Just Do It #2

Quick, throwaway "motivational" phrases can be helpful, especially when you're exhausted and your body's drenched in adrenalin, and the buffer zones of carefully-constructed cognition are crumbling in the face of your inner waaah that just wants to give up and go home and, incidentally, eat a large plate of biscuits, or possibly ALL THE CHEESE.  So this tag series is for those small, pre-fabricated tools that help me get the chuff on with it.

So my latest auto-Tweet sharing this blog got favourited by @Inside_Tracker. I went to have a look, and they have some doozies of those cheesy inspirational bon mots that I implicated in my last post on this tag.

Oh, some of them are pretty good, don't get me wrong: 

"It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop."

and

"It's never a question of can you, but will you?"

which, okay, has some grammar issues all its own, but is reminiscent of that Ayn Rand quote that I have up on my desk at work, in its Zen Pencils form:

"The question isn't who is going to let me but who is going to stop me."

Quite a flawed individual, that Ayn Rand, but that doesn't make her statement any less true, or any less useful to people who've suffered from a form of training that leads them to expect to need permission to follow their ambitions.

Anyway, there are some properly silly quotes there too:

"There is no elevator to success; you have to take the stairs."

which is patently a lie (cronyism, inherited wealth, nepotism, blackmail, etc.), and:

"Training is the opposite of hoping,"

which is madness, because surely you need hope to start and persist through training. Surely "wishing" would work better there.

My favourite, though, is:

"Clear your mind of can't."

because I want to remove the apostrophe and send it back to them.

:)

Got sent some great links to motivational phrases by Theodore Roosevelt (among others) in the wake of the last post in this tag. Ima check those out and see if any can turn into tiny "come on, one more push"-type tools and will - of course! - share if they do.

Any of you got any more for me?