IMMORAL JOBS:
1. Hitmen
2. Drug dealers
3. Motivational speakers
4. Prostitutes

Hitmen, drug dealers and prostitutes all hurt people for money. Hitmen kill people for money, drug dealers feed the dangerous chemical habits of others, and prostitution leads its customers into problems with their consciences, the police, and a host of opportunistic social diseases (not to mention angry pimps with canes or burly boyfriends with drug addictions). So it’s pretty easy to see how these three occupations made it onto my (abbreviated) list of immoral jobs, but the reason that motivational speakers deserve this abuse may be less obvious.

Motivational speakers capitalize on the insecurity and incompetence of the general public, and make an absolutely obscene amount of money for doing it. Apparently so many people are growing up with really bad parents that nobody knows how to work hard or be committed to their goals or make good decisions such as avoiding drugs or not feeding their genitals to wolverines, and so motivational speakers are able to make a pretty darn good living by telling people that you get rewarded more for working hard than for not working at all and that genitals are not a necessary part of a wolverine’s diet. It seems to me that this should be more of a public service than a money-making opportunity. Don’t all people have the right to know that goals take work and that drugs are bad for you, just like all people have the right to know that an active wood stove is hot or that wet floors might be slippery? But janitors don’t get paid any more for putting up the little cones that warn of slick floors, and parents don’t get any sort of recognition for teaching their toddlers the word “hot”, while motivational speakers are paid through the olfactory protrusion to spread such earth-shattering news as “Your boss is less likely to fire you if you don’t staple your co-workers to the cubicle wall”.

Here is an entire class of people that travels about the country and the world, telling people that the only way to get ahead is to work at it; if this is true, why don’t we see motivational speakers begging on the streets? They don’t do any work. They don’t provide a necessary service. They’re probably not even pursuing their dreams: how many toddlers or students or college graduates say “I want nothing more than to spend my days in crowded auditoriums full of people that hate me so I can tell them things that they should already know.”? NONE. A motivational speaker is what you become if you can’t cut it as a politician or television news anchor; anybody with a larynx and reasonable confidence in themselves can be a motivational speaker. You don’t even need to be pretty or well-spoken, and you definitely don’t need to have any new ideas.

Apparently all motivational speakers are trained by the same company or read the same book or something, because, with the occasional exception of a new anecdote, all motivational speakers always say the same things and lead the same exercises. Our senior class retreat was led by a motivational speaker that started the day with the painful cliché of “If you only had one day left to live, who would you call, what would you say, and why haven’t you done it?”. I stopped listening after that, because I was trying to figure out how much money I would make if I copyrighted the phrase “If you only had one day left to live…” I quit when I realized that the calculations would involve both math and knowing how many motivational speakers are currently in circulation, not to mention lawyers. I really don’t want to know how many motivational speakers are roaming the country right now, because I think I would probably be terrified and lock myself in my bedroom, which happens more often than you might expect (do you know what kind of nasty stuff lurks in the average carpet? At least the dead skin cells in the carpet in my room are mostly MY dead skin cells, so they attract MY mites and bacteria).

By far the best part of our session with this motivational speaker was when he led us in a goal-setting exercise that I had done with a friend just the night before. Except his was planned and supposedly researched and stuff, and mine was just the logical outcome of a conversation. So motivational speakers are essentially friends for hire, except they’re the sort of loud, annoying and imbecilic friends that you would expect to hang around people who have to hire their friends. So I would like to propose some sort of legislation that make the knowing use of clichés and corny anecdotes punishable by death. Then I would train all the motivational speakers to do something useful. We could train them to be the subjects in human pain-threshold testing or teach them to operate a jackhammer. Better yet, we could put them in charge of feeding the wolverines.

Required Reading

Mac Hall Comics

I highly recommend that you read through the entire archives on this site when you get a chance, because these guys are amazing. Nothing like a good webcomic to get your day started correctly. Of course, they only update once a week, which means that I only ever have one really good day a week. If being addicted to webcomics is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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