Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Gerber

Gerber’s line flatters you and scolds you in the same breath, and that’s the point: it’s motivational rhetoric built to make passivity feel vaguely embarrassing. The sentence sets up a clean moral binary - “great people” versus “everyone else” - then anchors it in a simple grammatical trick. Great people are the subjects of the verb (“create”), while everyone else becomes the object (“is created”). Agency isn’t just the theme; it’s baked into the syntax, turning self-authorship into a kind of adulthood and drift into a kind of childish dependence on whatever happens next.

The intent is practical, not poetic. Gerber’s career sits in the self-made, entrepreneurial lane (think systems, ownership, design-your-business) where “life” often functions as a euphemism for work habits, risk tolerance, and whether you built a plan or merely endured a schedule. In that context, “actively” doesn’t mean living loudly; it means choosing constraints on purpose: setting priorities, building routines, creating structures that don’t rely on mood or luck.

The subtext is a very American kind of pressure: if your life feels stalled, the most available culprit is you. That’s empowering in the way a hard deadline is empowering, but it also quietly erases friction - class, caretaking, illness, discrimination - everything that can “create” a life regardless of willpower. The quote works because it’s a clean, exportable identity test: do you want to be the author or the character? Even if the dichotomy is unfair, the provocation is effective.