Moneylove Redux

Stop Regurgitating Old Food For Thought

For the first time in my entire long life, I have used the word “redux,” even looking it up in a few sources, where the consensus seems to be that it means something “brought back.” As I do from time to time, just to keep up with the latest in prosperity thinking, I have been listening to audios, watching videos, reading articles and book excerpts on the subject of prosperity. I want to make certain that much of my material for my monthly Moneylove Club audios is new, cutting edge—and building on solid past information rather than merely chewing it up and spitting it out largely unchanged. So I find I’m not really guilty of just repeating all those ideas from Moneylove, but just about everyone else is!

Flattering But Disturbing All The Same

Of course, being only human, I am somewhat flattered that so many prominent prosperity teachers are just repeating what I originally said thirty-some years ago, or what Napoleon Hill said seventy-five years ago. But it also disturbs me that so many of them are so lazy they won’t allow the original material to stimulate at least a few new ideas. I remember something my friend and favorite Renaissance Man, Ray Bradbury, once told me. He said that he often tells new writers to take one of his many published short stories and rework it, maybe create a completely different ending. Ray said he considers this being just as original as starting from scratch.

But that is not what many of today’s aspiring prosperity gurus are doing–they’re just repeating my old stuff with the same exact ending. Even I’m allowing some of that material to stimulate new ideas and exercises and thought processes. It’s all part of an even bigger issue, the eroding attention spans of Americans. In my old career of broadcast journalism, it’s increasingly evident that reporters and commentators today are too lazy to do their homework, to research basic background information. Once someone reports a story, even if it’s filled with inaccuracies no one has bothered to fact check, it gets repeated over and over and over again on the air and in newspapers and magazines. No wonder so many politicians can get away with misinformation and lies.

A challenge I set myself whenever I write an article or record an audio is to come up with at least one sentence that expresses an idea I’ve never expressed before, and so far as I can find out, no one else has either. There are several in my January audio, one of which is:

Our perceptions of others either expand or contract our possibilities in any transactions with them.

This is a thought I’ve never considered before, and it provokes even more thought on the whole subject of perceptions and possibilities. What I mean by it this that how I see you, what I perceive about you, whether true or inaccurate, either limits or expands the results I can get in any exchange with you–personal or commercial. I imagine you can see how this could stimulate a whole workshop on the subject, perhaps looking at how we perceive others and how this affects our own actions and their responses. I expect to do a lot more thinking about this particular subject, and you can watch this space for future ponderings in this area.

But back to my point. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with some new ideas–we all have the mental resources to do this. The trend, however, is to redo the redux until we have no idea what we’re doing. Look at Broadway musicals as one example of this. At one time, they were one of the great original art forms. Now, mostly, they are warmed over insipid copies of former hits. Or musical copies of non-musical plays or movies. If we finally make public contact with extraterrestials, some producer will come up with the brilliant idea of doing Oklahoma with an all-Martian cast.

I think it may be time to do a useful redux and bring back the once widely popular THINK sign. Thanks to Google, I just found out it was originally introduced by IBM’s Thomas J. Watson, Sr. in 1911. We are long overdue for a resurgence of its popularity and desperately need its message.

And if you are willing to accept it, here is a homework assignment for you. Sometime in the next week, think an entirely new thought.  Share it with a few people. Sooner or later some lazy so-and-so will repeat it to you as if it was their idea all along.

Jerry