Life & Wisdom Quote by Jerry Gillies

Gillies is smuggling a hard-edged warning into the soft packaging of self-help: your imagination is not neutral territory. "Visualize" sounds private, even spiritual, but he frames it as a contested space where other people's ambitions can squat in your head rent-free. The line works because it treats desire as something that can be outsourced without you noticing. Not coerced, not openly stolen - just quietly overwritten by expectations that arrive disguised as love, advice, or "being realistic."

The specificity of "really want" does a lot of labor. It implies a split between surface wants (the ones that earn approval) and deeper wants (the ones that might cost you status). Gillies isn't just promoting positive thinking; he's challenging the social economy around aspiration. Parents, partners, bosses, even the broader culture all offer pre-made scripts: stable career, respectable milestones, palatable dreams. Visualizing "what someone else wants for you" is the mental version of living in borrowed clothes - it fits well enough to get you through public life, while slowly erasing your silhouette.

Contextually, Gillies comes out of the late-20th-century motivation and visualization boom, an era that promised inner control in a world of corporate hierarchies and mass media persuasion. That backdrop makes the quote less airy and more defensive. It's about reclaiming authorship. If your goals are partly hallucinated by someone else's approval meter, then even success can feel like a misdiagnosis: impressive results, wrong patient.