Borrowed Wisdom
You've been quoting your way to nowhere for years.
INITIATING_TRANSMISSION
AUTHOR: Profit
ORIGIN: 41st and Vernon, Queensbridge
CURRENT_LOCATION: Oxxo, Tijuana, MX
STATUS: Confrontational
CLASSIFICATION: RAW_AUDIT // BORROWED_WISDOM // STOP_REPEATING
You’ve been quoting your way to nowhere for years.
I’m not gonna be nice about it.
//THE_LIST
Here they are. Every single one. The greatest hits of people who ran out of original thoughts and started borrowing someone else’s.
Read them. Feel the familiarity. Then ask yourself how many of these you’ve posted, shared, saved, or repeated out loud like they were yours.
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
“Your vibe attracts your tribe.”
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”
“Hustle until your haters ask if you’re hiring.”
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”
“Done is better than perfect.”
“Your network is your net worth.”
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
“Stay close to people who feel like sunlight.”
“Distance yourself from negativity and great things will happen.”
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
“The quieter you become the more you are able to hear.”
“Surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you.”
“Don’t count the days, make the days count.”
“Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and think of what could go right.”
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal.”
“Chase the vision, not the money.”
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
Read all 25?
Good.
Now tell me one original thought you’ve had this week.
//THE_PROBLEM
None of these are wrong. That’s the trap.
They contain just enough truth to feel profound. Just enough vagueness to apply to anything. Just enough borrowed authority to make you feel like you said something when you repeated this shit.
You didn’t say something. You echoed something.
The person who wrote “your vibe attracts your tribe” had a specific thought, in a specific moment, from a specific life. When you repeat it you’re wearing someone else’s clothes and calling it your style.
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
Says who. Based on what. Did you test that shit? Did you look at your five people and do the math. Or did you just nod because Jim Rohn said it and Jim Rohn had a LinkedIn following.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.”
Einstein didn’t say that. Nobody famous said that. It appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet in 1981. The internet gave it to Einstein because the truth wasn’t impressive enough. You’ve been quoting a recovery program and crediting a physicist. Haha.
That’s the whole game right there in however many examples I gave.
Let’s consider some more.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world Gandhi didn’t say that either. Not like that. What he actually said was longer, more specific, and about the relationship between personal conduct and political action. What got turned into a bumper sticker lost the part that required you to do something. The version that survived is the version that costs you nothing.
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” This one gets repeated in youth sports and corporate motivational posters and it sounds like fairness. It isn’t. It’s a fantasy dressed up as meritocracy. Hard work beats talent in a vacuum. In the real world, talent with resources beats hard work almost every single time. The system the quote lives inside doesn’t get mentioned. It never does.
//THE_REAL_DISEASE
The quotes aren’t the problem. The habit is.
The habit of reaching for someone else’s words when you have something to say. The habit of performing wisdom instead of developing it. The habit of mistaking recognition for resonance, you share something that gets 47 likes and you feel like you communicated something when all you did was confirm what people already believed.
That’s applause farming. Way to go champ.
Montgomery told me once, in the Walmarts parking lot near the seasonal aisle, that he had a pamphlet for every quote on the internet. I asked him why. He said: “Because if it fits on a pamphlet it probably fits on nothing else.”
I’ve been thinking about that for three years.
//WHAT_ACTUALLY_WORKS
Your life has produced something none of those 25 quotes have.
Specificity.
The specific thing that happened to you. The specific way you survived it. The specific conclusion you came to that nobody handed you because nobody else was standing where you were standing when you figured it out.
That’s the thought worth sharing. That’s the thing that makes someone stop scrolling. That’s what actually moves people off the comfortable middle ground where everybody nods and nobody changes.
“Your vibe attracts your tribe” never made anyone cry.
“It took the literal worst thing that ever happened to me to become whole again and I didn’t ask for it either” made someone stop breathing for a second. That someone was me.
One of those is a quote. The other one is a life.
//THE_CLOSE
You’ve been given a mind that processes the world in a way nobody else does. Your specific coordinates, where you were born, what you survived, what you lost, what you built anyway, produced a lens nobody else has. NOBODY.
And you’re out here repeating someone else’s pamphlet.
Stop borrowing shit. Start building.
The original thought is already in you. It’s just harder to say than something with 47,000 likes on LinkedIn. Fuck Linkedin.
SYSTEM_LOG: BORROWED_WISDOM
QUOTES_AUDITED: 25
ORIGINAL_THOUGHTS_DETECTED: 0
EINSTEIN_QUOTE_ACCURACY: False
SOURCE: Narcotics Anonymous, 1981
YOUR_LIFE: Unquoted. Still waiting.
MONTGOMERY_STATUS: Has a pamphlet for all of this
STATUS: Say your own thing
Say it anyway.
//END OF TRANSMISSION
-Profit
Fuck LinkedIn! And I love the fact you spoke on this. So many of these quotes are often taken out of context to suit personal needs of people who wouldn't know the first thing about original thought. Your writing continues to make me rethink my entire life.
💖