Success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes hard work, time and absolute dedication.
Many factors set successful people apart, including their habits, their traits and even a way of thinking that is very different from everyone else’s. We have already looked at the 25 habits of successful people.
Now we look at the opposite: people who don’t succeed or, to put it less kindly, people who fail. Most of them live in a bubble of hopelessness, trying to find a way out of their dark room. At times their situation is very sad. Sometimes they seem to walk backwards instead of forwards, and when they do move ahead, they do so hesitantly. These people have certain constant habits that, according to Bill Murphy Jr., founder of ProGhostwriters.com, they never stop doing.
1. Not facing problems
Here we are talking about ignoring problems or setbacks as they come up, not confronting them and keeping your head down. Some “unsuccessful” people can’t cope with the stress of modern life, so they ignore their problems and hope they’ll go away on their own. And as most of you will have found out for yourselves, that rarely works.
See also: 6 phrases successful people never say
2. Feeling envy
People who fail to succeed are often unhappy as a result of refusing to take responsibility for their own lack of effort and achievement. They make up for it by trying to tear down other people’s achievements. Instead of taking smart risks and achieving more in their own lives, they are jealous of those who are doing better than them in business, at work and in life. It is an exhausting way to live, and it rarely leads to anything good.
3. Holding resentment
Envy leads to resentment. Many unsuccessful people, however, have to live and work among others who achieve more than they do. Their resentment shows itself in various ways, but one of the most insidious is passive-aggressive behaviour.
4. Slow-playing
People who fail often pretend to be part of a winning team working together towards a goal. But instead of giving their best and working with the same intensity as the rest of the team, they shirk and do everything they can to work as little as possible. That’s slow-playing.
5. Hiding information
When people who fail have relevant information that could help achieve a shared goal, instead of sharing it with their colleagues, they keep it to themselves, regardless of their company’s common objective.
6. Being condescending
People with so little confidence in their own knowledge try to deflate others by belittling what they know. Truly successful, well-adjusted people are happy to share what they know and to learn from others, rather than hoarding their supposed expertise as if knowledge were a zero-sum game.
7. Shaming others
Because they are insecure, people who fail often try to shame others. It lets them feel as if they belong to a dominant group, pointing out other people’s negative attributes out loud, when in reality they are only showing off their own lack of confidence. As we saw in our article “12 apparent contradictions that are true“, the people who most criticise a negative trait in someone else are often those who find that trait in themselves.
8. Being addicted to technology
Spending all day on the internet, watching television or doing anything else that involves constantly consuming pop culture and meaningless trivia is certainly not a path to success. Of course, we are all a bit addicted to the internet these days, but many of the least successful people spend an excessive amount of time hooked on new technologies, to the point where it interferes with their lives.
9. Betraying other people’s trust
The last behaviour on this list is something to keep in mind the next time you feel betrayed, or when you suspect that someone is trying to sabotage your success. The truth is that unhappy, unsuccessful people are so affected by the happiness and success they see others enjoying that they can sometimes desperately try to knock down other people’s achievements. It is especially bad behaviour when they betray your trust to do it, because at that point they stop being merely “unsuccessful” people and become truly toxic people.
See also: Why attitude matters more than IQ
Featured image: Armin Kleiner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
