How to succeed in life

If you want to succeed in life, then you need to avoid people who are failures.  You need to avoid hanging around people who have negative attitudes.  You need to avoid people who incessantly complain about their work.  Because these people will never succeed.  They will never be better than what they are today.  

If you want to succeed you need to talk to people who have succeeded.  Any person who has succeeded will tell you this.  If you hang around negative people, people who are not happy with their jobs, then that is the attitude that you will pick up.  So if you want to succeed, hang around happy and successful people.  

That's not just something I'm making up, it's true.  If you hang around the failures, you're just going to become negative, and you are going to lose hope, and you are going to become apathetic about your job.  Once apathy sets in, chances of you moving up the ladder will probably be thrown out the door.  

Once you become apathetic and sit around the RT Cave complaining about this or that, or complaining about this person or that person, then you are going to trapped where you are right now.  If you want to succeed, if you want to move up the ladder, for instance, you will have to get away from these people.  You will want to rise above them.  

Don't hang around people who tell you you can't succeed because they didn't, because then you won't succeed.  You don't want to hang around people who are bitter.  Find the successes and learn from them.

If you want to be a writer like I am, you used to have to be ambitious and try to get some newspaper or magazine to like your writing.  One day I was sitting around trying to figure out how I could become a writer, and my wife introduced me to the Blogosphere.  I started writing.  At first I wrote to no one, as I has no audience.  Then people started discovering my blog, and they realized that I had something interesting to say.  

Then one day I received an email from a producer.  She said, "I love your blog.  I love the way you write in a pithy manner, and how you describe your profession accurately, and how you write about asthma.  I love how you write about smart people and stupid people.  I think you are a great writer, and I want you to write for me."  

I responded to this email, and now I have been successfully writing about asthma and COPD since 2008 for healthcentral.com.  I love doing this.  To me, it's not work: it's fun.  I have succeeded.  You can too.  But you will have to take advantage of opportunities, and you'll have to stay away from the complainers, or at least not listen to them. 

I'm not even saying you can't complain, because Lord knows I do.  I'm honest about my job.  However, I talk about it in a generic way, without blasting any person.  I might honestly discuss a situation that isn't going well,  and I might even disagree with doctors and bosses, but never at the expense of respect.  

People do things for a reason.  Doctors order useless breathing treatments because that's what they were taught, and telling them they are "idiots" will not solve anything.  Many doctors even admit that they order 'useless" treatments because they have to in order to get patients admitted.  

You might look at me and say, "You are a small town respiratory therapist and you have a couple blogs, but you are not successful."  To that I say, "It depends how you define success.  I define success by how satisfied I am, and I'm very satisfied."