I was doing a little market research the other day. I took the biggest sites in the broadly defined sphere of ‘self-improvement’ and watched how people find them.

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

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

What caught my attention was the appearance of common ‘inspirational quotes’ (or variations).

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

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

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

And so…

All with the goal of improving, so the right quote may be exactly what you need. An old piece of wisdom suddenly triggers the right epiphany and you see what you learned (and what it means to you) in entirely new ways.

Secondly…

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

In fact, they might even hurt you.

They create this false sense of inspiration. Inspiration is fantastic, one of the best things that exists, if you direct 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 by completing your master’s degree or building an app.

Or you could read something great that Einstein once said.

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

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

You have to find a level of clarity and honesty that goes beyond what you currently have. Yes, yes, I know how wonderfully aware you are. Still, we need to dig 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.