… excluding deliberate parodies, of course. We have one rotating on the screen for the poor folks on the phones across the office from me that says (complete with total lack of punctuation):
If opportunity
doesn’t knock
build a door
… as if having more doors will magically attract more knockers (so to speak). The floor is now open for further nominations!
I think the whole “In 100 years it won’t matter whether I [blah blah blah], but that I made a difference in the life of a child,” steals the bullshit pie and leaves an explosive fake behind.
Actually none of them work for me. I love the demotivator calendars though. Every year I give me mother in law one and I list our wedding anniversary as “Can you believe she’s still married to that SOB?” or some such. She loves them.
“Winter teaches a naked woman to knit.” … if we assume that yarn and needles are free, and that you can learn to knit just by examining yarn (without needing, say, lessons), and she doesn’t freeze to death or get arrested for indecent exposure in the time it takes to learn.
Stupid and callous.
Why would it have to be a naked woman? Wouldn’t a naked man have the same reason to learn to knit?
I like when you go in people’s kitchens and they have signs on the walls that say “EAT.” Or a sign that says “dream” over their bed. Yeah, that’s gonna help.
There’s a radio commercial airing here that says “You can’t fix the economy, but you want to make gay marriage legal?”
Hey, Stupid. Ever hear of the marraige tax?
Two from real life:
Keychains that said “Do it right the first time.” I kept expecting to flip it over and see “Or else.”
The second was a whole theme, complete with mousepads, “Failure is not an option.” It was for a massive administrative project that, sure, it had to be done, it was work, but lives most definitely did not hang in the balance.
A motivational slogan I’ve seen on promotional gear for the US Marine Corps: Pain is weakness leaving the body. :rolleyes:
I’ll remember that next time I get a migraine.
Whaaa…? Where did you see this?
“Success is not an option”
http:// FAIL Blog - Epic FAILs funny videos - Funny Fails - Cheezburger (Mildly NSFW)
Obviously, a naked man would simply kill a bear with his bare hands and cuddle up in the warm, steaming entrails. They just didn’t think that would look good on poster.
Because necessity is the mother of invention?
From way back when…
THINK
If I plan to learn, I must learn to plan. Seen in various classrooms from elementary school to college.
Okay, so before you can learn, you have to be able to plan, but in order to plan, you have to learn to do it, which you can’t do, because planning is a prerequisite for learning. Ergo, you’re fucked from the outset and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is an excellent message to send to students.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that the sentiment itself is blatantly untrue, and thank god for that. If I had gone through life learning only the things I had actively planned to learn, I would be one ignorant SOB, and wouldn’t we all.
Alternately, there’s the interpretation that it’s not saying that unplanned learning is impossible, but merely that planned learning requires planning beforehand. In that case, I’d respond that long cat is long, and useless tautology is useless.
I know I’ve spent far more time and energy hating that poster than it probably warrants, but its prevalence combined with its nonsensicality pisses me off.
I could use a sign on my 'fridge that says FAT ASS.
I hate this one. The reality, in almost any life situation, and especially in almost any business situation, is that failure is an option and should remain on the table. The alternative is to squander endless resources on hopeless causes.
How about one in the bathroom that says STRAIN.
No, he just finds that naked woman who just knitted that sweater and steals it.
IMHO, pretty much every “motivational” saying stinks - when used as a broad-brush, state-it-like-a-universal-truth type cliche.
But I use this one in the middle of project management conversations a lot. My company is very, very small, and we often have folks who come from much bigger companies starting with us. As we come up on a project, they will start off with expecting a huge budget, like when their Fortune 300 company hires a big consulting firm. So, as part of the discussion, I will say "well, we have about 1/10 of that budget, if that - but since failure is not an option, how can we achieve a similar result with the resources we have on hand? (so, yeah, I go for the Apollo 13 reference) It helps re-frame the situation and gets them brainstorming from a place that better suits what my company needs…
So - yeah, if someone popped off with that in a random The Office sort of way, I would want to kill them, but when it applies and you are making the point that we have to work past the assumptions we may have, it can be helpful…