Two reasons why many dream of boats and fancy cars but will never do anything towards achieving these: skepticism and conformity. North Americans are highly skeptical because a lot of corporations have done a great job at marketing just about everything under the sun (including just about every opportunity, legitimate or not) to these individuals.

They’ve heard it all. They’ve heard the promises of the super pill that allows you to lose 5-10 lbs while you sleep. They’ve heard of the ground floor opportunity that will make them rich. They’ve attended the motivational seminars that promised to make them successful (as soon as they would buy the overpriced course offered by the presenter).

In a time where consumers spend less time enjoying pristine lakes and mountain ranges and instead have their days cluttered with billboards and commercials, it’s not hard to understand why North America is a nation of skeptics. Yet some of the same concepts that create a “red flag” for the consumers here would create intelligent discussion in other parts of the world. That’s because the phrase “too good to be true” is abused in North America.

Technology (including business technology and marketing compensation technologies) allows for many “too good to be true” scenarios to, in fact, be true. A laptop, afterall, would be too good to be true for those who have never even seen a personal computer (desktop). Electric cars are too good to be true for the farmer used to the horse and buggy. It’s all a matter of our perception and understanding. We as humans tend to fear that which we do not understand. But ignorance is not the best defense.

Yes, there is a lot of hype. Sometimes even the best of companies (including traditional “bricks and mortar” corporations) start dishing out hype. But it’s important to wade through hype marketing tactics, put the “business analyst hat” on and really consider the information presented. You then have the option to accept it, neglect it or reject it. But if you don’t have your facts in place first, you could miss out on a viable opportunity.

There’s a story I heard from a professor back in my college days. He told me of a woman who was running an advertisement selling a classic Mustang for $100. The ad was brief (and I’m not a car enthusiast and can’t recall the specifications) but it more or less informed the reader that it was a true, classic Mustang and it cost $100. This ad ran in a popular newspaper. Yet several days went by before the calls came in. Again, tens of thousands had seen the ad… yet nobody was acting on it until a few days later (and eventually she sold it). The readers might have imagined a rusted mustang, a toy mustang, or they thought there was a typo in the ad or that it was a hoax… a million and one things they made up in their mind. But, as the story goes, it was an angry wife who was selling off her cheating ex-husband’s car and out of spite, she was selling it for only $100. It was a legitimate opportunity to purchase a beautiful vehicle for $100 but many perceived it as a joke or a misprint and ignored it. They missed out.

Another story flows from that one, this one taken from the popular television show Candid Camera. Candid Camera ran a spoof one time where they filmed customers in a gift shop. At the counter, they placed a bowl with $1 US bills in it and a note that read something along the lines of “Please Take One”. Customers were filmed on tape as they entered the store, saw the bowl, stared at it in surprise but didn’t take the money. Dozens and dozens of customers saw it. Some made a fuss and questioned it. They talked it over with their friends. They looked, walked away, came back and looked again. Yet it was only a child who actually dug in and finally grabbed a $1 bill from this overflowing bowl of free money.

Yes it was only a dollar, but let’s face it, if the clerk had offered to deduct $1 from their purchases for the day, everyone would have jumped at the opportunity. Or if the clerk had informed any customer that they would receive $1 off of anything they bought that day, the customers would have appreciated it. But free money? That must be too good to be true. Even though many talked it over with their spouses trying to figure out if they were reading the sign right, their skepticism held them back.

Conformity is the other mindset. I touched on it earlier but in essence it’s the majority choosing to accept and follow the beliefs of… well… the rest of the majority. This is how mediocre income and mediocre lifestyles are created. The majority, the masses, have their mentality set on mediocrity (on being average) and 98% go right along with this… they follow the large group. Unfortunately, they follow the wrong group.