Sometimes, the difference between success and failure is determined by daily small decisions.
Deflecting accountability
When things start going south in an operation, unsuccessful people will quickly look around the room to find someone or something else to point fingers at.
Completely blaming external forces like bad luck, toxic coworkers, or unjust systems allows them to save their ego but wholly deprives them of the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. If they don’t take responsibility for their actions, they can’t grow.
Waiting
Paralysis by analysis is how most golden opportunities are killed. If a person waits until everything is 100% certain, until they have all of the perfect data, until the timing is just right, or until they can do something with absolutely no risk, they will be waiting forever.
Doers know that clarity only arises when they take action. Those who are stuck are always readying themselves to take the first step while opportunity bells ring in their ears.
Ignoring etiquette
Even if someone is a technical genius, if they fail to play by basic social rules, they will not get far. Showing up late to Zoom meetings, dressing improperly around clients, forgetting to thank someone, or not respecting someone’s time is such bad social etiquette that it will cause high-value contacts to distance themselves from a person.
Hoarding knowledge
Holding on to secrets, shortcuts, or industry intel doesn’t actually make a job secure. Instead, it just marks a person as an insecure, unhelpful teammate that no one wants to scale.
Mentors and teachers create leverage by sharing their knowledge. Whiners and self-saboteurs restrict information to feel momentarily important.
Overpromising
Desperate to prove themselves to clients or bosses, many unsuccessful people often overpromise and underdeliver on unrealistic deadlines or impossible expectations. When they fail to meet these expectations, they burn huge amounts of professional goodwill they’ll never get back. It’s always better to do the opposite: underpromise and overdeliver, allowing the excellence of completed work to speak for itself.
Reactive blame
The professional world is very small, and industries are also highly connected. People who are doomed for failure allow their momentary feelings to dictate their departure. They send passive-aggressive emails, talk badly about their old employers, or abuse entry-level workers. They don’t understand that one bridge burned today can close off a freeway tomorrow.
Prioritizing comfort
Consistent growth often comes with the short-term pain of boring meetings, weird small talk, or difficult learning curves.
Unsuccessful people always make themselves as comfortable as possible in the short term, doomscrolling instead of doing hard work or taking the easy route on a project instead of tackling something that challenges them. They trade their future compounding power for a few moments of comfort today.
Resisting feedback
Some people treat constructive professional criticism like a personal attack. If someone like a mentor or manager is trying to give notes on how to improve, a self-saboteur will get defensive and start making excuses or ignoring everything they say. Eventually, people will stop trying to help them, which allows them to be 100% alone with their bad behavior.
Chasing distractions
Extreme lack of focus will destroy even the smartest people. One thing unsuccessful people have in common is terminal distraction. They flit from one business idea, project or career path to another the second that initial excitement turns to work. Constantly starting over at zero, they never allow their efforts to build into true mastery.
Chronic cynicism
Objective skepticism is very different from chronic cynicism. Saboteurs perceive the world through a bitter lens. They think every new corporate initiative is a scam, every co-worker has an axe to grind, and every opportunity is stacked against them. Their negative filters keep them from ever seeing a true open door.
Neglecting follow-through
Beginnings are easy. Dragging something over the finish line once excitement has waned is what differentiates pros from amateurs. Quitters leave behind a path of partially completed endeavors, ghosting on final email threads and forgetting to follow up after that first introductory meeting.
Overestimating infallibility
Smart problem-solvers never get offended when you prove them wrong because they care about getting the right answer more than they care about who provided it. Saboteurs, on the other hand, base their entire sense of self-worth on being right. They refuse to consider better ways of doing things out of pure stupidity.
Excessive consumption
Unsuccessful people spend countless hours reading about success, obsessing over competitors’ moves, and reading through business tweets or articles instead of actually creating/building something themselves. Consuming information fools a person into thinking they are being productive. The only thing that creates real value is production.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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