Motivational Posters Are Lame

I love "How I Met Your Mother," a sitcom that has some of the smartest writing on television. The set design and the inside jokes are clever, which is why I watched part of the last episode with my DVR set to super slo-mo in an attempt to decipher one of the snarky motivational posters ("Awesomeness") on Barney Stinson's office wall.

What it actually says is pretty funny, and it got me thinking about the real motivational posters you see in SkyMall -- you know, the ones with misty images of rainbows and sunrises and wise quotes from philosophers and poets.

Do those hackneyed phrases really inspire teamwork or excellence? I doubt it. In fact, they're lame. The only thing I've ever gotten from them was an idea for a poster chronicling my brother-in-law's ill-advised leap off a cliff in Hawaii (pictured).

It turns out that the HIMYM scribes and I aren't the only ones with that kind of skewed thinking; the folks at Despair.com have actually created a whole gallery of "soul-crushingly depressing" posters of this genre.

My two favorites: "Teamwork -- A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction." And "Idiocy -- Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."

Got any of your own to share?

(Image by C.C. Holland, copyright 2002, all rights reserved. Yes, I made that image all by myself)