life as failures, and the irony is that they haven’t failed at anything yet, because they never even tried.
If you sit around waiting for something to happen that will change your life, the only thing that will happen is that life passes you by.
5. Lack of persistence
Many people are very quick to throw themselves into something, but too lazy or not persistent enough to finish it. They tend to give up at the first “no” or the first fall life deals them. A lack of persistence shows that you’re not much of a fighter, and fights are won by fighting, falling and getting back up again with energy. Remember: never, ever give up! The biggest failures are the ones who quit.
Falling is allowed, but getting up is mandatory.
If you fall once, get up with energy. If you fall again, get up again, body and soul. If you fall a third time, stay on the ground and work out why you keep falling.
6. Choosing the wrong vocation
See also: Nine simple, extraordinary things to say to people at work every day
Some people don’t feel successful even when they are successful in their careers. Every morning they head to work as if it were the worst obligation in their lives. This tends to happen when you spend your life doing something you don’t enjoy. Sooner or later these people realize it and let their lives go off the rails. Some need several glasses of whisky just to face the day ahead, and others feel so “wretched” that they take their troubles out on their families. You end up hurting the very people who care about you, and sooner or later failure takes hold of you.
If you notice you’ve taken the wrong path, stop. When you find the right one, go ahead.
7. Holding power that wasn’t earned through effort
If you’ve come into a fortune without doing anything to earn it, don’t worry: it’s only a matter of time before you lose it. If you were handpicked for a position of responsibility, no matter how hard you try to show others you deserve it, the truth is you can’t fool yourself. Deep down, a little voice keeps reminding you that so far you haven’t done anything and don’t deserve what you have. Sooner or later, that little voice will bring out latent flaws in your character that will lead you to failure.
In this life, you’re worth what you believe you’re worth. If you think you’re worth a lot, that’s what you’re worth. If you think you’re worth nothing, that’s your value.
8. Dishonesty and selfishness
Can a dishonest person succeed in life? Actually, yes, but they won’t be able to keep that success. A person who isn’t honest is, to begin with… not much of a person. Their value is -1, and sooner or later they end up making enemies. Obviously, people don’t trust them, and without trust there’s no love, no business, nothing. As for selfishness… a selfish person has a traffic light on their forehead shining a bright red light at everyone else, with a very clear message: “Don’t come near me, because I won’t do anything for you.”
If you play fair in life, you’ll have a clean success. If you play dirty, you’ll get a dirty failure. There’s no victory without honor.
I think these eight points sum up very well the reasons that lead us to failure in any area of life, business included. Remember that they’re all flaws in our character, and that we’re born with some of them. That doesn’t mean we can’t change them. Do you recognize yourself in any of these flaws?
Further reading
- An entrepreneur’s mindset: Donald Trump
- Steve Jobs’s early days
- The man who had to start a business to save his children’s lives
- The entrepreneur’s 15 commandments for business success
- The only secrets to getting rich (there are no others)
Featured image: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper staff photographer., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
