Things Survivalists Get Wrong

1. Roads are going away. Few survivalists understand this. 
2. Water is more important than ammunition. Clean water is nearly as important as water. Get a good water purifier, and use commercial soda pop container because they don't leak like canteens do. 
3. A cookpot is more important than a weapon. Much of survival is about waiting for the violence to run down when the violent people kill themselves fighting each other because they are violent idiots. 
4. Physical fitness requires frequent effort. Get a sport that makes you exercise. And do this often so you aren't a heart attack waiting to happen. 
5. Get used to a wood stove. Operating one correctly is not easy. 
6. Get used to a gas generator. And get solar panels YOU control, going to your fridge backup battery, and shunt the excess into your water heater. 
7. Fill your pantry with food you LIKE to eat, and eat from the pantry every week. Food spoils, so your pantry should be colder to make the food last longer. Watch out for bugs. MREs spoil in 3 years. Canned food loses its proteins over 5 years, but jam lasts forever if the seals don't fail. White rice lacks nutrition, but it is cheap carbohydrates and last indefinitely if bugs don't get into it. Brown rice spoils in 6-9 months. 
8. "Vegetable Oil" is best as a spare fuel source and spoils in a year or two. Canola (rapeseed) oil spoils in 3-6 months. Olive oil lasts indefinitely if kept cold. Use spoiled oil as a source for biodiesel. 
9. Methanol is toxic to humans, but an essential ingredient in making biodiesel so if you get into making hooch (hopefully with a local/agriculture license). Methanol is about 1/3 of the yield when distilling alcohol. Alcohol is the source for making vinegar, which essential to curing meats, canning food (stops browning of peaches), and various sauces that make food taste better. 
10. Spices don't keep forever but they do make boring food edible. Learn to use them and become a good cook. Much of survival is about getting enough to eat regardless of supplies. 
11. It is much cheaper to buy eggs than deal with the hassles and expense of raising chickens. 
12. Do not raise chickens AND pigs at the same farm/ranch. They transmit viruses from bats to chickens to pigs to people. People with both spend more time with the flu. Having both is a serious biohazard. Better to buy eggs and buy hams and bacon from others. 
13. Alternative transportation starts with feet. Bicycles are also essential. I know few preppers who ride bicycles regularly. A commuter bicycle is good practice, and an easy conversion from a mountain bike using slick tires instead of knobby ones. Ride to work once a week, if you can. Otherwise ride around on the weekend for a few hours a couple times a month. This will also give you a chance to fix any issues and get it really comfortable to ride. 
14. Every prepper should own a dual-sport motorcycle, preferably between 125cc to 400cc. 250cc motorcycles with knobby tires. Why? Because these can cover dozens of miles an hour on dirt singletrack trails through the woods or around roadblocks or whatever else the future holds. You need between 18 and 30 hp to make it agile enough. A 9hp bike is too slow. A 4-wheeler is safer, but less able to work on these singletrack trails. 
15. Automatic rifles are a suicide machine. They aren't very accurate and go through ammo too fast, and have feeding and pressure limitations. Don't bother. Lever Action are mostly inaccurate (exception is BLR due to stacked magazine). Marksmen use bolt action. Best choice are middle calibers (6.5, 7mm. 270, 308). If you don't have the range with these, you should be avoiding the target or getting closer. In hunting, many species don't notice you till you're around 70 yards away anyhow, so you really don't need a .300 Winchester Magnum to hunt a deer at 70 yards. 
16. Don't be a Mall Ninja. Most have very nice automatic weapons and lasers and holographic sights and too much ammo, like they're geared up for a costume party, but no water, little food, and no firewood. A real prepper is more like the old folks that survived the Great Depression. Strength in depth, extra food, sensible clothing and doing proper maintenance and exercise. 
17. You can buy a lot of meat at the grocery store, and turn it into beef jerky, for the cost of a hunting rifle and permit and time spent hunting somewhere. 
18. Learn how to cook with eggs and make them taste good. Eggs are the most digestible protein other than milk. 
19. Someday the roads will fall apart, and refugees with lawyers from racist metropolitan areas are going to cause problems where you live. Most of your neighbors will vote to have the sheriff setup armed checkpoints to keep those people out and stop them from stripping your community of food, rape your daughters and kill your sons. Stopping them getting in will save a lot of lives. Be prepared for "travel papers" when that happens. 
20. Someday there will be gasoline rationing, and mandatory (state or federal) GPS tracking of your vehicle. Its big brother, but it is coming. Understand what that really means. And why moving around without a GPS tracker is important. Bicycles and motorcycles will be most able to avoid these. And local ordinances may officially refuse to enforce those kinds of laws. Local law enforcement has better things to do. Rationing is the next step in turning us into peasants with no civil rights. 
21. Forget about heading for the hills. You cannot store enough food to sit out the entire Great Depression, and this time there's no WW2 and rebuilding and loan payments and gasoline to restore things. 
22. Join your community. Become too useful to abuse and discard. This is often very difficult for preppers who got into it because they can't stand how awful people really are. You can't change people, but you can adjust your personal exposure to them, and help in ways which risk you the least, yet are visible enough to establish yourself as a "good guy". When it all goes Local, you won't become an exploited resource that gets raided and killed off "for the good of the community" like the rich punks from the City, or the refugees that manage to get inside the local area before the roadblocks go up. This detail is very hard for a prepper to understand. 
23. If you find yourself wanting to carry a handgun every day, you live in the wrong place. Seriously consider paying more of your income to live somewhere a lot safer. Or change careers/job to a safer clientele or location. 
24. You still need a job. This is the hardest point to get through to Preppers. Even collapse requires income. There will always be taxes. You still need to eat, and shower to keep the diseases off, and you literally cannot store enough food to stay home for 10 or 20 years or the rest of your life. Remember that most of all. You can't just hide in the house. You still need to get to work. You still have to pay your bills.