Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (9 page)

        What is your private retreat? It could be a sailboat or a warm cabin on a mountain summit—whatever makes you feel relaxed, positive, and at peace with yourself and the world around you. The more often you do this, the more detailed your private retreat becomes in your memory. By distracting your mind this way, you keep the door firmly shut to the negativity around you. The best aspect of this trick is that one day your retreat turns up in your physical reality. I mentally walked that ribbon of sand a hundred times before I got to do it for real. This is the joy of control of mentality. When one becomes so adept at it, even idle daydreams get to be experienced.

        Finally, on the occasions you find yourself pressed back against a wall while someone rants and raves about all the injustices in their life, throw the responsibility back at them with, “So what do
you
intend to do about it?” In most cases, the complainers don’t actually want a solution. They don’t even want sympathy. They just want to react by venting anger. Throwing that question to them will stop them in their tracks.

In
The Shipping News
, Lasse Hallstrom’s adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s best seller, there is a scene in which the local newspaper editor confronts reporter Quoyle about his inability to find a storyline. Billy takes Quoyle to the edge of a cliff:

Almost all television news and newspapers exist to sell advertising space. If they fail to do that, the news media fail to exist. To get good prices for the space, they need to guarantee an audience to their advertisers. To do that, they must grab our attention with a dramatic headline or image that draws us in and then hold our attention long enough to get to an advertisement. Fear is generally their weapon of choice. Who can resist watching a live car chase, a battle scene from a war zone, or the threat of a tornado in the area? At this point, you might think it’s all harmless, but any sensational headline or news story has the potential to induce fear into our systems.

The challenge we face with regard to the news media is that the brain does not distinguish between that which is real and that which is imagined. Watching a scene of carnage in a war zone causes some of the same detrimental stress effects as actually being there ourselves. The fear response we have in front of the television is the same we would have in the real situation. Of course, it is diluted somewhat by the safety net of our home, but people addicted to the news are subjecting themselves to chronic stress every time they tune in. Day after day, they take their dose of news and induce a cascade of destruction in their neurons.

To make matters worse, everything you see and hear in the media triggers images in your brain. If you watch a news report about a crime, the pictures in your brain are a reaction to the horror you are observing. Your eyes take in a stranger on the street being mugged, which at first might seem inconsequential. The emotion you feel, however, is not because you recognize the stranger but because you know how you would feel if that happened to you or someone you know. Many times, I hear people say “I don’t know how I’d cope if that happened to me.” The moment they say it, they imagine it, and those thoughts remain out in the universe with the potential to create exactly what they don’t want. Every time you watch something fearful on television, you also place your life at risk because your thoughts have the propensity to convert to matter and come right back at you.

You should understand I am not antimedia—far from it. Media are simply vehicles for transmitting messages and can be valuable assets in our quest for knowledge and success. I enjoy a comedy, an educational documentary, or a film as much as anyone, and I watch a lot of sports. The key is in being selective in what media messages you allow into your brain, and then how you choose to react to them.

For instance, if you are in debt, then you should avoid those advertisements that offer debt solutions because of the effect on your thought generation as we discussed earlier. If, however, you desire to own a top-end Mercedes-Benz, then not only is it acceptable to watch those advertisements, you should record them and play them over and over until, instead of the actor in the driver’s seat, you start to see yourself. You should call the toll-free number to request a brochure and more information. Then read the car reviews in the newspaper. Find your local dealer and go for a test drive. You should watch any show or film in which the car manufacturer has paid to have their vehicle used by the actors. The point is that we must be selective in what
we allow into our minds, manage what we think about them, and control our reactions. We avoid what we are
against
and seek out what we are
for
.

Media marketing attempts to influence our behavior in remarkably simple ways. An unguarded state of mind can be shown an advertisement of a sexy girl, who appears attracted to a man smoking a particular brand of cigarette. As he watches, the viewer knows it is a carcinogenic poison. He knows his nicotine-stained hands, poised to hit the channel-change button before a girl in a bikini showed up, would turn off any female who looked like the one on the screen. His breath would send her to the nearest bathroom. His reaction, however, is to reach for a cigarette because he subconsciously fears being undesirable.

In my father’s case, his reaction to this type of advertisement was to send me out to the store to buy some more cigarettes. When I was six, in the days when there was no age limit required for their purchase, he would send me to the corner store for an extra pack of his favorite filter-tipped brand. I once forgot what I had been sent for and brought home half a dozen eggs, a ball of wool, and some oranges. Audrey appreciated the wool, but a man deprived of his nicotine fix can launch eggs and oranges like missiles.

Media can also be vehicles for propaganda. Anyone with an idea that they want to share with others becomes a propagandist. The father of propaganda, long before the days of television, was Joseph Goebbels. In a famous 1928 speech on the means and power of propaganda, he stated:

Propaganda in any format can erode the individual mindset, and we have to be aware of its influence on us. Are the opinions you have on various matters your own or have they been comfortably fused into your mind by propaganda?

I often have this discussion with a relative who has strong opinions about the members of the Royal Family in England. Her opinions have changed over time, depending on the images shown in newspapers and on television. I have met many of the Royal Family personally and formed my own opinion of them from those interactions. My impressions differ markedly from anything you would read in a tabloid newspaper or that my relative repeats thereafter as her own opinions.

When I remind my relative that she has never met these people, she will vehemently defend herself and her right to her own opinion. She admonishes me, even though in reality, her only source of information is what she has seen or heard through various media, often reinforced by her friends who share the same opinions.

In reality, since 1997, there has been a concerted public relations campaign run by a prominent global advertising agency, and costing millions, to repair the image of the Royal Family. The goal of the campaign was to “reposition the family into a unifying force.”

In the same way as someone from Joseph Goebbel’s time would distribute pamphlets to a crowd, the religious, political, and business institutions in our high-tech world use all the vehicles of modern media from television to social networks. The
aim is to form a state of mind, bring like-minded people together, and create a specific reaction. That might be to cause you to send a donation, vote a certain way, or buy a product. It could also be to encourage you to buy a house you can’t afford or invest unwisely in daily stock trading with the money you could have used to start a business of your own.

In the mid-1980s, prior to the innovation of satellite television, I lived in the United Kingdom, where I was quite satisfied with three television channels. After heated debate, the government allowed a fourth network to start broadcasting. They needed innovative programs to draw audiences and picked up American football. A one-hour highlight show ran on Monday nights and, for the first time, Brits started to get into the game.

The program quickly got the highest ratings in the lineup. At the end of the season, the producers pulled a coup with the first live showing of a Super Bowl. Some friends and I got into the excitement and threw a party as Chicago played New England.

Our first mistake was miscalculating the time difference. The game kicked off at close to midnight, by which time most of us were highly inebriated. The second mistake was that no one realized there would be so many commercial breaks. A one-hour game took three hours to play. We had been used to the condensed highlights show and did not expect the game to be so fragmented. Brought up on soccer and rugby, in which the games flow without commercial breaks or time-outs, by the end of the first quarter, no one remained conscious.

When I moved to America, I wanted to follow the sport. I could not, however, get beyond the number of commercial interruptions that seemed, to me at least, to be thinly disguised military propaganda. I was not judging it. I didn’t have an opinion on the merits of US foreign policy, but I know propaganda when I see it, regardless of who produces it, and I don’t allow it into my brain. I found it hard to tune out the jingoism and enjoy
the sport. Hitting the mute button is not sufficient to protect my neurons from all that shock and awe.

Whether it is an army recruitment advertisement or a military commander involved in the coin toss, all those images can be dangerous to your state of mind. Most people, however, consider them harmless and think of themselves as being immune to the impact because they are seemingly passive background images. If your mentality is unguarded, they are anything but passive.

Nothing demonstrates the power of media marketing or the extremes of habitual reaction like that of a soldier going off to war. A poorly educated farm laborer, who knows nothing more than the art of tending dairy cattle, watches the threat of terrorism every night on the television news, absorbs the glorification of war in a stream of macho army recruitment commercials during his Sunday football television ritual, and drinks in his favorite reality television show being beamed live from the deck of an aircraft carrier. His reaction is to leave his farm, don a uniform, and travel to a place he could never have found in an atlas. Acting on orders, he shoots an “insurgent” because he believes his freedom on the plains of Ohio is threatened.

The insurgent was also a happy, world-unwise farm worker, tending goats in his own country. His unguarded state of mentality was convinced by different propaganda that was shouted from a shrine to react to a perceived threat. He left the field that his ancestors had farmed for centuries, strapped an explosive vest to his chest, and went to greet the “infidel” who just showed up.

As fellow farmers, with individual mindsets and opinions, the two should have had a lot in common. The possibility exists that, under different circumstances and with controlled mentalities, they could become friends, and share their farming stories.

More than ninety million people tuned into the 2012 Super Bowl half-time show to see a bunch of commercials. Forty-four
percent of all female and thirty-one percent of all male viewers of the Super Bowl claimed to tune in just to watch the commercials. Most of them probably considered it harmless entertainment and thought they would be immune to its impact. If it were so harmless then why would advertisers be willing to spend $3.5 million for a 30-second commercial? Throughout the game, more than 100 commercials aired. In one advertisement, I counted the word
debt
mentioned ten times. If that advertisement was played five times during the game, it pressed four-and-a-half billion footprints of debt-thought into the ether, all of which, by the law of nature, must return back into the lives of those who generated them.

In an average year, a five-year-old sees forty thousand media advertisements. How does that impact a child’s unguarded state of mind? Over a lifetime, how has that impacted adult mentality and eroded individual thought? Statistics show that advertising expenditures for debt reduction programs and weight loss products have grown exponentially in the last few years. At the same time, personal debt is at unprecedented levels and obesity is a national issue. But which came first?