In one’s personal life, everyone has to lose his or her defensiveness and self-centeredness in order to find success and avoid failure. People fail in life because they cannot get outside of themselves. The greatest failures in every aspect of life are the result of selfishness. Alcoholism, drugs, addictions of all kinds, sicknesses, illnesses, depression, lack of education, and career failure all can be traced back to the sin of selfishness. The seven deadly sins are all traced back to selfishness. Once selfishness sets in, then self-control and self-discipline erode. Once self-control and self-discipline erode, a spiral of failure begins. I have worked with thousands of homeless people. In each and every case, selfishness and a lack of self-control and/or a lack of self-discipline produced the failure. Of course, the selfishness in these homeless people had, in some cases, a cause unrelated to the person's behavior, but the root cause of their homelessness was still selfishness fed over and over again by lack of self-control and lack of self-discipline. However, there is a way to combat selfishness and that way is to get outside of yourself. The surest way of getting outside of yourself is to turn away from your innate selfishness, turn to Christ, and accept Him as Savior and Lord of your life. When you go through these redeeming steps, you are no longer bound up within yourself but you are now outside of yourself and you are free, perhaps for the first time in your life.