How Not to Be Motivated
by Steven HellerJune 24, 2008
Although they may put forth the occasional pearl of
wisdom, I cannot tolerate motivational speakers.
Their imperious, self-bloated stagecraft is, for me,
like listening to chalk screeching on a blackboard.
Nonetheless, I know people who draw real
inspiration from this twaddle. In fact, at a few
conferences I’ve seen audiences become rapt in
devotional attention as motivational gurus toss out
bromides about how to achieve design nirvana.
Maybe I’m just being a little too cynical. Maybe that
nagging voice inside my head is correct when it
says, “If you gave these folk half a chance, you’d
learn what you need to become a better
designer/business wonk and actually find true
fulfillment in your chosen field—which, incidentally,
might help you rise above the pitiful pettiness of
your current existence.” Well, faced with such a
persuasively articulated argument, perhaps it is
time to drop my resistance and open my ears and
heart.
My problem, however, is this: while you can remove
the cynic from the skeptic, you can’t lead a horse
to the waters of motivational salvation when
prejudices are deeply ingrained. And mine are
definitely deep. Listening to motivational speech
cadences—tough-love vibrato alternating with
earnest, sing-song rhythms—is about as annoying
as listening to the TV pitchman who slices and
dices or sells male enhancements on infomercials.
I hate the patronizing timbre that others seem to
find hypnotic. Despite the fact that, to me, they
offer little more than robotically formulaic liturgies,
I finally gave in to the inner voice urging me to give
motivation a try. Understanding that the key to
acclimating myself to such rhetoric would best be
done, at least initially, in a more palatable way
than attending another design conference, I curled
up with a book.
As luck (or fate) would have it, I stumbled onto Tom
Peters Essentials: Design—published several years
ago and adapted from Re-Imagine!: Business
Excellence in a Disruptive Age—a decidedly
evangelical, motivational tome that promises to
empower its readers to “innovate, differentiate and
communicate” through the marvel of DESIGN. It is
written by “the most influential business thinker of
our age,” or so says the flap copy. Tom Peters and
his persuasive powers are indeed legendary: the
co-author of the celebrated In Search of 1 
Excellence, he is a pioneer image consultant for
Rolls-Royce, Starbucks, Virgin and Intel, among
others. Thanks to the Essentials pocket-sized
edition, I could dip a toe in the waters of his
knowledge and experience, and, if his lessons
sunk in, maybe I’d become a more enlightened
design person (and just maybe those nasty
headaches and that annoying twitch would go
away, too). I might even graduate to his others on
Leadership, Talent and Trends.
But first, an admission: in case my snarkiness
sends the wrong message, this essay is not a rag
on Mr. Peters. He is an acute business thinker and,
more importantly, a tremendous design advocate.
His motivational rhetoric is sincerely intended to
prevent designers from being “odd ducks who
should be confined to their desks.” Actually,
Peters’s laudable mission is to release us fowl
from stereotypical bondage—and the fiction that
we are inarticulate passive-aggressive artistes who
routinely push our own aesthetic agendas at the
expense of our clients’ need. Rather, he insists we
should “sit at the CEO’s immediate right at the
boardroom table,” which I presume means not as
servile concubines but as meaningful strategic
contributors. And it takes an “uber-guru”—one of
the many honorifics applied to Peters on the
book’s back cover—to help the rest of us get our
acts together.
Peters’s goal is to both bolster designers’
confidence while proselytizing the value of design
to business. For instance, there is nothing more
rousing to this designer’s ears than Peters’s
forceful directive to execs to “have a formal design
board,” “routinely invite top designers to address
the company as a whole” and make certain “the
chief designer is a member of the board of
directors or, at the very least, a member of the
executive committee.” Having read these words
(twice), I felt he was that proverbial big brother—
the one who protects and defends against the
bullies—we all wish would be at our sides at all
client meetings. (By the way, he further urges
those execs to “have great art on the walls” to
improve their visual literacy. Who could argue with
that?)
Peters’s sprightly tome is packed with visual aids,
including typographically explosive manifestos,
insider tips, bullet points, lists of to-dos and not-to-
dos, homilies, slogans (e.g., “Design = Soul”;
“Believe It”), screeds, rants and raves, asides,
declarations and “words of wisdom on design’s

large (and potentially enormous) place in the
universe…” The book looks like an ambitious
Power Point or (better yet) Keynote presentation,
with each sentence—and almost every word—
meant to jolt and stimulate. Among Peters’s many
quotable truisms, for example, is this message to
corporate executives that can’t help but feed a
designer’s optimism: “You don’t become ‘design-
minded’ by opening a checkbook, spending a few
hundred thousand dollars on a ‘great designer’—
and then telling him/her to please ‘do the design
thing.’”
Peters’s collected aphorisms are like “Home Sweet
Home” samplers for us designers, and his
rationales for how and why design is essential to
all facets of corporate culture is so solidly absolute
it is difficult for even this cynic to find ways to
puncture his logic. Even his frequent hyperbole is
indisputable. He clearly loves design and hates
those who misunderstand it. He wields prose like a
battle-ax against the hordes that encourage
mediocrity or worse.
Peters believes design makes dreams (or at least
“dream products”) come true. As a contraction of
the term “marketing of dreams” he uses the
coinage dreamketing. On one of his many bullet-
pointed pages peppered throughout the book he
explains that dreamketing is: “touching the client’s
dreams,” “the art of telling stories and entreating,”
“building the brand around the ‘main dream,’” and
“building ‘buzz,’ ‘hype,’ a ‘cult.’” Another of his
many motivational mantras—“Enthusiasm begets
enthusiasm. Technicolor words beget Technicolor
responses”—seems to define his entire philosophy.
So, after reading the 160 pages in but a few short
hours, I was convinced that if he were Secretary of
Design for the United States, designers would
definitely enjoy an elevated status heretofore
unknown in this or perhaps any country. In fact, I
was so sincerely motivated that while reading I
even punched the air with my fist: “Right on!
Peters!”
Yet despite that unbriddled surge of excitement, I
find something troubling about his motivational
method.
You see, Peters’s Design is as much a reservoir of
motivational tropes as it is a bible for the
motivationally needy. It is a stunning example of
what he himself calls buzz, hype and cult, and I
have this nagging feeling that his motivational
rhetoric, which reads so convincingly, is powered
by hubris, fueled by generalization and depends
entirely on packaging to succeed. If I succumbed to 2 
this allure, just think about the more malleable
reader.
Are design motivators really just hucksters? Must
design-speak really be hyped-up marketing speak?
Peters basically says yes. To truly persuade clients
that design is worth something, designers must
exhibit what Tibor Kalman called “the bullshit
factor”—the gift of doubletalk—which is the point at
which all this motivational hooey gets depressing.
While I understand the realities of business—and I
realize that Peters and other motivational gurus
simply want us to do better (or as he says,
“dramatically alter perspective”), must we build our
credibility on a foundation of hype? Why must the
rhetoric be so calculated that it sounds
disingenuous, even if it is not?
Intense repetition of a single idea, phrase or
doctrine is called brainwashing, and that is exactly
what motivational speaking (and writing) is all
about. Motivational speaking, like advertising and
propaganda, is part psychology, part philosophy
and part ideology (religious at times), couched in
any mannerism that sells the big idea. Frankly, I
was taught that brainwashing (a torturous practice
first administered to American prisoners by the
Chinese Communists during the Korean War and
best illustrated in The Manchurian Candidate) is
wrong. Of course, every successful motivational
self-help author or lecturer is at least tacitly
brainwashing their audience, and they exude
hubristic self-confidence to command their
listeners or readers long enough to impart their
wisdom. The uber-guru must satisfy the need of his
audience to be bettered, if not transformed,
through sage advice, convincing promises and
corrective admonishments. Motivationalism and its
cousin self-helpism are such a big business these
days because we all want direction and are
susceptible to anyone who seems willing and
capable to offer it.
Yet back before design gurus roamed this was
more or less accomplished through
apprenticeships. Mentors were teachers and
teachers found ways to impart ideas in
demonstrative ways that went beyond aphoristic
rhetoric alone. A good teacher didn’t resort to the
formulas so common in motivational speech and
writing.
Sure, people wrote inspirational books—Dale
Carnegie was the pioneer with How to Win Friends
and Influence People in 1937—but the practice
 

was not as cliché as it is now. Turn on any channel 3 

in the early hours, and someone is at the pulpit
motivating. The design field is a fairly recent
recipient of this gift, but now has more than its fair
share. Today, anyone with a good stage presence,
convincing oratory and catchy slogan can be a
motivationalist. Some certainly hit the right nerves
and stimulate strong responses. But it is just too
easy to get sucked in for all the wrong reasons.

After reading Design I feel a bit shucked and jived.

And believe me, I tried to be tolerant—really, I did!
So maybe it is just me. Maybe I find it hard to
believe that being formulaically told what to do will
make my work, my life, better. Still, I believe that
we all must find our own answers—our own blissful
motivation—for ourselves. Or maybe you should
take two bromides and call me in the morning.

_________________________________________

About the Author: Steven Heller, co-chair of the

Designer as Author MFA and co-founder of the MFA
in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts, is the
author of Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde
Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century
(Phaidon Press). He is co-author of New Vintage
Type (Thames & Hudson), Becoming a Digital
Designer (John Wiley & Co.) and Teaching Motion
Design (Allworth Press). His book Iron Fists:
Branding the Totalitarian State (Phaidon Press) is
forthcoming. www.hellerbooks.com