Failure

S     ee? I've failed before I've even begun. Why? Because I called the project "A Post A Day." I did not call it "Two or More Posts a Day."

That, my friends, is short-sighted thinking -- thinking inside the box (betcha don't even know what the origin of that phrase is, do you? No? It's an old experiment where you have to draw a line through nine dots without lifting your pen, except the nine dots are arranged in a square with three dots to a row. Try it. If you succeed, you will have "Thought outside the box.")

That brings me to another tired old saw of a misused aphorism: the "Carrot and the Stick" analogy.

Most, if not all people think that means "Applying the carrot and the stick" is where you either reward someone or something with a carrot, or beat it with a stick.

That is not true. The origin of the carrot and the stick is the old theory of how to get a donkey to go where you want it to go, because as you know, donkeys are stubborn -- at least that's what they say. Maybe it's because they can't have kids, but I digress.

No, the "Carrot and the Stick" analogy originally meant tying a carrot on the end of a stick and then attaching it to the donkey's head, so the carrot was dangling in front of the donkey. The donkey would naturally want to get the carrot, so it would follow the carrot wherever it was led. It had nothing to do with beating anyone. No, you're thinking of the old Theodore Roosevelt maxim "Speak softly but carry a big stick," when he was talking about diplomatic negotiating.

Do you see how muddled human thinking can become, how completely derailed a simple expression can become, in the hands of a few dumb but well-meaning people? Well, now "Carrot and stick" is almost 100% used to mean a reward (the carrot) or a beating (the stick). In the original, no one got beaten. Beating anyone didn't even come close to the analogy. It was meant as a benign analogy, a way of "a gentle but nonetheless deceptive way to get someone to do something he may not want to do."

Why did beating anyone get in there at all? Because of the brain's automatic tendency to parse things down to their most simple building blocks whenever convenient. In other words, laziness. It was too complicated to imagine a mule  with a stick tied to its head with a carrot at the end of it; it was easier to imagine just using the stick to beat the animal when it did something wrong or give it a carrot if it did something right.

Perhaps I should change the name of the new project to "Exploding Myths about the Meanings of Commonly-used Aphorisms." I like that title because it has the word "exploding" in it. That tends to get the eye's attention, a word like "Exploding", so maybe I should use it to lure the reader into actually reading the post. Kind of like using the word "Exploding" as a "carrot" tied to a "stick" attached to the reader's head.

So in one fell swoop (could someone explain that term to me?) I would simultaneously create a new post, which fulfils my objective of getting the project off the ground, and get people to read it, which is kind of a cool micro-encapsulation of two disparate concepts. An automatic "First success" which seems to me foolproof -- getting a project off the ground. Keeping it up there, that's a whole 'nother story.