St. Stephen — Not content with the billions of existing motivational quotations available on the internet, St. Stephen man Randall Martin has started coming up with his own quotes and plastering them all over his and his friends’ Facebook profiles.
Martin got his start in quote-making after reading lots of celebrity biographies and noticing that these books were absolutely packed with digestible nuggets of wisdom for the masses.
“I thought, why should you have to be a celebrity or an author just to inspire others?” said the 49-year-old insurance manager. “What could Obama or Chris Hadfield or Maya Angelou possibly have to say that I couldn’t say better?”
Martin began borrowing words and ideas from well-known inspirational quotes and rearranging them until he figured he could get away with calling them his own. Then, he made them into posters he can share on Facebook when the mood strikes.
“Teddy Roosevelt once said, ‘Believe you can and you’re halfway there,'” recited Martin from BrainyQuote.com. “But my version is, ‘Believe in yourself, and you’ll make it all the way.’ I said that.”
We examined Martin’s social media for examples of his work.
There’s a popular quote by Joseph Campbell that goes, “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one waiting for us.” Martin, in an attempt to get Facebook likes, this morning posted a picture of a rainbow with the words, “The sooner you accept your greatness, the easier it will be to let go of your past. — Randall Martin.”
His Facebook friend Dave Colburn reacted with the “angry” emoji.
“I couldn’t resist,” Colburn told us. “It just pisses me off that he thinks he’s some kind of philosopher or religious guru — but look at that…he actually wrote his name next to that nothing quote to make sure everyone knows it’s a Randall original. How vain do you have to be to attribute something so broad to yourself? He’s just this boring-ass guy who talks your ear off if you run into him at the drugstore.
“The other day he had one along the lines of: ‘There’s nothing harder than change, but together, change is a little easier.’ What the fuck is the point of that? Who is feeling uplifted or inspired by this insipid trash?!”
While most of Martin’s Facebook friends humour him by commenting things like “Thanks, I needed this today” on his quotes that literally mean nothing, a sane few are on Colburn’s side.
“There’s just something about a homemade quote by some nobody that’s infinitely worse than a generic one like ‘shoot for the moon’ or whatever,” said Martin’s co-worker Denise Oswald. “Inspirational quotes in themselves are so watered-down and trivial — they’re just tripe. But this? A million times worse.”
Adding, “Oh god…he just tagged me in one. I’m gonna have to block him.”