Habits Of Unsuccessful People: Everyone wants to be successful, but sadly; looking around the world today you will notice that more people in the world are unsuccessful. This is because there is a thin line between being very successful and unsuccessful, and this thin line lies in the patterns and habits of a person. If you notice, successful people have a particular set of habits which unsuccessful people do not possess and likewise unsuccessful people usually exhibit some habits which you will never see in the life of a very successful person.
In this Article, I shall discuss some of these habits of unsuccessful people and the ways to curb these habits. Before I proceed, it is important to clarify who can be regarded as an unsuccessful person.
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Who Is An Unsuccessful Person?
An unsuccessful person can be categorized as a person who has a record of failing consistently. It is instructive to note that failing does not makes you an unsuccessful person, but consistently failing, having misfortunes; with no hope of success makes you an unsuccessful person.
Being unsuccessful usually stems from habit. From study, there have been a particular set of habits and pattern of behavior evident amongst unsuccessful people. These habits are:
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Top 10 Habits of Unsuccessful People
1. Easily Distracted: I always say that “Distraction could lead to destruction”, and this statement is always evident in the life of unsuccessful people. When you take a good look at the patterns of people who are quite unsuccessful, you will notice that they are people who are easily distracted and cannot fully put their minds only on the task at hand.
Unsuccessful people usually do not have the mind of their own and are easily swayed by things that come their way and these things usually push their progress off track. For instance, a person has a work today, but instead of focusing on the work he or she will be focusing on other unnecessary pleasurable things around them, and this could make the person lose the work and hinder their chances of getting more work.
Notably, unsuccessful people don’t usually finish up most things which they start often because of distractions which come their way and will no longer keep them motivated on the task at hand. They often focus on other priorities.
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2. Procrastinating: I always reckon that ‘Procrastination can never take you to the destination of your imagination”. This is so because Procrastination is a very bad habit which will take away your time and will equally take you away from achieving your goals and reaching the destination which you imagined yourself to be.
Procrastinating simply means delay an action which you are meant to make and postponing it till a later date. If you study the lives of unsuccessful people, you will notice that they are usually fond of Procrastinating and it is one killer of their progress.
3. Quitting: It is said that “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, and it is the courage to continue that counts”. However, most successful people do not have this courage to continue as they often quit. After experiencing one or two bad responses, they are usually off the hook and no more ready to stay focused, committed and dedicated to what they have been destined to achieve.
It is said that “failure and rejection are minor speed bumps on the road to success” and “90% of the success is not giving up”. Unfortunately, after one or two unsuccessful trials, unsuccessful people usually tend to quit and give up or sometimes even without trying, they opt out believing that their goals are too difficult to accomplish.
Coco Chanel further added that “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable”, but most people don’t realize this; hence after they encounter three or more failures, they give up on achieving success.
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4. Laziness: Achieving success requires hard work. Not matter how much you may want to twist it, there is no easy way to achieving success, there way requires some form of commitment and hard work, but the inability of people to give in hard work is one of the reasons why they are not successful.
Unsuccessful people are usually exhibit the habit of laziness, which is the unwillingness to work diligently. It is no gainsaying that “If you are not Diligent, you will become indigent” meaning that if you are not diligent to work, you will need up being poor.
Laziness is a major impediment to achieving success. Samantha Saifer-Berngard rightly said that “Success is not easy and it is certainly not for the lazy”. It is nearly impossible to achieve success with the habit of laziness.
5. Giving excuses: One common trait of unsuccessful people is that they always fail take responsibility of their failure; rather they tend to give excuses and blame other people or some other external factors.
Failure is inevitable on the road of success, but the difference between a successful and unsuccessful person is the way in which they handle failure. While an unsuccessful person fail to own up their mistakes, give excuses for their failure, and blame other people for their failure, a Successful person own up to their mistake and they have the consciousness that they will definitely encounter failure on their road to success, hence when that failure happens they embrace it, learn from it and do better next time.
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6. Jealousy: Jealousy is a common habit of unsuccessful people as they tend to remain unsuccessful and unhappy at the same time. Most at times, you will see them being jealous of someone who is doing well and even trying to help them.
Unsuccessful people usually spend more time envying the feats and accomplishment of others, instead of trying to be happy for them, complimenting them, learning from them, and taking responsibility for their own lack of achievement.
7. Surround themselves with negativity: One observable feature of an unsuccessful person is that they are always associated with negativity either in their thinking, action or association. In thinking, unsuccessful people tend to limit themselves.
In action, unsuccessful people usually have a negative body language which depicts lack of confidence and they fear too much (they fear failure, fear embarrassments, fear changes) as well act hypocritically; expecting people to live up their own high standards.
In association, unsuccessful people surround themselves with their like minds and instead of talking about ideas; they talk about other people, share negativity about these people and wish to drag other people down.
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8. They don’t have a mind of their own: Unsuccessful people are not only negative minded, but they also do not have a mind of their own. Having a mind of your own means being capable of having an independent opinion without being influenced by other people.
Sadly, unsuccessful people are usually influenced by the opinion of other people, they basically seek validation from others, they act to please other people, they fear standing out amongst the crowd, and they can’t handle criticism. Unsuccessful people not having a mind of their own are one of the reasons why they don’t take risks.
9. Doesn’t take risks: Unsuccessful people are traditional thinkers and they are too scared to take risk, rather they opt to stay in their comfort zone.
Unsuccessful people usually do not believe some things are possible and as such they undermine what they are capable of achieving.
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10. Inconsistency: Dwayne Johnson rightly said that “Success isn’t always about greatness, it is about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success”. Byron Pulsifer further added that “Consistency is one of the biggest factors to accomplishment and success.” Thus, to be successful, we can all agree that you have to be consistent in your trade or whatever you are doing and this trait of Consistency is one thing which distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful people.
One common trait of unsuccessful people is that they are grossly inconsistent; start a thing today, stop tomorrow or do one thing for a couple of months and another thing for the next couple of months.
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The Way Out
We can all agree with me that these aforementioned habits are evident in the lives of unsuccessful people and you can equally agree that these are bad habits; hence there should be a way.
The following are the way out to curb these bad habits:
a. Disciplining yourself is a key to curbing these bad habits. It only takes discipline to wade off distractions.
b. Taking a task at a time. Having too much tasks at a time is one primary cause of procrastination. Thus, to curb the habit of procrastinating, you need to discipline yourself to break down your projects at hand and handle one at a time, immediately after completing one you move to another. Gary Keller quite agreed with my suggestion when he said “It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance the world”.
c. Setting goals, planning your life, setting time limits to executing your plans and reminding yourself of the need to work hard to achieve your goals is a way to curb the negative habit of laziness.
d. Taking action, putting in hard work, acting wisely, and always being persistent towards achieving your goals will definitely help you to kill off the trait of laziness and inconsistency.
e. Always humble yourself and be willing to learn and listen to people, rather just speak
f. Always be happy for the success of others, and believe your own is next in line. This way you will no longer feel jealous that someone else is progressing and of course you have no chance of progressing.
g. Surround yourself with positivity this is the only way to grow and achieve great success.
h. Finally, you should understand that you came into this world alone, and only you can think and act best for yourself. Thus, you must have a mind of your own.
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In conclusion, it is worthy to note that nobody chooses to be unsuccessful, but sadly they just adopt the habits of an unsuccessful person, and this makes them unsuccessful too. Instructively, strictly employing some of the aforementioned way out will definitely help you to kill off these habits and be on your track to success.
Edeh Samuel Chukwuemeka, ACMC, is a lawyer and a certified mediator/conciliator in Nigeria. He is also a developer with knowledge in various programming languages. Samuel is determined to leverage his skills in technology, SEO, and legal practice to revolutionize the legal profession worldwide by creating web and mobile applications that simplify legal research. Sam is also passionate about educating and providing valuable information to people.