The book that introduced most twentieth-century Americans—as well as people worldwide—to the ceaseless work of positive thinking was, of course, Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale was a mainstream Protestant minister who had been attracted to New Thought early in his career, thanks, he later wrote, to a New Thought proponent named Ernest Holmes. “Only those who knew me as a boy,” he wrote, “can fully appreciate what Ernest Holmes did for me. Why, he made me a positive thinker.” 32 If Peale saw any conflict between positive thinking and the teachings of the Calvinist-derived Dutch Reformed Church that he eventually adopted as his denomination, it did not perturb him. A mediocre student, he had come out of divinity school with a deep aversion to theological debates—and determined to make Christianity “practical” in solving people’s ordinary financial, marital, and business problems. Like the nineteenth-century New Thought leaders before him, he saw himself in part as a healer; only the twentieth-century illness was not neurasthenia but what Peale identified as an “inferiority complex,” something he had struggled with in his own life. In one of his books, written well after the publication of his perennial best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, he wrote:
A man told me he was having a lot of trouble with himself. “You are not the only one,” I reflected, thinking of the many letters I receive from people who ask for help with problems. And also thinking of myself; for I must admit that the person who has caused me the most trouble over the years has been Norman Vincent Peale. . . . If we are our own chief problem, the basic reason must be found in the type of thoughts which habitually occupy and direct our minds. 33
We have seen the enemy, in other words, and it is ourselves, or at least our thoughts. Fortunately though, thoughts can be monitored and corrected until, to paraphrase historian Donald Meyer’s summary of Peale, positive thoughts became “automatic” and the individual became fully “conditioned.” 34 Today we might call this the work of “reprogramming,” and since individuals easily lapse back into negativity—as Peale often noted with dismay—it had to be done again and again. In The Power of Positive Thinking, Peale offered “ten simple, workable rules,” or exercises, beginning with:
1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. . . .
2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.
3. Do not build up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. 35
Peale trusted the reader to come up with his or her own positive thoughts, but over time the preachers of positivity have found it more and more necessary to provide a kind of script in the form of “affirmations” or “declarations.” In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, for example, T. Harv Eker offers the reader the following instructions in how to overcome any lingering resistance to the wealth he or she deserves:
Place your hand on your heart and say . . .
“I admire rich people!”
“I bless rich people!”
“I love rich people!”
“And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!” 36
This work is never done. Setbacks can precipitate relapses into negativity, requiring what one contemporary guru, M. Scott Peck, calls “a continuing and never-ending process of self-monitoring.” 37 Or, more positively, endless work may be necessitated by constantly raising your sights. If you are satisfied with what you have, you need to “sharpen the saw,” in self-help writer Stephen Covey’s words, and admit that what you have isn’t enough. As the famed motivator Tony Robbins puts it: “When you set a goal, you’ve committed to CANI [Constant, Never-Ending Improvement]! You’ve acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is a power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life.” 38
There is no more exhausting account of the self-work required for positive thinking than motivational speaker Jeffrey Gitomer’s story of how he achieved and maintains his positive attitude. We last encountered Gitomer demanding a purge of “negative people” from one’s associates, much as an old-style Calvinist might have demanded an expulsion of sinners, but Gitomer had not always been so self-confidently positive. In the early 1970s, his business was enjoying only “moderate success,” his marriage was “bad,” and his wife was pregnant with twins. Then he fell in with a marketing company called Dare to Be Great, whose founder now claims to have anticipated the 2006 best seller The Secret by thirty-five years. Told by his new colleagues that “you’re going to get a positive attitude . . . and you’re going to make big money. Go, go, go!” he sold his business and plunged into the work of self-improvement. He watched the motivational film Challenge to America over five times a week and obsessively reread Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich! with his new colleagues: “Each person was responsible for writing and presenting a book report on one chapter each day. There were 16 chapters in the book, 10 people in the room, and we did this for one year. You can do the math for how many times I have read the book.” 39 At first the best he could do was fake a positive attitude: “Friends would ask me how I was doing, and I would extend my arms into the air and scream, ‘Great!’ Even though I was crappy.” Suddenly, “one day I woke up, and I had a positive attitude. . . . I GOT IT! I GOT IT!” 40
Substitute the Bible for Think and Grow Rich! and you have a conversion tale every bit as dramatic as anything Christian lore has to offer. Like the hero of the great seventeenth-century Calvinist classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, Gitomer had found himself trapped by family and wallowing in his slough of despond—of mediocrity, rather than sin—and like Bunyan’s hero, Gitomer shook off his old business, and his first wife, in order to remake himself. Just as Calvinism demanded not only a brief experience of conversion but a lifetime of self-examination, Gitomer’s positive attitude requires constant “maintenance,” in the form of “reading something positive every morning, thinking positive thoughts every morning, . . . saying positive things every morning,” and so forth. 41 This is work, and just to make that clear, Gitomer’s Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude offers a photograph of the author in a blue repairman’s shirt bearing the label “Positive Attitude Maintenance Department.”
Reciting affirmations, checking off work sheets, compulsively rereading get-rich-quick books: these are not what Emerson had in mind when he urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of Calvinism and embrace a bounteous world filled with “new lands, new men, and new thoughts.” He was something of a mystic, given to moments of transcendent illumination: “I become a universal eyeball. I am nothing; I see all. . . . All mean egotismvanishes.” 42 In such states, the self does not double into a worker and an object of work; it disappears. The universe cannot be “supply,” since such a perception requires a desiring, calculating ego, and as soon as ego enters into the picture, the sense of Oneness is shattered. Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Still, surely it is better to obsess about one’s chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?
From the mid-twentieth century on, there was an all too practical answer: more and more people were employed in occupations that seemed to require positive thinking and all the work of self-improvement and maintenance that went into it. Norman Vincent Peale grasped this as well as anyone: the work of
Americans, and especially of its ever-growing white-collar proletariat, is in no small part work that is performed on the self in order to make that self more acceptable and even likeable to employers, clients, coworkers, and potential customers. Positive thinking had ceased to be just a balm for the anxious or a cure for the psychosomatically distressed. It was beginning to be an obligation imposed on all American adults.
FOUR
Motivating Business and the
Business of Motivation
Today 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. 1 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.” 2
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. * 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. 3 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.” 4 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. 5
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. 6 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.” 7
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