My goal is to uplift and inspire readers that you can go to school or work and have a good life even though you live with a mental health challenge.

For those of us who are able to do this I offer hope because I’ve seen with my own eyes what’s possible.

One of my favorite quotes is from the Adidas store marquee on Lower Broadway in Manhattan: Impossible is Nothing. It’s a riff on challenging yourself to do what seems impossible, as if doing it is a piece of cake.

It’s not a piece of cake. Yet it can be done. As hard as life can get living with a mental health condition, it can be a good life often a better life at the same time.

In August 1990 I obtained a job as an administrative assistant to the director at an insurance firm. This was unheard of: for a person diagnosed with schizophrenia to be employed at any kind of job.

This risk paid off and I’ve been employed at jobs ever since.

That’s how I firmly believe if you want to go to school or get a job you deserve to try. A fortune cookie implores: “There is no shame in failure, only in quitting.”

It might take trying on different school majors or types of jobs before you’re able to find the one that’s a right fit with your personality and talents and what you’d like to do.

At HealthCentral, the editors cribbed something I wrote: “The only real failure is the failure to try.”

You can believe in yourself when others don’t. You can dare risk trying to do something and see how it goes. If at first you don’t succeed, you can try it a different way or change the goal to achieve something different.

Risking change can be scary. It can bring on self-doubt. That’s OK. Doubt can be a force that motivates you more so than a fear that deters you. Accept that the doubt will come on and remember the other times you tried to do something new and were successful.

If you haven’t tried this before, you might start out with a goal you can achieve and then progressively set the bar higher as you go along.

I’ll end here with the motto of Olympic champion Gabby Douglas:

“Dream. Believe. Achieve.”

This is easier said than done so my two books will give strategies for how to do this.

I can think of no better motto.