There are elements in this world you simply have to avoid as much as possible. If you allow them to, they will drain away all of your time and energy, leaving you little for your own prosperity.

First are the professional victims. These people are never at fault for their own failures. They always find someone or something to explain away their shortcomings. These people never grow and develop properly because they never learn to evaluate what they did wrong that caused them not to achieve their goals.

Closely related are the victimization enablers. These people, who come from every band of the political spectrum, tend to develop elaborate theories for why a particular socioeconomic group is struggling. From conservatives blaming immigrants to liberals blaming white people, the enablers dismiss personal accountibility and engender negativity. If you want to find internal peace, you must remove the victimization enablers from your reality.

Another form of energy leech is the constant complainer. Nothing will ever satisfy these people. If you give them soup, they prefer steak. If you give them steak, they want pie. No matter what you try to do, you will never satisfy their needs because their misery is deeply rooted. Your best course of action is to limit your exposure as much as you can.

To me, the most important people to avoid are the naysayers. These are the people who said that flight was impossible, that computers would be a passing fad, that we would never reach space. Naysayers will pick apart and scoff at any idea. If you aspire to create anything new, to start a business, to ponder fresh ideas, you will have to teach yourself to tune out the naysayers and listen to the animal spirit inside you. At some point, you will run up against an obstacle, and the naysayers will be quick to say I told you so. That’s when you will have to tune them out even more and trust that virtually every success follows a handful (or more) of failures.

That’s all for now.