Jerry Gillies Quotes With Add-Ons

Expanded Comments On Quotes

I’ve often commented that one of the biggest surprises for me when I was released from Folsom State Prison in 2008 (read about this in The Appendix of the free Moneylove Manifesto) was the fact that I was very visible on the Internet, despite having, as far as anyone knew, vanished from the face of the Earth for 12 years. A lot of this was due to many people, including a number of prominent authors and motivational teachers constantly quoting me.

Some of these quotes were from Moneylove, some from my Moneylove Tapes, some even from seminars and lectures. I decided it might be interesting to take three of these quotes most often being circulated and expound on them and what an expanded version of that thought might look like. And I am adding two brand new quotes, from my new Moneylove Club audio series.

1. What you do is more important than how much you make, and how you feel about it is more important than what you do.

I think what this expresses is the fact that we have moved away from the old-fashioned idea that money is the driving force in choosing a career or profession. I remember when I was in high school, many of my friends chose to major in Engineering because it was said that would be a lucrative field–even though they really had no skills or aspirations in that direction. And how many doctors chose their professions because their parents told them it was the way to make a lot of money (which may be the large undiscovered cause of our health care problems) even though they were not naturally inclined toward healing or helping others?  We are lucky living in this era, because even if we made a choice based on potential income rather than what felt right for us, we can now change direction much more easily than in the past. Never before in history has there been more of an opportunity to make bad decisions right.

2. It takes a lot more energy to fail than to succeed, since it takes a lot of concentrated energy to hold onto beliefs that don’t work.

This goes against what a lot of us were taught. That success came as the result of ambition and hard work, while failure was due to inaction and laziness. This is sometimes true, but most often not. People who consistently fail are usually repeating patterns of behavior that require a lot of effort to keep repeating. This is true in relationships, too. Good relationships are a lot easier to maintain than bad ones. How many people have you known who have held onto bad relationships for many years with little or no reward for doing so? And do you notice how fatigued and worn out those people are? This actually fits in well with my next quote, one of the most often repeated of mine on the Internet.

3. You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.

When we’re on the wrong path, even temporarily, we feel stressed, pressured, tired, and often useless. But a tremendous sense of release comes with a shift in the right direction. This sense of release, of almost floating and flowing through life, comes with being on the right path, knowing our true purpose, doing what feels right for us to be doing.

Now For Two New Quotes:

4. The best thing you can buy with money is time well spent.

Hopefully you’ve learned by now that your time is worth more than the money you earn, and the money you spend, and the money you invest. Time well spent is like money in the bank, except often better used. I often said in my Moneylove Seminars that it isn’t how much money you make, but how well you use the money you have that matters. And what underlines my belief that I deserve great abundance in my life, is my knowledge that I will use it well.

5. Our life gets better not necessarily because of the big and significant things we do, but often the small ones that we do with intention and consistency.

Since I came up with this thought for the first audio for The Moneylove Club, I think it is worth connecting it to a thought Jack Canfield expressed in an exclusive conversation I had with him on that audio. He said that, after listening to six hours worth of audio, rather than a large amount of information, he would prefer taking away one action step he could apply to his life. We so often get caught up trying to make big decisions about big events, and wanting big results, that we may not appreciate the small, powerful pleasures in life–the small things that give our lives meaning and purpose. And small things done well often turn into very big things. I can think of a number of small decisions I made in my life that ended up moving me in completely new directions, and that brought powerful changes for the better. I bet you can, too.

Jerry

Moneylove Mind Mix

Multiple Forms Of Input Increase Brain Power

You may notice that at the top of this blogsite, there is a new item, which you can click on to get information on my new monthly audio and learn about membership in The Moneylove Club. Or you can just click on this link:

http://moneyloveblog.com/moneylove-club-join-now/

What led me to creating this monthly audio was all the response I got in the past year from people whose lives and finances were dramatically and positively influenced by my 1987 Moneylove tape series from Nightingale-Conant. I’ve mentioned before what an amazing and gratifying surprise it was to come out of 12 years in prison and discover that my ideas and concepts were alive and well, even though few people knew that I was. Googling my name and getting thousands of hits, quotes, recommendations, testimonials, was an amazing experience. It led me to the decision to revise and annotate the original Moneylove book, and to start offering personal coaching, and now this audio club.

I strongly believe that one of the reasons my material has had such an impact over so many years is because I discovered early on in my teaching seminars that giving people different kinds of information in different modalities activated more of the subconscious mind and made a more powerful impact in effecting change.

For example, when I did a workshop, I would intentionally break it up, so that my agenda might look like this:

1. Lecture.

2. Visualization led by me.

3. Breaking into small discussion groups.

4. Pairing into twosomes for a prosperity exercise.

5. More lecture.

6. Large group experience or game.

7. Individual sharing in whole group.

I would bounce back and forth, so that we never spent more than fifteen minutes in any one format, and thus it would never be boring and the mind would have to stay alert and keep paying attention. Scientists have since found that this is a way to activate more parts of the brain.  And I have no doubt that some of the people who subscribe to my monthly audio will expand their prosperity significantly even if they are already reading my blogs, or my books, or taking one-to-one coaching. Each of these reaches different parts of the brain, and the more forms you can use to take in information and inspiration, the more potent the internal mix will be.

As an aside, I have a dear friend who talks about all the books she reads, but she actually doesn’t read any books, she listens to them as audiobooks. For some people, including her, this is a great way to experience novels and nonfiction, especially as you can listen to a book on an iPod while doing other physical chores or driving.

But I assert that there is a part of the brain that isn’t getting exercised if you aren’t reading words on a page in a real book. People who choose one or the other form as the only way to experience books are missing out and depriving themselves and their brains.

So I caution and advise you that no matter how much value and pleasure and inspiration you may get from my monthly audios, don’t let them replace all the other ways of taking in information.

And as part of my commitment to create this mind mix, I am now learning some skills in producing videos, which I will add to my repertoire later this year. For it is also true that in addition to taking in stuff at a more potent level if you receive it in several different ways, delivering information in different ways also expands our horizons and mental skills.

Jerry

Moneylove “More Than” List For 2010

10 Reasons 2010 May Not Suck

These are not necessarily in order of importance or significance. In fact, #10 is one of my favorites.

1. You are committed to stop complaining this year.

www.acomplaintfreeworld.org

2. You are never too busy to stop and enjoy some fun, if only for a few minutes.

www.eatpes.com

3. No matter how good or bad your life was at the end of 2009, you are absolutely certain it will be better at the end of 2010.

4. You are sharing your abundance with others through your church, synagogue, mosque, fraternal organization, trade association, some private entity, or just on your own.

5. You are giving some of your valuable time to a worthy and/or passionate cause–whether reading to a blind person, attending a city council meeting, delivering food packages to the needy, writing a letter to the editor of your local paper, or commenting online on some blog post you particularly like.

6. You are doing something new, nurturing, and fun with your body. Whether it’s learning folk dances or the tango, getting involved with a new form of body work like The Alexander Technique or Rubenfeld Synergy Method or Rolfing, rock climbing, or jumping into a vat of warm chocolate pudding.

7. You are constantly discovering and exploring new adventures, new toys, and new learning experiences online.

8. You are mentoring someone, guiding them to greater success by sharing your experience and knowledge.

9. You are really feeling the newness of this new decade, and always have room in your life and consciousness for someone new or some new idea that will shake up your entire perspective on life.

10. You are regularly reading this blog. And are also constantly checking out  sources of new and positive thoughts and techniques for living life well and prosperously.

Some of these you may already be doing, some you may need to add as the year continues to unfold. Your own formula and pacing should prevail. But make no mistake about it, if you are living and feeling these ten suggestions, there is absolutely no way your life can suck in 2010.

Jerry

MoneyLove “Less Than” List For 2010

10 Reasons Your Life May Suck In This New Year

This list may provoke or anger or motivate you, but do remember it is just my opinion, not a proclamation handed down from Mount Olympus.

1.  You’ve had no intention of using this beginning of a new year and new decade to motivate and inspire yourself to new action.

2. You are complaining about the same stuff you complained about in 2009.

3. You haven’t reached out to a single new person in 2010.

4. You have no idea what you would ask for if a genie granted you 3 wishes.

5. You haven’t read a single book in the first month of the new year, fiction or nonfiction.

6. You couldn’t care less about Haiti.

7. You are cynical and pessimistic about politics and anything in Washington ever changing for the better.

8. You spend lots of time text messaging people you don’t care about that much about things you care about even less.

9. You use a lot of time joining silly games and communities on Social Media sites. (Yes, I mean Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc.)

10. You distribute dozens of things other people have said, quotes and aphorisms, rather than tapping into your own wisdom and coming up with your own philosophy.

None of these items are necessarily that destructive by themselves, but having several of them as current factors in your life is indicative of major stultification and stagnation.

And if you don’t see a call to action in this list, then good luck to you for the rest of the year.

Jerry

MoneyLove Is About Balance

“Show Me The Money” Is A Very Narrow View

As I stated emphatically in Moneylove over thirty years ago, prosperity is about a lot more than money. And I’ve been thinking a lot about balance in life, and how some people are a lot better at creating it than others. A large part of my new coaching sessions focuses on this aspect of success, and it’s very rewarding to see how it is possible to add a lot more balance to a life that has been teetering and tottering through imbalance.

So it was another one of my continuing serendipitous events that when I received the results of today’s Google Search Alert on my name, it contained a quote of mine and a link to a speech by someone named Bryan Dyson.

At first I thought it might be the guy who does all the ads for the vacuum cleaner he invented, or maybe a relative of Esther Dyson’s, a woman who is a pioneering major thinker in the cyber world. But on exploration, I found Bryan Dyson spent 35 years with Coca Cola, including several CEO stints. And he had this to say in a speech on the subject of balance:

Unique Path To Prosperity

Your Unique Personal Differential

This is a concept I came up with back in the early 1990s, inspired by marketing guru Harry Pickens, who said that the secret of marketing success was to find the one thing that sets you apart..and then let people know about it.

I was reminded of this by Rupa Cousins, one of the most unique women I know, with whom I am now brainstorming about where she takes her important and transformational work as an Alexander Teacher and practitioner of the Rubenfeld Synergy Method (you can find out more at
www.rupacousins.com). This is also impacted by her deep involvement in Peace Dances, and sacred dance practices, as demonstrated in her highly regarded workshop When Dance Becomes Prayer.

Rupa and I have separately come to the conclusion that this unique synergy of mind-body-spirit work, rather than needing to be a difficult challenge to explain, can be celebrated for its unique difference from anything else anyone else is doing.

So How Are You and Your Work Different?

Which brings us to you, and what you can take from this exploration. Rupa talks about uncovering your uniqueness, and suggests two important questions that we can all ask ourselves as we want to take our lives to the next level:

What is in the way of being your unique self, of living your unique vision?
What am I that is just me, not anyone else?

I wrote back in 1991:

You can do yourself a great service by exploring and exploiting your own uniqueness. What about you is unique, special, unusual, remarkable? When I ask myself that question the answer isn’t that I am successful or prosperous, but rather that I seem to have a lot more fun than a lot of other people have.

One of my all time favorite quotes is from Christopher Morley:

There Is Only One Success:
To Be Able To Spend Your Life In Your Own Way

And isn’t a new year in a new decade, in what I like to think of as a new start to The New Millennium, the perfect time to uncover and discover your own unique personal differential?
Jerry

And by the way, though not always focused on prosperity, you might also enjoy my more personal blog at www.JerryGillies.net

Prosperity Coaching – Restarting The New Millennium

New Millennium Prosperity Coaching With A Brand New Tool

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2010 milestone–the beginning of the second decade of this new millennium. And how so many of us had major dreams and aspirations for the turning of the new century and new millennium in 2000 that just haven’t materialized. Of course, the tragedy of 9/11 changed a lot about our perceptions of the world and perhaps it had a major impact on you. But here’s a new opportunity to make this a new time with new results in your life. To help accomplish this, as part of the preparation for doing a personal coaching session with me, I am creating a new version of a tool that has helped tens of thousands of people focus on their accomplishments, desires, and aspirations.

The Jerry Gillies New Year’s Questionnaire

It originally started as my contribution to a New Year’s evening at my apartment in Miami in 1976, the Bicentennial Year. I designed 76 questions each of us could answer for ourselves, and then discuss if we wished, about the year just gone by and our hopes and dreams for the one just beginning. This expanded in later years, and the questions kept evolving. Now I have come up with 110 Questions For 2010. And part of the emotional preparation for all of this is to look at 2010 as a restart of the New Millennium, a do over if you will.

Now here, I have to toot my own horn a bit. I am known for the power and potency of my questions. In fact, Dr. Wayne Dyer told me a list of questions I created for couples to ask and answer for each other in my first book was the single most valuable tool he had discovered when teaching a course in marriage counseling at St. Johns University.

What is different this time is that I am going to ask everyone who signs up for a one hour coaching session to answer these 110 questions, then send as many of the the answers as they are willing to share directly to me. I am asking that they send at least ten of their answers. I will read through them as my preparation for a very individual coaching session.

If you register, you will immediately receive the fourteen page questionnaire you can download or print. You can then highlight the answers that are most significant for you, or I will pick out several that we can discuss specifically during the actual coaching. So far as I know or have been able to discover, no other coach in the world offers this kind of advance preparation, this kind of honing in on the client’s specific needs. And quite honestly, in some early sampling of coaching clients, I have seen that this list of simple questions may be a powerful source of transformative inspiration worth far more than the coaching fee itself. Especially as it becomes a back-and-forth shared experience between the two of us.

One reason for this unique component of my coaching is that I want to start off with each client at a higher level of awareness. And that’s for each of us. Most coaches expect their clients to keep coming back, so that their wants and desires and needs will slowly but surely unfold over time. I am designing this offer so that one session will do it for you, move you into your next level of peak performance. Sure, I would love to have you continue to work with me. But not because you haven’t gotten full value in the first session and feel unfinished, rather because it has proved so valuable that you want more to add-on to your successful results.

For thirty years now, I have been teaching, writing, mentoring, coaching, and speaking about prosperity consciousness. And because of that wealth of experience, I know you can be richer than you are now. Despite the economy, despite your own doubts, despite having some negative beliefs that have held you down until now. In other words, in spite of everything you perceive as the reality of today, you can dramatically change your results by listening to someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who won’t let you get away with dawdling or dithering or delaying.

So here are five ways in which my coaching sessions are different and much more empowering.

1. Investment.

Having done one-to-one sessions in the past at $1000 per hour, I am now doing a test of a new approach, and want to make it accessible to people who have a burning desire to change their current situation, and will make good case histories for future books and seminars. $197 is the one-time, one session fee.

A personal note:

I know this is not the accepted practice–mentioning the price so soon up front goes against most conventional marketing wisdom. But I’ll confess I am letting my personal bias dictate my decision. I hate having to read my way through pages and pages of marketing ploys before I find out how much it’s going to cost me. I just received a sales letter email from a very famous and successful entrepreneur selling a course. I wanted to know how much he was charging, but had to scroll down past sixteen pages to finally find out this “$1597” value would cost me $277. The truth? My time wasted with reading sixteen pages should be compensated with at least $277 just to read all this hype.

(I have lots more to share with you–I want to provide as much information about what you’ll be getting as possible. But I also realize you may not want to read further, or you may already know this is the gift you are ready to give yourself right now. If this is true, you can leave this letter and go to the link below and sign up.)

2. Action-Oriented with Unique Follow-Up.

My purpose in creating this special series is to get you moving in your life, and I will design at least three specific strategies for you to implement, with a follow-up to check on how you are doing and to see whether your program needs tweaking or modifying in any specific way. You will be given three specific tasks to perform in a set amount of time. These will be based on your individual needs and desires, based on information from your answers to the 110 questions and what you discuss during the coaching session itself. You also will be given three additional, very individual questions to ponder on your own at the end of the coaching session. A week or two after your session, I will, by phone or email, personally contact you to see how you have been doing with your three tasks, and what you’ve learned from your three personal questions.

It’s not enough that I give you ideas and concepts that you find interesting or entertaining. My intention is not only to inspire and encourage, but to motivate and activate. If you aren’t putting this stuff into immediate practice in your life, it isn’t working. My whole motivating goal in putting out this unprecedented program is to move toward my long-range goal of producing a book incorporating many success stories of people who have used my techniques to make dramatic changes in their quality of life and standard of living. If you aren’t going to contribute to that result, I really would rather you didn’t participate.

3. Continuing coaching.

If you are excited about the process and your results and want to do some more sessions, I will personally design a continuing coaching program for you, taking into account your goals and desires, your available time, and your budget. But your initial commitment is just a one-time $97 investment–there will be no automatic debiting or billing thereafter–you will have the option to continue, but you will have to tell me directly you want to do so.

Here’s an area where many information marketers are condescending and deceptive. They don’t mention in the initial marketing material that they want you to keep on buying more and more of their products. Sometimes they go so far as to build in a continuing monthly debit that will be charged to your credit card or bank account if you don’t read the small print and figure out how to cancel it.
I abhore and deplore these tactics–they make my skin crawl. On the other hand, if you decide you want more, and only because the initial coaching session works for you and helps you make immediate progress in your life, I would love to keep working with you, and will make you a very special offer at a very special rate.

After the first session, or even before if you know you will want more than one such experience, you may sign up for five coaching sessions that can be spread out over a six month period at the price of less than four sessions. 5 for $750.

4. Additional free material.

You will immediately be put on a special list and receive weekly email prosperity messages and ideas before they appear in future books, on my blogs, or in any other form. This is a two-way street and win-win proposition, as I will ask for your feedback and reports on any positive results you have putting these ideas and suggestions to use. And as I come upon audios, videos, reports and trainings that pertain to your particular issues, I will forward these to you regularly. Just as you may email friends those things you think they will be most interested in of find most useful, I will do the same for my coaching clients.

5. Free recording.

You will receive an MP3 recording of your coaching session so that you won’t have to be distracted taking notes during your session. And instructions on making the most of this recording for your own success.
Another two-way street and win-win situation. I will also have a copy of the session and may want to use parts of it in seminars, or on my blogs, and by signing up for a coaching/consultation, you agree to have it recorded, though your name won’t ever be used, unless you give specific permission to do so.

Buying Your Ticket For Transportation To Your Future Success

I know you are probably used to a lot of hyperbole about the value of various programs–everyone does it–telling you this is $5000 worth of materials you are getting for $39.95, etc. Where I choose to be different is that I have actually been paid $1000 for personal coaching sessions. And the people who paid me this, fans of the original Moneylove bestselling book, or of my Nightingale-Conant cassette program, were excited to have my personal attention and more than willing to pay that amount, and no one ever took advantage of my money-back satisfaction guarantee. I keep the names of all such clients confidential, but you would be surprised at some of the major figures in the world of motivation and success who saw their careers take off after one or more sessions with me.
Actually, though I could be a bit deceptive and use this in a bold print headline, I have been paid as much as $5000 for a one hour coaching session. However, this amount was paid at a charity auction, and the money went to the charity rather than into my pocket. But the client said it was worth every penny and continued with several more sessions (at a considerably lower price, I’ll admit).
And I’ve a lot more experience and knowledge now, so my coaching sessions are even more valuable.

Your Decision To Take The Next Step
And unlike anyone else selling this kind of program, I am not going to tell you that it’s time for you to take the next step in your life. That’s your decision, and I don’t want you as a coaching client if you are not yet ready to take the plunge, to start doing things differently and thinking new thoughts in order to get new and different results. If you know in your heart you are ready for this, then welcome. If not, I wish you well, and perhaps another time. Yes, it may be a lot more expensive then, but the truth is if you are ready then but not now, it will be money well spent, and a wait wisely worth it.

I hate false ultimatums. So I’m not going to tell you I’m only taking on so many clients and that’s it, or claim that this offer is only good for the next week or month or 24 hours. But obviously, as I am highly focused on creating my blogs and my revised and annotated new edition of Moneylove for early release next year, there is a limited amount of time I am willing to devote to this. When I’ve filled up what I consider to be a reasonable coaching schedule, I will withdraw the offer. Some of my superstar friends in the motivational world already are telling me I should charge $1000 for these sessions. One recently said to me, “Your work changed my life and made me a millionaire several times over. If anyone is charging a thousand dollars for an hour of coaching, it should certainly be the author of Moneylove.”

Your Coach’s Commitment

So here’s my commitment. I will deliver to you a coaching session with the intention of making it worth $1000 an hour. It may be a subtle difference, but when we start our session, I want the kind of attention from you as if you were paying $1000, and I will give you the same elegant, high-end attention. This is only worth it for me and you if it produces results. I’m not going to be satisfied to accept your money and then send you on your merry way. I want to know what is happening in your life, and how effectively you are using my ideas, and how you may be tailoring them to your own situation. We are entering into much more of a partnership than most coach-client relationships.

Are You Ready?

And I am not going to talk you into this, or keep sending you marketing letters with more enticing offers. This is my best offer, and you know right now whether now is the time and place in your life to move forward in this way. If you can’t make a decision, then you are not ready and I am not interested in having you as a client. I do not want to spend my limited time trying to train wishy-washy, uncertain, uncommitted clients. It’s too much work with no payoff in terms of satisfaction for me. When you’ve been doing this for thirty years, you know immediately who is going to get positive results because they are willing, ready, and able to make immediately changes in their current patterns, and who isn’t going to succeed because they are stuck in old habits of indecision, doubt, and fear. Are you one of the ready ones? You tell me–you’re the only one who can.

The Moneylove New Millennium Challenge

The Start Of A New Millennium And None Too Soon!

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I have been writing about seeing 2010 as the opportunity to have a do over of The New Millennium, which has been pretty disappointing for most people. Two questions in my 110 Questions For 2010 list address this:

What one word or phrase best describes your experience of the first decade of the new century?

Did you accomplish the following in relationship to your expectations in 1999 for the then impending New Millennium?
___Everything I wanted and more.
___Most of what I wanted.
___Hardly anything I wanted or desired.
___Nothing I planned or expected.

Of course, for me, answering this type of question is a basic no-brainer. On New Year’s 2000, I was in a cell at Pleasant Valley State Prison. I just spent Christmas visiting my cellmate from then, Keith Crawford. We reminisced about staying up all night and watching the festive celebrations around the world for the dawn of the New Millennium. A very hopeful and optimistic time–it just didn’t work out that way for most people.

In one sense, I think it might be useful to adopt for the past decade that same attitude often recommended in talking about another person, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” In which case, you wouldn’t hear a mention of 2000-2009. But, in another sense, it probably is important to put a label on the decade just ending so we are free to move into a new one, and my recommended do over of the entire start of the New Millennium. On ABC’s This Week, in their online Green Room segment, the four Roundtable panelists were asked to name the decade just ending.

David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times, and perhaps my favorite pundit even though we don’t share political views, said he would have to go with The Decade of Hate because of Islamic extremism and domestic political hatred. Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Economics Paul Krugman, also a NY Times columnist, said it was The Big Zero with “zero job growth, zero gain in stocks, zero credibility for our financial system. Lots of things came up empty and we didn’t get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive.”

Washington Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus said instead of a decade called “aughts,” it should be known as The Decade Of Oughts because “We ought to have got things under control and we didn’t. It was a wasted decade.”

And, finally, Republican strategist Malcolm Dowd said it was The Loss Of Illusion Decade “because on 9/11 we lost the illusion that we were safe here in our country, we lost the illusion that we were somehow financially safe, we lost illusions about all the major institutions, and it was appropriate that it was all capped at the end by the Tiger Woods episode, which destroyed the illusion that he was a totally focused and disciplined athlete who only had his mind on his golf game.” But Dowd was optimistic that we are now ready for a decade of reality and truth.

I agree, the dismal performance of these past ten years sets us up beautifully for a new start, a rare and precious time for a do over. So Happy New Year and Happy New Millennium.
Jerry

Moneylove 2009 Man Of The Year

He’s A Lot Smarter Than He Looks!

Not that he looks dumb, he’s just so damn young. But, having just turned 21 a few days ago, Michael Dunlop straddles the world of online entrepreneurship with a masterful touch, an incisive mastery of his chosen field, and a generosity of spirit in the way he does his life and his businesses.

He also turned out to be my answer to one of my 110 Questions For 2010, namely:

What person, man or woman, do you think will have more importance and significance in your life in 2010 than they did in 2009?

I first met Michael through his father, Barry, who has been my main Internet mentor since he wrote me a fan letter saying what a major impact Moneylove had on his life. They’re both located in Sussex, England, but their online operations are worldwide. One of the first things that impressed me about Michael was that he has done something few modern young men do: followed in his father’s footsteps by choosing the same career of Internet entrepreneurship. And unlike a lot of sons who have tried this throughout history, I suspect Michael will eventually far surpass his Dad’s accomplishments despite Barry’s successful and creatively enterprising online presence (Sorry, Barry, I have to call them the way I see them). I wrote about Michael a few weeks ago in the post, Moneylove Minds, Moneylove Mentors, but that was just scratching the surface of this young man’s triumphs. He started his first website at the age of sixteen, and now has at least six. The ones I like best are:

www.IncomeDiary.com
www.RetireAt21.com
www.WebDesignDev.com

My very favorite is Income Diary, as on this site Michael puts more valuable free information on doing business online and creating successful blogs than any other website I’ve found. I have recommended the site to several friends and colleagues and they all report finding things of great value in his content. He is a master at finding and getting to know the most innovative people doing Internet business–and maybe more important, the people who are doing it with integrity and who are walking their online talk.

Michael is very forthright about his dyslexia and the fact that he’s a college dropout, but whatever deficiencies and challenges he faced he has more than overcome by conquering the world of cyber language, and developing an uncanny grasp of how the Internet works and what its real possibilities are. I have often believed that no one really yet understands the true power of this phenomenon, but Michael certainly comes closer than most to getting it, and passing it on. In the way he shares the people he meets and the new information he gets, he is an exemplary example of the “Pay It Forward” concept.

He was an easy choice for my first Moneylove Man Of The Year. Frankly, if I could afford him and he was willing, I would hire Michael to run all my online operations. And he’d probably be able to do it with one eye shut, one hand tied behind his back, and part-time.
Jerry

Moneylove Musings On Happiness

DOES LOTS OF MONEY EQUAL LOTS OF HAPPINESS?

This is such a multifaceted area of debate that the same person from the same perspective and life experience can sometimes argue both sides of the issue. There is lots of evidence–that gathered by studying big lottery winners, for example–to the effect that money doesn’t buy happiness, maybe even the opposite. And before you weigh in on the subject, here’s a challenge. As you know from my recently announced 110 Questions For 2010, I am a strong advocate of asking oneself provocative questions to find out stuff that lies deeper than the surface. So here’s yours now, which I am myself going to answer in this very moment:

Can you name three instances in your life when money did buy you happiness?

Here is where I challenge myself. And the first one is easy.

1. My very expensive cat, Hobbes, a Bengal–the new breed involving a cross between a domestic cat and a Wild Asian Leopard Cat. Though no longer with us, he was an amazing and endlessly affectionate and interesting creature. Now, my first two cats, Brandy and Lucifer, a Siamese couple, were inherited when a relationship ended. And I can’t say I got more pleasure from Hobbes than from the ones I got free, but there is no way I could have gotten him free, and he was unique in many ways.

2. A more current event: my recent purchase of gourmet imported olives. Definitely beyond a limited budget, and a delight each time I add a few of them, like my new favorite olives with Cloves and Cinnamon, to a salad. And countless delicious meals I’ve had in restaurants over the years. Yes, I could be quite happy without them, even during my years in prison. But part of what brought me joy in those years in a bleak and dehumanizing environment were the memories of some of those meals.

3. Courses, classes, workshops, and lectures. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on these over the years and can hardly think of a single one that didn’t enthuse and delight and inspirit me. More than worth every penny.

So how did you do coming up with your own list of three? The easier it was for you, the more it indicates how well you use money in your life. Money does not automatically buy happiness, but with a little imagination and a willingness to treat yourself well, it can certainly do so. And it relates to one of my favorite personal affirmations:

I deserve lots of money because I use it so well.

There have been lots of studies showing a relationship between success/prosperity and happiness. I think some of the dissatisfaction now present in the land may very well have to do with the fact that, due to recent setbacks in the general economy, people have pulled back on spending and are saving lots more. There’s nothing wrong with saving, but it shouldn’t be done out of fear that may not be realistic, and it should be done when it makes you happier than not saving.

GOOD TIMES NOT NECESSARILY HAPPIER TIMES

In all fairness, I should mention that most studies do show that people in general are not any happier during good times than they are during bad times–except for those at the very lowest levels of income. When lack of money forces you to have two meals a day instead of three, or to live in a box instead of a nice apartment or house, money and happiness are definitely connected. On the other hand, one study showed that lottery winners were not happier than a control group. And happiness is probably a genetically inherited state in many cases, which means that some people are more disposed to being happy than others. This has been shown in research on identical twins separated at birth, who grew up in very different environments and financial situations, but seemed equally happy or unhappy independent of these circumstances. Personally fascinating to me are studies that show prisoners are not any more miserable than non-prisoners. Granted, like lottery winners, prisoners go through an initial period of dealing with this traumatic change in their lives, but then they get used to their situation and revert to their normal levels of happiness or unhappiness. I can attest to this, as I have to say that I was a happy and optimistic prison inmate for twelve years.

Though we may be predisposed to be happy or not, we can change our levels of happiness by conscious effort. By filling our consciousness with happy events, even happy purchases. Even more important, hanging out with happy people. Or reading blogs like this one, written by an extremely happy person who plans to get even happier as he gets richer.
Jerry

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