Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Gillies

Jerry Gillies is selling something subtler than hustle: permission. The line reassures would-be earners that error isn’t disqualifying; it’s part of the job description. That’s an especially American comfort, rooted in self-help’s favorite alchemy: turn embarrassment into “lesson,” failure into “feedback,” chaos into a curriculum. The phrasing is key. “People who make money” isn’t “the rich,” or “the lucky,” but a behavioral category, like a club you can join if you adopt the right mindset. Money becomes less a material outcome than a psychological identity.

The subtext is entrepreneurial triage. Mistakes and “major setbacks” aren’t denied, they’re normalized, but only to be instrumentalized. Pain is permitted on the condition that it produces utility. That’s both empowering and quietly coercive: if every setback is a lesson, then a setback that doesn’t yield progress is almost a moral failure. Gillies places belief at the center - “they believe they will eventually prosper” - which turns prosperity into something like destiny for the properly disciplined. Structural forces (timing, privilege, markets, illness) vanish offstage, replaced by a personal narrative you can manage.

Context matters: Gillies wrote in a late-20th-century culture that increasingly treated the self as a small business, primed for risk-taking and constant optimization. The quote works because it flatters the reader’s agency while laundering uncertainty into inevitability. It’s optimism with a ledger: you can be wrong, even repeatedly, as long as you keep converting the wreckage into forward motion.