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

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 Quote Goes Around The World

A Friday Morning Surprise

So imagine my surprise, having been absent without leave from the world at large for twelve years, to wake up this morning and be greeted by The Motivational Quote Of The Day on my email from Nightingale-Conant, a quote that reaches tens of thousands of people, including many movers and shakers. It was one of my old Moneylove quotes, uttered more than a generation before the popularity of The Law Of Attraction. Here it is:

“Wealth Is Not A Material Gain, But A
State Of Mind.”

In some ways this is no big deal. After all, NC puts one of these quotes out every day. On the other hand, with all the top people in the field of human growth, motivation, and spiritual development–people like Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, even the late Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale and Dale Carnegie–they picked me, describing me as an author and speaker and radio personality (It’s been over 30 years since I’ve been on radio regularly.) I don’t know what archive they searched to find that quote, but as a good friend pointed out to me, they probably don’t even know I recently paroled from 12 years in prison.

So I am not going to let my head get too inflated with this, but I will allow it to re-inspire me, to remind me that a lot of my ideas have a degree of permanence unusual in this “here today, gone tomorrow” soundbite world we live in. And also, it will motivate me to come up with newer and more powerful quotes, as I think this one is a bit archaic, especially considering that it was once a cutting edge thought.

My prison experience taught me some valuable lessons that eventually will be featured in a book, but one thought I will share now, a quote I like even more than my old one:

“Freedom Is Not Wide Open Spaces, But A
Wide Open Mind.”

Jerry