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While failure is not always a bad thing, especially if it teaches you something that propels you towards success, constant failure is. Unfortunately, there are people who are addicted to it and are on a path littered with series of failures and little or no success. Nailantei Norari lists a few red flags to look out for in a self-saboteur. 

1. Hooked to external validation

Instead of trusting your logic and intuition, you consult with the people around you first even when they do not know much about the subject matter at hand.

You value the opinions of others more than you value your own. This emotional addiction to the approval of others stems from your lack of self-confidence, and your desire to please everyone.

Successful people are very particular about whose advice they ask for. They don’t concern themselves with the opinions of anyone and everyone, especially when it comes to issues that those people have little or no experience with.

2. Entertain more than educate 

Instead of spending your spare time investing in yourself and your ability to provide more value to the marketplace, you distract yourself with entertainment that adds no real value to your life or your productivity.

You often watch television or pornography; you don’t open a book, go for networking parties or even listen to podcasts that are industry specific.

You are okay with mediocrity and, therefore, have zero to no chances of moving up the career ladder.

3. External control locus 

You do not take responsibility for personal failures and instead blame everyone else when things go wrong.

This means that you will never learn or improve yourself since you believe everything is outside of your control.

4. Afraid of mistakes

You’re afraid of failure, so you do whatever you can do to avoid making mistakes.

You forget that in the real world, failure is not good or bad, it is simply feedback.

But instead of learning from the valuable feedback that failure provides, you try to avoid it entirely.

5. Stick to dead relations

You have a tendency to date people who bring you more problems than pleasure.

You often tolerate behaviour that you know are unacceptable, and because you tolerate them they continue.

You must understand that your choice of spouse has a major impact on your life and success.

If the person you are with now is inhibiting your happiness and success, cut them loose and raise your standards.

6. Addicted to drama

Your life is a lot like an episode from a reality TV show. You are rarely on good terms with all of the people around you.

The people you spend time with are known for arguing with each other, flirting with each other’s spouses, lying, and generally just causing problems between each other regularly.

Instead of disassociating yourself from such people, you jump right in and add fuel to the fire. There is little productivity in chaos, get out of the drama cycle.

7. Spend time with losers

The term loser here is used to describe people with little to no ambition. These are the people you spend time with and are, therefore, equally unmotivated.

You all have no concrete plans for the future and are therefore doomed to end up wherever life takes you. Chances are, you are headed to ‘failureville’.

8. Careless with money

You are living paycheck to paycheck and invest nothing for the future. You often take vacations you can’t afford, and buy expensive things impulsively.

You spend money trying to look successful, but your balance sheet tells a different story.

You hardly have any savings. You don’t have any assets that make money for you, and your spending habits are your biggest liability.

Finances are invariably tied to success, so make better financial decisions.

9. No set goals

You often imagine a more desirable version of your life, but instead of working towards making that vision a reality, you settle for your present circumstances.

You wish for your life to get better, but you make no commitment to improve yourself or your circumstances. Successful people have clear goals and a clear plan of how they will achieve that. Emulate them.

10. Believe success is luck

You believe that people who are successful got lucky; that they had some sort of advantage that you don’t have.

You think success is something that people stumble upon. But the reality is, most successful people work relentlessly to prepare themselves for specific opportunities, and when those opportunities present themselves, they seize them.

They don’t sit around waiting for the life they want to fall onto their laps.