Seth's Blog : Hope and truth

Hope and truth

The candidate running for re-election offers truth. This is what I did, I would like to do it again. The candidate coming out of nowhere offers hope. We can’t know but we can imagine.

Kickstarter offers hope. No reviews, no tests, simply a promise of what might be.

Book publishers buy hope, so do venture capitalists. On the other hand, the typical commercial investor simply wants a repeat of what already was.

Some pharmaceuticals offer specific outcomes with known statistics…

Simple example: Early in my career as a producer and creator of non-fiction books, my proposals included finished layouts. It turned out that whatever I could have offered at this stage could never be as good as the publisher imagined could be created once I had their input… better to offer a blank page than the page we would actually produce. On the other hand, I couldn’t simply assert that the contents would be worth publishing–we had to offer examples and a track record.

The thing is, there’s never just truth, because we’re talking about the future. So we base our hope on what has come before.

And there’s never just hope. The hope is based on something that came before, some clue or hint or track record that makes us believe.

The hard work for the marketer is in choosing when we’ve established enough of a track record–but not too much.

And for the voter/consumer/investor, we get to choose what we seek, and what we offer. Confusing truth and hope doesn’t make it more likely we’ll succeed.