Judy: Ah, I’ve noticed also that you’re very tuned into personalities -
I couldn’t miss that. And also to people’s needs and willingness
to participate in life, and to act on their own behalf, or someone else’s.
That’s in that area, I think.

Ray: I think that too many of us have subrogated our responsibilities
as people, our responsibilities for our own health, our responsibilities
for passion and life. We say, “That’s outside of my control. And I don’t
have anything to do with it.” And that’s NOT SO. We live a high quality
of life because we pursue involvement, or we don’t pursue involvement,
an’ become stick-in-the-mud. I mean, many of us are wrapping ourselves
up in television for hours a day.

That’s an escape mechanism. That’s saying, “I’m not going to participate in life.”
An’ I think our personalities end up being damaged (by that) because we give up
our responsibilities. When we turn all of our decisions for our health care over
to a health professional, we put too big a load on that individual, or said individuals.....

Judy: Especially when you sometimes only have five, six, or seven minutes
with that health professional.

Ray: Absolutely. We need to have a very strong personal involvement.
And that relates to everything. I mean, we need to have a personal involvement
with discipline. Americans are having great difficulty just keepin’ a
relationship together. It’s because they’ve got this attitude of “I’m only
gonna do what serves me.” It’s a selfish thing.

Well, things that yield success frequently have things that you don’t
necessarily want to do, but you do on a regular basis because it affects the
lives of everybody around you. That’s discipline. I’m an advocate of us
taking responsibility for our actions in everything; in our health, how we treat people.
I think that most Americans..... they’ll just take the easy road out.

Judy: You’ve also talked about ah, people’s willingness to act on their own
behalf, as far as um, being able to improve their situations for themselves.

Ray: I think that the people that really have life itself - of any kind of
QUALITY are the ones who are willing to put a foot forward. Even if
somebody stomps on it. Then you maybe should take a different path the
next time, but you should never, EVER stop being willing to put a foot forward.
There are people that don’t run for offices because they think that they might lose.

That’s not the approach. The approach should be, “I’m gonna participate in life.
I’m gonna try.” The winners are the people that run for life. Not the ones that say,
“Oh, I might experience a failure so I’m not gonna do that.” I think a lot of
people do not have a high quality of life because they’re afraid that they might
be embarrassed, or they might be a fool, or they might make a mistake.

The best way not to have a life is to don’t DO anything! But it’s also
the best way not to have a life. It’s to don’t do anything. So I tell people,
“Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Just make sure you’re doin’ somethin’!”
Even if you don’t have all the information to do something, just GO DO SOMETHIN’!”
A mistake is better than doing nothing. We learn a lot from our mistakes too.

Judy: Oh, yeah. So many of the inventions we have are the result of many
attempts at something in a long line of mistakes.

Ray: Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think that every time Alexander Graham Bell did an experiment
with the telephone, it was a success. Because it got him closer
to absolutely, finally havin’ somethin’ that worked. So were all
the attempts en route a failure? I don’t think so. They were just steps
toward that ultimate success, so they were successes in themselves.
And the greatest success that you can attribute to the guy is
that he never quit. With all of the aberrations, with all of the things
that didn’t function, to me, he really believed in the theory so he
kept working with it. And he ended up attaining absolute success
with a terrific invention that benefitted mankind immensely.