Taxes On The Stupid

Pay Up

When I was a (had to be) remarkably painful to live with teenager, my mother would spend a few bucks on the lottery. As a single mother raising three kids on her own, it was likely one of life's few and good diversions for her, as a bartender who logged late hours to keep a roof over our head. She'd connect more than a few times on the three digit daily draw, and when that happened, she's share the wealth. Nothing too dire or difficult in that, right?

Well, of course not. But here's where I prove my stripes as a world-class pain in the posterior. Having always had a political bent for aspects involving class systems and how poor people stayed poor (yes, you guessed it, we were not particularly well to do), I had picked up what legislators called lotteries, in private.

"Taxes on the stupid."

Now, to be very clear about this: I'm not insulting my mother's intellect, either then or now. The same way I'm not insulting anyone who played and lost in the most recent spasm of activity. We are, at our core, nearly helpless to resist the momentary good feeling and day dreaming that hits when we've got a ticket in our hands, and the simple truths of the purchase are undeniable. Can't win if you don't play. It's only a trivial amount of money. It's fun to dream.

But what's not fun is paying off people who think you are stupid, and proving it with the payment.

So I made my mom a deal, all those years ago. I told her that the next time she hit the lottery, I wanted no part of the winnings... but that every time she played, I wanted her to give me a dollar. For whatever reason, she put up with this disrespect. And then I left those dollars in plain sight, in my room, near where she'd drop off laundry. (Why wasn't I doing my own laundry by the time I was a teenager? No idea, really. Probably because, as this whole story shows, Mom had the good wisdom to regard laundry as a welcome respite from putting up with me. Anyway...)

I was fortunate enough, as a kid, to have relatively steady employment. First as a paperboy, then as a gopher and counter person at a miniature golf course, and finally as a content provider at a pre-Internet telecommunications start up. So I didn't have to touch that pile of dollar bills that started piling up on my dresser. And when they hit a certain tipping point -- probably $50 or $60 -- my mom told me tht she wasn't playing the lottery any more, and I'd made my point. (She also refused to take back the pile.)

Since then, lotteries have only gotten bigger, with a spiraling amount of "news" coverage that just strikes me as downright unseemly. I pay my own taxes for being dumb, mostly through gambling with friends at a poker table or in fantasy leagues, or less often, in casinos. (It's still a tax on the stupid, but the difference is that I can feel like I've earned my luck in those games. It's a more fun illusion.) But I never got the lottery bug, because I've never lost the need to refuse payment of cynical political operatives. Or the knowledge that the only people who consistently get paid from this game are the ones working for the house.

Where this ties into the mission statement of marketing and advertising perspective is that we all, as professionals, make pitches to ourselves just to get through the day. Knowing why a pitch works allows you to counter it, use its power to subvert it, and maybe, in the long run, make better choices. Or, at least, better pitches.

Our world would be better without lotteries. Especially if we just donated to charities routinely, rather than believe the most over the top cynical political move of saying how a portion of the proceeds goes to a good cause, so losing in the lottery is just like charity.

And the trick to taking the juice out of this purchase, and keeping more people from succumbing to inertia the next time the pot gets big enough to make everyone forget the earlier losses?

Well, turning off the unpaid propaganda for it in the media would be a start. As would keeping in mind what the people who run the games think of the customers...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit the site. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Serious Business Of Fun

Yes. Yes, We Are.

Recently, I was asked for a single word that related to my idea of fun. Which, as any routine reader of my content will attest, is an absolutely impossible request to fill. I'm barely able to answer, in one words, yes or no questions. An occupational hazard. But anyhoo...

After thinking way too long and way too hard for anyone who actually knows what fun is, I finally have an answer. (Don't worry, there's a practical marketing and advertising application for all of this later.)

Fun is Focus.

You've probably rolled your eyes at this point and are about to go find anything else to spend your time on than more time with a workaholic, but hear me out.

Name anything that you find to be truly fun -- for me, that's water slides, poker, golf, playing Frisbee with my dog, playing my guitar, making my kids laugh, watching a good game, and other less public activities (there's a particular Michael Palin skit from Monty Python that works here)... and there's a common theme running through all of it.

It's the only thing that I am doing at the time.

You are almost never having fun when you are doing two things at once. Fun is utterly ruined by distraction. It's destroyed as soon as you look past it to the next thing, even if the next thing is also Fun. Fun is relaxed, monomaniacal, and childish... because children are the only people who rarely have two or more things going on in their heads at once, and who are totally present to the moment.

Fun does not involve clocks, unless having to fit into a set span of time is part of the Fun. The fact that Fun can end at any moment is, perversely, part of the Fun, because that's what makes you so present to it. It's not usually found on mobile devices, because every mobile device is absolutely ready to distract you with something else (perhaps something very Not Fun) at any moment.

Want more? Anticipating an event is often more Fun than the actual event, because the actual event has to be enough Fun to prevent distraction, whereas the anticipation has no such bar to clear. People who are having fun are almost always attractive on some level, because others want to be more like them.

Finally, this. Fun is a choice. I've had great times cleaning my house, just because. There have been aha moments in analytics that can make me giddy. Catching the scene of an optimal tactic, then tracking it down to its workable essence? Downright joyous.

And if you're in a situation where you are not having fun at work, and you used to? Ask yourself whether your manager isn't keeping enough distractions away from you, so you can go back to having the fun. (Oh, and this is also a reason why consultants... seem to be having all the fun.)

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit the site. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

When Marketing Gets Personal

Wall Crusher

This evening, as I checked my social feed for news from friends and family, I saw a GoFundMe for someone near and dear. It's to help pay for the medical bills for my niece and goddaughter, a high school senior who is undergoing an operation to take out thyroid cancer. You can see it for yourself here, and by all means, feel free to add to the fund or share it.

It's a simple page, for what we all are hoping is a simple procedure, because while life is rarely fair, it's more than a little obscene to have to deal with any form of cancer at age 17. Especially when you have always played by the rules and taken advantage of your opportunities, through diligent schoolwork, athletics, activities and more.

As scary as something like this is, I have every confidence in my niece, and on some level, I'm not surprised to see her take this step to deal with the situation head on. In any equation where there is a wall between this kid and a goal, it's a bad day to be the wall. You are, on every level, putting your money on a winner with this campaign.

I knew about the surgery, of course. The GoFundMe is another matter. My family tends to be pretty private folks, and incredibly hard-working. But where this goes beyond just using my platform to publicize a good cause is to note how, once more, technology is changing the world in a million small and powerful ways.

There is, honestly, nothing to stop anyone in the world with Web access from directly impacting someone's life in a small but potent way, through acts like funding a medical procedure. We spend so much time noting the horrible moments of the Web -- shameful comments and behavior, timewaste content and addiction enablement, social media use by evil actors, malware and fraud and so on -- that it's really easy to forget how much good can be done.

That's the nature of communication without filters, and peer to peer conversation. A power that can be used for great good.

Oh, and one final point? I didn't coach her on anything involved with this. Seems to be entirely her idea, and her execution, and as a consultant, I think she nailed it. Pitch is short, sweet, and to the point -- and keeps everything in its proper perspective and tone.

Nice work, Em. Now, go kick cancer's ass.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit the site. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.