Top Ten Reasons People Fail In Life And Business

Take a look around you, in your office, environment and society and you will notice that a lot of people are struggling with living. They are trying hard to make ends meet both in their life and business. No matter how hard they try and throw up the hand-held-fan it always lands on its flat side. What else could be done? They seem not to know the cracking code for success. Especially when they compare themselves with the few people that is really moving ahead in life.
And the question to ask is why is a handful of people progressing and the rest of the populace are barely surviving? Simply put, they know what the majority don’t know or they do what the rest of the people know but won’t do.

In this post I attempted to analyze top ten reasons people struggle through life so that you can beware of them in your journey to a successful living and have a transformed life:

1. Lack of Goal, Weak Or No Clear Goal

“Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and they are willing to go through hell to get it”---- D. Marquis

If you ask most of the people that are struggling through life what they plan to achieve in a month, a year and few years from now, hardly would you get a reasonable and well satisfied answer. They don’t have goals they would want to achieve in their life time; they simply lack any sense of direction. In rare cases those that went as much as setting goals for themselves really don’t have a concrete goal in place. The goal is so weak that they lack the zeal to take off or pursue such goal.
Consequently, if you want to succeed in life you must not be among the majority that live their lives as it comes; because such people go through life wishful-thinking, hoping to make a breakthrough one day without any plan, with little or no effort on their part. Without consciously or unconsciously setting of goals it would be impossible to have any worthwhile achievement. Some people have little or no drive for achievement in little; they are comfortable with the status quo and or their comfort zone. They are afraid to set goals that would bring them success in life and they don’t dream big for fear of ridicule if they should fail to achieve whatever they have set out to achieve.

2. Fear Of Assuming Responsibility:
Those who move ahead in life are those that make up their mind to be solely responsible for their actions and whatever happens to them. Your present position and situation is the result of your total action, inaction and activities that you have engaged in up to the moment. And the only way to move ahead is to first realize where you are and accept responsibility for it whether you like your present situation or not. Then you must also accept responsibility for where you want to be and know that the transition from where you are to where you want to be is solely up to you.
Goal setting is all about making up your mind to leave where you are now to the place of your dream and in doing this you must experience change which involves taking up responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility; greater achievements in life and business come with greater responsibilities. The biblical ten-talent servant received more when he demonstrated and showed zeal for more responsibility.

3. Short-Cut Mindset
Success in everything takes time and lots of hard work and patience, among other things. Most people however, believe they could cut corners and have success overnight. They are those that are always after Get Rich Quick, GRQ, programs or schemes everywhere on the net. They want to walk before they craw and they get crashed before they could rise. They don’t want to pay the price through hard work, commitment, patience and focus that true success requires.
Even though such people may achieve what I called pseudo-success they eventually end up being miserable and worse off.

4. Poor Relationship With People
Success in life and business is built on relationship with others. How well you are able to relate and interact with people in your life, environment and those you come in contact with determines how far you will go up the ladder of success.
Most of those that are experience one failure or the other in their life are have poor people skills and cannot relate well with people in their immediate environment. Can you communicate effectively with people at the other end of the spectrum? If you are into sales and you hate talking to or facing people how do you intend to sell your products to them?

5. No or Weak commitment

People fail in life as result of no or weak commitment to their goals, if they set any one at all. They do things half-heartedly and never completed any project before jumping to another. They jump from one business to another; move from one relationship to another. They never invest adequate time and money in any worthwhile project they might engage in. And before you blink they are on new project! They are simply not committed to excellence in whatever they do and the ultimate result of this is failure and frustration.

6. Lack Of Focus
Failure and struggling are inevitable whenever there is lack of sense of direction in life and business. Every worthwhile athlete knows that he must focus totally on the prize and task before him and should he allow any distraction or remove his eyes and mind from the prize he would never emerged the winner. So also is winning in life and business, the moment there is any distraction or lack of focus then it would be impossible to achieve the set goals.
Focus means you know and define clearly what you want, where you want to be and you set out in clear terms how you will achieve all these and did not allow anything to derail you and you remain committed to achieving your goals to the end.

7. Lack Of Adequate Or Poor Information
Information is power and it what makes the difference between failure and success. The information in your possession could change your life for the better and so also is the lack of it. Many fail in life and business because they never took time to gather enough information about what they want to do or who they want to associate with. They venture into business with ill-equipped information about the business and before they know it, they are experience one failure or the other. Once they see other people doing well in any business they never bother to find out the details they just plunge into it hoping to learn the intricacies as they move on forgetting that such might be all they needed to succeed in that line of business.

8. The Killing Power Of Inertia: Inaction
In truth knowledge is power but the actual power is the application of the knowledge possessed. There is no difference between a man who knows and does nothing and a man that doesn’t know. You can have all the information in this world that is needed to move forward your business and life but until you begin to apply such information you won’t experience any change at all. Many remain where they are not because they don’t know what to do to get out of their situation but because they refuse to take the step to move forward. They simply refused to take action. Failure to take the first step has always being the reason many people remain at the bottom of the success ladder and still struggling with living. What such people fail to realize is that once they take the courage and pain to take the first step it will be easier to move ahead unhindered. After all the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step taken.
It is amazing and painful seeing people telling you about their fantastic and laudable ideas and plans still struggling with living and when you probe further you discover the reason they are still struggling is because they have not acted upon their ideas and plans. They have allowed the destructive power of inertia to get at them and until they break loose and take ACTION they will remain the same.
How many of your ideas and plans did you acted upon this year? And as the year is round up, can you look back and give yourself thumb up for acting upon your ideas and plans for year 2006? Do you know that you are where you are right now as a result of your action and inaction? It is never too late. It is better now than never. Get up today and start doing something about your ideas and plans; otherwise you will remain where you are.

9. Failure To Do What They Love To Do
When you don’t follow your passion, you will continue to struggle and continuously move from one job to another; from one career to another and from one relationship to another. Many today are working on a job they don’t like, they are working a boss they hate with a passion and remain stuck in a relationship that is not giving them any fulfillment. How sad! No wonder they continue to struggle with living. How could they succeed in what they are doing without passion? Take for instance somebody who hate facing and talking to people taking up the job of a salesman and everyday he dresses to go out for business is like a hell for him. The result is already determined, he won’t succeed.
When you don’t do what you love then you are simply pursing another man’s dream and there is no way you could succeed at that.

10. Inability To Engage in a Life Time Training

Many people that fail in life do so because of their belief that they have learnt all they need to know in order to succeed in life. They believe they are reservoir of knowledge and skills in their chosen field and that there is nothing they could learn from other people, especially from people outside their chosen field. They hardly study or go for training and seminars and as such they continue to apply the same techniques, principles and ideas to their businesses and relationships whilst the rest of the world is adopting new techniques, ideas and principles to advance at a supersonic speed.

The truth is that to stay at the top in life and business you must subscribe to a life of continuous learning. Any person or business that stops learning will begin to die.