Many years ago, in the 1990s, I wrote a story for U.S. News & World Report on the horse racing industry and its steady decline into irrelevance in the face of the onslaught from casino gambling, which was spreading rapidly to different parts of the country.

Even back then, the thought was: “It’s a dying industry filled with dying people.”

But while many viewed horseplayers as relics of a different age – losers who wasted their social security checks on longshots that would never come in – I saw something different. When I went to the track, I saw camaraderie among the racing patrons- they rooted for each other, celebrated their wins together, and talked about their favorite horses (Cigar, Zenyatta, Thorpedo Anna) like a young baseball fan might talk about Bryce Harper or Shohei Ohtani. Mostly, I saw what many of the great racing writers also observed at the track – horseplayers, above all else, had hope. That despite losing four days in a row, they’d come on day five believing that this was indeed their day to win.

There are those who might snicker and suggest such belief is indeed folly, but there’s something actually wonderful about this sentiment and the way that you can approach life and marketing in general. After all, you may have had setbacks, but who’s to say this isn’t your day? Our Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians) haven’t won the World Series since 1948, but who’s to say this isn’t their year? Who’s to say that today you won’t find the secret to that new campaign? Or that you’ll work out the messaging or brand narrative for a client that really changes their outlook? Who’s to say, that as a company or brand, you won’t inspire your audiences or motivate them to do something good for themselves?   

I remember reading an interview with TV writer David Milch, who wrote and produced the HBO series Luck about the lives of people playing the horses in Southern California. They asked Milch, who loved playing the horses too, about the hopefulness of people at the track. He said: “The deepest truth of our experience is that, every day we wake up, we’re lucky. As long as you’re drawing breath, you got another chance.”[1]

Every day we wake up, we’re lucky.

I just love that line. Not just because it’s about gratitude and appreciation, it’s also the sentiment that allows people to think positively in terms of their outlook. It’s a baseline for your perspective – something that we should spread more as marketers. Not this idea of “You deserve everything in the world” (which we probably do too much of as an industry, along with “you should fear this”). We don’t do enough of “You can do this.”

With the former, we’re just selling entitlement and fear; with the latter, we’re selling hope.

Let me explain more about what I mean.

Selling Hope Is Hard 

Back a decade ago, when we had a thoughtful leader of the country in Barack Obama, he used to talk a lot about hope. Part of the former President’s aim was to inspire optimism, for sure. But it was much more than that, I think, on a deeper level. He understood that hope wasn’t a strategy, it was more of a mindset that required honesty in assessing what’s real (telling people the truth about what a realistic baseline is – “every day we wake up, we’re lucky”). In order to make progress, it also required effort – not this “You’re worth it” bullshit that we peddle too often.

However, like everything in the polarized political world we live in, his message of hope was met with derision by some. It was probably overly layered and complex. In truth, Obama was almost certainly too intellectual for the average American, some of whom, as a result, painted him as an out-of-touch elitist.[2]

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.

To put it in marketing terms, Obama was selling what people needed versus what they perhaps wanted to hear. In our field, it’s generally easier for us to sell something people already want or sell something based on vanity, fear, anxiety, or some other strong emotion that takes over our primitive brains. What’s harder is selling what people really need but may not know it yet.

After all, that involves creating demand, which is more layered. It may involve getting people to take a different mindset, embracing complexity more than they currently do, or resetting people’s expectations for how they look at the world.

Talk about difficult. It’s almost everything our marketing industry counsels against doing.

Yet, I’d argue we need that kind of “hope” right now – the kind that implies realism and resilience – the “we’ve-been-knocked-down-five-times-let’s-get-up-six-times” attitude because brighter days are still ahead. Not this idea “you deserve whatever you want” – that if something’s not right you should get a different outcome.

Yet, that’s how life has been marketed to all of us. The problem is that, while that must make us feel good, it’s a lie. And ultimately it hurts the people who come to believe it. And unfortunately, it impacts the choices we make, like the recent election.

Take a look around you. More people in this country are really hurting because of the dumb things our current, less-thoughtful leader has done to cripple us only 3 months into office. Maybe part of the reason he was chosen was that we felt we deserved more.  

Would it be better if more of us had adopted a “As-long-as-you’re-drawing-breath-you-got-another- chance” approach to life? I don’t know. Perhaps we wouldn’t have seen the need to make changes if we took the attitude of “we’re lucky to have what we have.” That doesn’t mean complacency with the status quo, but it does involve benchmarking our own true reality. We used to feel that way. Or at least more so. It sounds like an oxymoron to say that having hope is about being more realistic, but that’s probably what it really is on deeper level. Ultimately, it’s about being resilient in the face of adversity. And selling that, we might all be a little better off.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/80030529/HBO-LUCK-Interview-With-David-Milch#scribd

[2] The truth was more that he understood complexity and tried to explain why complexity matters to people who wanted more simple answers. Simple sells, but it doesn’t reflect anything in life.