This quote, which I actually really like, is from the 1996 book, "Life's Little Instruction Book," which is a collection of Jackson Brown's advice for his son, Jackson Brown, Jr. (it was Junior who compiled it into a book). So how did this become an overly-memed quote falsely attributed to the Dalai Lama?
In 1999, a chain email called "Nepalese Good Luck Tantra Totem" went around, and apparently, it never died, it just went through a kind of digital telephone tag until someone assumed that these "Nepalese sayings" could only have come from the Dalai Lama. And the rest, of course, is meme history.
Some might think that crediting the wrong person for this quote is harmless. That the point was to spread positivity and inspiration. Why do we need to bother getting the source right? It's because these harmless things, these little misses, often turn out to cause the biggest trouble.
Today's climate of political and community division, the harmful conspiracy theories and fake news sites that fuel hatred, violence and murder -- remember this all started somewhere. This started from small, "harmless" words, misused and uncredited. The same way this popular meme started with a "harmless" email that didn't credit the original author. The way that email became so popular that the meme machine eventually pounced on it, and snuck the image of the Dalai Lama in there because Buddhism was a trend that engaged their target market.
It all starts with these little dishonesties and lies of omission that add up, until lying becomes habitual, normalized and monetized. Feel-good lying has become a profitable industry, and it has given us the dystopian world we have today.
The source matters. Proper credit matters. Truth matters. Words matter.
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Sources:
Mikkelson, David, "Dalai Lama Instructions for Life," Snopes, 2007.
Brown, Jackson Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book. Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.