Information Sells

Breaking Free from Preconceptions

A friend in Boston was buying garden seeds. As the cashier rang them up, she picked up a packet, shook it, and asked suspiciously, “Do these things really work?”

The cashier wasn’t asking about the brand or the germination rate – she was asking if you can really grow a plant from a seed.

I knew a man who grew up reading Winnie The Pooh. Somehow, in his youth, he became convinced that honey came from bears. When he learned it came from bees, he was flabbergasted.

When I was small, I thought, after learning the words to Silent Night, that the Virgin Mary was married to a jolly, bearded, fat man in a red suit named Round John Virgin because that not only explained the otherwise inexplicable presence of Santa Claus in most Christmas scenes, it was right there in the song: “Round John Virgin, Mother, and Child.”

Go ahead and laugh – but when you’re done think about how little we understand about the world around us. We rely on accepted, conventional wisdom for the few things we really need and let the rest slide.

Like the Winnie the Pooh fan, we tell ourselves stories to explain those things we don’t understand. Like the cashier, we remain skeptical of outlandish claims. Like me, we hear what we expect to hear, and if we don’t, we change the sounds until the words make sense.

How does anyone separate myth from marketing and marketing from reality? It’s a wonder we can communicate at all.

Photo by aussiegall Released under Creative Commons License.

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