Do something positive - leave your job
shop.holstee.com
shop.holstee.com
People who learn English as a second language and whose native language doesn't use latin letters have an extremely difficult time reading words in ALL CAPITALS.
I was amazed when I gave a class a handout once which had sentences in all caps and they had an extremely tough time reading it.
Since many people do not read each individual letter, but read by looking at the word, putting a word in all capitals changes the structure of the word and makes it more difficult to read.
I don't think Russians or other people that use the Cyrillic alphabet, or Greeks have the same problem - so I believe it's not the different character set, but the ideograms.
Learning a language as an adult is hard, I just wonder if it might have something to do with that. (I never had problems reading German or Portuguese in all capitals, or other languages I've tried learning, but they're almost the same language as English or Spanish when compared to an ideogram)
Of all the weird English rules, idiosyncrasies, etc. that would confuse my parents time and time again, words in all-capitals were never one of them.
I'd chock this up to the Chinese alphabet.
It's all to do with what your original language has and doesn't have. My parents still can't understand why you need the word "the" or where you're supposed to use it, since Russian doesn't have anything like it.
Coming from what appears to be (I didn't know them before) a t-shirt company, to me it now reads as "life is short, buy our t-shirts". But maybe I'm just jaded. :)
I hate this sanctimonious bullshit people try to pull off as being motivational. Everyone knows that loving your job is the best way to go, but you could be doing a lot worse (tried being a shoeless kid with no clean water and a sever case of malnutrition) than not 'loving' your job.
You might not enjoy working at your local McDonalds, but if that's where you are now (for a lack of a better job) you better freaking try your hardest to better yourself, and in the process smile when you're giving me my fricking order. Not everyone has the luck of getting their dream job right away or the benefit of rich parents that allow some fast climbing in the social world. Stop preaching.
The idea isn't to do everything alone. The idea behind the walkabout is indeed to find yourself -- and when you return, you are accepted into society as a member. It's a coming of age ritual, and finding yourself is one of those things that only you can do.
My sensei once told me that he could show me the road, but I had to walk it myself. I didn't get as far down the road of enlightenment (google Okinawa Kodokan if you want context) as I did without help, but I did walk the road myself.
There's very few people who are decent and / or successful who haven't had some seriously hard knocks involved in shaping who they are.
Edit for anecdote: I was a mid 20's guy with an average job and bad investments that put me close to 3/4 million in debt just before the crash. A lot of pain, panic and off the cuff decisions to save my own ass, but hell, was one of the best things to ever happen to me in hindsight.
But these guys are really great. I met Mike from Hostlee at the 'A Better World by Design' conference up in Providence. He's a really cool guy, and definitely believes in living what you dream. I kinda wish he had designed that whole poster himself.
Still, very cool, considering his dream is helping others.
Regarding the readability of the message, I think it depends on your reading frequency. I did not struggle at all. And just for the records, my native tongue is not English.