"What you do is more important than how much you make, and how you feel about it is more important than what you do"
About this Quote
Gillies slips a quiet insurgency into the language of career advice: he demotes money, then demotes the job title itself, leaving subjective meaning as the final authority. The sentence is built like a set of trapdoors. First, it nudges you off the salary scoreboard - a culture that treats income as a moral sorting hat. Then it pulls the rug from the next prestige metric: the work itself. What remains is interior, harder to fake, and harder to outsource: how you feel about your life when you wake up and when you come home.
The intent isn’t to romanticize poverty or sneer at ambition. It’s to reframe the hierarchy of values in a way that makes our usual bragging rights look flimsy. Gillies is talking to the modern worker who has learned to speak fluently in compensation packages and LinkedIn verbs while privately feeling numb. The subtext is blunt: if you’re miserable, a “good” job becomes an expensive costume; if you’re engaged, even imperfect work can carry dignity. That last clause also hints at agency. Feelings aren’t just weather; they can be informed by alignment, boundaries, and self-respect.
Context matters: Gillies’s era watched work become identity at scale, then watched identity become brand. His line reads like a pre-emptive antidote to hustle culture before it had a name. It’s a reminder that the most consequential metric isn’t market value but psychological cost - and that the most radical career move might be refusing to let external measures finish the sentence for you.
The intent isn’t to romanticize poverty or sneer at ambition. It’s to reframe the hierarchy of values in a way that makes our usual bragging rights look flimsy. Gillies is talking to the modern worker who has learned to speak fluently in compensation packages and LinkedIn verbs while privately feeling numb. The subtext is blunt: if you’re miserable, a “good” job becomes an expensive costume; if you’re engaged, even imperfect work can carry dignity. That last clause also hints at agency. Feelings aren’t just weather; they can be informed by alignment, boundaries, and self-respect.
Context matters: Gillies’s era watched work become identity at scale, then watched identity become brand. His line reads like a pre-emptive antidote to hustle culture before it had a name. It’s a reminder that the most consequential metric isn’t market value but psychological cost - and that the most radical career move might be refusing to let external measures finish the sentence for you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Happiness |
|---|
More Quotes by Jerry
Add to List
