The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [50]
“Worst case scenarios rarely happen.”
—Anonymous
I’VE LIVED THROUGH the projected end of the world from global freezing in the 1970s, the near end of the world from Chernobyl in the 1980s, the even nearer end of the world from Y2K at the turn of the century, death from alar on our apples, cancer from our power lines, cancer from our cell phones, cancer from our food coloring, and cancer from the cyclamates in the diet soft drink TAB.
When the cyclamate scare hit in 1970, many in the scientific community thought the charge was baseless because such massive doses of the chemical were used. They concluded that the poor little lab rats that raised the cancer flag were getting the human equivalent of seven hundred bottles of cyclamate-sweetened soft drinks a day. It’s a wonder they didn’t drown. Nevertheless, cyclamates were banned and saccharin was substituted.
You would think that at some point we would grow tired of it all, that we would become aggressively pessimistic regarding the pessimism industry. But no.
Pessimism: Focus on Failure
Maybe, given the nature of media, it’s just unavoidable. Television is the greatest gift to pessimism since Malthus himself. It is the lens through which we see the world, and it is not a flattering one.
An architect friend tells me that he can make even the most beautiful buildings in the world look bad. All you need to do, he says, is to take a camera, use certain angles, accentuate certain features in certain ways, and virtues are made to look like flaws. Suddenly, even the most graceful skyscraper can look like an urban blight.
When you focus on the failures of the world day in and day out, it shapes your whole attitude toward life and the future. I’ve always liked the old couplet, attributed sometimes to Robert Louis Stevenson, sometimes just to Anonymous: “Two men looked out through prison bars. One saw mud and one saw stars.” A tilt of the head, an attitude, it makes all the difference how you shape your world.
The news business has never been about good news. It’s the bad stuff that makes people sit up and take notice. And that makes perfect sense. Millions of cars safely negotiating a daily commute is a nice piece of information. But ten cars in a massive pileup is news!
However, we’ve never been so inundated with news. Bad stuff is happening everywhere, all the time.
With the Internet and cable channels churning out stories 24/7, we are just up to our earlobes in warnings of disaster and reports of disaster from every corner of the globe.
Then, too, another phenomenon that multiplies our level of anxiety several times over is the staged argument. Increasingly, we are encouraged to believe that there are two (or more) sides to every question, even for those that can be answered with incontrovertible scientific proof. Our society, already suffering from a considerable lack of civility, is further afflicted by TV shows featuring shouting heads who pose as experts debating an issue. The conclusion you are likely to draw from such entertainments is that everything is in question, everything is up for grabs, everything has a pro and a con, and since the burden of proof is on the affirmative, the negatives usually seem to outweigh the positives in these arguments. It has always been easier to assert that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It’s always been more fun for the shouters, and more riveting, though more disturbing, for the audience.
Until the last few decades, we received our news from newspapers. No matter how lurid the headlines might be, a newspaper is a nice quiet thing. The sound of a turning page is even kind of reassuring. Radio, when it became a major source of news, still seemed more benign, much less threatening than our present