Happy New Year 2009!

Hello, Readers -- Last night I was already asleep when the fireworks starting going off at the Cherokee Yacht Club right up the road from where I live at Grand Lake, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack -- plus it scared all the cats!! So now it is the New Year 2009, and this is the start of another chapter of our lives.

When I was at a Convention in Boston in 2006, we had a motivational speaker there who normally gave talks for Fortune 500 companies, but he was addressing the American Association of Medical Transcriptionists at that time. He informed our group of medical transcriptionists that the government was already "broke" and that the most significant goal any individual could have for himself/herself at this point would be to stay at the top of one's game and keep current on the latest technology and the latest skills that a person needs to be able to do in order to stay employed and not be a burden on others. This is general knowledge that sometimes we forget in our day-to-day lives, but I tend to take it a step further.

Rather than thinking about what it would be like to be competitive just in a rural area, or in a city such as Tulsa, I tend to think in terms of being competitive even if we were working in a foreign country, somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. So this is a thought process that is always in the back of my own mind, as I go to work every day. I speak no other languages except English. I have met others who could speak five languages, but were not fluent enough to write a paper in English.

So as we go on into the next chapter of our lives in 2009, try to think of ways in which you can be a value-producing individual with something to offer, that would help make the world a better place to live, but also remember this: taking care of your own self is your first and foremost obligation. You cannot save the world, if you are not able to take care of yourself without being a burden or a hindrance on others. Your first obligation truly is to yourself, and to God. Only then can you help others survive and do better in the world we live in today.