Bright-Sided (14 page)

T
oday there is no excuse for remaining stuck in the swamp of negativity. A whole industry has grown up to promote positive thinking, and the product of this industry, available at a wide range of prices, is called “motivation.” You can buy it in traditional book form, along with CDs and DVDs featuring the author, or you can opt for the more intense experience of being coached or of attending a weeklong “seminar.” If you have the money, you might choose to go to a weekend session in an exotic locale with a heavy-hitting motivational speaker. Or you can consume motivation in its many inert, fetishized forms—posters and calendars, coffee mugs, and desk accessories, all emblazoned with inspirational messages. Successories, a company devoted entirely to motivational products, offers a line of “Positive Pals,” including a “bean bag starfish” wearing a life preserver bearing the words “Reach for the Stars.” Most recently, a canny retailer has invented the “Life
Is Good” line of products, including T-shirts, blankets, banners, luggage tags, dog collars, and tire covers.

It doesn’t matter where you start shopping: one product tends to lead ineluctably to another. Motivational gurus write books in order to get themselves speaking engagements, which in turn become opportunities for selling the books and perhaps other products the guru is offering, some of them not obviously related to the quest for a positive attitude. Superstar motivational speaker Tony Robbins, for example, sells nutritional supplements on his Web site along with his books and at one point was heavily involved in marketing Q-Link, a pendant that supposedly protected the wearer from cell phone radiation. Many thousands of potential customers are drawn into the motivation market through the thirty “Get Motivated!” rallies held each year in various cities, at which, for a low ticket price of about fifty dollars, one can hear celebrity speakers like Colin Powell or Bill Cosby. Many things go on at the rallies—“platitudes, pep talks, canned-ham humor, live infomercials, prefab patriotism, Bible Belt Christianity,” according to one newspaper report—but they serve largely as showcases for dozens of other products, including books, tapes, personal coaching, and further training in the art of positive thinking.
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According to John LaRosa of Marketdata Enterprises Inc., which tracks the self-help industry, “basically the money is made in the back of the room, as they say,” through the sale of “books and tapes and multimedia packages.”
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Millions of individuals buy these products. People facing major illnesses are particularly susceptible, as are the unemployed and people in risky lines of work. In 2007, I got to know Sue Goodhart, a realtor who was showing me houses, and I happened to mention that I was doing some research on motivational speakers. She smiled ruefully and gestured toward the backseat of her
car, which I saw was piled with motivational CDs. When I teased her for being a “motivation junkie,” she told me that she’d come from a working-class background and had never been encouraged to set high goals for herself. Then, at some point in the 1990s, her agency brought in a motivational firm called the Pacific Institute, which provided a five-day session on “goal-setting, positive thinking, visualization, and getting out of your comfort zone,” and she began to think of herself as a self-determining individual and potential success. But that first exposure was hardly enough. She continues to listen to motivational CDs in her car from house to house, both because “sales is a lonely business” and because the CDs help her get to “the next level.”

But the motivation industry would not have become the multibillion-dollar business that it is if it depended entirely on individual consumers.
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It carved out a much larger and more free-spending market, and that new market was business in general, including America’s largest companies. Corporations buy motivational products in bulk—books by the thousands, for example—for free distribution to employees. They can pay for motivational speakers, who typically charge five-figure fees per gig and often more. Almost any major U.S. company can be found on the lists of clients proudly displayed on motivational speakers’ Web sites; a book on the motivational-speaking business mentions Sprint,
Albertsons, Allstate, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, and American Airlines among the corporate clients.
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And companies can command the attention of their employees, requiring them to attend coaching sessions, listen to DVDs, or show up at motivational events. Many of the people who attend “Get Motivated!” events do so with free tickets provided by their employers.

In the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined—not an exhortation to get up and get going but a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels. The publishers of Norman Vincent Peale’s
Power of Positive Thinking
were among the first to see this potential way back in the fifties, urging, in an ad for that book: “EXECUTIVES: Give this book to employees. It pays dividends!” Salesmen would gain “renewed faith in what they sell and in their organization,” plus, the ad promised, the book would bring “greater efficiency from the
office staff
. Marked reductions in clock-watching.”
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With “motivation” as the whip, positive thinking became the hallmark of the compliant employee, and as the conditions of corporate employment worsened in the age of downsizing that began in the 1980s, the hand on the whip grew heavier.

Lonely Salesmen

Salespeople didn’t need any prompting from management to buy into positive thinking, and for understandable reasons. Theirs is a lonely existence, as Sue Goodhart told me, typically cut off from company headquarters and lived out in the perpetual exile of highways, motels, and airports. As much as anyone in the corporation, they face a life of constant challenge, in which every day is a test likely to end in rejection and defeat. But however lonely and wounded, the salesman has to be prepared to pick himself up and
generate fresh enthusiasm for the next customer, the next city, the next rejection. He—and, as the twentieth century wore on, increasingly she—urgently needed a way to overcome self-doubts and generate optimism.

Consider the Internet testimony of a salesman named Rob Spiegel, who describes himself as initially skeptical of positive thinking: “My doubts centered on the thought that positive thinking wasn’t much different than magical thinking. . . . Even more disturbing, I worried that positive thinking may be a nasty form of self delusion that could ultimately clothe you into an unreality that could actually prevent success.” But once he started his own business—he does not say in what—he came to understand the need for a defensive reprogramming of his mind:

When you roll up your sleeves and begin the heavy lifting of starting a company, doom thoughts quickly fill your empty brain. Every “NO” from a sales call is a powerful referendum on the very idea that you could successfully launch a business. If you’re not thinking positively in the face of rejection, you eventually believe those who are rejecting you, and during the early stages, there’s more rejection than acceptance.
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The centrality of the sales effort to the consumer economy cannot be underestimated: if that economy is to flourish, people have to be persuaded to buy things they do not need or do not know they need, and this persuasion is the job of the sales force as well as the advertising agencies. But for all their contributions to economic growth, salespeople get very little respect. In Woody Allen’s film
Take the Money and Run
, Allen’s character is tortured by being locked up in a room with an insurance salesman. We find salespeople’s enthusiasm false; we think of them as the quintessentially
hollowed-out men. The twentieth century saw two great plays about salesmen—Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
and David Mamet’s
Glengarry Glen Ross—
and in each of them the drama hinges on the fact that some flicker of humanity remains within the salesmen’s shriveled souls.

It was to this despised group that Norman Vincent Peale took his ministry beginning in the 1950s. Although he enjoyed consorting with top business leaders, he especially liked speaking to the lowly salesmen, even to the point of seeing himself as one of them—“God’s salesman,” as he liked to say. Surely, except for the constant rejection, his life resembled those of the salesmen to whom he preached positive thinking. After the success of
The Power of Positive Thinking
, Peale never ceased traveling and speaking, leaving his children to be raised by his wife and his church to be tended by his staff, so that he shared with salesmen their “nomadic, endlessly mobile, existences, aware that every transaction was an individual performance and a personal challenge,” as a biographer puts it.
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In
The Power of Positive Thinking,
most of his anecdotes are set in hotels or conference rooms, where anxious or shattered salesmen buttonhole him for personal counseling. This was Peale’s designated constituency—“the lonely man in the motel room.”
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Today salespeople are hardly alone in their efforts to achieve a state of frenzied enthusiasm; they get plenty of help from their employers, who have become increasingly ingenious in their motivational efforts. One approach, pioneered by the pharmaceutical companies, is to start by hiring people who are already, in a sense, motivators themselves—college cheerleaders—and they have turned out to be so successful as sales reps that a regular recruiting pipeline has developed between the drug companies and the campuses. “They don’t ask what the major is,” a cheerleading adviser at the University of Kentucky said of the recruiters; it’s enough
for the job candidate to be a trained cheerleader. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm,” the adviser continued, “they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.”
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Another straightforward way to motivate a sales force is to offer rewards for high performers. Top sellers of Mary Kay cosmetics get pink Cadillacs; the “employee of the month” at any company may get a more convenient parking space. A management consultant observed in 2006 that “U.S. employers spend $100 billion a year on incentives like T-shirts, golf outings and free trips to Florida in the belief that they somehow motivate and inspire their employees.”
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Not all the motivational methods applied to salespeople feature rewards and incentives. In a workplace environment where employees have few if any rights, some companies resort to motivating their salespeople in ways that are cruel or even kinky. Alarm One, for example, a California-based home-security company, was sued in 2006 by a saleswoman for subjecting her to what could be called motivational spankings. The spankings, usually administered with the metal yard signs of competing companies, were meant to spur competition between teams of salespersons. As one salesman testified, “Basically, you’d get up in front of the room, put your hands on the wall, bend over, and get hit with the sign.” Other punishments for underperforming salespersons included having eggs broken on their heads or whipped cream sprayed on their faces and being forced to wear diapers. (Since both men and women were subjected to them, the spankings did not qualify as sexual harassment, and the woman lost her suit.)

An even more disturbing case comes from Prosper Inc. in Provo, Utah, where in May 2007 a supervisor subjected an employee to waterboarding as part of a “motivational exercise.” The employee, who had volunteered for the experience without knowing what was involved, was taken outside, told to lie down with
his head pointed downhill, and held in place by fellow employees while the supervisor poured water into his nose and mouth. “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there,” the supervisor reportedly told the sales team. “I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”
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While insisting that the company does not condone torture, Prosper management has had nothing to say about this supervisor’s more routine motivational practices, like drawing mustaches on employees’ faces and making them work standing up all day. Oddly enough, Prosper is itself in the business of selling “motivation” to other companies.

Far more commonly, of course, companies have left their salespeople’s bodies untouched and sought only to control their minds. When sociologist Robin Leidner underwent sales training at a company called Combined Insurance in 1987, he found an “emphasis on teaching proper attitudes and selling techniques and [a] relative lack of attention to teaching agents about life insurance.” The first day of class began with trainees standing up and chanting, “I FEEL HEALTHY, I FEEL HAPPY, I FEEL TERRIFIC!” while throwing “the winning punch.” At Combined Insurance, this was part of the “Positive Mental Attitude” philosophy developed by the company’s founder, W. Clement Stone—a major Republican donor and coauthor, with Napoleon Hill, of
Success through a Positive Mental Attitude.
Slogans flashed at sales trainees on video included “I dare you to develop a winning personality.” Leidner comments, “As that last slogan makes clear, trainees were encouraged to regard their personalities as something to be worked on and adjusted to promote success.”
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Few companies have worked as hard to instill positive thinking in their sales force as Amway, the purveyor of cleaning products, water purifiers, and cosmetics. Amway recruits undergo an intense indoctrination, paid for out of their own pockets, in the form of
tapes, books, seminars, and rallies. In the early 1980s, salespeople were expected to buy a book a month from a list including such classics as
The Power of Positive Thinking
and Napoleon Hill’s
Think and Grow Rich!
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At seminars, which the salespeople pay to attend, they learn that “God is Positive, and the Devil is Negative.” As one former Amway salesman explains, “Whatever influence weakens your belief and commitment in the business is Negative. . . . Refusal to buy a tape when recommended by the upline [people higher in the sales hierarchy] is Negative.” This salesman describes an Amway sales rally as something like a rock concert: