How Inspirational Quotes Demotivate You

The other day I was doing a little market research. I took the top sites in the broadly defined “self-improvement” sphere and took a look at how people find them.

With the right tools, you can see what keywords people are using to find a certain site.

Each site was unique, with its own brand, personality, and target audience.

What surprised me was how common ‘inspirational quotes’ (or variations) appeared.

In fact, one site, which was supposed to be a blog about success, only attracted people who were looking to be motivated in the form of dating.

If that’s what you’re looking for, keep walking. Rarely trafficked with them, for a very good reason:

Motivational quotes can be awesome. If you dive deep into personal development and research in psychology, influence, religion, politics, sociology, collective intelligence, history, language, neuroscience …

And so …

All with the goal of improving yourself, then the correct quote may be exactly what you need. An old wisdom suddenly triggers the correct epiphany and you see what you’ve learned (and what it means to you) in whole new ways.

On the other hand …

If you spend all day at an unstimulating but strangely exhausting job, spending your free time on social media or watching YouTube, motivational quotes won’t be enough.

In fact, they might even hurt you.

They create this false sense of inspiration. Inspiration is fantastic, one of the best things in history, if it guides it towards some result. If you feel it just to enjoy the buzz, then that replaces your need to do anything.

Sure, you could be proud of yourself completing your master’s degree or creating an app.

Or you could read something great Einstein once said.

If it’s a neurochemical solution you’re looking for, they get the job done. For a while, that is. This is why some people spend so much time flipping through these quotes – they are literally addicted to them.

But if you want real inspiration, you have to work harder.

You have to find a level of clarity and honesty in yourself that goes beyond what you currently have. Yes, yes, I know how wonderfully aware you are. Even so, it is necessary to go deeper.

Ideas inspire you when they align with your unconscious values. You probably already have an idea of ​​some of these values. However, we all need more than a “sense”. What we need is a photorealistic 3D special effects model of them.

Find them, study hard, and then see what quotes you like.

Not the other way around.