The following is a list of mistakes many survivalists make; learn from them! It's important to not make these errors because they could lead to serious consequences.

Not Being Prepared

Going into the wilderness without at least a basic survival kit is foolish. I haven’t been in the woods without one for at least 40 years. You never know when you might be thrust into a survival situation, so you need to have the right equipment and supplies with you at all times.

A good EDC/survival kit will make it much easier to survive, yet you never see these guys go out in the wilderness properly prepared. I don’t care if you’re going hunting, fishing, or just going for a Sunday afternoon drive, you should have some basic gear with you.

One thing that pretty much all survival instructors like to do is show off their fire-starting methods. I think most of them collect those methods just so they can impress people.

But just because you can start a fire by rubbing two sticks together doesn’t mean it’s good idea. Why not do it by flicking your Bic lighter? You can probably get 1,000 fires out of that Bic if you’re careful with it.

Not Conserving Their Energy

In most survival and doomsday shows, people do a lot of walking. There’s nothing wrong with a good walk, but it burns up energy. If you can avoid burning that energy, then your body can use it to produce heat and keep you alive. Since hypothermia is the biggest killer in the wild, saving energy that your body can use to create heat is an important part of your survival strategy.

Granted, a certain amount of walking is a necessary part of survival. But that doesn’t mean you should just walk all day in hopes of stumbling upon extra supplies. Nor does it mean finding the hard way of doing something when there’s an easier way available.

But then, if you didn’t bring along that survival kit, you might have no choice.

Not Understanding Teamwork

Working as a team is essential to survival, yet you rarely see any real teamwork in survival shows. Part of that is caused by the format of the show, but another part is the people themselves. They never sit down and organize themselves, but instead start forming cliques. Leaders usually emerge simply because they are the bossiest or most talkative in the group.

Forgetting Their Priorities

Survival has a very specific set of priorities. You have to take care of the most important things first or you’re not going to make it. Yet many people focus on things that really aren’t that important, rather than those that are. The most glaring example of this is when people put food before fire and shelter.

Fire and shelter together are what help us maintain our body heat. That’s the number one survival priority. But our stomachs tend to complain pretty loudly when they aren’t filled. So people listen to that complaining and look for food before they build shelter and start a fire. That’s setting themselves up for a lot of trouble, even putting themselves in a dangerous situation.

If you’re going to survive in any wilderness situation, you have to keep your priorities straight. You have to develop a plan and you have to complete that plan. Anything less, puts you in danger.

Someone once said it would be ideal if life came with a manual, but we would still find a way to screw it up!

That mantra holds true no matter what we do, but we can learn from the mistakes of others.

To read more about common survivalist mistakes, check out the Urban Survival Site.