Ten Reasons People Fail in Life

Amidst the desolate landscape of missed opportunities and broken hearts there lies the unanswered question: Why Do People Fail in Life? Could I have detected early warning signs and avoided this misery? How far can I fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable? How can I reverse course and get my 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, coming back even stronger—even after having crashed to the point of bankruptcy.

To be clear, this piece is not about achieving success. It's about why people fail. By understanding the characteristics of one's demise, we can substantially reduce the chances of falling all the way to the bottom, tumbling from importance to irrelevance. The purpose of this piece is to avoid failure. 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're wrong.

4. Behaving outside social norms, while expecting to be treated like royalty.

5. Hubris, born of small successes, gives rise to denial of risk and peril.

6. Undisciplined pursuit of unrealistic goals .

7. Grasping for success with a quick, big solution.

8. Capitulation when the going gets tough.

9. Failure to work hard, very hard, in everything that you do.

10.Clinging to people who hold you back.

There are many variables to success, including chance or luck. But failure can always be traced to a combination of the above ten factors.

Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book, Everything Will BE All Right is a memoir, scheduled for nationwide launch on October 1, 2009. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for the generationally impoverished. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Kindle, Sony Reader, and retail book stores everywhere beginning fall 2009