Sometimes, while contemplating who you are, what you’ve accomplished so far and how your life looks, you may find yourself thinking and saying to yourself: “Wow! My life sucks!”

Many times, this thought is a blatant lie. Your life doesn’t suck; you have plenty of things to feel good about. Sometimes though, even if it’s still an exaggerated thought, there may be some truth to it. There may be several areas of your life where things are not going the way you’d like them to go, and you’re clearing not living up to your potential.

As a confidence and communication coach, I work all the time with people who feel they’re underachieving. Although a dramatization, “my like sucks” is almost a mantra for some of them. Drawing from this coaching experience, I’d like to discuss what I deem the 5 most widespread and crucial reasons why your life may not be how you want it to be.

1. You Don’t Know Yourself

Self-knowledge is critical if you wanna achieve something in life and be happy. If you don’t know what you want, you’re not gonna have clear, stimulating goals to go for. If you don’t know what truly makes you happy, you’re likely to aim for goals society says you should achieve but actually do little to make you happier.

If you don’t know your natural strengths, you’re gonna let them go to waste while trying to perform well in tasks you have no natural inclination for. A shortage of self-knowledge leads to heaps of missed opportunities and pointless frustrations.

So if you believe you don’t know yourself well, I recommend that you make understanding yourself better a priority. Introspection, feedback from others, personality tests, psychology books and coaching sessions, they can all help immensely in knowing yourself better. Use these tools.

2. You Let Yourself Get Distracted

There are plenty of elements all around us to distract us from our goals: movies, games, TV, the web, Facebook, food, drinks, music, gossip, etc. They pull us to engage with them for a dose of brief but immediate pleasure, often losing sight of our long-term goals in life.

It’s very easy to fall prey to such distractions and end up ignoring your major goals. Then one day, as you look back at your life, you realize you’ve spend years entangled in activities that gave you instant gratification, but you’ve accomplished little that’s worthwhile.

People who get things done recognize the powerful pull of distractions, they learn how to manage them, and they do so daily. They learn how to balance seeking short-term and long-term satisfaction, and they take active steps to make distractions less available. If you wanna achieve something in life, you wanna follow their example.

3. You Expect Quick Results

I’m frequently shocked by how fast most people expect to achieve their goals. They have nearly zero tolerance for things going slowly and taking hard work. They want everything to happen now and happen effortlessly.

I see this related to confidence and communication skills building in particular, since this is my field. So often, severely shy people expect to become super-confident socially in literally just a few days. Or people with few social skills seek a few quick tips that will make them smooth and charismatic overnight.

When you tell them that social confidence and social skills, even with a highly-optimized approach, will still take weeks and months to improve visibly, many swiftly go looking for someone who will promise them immediate results. A year later, they’re back looking at your solutions, having made no progress in this time. That’s the paradox of seeking quick fixes: it actually delays one’s progress instead of hasting it.

Expecting quick but meaningful results is simply not realistic. Anything worth achieving will require time and work to be achieved. Change doesn’t happen overnight; success doesn’t come overnight. It’s crucial to accept that and let go of expectations to get quick, meaningful results. Only then, you’ll be able to put in the necessary work to get what you want.

4. You’re Not Willing to Invest in Yourself

Your success in any area of life (career, relationships, health, etc.) is greatly influenced by the quality of your education in that area. Quality education gives you the right know-how and helps you develop the proper skills to achieve what you want, in a timely manner.

But quality education rarely comes cheap, and it almost never comes free. Sadly, a lot of people are not willing to invest financially in their professional and personal growth. They try to get by with free information they can find on the Internet, or to figure everything out on their own.

That’s the very long, slow and frustrating road to success. As I mentioned above, no meaningful results can be achieved overnight, but you can sure speed up the process a lot by getting the proper education and help.

It’s worth investing some money in books, classes and training programs that help you gain key knowledge and develop relevant skills. I can vouch from experience that, if you choose the right education and teachers, the return on investment will be tenfold.

5. You Hang Out With the Wrong Crowd

The people you surround yourself with and spend your time with have a huge impact on where your life goes. Unsurprisingly, it’s very common for individuals with unfulfilling lives to hang out with people who pull the down instead of pushing them up.

These people they hang out with fit various negative profiles: some are pessimists who discourage them from following their dreams, some are slackers who encourage them to waste time, some are needy and drain them of resources, some are dumb or prejudiced, and some are toxic or manipulative.

If you have such people in your life, it’s crucial to distance yourself from them, so they’re not able to influence you. You will do much better when you’re out from their negative spell.

Your life really doesn’t have to suck in any way. Like all other people, you’re not perfect, but you do have the ability to live a pretty damn good existence. However, it won’t happen by accident. You need an effective approach to life. I have laid out its fundamentals in this article.

For more advice from me for your personal and social success, check out my free social confidence training video, and join my free social skills newsletter. You won’t regret it.