There are thousands of books on positivity. Every week new ones emerge that squeeze every last nuance out of get up and go. Amazon lists 261 titles under positivity and over 220,000 in the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ category. The concept must sell.

One of the common themes is to think big. Upsize your ambition as well as your fries and truly exceptional things can happen. Your thinking, the ideas you can conjure and your cholesterol levels can all expand if you upsize enough.

It is tempting.

I had great plans for a past venture of mine, Biotrack Australia, that monitored environmental performance for a fee. There were visions of expansion from a few local government, research, and mining company contracts to global dominance. Fuelled by much hard work with some great staff, the technology improved along with the business. We even set up a branch in Botswana (long story).

I began to imagine a neon sign atop a high-rise in North Sydney beaming out the company logo across the iconic harbour.

Then the cash ran out.

Instead of expansion to the world, Biotrack downsized. It turns out that the fees did not match the level of interest potential clients had in finding out just how well their environment was performing. And you can see why. Unless a company has to report its externalities they have no need to measure them. Knowledge has to make a material difference to the bottom line and even then decision makers need to feel the immediate benefit of investing in it.

So Biotrack spent what we had left on an all out search for clients who would make money from knowing their environmental performance and, well, failed to find any. Soon after the technology and IP were sold for a modest amount.

No neon this time.

The post mortem was brief. We decided that we’d experienced an all too familiar problem for commercial start-ups where some success prompted growth in advance of the cashflow to support it. In short, we were undercapitalised. Our resources did not match the grand vision.

This was a satisfactory explanation at the time. One that did not undermine the positive grand vision.

And given that nobody has ever won the lottery without a ticket, we felt we had given it a fair go but just didn’t have the necessary luck.

A decade on and I’m reflecting again on this notion of positivity. I suspect that in our line of business — the one that is trying to provide information and knowledge of environmental performance for a fee now taken up by Alloporus Environmental — no amount of positivity is enough. It is not the same as, say, a golf tournament where there are 50 people with enough skill to win it, and one winner on the day. Rarely is the winner the one who didn’t think they could.

No, I now believe that we are in a game without a winner. And in such a situation not even a shelf full of positivity is enough.

I am convinced that knowledge is neither required or desired, especially when it comes to the environment.

As an environmental knowledge provider you can think as big as you like, imagine the neon signs, and read all the books, but it will make no difference for there is no tournament there to be won and no amount of upsizing can create one.