It starts at an early age and it’s been passed down for generations. On the surface the message is completely innoculous.

Most of us have been at a little league game and are probably guilty of this insipid offense. Little Johnny is at the plate with an 0-2 count. There’s a runner on third and if Johnny strikes out here, we lose.

Here comes the 0-2 pitch right down the middle. Johnny watches it float harmlessly by. Strike three. Tigers lose. Johnny walks back to the dugout and the coach pats him on the back and says, “Hey, its OK son. The main thing is that you tried.”

Most civilized, intelligent parents and spectators would agree that the coach did the right thing by supporting poor Johnny in his time of need.

The problem is, they’re wrong.

Before you label me a monster, hear me out. I’m not saying that our coach should have ripped Johnny apart. We have plenty of psycho coaches to go around, thank you very much. The fact is Johnny needed the truth at that moment.

He needed the coach to calmly and quietly say something like this, “Johnny, I have seen you do really well while hitting in practice. I know you’re quite a player. But you just made a mental error by not swinging with two strikes. Even if you struck out swinging, you had a chance to knock in a run. Let’s learn from this experience and we’ll know what to do next time. Do you understand, son?  Great now go buy some candy, it’s on me!”

The truth is, Johnny failed. And, deep down Johnny knows he failed. That’s the problem with mis-using the word “try.”  Trying becomes an instant, magical excuse for failure. And if enough people keep telling Johnny that trying is all that matters, Johnny begins to believe the lie.

Failing is normal and inevitable. Your success in life determines what happens a micro second after the failure. Do you make an adjustment and learn from the mistake or do you whistle and walk away content that you tried? Edison tried nearly 10,000 experiments before the light bulb kicked on for him. Thankfully for us, Edison was never instructed about how important trying is.

The act of trying has no noble characteristics, in fact trying really has no meaning. Let me illustrate with an experiment. Grab a pen and lay it on the desk in front of you. Now, I want you to try and pick up the pen.

Go ahead, try and pick it up.         I’m still waiting.

The reality is that you either pick up the pen(success), or it lays there motionless (failure). No amount of money or determination could make you try to pick up that pen.  Hence, “trying” is fiction. You either get a hit or you strike out. There is no scoring column in the book for trys.

When you go back to work tommorrow, remember life rewards action and activity that produces results. Don’t rest on the crutch of Trying.

All around us today it seems as if the world is crumbling. Rouge nations like Iran and North Korea are rattling their sabers, Iraq is a bottomless pit that we are dumping money into, Bin Laden is still on the lamb, our local economy is strained to say the least, we spend 55 bucks to fill up the car, and many people have found their dream home is worth less today than when they bought it.

Enough doom and gloom, because as bad as some of these events are- they’re not new. Not by a long shot.

How do you think your ancestors in 1862 felt during the Civil War?  How about our citizenry during the Nazi march and the Holocaust? Do you think there was some anxiety about the fate of the US then?

Imagine living moment to moment through the Cuban Missile Crisis, with nukes pouring into Cuba on freight cars and pointed at our cities. As Senator’s Obama and McCain posture for the election, they surely don’t feel the pressure that President Hoover felt as our economy plunged into the Great Depression.

Here’s the good news. It does you and your business absolutely no good to concern yourself with the economy or world affairs, or the backhanded remark your mother in law made about your business future during dinner.

The only thing you can control is your thought process at any given time. And make no mistake, to the extent that you formulate positive thoughts of action, will determine your success or failure.

Everything that you are to this moment is a direct reflection of what you choose to think about. Your thoughts determine your reality. External forces have no power over your results unless you allow them to enter your mind.

One of my favorite examples of the power of thought was something I remember from a criminal psychology course I elected to take in college. This is a true account of twin brothers who were born to a mother addicted to crack and a father who was never around. When the father did come home he was extremely abusive and because of the neighborhood they lived in, even the police and social workers were afraid to step in. So the brothers did what they could to survive. As you can imagine most of these kids tend to end up like their parents. Except for one of the twin brothers. He managed to claw his way out of his circumstance, get a grant for school, work his way into the home and hearts of new foster parents by the time he was 18 and graduate from college with an MBA.  He eventually became CFO of a mid sized technology firm.  The other twin suffered the fate of most from that background and ended up in prison for manslaughter during a botched robbery.

Get this- a noted criminal psychologist took interest in this story and did an interview with both twins. One interview in a high rise office overlooking th city and the other interview with a phone and bullet proof glass between her and the twin brother.  The psychologist asked one key question to both brothers- and she got the exact same answer, which goes to the heart of thinking positively and getting positive results.

The question?  “Based on your horrible background, how did you end up like this?”

Their mutual answer-  ” With my background, how the hell else would you expect me to end up?”

One brother chose to make his entire situation an excuse for remaining in his plight and cursing the darkness, while the other one focused every day on every option to get out. The brothers became exactly what they thought about.

Don’t worry about events, stay positive and get moving. Your thoughts will produce your success if you choose them wisely.

“FEE-JEE”

The man who gave us the Greatest Show On Earth was none other than Mr. P.T. Barnum. He was the founder of the Ringling Brothers Circus and was the first showman to earn over a million dollars a year. Barnum introduced the patrons to such oddities as Tom Thumb - the shortest human in the world. (Tom was actually a premature baby and was five years old when he worked for Barnum, smoking cigars and drinking wine.)

In addition, the circus goers were amazed by FeeJee the mermaid, or shall I say her remains.  P.T. Barnum had an incredible talent for public relations. He intuitively knew what people would clamor for and he gave it to them- in a big way. There were Barnum detractors, he polarized people of the day. Either you wrote him off as a fraud and con artist or you couldn’t resist his marketing of seeing the Worlds Only ThingamaJig.

Judging by Barnum’s success most people wanted to be amazed even though their common sense knew better.  The people of today are no different. The National Enquirer sells millions of copies with “Britney Spears is Really a Space Alien..”  as the lead story. Propsects love to be sold and entertained.

There have been many boxing promoters…

… but there is only one Don King. 

Our industry has known many shrewd real estate investors with incredible stories of triumph…

… but there is only one DonaldTrump.  

Can you make a splash as big as PT Barnum, Don King or Donald Trump?

Probably not. But you can do the next best thing. Be yourself.

Be authentic.   Absolutely refuse to pay attention to what your peers and competitors are doing. Don’t advertise where they advertise, don’t sell the way they sell, don’t offer the same excuses they offer, don’t hire the same types of people they hire. Don’t believe or accept the conventional wisdom.

A word about “conventional wisdom.” Conventional wisdom may dictate that you advertise in the yellow page online program because that’s where everyone else in my area is advertising. Conventional wisdom may suggest that you can’t make any money in our city becuase the gas prices are so high because that’s what you’re hearing. Conventional wisdom mandates that you can’t make money with Email marketing because your friend heard of a business owner wasting money on an email blast. Conventional wisdom bemoans the onset of the “Super Depression”, the likes of which we have never seen because that’s what you heard in the barber shop last week.

Conventional wisdom dooms you to following the lead of the blind.

The road to success is not travelled upon by those who seek out misfortune. For those who seek misfortune, they will find it in abundance.  Realize that obstacles exist and the object of the game is to calmly and with emotions detached, navigate around them.

Obstacles are something you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

Indy 500 drivers say that if you momentarily focus on the wall, you will drive into it. They look straight ahead or crash.

Conventional wisdom is merely a perception and relative only to the person who is opening their mouth at the time. Fortunes were made in 1930, during the Great Depression and fortunes are being made this minute. If you need to adjust, simply make an intelligent adjustment.

From a marketing perspective- FORGET THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.

Keep your eyes and heart focused on your goal.

This article could have been titled, The Re-Birth of Personal Communication.

There was a time when a telephone was answered by a live human being and the business person on the other end existed to serve you instead of the other way around. There was a time when a radio ad was being performed by a live person in a studio and spoken by a real business person, not an actor.

Businesses across the board have become so selfish with technology that the majority of them use it to serve their personal convenience rather than increase their service to you. An example of this is voice mail. I remember back in the late ’90’s when customers were furious about being dumped into voice mail. There was a mini-revolution and customers said they would only do business with companies who answer their phones.

Guess what? The customers lost that revolution and from 2000 until now, voice mail quietly became an acceptable response on the other end of the phone.

Buying trends, however, tend to go in cycles. Kind of like the ’70’s and disco. We are on the end of that cycle. The days of businesses using technology to make their lives easier at the expense of quality service, are numbered.

Whatever business you may be in, I implore you to use any and all technology to provide old-fashioned, I’ll wipe off your windshield and check your oil, customer service.

Email marketing? No boring html coupon blasts. Send mail merged text emails with your customer’s first name in the subject line and body of the email. You can send 1,000-10,000 with the click of a button. This is what the smart marketing people are doing.

Telephone? Eliminate the gut-wrenching phone tree that attempts to make your company seem larger than it is. No one wants to wait until the robot secretary says for sales push “7″.  Instead, tie all your lines into a “one-call” system so that if I dial your mobile or your office, my call is routed to you or the next person down the chain, but odds are I will get a person with a heart beat.

If you want to see your numbers go up, start treating customers as you would like to be treated.

1950 is upon us.