404·motivation

Room 0002 — permanent collection

Monday

Nothing in this room is about working harder. Every line is about the specific problem of beginning — which is the only part of Monday that is actually difficult.

Forged for this room · every print in the Studio below is one of a kind

The Studio — take one home

Make it yours

Pick a line from this room — or write your own words — then choose a design, a palette, and how the type should sit. Drag the print to turn it. Every piece carries a seed: the same seed always forges the same art, so “Copy link” sends someone your exact print.

The words

Design

Colour

Type & layout

Texture

Take it away

Seed the same seed always forges the same print

Your shelf

Nothing kept yet — press “Keep it” and prints you like are saved on this device.

Nobody here is telling you to work harder

Read the room and the advice is almost entirely about the first five minutes. Ziglar attacks preparation, Twain attacks delay, Levenson attacks measuring the distance, Rohn explains why the enthusiasm that got you out of bed will not last until Wednesday. It is a fair diagnosis. Very few weeks are ruined by insufficient effort in the middle. They are ruined at the beginning, by a start that keeps being postponed until the week is too far gone to rescue.

Franklin twice, and a subject that did not exist until recently

Benjamin Franklin has two of these fifteen lines, from 1746 and 1747, and everything else is modern. That gap is the whole story of the room. Monday is not an ancient complaint; it requires a five-day week, which arrived in the 1920s and became general after the Second World War. What Franklin wrote was about time in general. The room around it was built by a calendar that did not exist when he was writing.

What is a good Monday motivation quote?

Arthur Ashe’s “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can” — because it removes the three conditions people most often wait for. Ashe learnt tennis on segregated public courts and won Wimbledon, so it is a description of what he did.

Did Mark Twain say “the secret of getting ahead is getting started”?

It is credited to him nearly everywhere and cannot be traced to anything he wrote or said, so it is labelled attributed here.

Next door, in the dictionary

eat the frog

the name for doing the worst thing first, which is what a Monday is.

Read the full entry →

Next door