My Life as a Gamer: How to Succeed as a Raider in a MMORPG

Being a successful raider is not that hard. There are no arcana here to master. It's all very simple, very basic, and if you have ever held down a respectable job or played a competitive team sport then you already know what it takes. First, a summary.

Raiding is a team sport; there is no place for special snowflakes.

1. Respect Others' Time: Know when to show up, and be on time. If you will be late, contact the raid leader and inform him of your delay; if you will be unavailable, inform your raid leader that you will not be there that day so he can replace you well before the fact.
   
2. Be Prepared: Your gear must be fully repaired, properly enchanted, and properly gemmed. You must have a full evening's provision of consumables ready to go; you are expected to know what that is and acquire provisions on your own initiative- don't count on others to do it for you. (WOWhead is your friend, and that's just the most general place to find this stuff.) You are expected to know what the boss strategies are, so do your homework; watch the boss guides beforehand. (Not pulling your weight or expecting explanations shows disrespect for others' time.)
   
3. Discipline Matters: You are expected to improve your performance, starting with knowing what your job is and focusing upon it. Keybinds are superior to clicking. Macros are superior to repeating manual key-pressing for commonly-comboed abilities or commonly-associated conditions of ability use. (e.g. mouseovers for healing/curing/cleansing spells) You are expected to not slack off during farm content, or it stops being farm due to making avoidable mistakes (and, again, shows disrespect for the time of others) and thus wasting time on repeated attempts when you should be one-shotting things.
   
4. Leadership Matters: If you're the boss, you set the example, so all of this is on you to establish and enforce. Lead, dammit. Get to know your raiders. Dump the bad ones--drop the boat anchors and bench the sandbaggers--and promote the good ones. Pass the links to the info and follow-up that they've done their job; bench them if they don't- and no raiding is better than shit raiding.
   

See? Not that hard now is it? You already do this for any other area of your life where you want to succeed. Raiding is no different.