I don’t like motivational fitness posters. I feel like they’re more about cleverness than they are about 
motivation. They always take a phrase and then slightly twist the nouns, like “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” You can just make those up. “It’s not the height of the grass when you cut it, it’s the height of the cut grass.”
Motivational posters don’t really motivate me. They just make me feel bad for like 10 seconds. I think, “Hey…that’s pretty clever. I should probably work out instead of finishing this bag of chips.” But when it comes down to it, I just want to eat chips. And no poster is going to stop me from doing that. I used to “like” those images, but I feel like it sends the wrong message when I encourage that which encourages.
I fully understand how jacked up that sounds. Every goal ever set or reached stemmed from some sort of motivation, and motivation increases with encouragement. But I think that there are times when we set goals thinking about what it would be like when we reached the end and not always thinking about the work that it would take to get there. I imagine myself with a six pack. I don’t imagine myself working out. All goals start with good intentions. But nothing really changes unless we push past the part that’s holding us back. Without any real personal motivation behind it, you’re just gonna be a dude with a bag of chips.
To me, motivation and encouragement are emotions that are usually fueled by words. And that’s because I feel like words can do so much. They carry so much power and meaning, but can be so confusing at the same time. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people confuse “your” and “you’re.” It’s such a small mistake, but it seriously pisses me off. I feel like the biggest forehead-slap-inducing action is when someone is trying to correct a grammatical error and messes up the sentence used to point out the correction.
Person A: “This jacket cost me a armenian leg but its worth it.” (Posts a selfie with jacket)
Person B: “Your a dumbass it’s ‘arm and a leg’ bro.”
When two idiots murder an idiom AND grammar at the same time, that makes me sad.
I’ve noticed a lot of those comments on Instagram. And that tells me a lot about people on Instagram. To me, Instagram is basically a way of consuming information the same way we did when we were 3…pictures with 10 word commentary.
Did you know Green Eggs and Ham contains only 50 words? In fact, the book was created based on a bet from Dr. Seuss’ publisher.
On another note, I’ve been struggling with the letter “W” lately. You have to look at the number of words that the letter “W” is in and think, “What the hell was going on when they decided to use that?”
Note: I fully understand that this is probably an issue that only I struggle with because none of you are freaks. But since you’ve made it this far, just bear with me.
At the beginning of the word:
“While” is not the same as “Wile,” and “Whale” is not the same as “Wale,” even though they are homophones (sound the same).
Then you change the middle vowel to an “o”, the “w” magically becomes silent (Whole), and dropping the silent letter is almost the exact opposite (Hole).
At the end of the word:
Let’s group some words that rhyme –
Grow
Blow
Show
Tow
Flow
Slow
And now let’s add an ‘er’ at the end
Grower
Blower
Shower (what the hell just happened? We just turned that long “o” into an…”ow?”. And adding the “er” at the end of the first two words just turned the verb into a correlating noun. But with Show/Shower, we just completely changed the word by adding an “er”.)
Flower (wth v2.0)
Slower (o, so now we’re back?)
At first I thought it was just the 4 letter “ow” words. But look at “Tow” and “Cow.” Why does the “o” sound change when you swap the first letter? But if you add an “er” to the end of both of those, they magically rhyme (Tower and Cower). Then we have words like “Arrow” and “Allow.” What the shit happened to “sew” and “sow?” Someone really jacked that one up…
Anyways, that’s enough of that…
Thanks for reading.
– The Encouraging Cow
