Those of you who have been following our blog for a while and have long memories may recall that I occasionally bristle at false and misleading motivational quotes. First in 2014 and then again in 2019, I wrote about two such quotes, each of which suggests that we have more control over our outcomes than we really do. The latter quote was posted on a message board outside an elementary school, which especially bothered me, as I thought of all young readers now primed to blame themselves when some aspect of their lives turns out differently than they had hoped.
Strangely enough though, an experience at another elementary school has me reconsidering my stance. This summer, our daughter has been using the area playgrounds to push the boundaries of her newly discovered confidence. She was always capable of more than she realized, I thought, and now she has discovered this for herself. Slides that she used to look at with fear have become some of her favorites, and she darts across monkey bars that she would barely even try before.
One of her favorite playground activities is playing The Floor Is Lava. The game motivates her to use her creativity and try new movements in order to make her way between pieces of equipment without touching the ground. If she got carried away and actually believed that touching the ground would burn her, her loosened grip on reality would of course be an issue, but so long as she remembers it is just a fun, inspirational, and imaginative game, no problem.
A day after watching her play The Floor Is Lava, I walked by the fitness director’s office at my gym and saw a quote she put up that read something along the lines of, “Push harder than yesterday if you want a different tomorrow.” Immediately, I thought of counterexamples, situations in which someone pushing themselves harder than the day before could cause a setback rather than progress, such as someone recovering from illness or injury, or an athlete in need of a recovery day after a particularly demanding exercise bout.
But then I remembered The Floor Is Lava, and I realized that maybe these motivational quotes are to be taken with a proverbial grain of salt. In other words, by assessing where they fall on the continuum spanning between reality and fiction, maybe I was missing the point, as they were perhaps never meant to be taken seriously. Their power lies less in their degree of truth and more in their ability to inspire. Sure, such quotes are oftentimes factually incorrect, but if people can keep that in mind while simultaneously using them as fuel to take better care of themselves, one could argue that the ends justify the means. After all, our daughter seems perfectly well aware that, contrary to the name of the game, the floor is not actually lava.