Personality Characteristics Of Success And Failure

It is a well known fact of life that some people become successful and some people do not. But what makes successful people a success? What makes people unsuccessful?

The answer to these questions can largely be found in the type of person that somebody is, or more specifically, their personality traits or personality characteristics.

The type of personality that you have has a massive influence over the direction that your life goes and the way that it turns out, because essentially, your personality dictates the type of thoughts you will have and the type of actions that you will take in your everyday daily activities.

So if we break this down to the simplest level, it can be stated that your personality will either make it more likely for you to become a success or less likely for you to become a success. In this sense, success can be viewed as a byproduct of your personality. It is an end result of an accumulation of your most dominant thoughts and actions.

Are All Personalities Different?

Whilst it may be true that no two people are exactly alike, there are some similarities that all people share and understanding these similarities can help you to better understand your own behavior and the behavior of others.

In this article, we shall be focusing on these similarities, which we call the personality characteristics of success and failure, to see how they can make it easier or harder for you to get what you want out of life.

The biggest “secret” when it comes to what made successful people a success, is not due to them being more talented, smarter or luckier than the average person, but rather the type of habits that they developed.

The large majority of people for example, develop habits of failure as a direct result of their personality characteristics. Rather than working hard to achieve their own personal goals, they do what is required to earn a living and survive, and then spend the rest of their time enjoying and entertaining themselves. The end result is that they remain in more or less the same situation throughout the course of their life.

Successful people on the other hand, have learned the personality characteristics of success and failure, which you too shall also learn, and then made sure that they spent the majority of their time and effort doing the things that would bring success into their life and avoiding the things which won’t.

Although this sounds simple in principle, and it is, it will mean having to make sacrifices, and at times, feeling lonely as you work hard to build a successful future for yourself. This however, is something that the large majority of the population are unwilling to do or experience.

So what are these personality characteristics that we have been talking about? Lets take a look at them now.

1) We Are All Lazy

Given a choice, would you rather work hard all day or have a nice relaxing day spending time with friends and family? I think the answer is obvious! Given a choice, most people would prefer to do something easy and fun rather than something which is hard and necessary.

This is an extremely important personality characteristic to recognize, because given a choice, people will generally choose the easiest and quickest way to do something so that their leisure time can be maximized. Unfortunately, most things which are quick, fun and easy very rarely bring long term success into your life. Yet it is these very same things which we are hard wired to do.

A good example of how prevalent this personality characteristic is can probably be found at your workplace. The large majority of people can’t wait to finish work, go home, have something to eat and then spend the rest of the day enjoying themselves in front of the TV or computer. They do only what they have to, so that they can maximize the amount of leisure time they have.

Successful people on the other hand, have learnt to fight back against the natural human tendency to do what is fun and easy. They have learnt that whilst having fun today may be enjoyable, in the long run, it can result in them having less fun and enjoyment. Lets use a simple example of two students to demonstrate this.

Student A wants to have fun and party, and so he doesn’t bother studying much at school. At the end of the school year he’s had a blast, but his grades absolutely suck.

Student B wants to have fun and party too, but he also wants to get good grades so that he can get into medical school after graduation. So he spends most, but not all, of his time working and making sure that he learns well. At the end of a long and hard school year, he feels a sense of satisfaction when he looks at his exam results and sees that he got top grades.

Everyone knows a student A and a student B, but you probably know many more student A’s than you do student B’s. This is because we are all lazy, and the vast majority of us like to stay that way because it is the easy and comfortable thing to do. Is it any wonder why there seems to be so many more unsuccessful people than there are successful people?

However, it should be noted that being lazy isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. In fact, much of human progress, whether it be scientific or technological, has come as a result of a desire to get things done easier and quicker.

The automobile for example, was designed with the intention of getting people to where they wanted to go faster and without having to expend energy by walking. Today, much of modern day society exists as a result of the freedom that motor vehicles provide us with.

So whilst laziness can result in failure, it can also be a powerful motivation for success. Laziness in itself is not the problem, the amount of laziness is!

Action step: Overcome the urge to do what is fun, quick and easy all the time. Instead, do the things which are necessary, even if they are hard and will take a long time to complete.

2) We Are All Greedy

Would you like $100 or $1000? 1 car or 2? Given a choice, people naturally desire to have more than they currently have, and as a result, are never completely satisfied with what they do have.

This personality characteristic can quickly bring failure into your life, and is one of the primary reasons why so many people are unable to save their money and will always remain poor. Interestingly, it is also what drives our consumerist society.

Think about it. In the past, people used to be happy if they had something that worked and did what they needed it to do. Today however, functionality has become less of an issue, as now people are more concerned with the image of a particular product and how they think that others will view them for owning it.

This has resulted in an endless variation of goods and brands that have been designed to target different consumer tastes and preferences. The trouble is, these tastes and preferences are changing all the time, which ultimately causes people to buy new products they would otherwise not have bought.

A good example of this can be found in the fashion industry. What may be fashionable one year, could easily be out of fashion the next. Cell phones are no different, although they do tend to have a slightly longer lifespan.

Because of our natural human desire to have more than we currently have, it is not uncommon for a person to spend the majority of the money they earn, or even spend more than they earn and get themselves into debt, in order to try and feel satisfied in their life. This however, is obviously not going to make a person wealthy, but rather is a personality characteristic that is going to keep them poor and broke.

Successful people understand the greed characteristic, but, are able to control it rather than having it control them. Successful people use the desire to own and have more in life to give them the motivational energy to keep going when things get tough, to help them achieve the goals that they have set for themselves.

So greed in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as the desire to have more is what makes society progress and get better as a whole. What determines whether greed is ultimately beneficial or not, is what you do with it and when you do it.

Action step: Rather than using greed for the satisfaction of your short term needs, use the energy it gives you to help you work towards the attainment of things that really matter in your life. The things that will make you successful and bring prosperity into your life.

3) We Are All Ambitious

Everything we do is motivated by a desire to improve our quality of life. This can range from small short term improvements such as improving your mood by eating food, to larger long term improvements such as starting a business and becoming financially independent.

Ambition therefore, is generally a good thing, as without being ambitious a person would never grow and develop in their life as they would always be doing the same things in the same place.

Unfortunately however, most people in today’s society are ambitious about the wrong things. They focus on short term improvements to their life, and/or on things which in the long term don’t really matter to their own personal development.

For example, a person may become interested in a particular celebrity, a television show or a sports team and proudly boast to their friends how much they know about it.

Whilst this may make them feel good in the moment, in the long run, becoming an expert on a celebrity, a TV show or a sports team isn’t going to make you successful in life unless you are using that knowledge to pursue a particular career, which for most people, is not the case as their primary concern is with leisure and entertainment.

Society tends to promote this short term mentality, by providing people with quick fixes and things that bring instant satisfaction. This has caused people to come to expect things immediately with little or no effort, which has consequently discouraged people from working hard to achieve something over a long period of time. It is this very characteristic that is virtually guaranteed to lead to long term failure in life.

Successful people on the other hand, are ambitious for things in their long term future, which also tend to be large and important things of significant value to their life. For example, rather than concerning themselves over who a particular celebrity might be dating, they focus their energy on learning what they need to do in order to make their business successful.

Ultimately, the type of things that you are ambitious for will largely determine the type of success that you achieve in life, and the greater your ambitions are, the more of that success you are likely to achieve.

Action step: Think about your main interests and ask yourself whether or not those things really matter in your life? Will they help you to achieve your goals and dreams? Or are they just leading you down a road towards long term failure in life?

4) We Are All Selfish

We all act primarily from our own point of view. So the things we do are done for the benefit of ourselves and not necessarily for other people. Even the act of charity is a selfish act.

If you decide to help someone, it is usually because you feel some kind of emotion for them. Once you have given them help, you now feel better about yourself.

Therefore, almost all the actions that you carry out, are influenced by the feelings or emotions you experience and driven by your desire to change them.

Let me give you another example.

Have you ever seen an advert on the TV or in the paper that said something like “Are you worried about your weight?” or “Do you have financial problems?” if so, then try/buy this product and all your worries will disappear!?

Advertisers know that by provoking a certain emotion or feeling in the audience (by using a trigger device, i.e. the product) they automatically stimulate the selfish desire.

By influencing how we feel they can then influence how we act. Which in this case, occurs as a purchase of the product. The key, is to stimulate the right thoughts in the right type of people. This is why you see TV ads targeting certain types of people at different times of the day, such as advertising male products around sporting events.

Our natural human tendency is to maintain a pleasurable state or to move from a state of displeasure to a state of pleasure. There are two ways in which we can do this; either immediately, or sometime in the future. Something which is also known as immediate or delayed gratification.

People who tend to fail in life tend to do so because they give in to the natural desire to change their emotional state immediately. For example, if they are feeling bored they will go and watch TV. If they are feeling depressed they will drink some alcohol. If they are feeling frustrated they will give up. Whatever action they take is done so with the intention of making them feel better as quickly as possible.

As you might imagine, a person who lives their life by this principle is unlikely to ever get very far in life, because as you already know, most of the things that are worth doing in life will require lots of time and effort on your behalf and so in order to achieve worthwhile aims and objectives, you need to have the persistence to keep yourself moving forward especially when things become tough or difficult.

This is exactly what successful people have trained themselves to do. Just like any other person they also desire to change their emotional state, but do so not through immediate gratification, but with the prospect of achieving something more meaningful in the future.

In other words, they are able to put up with what they view as an acceptable level of discomfort now, so that they can receive a greater level of pleasure later on. Unsuccessful people have a low discomfort threshold, and so are only able to put up with a small level of discomfort before they give up and go do something else.

Action step: We are all driven by a desire to change our emotional state of mind, which subsequently can cause us to shift our focus from important issues of significance to distractions of no significance.

If you don’t feel like doing something, that is usually a good indication that it is important for you to do. The more you can train yourself to do those things, the more successes you are likely to achieve in your life.

5) We Are All Ignorant

Not even Einstein knew everything about the subjects he studied, so why do we often assume that we are experts on something?

No matter how much you learn, there is always more that you can learn. In this sense, we are all ignorant and carry out our actions based on incomplete information. Recognizing this personality characteristic can encourage you to become a life long learner and avoid making the mistake of thinking that education stops once you finish your years in formal education.

In today’s society knowledge is constantly changing at an ever increasing pace. There are always new things being discovered, and with so much information out there, you will never be able to know everything. What this means is that there is always room for improvement and there is always something that you can learn from someone else.

Unsuccessful people tend to stick with what they know. They learn how to do something once, and then keep doing it the same way for as long as possible until they are forced to make a change. They also tend to be very resistant to new information, because they feel that they already know the important things and so there is no point in spending their free time learning something extra. As a result, they like to spend their free time watching TV, reading celebrity magazines or playing video games.

But what happens once you stop learning? The world doesn’t stand still, that’s for sure. Eventually, if you are not growing your knowledge, talents and abilities, your existing set of skills will become obsolete. What happens to obsolete people? They are discarded and thrown to the side because they are no longer viewed as being of enough value to be worth keeping.

If you contrast this type of personality to the personalities associated with successful people, you will find the complete opposite type of behavior. Rather than thinking that they know everything, you will usually find that highly successful people have a strong desire to learn new information and to improve themselves.

As a result, they are constantly reading or learning how to do something they could not do before. Over time, such people are able to grow their knowledge, talents and abilities and by doing so become more valuable to others.

Action step: Recognize that what you know today will soon be outdated, and so unless you are constantly developing and improving yourself, you too will also become outdated.

6) We All Have An Ego

Freud described the Ego as the part of you that experiences and reacts to the outside world. Ego’s have a lot to do with our self esteem, as this determines how you feel about yourself and what you think is possible for you to achieve in life.

Low self esteem generally comes as a result of your current self image being very different from how you would consider your ideal self to be. This is something which is made worse by the society that we live in, as many people, in particular women, feel inadequate with their appearance when they compare themselves to attractive models or actresses they see on TV and in magazines.

People with low self esteem personalities are less likely to try new and challenging things, because they do so from a starting point of inadequacy and an expectation of failure. Low self esteem individuals, therefore tend to stick with familiar routines and rarely go outside their comfort zone. These are obviously not personality traits that are going to make a person successful in life.

In order to become successful, you must therefore work on raising your level of self esteem by not allowing the media to make you feel inadequate with your current self.

Although these feelings of inadequacy could help to motivate you to change yourself for the better, in the large majority of cases, this rarely happens because the ideal self that people try to obtain is so unrealistic that they never achieve it and so always feel inadequate with who and what they are.

Action step: If you have low self esteem, recognizing this fact and then working to improve it could perhaps be the biggest and most important change that you ever make in your life.

Personality Characteristics Are Neutral

It should be remembered that personality characteristics themselves are neither good nor bad, it is how you use and balance them in your life that really matters in determining the success or failure you experience.

So take some time to reflect upon what you have learnt in this article, and then actively use it to improve your life. It is only through small and constant daily improvements will one succeed.

If you can do this, you will be one step closer to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve. Some day, you will then look behind you and be amazed at how far you have come and how much your personality has changed from what it once was.