By Tristan Loo
During my tour of duty as a police officer, I’ve had the unique experience of having dealt with highly unsuccessful people and I’ve always focused on comparing and contrasting these unsuccessful people with those people who are highly successful. The result of my research has yielded nine of the key behavior traits that I believe to be the most influential in holding people back from their dreams in life. This list should be studied by those people who desire happiness and life success because by knowing and identifying these unsuccessful behaviors that prevent dreams from being realized, we can better eliminate and prevent these behaviors from entering our lives.
Unsuccessful Behavior #1: Greed and Instant Gratification
Nearly all of the highly unsuccessful people out there that I've dealt with on the streets exhibited short-term thinking, meaning that they base all of their decisions on what they want right now with careless disregard on how their decisions will impact their future. They almost always give in to instant gratification and can’t think about the future implications and ramification of the decisions that they make right now. Remember that we as human beings automatically default our decision-making processes to our emotional minds and then we try to justify those emotion-based decisions with one-sided logic. That’s our animal programming at work. Just as a mouse is lured by a piece of cheese, we as human being can be lured away from sensible judgment by material possessions, sex and power that is waved in front of our faces. The highly unsuccessful people give in to their emotional minds and give into instant gratification. The highly successful people out there, on the other hand, have the self-restraint to pull themselves back, switch their decision-making process back to their logical mind and weigh the cost versus rewards of the decisions that they are about to make before they actually make them.
Greed and selfishness are parasitic behaviors that drain the life force from other people around you. Greed also prevents personal growth from taking place. The behavior of greed can be described as wanting something from others without the intention of exchanging something of like value in return. Greed also acts like a cancer that spreads and grows bigger, infecting more and more of your personality until you become wholly consumed by this cancer. No amount of power or desires can ever satisfy the hunger of greed because it always wants more. This insatiable appetite that greed has is the reason why it destroys relationships, both personal and professional. The root cause behind greed is a grossly underdeveloped level of self-esteem, which always urns to possess and to control because it’s filled with insecurities.
Highly successful people realize that living within one’s means is more important than putting on a false image. They also realize that if they provide genuine value to other people, then abundance will flow to them in exponential magnitude over time. The highly successful people who are happy with their lives are outrageously philanthropic and devote a large chunk of their time and money to help others in need. By helping other people, you will find that positive things will come your way when you provide value for others instead of trying to deprive others of their value.
Unsuccessful Behavior #2: A Lack of Definite Purpose in Life
Another key trait that I’ve noticed from most of the unsuccessful people that I’ve dealt with as a police officer is that highly unsuccessful people lack a major definite purpose in life. Having a life purpose is important because it’s the foundation from which all your goals and your daily tasks sprout from. A major definite purpose gives you the focus you need to create a lasting legacy that people will remember for generations. Most of all, a purpose in life fuels your desire to achieve what your heart truly desires. People with highly focused life purpose statements are the ones who are able to defy impossible odds and inspire thousands, if not millions of people with their stories of heroism in the face of adversity.
A person without a definite purpose in life ends up becoming a wandering generality. They go here and there with their lives, but they never reach any meaningful destination.
Unsuccessful Behavior #3: Lacking Confidence in Yourself
People who lack confidence in their abilities simply get by life without ever engaging life at 100% of their potential. They neither take a stand, nor do they show any courage in the face of adversity. They conform to what everyone else is doing in order to be accepted by their peers. Those who do not possess the confidence to take a stand are like cows in a herd being led off to the slaughterhouse. Realize that whatever stand you take throughout your life, there will always be people who support your views and there will be people who oppose your views. You can’t please everyone in life, so please the one person who is the most important in your life—yourself.
Unsuccessful Behavior #1: Greed and Instant Gratification
Nearly all of the highly unsuccessful people out there that I've dealt with on the streets exhibited short-term thinking, meaning that they base all of their decisions on what they want right now with careless disregard on how their decisions will impact their future. They almost always give in to instant gratification and can’t think about the future implications and ramification of the decisions that they make right now. Remember that we as human beings automatically default our decision-making processes to our emotional minds and then we try to justify those emotion-based decisions with one-sided logic. That’s our animal programming at work. Just as a mouse is lured by a piece of cheese, we as human being can be lured away from sensible judgment by material possessions, sex and power that is waved in front of our faces. The highly unsuccessful people give in to their emotional minds and give into instant gratification. The highly successful people out there, on the other hand, have the self-restraint to pull themselves back, switch their decision-making process back to their logical mind and weigh the cost versus rewards of the decisions that they are about to make before they actually make them.
Greed and selfishness are parasitic behaviors that drain the life force from other people around you. Greed also prevents personal growth from taking place. The behavior of greed can be described as wanting something from others without the intention of exchanging something of like value in return. Greed also acts like a cancer that spreads and grows bigger, infecting more and more of your personality until you become wholly consumed by this cancer. No amount of power or desires can ever satisfy the hunger of greed because it always wants more. This insatiable appetite that greed has is the reason why it destroys relationships, both personal and professional. The root cause behind greed is a grossly underdeveloped level of self-esteem, which always urns to possess and to control because it’s filled with insecurities.
Highly successful people realize that living within one’s means is more important than putting on a false image. They also realize that if they provide genuine value to other people, then abundance will flow to them in exponential magnitude over time. The highly successful people who are happy with their lives are outrageously philanthropic and devote a large chunk of their time and money to help others in need. By helping other people, you will find that positive things will come your way when you provide value for others instead of trying to deprive others of their value.
Unsuccessful Behavior #2: A Lack of Definite Purpose in Life
Another key trait that I’ve noticed from most of the unsuccessful people that I’ve dealt with as a police officer is that highly unsuccessful people lack a major definite purpose in life. Having a life purpose is important because it’s the foundation from which all your goals and your daily tasks sprout from. A major definite purpose gives you the focus you need to create a lasting legacy that people will remember for generations. Most of all, a purpose in life fuels your desire to achieve what your heart truly desires. People with highly focused life purpose statements are the ones who are able to defy impossible odds and inspire thousands, if not millions of people with their stories of heroism in the face of adversity.
A person without a definite purpose in life ends up becoming a wandering generality. They go here and there with their lives, but they never reach any meaningful destination.
Unsuccessful Behavior #3: Lacking Confidence in Yourself
People who lack confidence in their abilities simply get by life without ever engaging life at 100% of their potential. They neither take a stand, nor do they show any courage in the face of adversity. They conform to what everyone else is doing in order to be accepted by their peers. Those who do not possess the confidence to take a stand are like cows in a herd being led off to the slaughterhouse. Realize that whatever stand you take throughout your life, there will always be people who support your views and there will be people who oppose your views. You can’t please everyone in life, so please the one person who is the most important in your life—yourself.
A person who lacks confidence is not willing to make mistakes and consequently cannot gain the valuable experience that those mistakes can teach them. The end result is that the highly unsuccessful people who lack confidence typically end up making the mistake later in their lives and because they never learned from it in the first place, that mistake can be catastrophic for their lives.
A lack of confidence goes hand in hand with poor self esteem. A lack of self esteem simply means that you do not value or respect your own self worth. This results in behaviors that are counterproductive towards personal growth and life success. Anger, procrastination, and self-depreciating comments are all signs of a lack of self-esteem.
Unsuccessful Behavior #4: Not Willing to Pay the Price for Your Dreams
Success in life not only requires that you know what you want, but perhaps even more so, it requires that you know the sacrifices you have to make in order to reach that success. Success in any aspect of our lives comes at a price and we must pay this price in order to achieve that success. Unwillingness to pay the full price of the success that you want will assuredly prevent you from obtaining that success. In the grand scope of things, you can’t cheat your way to the top. You can’t take shortcuts and expect to create any long-term success. If you want to be an Olympic athlete, you have to put in the time—you have to have the dedication and the perseverance and the drive to win. No amount of intention-manifestation will enable you to get what you want unless you are willing to give up the things that are necessary for you to obtain it.
It’s important not to confuse focused discipline with movement. A person can be the most busy person in the world and still not achieve anything meaningful for their lives. Getting what you want in life comes when you know exactly what you have to give up in order to get it and committing yourself to giving up specifically those things, whether it be time, effort, or money.
Most of the time, it’s not the pain of paying the price in order to get what we want that is the problem. It’s with the consistency of making those payments a habit. Most people will pay up for the first couple of days and then slowly slack off until they eventually give up on making the payments that they need to realize their dreams. If you make those payments an absolute habit, then you can avoid adopting this trait of highly unsuccessful people.
Unsuccessful Behavior #5: Giving Up Without a Fight
Lack of persistence is a big distinguishing behavior between those who consistently achieve success in areas of their life versus people who often fail to realize their goals. When pressure builds and problems seem to stack on top of each other, quitting is the easy way out. There is a big distinction we must make however between quitting and failing. Failing in life is a perfectly acceptable thing. We all fail at some point in our lives and chances are that we will fail yet again. But if we try our best and fail, then that is courageous and there are no regrets because we have the peace of mind of knowing that we did everything in our power to try to reach that goal. Failing is part of the journey towards success. Quitting on the other hand is much worst than failing. Quitting is not using your fullest potential to reach those goals. This is very disempowering because not only will you not reach your success, but always in the back of your mind, you will wonder if that success could have been possible had you given it one-hundred percent. As my former gymnastics mentor and 1984 Olympic gold medallist, Peter Vidmar, once said, “Getting to the Olympics was simple. I just trained when I felt like it and I trained when I didn’t.”
Unsuccessful Behavior #6: Not Willing to Take Calculated Risks
Getting ahead in life and reaching success involves taking calculated risks. That does not mean you have to be irresponsible however. Risk taking, as it applies to success, means that you have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone so that you can effectively expand your box and grow. When I was competing as a gymnast, I used to perform acrobatic stunts that had the potential of seriously injuring myself or even killing me. But I never considered those stunts to be irresponsible risks because my knowledge, training, and competency gave me the confidence to push myself further and try things that I knew I had the ability to do. I believe that great opportunities come into our lives daily, but it’s our indecision or fear that prevents us from taking hold of those opportunities. Be willing to step outside your comfort zone and seize those opportunities when they appear.
The amazing thing about fear in this day and age is that almost 90% of all our fears are imaginary and not physical. In caveman days, our ancestors had some real threats to worry about, such as war parties, predatory animals, and the harsh environment. Today, most of us don’t have to worry about physical injury, but fear has never been so great. Our fear makes us a prisoner in our own minds, preventing us to ever experience the joys of freedom. Fear causes anxiety which can lead to paralysis. Today more than ever before do we see people fail before ever giving their abilities a chance to perform.
Highly successful people are willing to take calculated risks. This is not to say that they are reckless, but rather that they are willing to step outside their comfort zones, knowing full well that there is a chance to fail, but also realizing that this is an opportunity to expand their comfort box.
Unsuccessful Behavior #7: Not Taking Action
Waiting for the perfect moment is a big killer of success in our lives. If we don’t have to do it, then chances are we won’t do it, but it’s this lack of action which erodes our chances of success early on. Realize that there will never be a perfect time to implement an action and the longer we wait to act, the less likely we are to do it. We all know how to fill up our time with busywork, but not all of us know how to prioritize those tasks that are important. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of our results will come from only 20% of the actions that we do. People who procrastinate instead focus on the other tasks that are of little importance, while delaying their action on those high-value tasks that will produce the most change in their lives. Remember the adage, “Don’t wait for tomorrow what you can do today.”
Unsuccessful Behavior #8: Not Taking Responsibility
Failures and mistakes are a natural part of the learning process and a crucial part in building any real success for yourself, but you must be willing to extract the lessons from each failure and apply it towards your future in order for it to be effective. Those people who ignore the lessons to be learned in their failures are doomed to fail again, and again, and again throughout their lives. Successful people, on the other hand, not only learn from their own mistakes, but they seek out other people and learn from their mistakes as well. They use history as a powerful leverage tool for their success so that they don’t have to recreate the wheel.
Highly unsuccessful people love to blame, complain and make excuses. The reason why they do this is because it defaults them to the role of the victim and they get sympathy points from others, but in doing so, they also give away all their power and their control over their own lives and instead they hand their future over to the rough hands of fate to do what it wants with it. Unfortunately this behavior is self-perpetuating because the more these people blame, complain and make excuses, the more bad things, people and events they attract into their own lives via the Law of Attraction. Not taking responsibility for your own life is a definite lose-lose behavior for you and those close to you.
Unsuccessful Behavior #9: Negative Thinking
The law of attraction states that we attract into our lives whatever we focus on, regardless if it’s what we want or not. So if you harbor negative feelings and negative thoughts about yourself or your environment, then regardless whether you or your environment are good or bad, the reality that you will attract into your life will be a negative one. Conversely, if you flood your mind with positive thoughts and good emotions, then you will inevitably attract positive things and positive people into your life as a result. Therefore, it’s important to make a conscious decision to eliminate negative self-talk from your daily life and replace it with rich, nourishing, positive affirmations that support you and your goals.
A lack of confidence goes hand in hand with poor self esteem. A lack of self esteem simply means that you do not value or respect your own self worth. This results in behaviors that are counterproductive towards personal growth and life success. Anger, procrastination, and self-depreciating comments are all signs of a lack of self-esteem.
Unsuccessful Behavior #4: Not Willing to Pay the Price for Your Dreams
Success in life not only requires that you know what you want, but perhaps even more so, it requires that you know the sacrifices you have to make in order to reach that success. Success in any aspect of our lives comes at a price and we must pay this price in order to achieve that success. Unwillingness to pay the full price of the success that you want will assuredly prevent you from obtaining that success. In the grand scope of things, you can’t cheat your way to the top. You can’t take shortcuts and expect to create any long-term success. If you want to be an Olympic athlete, you have to put in the time—you have to have the dedication and the perseverance and the drive to win. No amount of intention-manifestation will enable you to get what you want unless you are willing to give up the things that are necessary for you to obtain it.
It’s important not to confuse focused discipline with movement. A person can be the most busy person in the world and still not achieve anything meaningful for their lives. Getting what you want in life comes when you know exactly what you have to give up in order to get it and committing yourself to giving up specifically those things, whether it be time, effort, or money.
Most of the time, it’s not the pain of paying the price in order to get what we want that is the problem. It’s with the consistency of making those payments a habit. Most people will pay up for the first couple of days and then slowly slack off until they eventually give up on making the payments that they need to realize their dreams. If you make those payments an absolute habit, then you can avoid adopting this trait of highly unsuccessful people.
Unsuccessful Behavior #5: Giving Up Without a Fight
Lack of persistence is a big distinguishing behavior between those who consistently achieve success in areas of their life versus people who often fail to realize their goals. When pressure builds and problems seem to stack on top of each other, quitting is the easy way out. There is a big distinction we must make however between quitting and failing. Failing in life is a perfectly acceptable thing. We all fail at some point in our lives and chances are that we will fail yet again. But if we try our best and fail, then that is courageous and there are no regrets because we have the peace of mind of knowing that we did everything in our power to try to reach that goal. Failing is part of the journey towards success. Quitting on the other hand is much worst than failing. Quitting is not using your fullest potential to reach those goals. This is very disempowering because not only will you not reach your success, but always in the back of your mind, you will wonder if that success could have been possible had you given it one-hundred percent. As my former gymnastics mentor and 1984 Olympic gold medallist, Peter Vidmar, once said, “Getting to the Olympics was simple. I just trained when I felt like it and I trained when I didn’t.”
Unsuccessful Behavior #6: Not Willing to Take Calculated Risks
Getting ahead in life and reaching success involves taking calculated risks. That does not mean you have to be irresponsible however. Risk taking, as it applies to success, means that you have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone so that you can effectively expand your box and grow. When I was competing as a gymnast, I used to perform acrobatic stunts that had the potential of seriously injuring myself or even killing me. But I never considered those stunts to be irresponsible risks because my knowledge, training, and competency gave me the confidence to push myself further and try things that I knew I had the ability to do. I believe that great opportunities come into our lives daily, but it’s our indecision or fear that prevents us from taking hold of those opportunities. Be willing to step outside your comfort zone and seize those opportunities when they appear.
The amazing thing about fear in this day and age is that almost 90% of all our fears are imaginary and not physical. In caveman days, our ancestors had some real threats to worry about, such as war parties, predatory animals, and the harsh environment. Today, most of us don’t have to worry about physical injury, but fear has never been so great. Our fear makes us a prisoner in our own minds, preventing us to ever experience the joys of freedom. Fear causes anxiety which can lead to paralysis. Today more than ever before do we see people fail before ever giving their abilities a chance to perform.
Highly successful people are willing to take calculated risks. This is not to say that they are reckless, but rather that they are willing to step outside their comfort zones, knowing full well that there is a chance to fail, but also realizing that this is an opportunity to expand their comfort box.
Unsuccessful Behavior #7: Not Taking Action
Waiting for the perfect moment is a big killer of success in our lives. If we don’t have to do it, then chances are we won’t do it, but it’s this lack of action which erodes our chances of success early on. Realize that there will never be a perfect time to implement an action and the longer we wait to act, the less likely we are to do it. We all know how to fill up our time with busywork, but not all of us know how to prioritize those tasks that are important. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of our results will come from only 20% of the actions that we do. People who procrastinate instead focus on the other tasks that are of little importance, while delaying their action on those high-value tasks that will produce the most change in their lives. Remember the adage, “Don’t wait for tomorrow what you can do today.”
Unsuccessful Behavior #8: Not Taking Responsibility
Failures and mistakes are a natural part of the learning process and a crucial part in building any real success for yourself, but you must be willing to extract the lessons from each failure and apply it towards your future in order for it to be effective. Those people who ignore the lessons to be learned in their failures are doomed to fail again, and again, and again throughout their lives. Successful people, on the other hand, not only learn from their own mistakes, but they seek out other people and learn from their mistakes as well. They use history as a powerful leverage tool for their success so that they don’t have to recreate the wheel.
Highly unsuccessful people love to blame, complain and make excuses. The reason why they do this is because it defaults them to the role of the victim and they get sympathy points from others, but in doing so, they also give away all their power and their control over their own lives and instead they hand their future over to the rough hands of fate to do what it wants with it. Unfortunately this behavior is self-perpetuating because the more these people blame, complain and make excuses, the more bad things, people and events they attract into their own lives via the Law of Attraction. Not taking responsibility for your own life is a definite lose-lose behavior for you and those close to you.
Unsuccessful Behavior #9: Negative Thinking
The law of attraction states that we attract into our lives whatever we focus on, regardless if it’s what we want or not. So if you harbor negative feelings and negative thoughts about yourself or your environment, then regardless whether you or your environment are good or bad, the reality that you will attract into your life will be a negative one. Conversely, if you flood your mind with positive thoughts and good emotions, then you will inevitably attract positive things and positive people into your life as a result. Therefore, it’s important to make a conscious decision to eliminate negative self-talk from your daily life and replace it with rich, nourishing, positive affirmations that support you and your goals.
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