By the time my plane touched down in Texas the first half of this story was already written.

By the time I left town I had thrown out about five drafts and was pretty sure this story would never see the page.

There are three ideas that are at least partially responsible for every bad decision you have made since you bought that timeshare in Tampa.

These three things drive us to react when we should wait, wait when we should react, and generally make decisions that are exactly opposite of what a sensible, rational (see: imaginary) human being should.

A bolt of lightning sounds a little bit like a mortar explosion at close range. It’s one of those sounds that you can never really brace yourself for, no matter how long you have lived in Florida and how many thousands of smaller strikes you’ve sat through over the course of two and a half decades.

Famous people have never really interested me.

It’s not their fault really, most of them never really wanted to be interesting in the first place. They just wanted to be famous. If Tiger Woods or Brangelina or whoever else we’ve shoved onto the public stage this week could avoid tabloid rags taking pictures of their latest pimple, 7 out of 10 days they would. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Over the years I’ve made a lot of mistakes when trying to start businesses. It’s an obscene, almost irresponsible number of mistakes when I really look back at it.

I’ve also had the good fortune of getting to learn firsthand from the mistakes of others, which I’ve come to realize are just as silly and half-cocked as my own.

The net result is that I have a pretty good grasp on how businesses fail, so today I wanted to present you with a nonexhaustive list of some of the more common themes I’ve run into when dealing with entrepreneurs on the path to ruin.

When I was seven years old, I ate 21 slices of pizza in one sitting.

I know what you must be thinking. Well, you’re right, I was young and reckless.

It was the early 90s, I was at a birthday party and those 21 slices of greasy, cheesy Sicilian goodness where just sitting there, calling out to me.

The clock is tick, tick, ticking away on 2009 and as the year breaths it’s final breathe, everyone and his mother is putting together best of lists to round out the holiday season.

Since I would hate to disappoint, I wanted to give you all a list of my own to chew on as you make your way through your post-New Years “I’m serious about the diet this time” chip bowl.

For every hour of every day that we bebop our way through the world, for every risk we take, for every decision that we make, for every brilliant plan that springs to life at 3AM to do something world changing, for all of it there is a voice somewhere in the back of our heads telling us that despite the odds, everything is going to work out for the best.