All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.

Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.

No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.

Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?

The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.

In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.

If positive thinking was easy, we’d do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We’re the exception, so we say.

Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.

The local youth theatre troupe recently put on a performance of Grease. It was a high-spirited outing, with terrific performances and it was a great way for them to spend a month or two over the summer. I was amazed to discover, though, that the budget for the rights to the play were $3,000. That’s pretty steep for a high school production of an old, not particularly wonderful musical script that was only going to be seen by the local community. Should it really cost $7 for every person who watches the play?

The reason fees for licensing plays are so high is that almost all plays and musicals are licensed by just a few firms and the purchasers have no power whatsoever. The sellers have signalled each other and created an artificially high pricing floor. “Take it or leave it” is their motto.

Here’s the opportunity that the net provides (in this case and so many others): someone should organize the customers and negotiate on their behalf.

Imagine contacting 3,000 high schools and finding 500 willing to join together and agree to act as a buying cartel. Now, the organizer can poll the directors at these schools and find thirty plays they’d be willing to put on next year. Go to the rights holders of these plays and say, “We’re going to pick six of these plays. Each of the six will get a huge number of customers as a result, perhaps twenty times as many as you usually get. But to be among the six, you need to lower your price by a factor of ten.”

Now, if you’re the rights holder, you have a dilemma (but not a huge one). You can agree to lower your price and thus double your annual revenue on this dusty old play, or you can stay where you are and make zero.

Hmmmm.

Over time, the cartel will only grow more powerful. Word of mouth will spread, because news that joining this cartel cuts the cost of renting a play or musical by 90% is noteworthy. More will join. The benefits to the rights holders who agree to play along will go up because they’ll have the play reach more audiences. The only losers will be those that are stuck on the old model of taking advantage of independent communities with no purchasing power.

While this has been tried in markets where it’s very difficult to make it work (like consumer electronics where the margins are small) I think it can thrive in business to business, service and intellectual property markets where market share can easily make up for lowered profits. Universities can join up to push down the price of textbooks by agreeing to adopt the one of the six acceptable ones that’s the cheapest–and all the others get zero. The key is frequent communication and solidarity as you go through the dip that will happen when providers resist your initial offers. That’s why the net (and free online coordination and messaging) are so critical.

Think of all the tiny vertical markets where this can really pay off.

And of course, the organizer deserves (and gets) a piece of the savings.

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Not fair, but true.

New media isn’t the perfect marketing medium, and it won’t be until we find the magic beans.

TV had magic beans for forty years. For forty years, anyone, even a complete moron, could make a lot of money using TV ads. Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.

The hard part was buying enough ads, but once you did that, victory could be declared.

On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem.

Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.

Perhaps there will never be magic beans again. Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

Or maybe someone will find some magic beans.

When George Washington was a teenager, did he really, really, really want a car?

Unlikely.

In order to want something, you probably need to know it exists. But my guess is that it surely helps if you’ve been marketed to.

One definition of happiness is wanting the things you’re likely to get (or, conversely, not wanting the unattainable). One definition of marketing is persuading the world it wants what you have, regardless of whether they can afford it or not.

We don’t hesitate to motivate employees by marketing them the benefits of being promoted, even if they all can’t possibly get this. We don’t hesitate to tease kids by marketing every conceivable unattainable Christmas gift at them, relentlessly.

Teenage girls are taught what to want by magazines and by peers.

Patients are taught what to want by doctors who prescribe new tests. And doctors are taught to do that by lawyers eager to sue if they don’t. Imagine going home and saying, “the doctor wanted to give me another test, but I said no…”

This cycle of assigned wants is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The game theory demands it.

And so, once again it seems to come down to a personal decision. If you decide what you want (instead of letting someone else decide for you) perhaps you could choose the things that would actually bring you and your loved ones the satisfaction you can live with.

The following does not appear in the Star Spangled Banner:

“Babe Ruth through the night…”

When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing we use to navigate our day. Of course Babe Ruth wasn’t even a sparkle in Mrs. Ruth’s eye during the War of 1812, but if you’re singing by heart, you don’t think about it.

I walked into a cheap noodle joint in Soho last month and decided I wanted tofu with vegetables. They had a little plate on display (a special, I guess) and I asked for tofu, vegetables, no sauce. The cashier pointed to the display model and said, “like this?”

I said, “with no sauce,” because the gloppy stuff didn’t appeal to me.

So, after asking, clearly, twice, I sat down. Four minutes later, they called my number and handed me an identical copy to the display item, oozing with fluorescent sauce.

“I was hoping that there’d be no sauce…”

She didn’t miss a beat. She said, “that’s the way it always comes.”

She wasn’t being evil. She was merely doing it by heart. Just like the intolerant judgmental guy who can quote you chapter and verse from his spiritual book of choice but never thought about the meaning of the words inside or the status quo protecting technician who isn’t a scientist because she’s afraid of violating something that feels like a law.

The next time you or one of your people starts rattling off the obvious truth by heart, wonder about whether it’s obvious because it’s true, or true because it’s obvious.

The problem with customer service is not a new one. It’s about balancing between serving a lot of people a little, or dropping everything to serve a few people a lot.

Getting a lot of benefit for a lot of people for not so much money isn’t particularly difficult. In the chart on the right, for example, (a) represents the cost of good signage at the airport, or clearly written directions on the prescription bottle or a bit of training for your staff. It pays off. Pay a little bit and you help a lot of people to avoid hassles. The utility per person isn’t huge, but you can help a lot of people at once.

(b) is the higher cost of a bit of direct intervention. This is the cost of a call center or a toll free number or an information desk. You’re paying more, you’re helping fewer people, but you’re helping them a lot.

(c) is where it gets nuts. (c) is where we are expected to spare no expense, where the CEO has to get involved because it’s a journalist who’s upset, or where we’re busy airlifting a new unit out to a super angry customer. The cost is very high, the systems fall apart and only one person benefits.

Of course, if you’re that one person, you think it’s not only fair, but appropriate and right.

This “spare no expense” mantra is extremely difficult to avoid, because in any given situation, when the resources are available, your inclination is to say, “make the problem go away, spend the money!”

It’s certainly possible to build a brand without going to (c) (witness the way Google almost never gets embroiled in special cases or even answers the phone–I know that they’re certainly not eager to fix my imap problems), but once you’ve trained your customers that (c) is an option, it’s awfully hard to scale back.

The reason we get trapped by (c) is that, “I’m doing the best I can” is always much easier than, “we need to be disciplined and help more people, even if that means that some special cases will fall through the cracks. The internet makes this even more difficult because people who fall through the cracks are able to amplify their complaints ever louder.

The way around it, I think, is to set expectations early and often. If you’re going to give me your phone number, you better answer it. If you’re going to offer a warranty, you better honor it. If you position yourself as a company with real people eager to make every single person happy–you better deliver.

No matter what, you should decide. In advance. How much do you want to spend on ad hoc emergencies, how much do you want to reserve on design and helping the masses improve their experience?

Atlanta brags about having the busiest airport in the world. Like most municipal facilities, they don’t brag about having the best, the most pleasant, the most engaging or the most remarkable airport in the world.

That’s a shame, because airports are great opportunities to create value. Lots of curious, alert people with money to spend and connections to make. Yet the lowest-common-denominator is served, relentlessly. If you like fried meat, plenty to choose from. You’d think that rather than cater to the center of the curve 100 times at 100 concessions, they’d pay attention to some of the outliers now and then…

Imagine my delight, then, when I stumbled upon One Flew South, located at Terminal E. Perhaps because it’s at the end of the line, the economic and turnover pressure is less. Regardless, it’s better than we have been taught we should deserve. Jerry the general manager explained why in the simple quote that leads this post off. He’s busy comparing the place to other restaurants, not to other airports. (If you go, say hi to Carolyn at the bar. Tell her I sent you and she’ll take care of you.)

Who (or what) are you comparing yourself to?

There was an attention drought for the longest time. Marketers paid a fortune for TV ads (and in fact, network ads sold out months in advance) because it was so difficult to find enough attention. Ads worked, so the more ads you bought, the more money you made, thus marketers took all they could get.

This attention shortage drove our economy.

The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.

When people talk about the problem with free online, they’re missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven’t gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.

Hint: funny commercials with chimps won’t be the answer.

It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it’s anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.

Simple example: Ten years ago, there was nowhere for a company like Best Made Axe to advertise. Today, with billions of tiny micromarkets, it’s not hard to imagine many audiences of one or two or three or ten that would be delighted to know about their products. Right now, there’s no easy way for a marketer to conceptualize that effort, never mind execute it, though it’s surely coming.

Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.