The Broken Clock Meme

I first saw a variation of the following meme decades ago – I think it might have been in a puzzle book, actually:

And while, on the face of it, it seems like it’s a clever and motivational saying, I have a big problem with it.

Let’s assume that this broken clock is the only clock you have access to.

This being the case, how would you know when it is showing the correct current time?

It’s of no benefit to you if the clock is stuck, say, on 10:18 – if you have no other way of knowing when it’s 10:18.

Yes, the clock is indeed correct when the time is 10:18 – but how would you know when that was?

You could paint the numbers “10:18” on a rock and it would still be correct twice a day – and it would still be equally useless.

Another minor and arguably pedantic niggle is that the clock might be a 24-hour clock, which means it would be correct only once per day – but you still wouldn’t know when.

This saying reminds me, in a way, of something usually credited to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.“

Except even that’s not really 100% comparable, because there are methods you can use (these days, at least – maybe not when he came up with that saying) to analyze which advertising is working and which isn’t, whereas that’s not the case with a broken clock – well, not without reference to another working clock.

So, while I’m sure people who share this meme do so with the best of intentions, it is, to me, not in the slightest bit motivational – it’s actually like a back-handed compliment that sends the message you are, in fact, useless, which is the exact opposite of the intended one.