JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

To get the most out of your companionship, you must choose your friends well. One of the greatest time-wasters and obstacles to success in all areas of life is associating with the wrong people. Yet surprisingly many individuals spend time with dysfunctional characters whom they don 't even like. Associating with the wrong people can cost you your time, energy, creativity, and money. They can even cost you your health - mainly mental.

To achieve success in your career and personal life, it helps to have friends who are going to inspire you to greater heights.

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions," advised Mark Twain. "Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

In other words, the people closest to you will either keep you down or help you up.

You want to hang around a group of motivated people with whom you can trade ideas, find inspiration, and not end up dejected every time you meet with them.

It is a terrible mistake to befriend a bunch of misfits solely because it makes you look like a genius whenever you are around them.

After all is said - and mostly left undone - there is no glory in outdoing a bunch of muddle heads and blunderers.

If you hang around with a bunch of misfits, you are likely to become one yourself.

Just like them, you will come back from the Burger King with ketchup on your shirt after eating two more hamburgers than you should have.

Sure, negative people can come in handy if you are negative yourself.

If you consult enough negative people, you can confirm any negative opinion you have of something or someone else.

But being a skeptic is not in itself a virtue.

What good is it to mix with negative people who are going to pump you up with negative energy and negative beliefs?

 If you are like me, you have enough of your own negativity that you have to continually conquer.

The best strategy is to avoid endarkened people at all costs - hang around with enlightened people instead.

Stay away from people who set low personal standards that they constantly fail to achieve.

Make friends, instead, with individuals who have big dreams for themselves.

Associate with people who are making it in life, not ones who are barely hanging on.

The former are much harder to find than the latter, but when you find them, the price you will have paid will be well worth it.

Generally speaking, birds of a feather flock together.

So if you want to soar with the eagles, don't hang around with the turkeys.

Hang around with a bunch of blunderers long enough and you will become one yourself.

As you can well imagine, it's difficult to be successful if you are constantly distracted by fools.

What's more, associate with just one loser and soon there will be more.

Surprisingly, you wouldn't think that losers can multiply, but they can.

If we force ourselves into constant contact with "cool and creative," the odds are sky-high that cool and creative will wear off on us.

Hang out with cool and creative Web designers, for instance, and you will end up cool and creative.

Ditto: Cool and creative life coaches. Ditto: Cool and creative janitors. Ditto: Cool and creative engineers (granted, having been an engineer in a former life, I realize that I may be stretching it here).

The point is that a part of you becomes whom you hang with.

No doubt your parents warmed you that you shouldn't associate with fools or losers.

They were right, weren't they?

It behooves every one of us to adopt the wisdom of Joseph Marshall Wade: "If I wanted to become a tramp, I would seek information and advice from the most successful tramp I could find," wrote Wade. "If I wanted to become a failure, I would seek advice from men who have never succeeded. If I wanted to succeed in all things, I would look around me for those who are succeeding, and do as they have done."

Thus, drink coffee only with positive, focused people who will teach you a lot and who will not drain your valuable energy with their constant complaining and lousy attitudes.

By developing relationships with individuals committed to constant improvement and the pursuit of the best that life has to offer, you will have plenty of company on your path to the top of whatever mountain you seek to climb.