Handwriting Motivational Quotes

Irony, we want our handwriting to look like typed fonts, and our computer fonts to look like handwritten text.

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

Catharine’s office had two plants, three chairs, two desks, one hutch, six personal photos in standing frames, one of those clichéd motivational posters on the wall that had two crows tearing out the insides of a reasonably sized forest cat with the cheesy inspirational caption, “Unremittingly, you must stare into the sun,” and a clay paperweight most likely made by Catharine’s daughter (it was signed by your seed in adorable small-child handwriting).

The child is father of the man….attributed to Sigmund Freud, but believed to have been coined by a well-known poet years before Freud's time

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are ‘pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.’ Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

Before delivering a presentation, a salesperson might ask himself positive outcome questions that sound like this: Am I going to deliver a compelling pitch? Are they likely to buy from me? Will they be satisfied with their purchase? As it turns out, the very act of asking the questions is magical. In their fascinating paper “Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense,” researchers Ibrahim Senay, Dolores Albarracín, and Kenji Noguchi describe the surprising results of a clever experiment they conducted in 2010. Participants were led to believe that the researchers were “interested in people’s handwriting practices” and asked to write one of the following four words or phrases twenty times: “I,” “Will,” “Will I,” or “I will.” Once the writing task was completed, they were given a series of word puzzles to solve. The group that wrote the interrogative phrase “Will I” outperformed all three other groups in the word-puzzles task by nearly double.