Ten Behaviors Guaranteed To Ruin Your Life
Amidst the desolate landscape of missed opportunities and broken hearts there lies the unanswered question: Why Do 
People Fail in Life?
Could you have detected early warning signs and avoided the misery of failure? How far can will you fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable? How can you reverse course and get your life back on track?
Every person, no matter their circumstances, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that says the rich are guaranteed success while the poor are not. Anyone can fail and most all of us eventually do.
But, many people recover from setbacks, coming back stronger than ever,even if they have filed for bankruptcy. To be clear, this post is not “how to succeed,” but about “how to avoid failure.” It’s about why people fail in life.
By understanding the characteristics of one’s demise, we can substantially reduce the chances of falling all the way to the bottom. The seeds of decline can be detected early.
Here are the ten reasons people fail in life:
1. Unable or unwilling to follow through with commitments.
2. Allowing setbacks to destroy aspirations, making one impervious to hope.
3. Failure to make things right after discovering you have committed a wrong.
4. Your behavior is outside social norms, causing unwanted and negative attention which casts you in a bad light.
5. Hubris, born of small successes, gives rise to denial of risk and peril. People with this character flaw are doomed to failure. They are quick to declare success before they have confirmed the results. When failure comes, it causes others to lose trust and confidence.
6. Undisciplined pursuit of unrealistic goals. This is another serious character flaw. I call them dreamers. They set goals based upon impossible dreams rather than realistic goals. Employers will fire people like this as soon as they are discovered.
7. Grasping for success with a quick, big solution, also known as a mad dash toward a shortcut. There is no easy way to do hard work, and usually there is no shortcut. This character flaw will get you fired in an instant.
8. Capitulation when the going gets tough. The last thing your employer wants to hear is, “I give up.” There comes a point in time when everyone will face a daunting task at work or in their business. Giving up is not an option.
9. Failure to work hard, very hard, in everything that you do. My grandother used to say that anything worth doing deserves hard work. If a person refuses to work hard, then their career is doomed to failure.
10. Clinging to people who hold you back. Hanging around losers will cause people to judge you as a loser too.
There are many secrets to success, including chance or luck. But failure can always be traced to one or more of the above factors.
This is a followup to my comments earlier on your Programming the Rules post.
Okay, this top ten reasons for failure is more towards what I am searching for to help me and others like me. At least you are starting to enumerate some specifics, but even some of them appear to me to be frustratingly vague.
For example, number 4: Behaving outside social norms, while expecting to be treated like royalty.
To someone like me, who never learned exactly what those “social norms” are, this is somewhat meaningless unless you explain what the “social norms” are.
Thank you for writing this blog. I am finding it useful and hope that my comments you will also find useful.
Tim,
I sincerely appreciate your comments. Social norms are ofen “hidden rules” of class behavior that are not written in a book or taught in school. It took four years of my life to adjust to the most basic behavioral patterns in order to function in the middle class. It required many more years before those rules would become as natural to me as breathing. I still have family members in generational poverty and they are constantly doing things that don’t make sense to me. I try very hard to help them merge into the middle class, but it’s often a losing battle. You might be interested in my post at The Hidden Rules of Social Behavior where I discuss some of these more specific behaviors and rules. Thank you for your interests in my blog.