# The right people It is unthinkable to me, after now having worked with the right people and the wrong people in business, how anyone could ever continue to settle for a toxic environment working with people who do not operate with extremely high integrity. I can hear the push back now: - "you don't know what it's like" - "i can't leave because then i will lose my house, won't eat, etc" - "such privilege" I can only say from my experience, I've worked with snakes and I've worked with saints. There were times I felt like I had to stay with snakes to pay rent. I've been there. The turning point for me was when I literally got betrayed by the snakes I relied on to pay my bills - an extremely low point for me. I knew these people were toxic, and so my strategy was applying to other positions at nights and on weekends when I wasn't required to put in hours. At the very moment I was backstabbed, meaning fired unjustly and accused of violating my contract, resulting in the loss of well over 6-figures of compensation *(probably more given capital appreciate of the assets in my comp package which they fraudulently stole / refused to pay)* and an immediate loss of any further cash flow, I had luckily been able to move over to a new team. I say luck, but keep in mind I applied to over 800 positions in a 2 month period, so hard work did factor in, but also I got lucky that this particular group of people were looking for someone with my set of skills. In a matter of a few months, my entire life changed, and the rest was a bumpy, but incredible journey of onwards and upwards. The key was cutting out the toxic people. There is no way around it. There is no other option. You must do it and surround yourself with high integrity people or you will not move forward in your life or career. In fact, the only option you have is to become like them and go down a path which will lead to the dark side of life. Your morals will slip, integrity will decay, and the quality of your life will dramatically decrease in the long run. Your inner circle averages you up or down. Make the hard, but necessary decision and cut out those who average you down. Otherwise you are sacrificing your future self, and you will regret it.