Twenty-nine years ago, Carl Sagan wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995).One of the observations Carl shared in that book is particularly troubling:“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”Twenty-nine years later, half the nation is traumatized by an old white guy they believe will destroy America. The other half is traumatized by a different old white guy they believe will destroy America.When did old white guys become so scary?Why do we have these feelings of impending doom?During the Covid crisis we lived in an unfamiliar world for more than a year, a world of continual anxiety.Half of America was traumatized by the threat of vaccines and masks. The other half was traumatized by the people who rejected vaccines and masks. All the places that made us feel normal were closed. Restaurants and churches and schools and movie theaters and sporting events and theme parks and weddings were memories of a past life.When our circumstances returned to normal, we, ourselves, did not. The boat was gone, but the wake remained. It is hard to swim in rough and choppy waters.According to mental health professionals, the wake of that boat is a condition called hyper-vigilance.Think of it as a sort of PTSD. Even now, something inside us remains crouched, ready for danger. Are you beginning to see why so many people are anxious and uncertain?I never experienced hyper-vigilance until I was 40. When I had completed my second book, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, I began to spend countless hours revising and rearranging it. In the mornings I would eliminate a comma, and in the afternoons I would put it back again.Ray Bard saw what was happening and spoke wisdom into my life.He smiled and said to me these words,“Roy, you’re not making your book any better or worse. You’re just making it slightly different. It’s time to put down the pen. What you are experiencing happens to writers who take their craft seriously, and you obviously take your writing seriously. You are a wonderful writer. You have written a great book. But now it is time to lay down the pen.”Three weeks ago, I told that story to a close friend of mine who was trapped in a never-ending loop of revisions to a project he had been working on for more than a year. My friend is not a writer, but his project is just as big as mine, and his identity was all wrapped up in it, just as mine had been. He listened to my story of Ray Bard and the Pen and saw himself in it.I was able to open the door of his cage, just as Ray Bard had opened the door of mine.Whose cage door will you open today? Someone else’s, or your own?Roy H. WilliamsBernie Madoff perpetrated the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history, and before he died in prison in 2021, he met Richard Behar face-to-face 3 times, had more than 50 phone conversations with him, and exchanged more than 300 emails. How did Bernie Madoff pull it off? Who were his accomplices? Why were his investors so gullible? And how can you make sure it never happens to you? You’ll hear the answers to these questions and others, plus a couple of recordings of phone conversations between the two men, as investigative reporter Richard Behar reveals The Real Bernie Madoff to roving reporter Rotbart on this week’s edition of MondayMorningRadio.com

Lots of people have been asking me the same 3 questions.QUESTION ONE: “Who were your mentors?”Mentor is a word I never use. It smells of apprenticeship, that wafting, submissive aroma that arises from a servant who adores his master. By this definition, I have never had a mentor, but I do have many heroes I study from a distance, and I have a lot of friends who have spoken valuable things into my life.QUESTION TWO: “What is your writing method?”1. I descend into the depths of the client/character in whose voice I will be writing. This takes awhile.2. When I have lost contact with my surroundings and found that character and become that character, I write what that character would say. I do this in the middle of the night because there are fewer interruptions.3. When the character is finished talking, I ascend from the deep waters into the air and sunlight of my surroundings, walk into the kitchen, make a cup of hot tea, and add the juice of a Key Lime. This little ritual helps me find myself. Then I look at the digital clock on the microwave to find out how long I have been away, because time does not exist in that alternate realm.Sometimes, when Pennie is visiting her sisters, I will awaken in the wintertime post-midnight darkness, work for awhile, rise to make tea, and notice that it is not yet light. But when I finally realize it is the darkness of evening, not morning, and that an entire day has disappeared while I was underwater, I have to reorient my mind.QUESTION THREE: “Is your health okay?”“Are you pulling back? Are you stepping away from Wizard Academy and the Wizard of Ads partners? Your recent Monday Morning Memos make me feel like you are preparing to say goodbye.”I fear you have me confused with Mentor R. Williams.Mentor Ralph Williams (yes, Mentor was his first name) wrote “Drift Away,” one of the gold record hits of the 70’s. Dobie Gray sang it to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1973.“Day after day I’m more confused, yet I look for the light through the pouring rain. You know that’s a game that I hate to lose. And I’m feeling the strain. Ain’t it a shame.”“Beginning to think that I’m wasting time. I don’t understand the things I do. The world outside looks so unkind. And I’m counting on you to carry me through.”When you read these next words, you will likely hear Dobie Gray’s voice in your mind:“Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul, I want to get lost in your rock and roll and drift away.”This is not my day to be Dobie Gray. I am not feeling blue and I am not preparing to die. But I do appreciate your concern. Thank you for caring.A few weeks ago I wrote, “The important is rarely urgent, and the urgent is rarely important. Do not become a slave to the merely urgent.”I’m sure I will shift gears at some point and shoot off in a new direction, but right now I am writing about things that are important, rather than merely urgent. I hope to speak valuable things into your life, just as other people have spoken into mine.But first we need to make a deal, okay?The agreement I need from you is this: If you promise not to think I am feeling blue, stepping back, or preparing to die, I will share some of the valuable things that people have spoken into my life. I will tell you what they said, when they said it, and how I found value in their words.Does that sound okay to you? If so, raise your hand.I saw that hand, even though you raised it only in your mind.Indy says Aroo, and I do,...

Aim their laughter like a cannon that booms out over the water.Aim their sorrow like a rainbow that follows a storm.Aim their anger like a lightning bolt that kills a man standing under a tree.Be careful not to stand under trees.People would rather be angry that bored.This is why we pay attention to politics.People would rather be frightened than bored.This is why we watch scary movies.People would rather be sad than bored.This is why we read books that break our hearts.People would rather be laughing than bored.This is why we have comedians and memes and YouTube and TikTok.Why is it so profoundly difficultto simply sit still in silence?Because whenever we are silentfor more than a few minutes,all of our shadows and secrets and sinscome to the surface of our consciousness.Jesus says, “Whenever you pray,go into the closet and shut the door.”1Surely, Jesus knows about all theskeletons we like to hide in our closets.And Jesus wants prayer to be the placewhere we confront those skeletonsand face our fears.If we do not confront the skeletons in our closets,then they will control the whole house.If we do not control our shadows,then they will run the whole show.This is why some saythat all of humanity’s problemsstem from our inability to sit quietlyin a room alone. 2– Daniel DeForest London,The Cloud of Unknowing, DistilledAnger, fear, sorrow, and laughter are forms of excitement.Excite people and you will be the center of attention.But the happiest thing to do, if you can do it,is fill people with a sense of wonder.Wonder is a feeling without skeletons or shadows.Wonder is a reaction, not an emotion.Wonder is triggered by realizations that are bigger than our minds can contain.Roy H. WilliamsHOT TIP – Make Yourself Happy. Sign up for Jeffrey’s class Aug. 13-14 at WizardAcademy.org. It will give you more confidence, competence, and consideration. Your teeth will be whiter and you’ll be a better dancer. – Indy Beagle1 Matthew ch 6, verse 62  Blaise Pascal, (1623 – 1662)“It’s what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.“– Karen Marie MoningNick-Anthony Zamucen has launched four successful franchises: a pizza chain, a home care business, a crime scene cleaner, and a water and fire damage repair company. According to Nick-Anthony, there is a proven formula for running a successful franchise, whether you buy into someone else’s concept or decide to start a franchise of your own. What should you look for in a franchise? What do you need to launch one? And what should you absolutely avoid? Make some popcorn because the show is about to start as Nick Anthony Zamucen tells all to our own roving reporter Rotbart at MondayMorningRadio.com

Any person who relays messages to you from the boss, is now your new boss.An excellent messenger might relay exactly what the big boss asked them to tell you, but only after they have reframed it, recharacterized it, and added their own slant.Every messenger does this. Whether they do it consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant. Whether they do it maliciously or innocently is irrelevant. What matters is that it happens.When a person speaks for the boss, you work for that person. You must do what they say.If a messenger gives you a handwritten note from the big boss, your response to that message will be reframed, recharacterized, and delivered as interpreted by the mind of the messenger. The big boss is going to hear their words, not yours.And God help you if you entrust an innocent question to a messenger. By the time that question enters the ear of the emperor, it will sound like a childish challenge or an anger-inflaming insult. The only thing you can do now is kneel down, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye.Have I put the matter too strongly? If so, let me soften it with this short summary: You are forever at the messenger’s mercy.Which is perfectly okay if you do not love your job.Are you putting in your 8 hours then going home to begin living your real life? If so, you are incredibly lucky. Do your 40, collect your check, live your life.I envy you.But if you are cursed with ideas, innovations, and experiences you believe have value, you will forever be frustrated by the bleak barrier that separates you from that pristine person who can say “absolutely yes.” Your cheeks will be chapped by silly slaps from interfering intermediaries. Your days will be darkened by dullards. Your mind will be massacred by meetings with morons. (Yes, I am toying with alliteration today.)You need to get a different job. You need to have direct contact with that one special person who can say absolutely yes without having to clear it with someone else.I spent my youth writing ads for clients who grew too big and became too busy to speak with me directly. When I became weary of living in the leg-irons and handcuffs imposed by messengers, I cut two tablets of stone from the heart of Mount Moriah. Those tablets contain two sentences:“I cannot work my magic unless I am in direct contact with the person who has unconditional authority to say ‘absolutely yes’ without having to check with someone else.”“If that person is too busy to speak with me personally, I am too busy to write his ads.”You have felt what I am describing, or you have not.Again, I envy you if you have not.If you have felt that frustration:Get a job working with an entrepreneur who will take the time to hear you.Honor that person by giving them your best.If that person’s success causes them to feel the need to insert a messenger between them and you…Take your stonemason’s hammer and your stonecarver’s chisel to the ancient mines of Mount Moriah. Sit down and think for awhile in the shadow of the Almighty. Then carve what you feel.If Mount Moriah frightens you, then you must learn to live with chapped cheeks, darkened days, and a massacred mind.I will leave you to make your own decision.As for me, I’m placing my stone tablets in my front window where everyone can see them.Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY BEAGLE: August 13-14: Only 15 people will be allowed to attend an extremely special business class taught by Jeffrey...

There is a time to get started, and there is a time to wait.When you have thought carefully about it, take action. But when you haven’t thought about it, wait.The important is rarely urgent, and the urgent is rarely important. Do not become a slave to the merely urgent.Perception is to see things that not everyone sees. Intuition is to recognize connections, and the patterns that occur because of these connections.Maximum information is available, and maximum contemplation is possible, only at the last possible moment.If you ever feel bad about procrastinating, just remember that Mozart wrote the overture to Don Giovanni the morning it premiered.Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment. But if you procrastinate too long, you will have your choice made for you by circumstance.Mozart was christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Theophilus, in Greek, means “loved by God”.In a letter announcing his birth, his father said his name was Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. Gottlieb, in German, means “loved by God.”When he was 21, Mozart began calling himself Amadè, which is Hungarian for “loved by God.”Mozart called himself Amadeus only once, when he signed a letter “Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus” as a joke, (sort of like Indiana Beagle calling himself “Indianus Beaglus” in the image at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo.) Amadeus, in Latin, means “Loved by God.”“Johannes Chrysostomus” precedes the name “Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart” because he, a Catholic, was born on January 27, the feast day of Saint John Chrysostomus in the West until the calendar reform of 1969.But I digress. We were talking about the tyranny of the “merely urgent” versus information, contemplation, and procrastination.Waiting serves a purpose. In Manley Miller’s booklet, “Potato Chips: Greasy, Salty, Really Good Stories from Growing Up in New Orleans,” he writes,I became a pastor when I was still young and foolish enough to say, “All right, God, if I’m not a senior pastor by the time I’m 30, then I’m going to quit being a pastor. I’m just going to take that as a sign from you that this is not what I’m supposed to be doing.”Later, I found out the reason Jesus didn’t start his ministry until he was 30 is because you couldn’t become a rabbi until you were 30. You didn’t have enough life experience.Jesus was 12 when Mary and Joseph found him teaching in the Synagogue, and it says that he “spoke with great wisdom.” But then when he’s 30 and starts his ministry, it says he spoke with great authority.You have an aptitude for something when you have a talent for it.But you develop proficiency over long experience.And it’s going to take some time to get there.Likewise, there’s a long journey from wisdom to authority.When you have something to say worth hearing, that’s wisdom.But when people respect you enough to listen, that’s authority.Waiting is not wasting.And now we’re going to make a 90-degree turn and head off in a tangential direction. Hold on tight.Here are the Top Five Regrets of People Who are Dying:I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I had spent more time with my family.I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.I wish that I had let myself be...

When you are having an adventure, you wish you were safe at home. But when you are safe at home, you wish you were having an adventure.Every adventure is marked by setbacks, disappointments, and difficulties. Without trouble, there can be no adventure.Our love of movies, video games, and sporting events proves our craving for adventure, for what are these but a celebration of people overcoming setbacks, disappointments, difficulties, and problems?What are you facing today?What must you overcome?What is your current adventure?Adventure is exciting when the vision of a glowing future shines brightly in your mind. But when we have no vision of a happy outcome, we walk in darkness.Jesus spoke of this phenomenon in the sixth chapter of the book of Matthew.“Your vision is the lamp of your body. If you see the world clearly, your body will be full of light. But if your vision is distorted, the light within you will be darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”When our vision is distorted, we lose hope.Please understand that I am not talking about mental illness. I don’t pretend to have a cure for that. But I do know a thing or two about sadness, confusion, frustration, and loneliness.One out of every four people you encounter today will be hiding deep sadness, confusion, frustration, or loneliness. They won’t let you see it, but it is there.This is the cure you have within you: You can listen intently when a person is speaking, so that the person feels seen and heard. You can smile and nod, so that the person feels accepted.You have the power to make other people feel valued.Each of us needs to be seen, and heard, and missed when we are absent.You can shine a light into the darkness.And sometimes, that is enough.Roy H. Williams NOTE: Today we celebrate the 13th anniversary of MondayMorningRadio, hosted by our own Pulitzer-nominated roving reporter, Dean Rotbart. Next week’s episode will be number 600! Can you believe it? And last month we quietly celebrated the 30th anniversary of the MondayMorningMemo. How many of you have been subscribers since the days when it was delivered by FAX? Aroo. – Indy BeagleGwendolyn “Wendy” Bounds, an award-winning broadcast reporter, was an eyewitness of 9/11. In his book, September Twelfth: An American Comeback Story, roving reporter Rotbart describes Wendy Bounds as telegenically attractive, “with big chocolate-brown eyes, a sparkly broad smile, and shoulder-length buttery blond hair blended with honey highlights.” Today, the long-time desk jockey is ripped, with muscular arms, strong and toned legs, and broad, well-developed shoulders. Wendy has transformed herself into a competitive Spartan racer, running through mud pits, crawling under barbed wire, swinging across monkey bars, and hoisting sandbags as she navigates obstacle courses. “It is never too late to achieve your full potential,” Wendy writes in a new book, out tomorrow (June 18). “Age,” she tells the roving reporter and his deputy, Maxwell, “can be a secret weapon.” Age. Learn how to use it, at MondayMorningRadio.com

My friends know that I have not used – and do not plan to use – ChatGPT, although I do endorse it for people who do not love to write.I love to write.Undissuaded, my friends urge that I should at least allow ChatGPT to gather and compile data for me to edit.I like to gather my own data.Jeffrey Eisenberg gave ChatGPT this prompt: “In less than 500 words what advice would Roy H Williams give his good friend Tom Grimes about writing?”Twenty-seven seconds later, Jeffrey’s computer delivered a 448-word fortune cookie. (I’m not sure why, but I can see it emerging from the front of Jeffrey’s computer on a long, white paper tongue, like the receipt from a grocery story cash register.)Tom,Picture this: you’re standing on a bustling street corner, trying to get the attention of a hurried crowd. That’s what writing is like. You have mere seconds to grab someone’s attention and make them care. Here’s how you do it:Engage from the Start: Begin with a bang. Your first sentence should make the reader stop in their tracks. Something unexpected, a question, or a bold statement. For instance, “Have you ever tried to whistle with a mouth full of peanut butter?”Be Conversational: Write as you speak. Imagine you’re having a chat with an old friend over coffee. Use contractions. Keep it casual. The more natural it sounds, the more relatable it becomes.Vary Your Sentences: Mix short, punchy sentences with longer, flowing ones. This rhythm keeps readers engaged. It’s like a song; it needs a beat to keep people moving.Tell Stories: People love stories. They remember them. Use anecdotes to illustrate your points. A well-placed story can make your message unforgettable. “Remember that time we got lost in the woods and stumbled upon that hidden waterfall? Your writing should be like that – a surprising discovery.”Repetition for Emphasis: Don’t shy away from repeating key points. Repetition drills the message into the reader’s mind. It’s like the chorus of a song – it’s what they’ll hum later.Parallel Structure: Use parallel structure to create balance and rhythm in your writing. “He came, he saw, he conquered.” It’s pleasing to the ear and easy to remember.Engaging Openings and Closings: Start strong, but finish even stronger. Leave them with something to think about. A question, a challenge, a powerful statement. Make your closing as memorable as your opening.Be Clear and Concise: Don’t use ten-dollar words when a ten-cent one will do. Simplicity is powerful. It cuts through the noise and delivers your message with clarity.Emotion is Key: Tap into the reader’s emotions. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them think. If they feel something, they’ll remember it.Have a Purpose: Every word should serve a purpose. Ask yourself, “What’s the point of this sentence? Does it move the story forward or add value?” If not, cut it.Remember, Tom, writing is an art, but it’s also a craft. It takes practice. Don’t be afraid to rewrite, to polish, to perfect. Your goal is to make your reader feel something, to think, to act. Writing isn’t just about putting words on paper; it’s about creating an experience.So go ahead, write like you’re talking to an old friend. Keep it simple, keep it engaging, and above all, keep it real. That’s the secret.Cheers,RoyMy reaction is strangely twisted, like a chocolate and vanilla swirl cone from McDonald’s.The vanilla twist is that I am impressed by ChatGPT’s ability to extract 10 true things from 30 years worth of Monday Morning Memos. The chocolate twist is my annoyance that ChatGPT used filler words and boring...

“If the founder of an organization does not empower the next generation of leadership to carry the enterprise forward while he is still viable as a leader, the organization he founded will cease to exist within 10 years after his death.”I have no recall of how I learned that information, but I have known it for nearly 40 years. My confidence that it is true tells me that I trusted the source.I was working in an industrial steel fabrication shop in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma for 3 dollars and 35 cents an hour when I learned a second truth I cannot prove, but I remember the episode clearly. The year was 1976, when a million dollars was like ten million dollars today.I was listening to a radio interview while driving a delivery truck down Lynn Lane. The man on the radio had mailed a survey to a large number of millionaires and a surprisingly high percentage of them had completed that survey and returned it to him.He was sharing the characteristics of self-made millionaires:“Do self-made millionaires have a high I.Q.? No. The percentage of self-made millionaires with a high I.Q. is the same as the general population.”“Is it education? No. Self-made millionaires are no better educated than the rest of us.”“Is it family money? No. Self-made millionaires are no more likely to come from a wealthy family than you and I.”“Is it family connections? No.”“Did they marry someone whose family had money and connections? No.”“Did they ‘get discovered’? Did they get a big break? No.”When all of my assumptions had been shattered, he said there were only four things that self-made millionaires tend to have in common:(4.) Self-made millionaires are more likely to have been fired from a job than the rest of us.(3.) A high percentage of self-made millionaires have filed bankruptcy at least once.(2.) Self-made millionaires distrust traditional wisdom and believe there is a better way.(1.) Self-made millionaires think further ahead than we do. They have a time horizon that isn’t measured in days or weeks or months, but in years.The invisible man on the radio went on to say that a person’s socio-economic strata is largely determined by how far that person thinks ahead.The average American has a plan for their next two paychecks. Their upcoming paycheck is fully committed, and they have bills to pay with the paycheck that follows, although that one offers a small opportunity for discretionary spending. The paycheck after our next one gives us a little bit of hope.Two paychecks ahead is the furthest we dare look. This is what it means to be middle class.But at least we are not struggling to find the money to buy a new battery for the car so that we can get to work, or trying to borrow money to pay a long-overdue electric bill, or wishing we had enough food in the kitchen to last until payday. These people are struggling, but that is not the bottom. No.At the bottom of the socio-economic strata are the addicts who can think only of their next drink, their next score, their next fix. Their time horizon is a few hours, at most. Tomorrow doesn’t enter their mind.Friend, I am convinced you can succeed at anything you choose to do, provided you have the emotional staying power to survive your mistakes.No matter how hard you try, there are a certain number of mistakes you are going to make. This doesn’t mean you have failed. It means you are learning.So always keep trying. But above all:Think ahead.Roy H. WilliamsPS: “The one thing all famous authors, world class athletes, business tycoons, singers, actors, and celebrated achievers in any field have in common is that they all began their journeys when they were none of these things.”– Mike DooleyPPS: When business owners struggle, they often blame everyone but...

A successful mechanic shop brings in about $500,000 a year. But whether or not the shop owner makes any profit on that $500,000 isn’t determined by how good they are at repairing cars, but by how good they are at running a business.And even those shop owners who are good at running a business might not be good at converting telephone inquiries into customers.You realize I’m not just talking about auto repair shops, right? I’m talking about every category of business in America.At this moment, I’m talking to you about yours.Are you good at your job?(Are your customers impressed?)Are you good at running a business?(Pricing, recruiting, work-flow management, inventory management, vendor relations, employee retention, customer retention, payroll management, etc.)Are you good at generating inquiries?(Advertising, brand-building, sales activation, customer word-of-mouth and online reviews.)Are you good at turning inquiries into customers?(Close rate, conversion.)Now, back to Jerry:Jerry was good at his job.So good, in fact, that his reputation allowed him to bring in 12 times as much business as the average “successful” auto repair shop. Jerry wasn’t bringing in $500,000 a year. He was bringing in $500,000 a month.Jerry was good at running a business.He and his wife traveled and enjoyed life at a much higher level than most of us.Jerry was good at generating inquiries, mostly because his auto repair shop made customers happy for a lot of years, and happy customers tend to multiply.But Jerry was only average at turning telephone inquiries into customers. Still, he was doing 12 times the sales volume of the average “successful” mechanic shop in America.Jerry and his wife are often at Wizard Academy.Jerry was paying attention when I said, “Bad marketing is about you, your company, your product, your service, how many years you have been in business and how many awards you have won. Good marketing is about the customer, and how your product or service can change the private little world they live in.”After contemplating those words, Jerry and his wife realized that how they respond to telephone inquiries is a form of marketing. Specifically, it is the kind of marketing that can improve the percentage of incoming phone calls that become customers.I encouraged Jerry and his wife to experiment. I said, “Try something new. Give it time to work, but if it doesn’t work, try something else that is new.”Jerry’s second experiment caused his business revenues to jump 53% above the previous year, month after month.Jerry’s mechanic shop no longer does $6,000,000 a year. He now has a $9,180,000 mechanic shop.I know what you’re thinking. You want to know how Jerry and his wife lit the fuse on the rocket that put their business into orbit, am I right?Okay, I’ll tell you.Jerry’s wife said, “Every incoming call begins with the caller saying, ‘Can you,’ ‘Do you,’ or ‘Will you.’”“Give me some examples,” I said.She said, “Can you repair the transmission on a 2018 Mercedes-Benz E400?”Our answer is, “Yes we can. And if you’d like to bring it in, we’ll take a look at it right now.”“Do you work on Volkswagens?”“Yes we do. And if you’d like to bring it in, we’ll take a look at it right now.”“Will you take a look at my Porsche 718 Cayman? It dies every time I make a sharp left turn.”“Yes, we will. And if you’d like to bring it in, we’ll take a look at it right now.”Do you see what Jerry and his wife are NOT...

The Growing Up Years: Ages Birth to 20When a man is in his teenage years, people with good intentions will ask, “What are your plans for the future?” Fewer than 10% of us have a real plan at that age, but we make one up so that we don’t disappoint those who believe in us.I tell teenage boys the truth when I sense they are feeling adrift. “It is rare to know at your age what you want to do with your life, but people will often ask you as though you are supposed to know. But the real truth is this: If you have your head completely out of your ass by the time you are 30, you are way ahead of the game.”The Education Years: Ages 20 to 30Regulated careers – engineer, lawyer, doctor – require a young man with a plan. The rest of us just bumble along and learn from our mistakes.People assume that a man who “plans his work and works his plan” is more disciplined and has a higher I.Q. than those of us who bumble. But I believe it is better to aim your temperament than try and change it.Planners prefer structure. Bumblers prefer adventure. This doesn’t mean Bumblers are less visionary, less disciplined, less committed, or less intelligent. They just prefer to improvise, innovate, and impress, rather than plan, schedule, and execute.Planners tend to become professionals. Bumblers tend to become business owners, tradesmen, salespeople, consultants, worker bees, or bums.As of January 2024, there were 1,100,101 physicians in America. The average primary care doctor in America makes $265,000 a year. Specialists make an average of $382,000, which is about the same annual income as the owner of a modestly successful plumbing or air conditioning company with fewer than 10 employees.In January of 2023, there were 1,331,290 lawyers in America earning an average annual income of $100,626 a year. Lawyers in the 75th percentile make about $103,000. Top earners make an average of $131,000, which is about the same as a modestly successful salesperson working for a local TV or radio station.Like I said, a man’s path forward has more to do with temperament than anything else. To force a man to behave outside his temperament is cruel and unusual punishment.The Acquisition Years: Ages 30 to 40For most men, the years between 30 and 40 are about gaining experience and status and possessions as we quietly struggle and claw our way upward. Adrenaline is our drug of choice. Conspiracy theories, video games, sports betting, fishing boats, sports cars and motorcycles provide us a way of escape. These are the years when onlookers say, “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.”But in spite of our visible successes, we cannot quiet the inner voice that whispers, “If other people knew you the way that I know you, they would know what a phony you are.”It is no coincidence that Henry David Thoreau was just over 30 when wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”The saddest of all men stay in toy-gathering mode for the rest of their lives, wanting only to make more money and a bigger name for themselves. When such a man reaches 60 and looks back at his 30th birthday, he hasn’t really gained 30 years of experience. He has had one year’s experience 30 times. But he doesn’t know how to do anything else.Having never discovered his soul, he goes to his grave with his song still in him.The Elevation Years: Ages 40 to 50For about 80 percent of American men, the decade beween 40 and 50 is when we will make our mark on the world. The big leaps forward, the fingerprints we leave behind, the stories that will be told when we are gone, usually happen between our 40th and 50th birthdays.These are the years when we begin to see clearly.These are the years when we make fewer mistakes.These are the years when we suck the juice from all of our...

To Hollister and Gideon,You have arrived at that age when everyone you meet will ask you about your plans for the future. I am older, happier, and probably more successful than those people, so ignore them. Listen to me.Knowledge is important, but experience is what really matters. School can give you knowledge, but it cannot give you experience.Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.Success is simply a matter of surviving your mistakes. But first you have to make them. So take chances. Feel the pain of disappointment. Then pull yourself together.Avoid the mistakes that are bigger than you.Don’t die.Don’t create a baby until you’re ready.Don’t go to prison.Those mistakes are hard to undo.Surviving all your other mistakes will require nothing more than financial and emotional “staying power.”Financial staying power isn’t measured by how much money you have. In fact, an abundance of cash will tempt you to calculate your burn rate. You will say, “At my current rate of spending, I can last until such-and-such a date before I run out of money.”When you calculate your burn rate, you create an unconscious plan. You have looked into the future and seen yourself collapsing in defeat on that day. Personally, I have never known anyone who succeeded after calculating their burn rate. They imagined running out of money, and then they did.I knew they had calculated their burn rate because everywhere they went, they said, “I have to be profitable by such-and-such a date or I will run out of money.”Boys, no matter how much money you have, you can run out of money. True financial staying power isn’t measured by how much money you have; it’s measured by how little money you need to stay in the game. The secret is to keep your monthly obligations so low that it takes very little to cover your living expenses.The most successful of my Wizard of Ads partners kept their jobs until they were making enough money as my partner that they could afford to walk away from their previous employment. Some of the others were lucky enough to have a life partner who made enough money to cover all the monthly expenses of the household. The partners who struggled in the early days were the ones who had significant monthly expenses and a lot of money in the bank. These were the ones who calculated their burn rate and then slowly began to panic as they saw that money disappear month after month.Financial staying power is easy. Live modestly. Don’t owe money.Emotional staying power is what makes you successful. It gives you the ability to fail without thinking of yourself as a failure. So take chances. Feel the pain of disappointment, then pull yourself together, like I said.Failure, like success, is a temporary condition.You are going to need encouragers. I have your MeMaw and the encouragement of God that I find in my Bible.Mistakes are inevitable. Don’t fear mistakes.Encourage people. Be slow to offer advice, but quick to offer encouragement. Tell people what you admire about them. No one likes a flatterer, but if you speak the truth, they will hear it as the truth.Marry your best friend. You will know they are your best friend when you look forward to being with that person, even when you are not imagining them naked. Pennie – your MeMaw – believes in me more than I believe in me. I have asked God to give each of you a life partner like that.I am not the only person who thinks these things. On May 1, 2024, Jason Fried wrote,“Occasionally a 17-year-old will write, asking for entrepreneurial or business advice. Oftentimes they’re early bloomers and already have something going on. Others are chomping at the bit once they get out of high school. It’s great to hear from them. But my advice is generally that they don’t need advice. You don’t need...

“Telling the truth more powerfully than is completely accurate” is to think and speak of a future event as though it has already happened. Some people call this “manifesting,” but I am uncomfortable with that word because it conjures the image of a person literally speaking things into existence, an ability that I believe is God’s alone.Yes, I am of that ancient belief that the Big Bang began when God said, “Let there be…”Although I reject the idea of “manifesting,” I do believe in visioncasting, which I define as the encouragement of others by speaking of a possible future as though it is certain to happen.When a person needs courage and confidence, give them yours. Tell them of the future that you see for them.I meet every Friday for a luxurious lunch with 5 friends, most of whom are over 60. Recently, after 3 hours of conversation around a large, circular table, we fell into a silence as each one of us took a sip of wine, or contemplated what had just been said, or looked at the menu for additional things to order. I looked up when I heard a voice say, “Who put it into your head that you could do the things you’ve done?”The friend who had spoken was looking directly at me. Reading the confusion in my eyes, he began to list a number of things that I take completely for granted. Remembering that his question had been, “Who put it into your head?” I told him the truth: “My Mother.”I was suddenly looking into 5 surprised pairs of eyes, and I was surprised that they were surprised.The awkward silence that followed made me realize they were waiting for me to continue, so I said, “Whenever I told my mother that I couldn’t do something, she would always say, ‘Of course you can.’ And then I would do it. I can’t remember her ever saying, ‘Well, just do your best,’ and she never once did something for me that she believed I could do for myself. She would just look at me patiently and say with complete conviction, ‘Of course you can.'”My friends kept staring at me in silence. I wasn’t sure what was happening. Finally, the friend who had asked the question looked into my eyes and said, “What a gift!” The others began nodding their heads as they repeated, “What a gift.”I had the good sense to shut up and listen.For the next half hour, I listened as each one of them told stories of their childhood that made me understand their admiration for my Mother.Those thirty minutes connected a lifetime of dots for me. Throughout my adult life, I have been embarrassed by people who have asked me questions about my supposed courage, or audacity, or vision, of some other such fiddle-faddle. I was never sure how to respond to those people because I know for certain that I do not possess those qualities.I have somehow successfully coasted through more than 65 years of life without a college education, happily married to the girl I have loved since I was 14 years old, because the two most important women in my life believe that while failure is inevitable, it is also a temporary condition, and in the end we will succeed, because, “Of course we can.”Please listen to what I am about to tell you.Give the gift of courage and confidence to the people you love. Tell them what you believe about them. Tell them what you see when you look into their future. The sentences you speak to them should begin with the words, “You are…” and “You will…”They will see what you see, when you speak it.Your words will change their thoughts and actions.And they will live to see it happen.Roy H. Williams

Two-letter postal abbreviations don’t have periods after the letters, so when I titled today’s Monday Morning Memo, “Reno is West of L.A.” I was not using L.A. as the postal abbreviation for Louisiana.Carson City – the capitol of Nevada – is likewise west of Los Angeles, as are 5 other state capitols. Juneau, Honolulu, Sacramento, Salem, and Olympia are the capitols of Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. West, west, west, west, and west of L.A.Google it. Or Bing it. Or Yahoo it. However you like to do it.Reno is located at 119°49′ West.Los Angeles is 118°14′ West.Reno is 86 miles west of Los Angeles.The coordinates of a city give you its precise location, just like the chapter and verse numbers of books in the Bible.Psalm 119:49 – the Reno Psalm – says,“Remember your word to your servant, for you have given me hope.”Reno was founded by Charles William Fuller, who built a bridge across the Truckee river so that settlers would not lose hope.Psalm 118:14 – the L.A. Psalm – says,“The LORD is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation.”Los Angeles was named “The Angels” in 1769 by Father Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest who celebrated in his journal the discovery of a “beautiful river from the northwest.” A source of water that saved his thirsty band of travelers.You will remember that I mentioned Louisiana in my opening sentence.New Orleans is at 90°07′ West.Psalm 90:7 – the New Orleans Psalm – says,“We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.”The French Quarter of New Orleans is 90.°06′ West.Psalm 90:6 – the French Quarter Psalm –says,“In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.”Does the longitude and/or latitude of a city unlock a secret message from God to that city?No. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Have you lost your mind?But let’s pretend that it does.The latitude for my hometown of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma – which, prior to 1907 was “Indian Territory” – is 36.°06′ N.Psalm 36:6 – the Broken Arrow Psalm – says,“Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.”We create imaginary worlds when we pretend, but even imaginary worlds have to have rules. This truth is known to every author of Science Fiction, to every author of Fantasy, and to every 6-year-old.We must now make up some additional rules because some of the Psalms don’t have enough verses to match the coordinates of certain cities. As an example: Chicago is at latitude 41°52′ North, and its longitude is 87°39′ West.We’ll begin with longitude: Uh-oh, Psalm 87 doesn’t have a 39th verse.Now let’s take a look at latitude: Uh-oh, Psalm 41 doesn’t have a 52nd verse.But Genesis 41 does!Genesis 41:52 – the Birth Verse of Chicago – says,“The second son he named Ephraim and said, ‘It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.’”Chicago was incorporated in 1837, but it blossomed in an amazing second birth after the fire of 1871. Read it for yourself.I went with “birth verse” because Genesis means...

You see a lot of crap during 40 years as an ad writer.You see big, steaming piles of predictable ads written by amateurs who assume the audience is required to listen.You see frozen piles of heartless ads that speak to ideas rather than to people.You see the scattered shrapnel of ads written by highly creative but trigger-happy typists who don’t understand the necessity of strategy.Amateur ad writers believe in creativity. Accomplished ad writers believe in strategy.Good ad copy flows from strategy.Strategy flows from whatever is in the pantry of the advertiser.You must begin by prowling through that pantry. Take inventory of all the unused story elements you will find hiding there.Bad strategy is usually the result of someone’s ego.A business owner wants to hire you. When you meet with that person, you realize that they want to be perceived in a certain way. They usually call this fantasy their “brand essence,” and if you do not indulge them in their fantasy, they will accuse you of not understanding their brand.They want you to continue doing what they have done in the past, but make it work this time. If you disagree with their strategy, they will say, “You don’t understand who we are.”You will say, “No, that is not who you are. That’s just who you want to be. But you don’t have the ingredients to bake that cake.”This is always an unproductive argument, so when a business owner who wants to hire you says, “This is what I want you to do and this is how I want you to do it,” the best answer is to say, “It sounds to me like you’ve got things under control. Great idea! Follow your dream. God be with you. Stay in touch! Goodbye.”If you employ the same strategy they have used in the past, it’s not going to work any better than it did in the past.You will be tempted to do what your prospective client is asking you to do. “After all, it’s their company, right?”Your reason for thinking these thoughts will be that you need the money. But if you do what your prospective client tells you to do, this is what will happen:Your ad campaign will underperform.Your client will blame you.You will be fired.You will have a record of failure.You will lose confidence in yourself.Find your money elsewhere.Before you accept a client, ask yourself, “Am I willing to give this person a place in my life?”Consider that question carefully, because your client will certainly occupy your thoughts. Will you look forward to speaking with them, or will you dread it?Even the best clients will occasionally ask you to do something that you believe is a bad idea. This is when you will need to do the opposite of what I told you a moment ago. When you have accepted the job, you can no longer say, “It sounds to me like you’ve got things under control. Great idea. Follow your dream. God be with you. Stay in touch. Goodbye.”You have given this client a place in your life. You have accepted the role of being their ad writer. You have an ongoing relationship. This is when you have to remember that they did not hire you to be CEO.Tell them that you will definitely do what they say.Then tell them why you think it is a bad idea.When they have heard you, and understood you, and asked that you do it anyway, make it a point of honor to figure out how to make their bad idea work.Take ownership of the idea. Put everything you have into it. Be proud that you were able to make it work.When you have an ongoing relationship, you no longer have the option to say, “You’re on your own.”Most ads are not written to persuade. They are written not to offend.The power of an ad can be measured by the strength of the backlash against it.Backlash doesn’t mean the ad is good; it...

As you increase your words, you decrease their impact.Communicate your thoughts in short sentences. Those thoughts will be remembered, and you will, too.Shorter hits harder.I read a book by a man who is a deep thinker, a great strategist, and a good writer. His strengths are that he can identify, organize, and communicate key ideas.But those ideas would hit harder if the man could write tighter.Tight writers1. reject unnecessary modifiers.2. reduce the word count.3. prove what they say.4. use active voice.Modifiers:Adjectives and adverbs are fatty foods. They give energy to your story when used sparingly but cause your sentences to feel bloated, sluggish and fat if you overindulge. Adjectives are less dangerous like good cholesterol, and adverbs are more dangerous like bad cholesterol, but a steady diet of these modifiers will clog the arteries of your story and slow it down until your audience falls asleep.Word count:Editing will reduce your word count, but it is hard to edit what is freshly written. Look at it the next day and your mistakes will become obvious to you. Rearrange, reduce, and eliminate elements until your story is woven tightly and shines brightly.You can communicate twice as much by using half as many words.Willie Shakespeare taught us, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”1Blaise Pascal and Benjamin Franklin are remembered for their wit. This is why both of them apologized in writing when they took too long to say too little.Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales of 1657, wrote, “The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”Likewise, Benjamin Franklin concluded his 1750 Letter to the Royal Society in London by saying, “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”Prove what you say:A rainbow of people across the internet report that Martin Luther, Mark Twain, and Cicero of Rome made statements similar to the statements made by Blaise Pascal and Benjamin Franklin, but none of those colorful people can offer meaningful documentation.Martin Luther died in 1546. A biography of Luther published 300 years later – in 1846 –quotes Luther as having said he “didn’t have time to make it shorter,” but the biographer could cite no text left behind by Martin Luther to support that quote.Mark Twain died in 1910. In 1975 an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune attributed a version of the “didn’t have time to make it shorter” statement to Twain, but the journalist could offer no text, no chapter, no page number, no contemporaneous witness as proof.The person claiming that Cicero said he “didn’t have time to make it shorter” cites a book of quotes published in 1824 as “proof” of what Cicero supposedly said 1,800 years before that book of quotes was published. Cicero left behind no writings that contain that quote.“Do not believe what you read on the internet.” – Albert EinsteinUse active voice:Passive voice:“The sword is carried by me,” is passive because the subject – “The sword” – is acted upon by the verb.Active voice:“I carry the sword,” is active because the subject – “I” – takes the action.Sentences spoken in active voice command attention.Sentences spoken in passive voice are easily ignored.A child becomes an adult when they say, “I broke the cookie jar,” instead of, “The cookie jar got broken.”Don’t speak like a child. Let the subject take the action in every sentence you speak and write.Here’s an Example:Like the man I mentioned earlier, Matt Willis is a deep thinker, a great strategist, and a good writer. But...

Kings and pirates both wear swords, but for different reasons.A king wears his sword as a symbol of the army he commands. A pirate wears his sword so that it will be at hand when he needs it.Pirates have a high tolerance for risk because they have nothing to lose. Kings have a low tolerance for risk because they have everything to lose.A pirate says, “No pain, no gain.” A king says, “No pain, no pain.”A king is the establishment, the ultimate insider, the protector of the status quo. A pirate is an anti-establishment outsider looking for an opportunity.I was 10 years old and my father was 30 when he took me with him to visit an important old man. After we left, I said, “He was really nice. I like him a lot.”My Dad answered, “Yes, he is really nice, and I like him a lot, too. But old men like him always keep a sword in the closet.”Confused, I asked, “What do you mean?”Dad said, “If you crowd him, cross him, or attempt to ambush him, that nice old man is going to pull his sword from that closet and run it through your guts.”It’s been more than 50 years since I met that old man, but I’ve never forgotten the encounter.I know a lot of old pirates today who became kings just like that old man. With clenched teeth they built castles in their minds, then brought those castles into physical existence using their own hands to stack bricks they made by mixing their blood and sweat with the dirt they stood upon.Pirates are the founders of empires, not the inheritors of them, and I am honored to count pirates among my friends.Rich people raise their children to be kings. But poor boys like me raise their children to be pirates.When our sons were very young – perhaps 4 or 5 years old – I said to them, “Your mother and I will give you gifts on your birthday and at Christmas and at other times, but you can never ask for a gift. When you see a toy, you cannot ask us to buy it for you. You have to buy it yourself. And to make that possible, we will pay you as though you are adults so that you can afford to buy whatever you want. But you won’t get any money for cleaning your room or for any of the other things you do in our home. You will do those things because you are a member of this family. And I will never give you an allowance. But if you ever want to make some money, just tell me and I will drive you to the office and give you work to do.”If you pay a child the wages of a child, it is impossible for them to ever buy anything for themselves or for the people they care about.Our boys began their careers by gathering the trash from all the offices and then tossing it into the dumpster in the parking lot. This might take 20 minutes and earn them 20 dollars each, but now they had money of their own. If they wanted to make more money, they had to gather all the gum wrappers and cigarette butts and debris from the parking lot and put that in the dumpster as well. This might earn them another 15 or 20 dollars each.If a 5-year-old child will push themselves to the realistic limits of a 5-year-old (which is usually 20 or 30 minutes) they should be able to make enough money to buy themselves the kinds of toys that all the other kids have.When our sons wanted to buy something, they would ask Pennie and I to drive them to the store where we would watch them choose what they wanted, carry it to the cash register, pull their own money from their pocket, and then buy it.By the time they were 9 or 10 they were puzzled to see their friends pick up something in a store and ask their parents, “Can I have this?” The idea of asking for something was foreign to them.Pennie and I raised our boys to be pirates and my grandsons became pirates as well, making their first money as groundskeepers and later as construction workers under the watchful eye of Joe Davis, a pirate of the highest order. Those grandchildren are now 17

Every time you make a declarative statement, you choose one of only 9 sentence structures.You have been doing this unconsciously for as long as you have been able to speak and write. Today I am going to teach you how to do it consciously.Ten minutes from now, you will be able to speak and write with greater impact.You must first choose a perspective. First person perspective is when you are speaking for yourself, or as the spokesperson for a group: (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours)Second person perspective describes the experience of your reader, listener, or viewer individually or collectively:  (you, your, yours, yourself, yourselves)Third person perspective is then you are speaking not of yourself, or of your audience, but of some other individual or group: (he, she, him, her, they, them,)After you have chosen a perspective,you must choose a verb tense that frames the action of your sentence in the past (was), the present (am), or the future (will be.)That much has been known and taught for decades if not centuries.This next part is astoundingly useful and absolutely new, so if you quote it or teach it to someone else, be sure to spell my name right, okay? “Roy H. Williams”The Wizard of Ads® is now going to teach you: (A) the specific voice of each of the 9 declarative sentences, (B) how the addition of a status, a mood, or an emotion allows you to determine the intention and the impact of your sentence before it has even been created.First person, past tense, is the voice of personal MEMORY.“I was standing in the snow…”First person, present tense, is the voice of ANNOUNCEMENT.“I am standing in the snow…”First person, future tense, is the voice of PREDICTION.“I will be standing in the snow…”Second person, past tense, is the voice of WITNESS.“You were standing in the snow…”Second person, present tense, is the voice of reader/listener/viewer INVOLVEMENT or ENGAGEMENT.“You are standing in the snow…”Second person, future tense, is the voice of FORESEEING. (Fortune telling)“You will be standing in the snow.”Third person, past tense, is the voice of HISTORY.“They were standing in the snow…”Third person, present tense, is the voice of NEWS REPORTING.“They are standing in the snow…”Third person, future tense, is the voice of PROPHECY.“They will be standing in the snow.”REVIEWFirst person, past tense, is the voice of personal MEMORY.First person, present tense, is the voice of ANNOUNCEMENT.First person, future tense, is the voice of PREDICTION.The addition of a status, a mood, or an emotion allows you to determine the intention and the impact of your sentence before it has even been created.First person, past tense = MEMORY + humility = confession “I was hoping to be finished in one hour, but I wasn’t able.”First person, present tense = ANNOUNCEMENT + humility = vulnerability “I am self-aware enough to know that I am more lucky...

The tectonic plates of America are shifting beneath our feet. Can you feel the tremors?I’m not talking about the foundations of our continent. I’m talking about the foundations our nation.Our continent is rock, soil, and water; mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam.Our nation is a people; a family that we love.And if I might continue quoting Kate Smith for a moment, we would be wise to ask God to, “stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from above.”We feel the tremors of our unsteady family – our nation – not in our soles, but in our souls.I felt the tremors of the waning “Me” generation shift into the groupthink perspective of the “We” in 2003. To read my nascent ramblings about it, just go to MondayMorningMemo.com and type “1963 All Over Again” into the website search block. This will take you to my MondayMorningMemo for December 15, 2003.These are the important paragraphs:“AOL and Google.com are the Kerouac and Salinger of the new generation that will soon pry the torch from the hands of Boomers reluctant to let it go. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley have become Tupac Shakur and Eminem, and the Baby Boomers’ reaction to them is much like their own parents’ reaction to Chuck and Elvis. But instead of saying, ‘Take a bath, cut your hair and get a job,’ we’re saying, ‘Pull those pants up, spin that cap around and wash your mouth out with soap.’“At the peak of the Baby Boom there were 74 million teenagers in America and radio carried a generation on its shoulders. Today there are 72 million teenagers that are about to take over the world. Do you understand what fuels their passions? Can you see the technological bonds that bind them?”“Baby Boomer heroes were always bigger than life, perfect icons, brash and beautiful: Muhammad Ali… Elvis… James Bond. But the emerging generation holds a different view of what makes a hero.”The only hard choice in life is the choice between two good things.Freedom and Responsibility are both good things. But like all dualities, they oppose each other. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.All responsibility with no freedom makes you a slave. All freedom with no responsibility makes you a self-absorbed hedonist and an asshole.But I promised to tell you how to keep your balance during this earthquake, didn’t I?Here’s how to do it: remind yourself that different people perceive the world differently. They notice different things. They value different things. They live in their own private reality, and you live in yours.You are acutely aware of what you see that they do not, and you want to open their eyes.They are acutely aware of what they see that you do not, and they want to open your eyes.Both of you feel you are being attacked.I have a question for you: do the two of you have the courage to shut up and listen? Really listen? Can you muster enough courtesy and grace and self-restraint to share why you value what you value without disparaging or attacking what they value and why they value it?If both of you can do this, you will find your balance and quit hating each other.The birds will start singing, the flowers will bloom, a rainbow will appear, and everyone will laugh in joyous relief that the ugliness is finally over.As I look back on the events that have marked the previous 37 zeniths of the “We” generation that have occurred during the past 2,960 years (937 BC,) I realize that no one is likely to do this.But I thought I would give it a shot.Roy H. Williams50,000 new restaurants open in the United States each year, and most of them are...

My reputation is built largely on the fact that I cheat.I openly admit my cheating, but no one cares, because the way that I cheat is not unethical, immoral, or illegal.I realized in 2017 that Warren Buffet and I do exactly the same thing. Here is how he describes it:“Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting and in it he had a picture of himself at bat and the strike zone broken into, I think, 77 squares. And he said if he waited for the pitch that was really in his sweet spot he would bat .400 and if he had to swing at something on the lower corner he would probably bat .235. And in investing I’m in a ‘no called strike’ business which is the best business you can be in. I can look at a thousand different companies and I don’t have to be right on every one of them, or even fifty of them. So I can pick the ball I want to hit. And the trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot. And if people are yelling, ‘Swing, you bum,’ ignore ’em. There’s a temptation for people to act far too frequently in stocks simply because they’re so liquid. Over the years you develop a lot of filters. But I do know what I call my ‘circle of competence’ so I stay within that circle and I don’t worry about things that are outside that circle. Defining what your game is – where you’re going to have an edge – is enormously important.” These have been my filters for the past 35 years:Do I believe in the business owner? And do I like them enough to give them a place in my life?Has their company been flat, or declining, for the past 3 years?Do I see a clear path to grow them a minimum of 4x in 4 years or less?If we focus 80% of their ad budget on a single media, will that number of dollars allow us to reach enough people with enough repetition to see significant growth in the second half of the first year?These are the reasons behind those questions:If the business owner is incompetent, I cannot help them. If I do not like them, I do not want to help them. (Yes, I am tragically self-accommodating.)If the business owner has not been flat or down for at least 3 years, they won’t be willing to make the changes I need them to make.If they have no potential for massive growth, there is no potential for me to make massive money.When buying mass media, it takes more money to reach 20 percent of a large city than it does to reach 20 percent of a small one. Is the ad budget big enough to give us a fighting chance?A business owner and his son spent a day with us in Austin last week. I like both of them and they are obviously good at everything except lead generation. They live in a large city and have been receiving horrifically bad marketing advice for the past 20 years.They are doing $2 million/year in a town where $30 million would have been easily accomplished if they had started doing the right things just 9 or 10 years ago.I am now going to share with you a formula that I trust, even though I have never tried to disprove it. (A real scientist would have tried to disprove his hypothesis. I am not a real scientist.)I have observed this pattern for many years:Anything that works quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.Things that work better and better the longer you keep doing them always perform poorly in the early months.When you have discovered their untold story, and created a strategy that will work, and launched the right message to their city, the dollar growth you see in Year One will allow you to project with some accuracy the growth of that company for the next two years.At the end of 36 months, you will know if your business owner is tall enough to ride this...

In the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 10, 2022, I wrote,“Do you want to be one of the world’s great ad writers? Don’t read ads. Read the poems, short stories and novels written by the winners of the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes in Literature.”My friend Tom Grimes – the waterboy of Amarillo – texted me this insightful correction:“I’ve heard you teach in class that magicians, stand-up comedians and the creators of comic strips always structure their storytelling in that same tight economy of words used by the world’s great poets. ‘And then what happened, and then what happened, and then what happened…'”I stand corrected. Thank you, Tom.Yes, comedians, magicians, and the creators of comics are three different types of writers who know how to capture and hold our attention, just as the world’s great poets have done for centuries. These writers show us possible futures, imaginary pasts, or an exaggerated present; realities that exist entirely in our imaginations.And they do it in a brief, tight, economy of words.Likewise, the best ad writers take us on journeys that begin and end quickly, but leave us altered, changed, modified, different.I don’t list AI in my pantheon of persuasive writers for the same reason that I don’t list the makers of movies.Great movies are created from great plays and great books. Even Disney’s animated cartoon adventuresbegin with great stories.Stories are written by writers.The actors, directors, and illustrators who portray those stories are called artists and they are assisted by technicians. Artists and technicians don’t write the stories; they adapt stories to fit a format and then show them to us.AI is not a writer. AI is an artist and a technician.Dune was written by Frank Herbert 59 years ago and has sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. Artists and technicians adapted it into a 1984 film, a 2000 television miniseries, and then a major motion picture in 2021 with a sequel that was released in theaters just last week.The Lord of the Rings was written by Tolkien and adapted by artists and technicians.The Godfather was written by Puzo and adapted by artists and technicians.Harry Potter was written by Rowling and adapted by artists and technicians.Charles Schultz, Bill Watterson, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee, Scott McCloud and Tom Fishburne are writers who tell stories in comic panels.Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres and Dave Chappelle are writers who tell stories in short bursts while standing behind a microphone.Penn and Teller, Siegried and Roy, David Blaine, Brian Brushwood, David Copperfield and Nate Staniforth are writers who stand on stage and tell stories while proving that you cannot believe your eyes or trust your logical mind.Ian Fleming, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, Truman Capote, and Elmore Leonard are writers who tell stories using only words.Artists and technicians adapt their stories for stage, film, and video.Shakespeare wrote 38 stories that artists and technicians have adapted for the past 450 years. The artists who gave faces and voices to Shakespeare’s characters include Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Kenneth Branagh, David Tarrant, Derek Jacobi and Peter O’Toole.We have writers. We

There are two ways to become invisible, and both are easily accomplished.To become invisible to yourself: get lost inside your own head. When you ignore other people, it never occurs to you that they can see you. This is how you become invisible in your mind.To become invisible to others: say what people expected you to say; do what they expected you to do. This will blur you into the background and make you invisible. To make people see you again, all you have to do is say something new, surprising, or different.These techniques also work in advertising.If you get lost inside your own head, your ads will focus on your company, your product, and your service. You will ignore the things your customer cares about, and speak only about what they ought to care about, what they should care about, what you want them to care about. You will answer all the questions that no one was asking. You will be visible to yourself, but invisible to others. When your ads talk to you, about you, for you, no one other than you is interested.When you say what people expected you to say, they quit listening. Ads that sound like ads are filtered from conscious thought. The mind is constantly scanning for the new, the surprising, and the different, and for pain, pleasure, urgent necessities, and entertainment. If your ads look like ads and sound like ads, you can be certain they will be invisible.Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product, your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how their life will be altered if they allow you to come into it.Talk to your customers about them, not you.If you want to talk about you, find an old pay phone and drop a quarter into it. Call your mother. She’s the only one who cares.I slapped you just now because you are delirious, and you need to wake up. My slap may have stung a little, but it was an act of love.Five paragraphs ago I said, “The mind is constantly scanning for the new, the surprising, and the different, and for pain, pleasure, urgent necessities, and entertainment,” because these are the things that interest us.The New is always interesting because it might be relevant to us. When we have judged it to be irrelevant, it disappears.The Surprising is interesting, but only until it is no longer surprising. A magician knows that every surprise must be followed by another surprise, or they will lose the attention of their audience.The Different is interesting because it might be an improvement. But if we conclude it is not an improvement, we dismiss it.Pain is interesting because we want to avoid it. When your ads speak to pain, you become associated with pain, and the minds of your customers will recoil away from you. If you want to test this theory, just kick your dog every time you see it.Pleasure is interesting, always. But if your statements about pleasure are not judged to be credible, your listener will feel they are being manipulated and you will be viewed as a seducer, a con-man, and a snake.Urgent necessities are interesting because we need them, and we need them now. This is why so many advertisers spend copious amounts on Google ads. The problem with this strategy is that all your competitors are doing the same. This results in a high cost per click and a low rate of conversion.Entertainment is interesting because it allows us to escape into the lives of interesting characters. When you are watching a football game, the mirror neurons in your brain allow you to be part of the game as you live vicariously through the actions of others. The same is true

[The wizard has been writing twice a month for Radio Ink magazine for more than a quarter century. The column you are about to read will be distributed to every radio station in North America – more than 10,000 of them – when it is published in a few weeks. – Indy Beagle]Traditional wisdom would suggest that a writer offering advice to Radio professionals should focus on how to use Radio more effectively.But traditional wisdom is usually more tradition than wisdom.True wisdom is to know how every form of advertising works, not just the media you are trying to sell. When you can identify and communicate the markers of success in every type of advertising, you become a well-spring of insight, wisdom, and advice; a sustaining resource as refreshing as cold water on a hot day.The things I am about to share with you are not focused on radio because they are not limited to radio. You have observed these things all your life; you just never took the time to organize your observations.Your mind will whisper “Eureka” within the next few minutes. Listen for it.When you are speaking face-to-face, voice-to-voice, in writing, or through the medium of advertising, there can be no communication until you have won the attention of your audience. To win attention, you must deliver a magnetic First Mental Image (FMI.)There are three ways of delivering your FMI:When your FMI is delivered by voice, it is called an opening line.The bright light of vivid verbs project action onto the movie screen of the mind.When your FMI is delivered in printed words, it is called a headline, a title, or a subject line. You will need a second FMI for the opening line of your first paragraph. Vivid verbs are again the key. Verbs become vivid when they are accurate, but unexpected. Predictability is not your friend.Photographs, drawings, illustrations, and video clips win attention when the viewer enters into the world of that visual image to become a momentary participant in the scene.Face-to-face, voice-to-voice, in writing, or through advertising, there can be no communication until you have won the attention of your audience.Amateur ad writers will try to shock the audience. But it is much more effective to intrigue the audience by using one of the following five methods.The most straightforward methods are these two:A simple declarative statement: “70% of people over 50 have sore knees.”A customer testimonial: “My knee pain went away when I put these insoles in my shoes.The next three techniques employ what I call “The Hovering Question Mark,” since they are designed to trigger curiosity by delivering an incomplete message.A question aimed at the reader, listener, or viewer: “Do you have sore knees?”An incomplete sentence: “I first noticed my knees was sore when…”A metaphor that begs for context: “I had a headache behind my kneecap.”Any of these 5 techniques can be used to get attention, but you’re still a long way from making the sale. Your baseball bat has merely contacted the ball.Amateur ad writers – having made contact – will immediately switch into “AdSpeak,” that predictable, despicable language of bone-breakingly-boring ads. This is called clickbait when it’s done online. It’s called a rookie maneuver when it’s done in any other media. When it’s truly pathetic, it’s called a clown show.Amateur ad writers move from attention-getting into AdSpeak because they believe their job is merely to deliver information about the product....

There is a mysterious camera in your brain that will click and capture a poignant scene from time to time. You know what I’m talking about: random moments that you can vividly recall, but you’re not sure why.My awareness of that camera has been heightened and brightened in recent days as I feel a chapter of my life coming to an end and a new chapter about to begin.I’ve sure you have felt what I’m talking about.Phil Johnson explained these uneasy times of transition 40 years ago when I was in the middle of one. He said, “Roy, you’re in an elevator and the door is closed and that’s always an unsettling time. You’re not sure whether the elevator is taking you up to a higher floor, or down to a lower one. You know only that when that elevator door opens, everything is going to be different.”*Click* went the camera in my brain.Then he looked encouragement into my eyes as he said, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” As we began walking toward our cars, he finished by saying, “Marcus Aurelius wrote that note to us 175 years after Jesus was born.”*Click*Phil Johnson passed away in 2019, just 5 days before his 97th birthday. You will find the last words he spoke to me emblazoned across the 12-foot-high bookcases that hold the thousands of books he left to me in his will. “You acquire an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you absorb culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”The moment that heightened and brightened my awareness of the elevator I’m in was a 521-word text sent to me by Pennie’s sister, Pam. That text contained the complete lyrics of Billy Joel’s song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Nothing else.If you have been reading these Monday Morning Memos for any length of time during the 29 years and 9 months that I’ve been writing them, you won’t be at all surprised that Indy Beagle and I sprang into hot pursuit of the liquid-fast rabbit that leaped out from Pam’s mysterious text.To those of you who are new to rabbit chasing, the objective is not to catch the rabbit, but only to let it lead you to places you might never have otherwise discovered. Uptight people will say that Indy and I are wasting time. But those people will never meet Calvin and Hobbes.When Indy and I lost sight of the liquid-fast rabbit, an unsettled teenager said to Billy Joel, “It’s crazy to be my age. You didn’t have this kind of stuff going on when you were growing up. Nothing really happened back then.”Billy went home that day and listed more than 100 major worldwide events that occurred between the day of this birth in May, 1949, and the day of that teenager’s visit in 1989. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was a birthday gift Billy Joel gave to himself on his 40th birthday in 1989.If you click the image of Indy Beagle at the top of this page, you will be transported to a secret page featuring two different YouTube videos of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Each of those videos will show you the more-than-100 different people and events that Billy Joel is singing about 35 years ago.And now you know why we call those hidden pages, “The Rabbit Hole.”Indy said to tell you “Aroo.”I’ll tell him you said “Aroo,” too.Roy H. WilliamsSeven-hundred-thousand Americans per year submit a trademark application, but Andre Mincov says that number is far less than it should be. Prior to beginning his global consultancy specializing in trademarks, Andre worked at a law firm helping companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and Dell file and defend their trademarks. Today Andre rescues small and mid-size companies that failed to file formal trademarks, or that forgot to file them for all their brands. Listen and learn as Andre explains the most common trademark...

Every company has Untold Story assets that are hiding in plain sight, and every company has Limiting Factors that are holding them back.This is how you lift a company to new heights:1. Uncover the Untold Stories.2. Devise a plan to overcome the Limiting Factors.Untold Stories and Limiting Factors are not always related.Limiting Factors usually stem from(A.) Company Culture (the vibe of the hive)(B.) Competitive Environment (strengths of opponents and adversaries)Untold Stories always begin at the intersection of Who and Why.(A.) Who pulled the trigger? (Origin Story)(B.) Why did that trigger exist? (Character Diamond)Great ad campaigns require Interesting Characters.Interesting Characters require:(A.) Character Diamonds (Four conflicted, defining characteristics that cause this character to think, act, speak, and see the world the way they do.)(B.) Origin Stories (What happened that put them on the path to where they are now?)Customers should hear each Untold Story in the appropriate Emotional Environment.The appropriate Emotional Environment is created by(A.) The opening sentence of the ad (FMI – First Mental Image)(B.) Media scheduling (what is the customer thinking and feeling right now?)College professors, con-men, and private equity groups believe the primary goal of an ad writer should be to communicate the features and benefits of the product to the customer. But Wizards of Ads know the primary goal of an ad writer is to bond the hearts of the public to the advertiser.Listeners hear these customer-bonding ads and think, “Wow! You, too? I thought I was the only one.” These customer-bonding ads cause the client’s name to be the one that customers think of first and feel the best about.Untold Stories hide in the hearts of advertisers. Customer-bonding ads are born when you uncover those stories and write them in an unpredictable way.Predictable ads are boring.Here is a warm and happy customer-bonding ad Michael Torbay found hiding in the heart of his client on a cold and grey winter day:MARK: “It was the Pop-Tart that did it. I’m Mark Tapper. Someone recently asked me about the day I knew I had to propose to my girlfriend. Spoiler alert: she’s my wife now. But somehow the sound of that toaster popping made me feel so ‘single.’ I loved being single, make no mistake! I got to travel, tried on a few different jobs, went back to school, reinvented myself a couple of times. I was a-work-in-progress when I met Leora. She believed in me more than I did. That was what was on my mind when it suddenly popped: It wasn’t about me anymore. It was about us, together. That’s what I think about when I come to work at Tapper’s Jewelry. I get to meet people at the most exciting time of their lives, and we get to show you a diamond that will express how you feel right now, forever. Come to Tapper’s, tell us your story.”These are the moments in that ad when a customer might think, “Wow! You, too?”1. I suddenly felt so ‘single.’2. I reinvented myself a couple of times.3. I was a-work-in-progress when I met [my wife]4. She believed in me more than I did.5. It wasn’t about me anymore. It was about us, together.Here is another customer-bonding ad for a client in the same category. Listen closely and you’ll hear Jacob Harrison ask his client a question off-mic. Notice how this ad is equally powerful, but comes at you from an entirely different direction:DEVIN: Brad Lawrence, owner of Gold Casters Fine Jewelry.BRAD: When I opened the store, I had no money. We didn’t have the money for inventory. I brought wax models from school to use to cast...

How to Shear a Sheepby Barbara KingsolverWalk to the barnbefore dawn.Take off your clothes.Cast everythingon the ground:your nylon jacket,wool socks and all.Throw awaythe cutting tools,the shears that bitelike teeth at the skinwhen hooves flailand your elbowcomes up hardunder a panting throat:no more of that.Sing to them instead.Stand nakedin the morningwith your entreaty.Ask them to come,lay down their woolfor love.That should work.It doesn’t.I lectured them into the night, many hours past my bedtime, telling them how to continue the dazzling success of their father. He was there, listening, nodding his head, making sure they would never forget this night.He and I have worked together since 1989, when we were both very young and our sons were very small. Today he is a rich and famous jeweler in a well-known city. I am the man 500 miles away who writes his ads.His hard-working sons listened intently when I said, “People you trust and admire; people who care about you and your success, will come to you, pull you aside, and tell you with deep concern, ‘You need to change your advertising. You’re not doing it right.’ People who studied advertising in college; friends who feel certain they know what you should do, will say to you, ‘You need to change your advertising. You’re not doing it right.'”I told the sons of my friend about the heart-piercing lessons I learned as a young ad writer. I told them about the clever things I did that I knew would would, had to work, were certain to work, that didn’t work.I told them about all the clever things that I was taught, and trusted, and believed, that didn’t work.I told them about the millions of dollars of other people’s money I had wasted year after year on ideas that didn’t work.And then I told them what I finally noticed, and watched, and understood 35 years ago. I told them the counterintuitive truth that I finally had the eyes to see.I told them what always works. I told them why it never fails to work. And I told them why no one who sees it working ever believes that it will work.Their father nodded his head up and down. The four of us looked at each other and smiled.And then I went home to bed.Roy H. WilliamsPS – “How to Shear a Sheep” is just one of the many delightful poems in a little-known book by the legendary novelist, Barbara Kingsolver. If you haven’t read her novels, you should.Danny Heitman, during the Covid lockdown in 2020, published this book review in The Christian Science Monitor:“Barbara Kingsolver is best known for her novels, including ‘The Bean Trees’ and ‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ and her essay collections, such as ‘Small Wonder’ and ‘High Tide in Tucson.’ She’s not as well known for her poetry, though she should be. ‘How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)’ collects her best poems from the past few years. It’s a tonic for these pandemic times, reminding us of Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as a ‘momentary stay against confusion.’ Kingsolver’s poems are like that, though their clarity is less a matter of sudden revelation than the slowly ripening insight of age. The title poem, with its ironic parenthetical promise that we can learn to soar after ‘ten thousand easy lessons,’ sounds a winking dissent from all those how-to

The dew lies softly on the green grass and the sunrise is golden in the early morning sky. I come upon an unspoiled mirror of water. A smooth pebble leaves my fingertips. Yes! I land my pebble perfectly in the bullseye! I watch a concentric circle of ripples reach the edge of the pool and bounce back to the middle where they collide.I wander on.Who knows why we do what we do?I was contemplating Quixote, that strangely enchanting character created by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605.But what was happening across the water in 1605?Having a keyboard at my fingertips, I took an early morning walk backwards-in-time to see what was happening in America while the tormenters of the Inquisition were torturing the innocent people of Spain and wooden blocks were stamping the first edition of Don Quixote onto paper in Madrid.1607: Jamestown, the first permanent settlement by Europeans was founded on the shores of what would later become Virginia.1610: John Rolfe realized he could introduce the tobacco of the Native Americans to the people of Europe. Praise God! This would be the crop that would provide the income that would sustain our little colony on the sparkling shores of this brand-new world.1615: Miquel de Cervantes writes Part Two of Don Quixote, and more characters are carved into wooden blocks to stamp ink onto paper in Madrid.1619: Four thousand Europeans agree to work as indentured servants for a few years in the tobacco fields of Virginia if someone will loan them the money for passage across the Atlantic and give them fifty acres of their own. Among these 4,000 men are Anthony Johnson and 19 other young men of Africa. Each of them work in the tobacco fields to pay off the loans for their passage, then each is awarded 50 acres of his own. Anthony Johnson later becomes successful enough to pay for the passage of 5 more Africans to help him work his land.1650: Thirty-thousand people are working in the tobacco fields of Virginia, including about 300 Africans. Everything seems to be running smoothly and everyone is prospering.1654: Edmund Gayton writes the first commentary in English about Don Quixote. The book is published by William Hunt in London, titled, “Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot.” Later that same year, slavery is introduced to North America when Anthony Johnson convinces the court of Northampton County that he is entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor. This would be the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.As I return from my morning walk, I discover catastophic chaos raging in the pond, the unintended consequences of a pebble tossed. The ripples that bounce off the shores of the pond result in unintended collisions and consequences as all sense of symmetry disappears.Some people say only about 3,000 people were executed by the Spanish Inquisition. Other people say it was more like 30,000. No one has ever claimed it was 300,000. But the pebble of tobacco tossed by John Rolfe killed more than 100,000,000 people in the 20th century alone. We can only guess at the number killed by lung cancer and emphysema during the previous two centuries. Tobacco continues to kill about 8 million people a year.The pebble of slavery tossed by Anthony Johnson resulted in the subjugation of millions of innocent people in America for exactly 201 years. And the waves of that storm continue to crash upon the beach 161 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.Anthony, Anthony, Anthony… why did you throw that pebble 370 years ago?Anthony, if you are listening, please know that you are remembered as a hardworking and successful man who lived with his loving wife Mary for more than 40 years and...

You look at life from a unique point of view.I do, too.Each of us is trapped in our own perceptual reality.“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”You and I may look at the same thing but see it differently. And that little girl over there, yes, that one, sees things differently than either of us. The woman standing next to that little girl has experienced things you and I will never experience, and her reactions to those things have changed her and formed the person she is today. She is trapped inside her own perceptual reality, just like you and me.“Is there a way out of it?”Out of what?“Out of the perceptual reality in which each of us is trapped.”When you modify your perception, you modify your reality.“Explain.”When you listen carefully to an honest person who doesn’t agree with your beliefs, you understand that they experience things differently than you do. And that is when your perceptual reality is modified, and your mind is expanded.“What you are describing is relativism. I believe the facts are the facts, and the truth is the truth, regardless of what you choose to believe.”But would you agree that things are often different than they appear to be?“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”Sometimes we trust facts that are not facts. And even when our facts are correct, the complete truth is usually far more complex than it appears to be on the surface.“I reject that statement. Facts are facts, and the truth is never complex; it is always plain and simple. An honest person who doesn’t see the truth has simply been misinformed.”I respectfully disagree.“Then you have been misinformed.”It was six men of Indostan, to learning much inclined,who went to see the elephant (Though all of them were blind),that each by observation, might satisfy his mind.The first approached the elephant, and, happening to fall,against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl:“God bless me! but the elephant, is nothing but a wall!”The second feeling of the tusk, cried: “Ho! what have we here,so round and smooth and sharp? To me tis mighty clear,this wonder of an elephant, is very like a spear!”The third approached the animal, and, happening to take,the squirming trunk within his hands, “I see,” quoth he,the elephant is very like a snake!”The fourth reached out his eager hand, and felt about the knee:“What most this wondrous beast is like, is mighty plain,” quoth he;“Tis clear enough the elephant is very like a tree.”The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said; “E’en the blindest mancan tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can,This marvel of an elephant, is very like a fan!”The sixth no sooner had begun, about the beast to grope,than, seizing on the swinging tail, that fell within his scope,“I see,” quothe he, “the elephant is very like a rope!”And so these men of Indostan, disputed loud and long,each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong,Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!So, oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween,tread on in utter ignorance, of what each other mean,and prate about the elephant, not one of them has seen!“Okay, so what’s your point?”Each of the six blind men saw a different elephant, but every one of those six elephants was far more complex than it appeared to be on the surface.“But if the blind men had taken time to gather all the facts, they would have seen the truth of the entire elephant.”That’s true.“Well, that’s what I do. I gather all the facts, and then I see the truth.”You are to be congratulated on that. You are a very special individual.“Thank you.”The rest of us suffer...

A weak ad attempts to make too many points, and none of them very powerfully.A weak ad is a bloated little porcupine.A great ad drives a single point through one side of your house and out the other with all the momentum of a freight train. A powerful ad is a charging rhinoceros.The world is covered in porcupine ads. They waddle slowly across your television screen. They crawl out of your radio like termites. Their dead carcasses are displayed on billboards along the highways. You stumble over them wherever you go.If I paint an unpleasant picture, it is because porcupines are annoying little rodents.But a charging rhino is a wonder to behold. It makes us stop what we’re doing and pay attention. A rhino pays no attention to the hall monitor who wags his finger and scolds, “No running in the hall!”And that really pisses some people off.Chris Torbay wrote a charging rhinoceros radio ad that makes a single point, very powerfully. I told you about it a few weeks ago, one day after it began charging across the sky from the tops of radio towers in Florida.The ad features a woman who works at an insurance company:My name is Michelle, and I work for Chapman Insurance. I work in the call center answering the phone. What kind of job is that you’re thinking? Well, when it’s your call, maybe I make a difference for you. Maybe you were dreading another one of those stupid corporate phone things with their “press one” and “press two” and “press six if a palm tree just fell on your dog house.”[Now Michelle starts to become emotional, getting increasing wound-up as the ad progresses, until she finishes with thundering pride and deep conviction]But you get to talk to a person, and you get to tell a real person how worried you are. And I get it, because I’m a real person, and I do this for a living. And I can see your policy and answer your questions because I know how confusing this can be!! And when you hang up, you feel like someone with a heart and a soul, and a pretty awesome understanding of insurance has had the basic human decency to answer the phone and talk to you like a person instead of making you press six!!! My name is Michelle. I work with Chapman and your insurance call matters to me!!!!Does it surprise you that the insurance company has had multiple complaints about that ad?It makes a single point:“Business phones should be answered by knowledgeable people who can give you accurate and immediate answers.”Rhinoceros ads always get complaints.Chris Torbay has a younger brother named Mick Torbay who lives in Toronto and rides a rhinoceros everywhere he goes. Mick and I had lunch yesterday with Kyle Caldwell of Atlanta and Ryan Chute of Halifax. Mick said,“When I unleash an ad, there is a specific number of complaints I’m looking for, and it isn’t zero.”The rest of us nodded our affirmation.The majority of people love to see a rhino put on a show. They love rhinos because rhinos are never boring. Porcupines are boring.The rage of the tiny people who are shouting at Chapman Insurance are mostly business owners who are using those abominable “press one” and “press two” machines instead of having the basic human decency to answer the phone and talk to you like a person. You can see now how that ad could make them angry, right?Porcupine lovers are prickly, and easily aggrieved, and quick to call and shout,“Your ads are terrible! You’re not doing it right! You should hire a professional who knows how to talk about features and benefits and price and selection and value and convenience and how long you’ve been in business, and all the awards you’ve won, and say the name of your company at least 7 times in the first 30 seconds. You need to...

Efficiency experts say you must plan your work and work your plan. And you must have written goals and a budget and a schedule.A detailed plan is the key to success when you are doing something small, but you cannot have a detailed plan when you are doing something big and new and untried.You know a project is small when all the variables can be known in advance.When you do something big and new and untried, you will come to a place that your plan did not foresee. This is when you must improvise. Later, you will discover that you are making decisions at the last moment, because that is when you have the most information.Possibilities are in your mind. Reality is at your fingertips. So get started. Move. Take action. Do something.Clarity, commitment, and continual improvement are what you need most when doing something big and new and untried.1: Clarity means you have a clear vision of the outcome you are hoping to bring into reality.2: When you have clarity, you always know what to do next.3: Commitment means that quitting will never occur to you.4: When you have commitment, you find a solution to every obstacle.5: Continual Improvement means that you touch your project every day without fail.6: Touching your project every day – and moving it forward a little – unleashes the power of Exponential Little Bits, the energy that spins your flywheel.7: A thousand tiny touches don’t add up, they multiply. Two becomes four. Four becomes eight. Eight becomes sixteen, and 28 cycles later you have exceeded one billion.8: The only things you cannot know in advance are(A.) How long is it going to take?(B.) How much is it going to cost?9: If you insist on knowing those answers in advance, these are the answers:(A.) It will take as long as it takes(B.) It will cost what it costs.10: If you demand answers with more details, you either lack commitment or you believe I can see the future.11: I cannot see the future.12: The only hard part is step number one.You will notice I have given you a 12-step program. This is because doing things that are big, new, and untried is highly addictive, and every addictive thing has its own 12-step program.Do not confuse it with a plan.Roy H. WilliamsPS – George Bernard Shaw said, “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” Roy might tell you more about George Bernard Shaw next week. Or then again, maybe not. – IndyCharlie Munger was the billionaire businessman who built Berkshire Hathaway side-by-side with Warren Buffett. Just weeks before Munger died at age 99, Gregory Zuckerman of The Wall Street Journal spent 4 hours with Charlie in the billionaire’s Los Angeles home and came away with some life-changing insights. This week, roving reporter Rotbart interviews the last journalist to interview Charlie Munger, which makes everyone who listens to this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio just three degrees of separation from Charlie Munger and four degrees from Warren Buffett. How can you resist? This party will start the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com.

A germ is a tiny thing, but it can divide and become two germs, then four.Four becomes eight and after only 28 more cycles you find yourself handcuffed in the sad darkness of more than one billion germs.One billion, seventy-three million, seven hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four germs, to be exact.And they are all trying to kill you.Unlike the more beautiful forms of life, germs carry only one set of chromosomes instead of two. They reproduce by dividing into two cells, a process called binary fission.It began as a tiny cut. But every time you open that wound, you increase the pain of it.This is why it is dangerous to nurse a grudge. When we remember painful moments, we increase their strength.Did you know that most of what we remember never really happened? At least not the way we remember it.When we remember something that happened, we do not recall the event objectively. None of us do. We reconstruct the event according to how it made us feel the last time we thought about it. We remember only the memory of our memory.The memories you carry in your mind are distorted reconstructions, at best. But the assumptions you made – especially the motives and intentions you ascribed to other people – quickly crystallize into “indisputable facts” in your mind.That last statement bears repeating: the motives and intentions you ascribe to other people quickly crystallize into “indisputable facts” in your mind.Therein lies a great danger. When you nurse a grudge, you distort reality by crystallizing emotional impressions into “hard facts” that you believe with all your heart. And the more often you revisit that pain, the tighter your handcuffs and the deeper your darkness.We’ve heard it before, but it is good for us to hear it again:“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”Every person deserves to be remembered for their best moment.Take that thought with you into the new year. When you remember a person, search the secret corners of your mind for an event, a moment, something that person said, or did, that makes you smile a little. Replace your dark, sad memory with one that is happy and light.Don’t do it for them. Do it for you.Have a happy new year.Roy H. WilliamsSide Hustles, Online Retailing, Military Contracts, Bras, Walt Disney, Firefighters, Business Exit Strategies, and Worms. Those were 8 of the Top 10 Episodes for MondayMorningRadio in 2023. This week, roving reporter Rotbart – with brilliant co-host and son, Maxwell – revisit the highlights of 2023 and share an audio preview of their new book, a Monday Morning Radio anthology offering insights from 25 of the most interesting guests in the history of the show. The book won’t be released until March, but you can begin profiting from its compiled wisdom the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

“The thing about the systematic reduction of a woman down to her parts is that she doesn’t always know it’s happening while it’s going on. Just one day she wakes up and realizes that all she was,was a face,a line of cleavage,two legs,a couple of hands,the swivel of her pelvis,the swell of her breast.We were just the disembodied parts in the display cases. One day we wake up to find out that the diamonds were never chocolate at all; they were brown the whole time. And our bodies, which are finally ours again, can move on all we want, though they forever remain a library of our lives — of the hurt and the shame, and of what we either allowed or didn’t allow other people to get away with.”– Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times, April 23, 2019“The number of ‘likes’ a photo receives is correlated with sexualization on Instagram. This partially confirmed Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of self-objectification, where young women generally see themselves as objects for viewers to judge through ‘likes.'”– Amber L. Horan,“Picture This! Objectification Versus Empowerment in Women’s Photos on Social Media”“In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message we receive is that a woman’s value and power lies in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity, inner-self, or passions.”– Sonia SuarezLike most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women. But what, exactly, defines “woman”? Definitions are so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized. But when has that ever been an impediment to a curious mind? Today’s examination of the mystery and magic of women begins with a handful of quotes that show us “the perfect woman” that can exist only in the mind of a man. Psychologist Carl Jung calls her the anima. I call her, “The Imaginary Woman.”“What do we know about the goddesses, those elusive female figures, stronger than human males, more dangerous than male deities, who represent not real women but the dreams of real men?”– Alice Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible, p. 17“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, she takes on a mythical quality.”– James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 153Miguel de Cervantes gave us a perfect example of the imaginary woman 418 years ago. Don Quixote sees a village girl in the distance – Aldonza Lorenzo by name – and says,“Her name is Dulcinea, her kingdom, Toboso, which is in La Mancha, her condition must be that of princess, at the very least, for she is my queen and lady, and her beauty is supernatural, for in it one finds the reality of all the impossible.”In the book, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea. He sees her only from a distance. Like Helen of Troy – the face that launched 1,000 ships – Dulcinea is the anima, that perfect woman who can exist only in the imagination of a man. Everything Quixote accomplishes and endures is in her name and for her honor.“The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The younger boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.”– John Steinbeck“Freda was a dazzle, a virtual watercolor of a woman...

I don’t know if he was was an American Patriot or a British Loyalist. All I know is that he owned a 1726 edition of “The Gentleman Angler,” a leather bound book on fly fishing.That book was 50 years old when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.Speaking of Jefferson, that same fly-fisherman bought a first edition of the complete, 4-volume leather bound set of “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies” written by Thomas Jefferson and published in 1829. This leads me to believe that our fly-fishing friend purchased his 103-year-old copy of the 1726 edition of “The Gentleman Angler” at about that same time, roughly 200 years ago.There were no modern books in his collection.I just realized something. Our fly-fishing friend was obviously an American Patriot, or he would not have purchased Thomas Jefferson’s “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies” in 1829.“Hang on a moment, Roy, you identified that man as a ‘Fly-Fishing Fanatic’ in the title of today’s MondayMorningMemo. What led you to call him that?”I call him a “Fly-Fishing Fanatic” because the majority of the 18 books in his collection were about fly fishing, including a 1750 edition, a 1760 edition, and an 1823 edition of “The Compleat Angler” by Izaak Walton.I bought his entire collection because books are cool, especially books that are centuries old.What would have been REALLY cool, though, is if this lover-of-books who lived during the years of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington also owned an original, 1605 first-edition of Don Quixote de La Mancha. Wouldn’t that have been cool?There are only 10 known copies of that book in all the world, and the last one to change hands sold 35 years ago for 1,500,000 dollars. There are no universities that own a copy, and there are no copies available to public view except the one that is owned by the citizens of the United States of America, and that one is closely guarded in our Library of Congress.Did you guess already?Our colonial fly-fishing friend did, in fact, own a 1605 edition of Cervantes’ masterpiece, and I bought it with the rest of his collection.The mystery is that my copy is roughly 8 inches by 11 inches, much larger than the 4-inch by 6-inch edition owned by the Library of Congress. My copy is, without question, extraordinarily old. The attributes that bring me to this conclusion are not easily faked.The cover is wrapped in the remains of old, brittle vellum – tightly stretched animal skin – and the pages are substantial and thick. It is not, however, the unauthorized pirated version published in Portugal in 1605, because mine has the correct 1605 frontispiece and title page, identical to that of the 4-inch by 6-inch 1605 edition held by the Library of Congress.My copy has the vellum cover and ties, like the 1605 Portuguese edition and the 1620 English edition, but it is neither of those.It appears to a centuries old Presentation Edition, if such a thing existed so long ago.The print seems to occupy about the same dimensions as the smaller, first book, but the pages themselves are bigger and more substantial, as if the original press was used on larger paper, leaving a lot of unprinted paper bordering the...

Irwin Michnick, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish furrier from Ukraine, was a jazz musician who wrote radio commercials and advertising jingles for companies like L & M cigarettes and Ken-L Ration dog food.Bob Levenson was a copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach who needed a tune to go with the words, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Irwin Michnick got the call.But it was a different call that led to Irwin Michnik winning a Tony Award and the Contemporary Classics Award from the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Placido Domingo, and more than 70 other superstars of music have recorded the song that Michnik wrote.Josh Groban included it on his 2020 album, Harmony.Aretha Franklin sang it at the funeral of civil rights activist Rosa Parks.Senator Edward Kennedy asked that it be sung at his funeral, as well. And it was.The song teaches us that passion does not create commitment, but that commitment creates passion. It is a song that teaches us that we can achieve the miraculous only if we are willing to attempt the ridiculous.Do you remember the Ze Frank quote I shared with you last week? The one where Ze talks about how the hero throws himself into battle against impossible odds, fiercely pushing, shoulders back, despite the knowledge that he can’t win, that he will die in the end?Irwin Michnik wrote the music and Joe Darion wrote the words. It is the theme song of Wizard Academy, that school for entrepreneurs and ad writers and educators and ministers and researchers and every other agent-of-change who has become infected with an impossible dream.Do you remember the song now? Of course you do. It starts like this, “To dream the impossible dream; to fight the unbeatable foe; to bear with unbearable sorrow; to run where the brave dare not go.”You probably don’t remember Irwin Michnik because he was known professionally as Mitch. Mitch Leigh.I’ll bet you can guess what Indy Beagle has for you in the rabbit hole.In other news about impossible dreams, last week I bought an extremely old copy of the book Miguel de Cervantes wrote that inspired the song by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion.Perhaps I’ll tell you about it after the beginning of the year.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsGood business ideas often die on the vine because of the cost and logistics of bringing those ideas into reality. Uzair Ahmed saw all these missed opportunities, so he figured figured out how to use technology and automation to make these good business ideas come alive. Uzair tested a high-tech, low-overhead system to launch a business that provides on-site car repairs. Guess what? It succeeded wildly. Now, Uzair tells roving reporter Rotbart, he can help other businesses cut their costs up to 60% by following his model. And this also reduces the number of hours a business owner has to spend at work. We’ve struck the match and lit the fuse. If you want to see the fireworks, hurry over to MondayMorningRadio.com

Back in 2012, Ze Frank recorded a video I’ve contemplated for 11 years.“What was it about?”The hero and the clown.“What made it so interesting that you’ve contemplated it for so long?”The hero and the clown are the same person.“You’re going to need to explain that to me.”Here’s the transcript. Read it:“Once I was lucky enough to take a class with the great clown teacher Giovanni Fusetti and one of the things that he talked about was the ancient idea of a hero. In the Greek myths, humans were subject to massive and unknown forces outside of their control. The whims of the gods – fickle gods – the gods of wind, waves and war, of luck, of love, of age and death. And from up on Mount Olympus, humans, humans look like little ants in the face of all these things. Giovanni said that despite these unknowns the hero pushes, pushes up against all these forces, fiercely pushes, shoulders back, despite the knowledge that he can’t win, that he will die in the end. The clown on the other hand, celebrates the falling, the failure, the absurdity of skipping along the bottom, the absurdity of trying at all…”– Ze Frank, Unfair, June 22, 2012“Okay, that was interesting. But I don’t see how you could still be thinking about that after 11 years.”It answered a question for me.“So, what was the question?”How can one person look at Don Quixote and see a hero, and another person look at him and see a clown?“Sometimes you think about some really weird crap. You know that, right?”Yeah, I know that.“You need to tie all this together for me.”Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in 1605, and for the past 418 years, a person’s interpretation of that book has depended almost entirely on when and where they lived.“For real?”Yeah. For real.“Why?”Why, what?“Why does it depend on when and where they lived?”There are two specific times when people read the story of Don Quixote:When a nation is pursuing a beautiful dream, the artists of that nation will paint, and sculpt, and write plays about heroes who fight against impossible odds. And they will cheer for Don Quixote, a visionary hero who saw beauty, justice, and honor in a common village girl who didn’t know he was alive.Generations later, weary, disheartened, and brittle, those same nations will laugh at the absurdity of believing in heroes, and their comedians will mock the foolishness of relentless determination. And they will sneer at Don Quixote, a man who saw visions of beauty, justice and honor in a common village girl who didn’t know he was alive.“So what does America believe about Don Quixote right now?”Answer me this, Indy: Do you feel our nation is pursuing a beautiful dream? Or do you feel we are weary, disheartened, and brittle?“Considering that everyone is suspicious of everyone right now, I’d say that we are the second one.”Indy, I want you to research the founding fathers and find out whether they were reading Don Quixote when they were dreaming the dream of America, and fighting against impossible odds to escape from under the bootheel of King George.“You want me to put it in the rabbit hole?”That’s up to you, my little Beagle friend, but I’m hoping you will.“I will under one condition.”Name it.“Tell me what brought this on. I need to know why you’re telling me all this.”Do you remember what I told all those people who came to Austin to hear my final presentation of ‘Pendulum’ 11 years ago?“I remember the tower was full, but you said a lot of things during those 2 days. Which of those things are you talking about?”It was near the end, when someone asked me how soon I would be teaching ‘Pendulum’ again.“I remember that you told them you wouldn’t be teaching it again for at least 10...

Ninety percent of motorcycle riders who attempt this corner at 100 mph crash and die, so 9% of riders who attempt it at 10 mph will also crash and die, right?The fact that you answered silently ‘No’ indicates that you instinctively understand the concept of an inflection point.Somewhere between zero and 100 mph is the inflection point where crashes begin to occur, and every mile-per-hour above that inflection point increases the likelihood of a crash.Although we instinctively understand the reality of the inflection point when reducing from the greater to the smaller, we somehow believe things are infinitely scalable when moving from the smaller to the greater.If we can navigate the corner at 77 mph, then we can do it at 78 mph. And if we can do it at 78 mph, we can certainly do it at 79 mph. And if 79 is doable, then so is 80, right?I’m talking to you about lead generation for your business.A few days ago, I was having a conversation that I find myself having far too often. I have an acquaintance in the air conditioning business who told me he was planning to increase his Google budget. He said,“If I increase my Google budget by 50%, I’ll get 50% more leads.”He’s been in business about 11 years and is a major player in his city, so I asked, “During peak season, how many calls do you get on the average day?”He told me the number, then I said, “Now think of all your competitors and estimate the number of calls they could possibly be getting. Give it some thought. Don’t leave anyone out.”I gave him time to think, then said, “Add that call volume to your call volume. Now tell me, what is the largest possible number of people that could possibly need air conditioning service during peak season?”He gave me a number. I asked, “Is there any way it could be higher than that?”“No.”“Peak season has been over for awhile. How many clicks are you currently buying each day?” His eyes got big and he said,“I’m already buying more than 3 times that many clicks every day! How is that possible?”“Are you asking me how it is possible that a finite number of people in your city are in the market for your product today, but the number of clicks available today is infinite? Is that what you’re asking?”He shook his head yes, so I told him the answer.I run into the same problem when talking to clients about radio ads. They say,“Every time I have increased my radio budget, my sales have increased. So I want to increase my budget again.”“It won’t do you any good.”“But it has always worked in the past.”“It won’t work this time because you are already reaching all the people who spend enough time listening to the radio each week to make it possible for you to reach them with sufficient repetition. The only people left are the ones who don’t spend enough time listening. We’re going to have to add a new media: TV, or billboards, or maybe direct mail.”“Will it work as well as the radio?”“Of course not. Because we’re at an inflection point.”“What do you mean?”“You’re already reaching 39% of your city with enough repetition for those people to know who you are and what you do and how you do it and why they should choose you. So whatever media we buy next, you’ve got to keep in mind that we’re already reaching 39% of those people with relentless repetition on the radio. The best-case scenario is that you’re going to see about 60% as much business growth per ad dollar as you’ve seen in the past.”No one wants to hear that.People want to believe that everything related to business is infinitely scalable. But there is always an inflection point when lead generation becomes more...

Poetry is not limited to poets.When you1. say more2. in fewer words,you are being poetic.Pithy, insightful statements are poetry.Frederik Pohl was not trying to explain why we increase our purchases of ice cream, alcohol, and entertainment when we are sad, but he summarizes it perfectly in just 20 words:“What I wanted very badly was something to take my mind off all the things that were on my mind.”1In another of his books, Frederik Pohl uses just 15 words to remind us of something we have often seen and always known:“No circumstances were ever so bad that a little human effort couldn’t make them worse.”2Frederik Pohl was not a poet or a philosopher, but a science fiction writer born in 1919.Does this next statement conjure an image in your mind?“How clearly I saw what he had become! A man who so loved religiosity that he traded his ethical responsibilities for the brightness of that love.”3 – Arkady MartineArkady Martine is not a poet or a philosopher, but another science fiction writer.“Vanity manifests itself in overseriousness. To the vain, the trivialities of this world are of momentous importance. Everything that happens to a vain person is terribly important.”4– Eric Hoffer, a dockworker“It’s steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.”5– Anthony Doerr, a novelistPoetry is not limited to poets. When you say more, in fewer words, you are being poetic.Most people avoid poetry because they feel it to be sissy, elitist, and irrelevant. After all, who wants to say more in fewer words?Every advertiser on the planet, that’s who.Poetic statements jump over the wall of the intellect to land on the softest parts of the heart.And if you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Transactional writing wins the mind.Relational writing wins the heart.Transactional writing is about features and benefits.Relational writing is about identity reinforcement.Learn to say more in fewer words.People will pay close attention when you speak.Your ads will produce miraculous results.Your meetings will be shorter and more productive.You will be widely admired, much remembered, and often quoted.In the 6th chapter of Matthew’s Good News, Jesus tells his followers not to include mindless repetition in their prayers. God doesn’t need filler words, and he doesn’t need us to repeat ourselves in order to be heard.That’s right, God doesn’t need filler words.And neither do the rest of us.Roy H. Williams1The Annals of the Heechee, p. 912 The Other End of Time, chap. 153A Desolation Called Peace, p. 2694Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, p.955All the Light We Cannot See, p. 24He started with $200,000 in 2018. Today it is $200,000,000. You can do it, too. Bronson Hill heard Warren Buffet say that people will work the rest of their lives if they don’t find a way to make money while they sleep. This week, Bronson reveals to roving reporter Rotbart his successful strategies for passive investment in real estate. You can always count on our roving Reporter to seek out interesting people with fascinating stories for you to hear at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.“Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.”That was Jonathan Gottschall. This is the stunningly brilliant Chris Torbay.“My name is Michelle, and I work for Chapman Insurance. I work in the call center answering the phone. ‘What kind of job is that?’ you’re thinking. Well, when it’s your call, maybe I make a difference for you. Maybe you were dreading another one of those stupid corporate phone things with their ‘press one’ and ‘press two’ and ‘press six if a palm tree just fell on your doghouse,’… but you get to talk to a person, and you get to tell a real person how worried you are. And I get it because I’m a real person and I do this for a living! And I can see your policy and answer your questions because I know how confusing this can be, and when you hang up, you feel like someone with a heart and a soul, and a pretty awesome understanding of insurance has had the basic human decency to answer the phone and talk to you like a person instead of making you press six!!!!! My name is Michelle!!!! I work with Chapman, and your insurance call matters to me!!!!”[MALE VOICE] Visit cigFlorida.com© Chris Torbay 2023Jonathan Gottschall goes on to say,“Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.”“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”– Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature“Escapist fantasies are laughably superficial. Attaining them isn’t what we really want. If we did, they’d no doubt bore or disappoint us. We don’t want the fantasy. We want to fantasize.”– Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning, p.109“The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is ‘write what you know,’ and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, ‘You can write about anything you can imagine.'”– Tom Robbins“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”– Francisco GoyaBut how does a person become creative?“When you notice a commonality between two or more things, you say, ‘Oh there’s something there.’ And now we make what’s called a charm bracelet: You take these things and you find a way to associate them. So that’s the process: I’m thinking about this [one] thing and then remember this [other] thing, and then you go, ‘Oh there’s something there — let me connect those 2 things.”– Jerry SeinfeldBrandon Sanderson agrees with Jerry Seinfeld:“The way that human creativity works is by combination. That’s what we’re really good at. We don’t come up with a completely new creature. We put a horn on a horse and go, ‘Look at that, that’s cool.’ That’s how we create on a fundamental level.”And Steve Jobs agreed with both Seinfeld and Sanderson:“Creativity equals connecting previously...

Beautiful people know they are beautiful.Smart people know they are smart.Rich people know they are rich.You don’t need to tell them.If you speak about surface qualities, your words are superficial.If you speak about inner qualities, your words are deep.Flattery is an attempt at superficial bonding. It is the pickup line of a creep in a bar, hitting on a pretty girl. Creeps talk to women about the ‘features and benefits’ they see on the surface of the woman, and then they describe their own ‘features and benefits.’I am talking to you about advertising.Transactional ads describe something that is outside your current possession. Transactional ads are written to entice you to buy a product. Their offer of features and benefits is basically this: “Give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.”We settle for sex when we cannot find love.Most ads focus on ‘features and benefits’ because most marketing is created by morons.The woman in the bar is your customer. She is standing alone on a tiny island surrounded by an ocean of ‘features and benefits’, but it is an ocean only a few inches deep.What do you think would happen if you offered her what she really wants? What do you think would happen if your only goal was to rescue her forever from that tiny island?Relational ads speak to values and beliefs deep in your customer’s heart. Relational marketing is about meeting your customer’s needs today, tomorrow, and forever.Transactional marketing is about satisfying the need of the hour.Relational marketing is about satisfying the needs of a lifetime.“But,” you say, “product marketing isn’t about a relationship. It is about the features and benefits of the product.”Apple was the first company in the world to achieve a trillion-dollar valuation. Did Steve Jobs build that brand on transactional ads that described the features and benefits of Apple products? Apple-solutely not!In 1985, when Steve Jobs was fired from the company he had founded, a moron took over the marketing at Apple and immediately began talking about ‘features and benefits’. Those superficial ads plunged Apple into obscurity and brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy.When Steve Jobs came back to rescue Apple, he made a 7-minute speech to his team. (Indy Beagle has a video of that speech for you in today’s rabbit hole.)Steve begins that speech with these words:“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us, no company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want ’em to know about us.”Four minutes later, he finishes with this:“The things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this. And what we have is something that I am very moved by. It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, you know, that if they ever used a computer, it would’ve been a Mac. The theme of the campaign is Think Different. It’s the people honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward. And it is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company. So I’m going to go ahead and roll it, and I hope that you feel the same way about it I do.”“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only...

Portals are openings that lead from one place to another.The best screenwriters, novelists, poets, and ad writers use portals when they want their readers, listeners, and viewers to follow them to a new and different place.Portals can be visual, auditory, or literary.Visual Portalslike windows, doors, and tunnels, are used by painters, photographers, and graphic artists.A portal makes a 2-dimensional image psychologically 3-dimensional.There is(1.) the foreground,(2.) the portal (window) and(3.) a different reality on the other side.We see a kitchen, with people sitting at a table in the foreground. The kitchen counter is covered with the implements of cooking. But our eyes are attracted to the portal: a window under which the table sits… Looking through that window, we see that we are high up on a mountain overlooking a valley through which a whitewater stream makes its way to the sea.There is one world on this side of that window, and another world on the other.Portals make it easier for readers, listeners, and viewers to follow you on your journey of imagination.Auditory portalsbeckon you toward a world beyond. These portals of sound are another type of window that pulls you toward the valley, the river, and the sea.Pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, interval, and contour are the 6 sub-languages in the language of music. Each of these involves movement up-and-down, and/or left and right. This is what makes them two-dimensional. To create a portal, we must add depth, the 3rd dimension.Harmony provides depth, thus opening an auditory portal.Major 7th chords provide depth, and thus open auditory portals.When you strike the 1, 3, 5 and 7 keys in the major scale on a piano, you are playing a major 7th.Strike the 1 and the 7 without the 3 and the 5, and you will create a truly horrible sound; a sound from which you will want to escape. Add the 3 and the 5 to that ugly 1 and 7, and you will hear a rich, lush sound with all the transcendent DEPTH of rich harmony. Auditory portals make is easier for people to follow you to the place you are trying to take them.Literary Portalsare references from books, plays, movies, and TV shows that allow you to transfer a vivid mental image using only a few words.Example: “I was so deep in thought I felt like Hamlet talking to the skull of Yorick.”Example: “A drug dealer is a reverse Robin Hood, robbing the poor and giving the money to the rich.”Example: “When you step off a train in Switzerland, you step through the wardrobe into Narnia.”Literary Portals are another type of window, door, or tunnel.The tunnel of a rabbit hole takes Alice into Wonderland.The tunnel of a telephone landline allows Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity to get in and out of the Matrix. (They cannot do it over a cell phone.)Doors called waygates allow Moiraine and the Aes Sedai to go from place to place in the Wheel of Time.The spiraling tunnel of a tornado takes Dorothy into Oz.The portal of Platform 9 3/4 in the train station allows Harry Potter to leave the world of muggles.The shape of a spiralis a portal that pulls you in. It is always associated with a feeling of spin.Elevator Portalstake you to a different level. The concept of going up or down is easily communicated by the image of a ladder, stairs, an escalator, or an elevator.Elevator portals can be visual, auditory, or literary.A Dreamis a portal into a symbolic world; a waygate that allows you a glimpse of the unconscious as your pattern-recognizing right-brain processes your unresolved thoughts and impressions.When you want to speak of hope or fear, confidence or anxiety, fantasy or...

I bought an old oil painting. It’s not a large painting or an important one, but it came from the private collection of the founder of the Whitney Museum.I bought it because I’ve always admired Cornelius Vanderbilt and his great-grandson, Willie K. Vanderbilt II, and I consider the delightful Gertude Vanderbilt-Whitney, the great-grandaughter of Cornelius, to be the third, truly interesting Vanderbilt.The First Vanderbilt:The fourth of nine children, Cornelius was in the first grade when George Washington died. At sixteen, he borrowed $100* from his mother to buy a little sailboat to haul passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York City.By the time he was forty, the Vanderbilt fleet was hauling passengers and freight to ports all along the Atlantic coast, earning Cornelius the nickname “Commodore.” He then began buying up struggling railroads and turning them around.The difference between Vanderbilt and his competitors was that his boats and trains ran on schedule and the service was always excellent. If Cornelius Vanderbilt was running an airline today, you would no longer dread going to the airport.The Second Vanderbilt:Willie K. Vanderbilt II (1878–1944), was often seen covered in grease with an automobile engine spread out in pieces around him. Young Willie K outran Henry Ford in 1904 to set a new world land speed record of ninety-two miles per hour. Later that year, Willie held the first Vanderbilt Cup Auto Race and singlehandedly changed the course of American auto making.By offering a first prize of about a million dollars (by today’s standards), Willie K inspired more than 3,000 entrepreneurs to leap to the task of manufacturing stronger, better, faster cars. The Vanderbilt Cup was discontinued after its seventh year because the crowds of more than 400,000 spectators could no longer be safely controlled.He then built a modest home for himself with an excellent wharf and boathouse. His energy was forever after focused on marine life in all its strange and wonderful forms. Every day was a new adventure in the waters of the deep. Prior to his death in 1942, Willie K. Vanderbilt II discovered and documented sixty-eight species of ocean life previously unknown to science.The Third Vanderbilt:Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875–1942,) married a thoroughbred horse breeder named Harry Whitney when she was 21 years old. Harry was a descendent of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin in 1839.Shortly after she got married, Gertrude began studying sculpture in Paris with Auguste Rodin. Her love of the arts, her skill as a sculptor, and her Vanderbilt fortune allowed Gertude to become one of the world’s foremost collectors of art. Her artistic fever inflamed New York’s Greenwich Village and caused it to burn brightly as a new bohemia in the early 1900s.In 1931, Gertrude donated 600 of her most precious paintings to create the Whitney Museum of American Art.She kept only a few paintings for her private collection at home.Pennie and I plan to hang the one we bought in Alchemy, the Renaissance coffee and cocktail bar being built by our son, Rex. The painting is of two young women in a kitchen, painted in that style for which Frans van Mieris is famous. If those women aren’t twins, they are obviously sisters.When you visit Wizard Academy next year, perhaps Alchemy will be completed, and you’ll see it there.Aroo,Roy H. WilliamsPS – Of the 111 descendents of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I consider Timothy Olyphant, the actor, to be The Fourth Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper, the broadcast journalist, to be Vanderbilt #5. You can see the entire list on WIKIPEDIA.

It is easy to attract attention:Predictability is death. Spontaneity is life.Day and night, left and right,timid and bold, young and old,up and down, smile and frown.Start and end. Do it again.Negative and positive, effected and causative,passive and active, repulsive and attractive:Paired opposites are the essence of magnetism.You can attention now attract!But opposites quickly get old.To keep that attention,you must learn how to hold.Straight lines are okay, but so are twists, and twirls.Learn to do all three and create Magical Worlds.Two opposites can only disagree.Scientific Chaos begins with three.Opposites collide and we hear the laughter,but the space in the middle is what we’re after.Relieve opposing tensions and you’ll get no respect.Make them work for you, and you’ll be an architect.Marley Porter had the idea, so I gave it words:“Let other people have seconds; we want thirds.”Big endings and beginnings come with a riddleand the answer is hiding in that space in the middle.When a character is tri-flicted, we get addicted.When your story is hollow, fill it with what you can borrow.When your joke has a hole, fill it with what you stole.When your ad has a cavity, fill it with gravity.You can tap your foot. You can play the fiddle.But the dance will happen in that space in the middle.To hold attention slickly,transfer big ideas quickly.If you want to hit hard,make them drop their guard.When they quit thinking and start feeling,you’ll have them reeling.So now you know – but you always did –attention is auctioned but you have to bid.And you, my friend, are a story-telling squid.Wrap the audience in your multiple arms.Pull them in closer. Ignore the alarms.Hold their attention, and they will hold their breath.And what they will feel is life, the opposite of death.Roy H. WilliamsOn October 16, 1923 — precisely 100 years ago today — Walt Disney and his brother Roy launched an entertainment business. It filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. But the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio rebounded and evolved into one of the world’s best-known and most beloved companies. This week, roving reporter Rotbart explores the history of The Walt Disney Company and reveals an incredible Disneyland document that he and his son Maxwell discovered deep in the archives of a Kansas museum. You know that our roving reporter began his career as an investigative reporter and award-winning columnist for The Wall Street Journal, right? Finding things that no one ever found before is what Rotbart does best! Prepare to be amazed at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Most of us cheer for the little dog that doesn’t have a chance. The underdog.We like them because they need us.Underdogs are those little dogs that rise above their circumstances and overcome their disadvantages. It is the underdog we see in our mind when we say, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”Underdogs do the best they can. They push and struggle and hope for a brighter future. They remind us of ourselves.“The scientific literature suggests that fans of losing teams turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to the unreflective fans of winning teams.”– Dr. Jordan Grafman, a researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders (2011)That’s interesting, don’t you think? People who cheer for little David in his fight against big Goliath are reflective, good decision-makers, and unafraid to think new thoughts.We cheer for the underdog, always and forever. We go out of minds with ecstasy when the underdog finally wins. That’s our dog! We look at each other and we know, “That little dog is you and me.”The underdog is a cultural hero.“How do human beings put into words their ideas about the meaning of human life? How do they convey through art and religion their beliefs about the significance of human life? They do it partly by investing in certain transcultural stories, like the one about the adventures of a culture hero, which, after a period of trial and hardship, always ends in triumph.”– Barry Lopez, Horizons, page 323Do you know what has me concerned?The United States began as a nation of underdogs, but it took us barely 10 generations to become a nation of overdogs, victors, champions, and our values have changed because of it.Today we believe, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.“We want more subscribers, more influence, more likes, more admirers, more fame, and more money. How much is enough? “Just a little bit more.”I suspect Louis Menand was contemplating all of this in June, 2011 when he wrote:“In a society that encourages its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being.”Wouldn’t it be great to have a nation – and a government – of people who were informed citizens and reflective, culturally literate human beings?Wouldn’t that be great?Roy H. WilliamsCurt Tueffert has spent four decades helping people enjoy world-class sales success. When it comes to selling, Curt has seen it all, done it all. Qualify customer prospects, help them past their hesitations, and never feel rejection when rejected: Curt can tell you how. According to roving reporter Rotbart, this week’s episode will instantly boost your batting average in the great game of selling. MondayMorningRadio.com

My novelist friend, Brad Whittington and I share a deep and abiding love for the colorful canvases of Robertson Davies, a Canadian writer who paints pictures in the mind."Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position." – Robertson DaviesUseful knowledge is intellectual. Ornamental knowledge is artistic, fascinating, emotional. But please don't feel that you need to choose between the two. Just as air and water are both essential to your physical wellbeing, Useful knowledge and Ornamental knowledge are both essential to your happiness.Useful knowledge is hard to share. Short sentences are required. There is no room for wordplay when 20/20 clarity is your goal. Writers who can write clearly are needed and needed badly. How is it that every instruction manual is written by a Loquacious Luke who insists on using 27 words when 1 will do? Give me 10 people who can write the truth simply, sharply, and clearly, and I will remove half the frustration from the world.Writers of Useful knowledge communicate clearly and quickly.Writers who share Ornamental knowledge splash splendid colors in the mind to produce vivid visions.But there is a third writer for whom there is no place, no purpose, no need. This is the writer of Adspeak, that empty language of fluff and feathers favored by people who have nothing to say.Adspeak in the boardroom is known as 'Business-dude lorem ipsum'.Charlie Warzel writes for The Atlantic. Here's what Charlie said on August 31, 2022:"'Business-dude lorem ipsum' is filler language that is used to roleplay 'thought leadership' among those who have nothing to say: the MBA version of a grade-school book report that starts with a Webster’s Dictionary definition. Advanced business-dude lorem ipsum will convey action ('We need to design value in stages') but only in the least tangible way possible. It will employ industry terms of art ('We’re first-to-market or a fast follower') that indicate the business dude has been in many meetings where similar ideas were hatched. Business-dude lorem ipsum will often hold one or two platitudes that sound like they might also be Zen koans ('value is in the eye of the beholder') but actually are so broad that they say nothing at all."Weird Al Yankovic has a video on Youtube called "Mission Statement" featuring a delightful song made of 100% 'Business-dude lorem ipsum'. These are some of the lyrics:"We must all efficiently operationalize our strategies, invest in world-class technology and leverage our core competencies in order to holistically administrate exceptional synergy. We'll set a brand trajectory using management philosophy, advance our market share vis-à-vis our proven methodology, with strong commitment to quality, effectively enhancing corporate synergy. Transitioning our company by awareness of functionality, promoting viability, providing our supply chain with diversity, we will distill our identity through client-centric solutions... and synergy."Write colorfully, or write clearly, but please never become so vapid and shallow that you resort to Adspeak and 'Business-dude lorem ipsum'. You are smarter and better and more resourceful than that. You have the courage and wit to drive the snakes out of Ireland, shoot arrows from a rooftop, and land a fighter jet in a field.Maybe you didn't know those things about yourself, but they are...

When I was growing up, I could never change the opinion of my mother by saying, “But everyone else is doing it.”My mom had the courage and confidence to believe that Everyone Else’s mother was wrong.That’s a high level of courage and confidence. I’m hoping that you have it, too.When I speak to advertising professionals on the subject of advertising, I often find myself having to explain how certain widely-held beliefs are wrong. I will patiently produce the evidence, the case studies, and scientific documentation. In most instances, the audience will concede that I am right. Then someone will say, “But everyone else is doing it,” as though it is impossible for “everyone else” to be wrong.Here’s an example: most people believe in tightly targeting the right customer. They are convinced that the secret of successful advertising is to “reach the right people.”I believe targeting is essential if you are in a business that sells to other businesses.If you sell computer chips, you need to reach computer manufacturers, so send a letter, an email, a salesman to knock on their door. If you sell cardboard boxes by the traincar load, you need to reach companies that sell things packaged in cardboard boxes. Send a letter, an email, a salesman to knock on their door. The world of B2B lives and dies with their ability to “reach the right people.”But when you are selling a product or service to the public, “targeting the right customer” works only about 10% better than reaching the untargeted masses.If the cost of targeting is less than 10% higher than the cost of not targeting, go ahead and target. But I am confident you will find that targeting usually costs considerably more than that.“But everyone else is doing it.”Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.Nielsen is the highly scientific organization that measures television and radio audiences.D2D is cloud based, and leverages open source technology designed to collect, manage, and analyze complex data.Les Binet is a highly respected data scientist.In the summer of 2020, Les Binet published a huge, longterm study on the effectiveness of marketing. Here is one of the many things he learned:“In many ways, online marketing and online media has done itself a disservice by focusing on targeting more than reach. A couple of very interesting studies are out there. One was a study by Nielsen, about the relative contributions of reach versus targeting in effectiveness, and they concluded, with a survey of about 500 econometric models, that targeting only adds about 10% to the effectiveness of the campaign on average. A very similar result came from some work by D2D, where they looked at over 200 econometric models, from a wide range of categories, and they concluded that targeting of a campaign adds only about 10% to effectiveness. So the same numbers, two very different methods.”Have you been following the news about Phenylephrine, the decongestant that was proven to be ineffective in 2007 and in multiple studies since then, but is still on the shelf 16 years later?According to a recent news story by Sarah Zhang,“Americans collectively shell out $1.763 billion a year for cold and allergy meds with phenylephrine, according to the FDA, which also calls the number a likely underestimate. That’s a lot of money for a decongestant that does not work.”Generally speaking, I’m in favor of government staying out of the way of business, but this seems to be a case where the Federal Trade Commission might ought to step in

Too much to do, too little time. First you are interrupted; then the interruption is interrupted. Does that ever happen to you?Me, too.Surrounded by frantic, breathless, rapid distraction, we have become characters in the video game of Life. The problem is that we are becoming habituated to it. Sensory overload is becoming the new normal.Jeff Sexton, one of my business partners, sent me an article from Science.org last week. I’ll share a single paragraph with you:“The researchers then decided to take the experiment a step further. For 15 minutes, the team left participants alone in a lab room in which they could push a button and shock themselves if they wanted to. The results were startling: Even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think… People would rather be electrically shocked than be left alone with their thoughts.”– Nadia Whitehead, Science.orgLike I said, “habituated.” We skitter and twitch through each day as though the finger of God is mashing the fast forward button on the spacetime continuum.In her book, My Invented Country, Isabel Allende writes:“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: ‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”But last night I discovered the Nancy Reagan solution: “Just say no.”You have been telling yourself that you are overcommitted, but you’re not. You are careful about making commitments. You are not overcommitted. You are over-obligated.Obligations are thrust upon you by people who ambush you with an urgent emergency, or worse, a “quick question.” These people know quick questions often have complicated answers, but they just don’t care. They hide behind the word “Quick” so they can pretend they are asking for nothing more than a flickering moment of your time and attention.You never committed to do what they are asking of you, but you feel obligated nonetheless.Just say no.“Quick question.”“No.”See how easy that was?God bless you, Nancy Reagan.Roy H. WilliamsTo obtain power and influence, you don’t need wealth or privilege. Anyone can become widely known and respected if they can generate a compelling idea and communicate it effectively. That is the conclusion of Bob Dilenschneider, an author, historian, and strategic communication advisor who has been studying and dissecting the elements of power and influence for more than four decades. This week, Dilenschneider shares a surprisingly simple way to get others to listen to you, and follow you. Grab some popcorn and take a seat. The show is about to begin, starring Dean and Maxwell Rotbart, at MondayMorningRadio.com

You cut a nick into a stick to mark a moment. Then, at the end of the time being measured, you make another nick.To do a thing at the last possible moment is to do it within that second nick, “in the nick of time.”Millions of us have been using this phrase since the year 1580, but very few know the story behind it. You are now one of the chosen few who possess the arcane knowledge of the nick on a stick.But why do we say, “nick of time” instead of “notch of time”? If nick and notch mean the same thing, why haven’t we been saying for 443 years, “This money arrived in the notch of time.”We say nick because “nick” ends with a sharper, cleaner sound than “notch.” Say it out loud. “nick-nick-nick.” “notch-notch-notch.” “nick-nick-nick.” “notch-notch-notch.”“Nick” sounds like a sharp, narrow cut, shaped like a V, narrow and specific. But “notch” sounds softer and wider, with an indistinct bottom shaped like the letter U, a bite taken out of an apple.But nick doesn’t have a V in it, and notch doesn’t have a U. So what’s going on?The letters V and U are graphemes, visual letters in the alphabet. But the meaning of a word is not determined by the look of its letters, but by the sounds they make within the word. Those sounds are called phonemes.When describing a phoneme, don’t say the name of the letter. Make only the sound represented by the letter. The letter is a grapheme. The sound it makes is a phoneme.The sound of a word has a lot to do with how it makes us feel, even when we are reading silently.This is incredibly important when choosing names for products and services and companies. It is also important when writing messages that you hope will persuade.Ad writers, song writers, speech writers, and poets, are you listening?Phonemes with abrupt, clean sounds are “p” “b” “t” “d” “ck” and “g”. The visual graphemes that visually represent those phonemes are P, B, T, D, K, and G. “p” “b” “t” “d” “ck” and “g” are known as the stops, or plosives. This is because all the air is stopped, then released with a plosion: “Kate kicked a kite. nick-nick-nick.” The grapheme is called a K, but the final phoneme in “nick” is “ck”.The “tch” sound in “notch” is an affricate, a sound that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, a sound that will hiss, hush, or buzz, like “f” “v” “s” “th” “z” “sh” “j” and “h”. The indistinct ending of the sound is what causes us to hear something less sharply defined than we hear in “nick.”We could go on for at least 30 more minutes describing the 44 sounds that make up the English language and discussing the conceptual ideas we unconsciously associate with each of those 44 sounds, but right now my interest is elsewhere.I want you to return with me to the title of today’s Monday Morning Memo, “Living in the Nick of Time.”Do you remember the Monday Morning Memo from 8 weeks ago, July 17, 2023? Today’s Monday Morning Memo is a callback to that memo. A callback is a powerful tool in storytelling because it deepens the understanding of the audience by giving them a new context to consider.When you end with a callback to the beginning, this is called “going full circle.”In the words of T.S. Eliot,“We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.”Here is what I told you on July 17th:“You cannot suffer the past or future because they do not exist. What you are suffering is your memory and your imagination.”You cut a nick on a stick to mark a moment. At the end of the time being measured, you make another nick. To do a thing at the last possible moment is to do it inside that second nick, “in the...

A friend rotated my brain toward the subject of fame.He aimed my eyes in a new direction when he said, “Do you remember that thing you sent me 10 or 15 years ago?”I gave him the same blank look that you would have given him.He continued, “It was that thing Leonard Pitts wrote about being ‘the Man.'”I recovered it from the Random Quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com, handed my phone to him and told him to read it out loud. When he was finished, we laughed together like two little boys who heard someone fart in church.Here it is:“I’ve got nothing against fame. I’m famous myself. Sort of.OK, not Will Smith famous. Or Ellen DeGeneres famous. All right, not even Marilu Henner famous.I’m the kind of famous where you fly into some town to give a speech before that shrinking subset of Americans who still read newspapers and, for that hour, they treat you like a rock star, applauding, crowding around, asking for autographs.Then it’s over. You walk through the airport the next day and no one gives a second glance. You are nobody again.Dave Barry told me this story once about Mark Russell, the political satirist. It seems Russell gave this performance where he packed the hall, got a standing O. He was The Man. Later, at the hotel, The Man gets hungry, but the only place to eat is a McDonald’s across the road. The front door is locked, but the drive-through is still open. So he stands in it. A car pulls in behind him. The driver honks and yells, “Great show, Mark!”The moral of the story is that a certain level of fame — call it the level of minor celebrity — comes with a built-in reality check. One minute, you’re the toast of Milwaukee. The next, you’re standing behind a Buick waiting to order a Big Mac.”– Leonard Pitts, January 14, 2008There is something about laughing with a friend that soaks into your heart and redirects your thoughts.I woke up the next morning thinking about fame, and how easily it comes and goes.I thought about Bill Cosby and Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. And then my computer told me “Joe the Plumber” had died. Remember Joe the Plumber? He became a celebrity in 2008 when he asked Barack Obama a question. We learned later that his name wasn’t Joe and he was never a plumber, but his perspective resonated with a lot of Americans.And then it hit me: Andy Warhol was a painter, but what we remember about him was his colorful comment about each person receiving “15 minutes of fame.”I could feel the freight train of curiosity gaining momentum in my mind, so I had to quickly decide whether to grab a handrail, swing aboard and see where it would take me, or spend the rest of the day regretting having missed the chance.I didn’t want to live in regret, so I grabbed a handrail and was yanked off my feet into a noisy, rattling railcar.When my eyes had grown accustomed to the dust and the half-light, I found the following 19 statements carved into the wooden walls of that railcar. These statements were signed by Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Depp, Erma Bombeck, Tony Bennett, Emily Dickinson, John Wooden, Gene Tierney, Jack Kerouac, George Michael, Eddie Van Halen, Sinead O’Connor, Fran Lebowitz, Michael Huffington, Lord Byron, Arthur Schopenhauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Clive James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Davy Crockett.But not in that order. I’m not going to tell you who said what, because I don’t want your reactions to be influenced by your memories of those people.“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”“Fame is the thirst of youth.”“Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.”“Fame comes and goes. Longevity...

The comedian Mark Russell said you can judge a generation by its magazines.Life magazine was first published in 1883. It was followed byPeople in 1974, which was followed byUs, which was followed bySelf.Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, just a few weeks before the Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people by President Thomas Jefferson. Emerson was 23 when Jefferson died.America was still heavily influenced by Europe, but Ralph Waldo Emerson saw a future that no one else could see.At the age of 34, he gave a speech to a group of college students in Boston that provided a visionary, philosophical framework for escaping the influence of Europe and building a distinctly American cultural identity. That speech was entitled “The American Scholar” and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered it to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”Ralph Waldo Emerson was a poet, a writer, a lecturer and an encourager who inspired generations of positive thinkers that stir among us to this day. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him “the most gifted of the Americans” and Walt Whitman referred to him as his “master.”Emerson was also a passionate opponent of slavery. Throughout his life he urged Congress to bring slavery to an immediate and permanent end.When Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois on January 10, 1853, a then-unknown Abraham Lincoln was in the audience. Years later, Lincoln invited Emerson to the White House and told him of the impact that lecture had on him.Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke with whimsy, sentimentality, and vulnerability when he said,“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”Modern businesspeople believe whimsy, sentimentality, and vulnerability to be weaknesses.But I know those people to be wrong.When you choose to like a person who does not like you, this is whimsy.It is hard not to like a person who likes you.When you choose to believe in someone, this is sentimentality.It is hard not to love a person who believes in you.When you say something that requires humility and love, this is vulnerability.It is hard not to trust a person who says something that only a humble, loving person would say.As a writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson was lofty. But as a person, he was famously open and vulnerable.Vulnerability is the price of intimacy.Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Self Reliance in 1841.Elbert Hubbard wrote A Message to Garcia in 1899.Dale Carnegie updated Emerson’s ideas in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936.Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937.Norman Vincent Peale added a veneer of Christianity in his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, in 1952.Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson wrote The One Minute Manager in 1982.Stephen Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989.Joel Osteen wrote Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day in 2007.And every one of those writers owes a debt to Ralph Waldo Emerson.Life, People, Us, Self.Lifeis about more than just business. It’s about balance. It’s about the freedom to be stupid with old friends.Peoplecover the earth. They speak lots of languages and have confusing cultures, but every person is made in the image of God.Usis problematic because it necessitates the idea of “Them,” those who are not Us. Uh-oh.Selfis who you think...

I have a friend who is a famous online marketer. Last week he sent me an observation I found interesting. It occurred to me that you might find it interesting as well.“Now that targeting is pretty much dead on Facebook and Instagram, I have a theory that the rules of reach and frequency that have always applied to radio will also apply to social platforms as they shift away from micro-targeting and toward looking more like mass media.”[Frequency means repetition. – editor]And then he asked a question.“Can you remind me again what your magic formula is for reach and frequency when buying radio ads? I know this is a bit like someone asking me how to spell SEO, but this came up in a conversation I was having with a buddy the other day and I felt stupid that I couldn’t remember it.”Happy to help. Here’s what you’re looking for:APE = Advertising Performance EquationShare of Voice x Impact Quotient = Share of MindShare of Mind x Personal Experience Factor = Share of MarketShare of Market x Market Potential = Sales Volume1.Share of Voice: How much of the noise in your category in your marketplace is your noise? (All media combined, including word of mouth)2.Impact Quotient: The average impact of a message in your category is 1.0. If your ads are 30% better than average, you score a 1.3. If your ads are 10 percent weaker than average, you score a 0.9 … the Impact of your message can accelerate or reduce your Share of Voice3.Share of Mind is the percentage of real estate you own in your category in the mind of the average customer.4.Personal Experience Factor is likewise measured with a 1.0 being, “exactly the experience your customer expected.” Anything above a 1.0 is a delight factor. Anything below a 1.0 is depth of disappointment. Online reviews are just measurements of a customer’s Personal Experience Factor5.Share of Market is your sales volume as a percentage of the total sales available in your category, in your marketplace.For a message to enter Declarative Memory  (mid-term memory – longer than Working Memory – but not yet Procedural Memory, which is involuntary, automatic recall,) a message should be repeated to the same individual at least 3 times within 7 night’s sleep. Further research has lowered this number to as little as 2.5 repetitions per week.The more memorable the message, the less repetition is required. Therefore, the only way to beat the system (Google) and save money is to create messages that are highly memorable. NOTE: Any limited time offer with a call-to-action is erased from declarative memory when the “limited time” window is closed. This is why you cannot build a brand with Direct Response calls-to-action.To become a household word and enter long-term Procedural Memory, you need to hammer your message into the mind of your target at least 2.5 per week for at least 3 years. But even then, it will fade within 24 months after your ads disappear, assuming that your ads have only the average 1.0 Impact Quotient. But a message – or an experience – with a significantly higher Impact Quotient can enter Procedural Memory and become automatic, involuntary recall, with only a single repetition. PTSD is an example of this.The key to absolute category dominance is to elevate your Impact Quotient and Personal Experience Factor to numbers above 2.0.In other words, you’ve got to have awesome ads and deliver an amazing customer experience.But you already knew that.“This is perfect. Thank you. Have any of your partners tested APE in social ads (FB, IG, TikTok, etc.) to see if the numbers hold up? I would have to assume that Share of...

I meet with dozens of people each year who tell me how they grew their companies to an impressive size, but then the growth slowed down. And then it stopped. They can see a lot more business out there; they just can’t figure out how to get it.I used to call this, “hitting the glass ceiling,” but I don’t call it that anymore. Now I say, “You need to add more steps to your ladder.”Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years:It is easy to pick the low-hanging fruit.According to the US Census, there are 17 million owner-operated businesses in America that have no employees other than the owner. I imagine them as 17 million guys named Chuck and each of them has a truck. All of these Chucks-in-Trucks live off the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. They provide pest control, plumbing, electrical work, window cleaning, gutter installation, A/C repair, junk hauling, roofing, remodeling, swimming pool resurfacing, cement pouring, and tax preparation. They make a living, but their businesses are not scalable. In fact, it’s not really a business at all. When Chuck isn’t behind the wheel of that truck, Chuck is unemployed. But Chuck survives because it is easy to pick the low-hanging fruit.Most of the fruit on the tree requires a step-ladder for you to reach it.The steps on the ladder are preparation and planning, procedures and processes, recruitment and retention of customers, recruitment and retention of employees, vendor relations, profit margin monitoring, cash management, lines of credit, and then of course there is advertising and marketing.Everyone successful person has a superpower, a core competency, an area of excellence.And when the growth of the business begins to slow, the instinct of these people is always to double-down on the things that got them to where they are. This is a very seductive mistake.The steps that got you to where you are… will not take you to the next level.The business owner knows the steps what got them to where they are. They can name the reasons for their success. This is why they believe that doing what they have always done, but with greater intensity and deeper commit, will lift the company to a whole new level. But it never does.To get to the next level, you need to add more steps to your ladder.You’ve got to start doing things you’ve never done before. You have to identify your limiting beliefs. You have to go outside your comfort zone.It usually takes business owners about 3 years of pushing and straining plus motivational talks, accountability partners and invigorated compensation plans that result in zero growth before they realize that they have already found all the customers who like to buy in the way the business owner prefers to sell.Do you want to hear something really weird? I have learned that it is almost pointless to suggest meaningful change to a business owner until their business has been flat for about 3 years. It has been my observation that they will always resist adding more steps to their ladder until they have utterly exhausted their confidence in their superpower.Has your business been flat for awhile? Are you tired of standing on your tiptoes at the top of your ladder reaching at high as you can with your strong right arm and finding nothing there?Add more steps to your ladder.Roy H. WilliamsRoving reporter Rotbart is taking a Sabbatical until Labor Day so that he can finish his new book about Volunteer Firefighters before the deadline. I’ve suggested to the rover that his son, Maxwell, ought to interview him so that you and I can hear all about this new book after it is finished. Volunteer Firefighters! What will Rotbart think of next! You can count on me to let

I often share memories of wise old men who gave me good advice.I have a grandchild turning 17 today, so I will play the part of the old man.The person I am advising is you.Always deliver the negative truth while the sale hangs in the balance. If you smile and make the sale and keep quiet until that predictable moment of crisis arrives, the truth will no longer ring true. It will just sound like you are making excuses.Tell your customer what they deserve to know while they still have the chance to walk away. Look them in the eye and warn them. Make it a moment they will never forget.Fools are attracted to slick and shiny liars who will tell them what they want to hear. But when you tell the negative truth while the sale hangs in the balance, you filter out the fools.When a fool hears your warning and walks away, dance and sing. Rejoice! You don’t want to live your life surrounded by anxious, nervous, finger-pointing fools.Tell the truth when it is not in your best interest. Smart people will trust you. Your relationships will last for decades.When everything is upside and there is no downside, you can be certain that someone is lying.The downside of the advice I gave you today is that you will definitely lose sales you could have made.The upside is that you really didn’t want to make them. Not only would you have lost that client within a few months, you would have eroded your integrity and lost your self-respect in the process.And if you keep eroding your integrity, you will soon become slick and shiny.Roy H. WilliamsI have a weirdly excellent rabbit hole for you to explore today. Do you know the way in? – Indy BeagleKen Paskins witnessed his grandfather and his father struggle to run a successful business. He was determined to find a better way. So Ken went to work for giant companies like Oracle and BEA Systems. Today Ken is the co-founder of a CEO coaching and peer advisory community that shows owners and CEOs of companies with 100 or fewer employees how to achieve their goals. Rather than rely on a single guru for sage advice, Paskins tells roving reporter Rotbart, his clients learn from experts and peers

The first half of what I’m about to tell you, I have told you before. But you will understand why I chose to repeat it when you read the second half. – RHWThe average person has 5 senses. We can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.We also have the ability to interpret magical little constructs called “words,” sequences of letters that allow us to see things that are not there and have experiences that are not happening.Let us talk about that for a moment.The average human is equipped with approximately 100 million sensory receptors to gather the data that will become seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.This sensory data is nothing more than:wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrumvibrations traveling though air and waterchemicals dissolved in air and watersurfaces containing a total of fifteen properties, such as friction, compliance, adhesion, texture, and thermal conductance.Those wavelengths, vibrations, chemicals, and surfaces are real. But color, sound, smell, taste, and touch exist only in your mind.“They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colorless, odorless, insipid and silent.”– Dr. Jorge Martins de OliveiraYour 100 million sensory receptors put you in touch with the world around you. But your brain contains 10,000 billion synapses. This means you are 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist, than a world that does.And then you have – just forward of your left ear – Broca’s area, which is always searching for the new, surprising, and different, anxious to distract you with something more interesting than that which currently occupies your mind.All these things are standard equipment because you are fearfully and wonderfully made.We, average people, have all these things plus intuition, that astounding logic of the mute right brain, allowing us to predict things that are likely to happen, based upon patterns we have observed.Artificial Intelligence is machine intuition, a predictive output based upon patterns the machine has been taught to recognize.Allow me to tell you how it all began: average people created a machine that was deaf, mute, and blind. Then, they created a silent language made of only two numbers, zero and one. Then, using only that language, they taught their deaf, mute, and blind machine to hear, speak, and see. And now they are teaching it to recognize all the patterns that energize human intuition, that nearly-instantaneous ability to make accurate predictions.Here is a question: will the computers of the distant future believe the story I just told you, or will they conclude it to be merely myth and legend?Jesus answered, “Didn’t I say you are gods?” (Read it for yourself in the 10th chapter of John, the 4th book in the New Testament.)When Jesus said that 2,000 years ago, was quoting the 82nd Psalm, written by Asaph during the Babylonian exile 6 centuries earlier.Or so I have been told by an Ai bot named “Beta.” If you look at the top of this page, you can see Aloha pointing to the note Beta sent me.My oh my, what will we gods think of next?ONE LAST THING: You may have noticed that I choose to use a lower-case “i” following a capital “A” when I abbreviate the words “Artificial Intelligence.” I do this because a lifetime of pattern recognition causes me to see the name Al, as in Al Pacino, Al Capone, and Al Gore, when a capital “A” is followed by a capital “I.” I point this out to you because I don’t want you to think I am unaware that everyone else uses two capital letters when they abbreciate Artificial Intelligence.I have the...

Everything I’m about to share with you happened in England and France during the lifetime of Thomas Jefferson, while America still had its “new baby” smell.The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave us “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1798, while Napoleon sailed to Egypt to fight the Battle of the Pyramids and famously discover the Rosetta Stone.Coleridge died of heart failure due to his opium addiction.Wordsworth gave us “The Rainbow” in 1802, while the people of France enthusiastically approved a new constitution that elevated Napoleon to dictator for life.Wordsworth died of a lung infection.Shelley gave us “Ozymandias,” the tale of a fallen and forgotten emperor, in 1818, while Napoleon languished in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic.Shelley died in a boating accident at the age of 29.Keats gave us “La Belle Dame sans Mercy” in 1819, while Napoleon continued to languish on Saint Helena.Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.“Le Belle Dame sans Mercy” in English means “The Beautiful Girl without Mercy,” but you and I know her as Fame and Fortune.You’ve often heard the names of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, but did you know that each of these English Romantic poets was inspired by an imaginary 15th-century monk named Thomas Rowley?But imaginary through he was, Thomas Rowley re-ignited the flames of romantic literature in England during the colorful years that he lived in the mind of an adolescent boy in poverty.That boy, Thomas Chatterton, was born 15 weeks after his father died in 1752, when Thomas Jefferson was just 9 years old. Napoleon would not be born for another 3 years.Little Thomas spent his days with his uncle, the sexton of the church of St Mary, Redcliffe, where he would crawl through the attic of that vast, ancient building, examining the contents of oak chests stored there since 1185, where documents as old as the War of the Roses lay forgotten.By the time he was 6, young Thomas Chatterton had learned his alphabet from the illuminated capitals of those documents. By the time he was 11, Thomas had become so well-versed in the language and legends of earlier centuries that he began sending poems to “Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal,” claiming they were transcribed from the writings of a monk named Thomas Rowley who had lived 300 years earlier.Aside from the hundreds of poems written by this imaginary monk, Chatterton wrote political letters, song lyrics, operas and satires in verse and in prose. He became known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as Decimus, a rival of Junius, that author of the forever infamous Letters of Junius. Chatterton was also a contributor to Hamilton’s Town and Country Magazine, and the Freeholder’s Magazine, political publications supportive of liberty and rebellion.While the brilliant submissions of Thomas Chatterton were happily accepted by editors across England, he was paid little or no money for them.On the 17th of April, 1770, 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton penned a satire he called his “Last Will and Testament.” In it, he hinted that he was planning to end his life the following day.That famous poem by John Keats, “La Bella Dame sans Mercy,” may well have been written with Thomas Chatterton in mind. For the beautiful, merciless girl in that poem is a fairy – let us call her Fame & Fortune – who makes love to a medieval knight in his dreams, then leaves him sick and dying on a cold hillside when she...

You cannot suffer the past or future because they do not exist. What you are suffering is your memory and your imagination.Friend, you are not a good worrier, so you might as well quit.Most of the things you worry about never come to pass. And the majority of those things that do come to pass are inconsequential, unworthy of your worry, or they cannot be changed, no matter how well you worry.Of all the things you worry about, only a tiny percentage are worth your worry, and can be changed. These things things are called, “Things you know you need to do.” And you already know the actions you should take:When a friend pops into your head, call them, and say, “I’ve had you on my mind. Is there anything going on in your life that I should know about?”Talk to God.Get a colonoscopy.See? The things you know you need to do are simple, they just make you uncomfortable.Do them anyway.I believe we worry because it keeps us from being bored.We don’t want to be bored. We want to be excited.Fear is a form of excitement. Anger is a form of excitement.Have you ever noticed how easy it is to become famous? All you have to do is spread anger and fear. Spread it deep and wide. People will treat you like a god. Conversely, a person who spreads good and happy news is patted on the head and treated like a child.If spreading anger and fear is not your thing, and if spreading good and happy news is not your thing, perhaps you should consider lifting the spirits of the strangers you encounter.When you lift the spirit of a stranger, you lift your own as well.Someone in my life made a suggestion last week and I really, really, really didn’t want to do it. My friend said that every time he was in a restaurant, he made sure to remember the name of his server. And when the server brought the food, he would say their name, and then, “As soon as you leave, I’m going to pray over this food. While I’m doing that, is there anything I can pray about for you?”My friend said he had done this 20 or 25 times and every time, without exception, the servers were deeply touched and immediately shared something they were worried about. He then assured them that he would include that in his prayer.Like I said, I knew it was something I needed to do. But I didn’t want to do it because I knew it would make me uncomfortable. Extremely uncomfortable.I was worried the person might be frightened and think I was a religious nut. I was worried the person might be offended and create a big scene. I was worried it would be awkward for me to ever go back to that restaurant.But I remembered what my friend told me. “I’ve done this 20 or 25 times and it always turns out the same way. They always have something they want me to include in my prayer and they always seem to be deeply touched.”I’ve now done this exactly once, and it turned out exactly as my friend said it would. And the friend I was having lunch with didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, he said he might start doing it, too.I have interesting friends. I’ll bet you do, too.Your interesting friends have interesting friends.And one of them is you.Roy H. WilliamsLieutenant Colonel Ricky Howard has handled more than $1 BILLION in purchase contracts, many of them with small businesses. His client is a reliable buyer, and once your company is selected as a vendor, you will likely remain a vendor for decades to come. Howard is an expert on how to win government contracts, from office supplies to HVAC equipment to hi-tech computer programming. During his service in the U.S. Air Force, Lt. Howard flew 555 combat hours. Listen and learn as he explains to roving reporter Rotbart how your business could qualify as a government contractor, even if you never suspected

When a thought knocks politely on the door of my mind, I open the door and entertain the thought. But when an unseen thought shines into my mind through a skylight, I am always startled by the mystery of how words-not-my-own came to echo in my empty skull.“What, then, is Love?”Those four words, like the feet of a proud, white goat, prance in the snowy landscape of my mind.“What, then, is Love?”Unable to escape the music of those words, I will do my best to answer their question:“What, then, is Love?”Low-voltage love is a noun. It is something you feel. It surrounds you and you are “in” it.High-voltage love is a verb. It is something you do.E. W. Howe was 5 years old when Teddy Roosevelt was born, and he was 10 when the American Civil War began. E. W. Howe died 85 years ago. But while he lived, he said,“When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.”In those 25 words, we see love as a verb; love with its sleeves rolled up.Love as a noun comes and goes but love as a verb comes to stay. “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…”Alexander the Great died 323 years before Jesus was born. Alexander loved adventure and battle. He felt it, was surrounded by it, and was “in” it. Jesus loved people. He fed them, healed them, encouraged them, and died for them. Verb, verb, verb, verb.Alexander and Jesus both died at the age of 32.During the 12 years that Alexander was conquering and ruling the world, his soldiers taught every nation a simplified form of Greek so that everyone could understand what Alexander was saying. This “Koine” Greek became the world’s first international language.The entire New Testament – including all the stories of Jesus – were written in the “Koine” Greek of Alexander, a language with four different words for love, although only two of them were used in the New Testament. The two that do not appear are:Eros: sexual love.Storge: the love between members of a family.The two words for love that appear repeatedly in the New Testament are Philia and Agape.Philia: the love between close friends.Agape: sacrificial love; “I care about you more than I care about me.”The Harvard Grant Study is the world’s longest running and most comprehensive psychological study, and it talks about love. The study says the happiest people are those who have chosen to do 5 things.(5.) suppress unproductive and distressing thoughts,(4.) maintain a realistic view of the future and its difficulties,(3.) turn frustration and anger into productive energy,(2.) make light of stressful events,(1.) focus on the wellbeing of others.The world’s longest running and most comprehensive psychological study says the secret of happiness is to see love as a verb, something you do: focus on the wellbeing of others.Albert Schweitzer was a polymath. He was a physician, philosopher, musicologist, theologian, humanitarian, and a writer. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.On September 4, 1965 – the day Albert Schweitzer died – the song “Help!” by the Beatles, went to #1 on the charts. Do you remember the lyrics?When I was younger, so much younger than today,I never needed anybody’s help in any way.But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.And I do appreciate you being ’round.Help me get my feet back on the ground.Won’t you please, please help me?Albert Schweitzer spoke of love and happiness in much the same way the Harvard Grant Study spoke of love and...

We have a need to belong. We want to be seen and heard. We want to be missed when we are not around. We want to have genuine connection. This is the basis of relational ad writing.Never heard of it? That is because most ads are transactional, not relational.In a transactional ad, an air conditioning company might claim to be, “The Honest Air Conditioning Company.” But in a relational ad, the owner does not claim to be honest. They just say something that only an honest person would say.The people in relational ads are marked by their vulnerability.KARLA: When something at home isn’t working right and you need a guy,  your friend says,JOHNNY MOLSON: “I’ve got a guy.”KARLA: Hi, I’m Mrs. Michael and I want to be your guy. You need a plumber. You need an electrician. You need an H-Vac technician; I want to be your guy. I’m a happily married woman with two grown children, but back when I was raising two babies, my husband and I started a plumbing company, an electrical company, and an air conditioning company. Make no mistake: Mr. Michael is a genius with tools, but he did NOT enjoy running 3 big companies, so he asked me to do it. Guess what? I LOVE IT! I know that if I make your problems vanish into thin air, then when your friends say,SARAH: “I’ve got a thing at home that isn’t working right, and I need a guy,”  KARLA:  you’ll say,JOHNNY MOLSON: “I’ve got a guy. Her name is Mrs. Michael.”KARLA: Plumber, Electrician, H-Vac technician. I’m Mrs. Michael, and I want to be your guy.DEVIN: Go to MrsMichael.comKARLA: OR… go to Iwanttobeyourguy.comDEVIN: MrsMichael.comRelational ads are not portable. They are true only of the company that airs them. Transactional ads are portable. They can be used by anyone who wants to make the same offer, use the same gimmick, tell the same lie.Mrs. Michael does not use transactional ads. She uses relational ads that let you know who she is, what she believes, and how she thinks. You are free to like her or not. Most people like her. A lot. No surprise, right? We tend to buy from people we like, people with whom we agree, people who remind us of ourselves.Did it ever occur to you that a transactional ad with an urgent, “limited-time offer” is erased from the mind as soon as the deadline is passed? We do not retain information that is no longer relevant or meaningful. The only thing we remember is to never pay that company their asking price because they will soon be having a sale.Goldcasters Fine Jewelry sells a startling amount of jewelry per capita in a town that is located less than an hour from the inspiring city of Indianapolis. Goldcasters’ sales volume would be impressive for a jewelry store in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago.Like Mrs. Michael, Goldcasters uses relational advertising.DEVIN: Brad Lawrence, owner of Goldcasters Fine Jewelry.BRAD: When I opened the store, I had no money. We didn’t have the money for inventory. I brought wax models from school to use to cast into projects for customers. And hence the name Goldcasters. Things were so tight at times I remember the backside of my wedding ring was gone because I didn’t have the money to buy gold to size rings. So I’d cut the pieces out of the back of my wedding band to use as gold stock to size rings for customers. And then when we could afford to, then I’d replace it back onto my...

It would appear that journalists can no longer see clearly or talk plainly. They hand you something twisted and bent and assure you that it is straight.Propaganda hangs thick in the air around us and we are weary of it.It has gotten so bad that each of the people I could count on to keep me informed have chosen to cut the umbilical and set themselves free from the pollution of newscasts.I was contemplating these things in the predawn darkness when I remembered a comment made by Hosea 2700 years ago. His words were translated into English in 1611: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal.”The Contemporary English translation of the Book of Hosea was published in the year 2000: “If you scatter wind instead of wheat, you will harvest a whirlwind and have no wheat.”This morning’s Roy H. Williams translation says, “If you scatter falsehoods instead of truth, you will harvest confusion and have no truth.”You can use nuclear energy to illuminate great cities, or you can use it to vaporize them. Nuclear energy has no conscience, no ethics, no obligation to do what is right. It is we humans who must have conscience, ethics, and a sense of obligation.Artificial Intelligence is like nuclear energy. You can use it to solve complicated problems, or you can use it to create them.In recent weeks millions of people have seen photos showing Donald Trump being tackled and carried away by a group of police officers. We have seen Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket. We have seen an explosion at the Pentagon.The Pentagon bombing was believed by enough people that it affected the S&P 500 on Wall Street.But those things were the work of mischievous amateurs.I wonder what is going to happen when the big boys decide it is time to play for higher stakes?America has been losing its grasp on the truth ever since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987 and the 12AM/12FM/12TV limitations on broadcast ownership were lifted 20 years ago. This made it legal for anyone with a lot of money to buy all the TV and Radio stations and replace the news with falsehoods, half-truths, and outright lies. And we called it Freedom of Speech.Now we are holding onto the truth by our fingertips, trying not to let it slip from our grasp.As I sit in the predawn darkness, I see the rapidly approaching freight train of a Presidential election and I hear the sound of an approaching whirlwind.Roy H. WilliamsDr. Michael Lenox is an expert on artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. He knows the opportunities and the dangers of digital technology. Dr. Lenox advises business people on how to prepare for 2024, a year in which more data will be generated than in all previous years combined. Dr. Lenox is interviewed today by roving reporter Rotbart, a flesh-and-blood journalist. But Dr. Lenox says Rotbart could easily be replaced by a sophisticated algorithm. (Don’t tell Mrs. Rotbart.) The joy, the fear, and the wonder await you at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Do you remember that scene in Jurassic Park when the park’s founder revealed that he had extracted the blood of a dinosaur from a mosquito trapped in fossilized tree sap?Forget the blood. Forget the dinosaur. Our interest is in that mosquito trapped in amber.I sometimes think time is the amber in which we mosquitoes are held captive.As Edwin Abbot demonstrated in his breakthrough book, “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” we live in 4 dimensions: Height, Width, Depth, and Time. We have access to the 3 lower dimensions, but no access to the 7 dimensions in M-Theory that lie above and beyond our 4-dimensional “spacetime continuum.”According to theoretical physicists, those 7 dimensions are as real as the 4 in which we live. And here is the interesting part: beings in those dimensions are outside of time. They are above it. We, however, are like those mosquitoes trapped in amber. Time does not expand us; it inhibits us, shackles us, makes us wear blinders. This would seem to confirm the idea that we are not physical beings who occasionally have a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings who are having a temporary physical experience.You might be wondering what catapulted my mind into this strange, metaphysical sky this morning, so I will tell you. My partner Craig Arthur lives in Townsville, Australia, where his winter is our summer and his night is our day. This gives Craig and me a brief window to chat when he is ending his day and I am beginning my own.This morning I opened my laptop just as Craig forwarded a meme from Cat Damon. It said,“My son just walked into my room and said, ‘Daddy, I’m scared to die. Not of going to hell, I don’t think there is such a place, but I guess I’m scared there’s nothing. There was nothing before, so what if there’s nothing after?'”Cat Damon wraps up his story with these words,“My son is 37 years old and on acid.”I’m not on acid. My drug of choice is called “Speculation.” You make it by combining Knowledge and Intuition in equal parts. Stirring this mixture is not required. Speculation explodes into existence when the two ingredients make contact.Speculation is susceptible to confirmation bias, of course. We quickly see confirmation of what we already believe.There is another formula, more popular than my own, that is just as susceptible to confirmation bias, though its practitioners like to believe their formula is objective, reliable, and scientific. This more popular formula is “Knowledge plus Data.”Am I against data? Of course not. But I can tell you that the most skillful users of data – people like Sean Jones, Dewey Jenkins, Cedric Yau, Vi Wickam, Gene Naftulyev, Pyotr Belov, Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto von Tivadar, and Luis Castañeda – these people always ask themselves whether the data might be indicating something other than what they saw at first glance.But most people do not question their initial interpretation of data. In the words of Andrew Lang, they use data, “like a drunk man uses a lamp post – for support rather than illumination.”Knowledge + Intuition = SpeculationKnowledge + Data = SpeculationMy observation has been that these 2 formulas are really just 2 different paths that lead to precisely the same destination. The key that unlocks the golden door of miracles is to have an independent partner who is using the formula you are NOT using. When both of you arrive at the same conclusion – even though you came at it from different directions – you can be far more confident that you have found the answer you were seeking.Data is a snapshot of reality expressed in numbers in a database or on a spreadsheet. Data is the logic of the rational, sequential, deductive reasoning left hemisphere of your brain.Intuition is a snapshot of...

There are places in geography.There are places in the heart.There are places in time.Where shall we start?– Indy BeaglePlaces in Geography:“We have thought how places are able to evoke moods, as color and line in a picture may capture and warp us to a pattern the painter intended.”– John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 256Places in the Heart:“God only knows what I’d be without you. If you should ever leave me, though life would still go on, believe me, the world could show nothing to me. So what good would living do me?”– Brian WilsonPlaces in Time:“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed; some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain. All these places had their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life, I’ve loved them all.”– John LennonMy favorite singer-songwriter, James Taylor, was interviewed recently. When James was asked about his life-controlling addiction to drugs as a young man, he answered with these words:“The key for an addict is how much of a relief the addict felt when they first discovered their drug of choice. When that really works for them, watch out for the backend, because you’ll hold on until the very end. You’ll be the last person to admit that it’s gotta go.”I was considering these places and spaces in the darkness of early morning when the tone of an arriving text turned my eyes toward the telephone. My friend had been reading the Monday Morning Memos in the archives from 15 years ago and had a couple of questions for me. One of those questions triggered the memory of someone whose life briefly intersected with Pennie’s and mine 38 years ago.And Now We Shall Start:Patrick is two years older than me. He is insightful and articulate, but his life has been shattered into sharp little shards. When a person has been irretrievably shattered, they have a hard time holding themselves together.When he was a boy, Patrick saw his mother kill his father in the street outside their home. He and his mother did not get along after that.And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Patrick together again.Watching your father fall is not at all like watching the rainfall, or the snowfall, or the light fall softly on the window pane. Watching your father fall is different. In Patrick’s case it led to him being held tightly in the sharp talons of the law like an eagle holds tightly to a mouse.Policemen are attracted to Patrick like iron to a magnet. And Patrick is pulled toward prison like a moth is pulled toward the flame.Patrick was headed back to prison when Pennie and I let him sleep in our spare bedroom 38 years ago. He was there for only a few weeks, but it was long enough to get to know him and all the monsters he was fighting in his mind.Patrick’s life has a rhythm. He serves his time, gets out of prison, and promptly goes back to prison again.Patrick isn’t crazy. He has a sharp, clear mind, an impressive vocabulary, and a deep understanding of the reality that surrounds him. His crime is that he uses illegal chemicals to escape that reality, and he is smart enough to manufacture those chemicals himself.“Uh-oh. That’s a no-no. We’re going to have to put you back in your cage, Patrick.”In the 67 years of Patrick’s lonely life, his only romantic interest has been his love for chemical escape. Chemicals are the music of his life. To him, they are like the Big Band music of Glenn Miller and Cole Porter. In my mind, I see Patrick dancing with a mirror-image of himself as he looks back at the day he first learned how to escape his pain.“That’s the way it began, we were hand-in-hand, Glenn Miller’s Band was better...

She is dead now and so is he.He was a friend of mine; lean, rangy, and muscular.She was his mother. “You’re getting fat,” is what she told him, right up until the day he died.Criticism will often cause you to see yourself worse than you are.Did it ever occur to you that criticism – sometimes disguised as unsolicited advice – always springs from an assumption of superior intelligence?When a person begins by saying, “With all due respect,” they are making it clear they do not respect you.“Constructive criticism” is how they make you feel small while they tell themselves they are helping you. Ignore those people. Even the ones you love. They are having a bad day. Or maybe a bad life. Either way, don’t swallow what they are feeding you.Criticism is destructive. Encouragement is instructive.I am reasonably self-aware, I think. I believe I know the panoply of Roys that live inside me. The most widely known are Outraged Roy. Generous Roy. Foghorn Leghorn Roy. Introvert Roy.Pennie and I have a friend who stays with us when he is in Austin. A few years ago he started a church in a weird part of the weird town he lives in. Last week, he sent me a text:“Of all the Roys I know, my favorite version of you is Robe Roy. Robe Roy don’t give a shit. And if you lucky, you catch Robe Roy in a hat. Or them bluelight sunglasses. Eating a vitamin cookie. Drinking Shrooms. Feeding Squirrels. On a porch swing.”I replied, “I like that Roy, too.”My friend is an encourager. He will always find something inside you, no matter how ordinary you consider yourself to be, and then he will tell you a delightful new truth about who you are.Does it surprise you that my friend’s very large congregation is teeming with beaten-down homeless people, cast-off prostitutes, struggling drug users, and a handful of regular folks like me and you who care about the broken and the broken-hearted?They flock to that church because he makes them feel the love of God as they belly-laugh with glee when he tells wonderful stories from the Bible and gives them back their dignity.And then they walk out the door with a smile of renewed hope.A simple Welsh monk named Geoffrey – hoping to instill in his countrymen a sense of pride – assembled a history of England that gave his people a glorious pedigree. Published in 1136, Geoffrey’s “History of the Kings of Britain” was a detailed, written account of the deeds of the English people for each of the 17 centuries prior to 689 AD.And not a single word of it was true.Yet in creating Merlyn, Guinevere, Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table, Geoffrey of Monmouth convinced a dreary little island full of ordinary villagers to see themselves as a wise and powerful, magnificent nation.And not long after they began to see themselves that way in their minds, they began seeing the reality of it in the mirror.When I said Geoffrey told his countrymen a story, “and not one word of it was true,” I should have said, “not one word of it was true YET.” Geoffrey of Monmouth spoke a future truth about his countrymen because he saw something they did not see. He saw the greatness that was within them. So he called it out.Geoffrey was not a flatterer. He was an encourager.Encouragement causes you to see yourself differently. Embrace it, and you can become in reality that different person you saw in your mind.“Encourage one another daily, while it is called ‘today’…”That line from “The Letter to the Hebrew Christians” has always intrigued me. The writer emphasized our need of encouragement by adding these further instructions to the word “daily”… “while it is called ‘today.'”One last little tidbit about that church: when they built an activities center with basketball courts and other fun things to do, they encouraged all the ragamuffin, latchkey, unparented kids to...

William Shakespeare, wearing the mask of an imaginary Prince of Denmark – Hamlet by name – suggested that human knowledge is limited.“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”Each of us lives alone in a private, perceptual reality. We can communicate with one another only to the degree that our perceptual realities overlap.There is an objective reality, but humans are ill-equipped to experience it.The degree to which you understand the limitations of your private reality is the degree to which you are self-aware.Dr. Jorge Martins de Oliveira is Director of Neurosciences at the University of Brazil, on the Editorial Board of Brain & Mind magazine, and is the author of “Principles of Neuroscience.”This is what he has to say about Perceptual Reality:“Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way that we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses. We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors. We experience vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experience chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences. They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colorless, odorless, insipid and silent.”“Although you and I share the same biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a distinct color and smell is not exactly equal to the color and smell you perceive. We may give the same name to similar perceptions, but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.”Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for discovering that we don’t have one brain divided into two hemispheres, as much as we have two separate, competing brains. Sperry was able to demonstrate that we have a logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning (SCIENTIFIC) Left Brain, and a romantic, artistic, connection-seeking, pattern-finding, (ARTS & HUMANITIES) Right Brain. He said,“Each hemisphere of the brain is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and… both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”Did you notice it? The Left and the Right hemispheres can have “simultaneous, mutually conflicting, mental experiences.” You can have a single experience and walk away with two opinions of what just happened!“In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other… The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.”– Tom RobbinsBut what happens if the Left Hemisphere completely ignores the voice of the Right Hemisphere? What happens if the Right ignores the the Left?C. P. Snow published “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” in 1959. He believed that Science and the Humanities were the driving forces of western society, but they were splitting us into a society of “two cultures.”Looking back over the culture war that has increasingly devoured us these past 20 years, it would appear that C.P. Snow was right.In May of 2023 the world renowned neuroscientist Dr. Iain McGilchrist was discussing the (SCIENTIFIC) Left Brain, and the (ARTS & HUMANITIES) Right Brain when he said,“Something I discovered in medical school, was that this corpus callosum, this connecting band, spent at least half its time, if not more, sending messages to the other hemisphere, ‘You keep out of this, I’m dealing with it.’ So it wasn’t so much facilitating as inhibiting. Primates have...

“No one listens to the radio anymore. Radio is dead.”When someone says that to me, I beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter.“Wait a minute. When you say, ‘beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter,’ what do you mean by that?”Okay let’s role play this. Say to me, “No one listens to the radio anymore.”“No one listens to the radio anymore.”How well do you understand the science of statistical measurement?“I understand the basics, I think.”You’ve heard of the Gallup Poll, right?“Sure.”The Gallup Poll measures the opinions of the 260 million adults in America with 95% confidence and only a 3 percent margin of error. Do you know the sample size required to do that?“Tell me.”One thousand and sixty-seven people.“That doesn’t sound right.”Statistical scientists know their measurements are reliable because of the Law of Large Numbers. Are you familiar with the Law of Large Numbers?“No.”The Law of Large Numbers guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of random events. While a casino might lose money on a single spin of the roulette wheel, its earnings will return to a predictable percentage over a large number of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. The margin of error depends inversely on the square root of the sample size. In other words, the smaller the universe, the larger the percentage that has to be queried to get an accurate result. But the larger the universe, the smaller the percentage.“What are you saying, exactly?”In a universe of just 100 people, you have to ask nearly all of them to get an accurate measurement. But in a universe of 1 million people, you need only 600 people in your survey. To measure the entire United States of America, you need just 1,067 randomly chosen adults.“So how many people participate in a radio survey in the average city?”Name a city.“San Francisco. It’s a tech city. Silicon Valley. There’s no way radio is reaching San Francisco.”The Nielsen sample size in San Francisco is three times the number of people required to measure the whole United States. And Nielsen doesn’t measure just once per quarter. Nielsen measures San Francisco 365 days a year.“How?”What do you mean?“How are they measuring it? What’s the mechanism?”It’s a digital device worn by thousands of randomly selected people. Nielsen’s Portable People Meter knows precisely which station you’re listening to, when you started listening, when you changed channels, and when you quit listening. It doesn’t rely on human recall, and you can’t lie to it. Nielsen’s Portable People Meter is as reliable as anything offered by Facebook or Google. Nielsen isn’t guessing when they tell you how many people are listening to the radio. They’re measuring it 24/7/365.“You still haven’t told me how many people listen to the radio in San Francisco.”41.6% of the people in San Francisco – 2,565,817 persons – spend enough time listening to the radio that we can efficiently reach each of them an average of 3 times a week, 52 weeks in a row. This means 41.6% of San Francisco will hear your new, surprising, and different radio ad 156 times this year.“Yeah. But is it working? Radio, I mean.”Radio is delivering better results for less money than it has ever delivered. I can say that because my 70 partners and I have been using radio to grow owner-operated businesses for more than 40 years.“Okay, but isn’t attribution a problem? Sure, maybe your clients are growing, but how do you know that radio is what’s driving that growth?”We don’t use a media mix when our client can’t afford to swing that hammer.“What do you mean?”We believe in doing one thing wholeheartedly instead of two things halfheartedly. A focused budget...

You have tiny openings in your mind.When you look through one of those keyholes, you see a world that could easily become real, but only if you keep looking through that keyhole.Look through that keyhole long enough and it will expand into a window, then grow to become a door of opportunity through which you can pass into an entirely different future.Don’t look where you don’t want to go.If you gaze at dark possibilities, you are headed toward darkness.We do only those things we have rehearsed in our minds.Opportunity never knocks.It smells like jasmine in the air around you.It tickles like a feather in your open mouth.It twinkles like starlight in a midnight sky.It whispers like a girl behind a paper wall.Look only where you want to go.If you stare at goodness, you are headed toward good things.It smells like the sweat of people digging a tunnel through a mountain.It tickles like happy music played by musicians on the other side.It twinkles like the eyes of children having a bright adventure.It whispers like a companion who is urging you forward.As your friend, I have only one question.Where are we going?© Roy H. Williams, 2023Indy’s Favorite Meme of the Week: “Drink water. Eat vegetables. Be nice to animals. Exercise regularly. Explore nature. Find a small door under a tree. Open it. Take a look inside. Get pepper sprayed by a tiny elf. Learn a valuable lesson about knocking first.” – Roxi HorrorIndy’s Second Favorite Meme: “Novels are so great. Novels are like, ‘I made up a little weirdo. Oh no, now he’s in trouble!'” – Gabrielle MossDr. Henry Mintzberg has written more books than the Beatles had #1 records. He is an organization and management rock star. Dr. Mintzberg says many organizations – for-profit and nonprofit – are making a big mistake when they embrace a one-size-fits-all approach to structuring their operations. Listen as Dr. Mintzberg – who has received a whopping 21 honorary degrees – tells roving reporter Rotbart that there are seven different “species” of companies, each requiring an executive playbook as distinct from each other as football is from basketball, and baseball is from hockey. Where can you hear amazing people talk about fascinating stuff like this? MondayMorningRadio.com of course!

Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” He was speaking, of course, of DNA, the organizing pattern of every type of life on our planet.Your DNA contains the archetypal pattern of your physical body, but the world around you is bigger than your body.The world around you contains an infinite number of archetypes.An archetype is any recurrent pattern recognized by the pattern-seeking right hemisphere of the brain.Archetypes exist in our minds and in the physical reality that surrounds us. Archetypes are the interface that allows us to interpret, understand, and catalogue what we are experiencing.Archetypes are the basis for all similes and metaphors. Carl Jung understood this.If you Google “Jungian archetypes” you’ll find that most writers list the archetypes as twelve basic characters: Lover, Magician, Explorer, Creator, Sage, Outlaw, Hero, Jester, Everyman, Caretaker, Ruler, and the Innocent. These 12 characters populate the movies, television shows, novels, myths, and award-winning ad campaigns we experience on a daily basis.But what Jung actually taught is that archetypes are the psychological structures that allow us to recognize recurrent patterns in the world around us. They are the unconscious organizers of perceptions and ideas, since they spring from the systemic order that transcends both the external world and the human mind. Jung claimed there can be no master list of archetypes because there are an indefinite number of them, one for every recurrent pattern we observe.And not just patterns of personalities, but patterns of events, as well. Examples of events that follow an archetypal pattern include: Reproduction, Substitution, Reconfiguration, Following a Path, Collapse, Renewal, De-alignment, Re-alignment, and the Investment Bubble that always precedes delayed gratification.Every introduction of change requires a Pattern Shift, a transition from one pattern to another.Although most events could be categorized as “transitions,” an Archetypal Transition is a specific type of event, such as the ritual of Initiation (baptism,) or the ritual of Union (marriage,) or the ritual of Casting Out (divorce.) An Archetypal Transition is a portal to a new identity. Some examples of Archetypal Transition include being parented, courtship, loss of virginity, a sudden change in status, and preparation for death.Archetypes of Transition open the door for a new and different person to experience a new and different world.As a writer, you create new realities in the imaginations of your readers, so it is perfectly reasonable that you should observe and name new archetypes. You are not limited only to those named by Jung and popularized by tradition.In fact, I have invented names for several recurrent patterns that I have observed, and have mentioned several of them to you already.And now I officially give you permission to do the same:1. Go. Observe the world around you.2. Recognize and name the recurrent patterns that you find.3. Keep a list of them.Indy Beagle and I look forward to reading about your discoveries.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsPS – Today’s soirée was inspired by my partner, Vi Wickam, who sent me the Richard Feynman quote that opened today’s Monday Morning Memo.When Victoria Pelletier sets her mind to achieving a goal, she won’t let anything or anyone stop her. Nor will she blame anyone but herself when things don’t go the way she planned. Those two personality traits — being unstoppable and making no excuses — have been a recipe for success since she became the chief operating...

You see a photo of a man in a blue jacket standing in front of McDonalds. That photo contains at least 3 pieces of information.Information is content.1. Man2. Blue Jacket3. McDonaldsContent without context is boring.That photograph was taken to encourage you and elevate your hope.Does that surprise you? It should, because you haven’t been given any context.The man in that photo, Brian Scudamore, was a 19-year-old kid sitting in his car in exactly that spot in that McDonald’s drive-thru line when he noticed a ratty old pickup truck that had rounded the corner a few vehicles ahead of him. Spray-painted on the side of that truck were the words “Junk Hauling” along with a telephone number. Brian thought, “I could do that,” and as those four words echoed in his brain – “I could do that” “I could do that” “I could do that” – the world’s largest private junk removal service was born.Brian’s company is about to break through the clouds into the sunlight of one billion dollars in annual revenue. Just below the bottom frameline of that photo, the logo for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? is monogrammed on that blue jacket.Ray Bard retired a few years ago, but people still speak in hushed tones about his genius.Brian Scudamore has that same kind of genius.Ray Bard put it into words for me several years ago while we were having lunch. He said, “Every dazzling success is made from four components, and everyone, everywhere has the first two.”I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I was listening.Ray said, “Number one is a Big Idea. Everyone has a Big Idea. Number two is Nuts & Bolts; the step-by-step, the how-to, along with a few examples that demonstrate the Big Idea. Everyone has a Big Idea and some Nuts & Bolts.”“Okay, what are numbers three and four?”“Number three is Entertainment.”I raised my eyebrows again.“Entertainment is the currency that will buy you the time and attention of a too-busy public. Information is the medicine they need, but entertainment – wit – charm – enchantment – are the spoonfuls of sugar that help the medicine go down.”“And number four?”“Number four is Hope. People don’t just need advice, they need genuine encouragement. When you give them a glimpse of a future that is better than the past, when you help them see a tomorrow that is better than today, and they see it is within their grasp, you have done the only thing that any business ever needs to do.”Ray stopped talking and just looked at me.I looked back at him, waiting for him to continue. It was one of those moments when time stands still. I honestly can’t tell you whether it was 15 seconds or 3 minutes, but it felt like forever.He finally said, “Roy, the objective of every business is to make someone happy.”Brian Scudamore knows that, and I think he may have been born knowing it.And now you know it, too.So here’s the question: What are you going to do to make someone happy?Roy H. WilliamsPS – If information is content, then context is the framing of that information; the presentation of it, the backstory, the angle of approach that makes the information interesting. Your goal as a storyteller is revelation and delight, to pull back the curtain and reveal a mystery.

In 1947 a Norwegian became curious if it was possible for the natives of South America to have drifted on a raft 4,300 miles across the Pacific ocean to populate the islands of Polynesia.The question of who populated Polynesia wasn’t really important to anyone but Thor Heyerdahl.He opened his bestselling book in 1950 with these words,“Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about. If, for example, you put to sea on a wooden raft with a parrot and five companions, it is inevitable that sooner or later you will wake up one morning out at sea, perhaps a little better rested than ordinarily, and begin to think about it. On one such morning I sat writing in a dew-drenched logbook…”DNA evidence later proved Heyerdahl’s theory to be incorrect. Today we know for certain that Polynesia was not populated by South Americans, but by Asians.But I still like Thor Heyerdahl. He wanted to know if South Americans could have made that journey, so he built a raft using only the tools and materials available in prehistoric times, pushed away from the soft safety of the shore, and had himself a wonderful adventure.We don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but I wish we did.We no longer set out to experience – with an open mind – the lives of persons who are different than us. We are no longer willing “to walk a mile in their shoes” so that we might better understand them. What we do instead is look for evidence that our own perspective is correct and that all the others are wrong. We are assisted in this unholy endeavor by algorithms on the internet and one-sided news organizations that tell us exactly what we want to hear.I like Thor Heyerdahl and I like John Howard Griffin.Like me, John Howard Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas, but he got there 38 years before I arrived.Two years before America entered World War II, 19-year-old John Howard Griffin joined the French Resistance as a medic and helped smuggle Austrian Jews to safety and freedom in England. When America officially entered that war, Griffin served the United States Army in the South Pacific where he was decorated for bravery.Keep that characteristic in mind: bravery.While serving in the Solomon islands, Griffin contracted spinal malaria that left him temporarily paraplegic. And then the concussion of a Japanese bomb caused him to become blind. Eleven years later, in 1957, his eyesight inexplicably returned and that’s when the real adventure began.America was now at war with itself. The battle over civil rights was a whistling teapot on a fiery stove, so John Howard Griffin shaved his head in order to hide his straight hair, took large doses of Oxsoralen in 1959 to darken his skin, then spent six weeks traveling as a black man in the Deep South. He started in new New Orleans, then visited Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia, getting around mainly by hitchhiking.When I was young, I read John Howard Griffin’s book about his experiences as a black man, and it felt to me like an honest and straightforward diary. A lot of other people felt differently, of course, so the Ku Klux Klan beat him nearly to death in 1975.And so it goes.*Evidently, it is safer to drift 4,300 miles across the Pacific in a prehistoric raft than it is to talk about race in America.Roy H. Williams*I wrote those 4 words – Kurt Vonnegut’s signature line – because I heard him say it in my mind after I wrote the preceding sentence.Clay Stafford produces an annual conference that brings together authors, agents, exhibitors, and fans of crime and thriller literature. And he’s been doing it for 17 years. To pull off a large meeting, workshop, or other live event in the post-COVID-19 era requires...

My friend David Freeman gave me a tool about 20 years ago that I have used to great effect. David teaches screenwriters and novelists how to create fictional characters that draw you toward them like magnets.It is not my objective to teach you David’s technique today, nor will I teach you my simplified version of it. What I hope to do is help you understand that your business has a personality. If it does not, then you do not have a brand; you have a logo and a visual style guide.A powerful brand is an imaginary character that lives in the mind of the customer, no different than those imaginary characters that populate great novels and TV shows and movies. If you feel connected to a brand, it is because that brand represents something you believe in.Each of us is a jigsaw puzzle, and when we see a strangely-shaped piece that will fit a correspondingly-shaped hole in the self-image we are trying to complete, we feel we must have that piece.When we rise above a subsistence-level income, much of what we purchase is identity reinforcement. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.If you own a business, the personality of that business will be a reflection of your own personality. And the areas of your business that need improvement will usually reflect the areas in your life that need improvement.Your personality drives your business. This is why your business will always reflect your personality. You really need to capitalize on that.The most brilliant marketing consultants will:Identify the characteristics of your brand. It’s entirely possible that you never intended your brand to have these characteristics, but they will always be there. The best brand consultants want to answer the question, “What makes this brand think, speak, act, and see the world the way it does?”Amplify those characteristics so that the brand has a distinct personality. We do not bond with products or services that do not have a personality.Craft all messages so that they reflect the personality that has been there all along. When you do this, marketing efficiency is accelerated and customer acquisition rises to a new level.A week ago I met with the owner of a furniture manufacturing company that designs all its own products. After scrolling through their website, I said, “Anyone who loves Apple and Tesla will love your furniture.”His eyes got big and he said, “Those are the brands my team and I idolize! How did you know?”I replied, “Your designs reflect the same values and beliefs as those brands.”1. “You reject established styles and tradition.”2. “You are going for that clean, simple, look and feel of elegant design.”3. “You have created a walled garden; your stuff doesn’t mix well with other stuff. And your stuff is expensive.”4. “At your core, you are a leader and not a follower.”“These are the defining characteristics of the brand you have created. All you need to do now is begin communicating to the public in the voice of that brand.”I was hesitant to share the defining characteristics of the brands created by Steve Jobs and Elon Musk with you because it could easily lead you to say, “Those are things I believe in, too! I’m just like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.”Although it may be true that your worldview overlaps with Steve’s and Elon’s, it is highly unlikely that you share the same character diamond. Having used this tool for nearly 20 years, I had never before seen a company that mirrors Tesla and Apple in each of the 4 cardinal points.The defining characteristics of your company – your brand – are probably different from the brands created by Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. It is difficult...

Do people under 50 know what a yoke is? I honestly don’t know. When I consider that millions of Americans don’t know how to use a rotary telephone, I can easily believe they might be unfamiliar with that wooden implement used to unite a pair of horses or mules or oxen so that they might be able to “pull together” and accomplish things that neither of them could have done alone.You have people in your life to whom you are yoked. You are connected to them.We have names for these connections: Husband. Wife. Sister. Brother. Life partner. Business partner. Co-worker.Regardless of how you are connected, you can strengthen that connection and create a wonderful partnership by doing two simple things:Make a list of all the things you admire about your partner.You know their superpowers. You know their shining moments. Focus your attention on their talents and skills.Celebrate your partner.Tell people about the marvelous things you have seen your partner do. Your audience will be impressed and wish they had a partner like yours.Your partner will be happier. You will be happier. There is literally no downside to this.But the person who really needs to hear these stories is you.Feelings follow actions. When you focus on your partner’s superpowers – those things they do remarkably well – and tell happy stories about the things you have seen your partner do, you will remember how lucky you are to have that person in your life.If you are frustrated with your partner, it’s probably because you have been noticing their weaknesses and complaining to others about them.You’ve been telling the wrong stories.Feeling follow actions.Did I just hear you say, “I can’t help how I feel?”Of course you can!Instead of telling the negative truth about your partner, look for those things your partner does well and begin telling a different truth; a positive, affirming truth.Your feelings will change. And your partner, will, too.Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY – The wizard answers a HUGE question for Nick on page 3 of the rabbit hole today. I was interested in his answer. I’m betting you will be, too. – Indy BeagleKhierstyn Ross has an odd goal: she said, “We actually want our clients to fire us.” Khierstyn isn’t crazy. Her mission is to help launch and scale online brands until they achieve $3 million in annual sales and she’s already done that for many clients. By the time her clients’ grow to $10 million in yearly revenues, Khierstyn says her nestlings need to leave the nest. Roving reporter Rotbart says, “Whether you’re a startup or long-established, Khierstyn’s growth methodology is sure to impress you.” The place you want to be is MondayMorningRadio.com

I have been in a reflective mood of late. Unplugged from my beloved routine of writing an ocean of ads in the middle of the night, I have been examining the lives of people who sharpened their skills to such fine points that they pierced the skies and found themselves embodied in golden beams of light.A larger-than-life personality saturated in dazzling talent is combustible. Give that person the tiniest spark of opportunity and they will instantly be on fire.Ernest Hemingway embodied the sad machismo of the Lost Generation and became a cultural icon. Hunter S. Thompson embodied the psychedelic counterculture of the following generation and became a cultural icon. Arriving at the end of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, both of them shot themselves.But years before he pulled that trigger, Thompson wrote,“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”Robin Williams was 27 years old when he encountered the tiny spark of opportunity that embodied him in the golden beams of a career, and a life, on fire. He walked into the living rooms of America as Mork, a visitor to Earth from the planet Ork, in a show called Mork & Mindy that aired on ABC from from 1978 to 1982. Each episode ended with Mork closing his eyes and – through his thoughts – contacting an invisible being named Orson, with whom he would share his observations of the day.Right now you are expecting me to tell you that Robin Williams hung himself, but you already know that, so I don’t need to mention it.My interest is in the invisible god-like character named Orson. It is an interesting name for a god, don’t you think?My theory is that the writer of the show was thinking, consciously or unconsciously, about Orson Welles, the blazing talent that gave us The War of the Worlds, a 1938 radio event that has never been equalled, and Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that Orson wrote, directed, produced, and in which he played the leading role.Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.If Robin Williams, a hyper-creative being from another world, is talking to an epic giant from that other world, it doesn’t surprise me that the giant of that world would be named Orson.David Thomson, writing for The Guardian on October 22, 2009, said,“The Orson Welles of 1936-42 worked 20 hours a day, ate double meals to keep going, pursued pretty young women like a demon and lived as if he had no tomorrow. He worked, all at once, in radio, on the stage and in preparation for his great film. He was a looming figure in American life: an offence to Hollywood in the way he achieved a carte blanche contract, and a boy wonder of such arrogance that it was said of him, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.'”“If Orson Welles had never made Citizen Kane, he would be a phenomenon. But he did and that leaves us all his children. His real children might tell you that it was a difficult and sad life to be caught with. Alas.”“But remember this: Orson died alone in 1985 and you can read the reports as signs of sadness. On the contrary, I suspect he was exhilarated at the end. Real sadness is being worth $5bn and not knowing what to do with it.”Orson Welles and I never met, but I credit him with giving me some of the greatest advice about ad writing that I ever received.Orson wrote,“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater...

It is naive to believe the world is a meritocracy, but it is defeatist to believe that you can’t win.Six years ago, notacoward wrote,“Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about ‘meritocracy’ and the salutary effects of hard work.Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.”We’ve all seen what notacoward was describing, haven’t we? Each of us knows people who were born on third base and think they hit a triple. They populate the royal families, the financial aristocracies, the college fraternities, and the luxury resorts of our planet. The business world is full of empty suits and corporate assholes who like to pretend they earned what they were given.When you grow up in the poor part of town, you see hardworking people shake their heads and say,“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”This is nothing new. It has always been true. But it doesn’t have to apply to YOU.I knew it didn’t apply to me because I once heard a 3,000-year-old story of a shepherd boy who became King because he was stunningly good at being a shepherd boy. When a lion attacked his sheep, he killed the lion. When a bear attacked his sheep, he killed the bear. And when a giant taunted his nation, he killed the giant.The son of that King later wrote,“Do you see a person skilled in his work?He will stand before kings;He will not stand before obscure people.” **Is it wise to protect the ones we love from the problems that taught us all we know?I know a lot of successful people who wish they knew how to give their children the hardships that made them rich.One successful young friend – just 42 years old – has created four separate fortunes during the past 20 years and is working on a fifth one. He started with nothing: no family money, no angel investor, no connections. His only assets were his courage and his relentless efforts. I asked him recently what advice he would offer the emerging generation. He said,“I think the question this younger generation needs to be asking themselves is, ‘Ok, now what?’ Yes, it sucks, but it also sucks that previous generations were drafted and shipped off to die in wars.So shit happens. And sometimes people slip through the cracks.I’m happy to not call them ‘lazy’ if they’re willing to acknowledge that they still bear the responsibility of doing something… anything… to improve their lot.Because lingering in whiney little bitch mode sure ain’t gonna get it done.”If you have fallen into the trap of believing that you don’t have the money or the connections to rise above your circumstances, lift your head and open...

Jeffrey Eisenberg and Dewey Jenkins don’t know each other but each of them taught me the importance of removing the friction.Dewey sings it to every person in his company, “Make it easy for customers to do business with us.” And they do. Inventing new ways to “make it easier” is the job of every person in every department.Jeffrey Eisenberg calls this “removing the friction in the buying process”.Tesla is a good example.I am convinced that a number of other companies are building electric vehicles that are as good ­– or better – than Tesla, but Tesla remains the big name with the big stock price. At the time of this writing, Tesla is selling for $181 a share while Volkswagen is at $18, Subaru is at $8, Ford is at $13, Audi is at $19, Mercedes is at $20, BMW is at $35, and Rivian is at $15.Tesla has removed the friction from the buying process.Buying a car from Tesla is as easy as buying a book from Amazon. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. People who order a car from Tesla look up from their computer screen with a puzzled look on their face and ask, “Did I just buy a new car?” And then they look back at their computer screen and nod their head up-and-down slowly as they say, “Yes, I just bought a new car.”Go ahead and try it. It will only cost you $500.Princess Pennie ordered a Tesla a couple of months ago and was startled by how easy it was. Two weeks later, she decided she wanted to add the optional third row of seating. I watched her add that third row in less than 30 seconds with just two clicks. Tesla immediately displayed her new delivery date, and she closed her laptop. Done.Meanwhile, our younger son spent an entire day at the Volkswagen dealer trying to order an electric SUV. He persevered for 8 grueling hours, but he got it done and the car soon arrived. He loves that vehicle, and rightfully so, but he says he would rather endure a tax audit, a root canal, and a prostate exam than go through the process of buying a Volkswagen again.Volkswagen has not yet figured out how to remove the friction.1-800-GOT-JUNK is a company entirely committed to removing the friction. Led by its founder, Brian Scudamore, “Making it easier for the customer” is an ongoing source of enthusiastic discussion at every level in that company.Meanwhile, Google is introducing all kinds of new friction. Google “Best Electric Vehicles” and you will see pages of ads from manufacturers who want to sell you a car. Enter a different, more specific phrase and you’ll get that same list. In fact, any query that includes the word “electric” followed by any synonym for “car” will get you that list of ads.Google got big by putting the customer ahead of the advertiser. They’re clearly not doing that anymore, so I’ve decided to give Bing a chance. I suspect there might be millions of other people slowly coming to that same conclusion right now.But even though I am profoundly frustrated with Google, I remain encouraged that Dewey and Jeffrey and Brian Scudamore and the customer service team at Tesla remain committed to removing the friction at every point of contact, making it ever-increasingly easy for customers to do business with them.To remove the friction is to remove the customer’s frustration.I’m just an ad writer, so I’m not particularly good at refining the internal processes of running a business, but I highly admire those people who know how to do it.How about you? Can you think of 10 tiny-little-things that would each make it a-little-bit-easier for customers to do business with you? Think of those 10 things as Exponential Little Bits; they don’t just add up, they multiply and go exponential.And when you have implemented those 10 things, think of 10 more, and then implement those.Rinse and repeat.Keep it up and you’ll become the Tesla of your category.Roy H....

When your advertising leans on the weak wooden crutch of discounting, it is only a matter of time before that crutch splinters and slowly pierces your heart.Discounting is a seductive drug like heroin, meth, and fentanyl. It rarely kills you quickly.It prefers to kill you slowly.Yes, I know that is an uncomfortable image, but I need you to understand how dangerous it is to discount.Discounting erodes customers’ confidence in your pricing and trains them to delay purchasing from you until you offer them a juicy discount. Discounting also raises some questions about the quality of your product.But hooray, that’s not what we’re talking about today.Today I’m going to give you a method for acquiring customers that is far more powerful than discounting. This method allows you to pay for the results of your advertising according to how well your ads work.No, we’re not talking about pay-per-click. (Remember, you’ve got to pay for that click even if the customer gives you a glance, flips you the bird, and walks away.) I have a Love/Hate relationship with pay-per-click and I’ll bet you do, too.What I’m about to share with you is Love/Love/Love/Love.I love it.It loves me.You’re going to love it.You’re going to love me for telling you about it.I believe in only two prices: full price, and free.What can you give away for free?Thirty years ago, I was given an ad budget of $10,000 and asked to bring 500 new customers to a struggling frozen custard business that had two locations, but neither one of them had inside dining. These frozen custard stands were walk-up and drive-thru only. And this was during the middle of the winter in a state where ice and snow are a regular occurrence.I asked, “Do you care how I spend the money?”“No. We just need to see 500 new customers.”“Great. I’m going to spend $500 in a single day on radio ads on the smallest radio station in town and then I’m going to spend $1,700 on custard mix. You can keep the other 78-hundred. Get a good night’s sleep on Friday night because you’re going to be working 14 hours on Saturday.”My radio ad ran twice an hour from 6am until midnight on the day of the event.It said, “This frozen custard is so good it’s illegal in 7 states and under investigation in 12 more. And today, just to prove it, we’re giving away full-size cones for free.”I called them just after midnight.I asked, “Did anyone show up?”“We just finished counting the empty cone boxes. We served 11,000 free cones today and at least 10,000 of those were people we had never seen before.”Their business immediately jumped by 80% and their sales volume never quit climbing. Today they have 53 locations in 15 states.Another example is the air conditioning company that had a history of giving customers a 15-hundred-dollar cash rebate if they purchased a new air conditioning system in October.In 2014, I convinced them that customers would much rather have an iPad. Relatively few people had them back then.They said, “But an iPad is only $700. What do we do with the rest of the money?”I said, “Buy a few extra iPads for the people who call you and say, ‘Hey! I bought a new air conditioner from you two months ago. Where’s my iPad?’”They sold a huge number of new air conditioning systems in October, two months after air conditioning season was over.The first example was a full-size, free sample. Don’t be stingy. The second example was a highly desirable gift-with-purchase.The more irresistible your offer, the better it will work. If you try this and it doesn’t work, you made a weak offer that was easy to ignore. Your offer has to be remarkable.During the worst part of the Covid lockdown when doctors and nurses were working round-the-clock and everyone was losing hope, a jeweler...

Our song began in 1971 when Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the end of the 60s.He may as well have been writing about the end of a love affair.“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”You are free to use – or not use – words and phrases from that sad soliloquy at the end of a dream. But the song lyrics you are going to write won’t be about the end of the 60s. You are going to write a song about the end of a love affair.Another group of possible words and phrases you might use popped into my head during a business trip to Las Vegas in 2010. I was passing through the casino as I headed back to my room after speaking to an auditorium full of strangers when I saw a pattern, thought a thought, and wrote it down before I fell asleep.“Girls in black spandex pants, high-heeled boots and baggy leather coats punctuate Las Vegas. Vodka fumes trail like invisible puppies as they pass the dead-eyed, spent ones going through the motions of having fun without having any of it.”But the most important part of this song that you – yes, you – are going to assemble from bits and pieces of these shattered memories will be the phrase that Brad Whittington scribbled down in 2012 as he was driving past the Mean-Eyed Cat, a famous dive bar.“You’re just the one she hasn’t left yet.”That’s the hook, the recurrent chorus. “You’re just the one she hasn’t left yet,” will show up repeatedly as you write this song that some lucky singer is going to make famous. That singer will tour and sell T-shirts and sign autographs and be famous. But you and me and Brad are going to reach into our mailboxes and pull-out handfuls of songwriting royalties.Did you know that singers and their bands get zero money when their songs play on the radio? The only people who make money from airplay are the songwriters.That’s going to be you and me and Brad.Bernie Taupin doesn’t sing or play an instrument, but he has collected more than 70 million dollars in royalties from the lyrics of songs that play on the radio each day.Brad and I feel the musicians and singers should get some money, too, but that’s not how the system works. Oh, well. Maybe they’ll get rich selling concert tickets and T-shirts.Or maybe they should learn to write song lyrics.To submit your song, all you have to do is follow these simple steps:Don’t worry about whether your song lyrics make sense. You’re not writing an essay full of facts. You’re writing a song full of feelings.Your song lyrics will need to have poetic meter, those wonderful rhythms created by the stressed and unstressed syllables of spoken words.You must repeatedly use the phrase, “You’re just the one she hasn’t left yet,” and you have to use a few of the words and phrases contributed by Hunter S. Thompson and me. You can decide which phrases you will use, and you are free to add words and phrases of your own, of course.Your song can be Rock, Yacht Rock, Folk, Country, Western Swing, Opera, R & B, Rap, Hip-Hop, Bluegrass, or some musical genre I’ve never heard of. Brad and I don’t care and Hunter S most certainly doesn’t.You have to send your lyrics and an MP3 recording of your song, with or without musical accompaniment, to [email protected] before midnight Sunday, April 30, 2023.There is a distinct chance that no one will ever hear your song except for Indy Beagle and Brad and me. But we are all going to have a wonderful time and that’s something in itself, don’t you think?Yes, I was serious about sending us a recording. We need to hear the...

You believe in a lot of things. But what do you believe in the most?Go into the quiet security of your mind, and you will know that you value one of these more highly than the other four.GovernmentBusinessScienceFamilyDeity“American rates of religious affiliation have plummeted to their lowest point in the past 73 years. And nowhere are they lower than in knowledge-industry hubs like Silicon Valley, where high-skilled jobs are growing the fastest. If religion is in decline, I wondered, then what are Americans worshiping now? What has become our new religion? For many professionals, the answer is work. Work provides the identity, belonging, meaning and purpose that faith traditions once did.”– Carolyn Chen, NY Times, June 4, 2022“For thousands of years, our ancestors gazed at the world around us—the people and animals, the mountains and seas, the sun, moon and stars—and saw the divine. As the 19th Psalm puts it, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.’ Even Isaac Newton saw a universe filled with purpose. In his masterwork, the Principia, he wrote: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.’ Science advanced by leaps and bounds in the centuries following Newton, and scientists dialed back much of the God-talk. Many thinkers suggested that the universe runs like a mighty clockwork. Perhaps a creator was needed at the beginning, to set it going, but surely it now runs on its own. Einstein, who often spoke of God metaphorically, took a different tack. He rejected a personal deity, but saw a kind of pantheism—roughly, the identification of God with nature—as plausible.”– Dan Falk, Scientific American, July 27, 20211. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it government?At one end of this spectrum, Communism believes that citizens should collectively own the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society. Karl Marx proposed a classless society in which everything would be shared by everyone.At the other end of the spectrum, Libertarianism says, “We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.” [LP.org) Ayn Rand famously proposed, “If government would just get out of the way, individual self-interest would create a better society!”To have confidence in government – or in the absence of government – is to believe in people. To have faith in people is Humanism. Is that where you have put your faith?2. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it business, capitalism, free enterprise?“People create value and do good things when they have a profit motive.”“Capitalism creates jobs and provides a better lifestyle for everyone who participates. It is a virtuous cycle.”“Business people are problem solvers.”3. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it science, medicine, technology?J.G. Ballard was enthusiastic about living in a technological society. He said, “Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”Napoleon Hill echoed J.G. Ballard. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”But Thomas Schelling, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, disagreed with Napoleon Hill, saying, “The one thing a person cannot do, however brilliant they are, is write up a list of things that would never occur to them.”I like Thomas Schelling.Perhaps I am oversimplifying this, but my general feeling is that when we do a thing intuitively, we call it

Ten years ago, scientists discovered “a geometric, jewel-like object at the heart of quantum physics.”This jewel-like object is called the amplituhedron (cool name, right?) and it, “dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.” *A theoretical physicist at Harvard, Jacob Bourjaily said that when using the amplituhedron, “The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling. You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”But that’s enough of that. The real question behind all this is, “What is real?”Questions about the nature of reality, and the reality of nature, that echoed in the hearts and minds of humans for a long, long time.What is Reality? Mathematicians have structured long equations to explain it. Theoretical physicists have developed theories to predict it. Philosophers have made names for themselves by speculating about it.But I’m not asking them.I’m asking you.What are the most real things in your life?Indy Beagle is going to collect your answers and task the Tiny Tribe into using the most beautiful pieces and phrases in song lyrics that he will publish in the rabbit hole a few weeks from now.You can reach Indy at [email protected] answers don’t need to be scientific, philosophical, or universal.They need only be true… to you.We're looking for that jewel-like object that sparkles in your heart and twinkles in your eyes and glitters on the surface of the sea.The sea is your unconscious mind.We're looking for the song that has not yet been sung.Aroo,Roy H. WilliamsPS – Tom T. Hall said the most real things in his life were, “Little baby ducks, old pickup trucks, slow-moving trains… and rain.”*Natalie WolchoverFour obstacles prevent most people from becoming persuasive communicators, whether in print, in front of an audience, or on video. And those obstacles are SNEAKY obstacles. That’s the conclusion of Michelle Gladieux (Glad-ee-oh), a communication consultant with 18 years of experience teaching at the highest levels. “The ability to dazzle an audience is far more accessible than most people believe,” Michelle tells roving reporter Rotbart, “but you’ll need to take some uncomfortable risks to succeed.” Are you willing to risk a few minutes to elevate your speaking abilities by several notches? All aboard! It’s time for MondayMorningRadio.com

CHAPTER ONE:We assume that every plumber can plumb, right?We assume that any A/C company can make the house warm in winter, cool in summer.We assume that every jeweler can sell us a diamond, and a lawyer must know the law, or he wouldn’t have a license to practice.So how do we choose who to use?“In the 1950s, consumer packaged goods companies like Procter and Gamble, General Foods and Unilever developed the discipline of brand management – or marketing as we know it today – when they noticed the quality levels of products being offered by competitors begin to improve. A brand manager would be responsible for giving a product an identity that distinguished it from nearly indistinguishable competitors“– “How Brands Were Born: A Brief History of Modern Marketing,” a story in The Atlantic, 2011We choose the name we think of first and feel the best about. When no such name springs to mind, we type our problem into Google and a thundering horde of names appears.How often is your name the one that is clicked?When the customer types their problem into Google instead of typing your name, you get a high-cost, low-CAP click. [Conversion, Average sale, Profit margin] When the customer types your name, you get a low-cost, high-CAP click.Most ads communicate information, but good ads build relationship. You want yours to be the name they think of first and feel the best about.You want them to type your name into Google.Boring ads are about you and your company. Exciting ads are about the customer. Show them a movie on the visuospatial sketchpad of Working Memory, the movie screen of the mind!You can do this. Use your words. Use mass media.CHAPTER TWO:Most ads are not written to persuade. They are written not to offend.(Read more about this in today’s rabbit hole.)This is why most ads are flaccid, impotent, and ignored.EXAMPLE: a few of you mentally raised your eyebrows at the words flaccid and impotent. You would tell me those words should be changed. Perhaps I should shorten it to say, ‘This is why most ads are ignored,’ or soften it further by saying, ‘This is why some ads are less effective than they might have been.”It is never wise to willfully insult a person, but the risk of insult is the price of clarity.When asked to look at a piece of ad copy, well-meaning people instinctively scan it for images, ideas, and language that might be softened.Effective ads do not hit softly.Effective ads have impact. They challenge your previously held beliefs and send thousands of gallons of water spewing into the air when they knock down a fire hydrant while attempting to parallel park. Fleeing the scene, they almost run over a little dog. An old lady with a funny hat thrashes the air with her walking stick and shouts old-lady curses. We are glad the little dog is okay.CHAPTER THREEThe role of Human Resources and Public Relations is to broker a lasting peace.In their world, harmony and empowerment and inclusiveness are the rule.To allow the people under their care to be criticized and disparaged is unthinkable.They seek peace, harmony, and happiness for everyone.Social Media marketers live in that world, too.They are doctors and nurses in a beautiful place where people receive the loving attention they deserve.But…The role of the ad writer is to be a warrior.In their world, differentiation and ever-increasing dominance are the rule.To allow the...

There are only three reasons to have a list of core values.   1: Inspire and reinforce “on-brand” behavior from employees.   2: Assist in the orientation and onboarding of new hires.   3: Inform investors, customers, and other interested parties of what they can expect from you.PROBLEM: When your core values include aspirational words that describe attributes rather than actions, your core values list will be interpreted differently by different readers, regardless of any clarifying language that might appear beneath the aspirational words.Use descriptions of actionsrather than create a list of attributes.These are a few core valuesthat describe aspirational attributesrather than observable actions:“Transparency”“Integrity”“Quality”“Accountability”“Respect”“Passion”How do you know if a person is transparent, accountable, or passionate?It is hard to know what a person is being, but it is easy to see what they are doing.Actions are easier to recognize than Attributes.This is why lists of attributes rarely ring true in the hearts of employees.When you list aspirational attributes instead of observable actions:Employees aren’t exactly sure what to do.New hires are intimidated and confused.Investors, customers, and other interested parties will not be able to clearly observe your core values manifested through the actions of your people.If your employees do not see your core values modeled by their fellow employees and reinforced by management each day, you don’t have a core values list; you have a wish list, a poster on the wall that will quickly become invisible.An actionable Core Values List will improve your company culture as well as the experience you deliver to your customers.Ray Seggern teaches:Your core values list is the STORY you are telling,the daily experience of your employees determines your CULTURE,and the reactions of your customers will be determined by the EXPERIENCE you give them.If you have a Wish List of aspirational attributes rather than a Core Values List of observable actions, here are a few examples of how attributes can be expressed and described as actions:Rather than say “Transparency,”we might say, “We make only honest and accurate statements about our products.”Rather than say “Integrity,”we might say, “We always follow through on our promises.”Rather than say “Quality,”we might say, “We will only sell products that are expertly manufactured from the finest materials.”Rather than say “Accountability,”we might say, “We never make excuses for our shortcomings or try to shift the blame to others.”Rather than say “Respect,”we might say, “We use courteous language at all times and maintain eye contact when others are...

Lately I’ve been trying to explain to uncomprehending faces how the most powerful opening lines are never questions, but statements that trigger more questions than they answer.I am certain those uncomprehending faces are my fault. I fear the idea that I am trying to teach may be bigger than the teacher.I am going to do my best today – one last time – to make it as clear as I can:The job of the opening line is to engage the reader, listener, or viewer.If the opening line doesn’t do it’s job, you risk becoming invisible.If your customer turns their attention away from you, you cease to exist.The most famous opening line in literature is, “Call me Ishmael.” It is a simple 3-word statement, but it triggers the following questions:“Is your name not Ishmael?”“Why are you unwilling to tell us your real name?”“And why did you choose the name ‘Ishmael’.”“Are you hiding from someone?”“And if so, why?”The face on the billboard at the top of this page is a close friend of mine. The billboard contains no company name, no logo, no domain name, and no telephone number. We give you no clue that might allow you to answer the questions that swirl in your mind:“Who is Elmer?”“Why is he coming”“What will he do when he gets here?”“Did su madre really name him Elmer?”As an ad, that billboard, “Elmer is Coming,” is woefully incomplete. In fact, every dilettante in the world of advertising will take great joy in pointing out that “only a moron” would put up such a billboard. It will be the talk of the town.“What a stupid billboard! It doesn’t have a call-to-action and it doesn’t have any contact information or even a logo!”But those billboards are only the opening salvo of an ad campaign that will continue for decades.After 4 weeks, when the city is buzzing with “Who is Elmer?” my friend will introduce himself on the radio and share who he is, where he came from, and what he hopes to do. Everyone who hears those ads will be anxious to tell their friends all about Elmer.What I am describing is not a “unique selling proposition.” It is simply a literary device, an artifact of truth upon which we can build a captivating ad, the beginning of a highly successful ad campaign.You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.Your first impression of Elmer is that he is easy-going and interesting and fun. (All of that is true, by the way.)Both of the examples I gave you earlier were just three words.Are you willing to try your hand at writing a 3-word statement that triggers more questions than it answers?I am not talking about a 3-word caption that needs to be accompanied by an image. “Elmer is Coming” works its magic even without a picture. Likewise, “Call me Ishmael.”Can you write a 3-word statement that triggers more questions than it answers? If your three words make Indy and me to want to know more, Indy said he will publish your name in next week’s rabbit hole.Send your three words to [email protected] before midnight Saturday, February 4th.If you see your name in the rabbit hole the following Monday, that means you got an A+.Roy H. Williams

Regardless of our chosen profession, most of us work with Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands.You’ve probably never thought about it. I certainly hadn’t, until I was talking with my 13-year-old grandson, Gideon, trying to convince him to elevate the quality of books he reads. Gideon is an exceptional storyteller and a surprisingly good actor for his age. Based on his natural proclivities, I am convinced Gideon will someday make his money with words. There are hundreds of ways to do it.I was about to list the careers that depend primarily on a practitioner’s capacity to choose and use precisely the right words when it hit me: every endeavor requires the use of numbers, facts, words, and hands.Career choices fall into one of those four camps.Numbers. Facts. Words. Hands.Arrange those four in the order you prefer to use them. Your order of preference may not correspond with the order of your competence, but it usually does. We get better at the things we prefer, especially when we focus on them.Let’s look at the careers where the language of Numbers stands on tiptoe and shouts “Look at me!”Data scientist, structural engineer, statistician, bookkeeper/accountant/CPA, insurance company actuarial, theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, (pretty much any kind of physicist,) and the list goes on.And in which politesse is the finesse of finicky Facts essential to success?Teacher, lawyer, doctor, policeman, consultant, inventor, and the list goes on.And what pursuits depend on your ability to muster and master Words that tickle the intellect and elevate the ears?Stand-up comedian, ad writer, politician, broadcaster, podcaster, online influencer, reporter, novelist, screenwriter, lyricist, and the list goes on.You didn’t know lyricist could be a career? Bernie Taupin has made more than seventy million dollars writing lyrics for Elton John. Bernie doesn’t write the music. Just the words.Now let’s look at the careers that harness the Hands.Carpenter, plumber, artist, musician, masseuse, electrician, manufacturing technician, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. And the list goes on.No career relies on the use of a single category exclusively, but when you look at a career from a distance, it is easy to see that one of those four is used more often than the other three.I have no idea how you might use this information, but I felt it was an observation worth sharing.One final thought: I have known a lot of people who followed the advice of their guidance counselor and chose a career based on how they scored on a standardized test. Tom was one of those people. Twenty-five years ago, he said,“I scored high on math skills so they convinced me to major in math in college. I graduated and got a job with a bank and was very successful but not happy. Then one day I realized that I hated math and had always hated math and was an idiot for listening to my guidance counselor.”Tom left banking to become an ad writer and became even more successful than he had been as a banker.And Tom was a lot happier, as well.If you took a moment to arrange Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands in the order of your preference, [email protected] would like you to share your list with him, along with anything else you would like to add.I told him you said aroo.He says aroo to you, too.Roy H. WilliamsCompanies are pouring big money into programs that teach “soft skills,” such as employee training, human resources, community outreach, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.) But do they get their money’s worth?Jack and Patti Phillips developed a method for determining the return on investment for programs like these and it has become the...

You are rolling down the road when you wonder, “If I turn off the engine and quit burning fuel, how far can I coast?”If your thought was to save fuel, you have made a costly mistake. The fuel you will burn to regain your speed is a lot more fuel than you would have burned to maintain your speed.This isn’t just a common mistake. It is an “extremely very” common mistake.But you were wondering how far you could coast, so I will answer your question, as asked.Your ability to coast will be determined bySpeedMassFrictionGravity (Are you coasting uphill, or down? Anyone can coast downhill in a booming economy.)Advertising is the fuel that energizes your business.Speed of growth is determined by how heavily you have been advertising.Mass is determined by how long you have been advertising that heavily.Friction is the inefficiency of your people to consistently delight your customers.Gravity is the resistance of your competitors. How strong or weak are they?It has been my observation that a roaringly successful business with a lot of momentum can coast for about 6 months before people begin to suspect that something has changed. During those 6 months, the business owner will say, “I cut my advertising and nothing changed! I should have done this a long time ago.”At the end of a year, they begin blaming the media. “The thing we were using no longer works. We’ve got to find the new thing.”At the end of two years, the wheels begin to come off. But it has been so long since they changed their advertising that no one suspects it to be the problem.At the end of four years, the company is in real trouble.I have seen this movie so many times that I can describe every scene and quote every line of dialogue.Whether it is after a one-month vacation, a three-month sabbatical, or a six-month abandonment, when that company starts advertising again, they invariably become frustrated that it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. (Remember what I said? “The fuel you will burn to regain your speed is a lot more fuel than you would have burned to maintain your speed.” Payback is hell. It’s going to cost that company at least six months of painful fuel inefficiency to regain the momentum they lost during those six months they were lazily picking their nose instead of advertising.“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”– Christopher McDougall, “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe”A second business owner believes they can build their business to a certain size and then, “just hold what they’ve got,” as though that volume of business is something they can count on from now on. But “holding what you’ve got” is never really an option because the physics of mass, friction, and gravity apply to maintaining your current speed just as surely as they apply to regaining lost momentum.“Hold-what-we’ve-got” business owners quietly believe, “We have all these customers now, so we don’t need to reach them with advertising anymore.”BREAKING NEWS: People stay reached like grass stays mowed. A good restaurant is an exception to this rule. In truth, I think you could open a marvelous restaurant on the steppes of Mongolia and people would find it and tell their friends about it.But you’re not in the restaurant business.Your business inhales and exhales, expands and contracts, just like every other living organism. This fantasy of, “holding what you’ve got” springs...

I recently read a pair of books by Arkady Martine, a writer who is new to Science Fiction. A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021), each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.I like Arkady Martine and I like her books. She is an extraordinary storyteller.But she is not yet a great writer.That was not intended as an insult. Dan Brown sold a staggering number of The DaVinci Code, but he is not yet a great writer, either. We tend to read the book of a great storyteller only once. Knowing the story, the magic is gone. This is why every thrift shop in the world is stacked with countless copies of 50 Shades of Gray and The DaVinci Code.But we read the works of great writers again and again. A great writer could write an instruction manual and make it captivating.Literary evaluation is wildly subjective, of course, so I owe an explanation to Arkady Martine and to you.I never read borrowed books because I intend to circle passages and make notes in the margins along the way. To deface my own books with circles and notes is a sign of respect for the author, but for me to deface the book of a friend would not be a sign of respect.I will not finish a book if the author is not a great storyteller. I will not circle any passages if the author is a not a great writer.The hope of every great storyteller should be to also become a great writer. To win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize in literature, you have to be both.John Steinbeck was both.J.R.R. Tolkien was both.Tom Robbins is both.Bill Bryson is both.Barbara Kingsolver is both.I am currently on page 26 of Barbara Kingsolver’s 546-page novel, Demon Copperhead,* and I have already circled 10 passages. Indy will transcribe those passages into the rabbit hole when I have completed the book. (The Random Quotes database is now 6,108 quotes and climbing. – Indy)The stories that comprise One Thousand and One Nights were compiled a thousand years ago. In one of those stories, Prince Husain travels to Bisnagar and buys a magic carpet. Do not let Disney mislead you. Husain’s carpet is not a ‘flying’ carpet that rides the air like a raptor. His magic carpet is like a good book. All you have to do is decide where you want to be, sit down, and you are there.Good writing engages all your senses as it moves you to another place, another time, another life.You are at a spongey 100-year-old seaside resort favored by the idle rich in the tropical south.“The air was heavy with oleander and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5.”– Olivia NuzziYou are now in the brittle north.“It’s FREEZING cold; like the air is made of broken glass. Our English cold is all roly-poly snowmen and ‘woo-hoo! it’s a snow day!’ a hey-there friendly kind of cold. But this cold is mean…”“It’s getting so hard to breathe, my lungs are filling up with ants and there isn’t room for air any more. There’s a monster made of cold, hard as the edge of a pavement, coming towards us in the dark and it’s cutting through the windscreen and doors and windows and the only weapon against it is heat, but we don’t have any heat.”“…she felt it now as vastly, cruelly impersonal; a frozen darkness absorbing you into itself. She felt it filling her hollow spaces, embedding itself as icy marrow in her bones and then consciousness seeped away from her into the Arctic blackness.”– Rosamund LuptonYou stood in the rain sixty-five miles north of Seattle.“And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it...

I want you to:be more productive,reduce your mistakes,shorten your learning curve,and elevate your success.If I am going to help you do these things, we must first look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.Are you ready?Teamwork in Business is Highly Overrated.Teamwork is never the answer.Individual responsibility is the answer.A relay race is really just a series of individual runners, three of whom begin their efforts with an advantage, or a deficit, handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful.When individuals are rewarded collectively, we create the illusion of a team.1: Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.2: You create a committee when you remove individual responsibility.3: Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.But we love to be members of a tribe. Being part of a team – a tribe – gives us a sense of identity, purpose, and adventure. These feelings help us to perform as individuals.Americans love football. But it isn’t the teamwork that attracts us. It is the tribalism and the tribal leaders.Quarterbacks, running backs and receivers – the tribal leaders who score the most points – are paid a lot more money than the rest of the team. So why do coaches tell players that every member of the team is “equally important”? I can’t help but hear the “Animal Farm’ voice of George Orwell, his tongue about to punch a hole in his cheek,“All animals are created equal. But some animals are more equal than others.”The role of a tribal leader is to instill the values, beliefs, and culture of the tribe into each of its members and each of its fans.Tribal leaders are different from tribal managers.A Manager – a Coach – holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer. Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were not a team. They were partners, each of whom had specific responsibilities.“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.” *That is Steve Wozniak’s advice to you.“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy… Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”– John Steinbeck, East of EdenWozniak was the first runner in a relay race. He handed the baton to Steve Jobs. When Jobs was forced to hand that baton to John Sculley in 1985, Scully stumbled and handed the baton to Michael Spindler who stumbled and handed it to Gil Amelio who fell on his face and left a 20-foot skid mark on the track.Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996 and brought it back to life. After he died in 2011, tribal manager Tim Cook lifted Apple to a $1 trillion stock valuation, the first ever in history.Professor Scott Galloway made a piercing comment about the power of tribal leaders when he was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour,“As societies become wealthier and more educated, the reliance on a super-being and church attendance goes down, but they still look for idols. Into that void steps technology leaders because technology… …is the closest thing we have to magic. Our new Jesus Christ was Steve Jobs, and now Elon Musk has taken on that...

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the 2023 Zenith of the “WE,” so today I’ll give you a recap.The 3,000-year pendulum of Western Civilization* is energized by two good things that oppose each other: Every 40-year “ME” cycle is driven by the hunger for individuality and freedom of expression.Every 40-year “WE” cycle is driven by working together for the common good.We begin each of these cycles with the best of intentions; but then we take that good thing too far – all the way to the zenith at one end of the pendulum’s arc – and begin to mourn what we left behind. 20 years up to the zenith, 20 years back down; then we begin our 20-year journey up to the opposite zenith; then 20 years back down to complete the 80-year roundtrip.There are two reasons why so few people say, “Hey, I remember this!” 1. We don’t notice the truly important when we are distracted by the merely urgent.2. The pendulum is in the same position – headed in the same direction – just once every 80 years. How often do you listen to a 90-year-old when they say, “Back when I was 10 years old…” The 40-year “ME” cycle that began in 1963 was built on individuality and freedom of expression.  That “ME” zenithed in 1983, then it slowly deflated until 2003. That’s when we began our current “WE” cycle. And like every “WE,” it began with the beautiful dream of working together for the common good. As we reach the zenith of that “WE” – 2023 – we see the consequences of taking “working together for the common good” a little too far.Okay, a lot too far.Every zenith of a “WE” cycle is a time of intense opposition and strong beliefs. We feel that anyone who believes differently from us is stupid and evil and must be stopped at any cost. 1783 – The Revolutionary War ended on Sept. 3 with the Treaty of Paris. We spent the next 5 chaotic years writing and adopting – state by state – the Constitution.1863 – The middle year of the U.S. Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated 2 years later. Chaos.1943 – The middle year of America’s involvement in WW II. Two years later we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.2023 – (We shall see what we shall see.) Religiosity is often intense at the Zenith of a “WE” cycle. Disagreements often result from a lack of definitions of terms. For the purposes of this discussion, these will be the definitions of Faith, Religion, and Religiosity:Faith is that in which you place your greatest confidence.(Science? Politics? Deity?)Religion is the formalizing of a code of orthodoxy around your Faith.Religiosity is weaponized religion.Every reader takes from a text what he brings to it.“It is a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God. The minute I believe I know the mind of God is the minute someone needs to tell me to sit down and breathe into a paper bag. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”– Barbara Brown TaylorYou can get ancient scriptures to confess to whatever you want if you torture them long enough.“The history of the world shows that when you place an ego and a spiritual text (the Bible, Torah, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, etc.) in the same room, the text will always end up in a chokehold.”– Michele Miller-NelsonEvery person deserves to be remembered for their finest moment. From what I know of Ernest Hemingway,

Authority can be given to a person. Leadership cannot.People with authority often have no followers.People with followers often have no authority.Leaders require no authority. They say, ‘This is what I’ve decided to do.’ And then they do it. Others see them doing it and decide to follow.On Tuesday I was on the phone to my friend Manley Miller in New Orleans when he said,“No one wants to be a leader anymore. Everyone wants to be a commentator. You want to know how to identify a leader? Just took for the person who’s making the decisions.”The notorious billionaire oil man and corporate raider, T. Boone Pickens passed along this advice at the end of his life,“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader: Avoid the ‘Ready-aim-aim-aim-aim’ syndrome. You have to be willing to fire. Learn from mistakes. That’s not just a cliché. I sure made my share. Remember the doors that smashed your fingers the first time and be more careful the next trip through. Be humble. I always believed the higher a monkey climbs in the tree, the more people below can see his ass. You don’t have to be that monkey.”In his book, “Where Have all the Leaders Gone?” Lee Iacocca, that innovative leader who breathed new life into one of America’s most important corporations said,“The most innovative research is often killed during the peer review process. Why? Well, let me put it to you simply: Imagine if every time Chrysler wanted to bring a new car to market, it had to depend on positive reviews from GM and Ford. Are you starting to get the picture?”During his rant at a Wizard of Ads partner meeting a few years ago, the dazzling Mick Torbay said,“You need to understand something: the committee is not evil. The committee doesn’t want you to fail. The committee has nothing but good intentions. But the committee can’t innovate. More than anything, the committee wants to look good to the rest of the committee… So don’t be surprised that when you present a really, really great idea to a committee, the only thing you’re gonna get is a reason why that idea won’t work; one reason for every member of the committee. The committee will always pull you to the center. The committee will help you avoid risk, but risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. If you avoid risk, then huge success is out of the question. Are you okay with that?”As we approach the beginning of a brand-new year, let’s go back to what I said in the beginning:Authority can be given to a person. Leadership cannot.People with authority often have no followers.People with followers often have no authority.Leaders require no authority. They say, ‘This is what I’ve decided to do.’And then they do it. Others see them doing it and decide to follow.What have you decided to do?You doing that, in 2023, is what I want to see.You’ve talked about it long enough.You’ve thought about it long enough.It’s time to get started.Roy H. WilliamsONE LAST THOUGHT FROM MICK TORBAY: “Your comfort zone is actually a prison cell. It’s the reason you’re not growing the way you should. The good news? Every business owner, including your competitor, has a comfort zone and most never dare to leave it. But you will. You dare. And that’s how we’ll win.”Ted Clark started out as a shipping clerk, then climbed the heights of the wealth ladder. He now advises people on how to leverage their way into society’s upper crust. The secret? OPM. (Other People’s Money) How to get it. How to use it. MondayMorningRadio.com

We shall operate on the heart, but we shall not use a scalpel and it will not pump blood better when we are done. We have no interest in that muscle in the center of the chest.We will use magic words to operate on the center of emotions. We will change how people act, think, and feel. No one will die, but they will all be changed.Are you in?We will operate en masse on hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously.Screenwriters have been pumping out scripts for TV shows and movies that have captured and owned us for as long as we have been able to sit upright.As children we fell in love with cartoon characters.As teenagers we fell in love with heroes in action movies.As adults we fell in love with imagination, fascination, and surprise.We are going to use the secrets of screenwriters to create better, more effective ads in every form of media.Screenwriter Secret 1: Create colorful characters.The most memorable characters are always torn between two attractions.Screenwriter Secret 2: Deliver big ideas quickly.Short sentences hit hard.Screenwriter Secret 3: Win the heart.When your attention is directed by your mind, you are studying.When your attention is directed by your heart, you are being entertained.Screenwriter Secret 4: See the pattern.A great story has a pulsating rhythm of tension and release, followed by convergence.Screenwriter Secret 5: Know where you are going.A strong ending is the beginning of every great movie, every great story, every great ad.There are four kinds of thought:Analytical thought seeks to forecast a result.Verbal thought is hearing words in your mind.Abstract thought is rooted in unreality.Symbolic thought sees connections and perceives patterns.Music is a language of symbolic thought, as are 3-dimensional fractal images and similes and metaphors.Metaphors are magical.“A word of encouragement is an umbrella on a rainy day.”Metaphors are memorable.“Laughter is medicine.”Metaphors are money:“Lemon Wine is liquid sunshine.”Create that product.Use that metaphor.Become wealthy.These are just a few of the things taught for The Ad Writers Guild in a 2-year online course at Wizard Academy.You will be stunned.You will be staggered.You will be temporarily overwhelmed.You will be changed.You will pass, or fail.You will prevail.Roy H. Williams“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.” ― AristotleJoseph Fung has founded five technology companies, backed 20 more, and now is the CEO of an international educational organization that provides lifelong career training. Roving reporter Rotbart describes Joseph as, “a walking encyclopedia of business wisdom.” Listen as Rotbart and Fung discuss how to generate company culture, prepare employees for long-term success, invest in early-stage companies, and harness the rewards of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Where you gonna go? MondayMorningRadio! (dotcom)

The pain of loss is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain. When Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory in 1979, a generation of advertisers mistakenly began to speak to Pain, and to the fear of Loss.If you frame a choice as “Loss versus Gain,” most people will choose loss avoidance because “losses loom larger than gains.”But what if you want your audience to embrace the risk of loss? To what motivation, then, do you speak?Equally unwise is to frame a choice as “Pain versus Pleasure.” Pain and Pleasure are not as distinct as they may at first seem. You do not recall the event itself, but only your most recent memory of it.The experience of pain or pleasure during an event is replaced by the memory of that pain or pleasure; how it is perceived afterwards upon recall. Your memory is built upon what you were feeling at the peak point, and how the experience ended. These are the four peaks that matter:1. Elevation: a transcendent moment of happiness.2. Pride: a moment that captures you at your best.3. Insight: a eureka moment that gives you startling clarity4. Connection: a moment of knowing you belong.Don’t speak to the fear of loss – or to the avoidance of pain – unless you are counting on an immediate response from people who are easily alarmed.If you desire your audience to embrace the possibility of pain and loss, you must reframe the choice as “Fear versus Hope.”We have lionized feats of bravery and ridiculed acts of cowardice for millennia.“Are you a frightened, fearful little waste of skin, or will your actions be remembered for generations? Is there anything you care about more than yourself?”Loss vs. Gain, or Pain vs. Pleasure, can easily be reframed as Fear vs. Hope. To cause a person to prefer more pain instead of less pain, all you have to do is add a better ending.“With a beginning that invites each man to assume he’ll be the one who ‘outlives this day, and comes safe home,’ the speech skims over present difficulties to paint an evocative picture of future fellowship and hearty celebration. Instead of focusing on the suffering they’re about to face, the men project themselves years ahead, to the happy time when they will be old and honored, with even the meanest of their number elevated to gentry status as the king’s brothers-in-arms. With this vivid picture of their glorious future, the king moves the troops to conquer their fears and follow him to victory.”– Virginia Postrel, The Power of GlamourVirginia Postrell was referring to a famous speech Shakespeare wrote for a play in 1599. When they were impossibly outnumbered at Agincourt in 1415 and every man thought he was about to die; this is that famous speech given by King Henry V.HUMPHREY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTERWhere is the King? JOHN, DUKE OF BEDFORDThe King himself is rode to view their battle. EARL OF WESTMORLANDOf fighting men they have full threescore thousand. DUKE OF EXETERThere’s five to one; besides, they all are fresh.(The King, unseen, approaches from behind and hears… )EARL OF WESTMORLANDO that we now had hereBut one ten-thousand of those men in EnglandThat do no work today! KING HENRY VWhat’s he that wishes so?My cousin Westmorland? No, my fair cousin.If we are mark’d to die, we are enoughTo do our country loss; and if to live,The fewer men, the greater share of honor.God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more.Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through...

A person unconsciously frames a statement when they choose a perspective, a point of view, or an angle of approach.Verbal counterpunching is nothing more than the reframing of a statement made by someone else.Citizens of Britain said for centuries,“The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” to which a citizen of India replied, “The sun never set on the British empire because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.”Frame. Reframe.Samuel Johnson – an Englishman – wrote this definition for “oats” in his dictionary published in 1755.“Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”“Which is why England is known for its horses and Scotland for its men.”– James Boswell, a Scotsman, the biographer of Samuel Johnson.Frame. Reframe.Wages were framed as the property of the boss as long as the media referred to worker exploitation as “non-payment of wages.” But when the media began referring to it as “wage theft,” wages were reframed as belonging to the workers. Within a few months, “wage theft” began showing up in bills to be considered by Congress.“There is a basic truth about framing. If you accept the other guy’s frame, you lose.”– George LakoffNiels Bohr believed that every true statement can be reframed to communicate an opposite truth. “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”– Niels Bohr, winner of the Nobel Prize in PhysicsKeep in mind that verbal counterpunching does nothing to change objective reality. But most disagreements revolve around perceptual reality; the reality that is unique to the individual; the reality of what he or she perceives. Objective reality cannot be changed, but perception definitely can.Ronald Reagan was 73 years old when he ran for reelection in 1984. When his age was brought up in a debate, he said, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience exploded in laughter and Reagan won the electoral votes of 49 states that year.Frame. Reframe.When Senator Dan Quayle was running for vice-president in 1988, he said his experience was equal to that of John Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960. Vice-presidential candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen responded, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”Frame. Reframe.Big tobacco framed cigarette smoking as something that “real men” do. Tobacco ads feature strong, rugged men as smokers.Opponents reframed the issue by representing cigarette smokers as having black lungs, yellowing fingernails, and bad breath. Smoking is a matter of personal choice.People smoke because they are addicted.Smoking bans discriminate against smokers.Non-smokers have the right to breathe clean air.Tobacco companies do good through sponsorship of cultural, athletic and community events.Tobacco companies are attempting to gain innocence by association.Tobacco is just one of many presumed health hazards.Tobacco is the only legal product that – when used as intended – kills.According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “Cigarette smoking among U.S. adults has reached an all-time low of 13.7% — a decline of approximately two-thirds.”“Reframing is not easy or simple. It is not a matter of finding some magic words. Frames are ideas, not slogans… It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an ongoing process. It requires repetition and focus and dedication.” – George LakoffWhat...

There are four basic steps in every good story.Bad storytellers can do steps one and two, but recoil at step three.Good storytellers are willing to do step three.Brilliant Storytellers do steps three and four again and again.1. Create a character that people like, believe in, and can relate to.2. Launch that character on a hero's journey.3. Do terrible things to that character.4. Surprise your reader/listener/viewer by what happens next.And then what happens? Make it surprising.And then what happens? Make it surprising.And then what happens? Make it surprising.But it must also make sense.Predictability is the silent assassin of stories.Without trouble, there is no adventure.In 'That Hovering Question Mark,' I told you, "Every good story begins with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers." Ocean's 11 contains an excellent example of this."Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks. Not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever."– Rusty (Brad Pitt) to Danny (George Clooney), explaining how they will run the con in Ocean's 11And that is how they did it! Ocean's 11 contains surprise after surprise, even though the writer told us the plot when he gave us that Rusty-to-Danny statement just 12 and 1/2 minutes into a 2-hour movie. It was a statement that triggered more questions than it answered.A BOESKY: Ivan Boesky was a trader on Wall Street who got caught committing securities fraud. In Ocean's 11, Saul pretends to be a wealthy bankroller who has insider information.A JIM BROWN: Named for the famous American football player, this refers to Frank Catton, a large, intimidating black man who stages a confrontation with Linus Caldwell so that Linus can lift the security codes to the vault.A MISS DAISY: 'Driving Miss Daisy' was a movie about a woman who uses a chauffeur to drive her around. Using a SWAT truck and a disguised driver, the Ocean's 11 gang escapes with their own special chauffeur.TWO JETHROS: Remember Jethro of 'The Beverly Hillbillies'? In Ocean's 11, Turk and Virgil provide two-man 'goober' distractions, such as using helium balloons to obscure the security camera on the casino floor so that Livingston can get into the video surveillance room.A LEON SPINKS: When Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali in a Las Vegas prize fight, it was something that no one expected. In Ocean's 11, no one expects the power to go out in the middle of a prize fight in Las Vegas. A fabulous distraction.ELLA FITZGERALD: In a famous 1973 TV ad, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald shatters a wine glass, then the voiceover says, "Is it live or is it Memorex?" (audiotape). In Ocean's 11, the guys make a videotape of a pretend robbery and play it over the casino's surveillance system while the real robbery is happening.Most stories should be told as fiction, even when they are true. When confronted with facts we are always on our guard. But "Once Upon a Time" dispels doubt, opens the imagination, and creates a willing suspension of disbelief.In 1999 I was on the phone with an 87 year-old man I had been hunting for several weeks. His name was William Lederer. I needed his permission to publish a famous letter he had written to America’s Chief of Naval Operations back in 1963. He gave me permission, then asked, “Where you calling from young man?”“Austin, Texas.”“I was...

If life is a journey on water, with our conscious mind above the waterline and our deep unconscious beneath, and if all the people in the world are drifting, surfing, drowning and sailing on that surface, shouldn’t there be a person on a wooden chair in the sky above the beach watching over it all?Shouldn’t there be a person?And a beach?The people along the sandAll turn and look one way.They turn their back on the land.They look at the sea all day.As long as it takes to passA ship keeps raising its hull;The wetter ground like glassReflects a standing gullThe land may vary more;But wherever the truth may be—The water comes ashore,And the people look at the sea.They cannot look out far.They cannot look in deep.But when was that ever a barTo any watch they keep?– Robert Frost“Calm yourself, Little One. There is always a person. There is always a beach.”I had an idea for the story, which by the way has been in my head for about 20 years now, and all it was to begin with was an image of a boy in a wheelchair flying a kite on a beach. And that picture was just as clear in my mind as it could be. And it wanted to be a story, but it wasn’t a story, it was just a picture. As clear as clear as clear…– Stephen King, May 29, 2013The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 2005 and 2007, they took in more than half a billion dollars – the highest-grossing tour of all time. On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of ‘Street Fighting Man.’– David Remnick, The New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2010Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant…– Adam Nicolson, Sea RoomOn the edge of the water were a pair of waystones, their surfaces silver against the black of the sky; the black of the water. One stood upright, a finger pointing into the sky. The other lay flat, extending into the water like a short stone pier.No breath of wind disturbed the surface of the water. So as we climbed out onto the fallen stone the stars reflected themselves in double fashion; as above, so below. It was as if we were sitting amid a sea of stars.– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, p. 216This is the land of Narnia, said the Faun, where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. And you—you have come from the wild woods of the west?I—I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room, said Lucy.– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobePennie and I have had the flu for more days than is supposed to be possible, and I have still not recovered my voice. There were days when I was not sure I dwelt in the land of the living.“The rain to the wind said,You push and I’ll pelt.’They so smote the garden bedThat the flowers actually knelt,And lay lodged–though not dead.I know how the flowers felt.”― Robert FrostAroo,Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY – Taking care of Pennie and Roy prohibited me from putting together a rabbit hole for you. Sorry.

Dr. Nick Grant, a psychologist, Dr. Mike Metzger of Clapham Institute, and Ray Bard my publisher, each taught me about water.Life is a journey on water. Your conscious mind is above the waterline. Your unconscious is beneath.That weightless, magical world below the waterline is fundamentally different from the world of facts, figures and logic that hovers above it.The arts are an invigorating plunge into the unconscious, that part of your mind that understands the languages of color, shape, proximity, radiance, shadow, silhouette, pitch, key, tempo, interval, contour, rhythm, and frame-line magnetism.Our relationship to the unconscious is like our relationship to water. We need it by the cupful to survive, but if you stay underwater too long, you will drown; a psychotic break.Life is a journey on water. To better understand this Jungian journey, watch Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the 1990 film, “Joe Versus the Volcano.”Nick Grant made me aware of the symbolic nature of water.Mike Metzger taught me how to look at water in a second way:You meet four people on the Ocean of Life, but you meet them again and again. The first person you meet is drifting, pushed each day by the winds and waves of circumstances. The drifter always goes with the flow. You know you’ve met a drifter when they say, “Whatever. It’s all good.”The second person you meet is surfing. They seem to be having a good time, but they never really get anywhere. They mostly paddle around in the ocean, looking for another wave to ride. The surfer is always looking for “the next big thing.”The third person you meet is drowning. Lots of people “go under” once or twice in life and need a helping hand. They may need rescue financially, or chemically, or relationally, but this is normal.There are also professional drowners: “It’s been the worst week of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” So you come to the rescue… but the next time you see them, “It’s been the worst week of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”The fourth person you meet is sailing. Confronted by the same winds and waves that controlled the drifter, surfer, and drowner, the sailor navigates. “If I turn the rudder and adjust the sails, this wind will take me wherever I want to go.”You cannot navigate by watching the wind and waves. You must have a fixed point, a non-negotiable guiding light that does not move. The North Star – Polaris – is perfectly aligned above the axis of the earth. It is that guiding light around which the whole world revolves. What is your non-negotiable, your star that does not move? When you have found it, you will always know where – and who – you are.Ray Bard taught me a third way to look at water. When you’re writing a book or considering a business venture, it is essential that you discover two things:1. How widespread is the public interest?2. How deep is that interest?If public interest is neither widespread nor deep, you’re looking at a puddle. Never invest time or money in a puddle.If interest is widespread but not deep, you’re looking at a bayou. Be careful. A bayou looks like an ocean at first because the interest is wide, wide, wide. But that interest is not deep enough to drive action. You can go broke when you see a bayou and think it is an ocean.If interest is narrow but deep, you’re looking into a well. You can draw a lot of water from a well. “The Care and Feeding of Quarter Horses” held no interest for most readers, but those who owned a quarter horse had deep interest. The book was successful.If public interest is wide and deep, you’re looking at an ocean. But you’re going to need a boat – a platform – on which to navigate your ocean. If you don’t have a platform,...

People in museums stop to look at paintings that have people in them, but walk past paintings that have no people.Ninety percent of the books sold each year are fiction.Ninety percent of the books written each year are non-fiction.The same is true in movies and television: fiction beats non-fiction 10 to 1.Non-fiction is facts and figures, problems and processes, tips and techniques.Fiction is interesting people living fascinating lives.Non-fiction is reality and reality is a wildebeest held captive in a zoo.Fiction is escaping the zoo and adventuring in the wild.Good writing shines a mental movie onto the movie screen of the mind.Do the movies you write feature people in a zoo, or people in the wild? Are the people in your ads empty and hollow like zoo animals, or are they vivid and real like people you know?Henry David Thoreau told us, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”If you want to touch the quiet desperation in the heart of your customer, write ads that describe their pain and frustration, then offer to deliver them from it.If you want to touch the song that is in them, write ads that speak of freedom, fulfillment and joy. Show them the fascinating life they could be living.A well-written ad shines a mental movie onto the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory, the movie screen of the mind, located in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area.1On paper, on a computer screen, on a billboard, or coming through the speakers of a computer, a television or radio, words, words, words, words, words, words, words create those mental movies.Online reviews are powerful.Online reviews are not facts and logic.Online reviews are people’s impressions and reactions. Impressions and reactions are far more interesting than facts and logic.When a person describes their impressions and reactions, they are shining a mental movie into your mind.Q: Are you telling me that I should use customer testimonials in my ads?A: No, because you will not be able to resist editing your customer’s testimonial and the moment you touch it, that testimonial will become a predictable ad delivered by a ventriloquist’s dummy.Q: Why do ad writers assume the public is hungry for facts and logic?A: Most ad writers follow the rules of journalism when they should be following the rules of screenwriting.Journalists deliver facts. Screenwriters deliver fascination.Shine on, screenwriter, shine on.Roy H. WilliamsTodd Mitchell is a creativity sherpa that rescues writers, artists, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, and innovators who are struggling with self-doubt and circling the drain in failure. You’re not down the drain yet! Raise your arm out of the water and let Todd Mitchell pull you back up into the air and sunlight where you belong. MondayMorningRadio.com

I have seen friends walk away from relationships, jobs, and promising careers when all they really needed was some time and space to gather their thoughts, slow their heart rate, and rediscover their joy.I’m not saying you should always, “hang on one more day at a time and wait for things to get better.” I am saying you need to recognize the changing seasons in your life.Bobbie Gentry knew when it was time to stop, turn the page, and begin a new chapter.Bobbie knocked the Beatles off the #1 spot on the music charts with “Ode to Billy Joe,” a song that she wrote, performed, and produced. She won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards. Eleven more of her songs made the music charts. She was a major headline act in Las Vegas and she co-hosted a successful TV series with country music superstar Glen Campbell.America watched as Bobbie Gentry provided the music for a major motion picture about her imaginary Billie Joe McAllister, then performed “Mama, a Rainbow” for her mother who was seated in the studio during the filming of a television special.The next day, Bobby quietly retired from the spotlight without fanfare, returning no phone calls, answering no letters, and granting no interviews. She had been in the spotlight for 14 years when she whispered, “Enough,” and walked away 41 years ago.What triggered it? Nothing. She simply realized that a season in her life had ended.Solomon spoke famously about the seasons of life in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes:There is a time for everything,and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,a time to search and a time to give up,a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,a time for war and a time for peace.… He has made everything beautiful in its time.… I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.One can think of the seasons of life in a few different ways.Financially, we go from survival to acquisition to distribution.Relationally, we go from seeking, to finding, to celebrating.In business, we go from learner, to doer, to teacher. This is essentially the Hero’s Journey, a sequence of events that is nearly impossible to escape:1. We meet the Hero in modest circumstances.2. He encounters the Call to Adventure.3. He meets the Old Man in the Woods who prepares him for what lies ahead.4. He then rises to the challenge of adventure and discovers abilities within himself he didn’t know were there.In the Bible we see Moses, Joseph, Samson, David and many others, including women such as Hannah, Esther, Abigail, Ruth, and Deborah as they encounter the Hero’s Journey.In literature and in the movies, we see Bilbo in The Hobbit, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid, Simba in The Lion King, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Neo in The Matrix, and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.Luke was just a goober on the backwater planet of Tatooine when he was called to adventure. Obi-Wan Kenobi was the Old Man...

Ten different factors will determine how quickly your ads pay off.Do your ads capture attention or are they easy to ignore?Do your ads speak to a felt need, or are you answering a question no one was asking?Are you a known, trusted, and respected seller?Is the brand you sell known, trusted, and respected?What percentage of the public will ever – in their lifetime ­– purchase a product or service in your category?How often does the average person need to buy what you sell?Does your ad make the customer feel any urgency due to low price or limited availability?What percentage of the public knows your name and what you sell?In your category, what name will customers typically think of first and feel the best about?What percentage of the public considers you to be their preferred provider?Your answers to questions 5 & 6 indicate your product purchase cycle. Here are those questions again:“5. What percentage of the public will ever – in their lifetime ­– purchase a product or service in your category?”“6. How often does the average person buy what you sell?”Generally speaking, the longer your product purchase cycle, the longer it will take before your mass-media ads deliver a positive R.O.I.Online ads, however, work immediately. But will the customer type your name into the search block? If they do, you have already won the heart of that customer. They have chosen you as their preferred provider. This means you will enjoy an extremely low cost-per-click with a high conversion rate.But if they type the name of your competitor into the search block, then it will be your competitor that enjoys an extremely low cost-per-click and a high conversion rate.The starting pistol fires the moment a customer types your category into the search block instead of your name or the name of a competitor. Their computer screen overflows with the names of companies making them offers. If they see a name they recognize, the footrace is over in moments. But if no name is recognized, the names of several runners will be clicked.Every runner will pay a high cost-per-click due to gambling on an “unbranded” keyword.But only one runner will take home the prize money.Costs-per-click have never been higher.Mass media costs have never been lower.If you sell a product or a service with a long purchase cycle, the bad news about mass media is that it will take 3 to 6 months of weekly advertising before you begin to gain any real momentum.The good news is that the longer you use mass media, the better it works.1 This is how you make your name the one that customers type into the search block.I believe:Every advertiser should have a website.Every advertiser should be willing to pay for 100% of the clicks when a customer types their nameinto the search blockOrganic results are no longer enough.You’ve got to pay the price for your name to be seen.Your cost-per-click is extremely low when your name is typed into the search block.(I’ll tell you about #6 in a minute.)Ten years ago, Inc. magazine published an article by Jeff Haden titled, “How Google is Killing Organic Search.”“If your business depends on customers finding you in search results, you’re in trouble–and it’s likely to get worse. If case you haven’t noticed, pay-per-click ads are slowly taking over Google’s search engine results. That should come as no surprise since approximately 97% of Google’s revenues are generated by its core business, search engine advertising; Google is understandably protecting and extending its revenue turf… If you’re a business that depends on

Every good story – and every good ad – begins with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers.“I do not like to turn left when leaving my neighborhood…”“I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my father…”“You are sitting in a candlelit restaurant when you hear a strange noise…”The second line of your story is where the narrative arc begins. The narrative arc is the sequence of events, the plot. [In a radio ad, sfx means sound effect]You are sitting in a candlelit restaurant when you hear a strange noise[sfx-open] and the walls are instantly covered with jagged shards of golden light.You hear another strange noise[sfx-close] and the jagged shards of light are gone.Murmurs of wonder flood the candlelit restaurant.[sfx-open] The jagged shards appear on the walls again, dancing in unison to some silent music that only they can hear.[sfx-close] And now they are gone.The crowd applauds this unexpected delight. Smiles are beaming. Teeth are bright.[sfx-open] More jagged shards. More golden light.[sfx-close] No one notices the man at the table in the middle of the room, staring at his tablecloth, lost in thought. A woman emerges from the shadows behind him. Startled, he looks up, drops to one knee,[sfx-open] and the golden shards of light dance fast and bright across his face and hers.And then they kiss.And the candlelit restaurant explodes in applause.[sfx-close]  A tiny little box sits empty on the table.Flickering Firelight diamonds, available exclusively at Morgan Jewelers.Begin your ad with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers! If your opening line reveals what is to come, change the opening line.“Guidomeyer’s Furniture is having a sale!”When an ad begins with a sentence like that, you can be sure it was written by someone who follows the 5 W’s of journalism: Who, What, When, Where and Why.Ads written by journalists are why most people hate advertising.Guidomeyer’s Furniture is having a sale!This week, Guidomeyer’s is having a saleat 1715 Barkmaster Avenue! Save! Save!Save up to 50% this week at Guidomeyer’sannual clearance sale! Guidomeyer’s has beenserving the needs of Pottersville for 71 years,so come to Guidomeyer’s and shop localfor all your furniture needs! We have recliners,coffee tables, end tables, nightstands, TV traysand financing will be available! Guidomeyer’sAnnual Clearance Sale! This week! 1715 Barkmaster!Hurry, hurry, hurry before all the good stuff is gone!Guidomeyer’s!Guidomeyer is who.A Sale is what.This Week is when.1715 Barkmaster is where.Annual Clearance is why.That formula is so simple an idiot could use it. And idiots often do.No, I don’t mean that. Words have meanings, so let me be accurate. I don’t think such a person is an ‘idiot.’ ‘Moron’ would be the accurate term. Technically, a moron is an adult with the mental age of 7-10. Morons are more intelligent than idiots and imbeciles, but they are an especially troublesome group because they are not aware of their shortcomings.Don’t be a moron.Getting the listener’s attention is easy, but holding that attention requires skill.Open with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers.Bridge quickly into the narrative arc, the plot.When your listener thinks they know where you are headed, take them somewhere else.Introduce divergent elements that don’t belong together,then make them converge, add up, and make sense.Lead your listener to the conclusion, then allow them to...

I hope you are not prone to regrets. The next time you make the wrong decision, I want you to look back and remember that it seemed like a good idea at the time. You were given incomplete information. The future was unknowable. What is there to regret?Nevertheless, the dull ache of regret came upon me when Kary Mullis died without warning. I loved Kary for his sense of humor and his wit, and I will always cherish what he wrote in my copy of his book, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. And then Loren Lewis died without giving me a heads-up. Loren was never a father-figure; he was my outrageous older brother. He was bombastic and vain and he taught me how to get things done when I didn’t have any money, and he would have taken a bullet for me.And then Perry McKee walked over the horizon without a wink or a wave good-bye. Perry was extraverted and impulsive and he made everyone laugh. When we were 14, Perry decided the day had finally arrived that he should light a fart and become the world’s first jet-propelled human. He wanted me to hold the match for him but I vigorously declined, so Ernie Henry held the match as the rest of us stood anxiously outside the closed door of Perry’s windowless bathroom. It was Brother McKee’s deep conviction that the miracle of jet-propulsion should be observed in total darkness.When Perry bellowed like a bull and tumbled out the doorway, we knew that Ernie had held the match too close.Ernie Henry is gone now, too. The immortals from my past are disappearing.The last time I spoke to Kary Mullis, Loren Lewis, Perry McKee and Ernie Henry, I didn’t know that it would be the last time I spoke to them.My only regrets are the things I left unsaid.Please don’t read too much into these musings. I’m fine. Pennie is fine. No one is dying.It’s just that time of year. The green of the grass is soaking back into the earth and the leaves are turning red and orange. Children are gathering into rooms again where an adult tells them not to talk. Men are chasing a tapered leather ball as escaped convicts blow whistles and toss their handkerchiefs into the air. I look for Andy Griffith to ask if he wants to get a Big Orange drink, but Andy is nowhere to be found. It won’t be long before my lawn pulls a white blanket up to its chin, just outside my front door. The squirrel in his cap and the plants in burlap will all settle down for a long winter’s nap. And then Springtime will pierce the pale heart of winter with a shout of green and a blade of grass, and we will dress in bright colors for Easter.Kary Mullis opened the door of genetic research when he invented Polymerase Chain Reaction.Loren Lewis opened the future of a 15-year-old boy when he showed him how to be unafraid.Perry McKee and Ernie Henry had no regrets. It seemed like a good idea at the time.Roy H. WilliamsSteve Curtin is ranked as one of the top 30 customer service experts in the world. His clients include Carnival Cruise Line, NAPA Auto Parts, and TJ Maxx. Steve believes every owner and every manager needs to have “the conversation” with every employee about why their job matters, and why their company matters. “The NASA janitor wasn’t mopping floors; he was helping to send a man to the moon.” Imagine what would happen if your employees felt the same way about the greater purpose of the work they do in your company! Steve Curtin and roving reporter Rotbart talk about it at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Eighty-eight percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1955 are gone. Poof.Half of them withered because they had a manager in the role of CEO when they desperately needed a leader. The other half were destroyed by a leader when a manager could have held the company together and grown it incrementally.The most important role of a board of directors is to know when their company needs a leader and when it needs a manager.Managers prefer incremental change, evolution.Leaders prefer exponential change, revolution.Managers guard the status quo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”Leaders invent new ways of thinking. “If it ain’t broke, break it, so we can create something new.”Managers prefer a map and a path.Leaders prefer unexplored territory.Managers say, “Ready, Aim, Fire.”Leaders say “Ready, Fire, Aim.” But this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. When shooting a cannon, this is called finding your range.Managers focus on planning and execution.Leaders focus on improvisation and innovation.Managers make organizational charts.Leaders make messes.Managers are given authority over others.Leaders are voluntarily followed by others.Kodak, Blockbuster, MySpace, General Motors, and General Electric were overwhelmingly dominant in their categories until their Manager-CEO’s fell asleep while guarding the status quo.Do not think the internet killed K-Mart, Montgomery Wards, Sears, J.C. Penney, or Bed Bath & Beyond. Walmart sells all those same products and they’re still doing fine because they saw the marketplace rapidly changing in August, 2016 and responded by putting visionary leader Marc Lore in charge of Walmart’s US e-commerce operations.Amazon did $398.8 billion in 2021.Walmart did $488 billion.Managers mistakenly think they can lead.Leaders mistakenly think they can manage.I know only two men who can perform both functions. Dewey Jenkins is one of them.If I written those words during the 10 years Dewey and I worked together, it would have sounded like flattery. But now that he is retired and I have stepped away, I am free to speak the truth.Good mothers can also perform both functions. Every good mother is a miraculous manager and a visionary leader.I was raised by an extremely good mother and my sons were raised by another.Good managers know what to “protect at all costs.” They know what not to change.Bad managers look only for compliance and conformity, blind to the special abilities that hide within their employees. But good managers see those special abilities and call them to the surface where they can sparkle. A good manager encourages your special ability and uses it to maximum effect, while partnering you with someone who sparkles in the area where you are weak.When you see a legendary duo, you can be sure that a brilliant manager put them together.The genius of visionary leaders is that they charge full speed ahead when they see opportunity on the horizon. When they see a storm coming, they steer around it.Visionary leaders recognize what is no longer working and do hesitate to change it. Bang. Gone.If you want to listen to the inner thoughts of visionary leaders and understand how their minds work, there are only two books you need to read.Sam Walton: Made in America (John Huey and Sam Walton)Iacocca: An Autobiography (Lee Iacocca and William Novak)As a special bonus to yourself, take a look at – Where Have All the Leaders Gone? – a slim volume written by Lee Iacocca when he was 82 years old.I love that book.And I love you,...

Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a marvelous book about writing. In it, she says,“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”I’m going to attempt to do that today. I am going to attempt to write “from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth.”I hope I succeed, but you will have to be the judge.Another of my favorite paragraphs from Bird by Bird is when Anne Lamott says,“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”I have often quoted Anne’s friend because I believe his remarkable statement bears repeating: “You can safely assume that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”I wrote to you recently about my first job in radio. It was at a Christian station in Tulsa owned by a wonderful man name Stuart who lived in North Carolina. He was impossibly tall and thin and looked exactly like a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln.I had only been there a couple of years when Stuart flew to Tulsa, summoned everyone to the radio station, packed us all into the conference room and said, “People who work in Christian media often see and hear things that discourage them.” His face fell and he looked sad as he said, “And then they become bitter.”I could tell he was struggling to find the right words as he looked down at the ground. After a long silence he looked up into my eyes and said, “Promise me that you’ll never become bitter.”I looked into his eyes and nodded my head. One by one, he looked at every other employee until they nodded their head or said aloud, “I promise I’ll never become bitter.”When he had extracted that solemn promise from each of us, he drove back to the airport and flew home.It was a very short meeting that happened 40 years ago but I have never forgotten it.And I never became bitter.In later years I began to identify myself as “a follower of Jesus” rather than call myself a Christian, because “Christian” was coming to mean something that I don’t believe Jesus ever intended.I get uncomfortable when people sign God’s name to things Jesus never said.Thomas Jefferson, too, was uncomfortable with Christians who use the logic of Plato to extrapolate truths from the Bible. Platonists1 will argue, “If this statement in the Bible is true, then by extension this second thing is true. And if this second thing is true, then by extension this third thing is true.”I have been reading the personal correspondence of Thomas Jefferson in the national archives at founders.archives.govTwo hundred and six years ago – on October 16th, 1816 – George Logan wrote a letter to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, congratulating him for publishing,“a...

My friend is forever shouting about his Freedom. It is the only song he sings.Freedom is a good thing, but our love of freedom is why family sizes are shrinking. Children are a responsibility.Freedom and Responsibility are paired opposites, a duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.I had written only those few words when I received a request from the American Small Business Institute to answer a question from Glenn in Calgary; he wanted me to predict the Top Five Qualities of an Advertising Consultant in 2023.I had the Freedom to answer however I wanted. I could be flip, funny, cute, self-serving, dismissive, scholarly, insulting, pedantic, or predictable. My Freedom was unrestrained. But I also had the Responsibility to give Glenn a list of five specific, attainable goals that would make him and his clients more successful.I told Glenn the Top Five Qualities for 2023 would be these:Ability to write good ads. I’ve never seen a business fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” Businesses fail because they say the wrong thing.Knowledge of how to differentiate a business from its category. You must make your client’s business distinctive and memorable.Honesty. You must be willing to accept responsibility for the failure of your ad campaign.Courage to say what needs to be said to the business owner. This is how you avoid campaigns that fail.Wisdom to know that good advertising will not fix a broken business. Choose your clients carefully, Glenn.Depression and Joy are another duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.Pride – the inability to feel grateful – is what keeps us from feeling joy. The disembodied voice that tells us we need to be “proud, self-made men and women,” is the devil who robs us of our joy.Depression is unfocused anger. Joy is unfocused gratitude. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.If you look for reasons to be angry, you will find them. If you look for reasons to be grateful, you will find them.Don’t be angry. Be grateful.Justice and Mercy are a third duality. And the tug-of-war between them is intense.The only hard choices in life are the choices between two good things.Justice and Mercy are both good things. When you encounter the tug-of-war between them, which one do you favor?Opportunity and Security, a fourth duality.When Opportunity increases, Security declines. This sounds like Risk and Reward, but it’s not. If Risk and Reward were a duality, increasing your risk would decrease your reward. But increased risk of failure increases potential reward. This makes Risk and Reward a synchronous potentiality contained entirely within the realm of Opportunity.Ultimately, it all comes down to Choices.Our plan is always to make good choices, not bad choices. But most choices are neither good nor bad in the moment we make them. They become good or bad in hindsight. They become good or bad due to consequences. The outcome is never entirely clear until after the show is over.We learn more from our failures than we learn from our successes. Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.You cannot judge a person’s experience by their age. You can judge it only by what they have experienced. A person can have 30 years of experience, or they can 1 year of experience 30 times.Which will you have? Will you choose to embrace risk and take your beatings when you fail and learn hard lessons and win great victories? Opportunity is a good thing.But then again, so is Security.Roy H. Williams

I was the new kid in a new town, ­getting ready to start the third grade.We had moved into a rented house beyond the outer perimeter of Skiatook, Oklahoma. There were no other houses within sight, so there were no neighbors to visit, no new friends to meet, nothing to do except walk in circles.School had not yet started. Our house – like most houses back then – had no air conditioning.The Oklahoma air was too hot, too dusty to breathe.That’s when Indy showed up and introduced himself.He said, “What are you doing?”“Walking in circles.”“Can I do it with you?“Sure.”I wasn’t surprised that Indy could talk, and I wasn’t surprised that he could walk into photographs and paintings and talk to the people in them. When he walked out of those images, he would tell me the most amazing stories.Indy suggested I should become a writer.The following summer, I was the new kid in another new town – Broken Arrow – but we had neighbors and a park and a house with air conditioning. Mrs. Fisher would read to the class for about 15 minutes each day while Indy slept beneath my desk. She read Charlotte’s Web and Way Down Cellar and then she told us to write a poem about anything we wanted.I wrote a poem about a dog.Everyone was impressed, even Mrs. Fisher.Pennie and I were 19 and had been married about a year when I launched “Daybreak,” a daily, prerecorded message of encouragement you could hear if you knew the right telephone number to call. You couldn’t leave a message because it was an “announce-only” machine that Pennie and I leased from the telephone company for $50 a month. I never told anyone my name or how they might be able to contact me. “Daybreak” was just the voice of a stranger on the telephone, talking to you as though he knew you. I woke before dawn each day and spent a couple of hours writing and recording a new 2-minute message and then I went to work.Fax machines had not yet been invented. The internet wasn’t even a fantasy.“Daybreak” grew to the point where Pennie and I had to add a roll-over line and lease a second answering machine from the telephone company because too many people were getting a busy signal when they called.One thousand different “Daybreak” messages were written and recorded in 1,000 days between 1977 and 1980.“Daybreak” cost us about $130 month which is a lot of money when you make $3.35 an hour before taxes.With 25% of our income going down those telephone lines each day, I got a second job monitoring an automated radio station in Tulsa once a week. I was given the shift that no one wanted. I went to work each Friday night at midnight and worked until 11AM on Saturday morning. Indy would always go with me to keep me company.I had been there for more than a year when the General Manager walked in one Saturday morning about 9AM with a few notes scribbled on the back of a napkin about “Amir’s Persian Imports,” a local place that sold Persian rugs. He asked me to write an ad for them, so I wrote a 60-second story that took listeners into the sky on a magic carpet ride.The ad performed well. Amir was impressed. My boss was impressed enough to offer me a full-time job.Indy just smiled and winked at me.Roy H. Williams

You’ve heard it said, and might even have said it yourself, “Knowing what I know now, if I had it all to do over again, I would…”Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that you, “have it all to do over again.” You can return to any day in your past to begin reliving your life differently, but you must do it without “knowing what you know now.” You will have a second chance at a different outcome, but you must return to that day with no memory of what you did, or how it turned out.Will you trade your current circumstances and relationships for the “new and different choices” a second you will probably make? Think about it. If you travel to a time before your child was born, that child is not likely to be born. Another child, perhaps, but not that one.In fact, the jobs you get, the friends you make, and where you live are likely to be different the second time around.“Having it all to do over again” might create a better future for you, or it might create a worse one.Are you ready for the surprising second half of this game?Here it is: all of this has already happened. The original you was given the opportunity to return to any specific day in your past and THIS is the day to which you chose to return.Everything that originally happened after this moment has been erased. Your second chance has now begun.Why did you choose to return to this day? What different decision did you hope you would make?Is it something that you can decide today, or is it a choice you will need to make a number of days from now?Are you here for a second chance to have a conversation that never happened? To schedule a medical check-up before it is too late, or to take some other action that you deeply wish you would have taken?The only thing we can know for sure is this:“With every decision we make, we pass a point of no return and wonder what might have been.”Go. Live your life. Quit second-guessing yourself.Remorse is not where you want to live.Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY – Let’s spend a day together.The Wizard Academy reunion is October 15. You should come.

I was writing about third gravitating bodies and I needed to know the year that Henri Poincaré wrote The Third Body Problem and won that huge cash prize from King Oscar II of Sweden.I typed “third gravitating bodies” into the Google search block. At the top of the results page was a featured snippet and something about it looked familiar. When I glanced at the source link, I saw that it was a Monday Morning Memo I had written recently.Evidently, Google thinks I know far more about third gravitating bodies than I actually do, because they seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am an expert in the field of theoretical physics, and I can assure you that I am not.But that’s not what freaked me out.When I clicked the source link, it took me to a Monday Morning Memo I wrote a few months ago. I had a clear memory of writing that memo, and for some strange reason I have a particularly clear memory of creating the image at the top of the page. I created that image by selecting three different magazine covers over which I overlaid an image of the Broadway cast of Hamilton.My memory of writing that memo and creating that artwork felt like it was only four or five weeks ago, but I knew that it was more likely four or five months.What freaked me out was when I looked at the date of that memo.I has been almost 6 years since I wrote it.I felt like Rip Van Winkle.I looked up at the door in the room where I was sitting, and waited for Rod Serling to step into that open doorframe. I could already hear his voice.“Consider if you will, the man who stared so deeply into the void of his computer, that when he looked up, he was 6 years older. There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call The Twilight Zone.”My friend and business partner Ray Seggern spent yesterday afternoon with me. Ray is old enough to have an adult daughter who has completed college and worked for companies like Luis Vuitton and Rolls Royce and who will soon be married. Ray is 9 years younger than me.Shortly after he arrived for our meeting, he said, “You know how time seems to pass more quickly as you get older?”I nodded, so he continued, “What’s the word for that? Everyone says that a year seems like a long time to a 5-year-old because it’s 20 percent of his lifetime, but that same year goes by 10 times faster for a 50-year old man because it’s only 2 percent of his lifetime. What’s the word for that?”Ray and I sat and thought and scratched our heads and looked at each other for a long while.Here’s why I’m writing to you today: What’s the word for that?If you know – or even if you just made up a good word for it and are willing to share ­– send the word to [email protected] name will appear in the dictionary we are compiling.More about that in the rabbit hole.Indy says Aroo.Roy H. Williams

Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy.When Leo Tolstoy was 54, he wrote a book about the ethical teachings1 of Jesus as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. For the rest of his life, Tolstoy advocated the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change.Gandhi – the person we associate with peaceful, non-violent resistance – was 12 years old when Tolstoy’s book was published.Martin Luther King – the man who popularized peaceful, non-violent resistance in America – would not be born for another 45 years.In 1854, during the Crimean War, a British light brigade was ordered to charge the cannons of the Russian Empire.A “light brigade” carried only light weapons, such as sabers and pistols.Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about this famous headlong charge toward certain death:Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.“Forward, the Light Brigade!Charge for the guns!” he said.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.“Forward, the Light Brigade!”Was there a man dismayed?Not though the soldier knewSomeone had blundered.Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.Cannon to right of them,Cannon to left of them,Cannon in front of themVolleyed and thundered;Stormed at with shot and shell,Boldly they rode and well,Into the jaws of Death,Into the mouth of hellRode the six hundred…Leo Tolstoy was a Russian artillery officer in that war and was forever changed by it.That war – the first modern war – led Tolstoy to the Sermon on the Mount and convinced him of the truth of Jesus’ words.“Blessed are the peacemakers… blessed are the meek… blessed are the merciful…”Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 3 times, but each time he wrote to the committee and asked them to remove his name from consideration.When the public grew angry that Tolstoy never received the Nobel, he confessed that he had privately rejected it and wrote,“First, it has saved me the predicament of managing so much money, because such money, in my opinion, only brings evil. Secondly, I felt very honored to receive such sympathy from people I have not even met.”Tolstoy was loved by everyone except religious leaders.Remember that book he wrote in 1882 about the ethical teachings of Jesus? It did not appear in Russia for 24 years because it was blocked by the Orthodox Church, the leaders of the Christian faith in Russia. They were worried that Tolstoy might have been talking about them when he wrote,“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”The religious leaders became angry again when Tolstoy wrote,“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”Mark Twain, a contemporary of Tolstoy, may well have been making a joke about religious leaders in America when he wrote,“By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.”Tolstoy saw Jesus and his teachings as gold surrounded by the mud of religiosity. He said,“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”This reminds me of Michelangelo’s description of how he carved an angel from a block of marble:“I just removed everything that was not angel.”I will leave you now,to consider all that you have been told,and wash the mud from the gold,and remove everythingthat is not angel.Roy H....

Predictability is the silent assassin of persuasion.When static electricity saturates the sky, lift the lightning rod of the new, the surprising, and the different and let the concert begin. The booming of the big bass drum will make the draperies tremble as the lasers light up the night.Give that anxious electricity something to focus on. Win the attention of the storm. Don’t tell us, “It was a dark and stormy night.”Light it up.When your jagged blade rips a gash in the sky and makes the darkness cry, we will lift our faces into the wet and laugh until the grass is green again.Light it up.We rarely raise our faces from these glittering screens because you rarely have anything new to say. We stare at the electricity behind this glass because it is always new, always surprising, always different.Look into our eyes and you will see the static electricity of our boredom is always there, always anxious, always looking for an outlet. Lift your lightning rod into that darkness. Set our world ablaze with the unexpected. We will reward you with our attention.Pixies, faeries, sprites and elves run naked through the darkness, laughing at everything, giggling with glee, eyes twinkling, feet flying, they run with abandon, afraid of nothing.What are you afraid of?Do you read boring, fact-filled fluff? Or do you read fluff made of different stuff?As you read, so will you write.When colorful, unexpected words fill your sight, you have raised your ink pen into the night and filled it with ink of electric light.Now write.When you have nothing to say, don’t let anyone convince you to say it.But when you have something to say, don’t say it regular and tidy with tucked-in corners. Say it with the rhythm of faeries running naked through the night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Where you begin is unimportant. How you proceed is all that matters.‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even the faerie hiding behind the curtains with a match in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other.This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.So tell me, what happens next?Roy H. Williams

Rugged individualism is the essence of America.It is also the reason that we, as a people, feel isolated and lonely.Our focus on personal, individual success is the reason we feel disconnected from one another. This is happening even in our marriages according to Ian Kerner, author of the book, So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, and Terrence Real, author of Us: Getting Past Me and You.“Individualism is not a natural fact; it has a history. In American Colonial days, society was communalism on a small scale. It was about farms and small towns and small villages. When you lived face to face with your neighbor, it was a palpable reality that the good of all was the good for each of us. Civic virtue was the force that went beyond individual gratification. It was part of being a civilized person that you had a sense of civic virtue. With the Industrial Revolution, and the myth of the self-made man, all of that went by the wayside and it was each man for himself.”– Terrence RealWe are living in a very conflicted time because most of us hold two conflicting beliefs. (1.) We believe in a culture of individual achievement, “ME”, (2.) but as we approach the zenith of a societal “WE”, there is a desire to find our tribe, to join, to belong, to work as a group for the common good.Next year is the zenith of our current “WE.” It happens once every 80 years.The previous “WE” zenithed in 1943 when America was united against Hitler. We threw ourselves into something bigger than ourselves; something we believed in, something that satisfied our need to belong and make a difference.And now you know why we see all those deeply impassioned splinter groups in the news each week.Here’s the good news: you can harness that same “need to belong” to recruit and retain good employees.Good employees are attracted to companies with a strong culture. They are looking for a company they can believe in, a place where they can belong and make a difference.When you want to strengthen your company culture, you need to publish your Unifying Principles. I have previously called these your “We Believe” statements.Publishing them is the easy part. The difficult part is that you have to live them.About eight minutes into his famous TED-X talk at Puget Sound, Simon Sinek says,“The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”Indy Beagle will tell you about Culture Wizards in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

I’m telling you up front that I’m not sharing anything valuable or useful today, but don’t let that keep you from continuing.Today we’re going to talk about 7 guys named Francis.Alan Lightman is not one of those 7 guys.Lightman is a past professor at Harvard and a current professor at MIT and a famous physicist who was responsible for establishing MIT’s policy that requires all students to be trained in speaking and writingduring each of their four years as an undergraduate.Alan’s father Richard Lightman was a movie theater owner who played a major role in desegregating movie theaters in the South in 1962. Richard taught Alan how to get things done and make a difference.In his book, A Sense of the Mysterious, Alan writes,“Not long ago, sitting at my desk at home, I suddenly had the horrifying realization that I no longer waste time.”After he wrote that sentence, he wrote an entire book titled, In Praise of Wasting Time.That’s what you and I are doing right now. We are wasting time in a way that will invigorate you and cause you to think new and different thoughts.You are about to jump out of a deep rut in the road that has been your life.We are at the intersection of Monotony and Surprise. Are you ready to jump?Francis Scott Fitzgerald is the Francis we quote in the first hour of the 3-day Magical Worlds class at Wizard Academy.“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”Francis Ford Coppola gave us Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy.Francis “Frank” Sinatra gave Indy Beagle the song “It Was a Very Good Year.” Indy told me he plans to share it with you in the rabbit hole.Sir Francis Drake was a contemporary of Shakespeare and an explorer and a pirate for England, and a seafaring thorn in the side of King Philip II of Spain, who offered a reward for his capture that would be nearly $9 million today. Queen Elizabeth gave Francis a knighthood.Francis “James” Cameron gave us Avatar and Titanic, the first and third highest-grossing films of all time, bringing in $2.85 billion and $2.19 billion respectively.Francis “Frank” Zappa was an iconic musician, composer, singer and songwriter whose work was characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, musical virtuosity and the comedic satire of American culture. His kids are Dweezil, Moon Unit, Diva Muffin, and Ahmet Emuukha.Francis Bacon is my favorite Francis. Like Francis Drake, he was a contemporary of Shakespeare. Bacon was a statesman, a philosopher, and a master of the English tongue. After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Francis Bacon served as lord chancellor of England for King James I, for whom the 1611 King James translation of the Bible was named.These are some of my favorite memories of Francis Bacon:“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”“A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.”“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact (man.)”“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”“Nothing does more hurt in a state than when cunning men pass for wise.”“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.”“Where philosophy is based on reason, faith is based on...

Gerald was an unwanted third son to his father, so his mother took Gerald on long walks each Saturday night so they would not be available when his father came home drunk. To avoid a beating, Gerald and his mother would wait outside in all weathers until his father fell asleep.Gerald was 16 when his father died, so he quit school to help support his mother by singing in the London subways for tips.Gerald was a Scottish introvert who became famous, but who could have been much more so.I closed last week’s Monday Morning Memo with a famous line from one of Gerald’s songs: “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”Some people surround themselves with a low outer wall, and a high inner wall. It’s easy to get to know them, but hard to get to know them well.Gerald was the opposite; he had a high outer wall and a low inner wall. It was nearly impossible to meet him, but those he allowed to get to know him, knew him well enough to know that he was attracted to the comfort of the familiar.New places and new faces were emotionally exhausting to Gerald, so he drank to hide from them.Gerald wrote,“Winding your way down on Baker Street, light in your head and dead on your feet, well, another crazy day, you’ll drink the night away, and forget about everything. This city desert makes you feel so cold. It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul, and it’s taken you so long, to find out you were wrong, when you thought it held everything.”In the words of his daughter, Martha,“The soaring saxophone solo perfectly captures the endurance and triumph of the human spirit in adversity, the sun rising out of the darkness and lighting the way once again… ‘and when you wake up it’s a new morning, the sun is shining it’s a new morning, and you’re going, you’re going home’.”On that same album was a song called Right Down the Line.“You know I need your love, you’ve got that hold over me. Long as I’ve got your love, you know that I’ll never leave. When I wanted you to share my life, I had no doubt in my mind. And it’s been you, woman, Right down the line.”Both songs were on a 1978 album called City to City.That album almost didn’t get made. Gerald was not a people person.Paul Simon openly admired Gerald’s song-writing ability.Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney both wanted to work with Gerald, but Gerald said “no.”According to his manager, City to City was rejected by several record label executives because of Gerald’s defensive abrasiveness. The only reason they got a record deal was because Artie Mogull, the United Artists representative, “was in a rush and never met him.”When Rolling Stone interviewed Gerald, he said,“To be a ‘star’ in inverted commas – that is probably the last thing I want. I knew I’d written a good bunch of songs … I remember thinking I’d be pleased if City to City sold 50,000 copies.”City to City became a worldwide phenomenon, selling over 5.5 million copies.Hiding from people because his outer wall wasn’t quite high enough, the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, drank himself to death.Hiding from people because his outer wall wasn’t quite high enough, the great American novelist, Jack Kerouac, drank himself to death.Hiding from people because his outer wall wasn’t quite high enough, the great Scottish songwriter, Gerry Rafferty, drank himself to death.His daughter, Martha Rafferty, gathered a collection of her father’s unpublished recordings during the lockdown of 2020 and posted them, with these comments, on a website.“His evolution as a songwriter was intimately connected to his love and joy of singing. Singing was...

The long-ago Greeks had two words for time: Kronos (χρόνος) and Kairos (καιρός).Kronos is chronological time, sequential time, the metered time of the regimented left hemisphere of the brain.Kairos is an inflection point, a time-window of indeterminate length during which something consequential happens.On the other side of the Kairos, things are forever different.Kronos time is quantitative and accurate.Kairos time is qualitative and important.The thing about moments of Kairos is that you can see them most clearly when they are behind you.We make decisions every day, and with every choice we make we reach a point of no return, and wonder what might have been.But I think you will agree that some decisions have longer arms than others. They are more consequential. They carry heavier Kairos and more profoundly affect our future.I believe we will be swimming in Kairos moments during 2022, 2023, and 2024. I can see their silhouettes on the horizon at twilight. Walk outside this evening, just as the sun disappears below the western edge of the world, and consider the silhouettes of events that have not yet happened.These moments of consequence float like icebergs on a rising tide of misinformation, and are blown toward us by the breath of newscasters. One-by-one, they will soon begin to arrive.The frustrating reality is that we won’t be making these pivotal decisions individually; we will be making them collectively.Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.Roy H. WilliamsRoving reporter Rotbart is wandering the wide world with his family, but he and MondayMorningRadio will return to us after Labor Day.

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.In 1981, Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his documentation of brain lateralization, which basically says that we don’t have 1 brain divided into 2 hemispheres as much as we have 2 separate, competing brains.The LEFT hemisphere is the home of rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning. Think of it as the Intellect; the Mind. It puts you in touch with this world and leans toward suspicion and doubt.But the RIGHT hemisphere does none of those things. Think of it as the Heart. It understands the six sub-languages in the language of music; pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, musical interval and musical contour. The right hemisphere puts you in touch with a world that could be, should be, ought to be, someday.HOPE is alive and well in the right hemisphere of your brain. It understands symbols, and assigns meanings to shapes and colors. The logic of the right hemisphere is intuition, gut feelings, and hunches.Your body contains 100 million sensory receptors that allow you to see, hear, touch, taste and smell physical reality. But your brain contains 10,000 billion synapses. This means you are approximately 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist, than a world that does.Call 1-800-Got-Junk.Life is happierwhen it’s less cluttered.Your house will be bigger.Your teeth will be whiter.Angels will sing.You’ll be a better dancer.Magical Thinking is a style of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.Now this is where it gets really interesting; the right hemisphere of your brain doesn’t know fact from fiction or true from false. That’s the left brain’s job. This is why you can enjoy books, movies, and TV shows that you know are fiction.Magical Thinking is a style of writing that is full of HOPE.Magical Thinking doesn’t talk about the frustration of a situation or the pain of a problem. It illuminates a happy world in which anything is possible.Magical Thinking offers the customer an effortless, frustration-free solution.Employees, your boss wants you to know:“If you answer the phones for our company or knock on the doors of customers, please know that you are a vitally important part of the advertising and marketing team. Our customers expect you to be the living embodiment of our advertising; cheerful and helpful and magically able to make their problem disappear. We will become giants if we act like the company we claim to be in our advertising.”Magical ThinkingmakesMagical AdvertisingmakesHappy CustomersmakesBusiness Grow.Do you want to employ the power of Magical Thinking?Roy H. WilliamsAccording to Lynette Smith, July 4th is the perfect time for writing personal, heartfelt letters to colleagues, family members, friends, and others who have enriched your life. Lynette is a letter-writing evangelist who has authored multiple books on the art and impact of letters that will be kept and saved and savored for decades. “If you want to demonstrate genuine appreciation,” Lynette tells roving reporter Rotbart, “only a letter will do.” MondayMorningRadio.com

It’s impossible not to like someone who likes you.This is why the secret of success is to just keep showing up.My friend Brett was studying theater in college until the day a professor told him to lie on his back, close his eyes, and “breathe blue.” Brett did his best, gave up, got up, walked out.Brett did not become an actor. But he did become a highly successful political consultant.In Brett’s own words, here’s how it happened:“I was looking at the bulletin board in the hallway of my dorm when I saw a little poster that said, ‘All the pizza and beer you can eat and drink if you work 2 hours on the telephone.’ I like pizza, I like beer, so I went to the address at the appointed time and made calls to ‘get out the vote’ for a political party. I didn’t care about politics at all, but I cared a lot about pizza and beer, so I came back night after night. They thought I was really dedicated.”“After several months of showing up, they invited me to work at an out-of-town rally. I went along and noticed the food is better when you go out-of-town. So I kept doing out-of-town rallies until someone asked me if I could write some ads for a campaign. One thing led to another, and here I am. Go figure.”The only unique part of Brett’s story is the part about breathing blue. The rest of it – the part about always showing up – is the world’s most common path to success.Brett quit showing up for acting classes. But he never quit showing up at political events.You will become the thing for which you keep showing up.“Believe in yourself” and “Never give up” are motivational clichés. They sound good, but they give you no real action to take. Do you want to succeed? Just keep showing up.We hear a lot about the value of persistence and determination, but the way to demonstrate those qualities is to just keep showing up.The most important time to show up, is when you don’t feel like showing up.When everyone else has dropped out, faded away, and quit, you are the king of the mountain.In his final speech at the end of his long and wonderful life, Paul Harvey talked about the importance of never failing to show up. He said, “Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.”When you want your company to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they need what you sell, just keep showing up. It’s easy to do. The problem is that most advertisers will choose to reach 100% of the people, but convince them only 10% of the way, due to not enough repetition.They didn’t “show up” long enough to become a permanent fixture in the mind.That same money could have convinced 10% of the people 100% of the way, but most advertisers aren’t willing to do that because they worry about who they are “leaving out.”I’ve got news for you: You don’t have enough money to reach everyone. Limit your focus to only that number of people you can reach with relentless repetition.Keep showing up.It works in relationships.It works in business.It works in advertising.Just.Keep.Showing.Up.

My partner Kyle started a non-profit called “Neighbor in Need” after a developer made a comment that caused Kyle to become concerned about all the elderly people in his neighborhood who didn’t have the money to repair their homes, buy hot water heaters, replace air conditioners, or fix roof leaks. So Kyle decided to do something about it.What Kyle did was new, surprising, and different.That’s why it worked.If you want to bore people, just say what they expected you to say and do what they expected you to do. It works every time.You might even see them fall asleep.I have a friend who is building a condo tower in a town with a population of less than 100,000 people. He called a few days ago, laughing.He had hired a worldwide, world-famous company to manage the sale of the residential units in his building. They made a presentation to him about the “tried-and-true marketing plan” they intended to use.My friend said, “No, I’m going to ask my buddy to write me a series of radio ads. I’m planning to spend a small fraction of what you’re telling me I need to spend.”These professionals, understandably, began to vibrate with panic. “But we’ve tried radio and it doesn’t work! We’ve tried it again and again and it doesn’t work! You need to follow our plan!”My friend told them that radio advertising – quote – “works only as good as the ads you write.”Later, when they actually heard the radio ads, their panic rose to whole new level. The language and perspective of the ads was new, surprising, and different. And those three words can often mean, “experimental, reckless, and dangerous.”Things that are new, surprising, and different never feel as reliable as traditional wisdom.Don’t get me wrong; I believe in bringing the best of the past forward. I believe it to the core of my soul. In my heart, I am a traditionalist. But the problem with traditional wisdom is that it is often more tradition than wisdom.The problem with traditional wisdom in advertising is that it creates ads that feel familiar. And familiarity breeds contempt. Remember what I said earlier? “If you want to bore people, just say what they expected you to say and do what they expected you to do.”People hate ads that are predictable.The real estate marketers begged him not to air the crazy radio ads. They urged him to consider the story of how – in a much bigger city – they were able to convince nearly 1,500 people to register so that they might have a chance to buy a condo unit the moment they became available.Real estate roll-out campaigns like these typically span 56 days. The best they had ever done in 56 days– with a massive online push and billboards that blanketed a major city – was about 1,500 registrations.My friend was laughing because we were at day 14 of our radio push and our “experimental, reckless, and dangerous” radio ads had already generated more than 1,400 registrations and would soon top fifteen hundred.I wrote four ads and only the first of the four has been aired.I believe the second and third ads are the strongest.So now you know why my friend was laughing.I want you to do me three favors:1. Put things in your ads that are new, surprising, and different.Delight the public. Be remarkable.2. Quit thinking that the secret of success is to – quote – “reach the right people.”3. Slap the shit out of anyone who says to you, “No one listens to the radio anymore.”Indy has a wonderful rabbit hole prepared for you. To enter the rabbit hole, just click the image of Indy Beagle at the top of this page. Each click of an image takes you one page deeper.

The ancient Greeks understood psychology a lot better than they understood science.Hippocrates, the father of the Hippocratic Oath, believed that our information-gathering and decision-making processes are determined by an imbalance of 4 bodily fluids – red blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – two of which have never existed in the form that Hippocrates theorized.But the four basic temperaments that Hippocrates associated with these four fluids have lived on to be verified, codified, dignified and personified by screenwriters and novelists and social scientists* around the world. Hippocrates called these temperaments Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.More than 400 years ago, Shakespeare depicted the full range of human behaviors and character types by embracing the original theories of Hippocrates. The National Library of Medicine has an interesting online exhibit about it.We see these four basic temperaments in ourselves, our family, our friends, and all the most interesting characters in every form of story-telling:The Wizard of OzLion (sanguine) Scarecrow (choleric) Dorothy (melancholic) and Tin Man (phlegmatic)Archie ComicsArchie (sanguine) Veronica (choleric) Betty (melancholic) and Jughead (phlegmatic)I Love LucyRicky (sanguine) Lucy (choleric) Fred (melancholic) Ethel (phlegmatic)Gilligan’s IslandGilligan (sanguine) the Skipper (choleric) the Professor (melancholic) Mr. Howell (phlegmatic)Star TrekCaptain Kirk (sanguine) Spock (choleric) Scotty (melancholic) Bones (phlegmatic)Magnum P.I.T.C. (sanguine) Tom (choleric) Higgins (melancholic), and Rick (phlegmatic)FriendsPhoebe and Joey (sanguine) Monica (choleric) Ross (melancholic) Rachel and Chandler (phlegmatic)SeinfeldKramer (sanguine) Elaine (choleric) George (melancholic) Jerry (phlegmatic)FrasierRoz (sanguine) Frasier (choleric) Niles (melancholic) Daphne (phlegmatic)The Golden GirlsBlanche (sanguine) Sophia (choleric) Dorothy (melancholic) Rose (phlegmatic)Sex and The CitySamantha (sanguine) Miranda (choleric) Charlotte (melancholic) Carrie (phlegmatic)Schitt’s CreekMoira (sanguine) Johnny (choleric) David (melancholic) Alexis (phlegmatic)Desperate HousewivesSusan (sanguine) Gabrielle (choleric) Bree (melancholic) Lynette (phlegmatic)Unbreakable Kimmy SchmidtKimmy (Sanguine) Jacqueline (Choleric) Titus (Melancholic) Lillian (Phlegmatic)Big Bang TheoryHoward (sanguine) Sheldon (choleric) Raj (melancholic) Leonard (phlegmatic)The OfficeMichael (sanguine) Dwight (choleric) Pam (melancholic) Jim (phlegmatic)Game of ThronesArya (sanguine) Sansa (choleric) Jon (melancholic) Bran (phlegmatic)Entertainment is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.An understanding of the predictable frictions between these four temperaments – and their deep and abiding need for one another – is the basis of every form of long-term entertainment. The novelists who win the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes know this. The screenwriters of all the hit TV series know this. And the ad writers who make a difference know this.When you become intrigued with an interesting fictional character, you spend time with them,...

I made you a promise on November 22 in a Monday Morning Memo called “Time Travel”.This was how that memo began:“My friend Don has a time machine. He takes me with him sometimes. You should come, too! Every person who rides in Don’s time machine is changed by it.”“The United States Department of Justice has booked passage on Don’s time machine for countless prison inmates. State and local governments and hundreds of rehab centers have booked journeys for people as well. Thirty-five million in all.”“Each trip through time begins with a series of words…”I then described two different types of storytelling and the purpose and effect of each. And to give myself a little “third-party credibility,” I quoted Professor Steven Pinker of MIT and Harvard.When the word-count of that Monday Morning Memo indicated that we were approaching our destination and it was time to land, I instructed you to store your tray-table and return your seat to its full, upright and locked position. Then I told you something you probably didn’t know:“Every word in the English language is composed of just 44 sounds called phonemes. We arrange these into clusters called words which we string together in rapid succession so that others can see in their minds what we see in ours.”And then I talked about the Book of Beginnings. Do you you remember?“In the first chapter of Genesis, God says, ‘Let there be this’ and ‘Let there be that’ for 25 verses, and then in verse 26 he says, ‘Let us make mankind in our own image.'”“According to that ancient story, God spoke the world into existence and then gave you and me the power to do the same. When you, as a storyteller, speak a world into existence in the hearts and minds of your listeners, you are doing the work of God.”“Don Kuhl has spent the past 30 years unleashing the power of storytelling to help 35 million people find peace, hope, and happiness, and now he has written a book for you and me. It will be published early next year.”And then I promised you,“I’ll make sure you know when it’s available.”Roy H. WilliamsThat book is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. It’s called “Changing with Aging: Little Stories, Big Lessons.”Don sent preview copies to several people I know. Everyone who has received a copy has been enchanted and enthralled by the stories in Don’s book, as I knew they would be. Don is a remarkable teller of short, bright, heart-warming stories that overflow with honesty, transparency, and wisdom.Peter Vegso, the original publisher of that record-breaking series of books, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” is such a fan of Don’s stories that he jumped at the chance to publish Don’s book.I have fulfilled my promise. I told you the book is available for pre-order. Do what seems to you good.My partner Johnny Molson was asked to speak to a 4th grade class last week about his career as an ad writer.When he left the school, Johnny texted me to say that two of the children had asked remarkably delightful questions. The first child asked,“Have you ever cringed at your own commercials?”Johnny answered yes, that he always cringes at the predictable commercials his clients occasionally demand that he write, but no, he never cringes at the happy ads that flow from the depths of his heart through his fingertips and then onto the radio and television airwaves. That’s when the second child asked,“Do you have a criminal record?”A...

A successful cluster manager was one of 36 people in a class I taught 2 months ago. When we went into Q & A, he asked for suggestions about what to do with a poorly performing radio station in his cluster.He expected me to suggest a format change, or a clever promotional campaign using billboards and TV. Or he may have thought I was going to give him some half-baked idea about how he could use social media to build an affinity group around the station’s format, because these are the kinds of suggestions people make when a radio station wants to attract a bigger audience.Why is it that everyone assumes the way to increase a radio station’s revenues is to increase the size of its audience?I said, “I’ll answer your question if you want me to, but I need to warn you that my answer is extremely simple, it always works, and it’s going to embarrass the hell out of you that you haven’t already done it.” Then I smiled and asked, “Are you sure you want me to answer in front of all these people?”Since he was the only broadcaster in a room full of business owners and the whole group had bonded pretty tightly during the previous 2 days and nights together, he just smiled back at me and said, “Bring it.”I wrote something on a piece of paper, then folded it and laid it on the table in front of him. “Game on.”The other 35 people in the room clapped and cheered because they knew we were about to have fun.He said, “It’s my number 6 station. My top 3 stations are doing fantastic and numbers 4 and 5 do pretty well, but number 6 just kind of limps along.”“Does it make a profit?”“Yes, but nothing special.”“How many units per hour do you feel would be the right spot load on that station?”He said he’d like to keep it to just 14 units per hour.I said, “6AM to midnight, 7 days a week, 14 units per hour yields 1,764 ads per week.”Next question: “Based on your current audience size, name a spot rate you would be happy to get on that station if every advertiser bought equal daypart distribution across 4 dayparts, morning drive, mid-day, afternoon drive, and evenings until midnight.”He named a modest price per ad.I said, “I’m a local business owner, I’m going to buy 40 ads per week, every week for 52 weeks, and I insist that my 40 ads get equal daypart distribution 6a to midnight. I want morning drive, mid-day, afternoon drive, and evenings until midnight, just like we talked about; none of that R.O.S.* crap. Got it?”He said, “Got it.”I said, “During the next 12 months, I’m going to become a household word to a whole lot of people. Frequency and consistency! That’s the right way to use radio! Forty ads per week for 52 weeks is going to make my business the one your audience thinks of immediately – and feels the best about – whenever they or any of their friends need what I sell.”Next question: “On your #6 station, what’s going to be my 1-week net reach with a weekly 3-frequency, 52 weeks in a row?”The man knew his station, so he was able to name the approximate net reach my schedule would deliver each week. It was a net reach that could make a real difference for any advertiser. I said, “Never let an advertiser compromise frequency and consistency. If they don’t want to do radio right, they don’t get to be on this station.”He said, “But that’s not how advertisers buy radio in my town.”I said, “We don’t need to convince the whole world. We just need to find 44 small business owners who can understand that this is the right way to use radio. We’re going to explain it to them and answer their questions until we have found 44 business owners smart enough to buy 40 ads per week with equal daypart distribution 6AM to midnight.”Then I reminded him how little money those 40 ads per week were going to cost those 44 advertisers each month. I asked, “How many businesses...

What you do today is important, because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.What will you do today?“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”– Wes JacksonI knew a man who used to say, “I don’t ever get my hopes up. That way, I’m never disappointed.”If I had been the executor of his estate, his gravestone would say: “He had potential.”I often write about Identity, Purpose, and Adventure:Identity: Who am I?Purpose: Why am I here?Adventure: What must I overcome?Without trouble, there is no adventure.That being said, children and grandchildren are the most wonderful adventure.“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries: avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, non-redeemable. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell.” – C. S. LewisMy friend J.P. Engelbrecht sent me a text last week,“Finally read A Gentleman in Moscow. What a lovely book! Thank you for the recommendation.”For those who have not read it, A Gentleman in Moscow is about an older man who becomes, through no choice of his own, the protector and caregiver of a little girl. It is truly a remarkable book.Now that I think about it, Little Orphan Annie is essentially that same story.Many years ago, Pennie and I loved watching Anne of Green Gables (1985) when it was available on TV. Right now we’re watching the updated version, Anne With an E. Basically, it’s about an elderly brother and sister who become, through no choice of their own, the protectors and caregivers of…Oh, I guess it’s the same story as the other two.“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”– Albert SchweitzerTo protect and equip and encourage others is what each of us was born to do.Who are you protecting?If you are a not a protector, you need one.What are you equipped to do?If you are not doing it, now would be a great time to start.Who do you encourage?Let that be the personwho decides what to carveon your tombstone.Roy H. WilliamsA Young Brian Scudamore had a series of private chats with a man who took $1,000 and turned it into a personal net worth of $3.5 billion. Simon Sinek told Brian his deepest insights the night he slept on Brian’s sofa. In Brian’s new book, you’ll meet an NBA superstar, a past president of Starbucks, a British advertising tycoon, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics as they wander on and off the pages like movie stars on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. Wait! I just saw Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Dr. Seuss, and Charles Schwab. Roving reporter Rotbart talks to mega-famous Brian Scudamore, a longtime client of the wizard, on today’s happy and hilarious episode of MondayMorningRadio.com!

I write advertising because I’m good at math.According to my calculations at age 18, the odds of making a living as an ad writer were 117,682% higher than the likelihood that I could make a living as a poet.But really, poems and ads are the same thing.Good poems promote a new perspective in a brief, tight economy of words.Good ads promote a new perspective in a brief, tight economy of words.The objective of both is to get you to see something differently.Poets and ad writers want to alter your perception. To do this, they use words that cause you to hallucinate; to see something that isn’t really there. They want you to look into their magic mirror and see yourself less worried, happier, and beaming with light.Every generation worries about what the next generation seems to have forgotten.Perhaps I am an outlier even among my own generation, but I have long been concerned about how few people today understand the purpose of the arts.I am frustrated that so few understand the differences between the heart and mind.I am broken-hearted that so few know the basic stories of the Bible.“Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God;But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.”– Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1857Using the megaphone of poetry to whisper to us from 165 years ago, Dizzy Lizzy Browning is referring to the reaction of Moses in the desert of Midian when he saw a bush on fire in the distance that was never consumed.Moses turned aside to see it more closely. Looking into the glow, Moses heard a voice and took off his shoes because he knew he was in a special place.Elizabeth Barrett Browning is telling us that wonders are all around us, if only we would open our eyes. She is saying, “Stop. Notice. Go to the place. Realize that it is special.”How is that not an ad?When you know the basic stories of the Bible and the ancient Greeks, you see them echoed in the biggest movies, the best-selling novels, and the top-rated television shows.When you know those stories, you can use them as templates in communications of your own.These are stories that have proven to be magnetic, memorable, and persuasive. Note that phrase: “proven to be.”Repurpose the proven.In a movie directed by Oliver Stone in the second half of the 1980’s, Charlie Sheen plays a young man who follows a bad father figure, then turns to follow a good father figure. Can you name the movie?If you said Platoon, you are right. If you said Wall Street, you are right. Both movies told the same story, and both were a huge success. The primary difference was that Platoon took us into the green jungles of Viet Nam circa 1967, and Wall Street took us into the concrete jungles of Manhattan circa 1985.Here’s my point: Wall Street premiered less than 12 months after Platoon, but no one who saw it complained, “Hey, we were told this story last year!”Learn when and how to repurpose the proven.Solomon – another interesting Biblical character – said,“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. And though it cost all you have, get understanding.”Unconscious competence is called talent. A talented person instinctively knows what to do.Knowing what to do is wisdom.Conscious competence is called skill. A skilled person has studied talented people long enough to figure out what they are unconsciously doing and why it works.Talented people know what to...

In his 3,000-year-old book, Ecclesiastes, King Solomon tells us of the stages and phases of his life, his fads and fancies, his regrets and realizations. Then he gives us his final conclusions and advice. Next to the Good News of John, Ecclesiastes is probably my favorite book in the Bible.Oscar Wilde wrote a similar summary of his stages and phases, fads and fancies, regrets and realizations in a private letter to his best and last and only friend. Later published as De Profundis, “From the Depths,” this 55,000-word letter shines with the unfiltered transparency of a man who has nothing but time, nothing to gain, and nothing to lose.Indy Beagle shared a couple of passages from De Profundis in last week’s rabbit hole. After receiving several happy emails from rabbit holers, Indy suggested that I give Oscar’s story a wider frame and take you on a deeper dive.Grab your scuba gear.As a young man, Oscar fell in love with a woman who dumped him to marry his more conservative childhood friend, Bram Stoker. So Oscar married another young woman who bore him two fine sons. He soon became flamboyantly famous as a comedic playwright, a social wit, a raconteur, and a writer of children’s stories.*Oscar Wilde was like Coca-Cola. He was everywhere.And then he went to prison for being gay.“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation.”“I had lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But I still had my children left. Suddenly they were taken away from me by the law. It was a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do, so I flung myself on my knees, and bowed my head, and wept, and said, ‘The body of a child is as the body of the Lord: I am not worthy of either.’ That moment seemed to save me. I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since then—curious as it will no doubt sound—I have been happier.”“I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison… I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.”“A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.”“Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.”“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling. Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Someday people will realize what that means.”“Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus… [Christ] had an intense and flamelike imagination… He understood the...

If relationships matter to you at all, don’t put your negative emotions in writing.Spoken words land softly on their feet like a cat that has fallen from a tree. But written words often land with a thud, and the crack of a fractured relationship.My son Jacob taught me an African proverb last week,“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”That proverb reminded me to warn you,“Never put a negative emotion in writing.”There are few things as reckless and destructive as a text, an email, or a letter in which you “clear the air” by venting your anger, your fear, your frustration, your disappointment, or your sadness.If you cannot speak face-to-face with the person that you feel needs to hear what you have to say, then at least find a way to speak voice-to-voice.Never put a negative emotion in writing.I speak recklessly, but I write carefully. Every time I have put a negative emotion in writing, I have regretted it.Introverts prefer to communicate in writing. As a member of that 49 percent of our population, I say,“I understand your preference for writing instead of talking. You are good at writing. This is why it is especially important for you to realize that your negative, written words hit harder, hurt more deeply, and cause more widespread destruction than the words of your extraverted friends. So please, never put a negative emotion in writing. But the opposite is also true: your written words of recognition, praise, and encouragement will raise the spirits, strengthen the resolve, and give new energy to every person on whom you shine that happy light.”During the dark times, the tree will remember that light.And smile.Are you ready for a surprise? The same applies to advertising.If your relationship with prospective customers matters to you, don’t put negative emotions into your ads.You ask, “But don’t I at least need to describe the pain of the problem before I tell them about the solution?”No, because if you do, your name and your brand will unconsciously become associated with pain and problems. People will remember you when they need what you sell, but they will feel better about someone else. And this “someone else” they feel better about will probably make the sale.If you want to be that “someone else,” learn to write ads that make people feel good about themselves, their future, and you.I’ve been saying it for 35 years:“Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.”Did you know that I think about you several times each week? As I sit in the light of my computer screen at 2:30 each morning, I ponder the price you pay to read what I write to you. Money can be replaced but time cannot, so each minute you spend with me is spent forever. It can never be replaced. This is why I try to give you things that will last; things you can take with you and use again and again.I cannot see your face but I feel your presence and I want the best for you, just as you want the best for all the people that your life touches.Shine on, bright friend, shine on. All the trees around you will remember.Roy H. Williams

An affinity group is composed of peoplewho share an identity marker.Backpackers are an affinity group.Corvette drivers are an affinity group.If you like to sew, you are part of an affinity group.Every sports team has “fans,” an affinity group.If you like wine, you are in that affinity group.People who like science are part of an affinity group.If you would rather drive than fly, you are part of an affinity group.In a class he taught at Wizard Academy, Ryan Deiss said,“Identify a tribe. Develop the tribe. Market to the tribe.”Ryan was talking about affinity groups.Affinity groups have an affinity for – an attraction to – a particular thing.Marketing to affinity groups is a smart thing to do.*Do you know the jargon of the affinity group you are trying to sell?People who spend time to save money are in an affinity group.People who spend money to save time are in a different affinity group.Your ad copy attracts one of these groups more strongly than it does the other. Do you know which group you are unconsciously targeting?Maggie Tufu is a fictional character, but she spoke profoundly when she said,“Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.”Mark Zuckerberg is rich because he controls one of the major gateways that allow advertisers to reach affinity groups.Every time you click on something – anything at all – you reveal intimate things about yourself to Mark and dozens of other data brokers. Soon you will have told them everything about yourself that matters.Allow me to quote a video that you will see near the end of today’s rabbit hole:“What all these companies have in common is they collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others… The entire economy of the internet right now is basically built on this practice. All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product. They make money by selling your data… As one expert puts it, ‘They’re the middlemen of surveillance capitalism.'”Several of the apps you have on your phone are tracking you for the purposes of letting you know which of their locations is “Nearest You” at any given moment. And they sell that data to data brokers, some of which are happy to tell anyone – who wants to kill you, kidnap you, or sell you an extended warranty – exactly where you are right now.The going price for that information is $45.Seems like there ought to be a law that makes this impossible, right? Well, there is an outside chance that such a law might soon be enacted.According to that video you’ll see near the end of today’s rabbit hole,“The one time that Congress has acted quickly to safeguard people’s privacy was in the 1980s when Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court and a reporter walked into a local video store and asked the manager whether he could have a peek at Bork’s video rental history. And he got it. As soon as Congress realized there was nothing stopping anyone from retrieving their video rental records too, they freaked out. And lo and behold, the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed with quite deliberate speed.”At the end of today’s rabbit hole, you can see how one man is currently trying to motivate Congress by threatening to reveal all the detailed, personal information he gathered about each of them after spending just a few dollars with data brokers.This could get interesting.Roy H. Williams*Earlier, when I said, “Marketing to affinity groups is a smart thing to do,” please notice that I did not say that marketing to affinity groups is...

Thirty-five years ago, he patrolled a stretch of beach as long as two football fields on a Caribbean Island whose name I cannot remember.He pushed a wheelbarrow full of ice as he pranced from one end of his empire to the other, the music of his voice rising and falling over the sound of the surf.“I’m sorry I’m late, but I’m here. You want it. I got it.”His music would often stop. Then resume. Stop.Resume. Stop.Finally, we saw him, a tiny, native islander in his late 50’s, as slender and leathery as a bullwhip, his naked feet falling as lightly as snowflakes on the soft Caribbean sand.“I’m sorry I’m late, but I’m here. You want it. I got it… I’m sorry I’m late, but…”His song would stop abruptly when he saw a hand raised. Sprinting to that spot with his wheelbarrow, he would ask the vacationers to name the drinks they desired.I watched him for a while. He was a genius.Occasionally he would reach into the ice and produce the requested beverage, but usually, he would pull his empty hands out of the icy water and fly like a bullet to his shack at the back of the beach. He would leave so quickly that you had no time to tell him you would happily accept a substitute.He would return like Santa’s reindeer, his feet barely touching the sand, with the requested drink in hand, triumphant and proud not to have let you down.Once, as I saw him fly over the sand with cold drinks in hand, I thought I could hear the sound of sleigh bells,“More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:‘Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!‘”That’s when it hit me: “This sandy song and dance is the daily floor show he gives us in this magnificent tavern without a ceiling. He is making a fortune in tips, and earning every bit of it.”I observed him long enough to decode his methods: if he suspected vacationers of feeling entitled and flinty, he would immediately pull their drinks from the ice, accept their money, and resume his happy song.“I’m sorry I’m late, but I’m here. You want it. I got it.”I was honored when he couldn’t find our drinks. Pennie and I smiled at each other as he sprinted across the sand and returned with them 90 seconds later.One minute after that, we smiled at each other again when we saw him pull those same drinks from the ice to serve an unhappy couple 20 feet away.Like I said, the man was a genius.When an unpleasant person is demanding my attention and I feel like showing them the bird that I keep in my hand, I think of that happy, slender islander, and tell myself that he is still there, his hands in the ice, his bare feet falling like snowflakes on the soft Caribbean sand.Roy H. Williams

It is easier to increase sales than it is to cut expenses.In the words of Adrian Van Zelfden, “You cannot shrink your way to profit.”Cost-cutting CEO’s are hailed as geniuses by Wall Street and lauded as saviors by private equity firms because cost-cutting always works in the short-term.But that’s not how you build a business.When Roger Smith rose from his position of accounting clerk to become CEO of General Motors in 1981, Wall Street saw him as a brilliant businessman who was “optimizing operations” and “maximizing profits.” But anyone who loved cars could see that he was destroying one of America’s great companies.When I complained to one of my brothers-in-law that the GM brands were rapidly losing their distinct identities to become a bland blend of nothingness, he said, “You don’t understand business. It costs a lot to engineer and tool a new model of car for each GM brand,” (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac,) “so Roger Smith is building all the cars on a single platform. But each brand will get its own grill and headlights and interior and taillights.”I said, “Perhaps I don’t understand business, but I understand marketing and reputation-building from the hair of my head to the soles of my feet and I’m telling you that Roger Smith is destroying General Motors.”Every time I point out the dangers of an unsustainable plan to cash in on the 90-day attention span of the American investor, I am told, “You don’t understand business.”Always those same four words.Prior to the arrival of “optimizing, maximizing” Roger Smith in 1981, GM held 46% of the U.S. car market. By the time he left 9 years later, market share had slipped to 35.4% and was rapidly falling. When asked about the plummeting market share, he defended the bottom line: “You don’t pay dividends on market share.”By depriving his brands of the oxygen of creativity and innovation, Roger Smith choked the life out of General Motors.Oldsmobile died. Pontiac died. Buick is not far behind. GM’s market share in 2021 was only 15.2% of the U.S. car market.This did not have to happen.“Critics say Smith’s greatest flaw was overemphasizing that bottom-line mentality rather than working on improving product quality. ‘He was a bean counter,’ says Owen Bieber, who was president of the United Auto Workers during much of Smith’s tenure. ‘Suddenly, GM started making a lot of cars that looked alike. I used to tell him that you can’t have a Cadillac that looks like a Chevrolet and expect to sell them both.’”– Los Angeles Times, Dec 1, 2007By 1989 GM was losing $2000 on every GM10 it built. Asked by Fortune magazine why the program had failed, Roger Smith answered: “I don’t know. It’s a mysterious thing.”In June, 2009, when GM dropped to its knees and begged the bankruptcy courts for mercy, Motor Trend magazine had this to say,“Less than a year after celebrating its centenary, the company we knew as General Motors is dead. Once the richest and most powerful automaker in the world; the symbol of American industrial might; the engine room of the American economy, General Motors is now officially bankrupt.”*You cannot shrink your way to profit.Roy H. Williams* June 1, 2009 – A series of bad decisions based on grievously flawed assumptions led to GM having just $82 billion in assets and $173 billion in liabilities on June 1, 2009. This is a scenario that routinely repeats itself, but no one seems to be paying attention. – RHW

The choice between a good thing and a bad thing is never a hard choice. The only hard choice is between two good things.Science is a good thing. And so are the Arts. Why choose?Rube Goldberg became wildly famous 100 years ago because his elegantly absurd inventions combined Science with Art.Elegant absurdity surprises and delights us because it reveals lofty creativity and deep commitment aimed at something that is not – to the logical mind – worth the effort.Confronted with the elegantly absurd, pure logic snorts a derisive laugh, but the heart laughs with peals of pure joy.YouTube and TikTok are filled with elegant absurdity. OK GO rode the rocket of the elegantly absurd to heights unknown, then Walk Off the Earth rode it like a surfboard to the edge of the world and beyond. The absurdly elegant inventions of Mark Rober and the elegantly absurd shenanigans of Rex and Daniel have given them massive influence in their fields of endeavor.Marching bands, baton twirling, and tap dancing… perhaps all kinds of dancing… are examples of the elegantly absurd because they require creativity and commitment to achieve something that, again – to the logical mind – isn’t worth the effort.Indy Beagle has examples of all these for you in the rabbit hole.Satire is another elegant absurdity.“Satire has done more to change society than a mountain of political policies. Everything from All in the Family to Saturday Night Live to The Daily Show… (not to mention court jesters, Twain, Menippus, Will Rogers). It’s a battering ram disguised as a rubber chicken.”– Johnny MolsonBut is ‘elegant absurdity’ as absurd as it first appears?“Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.”– Jeannette Walls“The more evolved an animal is, the more time it spends playing.”– P.J. O’Rourke“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”– Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker, p. 19So there it is. When you are literate in the basic concepts of the Sciences and the Arts, you are qualified to be elegantly absurd. You are that flash of energy, that illumination we see when two wires come into close proximity after having been connected to opposite poles of the same high-voltage battery.Shine on, bright friend, shine on.Roy H. Williams

The great game of BUSINESS does not come with an instruction manual.The assumption of most players is that Customer Acquisition – lead generation – sales opportunities – is how you win the game.But the understanding of a Highly Skilled Player goes 2 levels deeper:Customer Acquisition (lead gen)Conversion (closing the sale)Remove the Friction (from the buying experience)Highly Skilled Players understand that exponential growth is unleashed by improving the conversion rate. Big differences in top-line sales and bottom-line profits flow from small improvements in Conversion.Highly Skilled Players are usually successful, but the Master Players – the paradigm shifters – the system disruptors – the Kings and Queens of their Categories – turn this Highly Skilled Order of Operations upside down.This is the methodology of every Master Player:Remove the FrictionCustomer AcquisitionConversionWithout exception, every one of the 26 Mammoth Successes in which I have played a part was triggered by Removing the Friction.When you remove the friction, you differentiate yourself in a profound and meaningful way. Customer Acquisition accelerates and Conversion Rate climbs.The friction in your customer’s Buying Experience is hard to see, but you can feel it in the reluctance of your customer.A customer survey will only add to your confusion because customers cannot consciously tell you what they subconsciously feel. You will read the results of your survey, do what your customers told you they wanted, but it won’t help you in the slightest.Let’s review:You need to remove the friction that creates Customer Reluctance.This is felt as a lack of sales opportunities, but you cannot identify the cause.Because it is subconscious, not even your customers can tell you the cause.Wait. It gets worse.When you were a kid, did you ever call “dibs”? If there was only one piece of cake and you wanted the right to eat that cake, you would call “dibs” on it. You had a preference and you wanted to impose that preference on others before they could impose their preference on you.Now that you are an adult, there is a new kind of DIBs – Data Information Bias – and it is far more costly than the loss of a piece of cake.I have a client who was successful long before they met me, but their Data Information Bias was impeding their ability to jump to a higher level. I recognized their DIBs when they told me to write ads that would drive sales opportunities to the telephone. Their data clearly indicated their conversion rate was much higher on the telephone than on their website.I said, “You have an extraverted sales assumption, a preference for listening and talking rather than reading and writing. And you assume that everyone else is like you. But it isn’t true. Your data isn’t telling you to drive your customers to the telephones, it is telling you to fix your website.”They believed me. They fixed it. And their sales volume doubled. Then we doubled the double by removing the friction in their mass media. That company is now approaching 10x the sales volume and profitability that was previously considered “successful.”You have already told yourself that you would have interpreted their data correctly. Am I right?Perhaps you would have. But that company’s data isn’t what is holding you back. Your own data and your own Data Information Bias is holding you back, but you can’t see it because it is hiding in your blind spot.If you knew it was there, they wouldn’t call it a blind spot.This last little bit that I am going to tell you – if I can figure out how to communicate it clearly – will resolve the final two mysteries that are lingering in your mind.If I am correct, you are wondering:“Why

Gordon Atkinson’s Land of La Mancha is the finest literary work of loneliness that has been chronicled since Henry David Thoreau spent 2 years on Walden Pond.Here is how Thoreau opens that most iconic of early American books:“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months.”Walden Pond, by the way, is only 2.2 miles from the old North Bridge in Concord where a British soldier fired “the shot heard ’round the world” that triggered the Revolutionary War.Come with me now to July, 1845 when Henry David Thoreau first arrived at Walden Pond:It has been only 69 years since Thomas Jefferson wrote that document by which 13 colonies of England broke away from King George and banded together to form this baby nation. (To put this in perspective, it has been 69 years since Chevrolet introduced the Corvette. – RHW) There are tens of thousands of Americans today who can remember growing up in the 13 colonies. They can recall reading the newspapers of Benjamin Franklin with his constant showering of articles advocating “No Taxation Without Representation” and how their fingertips became blackened by newspaper ink that was not quite dry.Florida became the 27th state 90 days ago and Johnny Appleseed died 15 days later. There is talk of the Republic of Texas also becoming a state. The newspapers of New York are buzzing about a new poem by Poe in which a raven walks around saying, “Nevermore.”That was America on the day Henry David Thoreau wandered off into those woods from which he and his book Walden would emerge 2 years and 2 months later.You’ve never read Walden? Here is a short passage from “Brute Neighbors,” one of the later chapters:“The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.”Gordon Atkinson is still writing his book, Land of La Mancha, but 3 days ago he posted 25 entries from the journal he has been keeping since the day he became the inaugural artist-in-residence at Wizard Academy.Gordon and I have not yet spoken. You will understand why when you read what he has written.Roy H. Williams

In 2011, the attention of our nation was consumed by the economic problems caused by the sub-prime mortgage debacle of 2008. That’s why everyone thought I was crazy when I wrote these words…“Western Society is in danger of becoming self-righteous, sanctimonious and insufferably judgmental. If history is to be our guide, the next 20 years will be when we move from our agreement of mutual brokenness, ‘I’m Not Okay – You’re Not Okay,’ to embrace a self-righteous indignation, ‘I’m Okay – You’re Not Okay.’ Sanctimonious vigilante-ism will become popular as indignant leaders demonize their enemies and rally their followers by appealing to their inborn sense of rightness and social obligation, ‘Let’s clean this place up and to hell with compromise. They are entirely wrong and we are entirely right. They are stupid. We are wise. They are evil. We are good.’”“The last time we went through this, America formed a committee in Congress called the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938) and later watched with glee while Senator Joseph McCarthy destroyed countless lives by recklessly branding his enemies as ‘Communists,’ and creating the infamous blacklists.”“This sounds a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it? I know it does. I’m writing because I want you to be able to look back and recall how absurd this all sounded when I first told you what was on the horizon.”I brought that 11-year-old prediction to your attention because I’m going to share something else that I see poking it’s head up over the horizon.Are you familiar with the argument that roared among the founding fathers during the 1790’s?Thomas Jefferson feared tyranny and was worried that a strong Federal government would stifle individual freedoms. He envisioned a decentralized republic built of small, agricultural towns. Alexander Hamilton feared anarchy and desired the structure and order that a strong Federal government would provide. He envisioned centralized, efficient power at the top of the pyramid.When the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 that restricted the activities of foreign residents and limited freedom of speech and of the press, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which called on state legislatures to nullify federal laws.I believe we are seeing the acceleration of that argument between “Federal Power” Hamilton and “States Power” Jefferson, but I believe this time Jefferson will win.I know you would like me to speak plainly, so I will. But first I want to make it clear that I am not advocating the thing I am about to describe. In 2011 I didn’t want to see our nation degenerate into two polarized groups that were equally self-righteous, sanctimonious and insufferably judgmental, but it happened anyway. Likewise, I don’t want to see a surging escalation of state’s rights that ultimately cause our nation to become an expanded and updated version of the European Union, but I believe that is where we are headed.By 2033 you will hear this idea of “each state doing their own thing” being proposed by Alpha Voices that will arise and popularize it.Ten years later, the “ME” cycle of 2043 will be launched in the heady delusion that all of America’s problems can be solved by letting each state become, in essence, its own little country. America will maintain a common currency and a standing army to defend the member states, but the real power of the nation will have shifted to the governors and state legislatures. When you cross a state line the laws will change in profound and meaningful ways.By 2063 we will have begun to realize that if you sow to the wind, you reap a whirlwind, and we...

Johnny Molson sent me a video of an elderly Ukrainian woman walking up to a heavily armed Russian soldier, the point man of a force that was occupying her town. Looking him in the face, she said, “Put sunflower seeds in your pocket so flowers will grow when you die.” *The note that came with the video said, “That’s a Patrick Henry/Paul Revere level story. That’s the shit Churchill wished he would have said.”Johnny’s note caused me to remember two things. The first was a passage from a remarkable op-ed from Yuval Noah Harari in London’s 200-year-old newspaper, The Guardian:“Nations are ultimately built on stories. Each passing day adds more stories that Ukrainians will tell not only in the dark days ahead, but in the decades and generations to come. The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks.”The second thing Johnny’s note brought to mind was something I wrote 19 years ago:Heroes are dangerous things. Bigger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we are striving to be.We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.Most people assume that legends, myths and stories of heroes are simply the byproducts of great civilizations, but I’m convinced they are the cause of them. Throughout history, the mightiest civilizations have been the ones with stories of heroes; larger-than-life role models that inspired ordinary citizens to rise up and do amazing things.Americans are united, at least for a moment, to set aside our petty bickering as we gaze in wonder at the people of Ukraine.My prayer is that Volodymyr Zelensky, his family and his nation, emerge from these dark days alive and free.Amen.Roy H. WilliamsPS – I have liked all of the Russians I have ever met. My strong suspicion is that Vladimir Putin does not represent the hearts of the people of Russia. One more thing: many of you have asked me about William and Sasha, Wizard Academy’s ambassadors to Russia. I have been very careful in my communications with them in recent days since Vladimir is angry with America and it might not be beneficial to be seen as having a lot of American friends right now. – RHW*The sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine, which makes grandma even more of a badass. – Indy

Motivational speakers often tell their followers to visualize accomplishing their desired outcomes; to mentally go into the future and feel the joy of that not-yet-happened moment.Visualization is the mental rehearsal of possible future events.When the word “rehearse” was invented more than 700 years ago, it meant to hear again; to re-hear.I am an ad writer. My job is to get people to repeatedly imagine doing what my clients want them to do. I want prospective customers to live those events in their minds.I could just as easily have been a songwriter.Each time you imagine an action that is followed by a sequence of events, you move precipitously closer to taking that action and bringing those events to pass.Athletes in every sport are taught this by their coaches.This is why I don’t listen to country music. I don’t want to visualize those events and imagine those feelings.Visualization – mental rehearsal – is a powerful thing.Visualization affects one-and-a-half percent of us a little more strongly than it does most people. We are the ones who are warned by psychologists not to get involved in role-playing games because we can get lost in the characters we play and lose touch with reality.This is why, for me, listening to a country song about heart-breaking loss and gut-wrenching grief is exactly like watching a horror movie. But I believe I understand the appeal of country music to people who are not afflicted with my condition. Shauna Niequist writes, “My friend Eve told me once that the ability to cry is a sign of health, because it means your body and your soul agree on something.”If I am right, people love country music because it helps them remember the things that are important in their lives.As Solomon said in the 23rd division of the book of Proverbs, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”His words apply equally to both of us, I think.To me, Solomon is saying, “Do not be in your mind the man you do not want to be.”But to the country music fan, Solomon is saying, “Feel deep and meaningful feelings in your mind if you want to be a deep and meaningful person.”I could be wrong. I have certainly been wrong before. But I do not think I am wrong this time.Roy H. Williams

A brief summary of this episodeThe goal of branding is to build a relationship with future customers. When a relationship has finally been established, you become who these people think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they, or any of their friends, need what you sell.Direct marketers often disdain mass media because it doesn’t allow them to “target and track” their prey. But these same Direct Marketers will give heavy bags of money to online influencers. It never occurs to them that every person listening to the radio or watching TV is an influencer of approximately 250 people.These 250 people are their Realm of Association. They are the people who listen to them when they speak. They are mostly friends and co-workers, but some of them are family.You have people in your life – acquaintances – with whom you are familiar, but they never quite made it into that circle that is your true Realm of Association.Here’s my question for you. Do you trust those people who never contact you unless they want something from you?Those people remind me of direct marketers. They target you – get something from you – and walk away smiling.Your true friends are the ones who spend time with you, who make you smile, laugh, feel good, and rarely ask for anything at all.A brand that you love is like a friend.Ads are either transactional or relational. A long series of transactional ads does not build a brand. It builds name awareness, yes, but not a brand.If I reach and win only 10 percent of your realm of association through my focused use of mass media, but you ­– my future customer – are not within that 10 percent, I am not worried in the slightest. My relational ads will have won the hearts of 25 of your best friends and it is likely that one or more of them will get my message to you when you finally need what I sell. If I reach and win 20% of your community through my relentless use of cheap and effective mass media, I will have reached 50 of your best friends.Decisions are rarely made in a vacuum.Each of us is surrounded by influencers who do not have blogs or podcasts or YouTube channels, but we value their opinions very highly. We trust the recommendations of our friends.“Reaching the right people” is not the secret to building a brand. The secret is to say and do the right things.Getting attention is easy. Any fool can do it.To win a person’s heart, you have to hold that attention. You have to nurture that little spark by the breath of your mouth and then blow it into a flame by your actions. You have to cause people to look forward to their next encounter with you. You have to make them enjoy spending time with you.This, mon chéri, is branding.Brand building is not something you test.Brand building is something you do.Your first encounter with a cold contact will be Low CAP.Low Conversion.Low Average sale.Low Profit margin.But when that contact types your name into the search block because they are looking for you – precisely you – those encounters will be High CAP.Direct marketers wear their CAPs low.Brand builders wear their CAPs high.The most successful direct marketers are those who first built their brands, then began offering specific things to their brand families at specific times, all the while maintaining and nourishing that bond their customers feel with the brand.My personal formula is one-third transactional ads, two-thirds relational.Television and radio advertising are astoundingly cheap and effective. They are the way to go if you want to build a brand. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

There are four kinds of thought.Verbal Thought is hearing a voice in your mind.Analytical Thought is deductive reasoning that seeks to forecast a result.Abstract Thought embraces fantasy and all things intangible.Symbolic Thought relates the unknown to the known. The pattern-recognition power of the right brain connects new ideas [abstract thought] with known information [analytical thought] in the deductive reasoning left brain.Symbolic Thought allows you to communicate the abstract by pointing to something familiar that shares an essential attribute with the abstraction you are trying to describe. This is the essence of all similes and metaphors.“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic…”– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline“murmuring…”“bearded…”“garments…”“Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic…”We’re talking about trees, remember?Symbols are a language of the mind.But that observation is just the beginning.I have no proof of what I am about to tell you. So if you continue to read, please understand that I will be sharing nothing more than a deeply held pet theory of mine. I can reference no sources other than 25 years of experimentation and my conversations with Indy.I believe the 4 types of thought are composed of 12 essential languages. Think of these 12 languages as the Operating System of the mind.I believe Numbers are a language of the mind.There are things that can be said in the language of Numbers that can be said in no other language. It is easier to learn mathematics when you think of Numbers as a language and the order of operations in math as the grammar and syntax of that language.I believe Color is a language. Red and pink say different things.Likewise, Shape is a language. A curve says something different than an angle.Arranging colors and shapes so they speak to us is the essence of composition in photos, paintings and illustrations. It is the basis of architecture, Feng Shui, and industrial design (cars, jewelry, furniture, etc.) In fact, it underlies every type of visual communication that causes people to think and feel a certain way.The human mind is given wings by its unique ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.When you use words, you are rapidly choosing which of the 44 Phonemes of the English language shares an essential attribute with the fractional abstraction you are trying to describe.Yes, the entirety of the English language is composed of just 44 sounds. This is not a pet theory of mine. This is settled science among the linguists of the world.When you speak or write, you are connecting Phonemes together in rapid succession to create words – sounds – that represent what you are trying to communicate.Did you know the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents? Graphemes, the letters of the alphabet and certain combinations of those letters like ch, sh, and th, merely represent the sounds – the phonemes – to which we attach deep meaning.Look again at ch, sh, and th. Don’t say the names of the letters in your mind. Make the sounds that each of those two-letter combinations represent, “ch,” “sh,” “th”Did it occur to you that “th” has two different sounds? Voiced “th” is the sound we hear in “the”. Unvoiced “th” is the sound we hear in “with”.It is my belief that a basic understanding of the 12 Languages of the Mind will make you a better communicator. Indy Beagle gave you a glimpse of one of the Languages – Symbol – before he got carried away in today’s...

Storm is a character in my mind.No, not so much a character as a caricature, an icon, an archetype.I occasionally meet Storm in the real world. Storm is sometimes male, sometimes female.You’ve met Storm, too.Storm is easily infatuated. Storm is in love with Love. Storm talks a lot about passion.But Storm is a rabbit, a mouse who runs at the first sign of difficulty or hardship.Don’t tell me what you are passionate about, Storm. Show me.Storm, I am old. I have lived many lives and I can tell you with certainty that commitment is the only true form of passion.Passion is not a feeling of fluffy-headed excitement. Passion is suffering. My friend Manley Miller taught me this.Passion comes from the Latin word “Pati,” the root word of Patience. We think of patience as an ability to wait. But patience, more accurately, is an ability to suffer.Compassion means “to suffer with,” to become a partner in the suffering of others. Compassionate people feel the pain of persons other than themselves.“…for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…”Better and richer and health speak of hope.Worse and poorer and sickness speak of passion.Storm, let no one deceive you. Passion does not produce commitment. Commitment produces passion.Have you never heard about the injustices endured by that boy who was born less than 9 months after his parents were married, who then spent his life bringing peace and help and hope to others? He endured mockery, false arrest, a sham trial, a bullwhipping, and then spikes were driven through his hands and feet. They call these events, “The Passion of Christ.”Passion, at its core, is a parching thirst that cries out to be quenched.No, Storm. You are not passionate. You lack the commitment to be.I am finished talking to Storm. Now I am talking to you. Have you been saying, “I can’t find my passion”?Would you like to be passionate? Would you like to feel so strongly about something that you would be willing to suffer for it? Passion is a fire easily lit: just make a commitment and don’t look back, or left, or right; only forward.Make a commitment. Pay the price of it.Mark Jennison has a passion for the gym. I know this because he goes to the gym every day and suffers.Princess Pennie has a passion for gardening. I know this because I see her on her knees, patiently digging and planting and weeding and pruning to create a look and feel of harmony across acres of land.Brad Whittington has compassion for the homeless. I know this because he cooks for them and drives to an unsettling place to serve them one-by-one, face-to-face.Commitment is the only true form of passion.Make a commitment. Passion will follow.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

You and I spoke last week about shadows being “holes in the light” that speak of past actions and their consequences.We are not the first to make that observation.The ancient Egyptians believed your shadow was the spent energy coming off you and dying in this world. Your shadow was separate from you but part of you, always there. The reason you could not see your shadow at night is because darkness swallows darkness.“The spent energy coming off you and dying in this world” sounds a lot like past actions and their consequences, don’t you think?Psychologist Carl Jung spoke of our shadow as the darkness within each of us. He said,“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is… forming an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions… In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if once he saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the ‘treasure hard to attain’. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of ‘self’ and thereby has gained himself… He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.”Did you notice that Carl Jung was speaking of past actions and their consequences?When Peter Pan first meets Wendy, she sews his shadow back on for him. Author J.M. Barrie used the shadow of Peter Pan as a symbol to help us better understand this “boy who would never grow up.” For Peter to be able to fly, Peter cannot have a shadow that binds him to the ground. He cannot have memories of the past. He cannot have memories of his mother.Victoria Rego writes,“In a moment of darkness, laying in my bed I suddenly remember Peter accepting his shadow before Wendy was able to sew it back on. It hit me in that moment that this is what we do with trauma. We tuck it away for safe keeping until we are either ready or forced to deal with it. This is how shadow work begins. When we do shadow work, we are learning to become aware of beliefs, ideas, triggers that we have been avoiding, parts of ourselves that we tuck away, so they do not ’cause trouble.’ Acknowledging these aspects of ourselves allows us to heal and find balance within ourselves.”I believe Carl Jung would have endorsed Victoria Rego’s observation.Are you ready to talk about history’s most famous shadow?David, that boy who slew a giant with a sling and then became a great king wrote of this greatest-of-all-shadows 3,000 years ago,“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for you are with me…”Death, that final consequence of all our actions, casts a very great shadow indeed. It is a mountain that looms before us and none can escape it.But take hope, my friend. That mountain would not cast a shadow in this valley where we walk except there be a bright and happy light on the other side.Aroo,

Your actions cast a shadow across space and time, affecting people directly – or indirectly – for generations.You already know this.The rest of what I’m about to tell you is speculative, but I believe I am right:Visually, a shadow is a hole in the light. A shadow carries the distorted shape of a moment beyond the moment itself. A shadow speaks of consequences.A silhouette is not a shadow. A silhouette is what we see when we look toward the light. A silhouette speaks of things to come.Painters and writers and photographers and historians and the makers of movies have always seen this, always known it.You have always known it, too.Shadows speak of the past. Silhouettes speak of the future. When you see a silhouette on the horizon, you immediately think, “And then what happened?”You can use these ideas to deepen the subtlety and artistry of your communication. Don’t worry that your reader/listener/viewer won’t understand. Trust their deep intuition. Trust the right hemispheres of their brains, that half whose principal function is to make connections and predictions through the recognition of patterns.Gut feelings, hunches, premonitions, and intuitions are psychological products of that wordless, pattern-recognizing logic of the right hemispheres of our brains.Zig-zagging enthusiastically back-and-forth across that landscape of possibilities, making connections and seeing patterns, you have a beagle in your brain.I call mine Indy.What do you call yours?Roy H. WilliamsPS – Einstein was a scientist who saw that time and space and reality itself were tied to the speed of light. E = MC2 : E – the energy in a thing = M – its mass x C2 – the speed of light, squared.In the first chapter of an ancient Jewish book of Beginnings, God says, “Let there be light” and our universe springs into existence. Scientists call this the Big Bang. Einstein, being Jewish, was familiar with the original story.We call it the speed of light, but a more accurate way to think of it would be the speed of reality; the frame-rate of the universe.Indy Beagle will explain the math of this conjecture in the rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole just click the silhouette of Indiana Beagle standing at the bottom of the clock in the image at the top of the memo. Each click of an image in the rabbit hole will take you one page deeper. This week, there are 20 pages in all.– RHW

I learned about advertising from listening to my eighth-grade football coaches.“Every play is a touchdown play if everyone on the team does their assignment properly.”That was one of the two things they bellowed at us every day. The other one was this:“If you succeed in football, you will succeed in life.”I was only 12 years old but that didn’t mean I was an idiot. I finished that season, but I never played football again. Those coaches believed what they were saying and that made my head spin because I knew it wasn’t true.If you believe, deep in your bones, in always doing what is correct and expected, right and proper, then I want you to be the engineer that builds the bridges I drive across. I want you to be the surgeon that operates on me. I want you to be the policeman that cruises the streets I drive. I want you to be the running back, the tight end, the wide receiver of the team I am playing against.When you’re playing offense and you know exactly what you are going to do and how you are going to do it, the defense knows it, too. You’re “telegraphing the play.” Defenders can read you like an open book.When you’re carrying the ball and the defenders don’t know what you’re about to do, it’s because you, yourself, don’t know. You are an amazing “broken field runner” because you make every decision at the last split second. You are never where anyone expected you to be. They leap to tackle you and grab empty air.If you believe in doing what is correct and expected, right and proper, I want you to write all the ads for the company my client and I are competing against.Predictable platitudes drip from the lips of people who say what is correct and expected, right and proper. Predictable platitudes flow like ink from the pens of the world’s worst ad writers. Predictable platitudes cause people to roll their eyes and say, “Get real.”I’ll tell you a secret if you promise not to be offended. I’ve never met a great ad writer who was taught how to write ads in college.Great ad writing is counterintuitive.You learn how to write great ads by keeping careful track of all the good ideas that should have worked, but didn’t. When you finally run out of good ideas and decide to do something crazy, dangerous, and ill-advised, tell your neighbors to keep an eye on the sky because the airshow and the fireworks are about to be spectacular.Congratulations, you have finally written a good ad.Every play is a touchdown play when your team is the only team on the field. But that’s not how football is played, is it? When you begin with the wrong premise, you always reach the wrong conclusion.To write an ad that is “correct and expected, right and proper” is the most foolish thing you can do.That’s all I have to say today, but Indy Beagle is going to take this discussion to a much deeper level in the rabbit hole.That’s where I’m headed now.Care to join me?Roy H. Williams

Twenty-three years ago, roving reporter Rotbart said to me,“You are three different people.1. There is the person you see when you look in the mirror.2. There is the person other people see when they look at you.3. There is the real you, the person no one can see but God.”Objective reality exists. I do not dispute it. Rotbart’s argument – and mine – is that you and he and I are not equipped to experience it.I live in a perceptual reality; a world that I perceive.You live in a perceptual reality; a world that you perceive.You see your own actions in the forgiving light of your motives, intentions, and regrets, while the “you” that is seen by others is shaped and shaded by their preferences, prejudices, and perspectives.John Steinbeck speaks of this in his preface to East of Eden,“The reader will take from my book what he brings to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there.”Steinbeck knew that we tend to see what is already within us.On May 1, 1831, an unspecified writer for The Atlas in London wrote,“We cannot see things as they are, for we are compelled by a necessity of nature to see things as we are. We can never get rid of ourselves.”Twenty years ago, my friend Kary Mullis challenged my musings about perceptual reality in front of a roomful of people. He said that his belief, as a scientist, was that “real” things can be measured, tested, and weighed. “Real things exist,” he said. “If it is not physical, it is imaginary.”I said, “Are emotions and opinions and beliefs real?”Kary described scientific method and Koch’s postulates, (the four criteria designed to establish a causative relationship between a microbe and a disease,) while I dragged a barstool to the front of the room. Holding up a copy of his book, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, I said, “Kary, would you be willing to sit on this barstool and read the dedication page to us?”As Kary read the page he wrote to his wife, Nancy, his voice tightened and he stopped speaking as tears rolled down his cheeks. I said, “Keep reading, Kary. It’s all imaginary, remember?”When he could speak again, he admitted I was right, and that a whole world of reality exists beyond the reach of physical science.Kary Mullis was a highly confident genius who was willing to change his mind.Persons like Kary Mullis are exactly the people Desmond Ford was talking about when he said,“A wise man changes his mind sometimes, but a fool never. To change your mind is the best evidence you have one.”Kary is gone now and I miss him deeply.The world of 2022 needs more people like him, and quickly.Roy H. Williams“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” – Meg Chittenden“Ever realised how surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.” – Katie Oldham, Sept 12, 2014, retweeted 3,837 times, favorited 3,728 times

“Hoare writes with the license of the nonexpert; you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms.”John Williams was describing Philip Hoare when he wrote that line, but he could easily have been describing me. As a nonexpert, I am free to speculate and arrive at my own conclusions.So are you.And so is your customer.You, me, and your customer claim we use deductive reasoning, but it simply isn’t true. Deductive reasoning – the basis of scientific method – would require us to work diligently to disprove what we believe.Do you know anyone who actually does that?Rather than use deductive reasoning, we use inductive reasoning to search out information confirming that our values, beliefs, instincts, and preferences have been right all along.When confronted with contradictory information, our confirmation bias kicks in to assure us the contradictory information is not correct, so we dismiss it with the flick of a mental finger.Let me help you with that flicking away of contradictory information. I am an ad writer. Magical thinking, inductive reasoning, and confirmation bias sparkle at my fingertips.My job is to speak to that which is already within you. You have more than enough information. Let me agree with what you already believe.Google and Facebook will use their algorithms to help us build a community where we can surround ourselves with like-minded people who share our opinions and beliefs. Everyone who doesn’t agree with us is uninformed, misinformed, fooled by faulty data, foolish rumor, or evil geniuses.Magical thinking, inductive reasoning, and confirmation bias sparkle at the fingertips of every evil genius. But I am not an evil genius. I am the genius that agrees with you.Magical thinking is difficult to explain, but Kurt Andersen does a pretty good job:“Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue. Our nation was started by Puritans in New England who wanted to create a Christian utopia as they waited for the imminent second coming of Christ and the End of Days. To the south, a bunch of people were convinced, absolutely convinced, that this place they had never been was full of gold waiting to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia. They stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced the facts and decided they weren’t going to get rich overnight.”“This was the beginning of America. Next we had centuries of ‘buyer beware’ charlatanism and medical quackery to an extreme degree, along with increasingly exotic, extravagant, implausible cults and religions.”“All those things came together and were supercharged in the 1960s, when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. A generation later the internet came along, giving each of those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure.”A wonderful story is dazzling and attractive, regardless of whether or not it is true. This is the basis of all successful advertising.“Hoare writes with the license of the nonexpert; you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms.”John Williams wrote those words in his recommendation of Philip Hoare’s new book, “Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World.”John Williams book review column is titled, appropriately, “Books of the Times.”Roy H. Williams

The limiting factors that will challenge business owners in 2022 are inflation, Covid, and the recruitment of good employees.The bad news is that I can give you the solution to only 1 of these 3 problems.The good news is that it’s the big one: the recruitment of good employees.Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel prize for proving it’s not hard to sell a dog on the taste of meat.Successful jewelers know it’s not hard to sell a man on the woman he loves.Recruitment problems disappear when you know how easy it is to sell a parent on their child.A couple of years ago, Dewey Jenkins and I had a series of conversations about opening a free, private day-care center as a benefit for the employees of Morris-Jenkins Air Conditioning and Plumbing. The thing that kept us from doing it was that the majority of his employees – the technicians – drove their trucks home every night and went straight to their first repair each morning. Consequently, they would have no opportunity to drop off their child.But still, it was a great idea.Do your employees report to a specific location each day? Have you noticed that space for lease just down the street from you?Lease that space.Get a daycare license.Hire 2 or more people to run it.Open your recruitment ads with the words “Free, Private Daycare.”(And now you know why I was explaining the importance of “framing.” – Indy Beagle)Prepare to be amazed at the quality and volume of job applicants.Your employee problem has now been permanently solved.You’re welcome.What? What did you just say?“I can’t afford it.”Raise your prices. Inflation is happening whether you participate or not.“It’s easier to pay a big signing bonus.”Signing bonuses attract job-hoppers.“It sounds like a lot of trouble.”Paying big money for bad employees is another kind of trouble. Is that the kind you prefer?“I’ll just wait it out. Things will go back to normal pretty soon.”Here’s a fun fact I’ll bet you didn’t know: to maintain our population and our workforce, American women need to birth an average of 2.1 children each. The parents of today’s workforce produced only 1.8 births per woman and the birth rate today is at 1.64 and declining.We are at least 10 percent short of having an adequate workforce because that 10 percent was never born. So if you’re waiting for the workforce to get larger, you’re going to need to convince women across America to have more kids and then wait 20 years for those kids to grow up.Child-care is a huge, for-profit business that is crippling the buying power of single-parent (and two-parent) households across America. It is within your power to solve that problem for a small group of people, and in so doing, solve your own problem as well.Give it some thought.And may you have a Prosperous and Happy New Year.Roy H. Williams

Matthew McConaughey writes in his book, Green Lights,“Cool is a natural law. If it was cool for THAT time, then it is cool for ALL time. A fad is just a branch on Cool’s trunk; a fashionable fling whose 15 minutes can never abide, no matter how long she trends to try. Cool stands the test of time, because cool never tries. Cool just is.”My friend Crazy Tony taught me about “cool” 45 years ago when we attended Broken Arrow High School together. Tony made a lot of money buying and selling old cars. I was known as Beatermaker because Tony was forever frustrated by my uncanny ability to drive a fabulous car and, within a week, make it look like a beater.“Beatermaker,” he said, “every guy who has found an old car in perfect condition believes he has found a gold mine. But it’s almost never true. If a car wasn’t highly desirable when it was new, no one wants it 20, 30, or 50 years later. But if a car was admired and desired on the day it was born, it will be cool forever, no matter what condition it’s in.”That was the insight that made Crazy Tony tens of thousands of dollars when we were in high school.The passage of time, the recklessness of the human race, and the slow smokeless burning of decay make old things rare. But it it does not make them wonderful. Remarkable buildings and books and paintings and songs don’t get better with age. They were wonderful the day they were born. I know it, Matthew McConaughey knows it, and now you know it.But what makes them wonderful?Wonderful things were touched by someone who knew the secret of wonder and how to capture it. When you know how to capture wonder, you carry it in your head, your heart, and your hands. You glitter when you walk.Isaac Newton knew how to capture wonder and he passed the secret of it forward in just 14 words. Countless millions have read those words and assumed Newton was talking about himself. He was not. Newton was giving you his most precious advice. He was telling you how to capture wonder. He was telling you how to glitter when you walk.In 1675, Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”Isaac Newton stood on the shoulders of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus in astronomy, Huygens, Euclid, Henry Briggs, and Isaac Barrow in math, Kepler and Descartes in optics, and Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides in philosophy. Newton combined the insights of all these men and made them uniquely his own.Choose your giants. Stand on their shoulders. Repurpose the proven.Vincent Van Gogh stood on the shoulders of Monticelli and Hiroshige. Long after they were dead, they taught him how to paint. He studied their paintings, captured their wonder, and made it uniquely his own.Johnny Depp stood on the shoulders of Pepe Le Pew, the cartoon skunk, and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. They taught him how to become Captain Jack Sparrow. Depp studied their mannerisms, captured their wonder, and made it uniquely his own.I stand on the shoulders of John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Asimov, Tolkien, Paul Harvey, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. They taught me how to write. In fact, I borrowed “the slow smokeless burning of decay” from Robert Frost and “glitter when you walk” from Robinson. They don’t mind. Each of them stood on the shoulders of giants of their own choosing.Do you have time for me to give you one more example?In the rabbit hole you’ll find “Summer Wine,” a hit song written by Lee Hazlewood that made the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967. When you listen to it, you will think it sounds like a movie score. This is because Hazlewood took three famous movie themes that don’t belong together and made them fit. He captured their wonder and made it uniquely his own.Yes, cognoscenti, you understand.The 3 giants on whose shoulders Hazlewood was standing...

When your intuitive mind senses a pattern and begins to search for the completion of that pattern, we call this, “curiosity”.But sometimes our searching for the completion of a pattern goes sideways, takes a shortcut, gets it wrong. The false logic that springs to mind as a result of this wrong turn is so common that it has a Latin name, “Post Hoc, ergo Propter Hoc.”Blame Isaac Newton.Newton taught us to think of cause and effect as sequential: a pool cue strikes a ball, which strikes another ball. As a result of our trust in Newtonian physics, the often-wrong logic of Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc is almost irresistibly seductive because it begins with the observation that two events occurred in sequence.Remember a TV show called The West Wing?Jed Bartlet: C.J., on your tombstone it’s going to say Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc.C.J.: Okay, but none of my visitors are going to be able to understand my tombstone.Jed Bartlet: It means, “One thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other.” But it’s not always true. In fact, it’s hardly ever true. We did not lose Texas because of the hat joke. Do you know when we lost Texas?C.J.: When you learned to speak Latin?Do you remember The Big Bang Theory? In a 2009 episode, Sheldon Cooper was speaking to his mother on the phone:“The Arctic expedition was a remarkable success, I’m all but certain there’s a Nobel prize in my future. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I’m entirely certain… (audience laughter) No, Mother, I could not feel your church group praying for my safety… (audience laughter) The fact that I’m home safe does not prove that it worked. That logic is Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc… (audience laughter) No, I’m not sassing you in Eskimo talk.”Similar to “Post Hoc” is the broken logic of simultaneous occurrences, Cum Hoc ergo Propter Hoc, “With this, because of this.”“The bigger a child’s shoe size, the better the child’s handwriting. Therefore, having big feet makes it easier to write.”The mental sleight-of-hand of “Post Hoc” and “Cum Hoc” are what make advertising – and conspiracy theories ­– so easy to believe.@WardQNormal writes,“The trouble with conspiracy theories is that a lack of evidence is taken as proof that the conspiracy is everywhere. This is like thinking that the reason you never see elephants hiding up in treetops is because they’re good at it.”Seeing patterns where they don’t exist can be costly and dangerous. But still, I am wildly in favor of curiosity.Zora Neale Hurston wrote,“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”Albert Einstein said,“Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”Gemma Stone,“When we enter a conversation with curiosity, we allow ourselves to see things differently and to be surprised by what we discover.”Tom Robbins,“Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.”Dorothy Parker,“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”And none other than Daniel Boone – yes, THAT Daniel Boone – said,“Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections.”Like I said, I am wildly in favor of curiosity. If I could, I would inject it into your arm with a needle. Curiosity will take you on trips like no other drug.Roy H. Williams

I’ve been saying for 20 years that I’m going to write a buddy movie about Jesus and the 12. I’ve got the whole thing in my head.But who am I to put words in the mouth of Jesus? The idea of creating a fictional Jesus who does and says things that are not in the Bible could easily be the pinnacle of hubris.I believe John Steinbeck was gripped by a similar fear. He and Elaine rented a cottage in England in 1959 so that he could work on his 20th century update of Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory, after he abandoned his half-finished story of Don Quixote as an old man in California who has watched one-too-many westerns on TV.He explained his motive for Le Morte d’Arthur shortly before he left England.“Malory wrote the stories for and to his time. Any man hearing him knew every word and every reference. There was nothing obscure, he wrote the clear and common speech of his time and country. But that has changed—the words and references are no longer common property, for a new language has come into being. Malory did not write the stories. He simply wrote them for his time and his time understood them … And with that, almost by enchantment the words began to flow…”– John Steinbeck, from a letter dated March 27, 1959.Steinbeck’s unfinished works, King Arthur and His Noble Knights and Don Keehan, Marshall of Manchon, are both amazing, and he never explained why he didn’t publish them. But having read everything Steinbeck ever wrote – including 50 years of his private correspondence published as A Life in Letters – I am convinced that John Steinbeck heard the same voice in his mind that I hear in mine, “Just who the hell do you think you are?”But still, I remain committed to making my buddy movie about Jesus and the 12.It occurred to me 2 years ago that I could save a lot of money on set design and costumes if I moved the story from Israel 2,000 years ago to the city of New Orleans today; interesting people in comfortable clothes in a colorful city.Little did I know that Chris Poché already had my idea. But Chris didn’t discover his buddy movie in the Bible. Chris Poché, like John Steinbeck, saw a buddy movie in Don Quixote de La Mancha.In a recent interview with Mike Rowe, Poché said,“And when I started reading it, what struck me was that it’s not a big epic tale. It’s little. He never gets out of his neighborhood. He’s on this cruddy old horse that can’t go very far. He just rides around the neighborhood doing crazy crap. And I’m reading and thinking, ‘Well, that could happen to anybody, any place, any time. I don’t need the desert in Spain in 1605. I don’t need to see a monster through his eyes. That windmill was not a giant. That was the whole point. He’s nuts… Maybe I could just make this [movie] right here. Doesn’t matter where it is. Doesn’t matter what year it is. It could happen to anyone.’ Little did I know, at that moment it was happening to me.”Chris Poché of New Orleans is what the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy call, “our brand of crazy.” And it is this special brand of craziness that has made Chris and a few dozen of his buddies an important part of Mardi Gras.“Everyone in New Orleans is Don Quixote. Everyone. That stupid little Mardi Gras club happened because I looked at my buddy who is my accomplice in all things stupid. I looked at him and said, ‘Do you know what? We’re going to start one of these clubs, but we’re not marching, we’re riding around in power recliners dressed like lounge...

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with.” – Rebecca SolnitIn just 25 words, Rebecca gave “hope” a new identity, introduced a new purpose for it, and caused us to imagine the beginning of a new adventure. She supplied the words, but we created the movie in our minds.Persuaders don’t tell you the truth; they lead you to it and let you discover it for yourself. Rebecca Solnit is a talented persuader, a gifted teacher, and a wonderful storyteller. She made us see hope as a powerful tool that can smash down barriers and give us access to things we desire.We broke down the door that kept us out, so now we are… where?That is up to you. What do you hope for?# # # #I will now reveal – bit by bit – my true purpose in writing these things to you:“Astral projection is a term used in esotericism to describe an intentional out-of-body experience that assumes the existence of a soul called an ‘astral body’ that is separate from the physical body and capable of travelling outside it throughout the universe.” – WIKIPEDIA“That sounds a bit woo-woo, so I’m out.”“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen… Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” – Hebrews 11:1-3, in the Bible“That sounds religious, so I’m out.”“Every morning, Tony Robbins engages in a 10-minute priming exercise to channel his energy and create the ideal conditions for a fulfilling day. By taking charge of his mindset and emotions, he cultivates a positive state, which greatly increases the odds that he will experience happiness, success and fulfillment throughout his day.” – tonyrobbins.com“That sounds like mind-over-matter, so I’m out.”“Don’t worry. Be happy.” – Bobby McFerrin“Wishful thinking is self-delusion, so I’m out.”“Stay focused, ignore the distractions, and you will accomplish your goals much faster.” – Joel Osteen“Every elementary school teacher has said that to every little kid in America for the past 100 years. I’m out.”“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with.” – Rebecca SolnitEach of us has hope. We cling to it. Rebecca told us precisely what all those other people were trying to tell us, but she chose the word “hope” instead of “visualize,” “focus,” “priming exercise,” “faith,” “Astral projection” or “The Law of Attraction,” because each of those other words and phrases have associations and connotations that might push us away from the truth.What is the truth?This is the truth: You imagine action before you take it. You see yourself do it before you do it. No person has ever cheated on their life partner without first imagining it in their mind, and no person has ever created anything marvelous or good without first seeing it in their mind. And no person has ever sold anything without first causing the customer to imagine buying it.The job of an ad is to cause people to imagine taking an action.I asked earlier, “What do you hope for?”Let me ask it differently, “What action do you want your customer to take?”Do what Rebecca Solnit did. Begin with something familiar; something that you and your customer agree on. Then build a bridge from that point of agreement to where you want them to go.You cannot take your customer where you want them to go until you first meet them where they are.What does your customer already believe in? Start with that.Roy H. Williams

My friend Don has a time machine. He takes me with him sometimes. You should come, too! Every person who rides in Don’s time machine is changed by it.The United States Department of Justice has booked passage on Don’s time machine for countless prison inmates. State and local governments and hundreds of rehab centers have booked journeys for people as well. Thirty-five million in all.Each trip through time begins with a series of words.My friend Don is a storyteller.Stories of the past help us to know who we are.Stories of the future help us to see who we can become.Stories are more effective than facts for changing beliefs and behaviors. Facts cause us to put our shields up and become skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.With these thoughts in mind, Don invented “interactive journals,” booklets that allow people in crisis to revisit their past and imagine a better future. Each reader of an interactive journal becomes the co-creator of two stories. (1.) the story of how they got into this mess, and (2.) the story of a brighter tomorrow.We imagine every action before we take it. If we want to change our behaviors, we need only to imagine different actions than the ones we have imagined in the past.Stories are portals of escape into alternate realities.An examination of the brain of any mammal will let us know its superpower. Monkeys can swing artfully through trees, not because their bodies are different, but because more than half their brain mass is devoted to depth perception, color differentiation, and guided grasping.According to Professor Steven Pinker of MIT and Harvard,“The human brain, too, tells a story. Our brains are about three times too big for a generic monkey or ape of our size. The major lobes and patches of the brain are different as well. The olfactory bulbs, which underlie the sense of smell, have shriveled to one third of the expected primate size (already puny by mammalian standards), and the main cortical areas for vision have shrunk proportionally as well…while the areas for hearing, especially for understanding speech, have grown…to twice what a primate our size should have.”The superpower of we humans is our unique ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.Every word in the English language is composed of just 44 sounds called phonemes. We arrange these into clusters called words which we string together in rapid succession so that others can see in their minds what we see in ours.In the first chapter of Genesis, God says, “Let there be this” and “Let there be that” for 25 verses, and then in verse 26 he says, “Let us make mankind in our own image.”According to that ancient story, God spoke the world into existence and then gave you and me the power to do the same. When you, as a storyteller, speak a world into existence in the hearts and minds of your listeners, you are doing the work of God.Don Kuhl has spent the past 30 years unleashing the power of storytelling to help 35 million people find peace, hope, and happiness, and now he has written a book for you and me. It will be published early next year.I’ll make sure you know when it’s available.Roy H. Williams

Creativity is counterintuitive. You hate it when you are handcuffed and expected to do your best work, but the secret of doing your best work is to be handcuffed. Creative restraints bring out the best in you.When Sean Jones sold controlling interest in Spence Diamonds a number of years ago, I left that company when he did, just as I left when Dewey Jenkins sold his company two weeks ago.My relationship is always with the business owner, never with the company. Here’s why: a brand without trust is just a product, and a product can be replaced. To become truly trusted, you have to forge a bond with the customer.People don’t bond with corporations. People bond with people.I am a better-than-average ad writer,(1.) because I cheat.(2.) because I don’t fight the handcuffs.This is how I cheat:(1.) I never work with a person unless I really enjoy talking with them. My relationship with that person is the source of my inspiration. How can I make the world love and trust someone if I don’t love and trust them myself?(2.) My new friend must have unconditional authority to say “absolutely yes” without having to check with someone else. Anything with two heads is a monster.(3.) Their company must be operationally excellent. Great ads won’t grow a broken business.(4.) The product or service they sell must have a solid profit margin and a long purchase cycle. A short profit margin is the father, and a short purchase cycle is the mother, of every twitchy little bastard that has ever been born.I hit home runs because I never swing at a pitch that is not in my sweet spot. Ad writing isn’t like baseball. A baseball batter gets to look at only 6 pitches – 2 strikes and 4 balls – before they have to leave the batter’s box. But the independent ad writer doesn’t face a pitch count. You can wait for the perfect opportunity that is in the center of your happy little sweet spot.The crack of the bat shatters the crystal silence as the adrenaline pumps the crowd screaming to their feet the ball arcs through space toward a little boy in the seventh row who has been waiting patiently all day with his baseball glove.Your sweet spot may be different than mine. This just means you have a different superpower.The secret of success is to know your superpower.I promise you have one. It doesn’t matter that you’re not an ad writer, you have a superpower! If you don’t know what it is, ask the people who know you best.So now you know how I cheat.I mentioned a second thing that makes me a better-than-average ad writer: I don’t fight the handcuffs. Yes, I scream at the handcuffs, I mourn the day they were born and I suggest to the handcuffs that they do things that are not anatomically feasible, but then I calm down and pretend they are cuff links and that I am the kind of guy who wears cuff links.A few months ago Sean Jones asked me to meet the new CEO of Spence Diamonds. His name is Callum Beveridge. Callum flew to Austin and we spent a couple of days together and I really like him. When he asked me if I could bring back the magic of the old Spence Diamonds radio campaign. I told him that it would be impossible because Sean Jones was no longer available as a voice actor. Any attempt to bring that campaign back to life without its principal character would be like trying to swim the English Channel wearing handcuffs. It would impossible.Callum reminds me of Dewey Jenkins. Both of them, when I said, “It’s impossible,” asked me the same innocent question: “Well, if it could be done and you were going to do it, how would you go about it?”“Well, Callum, the only way would be to use Sean Jones as a character that never appears on-stage. Conversations with him would always have to take place off-stage. The first time I saw this done was when I read Isaac...

When Pennie and I were preparing to move away from the town of our childhood, I told my friend Phil that I felt I was holding onto the end of a rope in the half-light of limbo, and I had no idea where the other end of the rope was tied. I have never forgotten what he said.“This is your time in the elevator. You are between two worlds. You are leaving behind the way it has been, but you have not yet arrived at the way it will be. You don’t know if you are going to a higher place or a lower one. The only thing you know for sure is that when those elevator doors open, you will be surrounded by new faces, new spaces, and new places; everything will be different. A new chapter in your life will begin and you will have to figure everything out. But that part is easy. The hard part is being in the elevator. The hard part is not knowing.”Your going-away party is over; your friends are gone. A new opportunity and a new town await you, but you are not yet there. You are in the elevator. It is awkward and filled with uncertainty. You want those doors to open so you can face what awaits.You remember that feeling, don’t you?Phil’s counsel about the elevator came from a book he had read. He said the book was called Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, by Gail Sheehy. It was published in 1976.When Phil Johnson died, he left me his favorite tie. It is blazoned with shelves of beautiful books from top to bottom. He wore it often.Phil also left me his library of more than 3,000 books, a portion of which now fill the shelves in the reading room of the Enchanted Emporium in the Village of La Mancha, just 200 yards south of the Tower at Wizard Academy.The next time you’re on campus, wander over to the Enchanted Emporium and plop yourself down in one of the soft, red leather reading chairs with a glass of wine and a book from Phil’s library.When you see the titles of the books he read, you will know the man.I think you will enjoy having met him.Roy H. Williams

“Unless your goal is to go backwards, you cannot make progress while staring into the rear-view mirror.”An opening statement like that would usually indicate a motivational message, but I’m doing something different today. I’m not backing up and I’m not moving forward. I’m pausing to look at the long road behind me and the short road ahead.A reflective mood requires a rear-view mirror.I’ve spent an hour on the phone each Friday morning for the past 10 years with my friend Dewey Jenkins. We won’t be doing that anymore. Dewey was offered so much money for his company that it made no sense to keep it.At the top of this page is a photo I snapped as Dewey walked onto the second-story porch of the historic Duke Mansion in Charlotte a few years ago. I had been sitting out there admiring the view when he walked in with his characteristic grin. *Click*We had wrapped up the famous “Mr. Jenkins and Bobby” campaign by giving Bobby $100,000 so that he could pursue his dream of becoming an actor in Hollywood. Now we had to accelerate our momentum and elevate our trajectory in a new and different way. Dewey and Jonathan and Casey and I were building a rocket ship while we were flying it.The new campaign, “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…”, has been even more successful than “Mr. Jenkins and Bobby.” Mr. Jenkins is still the center of attention even though he is now off-stage. The values and beliefs of his company are reflected by the things his employees remember him saying. “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…”The people of that company will be recalling things Mr. Jenkins told them for generations to come. (Indy put some of those TV ads in the rabbit hole for you.)I left the company when Dewey left, but Jonathan and Casey will doubtless reach the stars.Dewey Jenkins called me the morning after he closed the sale of his company.Mr. Jenkins told me, “It was June 23, 2000, when I heard you speak at the Airtime 500 Conference in St. Louis. I bought your first two books for $20 each and they took me to $20,000,000 a year. And then I came to see you in 2011 and we began this grand adventure…”And a grand adventure it has been.# # # #I closed my computer and went to bed after I wrote that sentence. Three days have passed and a lot has happened.Two more of my close friends have sold their companies, bringing the collective sales price for all three companies to considerably more than one billion dollars.Pennie tells me I must write to you next week about, “Your Time in the Elevator.”It is a story that began 37 years ago.I look forward to writing it.Roy H. Williams

King Edward of England inherited control of Gascony in France from his mother, Eleanor of Provence, a French noble. But when the 27-year-old King of France decided in 1295 not to let the King of England control part of his country, Edward asked his English nobles to raise an army so that he could regain control of his real estate on the other side of the water.His nobles said, “Edward, Gascony doesn’t really belong to the nation of England; its revenues belong to you, personally. So we’re out. You need to deal with that on your own.”A con man who wants your money will present you with a phony opportunity. But a con man who wants your vote will present you with a phony emergency.Having thus been rebuffed by the Earls of England, Edward summoned a vast assembly of barons and bishops, knights and burgesses, men of the shires, and representatives of towns and cities, and told them their nation was in danger. He said,“The King of France, not satisfied with the treacherous invasion of Gascony, has prepared a mighty fleet and army for the purpose of invading England and wiping the English tongue from the face of the earth.” 1It was complete bullshit, but it worked.Alarmed, outraged, and afraid, the people of England gave lying King Edward the army he needed to invade France and fight for his real estate. And thus the fuse was lit that would later explode as The Hundred Years War.Edward’s lie cost the lives of tens of thousands of English husbands, sons, and fathers.Fifty years later, Edward II told that same lie to a new generation of English husbands, sons, and Dads. In 1345, he began spreading propaganda throughout England that the French were spies and aggressors whose only goal was to invade England and convert the population to French speakers. He got the people of England so worked up that when they got to France in 1347, “they tore it to pieces like a pack of distempered dogs. The army marched through the countryside, slaughtering and brutalizing as it went.” 2The war that Edward II started that day lasted 116 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 4 days, and resulted in more than 3,000,000 innocent people dying violently in France. In the end, the French won. The English lost all of their possessions in France except for the city of Calais, which they held until 1558.Fifty years apart, two different kings told the same lie to create a national emergency. And both times, it worked.And it still works today.Roy H. Williams

On a Rainy Autumn Day…October 18, 2021ListenAHis father called him Bunny because he was born on Easter Sunday.Bunny’s younger brother got a scholarship to Harvard.I’ve had both of Bunny’s phone numbers memorized for the past 48 years and I mention his name at least once a week. “Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis” has been a private joke between the Princess and me since we were 17 years old.I spent my Oklahoma weekends helping Loren load and unload the mountain of antique furniture he would buy at auction.Loren infected me with an addiction for auction browsing that has never left me.At the end of each auction, he and I would load 5 times more furniture than could possibly fit into – and on top of – his 1960 Ford Station Wagon. It became a point of honor that we never had to make a second trip. Loren was a legend. He and I could have hauled the entire contents of the average 3-bedroom home, including all major appliances, in just one load.Pennie witnessed Loren work his magic more than once, so when she and I go to Costco or Home Depot or a plant nursery or an auction and buy far more than we can possibly pack into her little SUV, she will always look at me and say, “Do you think we can get it all home?”I smile and say, “Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis.”I always get it home in just one load. Always. We may look like the Beverly Hillbillies as we roll down the road, but I graduated magna cum laude from the Loren L. Lewis School of Hauling, where our school motto is, “Of course we can get it in just one load. Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis.”When I was 15, Loren was 30. Anyone who saw us together would assume he was my older brother or my very young uncle.Loren taught me how to rebuild an automobile engine. Loren drove me to the emergency room when I nearly sliced off my forefinger while trying to shave down the edge of a plastic light switch cover. After we left the emergency room, Loren took me to a seedy bar in a weird part of Tulsa to show me how to hustle pool.I woke up last night feeling that I had allowed the merely urgent to displace the truly important. I Googled “Loren Ladic Lewis” and saw his obituary.My big brother died on June 20th of last year and no one told me.What’s even worse is that in the 16 months that have come and gone since he died, I was always too busy to call either of the numbers I have known by heart for the past 48 years. What was I doing 17 months ago that was so desperately important?Is there a person you love that you haven’t called in a while?Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis.Roy H. Williams

In America, “generosity” implies an openhanded sharing of material resources.A restaurant can serve generous portions.A donor can be generous with their money.A friend can be generous with their pickup truck, their lawnmower, or their cabin at the lake.While some people are generous with their money; others are generous with their time. They will drive you to the airport, feed your pet while you’re away, and help you pack your stuff, load the truck, and move you to a better place.Are you more generous with your money or with your time?Those who are generous with their money are known as givers or donors or philanthropists. And those who are generous with their time are known as helpers or volunteers. But we have no special name for people who are generous with their encouragement, because those people are extremely rare.What is encouragement, exactly, and why is it so rare?The prefix en was extracted from Latin and came to us through the French. When it precedes a noun, en means to include, allow, or cause to happen. So when you encourage someone, you cause courage to happen within them. You give them a gift they can carry bravely into their future. You make them less afraid.Generic encouragement is as obvious and awkward as flattery. “You’re a winner!” “You can do it!” “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”To truly encourage a person, you must speak to an ability, a talent, or a special sensitivity they possess. When you privately tell a person about something special you see in them – something that they, too, know is there – you give them courage and confidence.“I’ve noticed that you see connections and relationships between things that most people never notice. I think this may be one of your superpowers.”“I’ve noticed that you can always tell when someone doesn’t feel included, and then you make them feel like they are part of the group. I really admire this about you.”“I’ve noticed that when everyone else is making excuses, you are the one who steps up and does what needs to be done. The world needs more people like you.”To see the good things that hide within a person, you need only to pay attention.Attention is high-denomination currencyin any transaction between two people.Attention is something you payand insight is what you can buy with it.If you want to have insight into a person’s hopes and dreams,you need only to pay attention.I know you. You want to empower people. You want to give them courage and confidence to face the future with a smile. You want to help them be stronger and happier.How do I know this about you?By choosing to read these memos I write, you are showing me a little of what is inside you. I tell you this so you will know I am not flattering you when I say that I know you want to give that little jolt-of-joy and spark-of-life to the people you care about.So the next time you’re with someone that matters to you,talk less and listen more,pay attention to their actions,and when you notice something they are good at,tell them what you have noticed they are good at.Everyone else who knows them will forever be giving them advice.Be that rare and special person who gives them honest encouragement and loyal support.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

Did you know that mood and mode share the same root word?1I point this out because you cannot take your customer where you want them to go until you first meet them where they are. And where they are is in one of two different moods, or modes of shopping: transactional mode and relational mode.Each of us operates in both modes, but we tend to choose our mode according to the category. If the category in question is one which you (1.) have an interest, (2.) have no preferred provider, and (3.) are willing to spend time to save money, you will approach that purchase in transactional mode.If the category in question is one which you (1.) have no interest, (2.) have a name in mind that you feel good about2, and (3.) are willing to spend money to save time, you will approach that purchase in relational mode.A customer in relational modeThinks long term.Considers today’s transaction to be one in a series of many.Does not enjoy comparison shopping or negotiating.Fears only “making a poor choice.”Hopes to find an expert they can trust.Is willing to spend money to save time.Desires a long-term solution provider.Is likely to become a repeat customer.A customer in transactional modeThinks short term.Considers today’s transaction to be the end of the relationship.Enjoys the process of shopping and negotiating.Fears only “paying more than they had to pay.”Considers themself to be the expert.Is willing to spend time to save money.Desires a lower price.Is a good source of word-of-mouth advertising.Relational customers are High CAP:High ConversionHigh Average SaleHigh Profit MarginTransactional customers are Low CAP:Low ConversionLow Average SaleLow Profit MarginWhen you target High CAP customers in Relational Mode, you face these dangers.You must create a company culture that causes your employees to take pride in delivering the experience that is expected by the customer in relational shopping mode.If you disappoint the relational customer, they take it as a personal betrayal. You were their trusted provider and you let them down.When you target Low CAP customers in Transactional Mode, you face these dangers:Transactional customers have no loyalty to you. Your relationship ends when the transaction is complete.Transactional customers who are attracted to you for reasons of price alone will abandon you for the same reason.There is nothing that someone else cannot do a little worse and sell a little cheaper. This is why no business is secure when it targets customers in transactional shopping mode.The words you use in your ads send signals to your customers. Do your word choices appeal to customers in relational mode, or do they speak to customers in transactional mode?Give it some thought, because it really is a big deal.Roy H. Williams1 Latin modus “measure, extent, quantity; proper measure, rhythm, song; a way, manner, fashion, style,” from a Proto-Indo-European root med “take appropriate measures.”2 When you “feel good about a name,” it is because you have repeatedly heard good things about that company though advertising or word-of-mouth.My friend Bill Bergh taught me about Transactional and Relational modes of decision making

“I did all the right things. I touched all the bases in exactly the right order and I was highly rewarded for it. If you had done what I did, you would have been rewarded, too.”Abel didn’t say it, but Cain heard it. And in his rage, Cain sent his brother to the other side of that open door through which we all must exit.Do you remember the Nashville man who blew himself up inside his motorhome in front of the telephone building on Christmas morning? The final report released by the FBI said, “Anthony Quinn Warner chose the location and timing so that the explosion would be impactful while still minimizing the likelihood of undue injury.” And it went on to say that Warner was driven in part by, “the loss of stabilizing anchors and deteriorating interpersonal relationships.”When otherwise normal people become violent and begin killing random strangers, we usually dismiss them as “crazy and evil” and that’s the end of our discussion.Jordan B. Peterson1 says,“We make our sacrifices in the present, and we assume that by doing so, the benevolence of the world will be manifested to us. That’s why we’re willing to forego gratification and to work. In doing these things, we sacrifice.”“So Cain sacrifices, but God rejects his sacrifice. And that ancient story is brilliantly ambivalent about why you can work diligently and make the proper sacrifices and yet fail, which means that despite all that work and all that foregone gratification, an implicit covenant has been broken. And Cain responds to that with tremendous anger. He raises his fist against the sky and shakes it and says, ‘This should not be!’ And then he takes revenge. He says, ‘I will destroy what is most valuable to you.'”“So he goes after Abel, who is an ideal person whose sacrifices are welcomed by God and he kills him. And then all hell breaks loose in the aftermath. The more I delved into that story, the more it shocked me. I couldn’t believe that much information could be packed into what’s essentially 12 lines.”“We see the suffering and the horror of our lives, the vulnerability and the mortality of everything that we love and cherish, and we see our failure, and that turns us against being. But there is another part of us that maintains faith and strives forward.”A great many people have quietly spoken to me about the unfairness of their lives. And each of them had a valid point. If we lived in an organized universe where hard work and good intentions were always rewarded, and laziness and dishonest manipulation were always punished, the list of winners and losers in this life would look radically different.This idea of winners and losers becomes particularly thorny when you throw God into the mix. Kate Bowler writes,“Blessed is a loaded term because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward. It can be a term of pure gratitude. ‘Thank you, God. I could not have secured this for myself.’ But it can also imply that it was deserved. ‘Thank you, me. For being the kind of person who gets it right.’ It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.”Twenty years ago, David Brooks wrote a book called Bobos in Paradise, and then a few weeks ago he wrote an update called, How the Bobos Broke America. The following is from that update.“The Bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they had secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. They were – as the classic Apple commercial had it – ‘the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.’ But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with

When you list “features and benefits” in your ads, you are speaking to the customer who is currently, consciously in the market for your product. What percentage of the public do you suppose that might be? One percent? I doubt it. In most categories, it is only a tiny fraction of one percent.But what about the remaining 99.9 percent? When they aren’t in the market for your product, they have no interest in your features and benefits.Do you remember the story of the Tortoise and the Hare? This is my letter to the rabbit:“Dear Rabbit, quit waiting until the last minute to advertise, hoping to impress the unwitting customer who has not already chosen a preferred provider. Be like the Tortoise. Impress future customers with stories that tug at their attention and make them smile and you will become their preferred provider. It takes courage and patience, but it’s how you win the race.”Looking back at your career, can you describe the moment when your foot first fell onto the path that brought you to where you are today?“I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my Dad…”“I won the race by only 20 seconds, so he beat the shit out of me…”“I was in the drive-through line at McDonald’s…”“I was looking at my brand-new baby boy and thinking about the kinds of things that happen to people when they’re least expecting it…”Those are the opening lines of the origin stories of Ken Goodrich of Goettl Air Conditioning, Mark Jennison of IAMACOMEBACK.com, Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and Tim Schmidt of the United States Concealed Carry Association.People listen to the TED Talk of Simon Sinek and realize the importance of “Start with Why,” but they never really know how to do it. Most of them describe the outcome they are hoping to create, or they just approach their Unique Selling Proposition from a new and different angle.If you want to “Start with Why,” write your Origin Story.If your origin story could be told by anyone else in your category, you have not created an origin story; you are telling us about your passion. Or you are telling us what you hope to accomplish.Have you ever read the bio of an artist?“I have loved painting since I was 4 years old.”“I knew I wanted to be a painter when I was 3.”“My mother tells me that I was painting before I could talk.”Those are not the opening lines of origin stories. Those are just people describing the longevity of their passion.If a jeweler says his “Why” is that he wants to “help people celebrate the important moments in their lives,” this is not an Origin Story. He is just telling us what he hopes to accomplish.To prove my point, these are the excellent opening lines of 8 different origin stories from 8 different jewelers:“Tom Heflin was a railroad conductor. His wife had a sister…”“Standing at the engagement ring counter, I felt like Oliver Twist asking for another bowl of porridge…”“Five years before Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders, Simon Schiffman stepped off the train to stretch his legs…”“My Dad was a house painter. He taught me to sand and scrape paint old paint until my fingers were aching and raw…”“During Hurricane Betsy in ‘65, my Dad moved us into his jewelry design studio…”“When I opened the store I had no money. We didn’t have the money for inventory, so I…”“Morris Jacobs immigrated to America as a boy. He came through Galveston…”“My Dad died in a car crash when I was 3 years old. So my Uncle Joe taught me…”As those 8 jewelers just demonstrated, origin stories are not interchangeable.There is no template, no pattern to follow. There is only a snapshot of a fleeting moment, a remembered glimpse of an unfocused future, a haunting voice that has whispered all your life, “Keep trying.”When was the moment that your foot first fell onto...

Jeffrey Eisenberg and I had lunch in a Japanese restaurant on April 28, 2007. I know this because he said something I quickly wrote down and later added to my Random Quotes database: “Marketers are paid to make promises that businesses have no intention of keeping.”Jeffrey wasn’t talking about marketing; he was talking about company culture, that invisible component that causes businesses to rise or fall.We humans search forIdentity (Who am I? What do I believe?)Purpose (What am I supposed to do? Why am I here?)Adventure (What must I overcome?)Identity, Purpose, and Adventure are what lives are built upon.Story, Culture, and Experience are what businesses are built upon.According to Ray Seggern,Story is what your business tells the public in your ads. Is your story a fairy tale or is it a mirror?Culture is an inside job. You cannot buy it or outsource it. It is what your employees feel when they work for you.Experience is what your employees deliver to your customer. Does it live up to the Story you told?Did you notice the parallels in those two lists?The Story you tell the public is a statement of your Purpose,but the Culture of your company is your true Identity,and the Experience you deliver to your customer will forever be your big Adventure, the forever source of your challenges, obstacles, and difficulties.Ray Seggern says that Story, Culture, and Experience are the 3 touch points on the ever-spinning flywheel of business, and when they align they create that perfect vortex of perpetual reinforcement and ever-increasing momentum that lift your business to breathtaking heights of profitability and fame.The Story you tell determines the Experience your customer expects. But whether or not your customer receives it will be determined by your Culture.Owners and managers like to believe their customers are receiving the experience they intended for them to have. But the best intentions are no match for company culture.In the famous words of Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”Company culture is what causes businesses to rise or fall.Are you ready to work on your culture? Are you ready for your next big adventure?I hope so. Because this is the one where we find the buried treasure.Roy H. Williams

The illustration at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo features Indy Beagle wearing a yarmulke as he says,“The FBI just released its hate crime statistics for 2020. Are you ready? 36% of victims were attacked for being black, 10% were attacked for being white, and 9% were attacked for being Jewish. Of all hate crimes motivated by hatred of the victims due to their religion alone, 57.5% targeted Jews, although Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population.”That illustration will be hotly criticized by two people.The first person will be the one who refuses to accept the validity of the FBI’s hate crime report. They will want to “set the record straight” by telling me that the FBI report was “fake news planted by Jews,” or some other nonsense.The second person will be outraged by the “deeply offensive” image of a dog wearing a yarmulke and accuse me of implying that Jews are dogs.But you, since you are not looking for a reason to be outraged, knew immediately that Indy is wearing a yarmulke as a symbol of support for his Jewish friends. And because you are perceptive, you noticed long ago that Indy is black, white, and brown.Small-minded people give themselves power by being easily offended. One person considers even the smallest request to be an attack on his or her personal freedom, and another person considers the rest of us to be asleep. Each of these believes that they alone know the true facts; they alone are awake.Although these two persons sit at opposite extremes on the sociopolitical spectrum, they are alike in that they both have an inflated sense of self-importance, and they are both easily outraged.I do my best to ignore them, because to pay attention to them is to give them power.The strange thing about all of this is that I agree – in principle, at least – with both sides. I agree that we must be vigilant to protect our liberties, and I agree that we should be sensitive to the needs of others.But the extremists on both sides have taken a good thing too far.You will remember that I predicted all of this many years ago when I wrote Pendulum, a book about the predictable, cyclical swings in western society for the past 3,000 years.The bad news is that it will get worse before it gets better. The good news is that it will get better.Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am. Stuck in the middle with you.*I appreciate your companionship, your tolerance, and your sense of humor.I like you.Roy H. Williams

Did anyone besides me grow up reading the King James Bible?Shakespeare was 40 years old when King James commissioned a new translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible into English, and he was 47 when it was published in 1611.During those 7 years, Shakespeare wrote a dozen plays including Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. So if the cadence, rhythm and phrasing of the King James Bible reminds you of Shakespeare, well, it’s because that’s how people spoke back then.But only if they lived in England.In the year 1611, approximately 597,000,000 people lived and breathed and wandered the earth. Of these, only 5,600,000 spoke English. So the great-good-gift given by generous King James benefitted slightly less than 1 percent of the world.But still, I like the King James Bible.The book of Genesis opened my mind to the law of duality and to the power of words. The book of Ecclesiastes gives me perspective; few things are as important as they seem, and nothing is permanent. The Gospel of John fills me with wonder and gives me hope.The King James Bible tells me the English language is a constantly evolving, shapeshifting animal.It has been 410 years since King James translated the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible into the English of Shakespeare, and during those years the words “spirit” and “ghost” have traded places.We think of “spirit” today as the ethos or essence of a thing, and we think of “ghost” as a frightening apparition from beyond the grave. But in the 1611 Bible, those definitions are transposed:In the 14th chapter of Matthew’s Good News we read,“And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.”Holy Ghost appears 89 times in the King James Bible. In the 14th chapter of John’s Good News we read the words Jesus spoke during the Last Supper to his remaining 11 disciples, just after Judas Iscariot walked out of the room to betray him to the religious leaders who despised him and the Romans who would crucify him:“But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”No matter which translation you read, the Bible is a wonderful book. It takes you into an ancient Middle Earth populated by Pharaohs, Philistines, and Pharisees.Pharaohs: those imperious, mysterious rulers of mystical, magical Egypt.Philistines: pagan Greeks whose champion, a giant named Goliath, was defeated by a young shepherd boy named David who later became King of Israel.Pharisees: leaders of the faith into which Jesus was born. When he grew up, Jesus criticized the Pharisees harshly for their tendency to behave like today’s Taliban, focusing all their energy on the enforcement of the letter of the law but missing the spirit of God’s law entirely. When you read what Jesus said to them! Oh, my!Unlike Jesus, I was born into the Christian faith. Now that I have grown up, I continue to...

A snapshot is a message in a bottle floating on the ocean of time.We had “picture day” at school when I was growing up. Is that still a thing?Our 8th grade yearbooks were delivered to Sequoyah Junior High the following summer, just before we started the 9th grade. There was no internet, no email back then, just letters in our mailboxes telling us to come to the school and pick up our yearbooks on a certain day between the hours of such-and-such.After I picked up my yearbook, I got on the telephone with Elaine, a girl my age who lived 4 houses away. Elaine and I were going through our yearbooks together, page by page over the telephone, making comments about every picture when lightning struck. I was looking at a snapshot of a girl I had never met. Although she and I had gone to the same school for 2 years, I had never once encountered her.I said to Elaine, “Pennie Compton.”Elaine answered, “She was in my math class. She’s really nice and super smart.”And then my ears were surprised to hear my mouth say, “I’m going to marry that girl.” I had never said such a thing in my life and I never did again. But deep down I knew it was true. Don’t ask me how, but I knew.A few days later my class schedule arrived with an invitation for all the parents to come to Sequoyah Junior High on Friday night at 7PM to meet their kid’s homeroom teacher and then classes would start on Monday.I didn’t show my Mom the invitation because my first-hour class was Oklahoma History taught by Coach Meeks, a man famous for lecturing kids on how he made his own sun-dried beef jerky and how every young man should drink protein shakes to build muscle mass.Yeah, no need for Mom to meet him. No need for me to go, either. I already knew my way around.But wait! Here was a list of the other 26 kids assigned to my homeroom class and one of them was Pennie Compton!I was the first person to arrive on Friday night. I took a seat at the back of the room and kept my eye on the door. After about 20 minutes, I saw a man and a woman walk in with the girl I had seen in the photo. I got up, strode to the front of the room, shook the man’s hand firmly and said with a smile, “I’m Roy Williams. You’re going to be seeing a lot of me in the future.”Pennie was embarrassed because she had no idea who I was, but it wasn’t long before we were friends.Oklahoma History was memorable. Coach Meeks liked to show off the heavy wooden paddle he made for disciplining unruly boys by beating them on the backside. According to him, those rows of half-inch holes drilled in the paddle were there “to reduce the wind resistance,” but those of us who experienced his beatings knew those holes were there to leave white polka dots on your bright red ass.I got my first butt-tattoo for spontaneously laughing when I shouldn’t have. Coach Meeks was talking about the glory and wonder of the O.U. Sooners Football Team when he decided to steer us onto the straight and narrow path by shouting, “If you succeed in footbaaaaall you will succeed in liiiiife.”Three years went by. Pennie had boyfriends and I had girlfriends but I always knew I would marry her one day. We went a thousand places together on the nights when neither of us had a date, but we never once held hands and I never tried to kiss her. But we told each other everything.The only secret I ever kept from Pennie was that I was deeply in love with her.I got a full ride to Oklahoma State University. She got a big scholarship to an exclusive private school. I attended classes at O.S.U. for a day and a half, then called Pennie and said, “I’m dropping out. Let’s get married and figure out the future together.”She said, “But we’re both so young and poor. Why don’t we wait a couple of years?”I said, “In a couple of years, we’ll still be young and poor.”She thought that was funny and laughed. I said,...

You are too young to remember when there were no search engines.Sit. Relax. I’ll tell you about it.In the days before the dawning of the internet and the Age of Aquarius, every household was given a fat telephone book, and in the White Pages of that book, the names of companies and individuals were listed alphabetically. To find a company’s contact info, all you needed to know was their name.Branded Keywords are the new White Pages. If you want to contact a specific company, just type that company’s name into Google and badda-bing, badda-bang, badda-boom, “Here is how you can reach them.”In the back of that same fat phone book were The Yellow Pages®, a directory for customers who were currently, consciously ready to buy, but who had no preferred provider in mind.Unbranded keywords are the new yellow pages. When you are currently, consciously ready to buy, but have no preferred provider in mind, simply type the name of the category into Google and a bunch of ads will appear. These ads will be listed, of course, according to which companies were willing to pay the highest price.Funny thing: that’s exactly how the yellow pages worked. Business categories were listed alphabetically in The Yellow Pages®, but within each category, the businesses that spent the most money were listed first. Full-page ads, then half page ads, then quarter-page ads…Have you ever heard the story of The Tortoise and The Hare?Aesop was a Greek storyteller whose 158 little parables about life were considered to be so wise that he was quoted by Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch more than 2,000 years ago.In one of these stories a tortoise and a hare – a sort of rabbit – ran a race. The tortoise began running immediately but the rabbit decided to wait until the race was nearly over and then dash across the finish line ahead of the slow, patient, relentless tortoise. The tortoise won that race, of course, because the rabbit was unable to overtake his enormous head start.The rabbit lost the race when he chose to wait until the last minute – the Zero Moment of Truth – to begin running.In the world of advertising, the rabbits win the customer only when there are no turtles in the race.Turtles use mass media – TV, Radio, and Outdoor – to win the hearts of customers while the rabbits are still asleep. These customers become familiar with the turtle; they like the turtle, so they type his name into the search block when they are ready to buy what the turtle sells.The advertising rabbit failed to wake up because there was no starting gun, no unbranded keyword. The turtle wins the customer, gets the click, makes the sale.The times may change, but the hearts of humans do not. Given the chance, they will always buy from a familiar face instead of a stranger.Become a familiar face – or a familiar voice – who tells wonderful stories.It only takes 158 of them to be remembered forever.Roy H. Williams

A branded keyword is one in which the name of your company appears. When a customer types the name of your company into a search string, they are looking for you, they believe in you. A friend might have recommended you, but usually it was your advertising that won them over.Either way, you have done well.Unbranded keywords include phrases like “air conditioning repair” and “diamond engagement rings.” When a shopper types an unbranded keyword into a search engine, it is a clear signal that they have no preferred provider in your category. No one has won them over.The best online marketers track their branded and unbranded keywords separately because they know that when you follow unbranded keywords all the way from the search string to the gross profit made on those sales, you will often find you spent more money on unbranded keywords than you made on the sales they brought in.That’s when you should drop them like a hot rock.Look at the case study at the top of this page. I have removed the name of the company, the category, and the cities, but the data is real, it is recent, and it is accurate.We spent $37,398 in unbranded keywords in City 1 so that we might have the privilege of losing $8,299.We spent $30,008 in unbranded keywords in City 2 so that we might have the privilege of losing $17,238.We spent $6,273 in unbranded keywords in City 3 so that we might have the privilege of losing $6,409.After losing $31,946 we grew tired of feeling privileged.Meanwhile, in City 1 our investment of just $7,452 in branded keywords made us a gross profit of $49,480 after deducting the cost of our branded keywords.In City 2 our investment of just $14,648 in branded keywords made us a gross profit of $62,976.In City 3 our investment of just $2,998 in branded keywords made us a gross profit of $9,042.But all the young digital weasels tell me I’m not looking at it correctly. They scold me for tracking branded and unbranded keywords separately, and smugly point out, “When you combine them into one big package, the return on investment is perfectly acceptable.”Some of my closest friends are world-famous online marketing experts who know how to create campaigns that allow you to monetize all the customer enthusiasm that has been generated through your radio and TV and outdoor advertising.None of my friends is young enough or smug enough to be a digital weasel.Digital weasels always fail to deliver what they proudly promised. Back when I was a 14-year-old boy on the wrong side of a little Oklahoma town, I would have pulled these weasels aside, put my arm around their shoulders and whispered in their ears, “Be careful not to let your alligator mouth overload your mockingbird butt.”But I have mellowed and matured.Or at least I pretend I have.Les Binet and Peter Field did what data scientists do; they monitored the advertising of more than 1,000 businesses for more than 15 years, then published the data.Binet and Field are not digital weasels. I smile every time I listen to them.ALes Binet says, “If you build your business, or try to build your business, using short-term efficiency measures – cost per response, click-through rates, that kind of thing – you’re on a hiding to nothing. You’re going to run your business into the ground, we believe, because those are not the things that grow the business, long-term.”Les Binet goes on to say, “You need to talk to people, not just who are in the market right now, but people who might come to market over the next two to three years. You need to engage them with things that are more humanly relevant, more general, more universal, and crucially, you need to engage them at the emotional level… So if you want really disproportionately large marketing effects, if you want big...

A verb avalanche is a highly engaging description that causes you to see, hear, and feel action all around you. You dodge each tumbling word-boulder only to leap, jump, roll and scramble to dodge the mountainside of word-boulders that follow close behind it.causes, see, hear, feel, dodge, tumbling, leap, jump, roll, scramble, dodge, followThat example included 12 verbs among 43 total words. Roughly 1 in every 3 1/2 words was a verb.Verb Avalanches are built from verbs: action words.“Thorin stepped up and drew the key on its chain from round his neck. He put it to the hole. It fitted and it turned! Snap! The gleam went out, the sun sank, the moon was gone, and evening sprang into the sky.”– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chapter 11stepped up, drew, put, fitted, turned, Snap! went out, sank, was gone, sprang10 verbs among 43 total words. Roughly 1 in 4 words was a verb.(Snap! is onomatopoeia, a word that imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. When constructing a word avalanche, onomatopoeia counts as a verb.)Here are some other examples of onomatopoeia:Machine noises — honk, beep, vroom, clang, zap, boing.Impact sounds — boom, crash, whack, thump, bang.Sounds of the voice — shush, giggle, growl, whine, murmur, blurt, whisper, hiss.“Jacob slipped into the shadows, ducked down a hallway, climbed a wall, and hid in the shadows above the throne room.”slipped, ducked, climbed, hid.4 verbs among 21 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“Jacob was afraid for his friends. He slipped into the shadows, crept over a rooftop, slid down a tree, hurried away from the palace, and ran all the way to Bethlehem.”– Chris Auer, The Littlest Magi   was afraid, slipped, crept, slid, hurried, ran6 verbs among 31 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”– Jack Kerouaclive, talk, be saved, desirous of everything, yawn, say, burn, burn, burn, exploding, see, pop, goes, ‘Awww!’14 verbs among 69 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of wordsas they tangle with human emotions.”– James Michener love, writing, love, swirl, swing, tangle In this sequence, 2 verbs – writing and swirl – were used as nouns, but we are counting them anyway. Even when used as nouns, verbs have impact.6 verbs among 17 total words. Roughly 1 in 3 words was a verb.“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock – shock is a worn-out word – but astonish.”– Terry Southernwriting, astonish, shock, shock, astonish.5 verbs among 19 total words. Roughly 1 in 4 words was a verb.“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and...

Isaac Newton discovered that force – impact ­– is the result of mass x acceleration. This is why the impact of any statement you make = the size of the idea x the speed of successfully transferring it from your mind to the mind of your customer.Newton also discovered, “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” The faster an advertised offer produces big results, the less well it will work over time.EXAMPLE: When a direct-response offer generates big money quickly, you can be certain that the longer you do it, the less well it will work. To gain attention, a thing must be new, surprising, and different. When it becomes old, predictable, and the-same-as-before, we turn our attention elsewhere.You already know this.Advertising is, in at least some aspects, a science. But systems-focused business owners are demanding that advertising become a science in all its aspects. They say, “Give us fast-acting, reliable advertising that drives ever-increasing sales opportunities,” and the sellers of advertising are saying, “You got it, boss! Coming right up!”I am reminded of the quest for a perpetual motion machine.The first documented claim of perpetual motion was made by Bhaskara of India in the 12th century. It has been followed by countless others. But not one of them has ever worked, and science has proven that none of them ever will.In his book on the subject of Perpetual Motion, Henry Dircks wrote,“A more self-willed, self-satisfied, or self-deluded class of the community, making at the same time pretension to superior knowledge, it would be impossible to imagine. They hope against hope, scorning all opposition with ridiculous vehemence, although centuries have not advanced them one step in the way of progress… The history of perpetual motion is a history of the fool-hardiness of either half-learned, or totally ignorant persons.”When you spend all day, every day talking with enthusiastic young advertising professionals, you meet a lot of people who fit that description.But I promised you a lesson on the Physics of Advertising. Here it is.Newton’s first law of thermodynamics is a version of the law of Conservation of Energy, which tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can only be transformed from one form to another.EXAMPLE: The chemical energy contained in gasoline can be transformed into kinetic energy, light energy, heat energy, and the percussive energy that you and I call sound, but those energies were there in the gasoline all along.When it is expended, the energy stored in the gasoline is gone. You cannot burn the same gasoline twice.Goodwill, reputation, share-of-mind, and other forms of “buying energy” can be stored in the mind of the customer in 3 different ways.The Performance of your product or service.When you deliver or exceed what the customer expected, you store “buying energy” in the mind of your customer. If you fall short of their expectations, gasoline is burned.A Referral from a friend or an online review.Word-of-mouth is when the buying energy stored in the mind of one customer is shared with another customer. When that word-of-mouth is negative, more gasoline is burned.Stories told in Advertising and by salespeople.Relational energy is built in the mind of the customer when your beliefs are aligned with their beliefs. Some people call this “branding,” but I prefer to think of it as customer bonding. When you create urgency with a limited-time offer, you force your customer into acting “now or never” and gasoline is burned.“Big Money Quickly” happens as the result of urgency; usually a shortage of time, or product, or opportunity. But shout “wolf” too often and the villagers no longer come running....

Edwin Twitmyer failed to close a loophole and it cost him the Nobel Prize.Twitmyer was working on his doctorate in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was on The Effect of Emotions on the Patellar Reflex, or Knee Jerk.To make his research possible, Twitmyer built an elevated chair with a remote-controlled rubber hammer that would strike the person’s patellar tendon and trigger the predictable leg-kick. He didn’t tell his subjects when he was going to release the hammer, he simply let it fall and then measured how far the leg kicked. When his subjects complained that the hammer caught them by surprise, Twitmyer began sounding a bell just before he activated the hammer.One day he accidentally sounded the bell without dropping the hammer and the subject’s leg kicked, even though the tendon had not been stimulated.Twitmyer knew he had stumbled onto something important. He then began doing the same to his other subjects and found that they, too, would kick their legs forward upon the sound of the bell, even when they were trying not to. He published his findings in his doctoral dissertation in 1902, one year before Ivan Pavlov announced the results of his dog research at the 1903 International Medical Congress in Madrid.But when Twitmyer presented his work at a meeting of the American Psychological Association, his research drew little response from the crowd.Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904, not Edwin Twitmyer.Twitmeyer knew he had a loophole in his research, but he failed to close it. As a good scientist, he acknowledged in his paper that the leg-kicks of the subjects could – theoretically – have been caused by his subjects voluntarily moving their legs, even though he was certain this was not the case.That same possibility had occurred to the other scientists as well.Here’s my point: When it comes to the purchases your customers make, each of them is occasionally a scientist. So when you speak to the customer’s intellect, you have to close all the loopholes. If you don’t, their doubts will remain and someone else, someone like Ivan Pavlov, is likely to make the sale.But when you speak to the emotions you are speaking to that part of the mind that is more interested in feelings rather than facts. Win the heart and the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.When my partner Johnny Molson heard about Twitmyer and Pavlov, he said,“So the moral of the story is that if a fella named Twitmyer wrote about conditioned responses a year before Ivan Pavlov did, that means you and I have been conditioned to associate Pavlov with conditioned responses, which would make it literally a Pavlovian-Pavlovian response.”Here’s my second point: The discoverer of a new thing – the genesis agent – is rarely the one who gets the reward. The fame, the money, and all the credit goes to the popularizer who knows how to get people’s attention.You don’t need to be the first.You just need to be the one people see.Roy H. WilliamsA

My friend Brian Scudamore shared a story with me last week. Today I’m sharing it with you.Ted Leonsis was on a little commuter airplane that lost the ability to use its wing flaps and landing gear. Face-to-face with the possibility of imminent death, Ted wrote a list of 101 things that he promised himself he would do if he lived. Start to finish, that list took 20 minutes.By May 27, 2021, Ted had accomplished 81 of those things.What would be on your list of 101 things to do before you die?When Brian Scudamore met Ted Leonsis at MIT, Ted sat him down and gave him 20 minutes to write his 101 things.What Brian wrote on his list is unimportant.What Ted Leonsis wrote on his list is unimportant.What is important is what you write on your list.You can download and print these 2 sheets of paper with lines numbered 1 to 101, or you can create your list of 101 things on your own computer.When you are finished, if you’d like someone to read your list and believe that you will, in fact, do every one of the things listed on it, send your list to [email protected]’ve got 20 minutes. Start a timer, then start your list.Don’t overthink it. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. If you live beyond the next 20 minutes, you can correct those things later.Your plane is falling from the sky. If you’re going to finish that list, you have to add something every 12 seconds.Start your timer.Go.Indy and I will continue this story in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

Bad marketing is about you, your company, your product, your service. “I, me, my, we, our…”Good marketing is about the customer, and how your product or service can elevate their happiness. “You, you, you, you, your…”With every purchase we make, we shout to the world who we are.We are attracted to products and services and brands and celebrities and organizations and friends because we see a reflection of ourselves in them.Our purchases and alliances are identity reinforcement.I’ve built a career on this belief.Simon Sinek says the same thing, but differently. Four minutes into his famous TED-X talk in Puget Sound, Simon says,“Here’s how Apple actually communicates. ‘Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.’At 5 1/2 minutes,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”At 7 1/2 minutes,“The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”As Simon approaches the 11-minute mark, he says,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.At 13 minutes:“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe.And at 15 1/2 minutes, he starts talking about Martin Luther King:“He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,‘ he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It’s what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August.”Most people call this the “Start with Why” talk, but Simon never did. Although he did use the word “why” 28 times, he used the word “believe” 32 times, and 28 of those were in his most high-impact statements.You gain the power of persuasion when you learn to see through the eyes of others. This allows you to talk to them about what they already care about instead of lecturing them on what they ought to care about.It sounds easy, but it’s not. To see through the eyes of others, you have to open your heart and mind to values and beliefs that are not your own.The only hard choices in life are the choices between 2 good...

Peter Raible was born in 1929 and he died in 2004.Of all the interesting things he said, this is perhaps my favorite:“We build on foundations we did not lay. We warm ourselves by fires we did not light. We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant. We drink from wells we did not dig. We profit from persons we did not know.This is as it should be.Together we are more than any one person could be. Together we can build across the generations. Together we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold. Together we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.We are ever bound in community.”My friend Brian Scudamore puts it this way, “We are bigger and better together.”About a dozen years ago, Wizard Academy board member Dr. Richard D. Grant held a Sunday morning chapel service in Tuscan Hall after an all-day-Saturday Wizard Academy reunion. He began that service by bowing his head and quietly speaking his thanks to all the unseen people who worked to create the clothes we were wearing.It was a surprisingly moving experience.Dr. Grant began with our socks, and spoke of his appreciation for the people who grew the cotton and tended the sheep for the wool from which our socks were made.And then he spoke of his appreciation of the people who worked the machines that knitted those fibers to become the socks we we had on our feet.And then he spoke of his appreciation of the people who created all the bits and pieces from which our shoes were made. And as he named those bits and pieces that come together to make a shoe, we saw each of those people hard at work, and we understood the benefit we took from their labor.By the time he got to the people who cut our hair, every person in that room was deep in contemplation of this wonderful, magical, interconnected world in which we live. And we loved the people who carried things across oceans for us, and the truck drivers who deliver things to warehouses for us, and the warehouse workers who load those things onto trucks for us so they can be delivered to the stores in which we shop, and to the restaurants in which we take such great delight.I hope to someday find the recording of that morning. I would like to share it with you.Indy Beagle tells me that 33 percent of the things we worry about never come to pass. The next 33 percent are so inconsequential that they are not worth our worry. The third 33 percent are things that might come to pass but cannot be changed, no matter how well we worry. This leaves only a tiny percent that are important, and could come to pass if we do not take action.I looked at him and said, “Is that your way of telling me to chill out?”Looking directly into my eyes, Indy just nodded his head.And then he quickly added, “Stop and smell the roses. Lie in a field and look at the clouds. Quit thinking so much about your reputation and your bank account and all the wonderful things you own. No one wins the rat race except for the rats.”Then his voice softened a little as he delivered his conclusion, “And in the end, the rats find out, after a lifetime of struggle, that there is no reward for the winner.”Thank you, Indy. It’s good to keep things in perspective.Roy H. Williams

It is 3AM on a Thursday morning and I haven’t yet written the MondayMorningMemo. In fact, I haven’t even started it.The fact that you are reading it right now means that I did, in the end, get it done, such as it is.Reading is a form of transportation that takes you to a different place and time.You are with me at 3AM as I try to think of something that might entertain you. I keep asking you what you’d like to read, and you keep not telling me.“Write what you want,” you say.At 4:46AM you watch as I visit the home page at MondayMorningMemo.com to see which of the 5,394 random quotes will pop up on the sidebar to inspire me.“One sword keeps another in the sheath.” – George Herbert, (1593–1633)It’s an interesting thought.I assume George Herbert was a military man, but I decide to Google him to be sure. As I type his name and birth year into the Google search block, I wonder, “What would it be like to live in a world where everyone carried a gun at all times? Would one sword keep another in the sheath?”Indy Beagle opens one eye and quietly says, “You don’t want to put your dog in that fight. Think about something else.” And then he goes back to sleep.A contemporary of Shakespeare, George Herbert was a famous metaphysical poet and a priest in the Church of England! He was born into an artistic and wealthy family, began classes at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1609 and was noted as an exceptional speaker by none other than King James the first. Yes, the King James of the 1611 King James Bible, that King James.George Herbert was elected to Parliament in 1624.We are now in England 397 years ago as Google, our tour guide, tells us more about the man who said, “One sword keeps another in the sheath.”“After the death of King James, Herbert renewed his interest in ordination. He gave up his secular ambitions in his mid-thirties and took holy orders in the Church of England, spending the rest of his life as the rector of the rural parish of Fugglestone St Peter, just outside Salisbury. He was noted for unfailing care for his parishioners, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill and providing food and clothing for those in need. Henry Vaughan called him – quote – ‘a most glorious saint and seer’. He was never a healthy man and died of consumption at age 39.”Who was Henry Vaughn, and what is “consumption,” anyway? I’ve heard of it all my life.Oh! Consumption is what they used to call Tuberculosis! Who knew?Henry Vaughn was another metaphysical poet and a physician. (yawn)Having wrung the last drop of honey from the story of “One sword keeps another in the sheath,” you and I decide to wander around Cambridge in 1609, the year that George Herbert entered Trinity College and came to the attention of King James. Indy Beagle, upon hearing of our journey, decides to go with us.We wander first into The Eagle and the Child, a pub in Cambridge that William Shakespeare was known to haunt. The locals call it The Bird and Baby. It stands opposite the oldest building in Cambridgeshire, the Saxon church tower of St Bene’t’s church which dates from around 1025. A tavern has stood here since 1353, famous for selling beer “for three gallons a penny”.I ask the bartender if he knows a young man by the name of George Herbert. Without looking up, he shakes his head “no.”Behind me, I hear Indy say, “Can we buy you a pint?”Shakespeare is sitting alone at a table scattered with ink-stained papers.“Sit,” says Shakespeare, as he pours wine from a jug into three wooden cups. The cups slosh a little as he slides them across the table. He looks down at the papers. “This new play I am writing is shit.”Indy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Cymbeline.”“It began as a tragedy but a comedy now emerges....

You choose a frame every time you look through the lens of a camera, sketch an image with a pencil, or write words with a pen. But today you’re going to start choosing your frames consciously, rather than unconsciously.The job of the ad writer is to introduce a new perspective and trigger a new belief. The best ads make people think and feel differently.When you look through the lens of a camera, you notice that as you move closer you see more detail, but less context. This ratio of detail-to-context is determined by your proximity. And as you circle an object, its profile and its background change with every step you take. Your angle of view determines your perspective.1. Proximity: The details you share reveal how close you are to the subject.2. Perspective: What is your angle of view? Are you a first-timer or an expert? Are you the manufacturer, the customer, or just a reporter with an opinion? Or are you the product itself?Proximity and Perspective:“I was sticky-smelly-suffocating, enveloped in nasty residue from places unspeakable when magical soap and steamy-soft hot water gushed from heaven above and the stickiness and smell of a lifetime of abuse melted off me like tears in the rain. I was stripped naked, but alive again, looking at my true color, when a rush of air lifted me off my feet a little and held me in its warm embrace until I was radiant and dry. This is the new me: happy and fluffy, beaming and bouncy, smiling and smelling brand-new. I am your carpet. Thank you, thank you, thank you for calling Roy’s Carpet Cleaning.”That ad began in first person, past tense perspective (I was…) and ended in first person, present tense (This is the new me… I am…)Your choice of person (first, second, or third) and your choice of tense (past, present, or future) are just two of the many choices you make every time you write. Choose them consciously rather than unconsciously and your writing will leap to a higher level.Ad writers seek to reframe our perspectives, redirect our thoughts, and renew our minds.Sales trainers and motivational speakers do the same.Beryl Markham was a female aviator who could have been an amazing ad writer. She published a 1942 memoir about her experiences growing up in British East Africa in the early 1900s. In 2004, National Geographic ranked her book, West With the Night, as number 8 on its list of the 100 best adventure books.Beryl Markham understood proximity and perspective:“The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star – if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”– Beryl Markham, West With the NightErnest Hemingway said,“She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers … it really is a bloody wonderful book.”I have a friend who helps inventors get funding from investors. He says the most important part of his job is the construction of “the dinner party story.” He says, “People like to invest in things that are fun to talk about. Give them a good story to tell and they are likely to invest their money in it.”The world around you is teeming with people willing to give you their money in exchange for elevating their happiness.You just need to start telling the right story.Roy H. Williams

A small chapel was built in Spain in the year 1150. Its name translates into English as, “Our Lady of the High Grasses,” because a religious icon was lost and then found in the high grasses or “tocha” nearby. For nearly 1,000 years, this chapel of Nuestra Señora de Atocha has been standing in the center of Madrid, with the life of the city revolving around it.Well, not exactly “this chapel.” In 1890, when the original chapel could no longer be repaired, Pope Pius IX commissioned that a Neo-Byzantine Basilica* be built to replace it. That Basilica was destroyed during the Spanish Civil war and its reconstruction was completed in 1951. All things considered, it is not the chapel itself but the idea of “Our Lady of the High Grasses” that has been around since 1150.The original chapel was 470 years old when the Mayflower disembarked on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the same year that representatives of King Philip IV of Spain took possession of a new galleon that had been constructed for him in the shipyards of Havana. Christened as the Nuestra Señora de Atocha after the old chapel in Madrid, this new galleon was 112 feet long, made of mahogany instead of oak, and required a crew of 110 men.The crew’s first job was to deliver 40 tons of gold and silver from Central America to King Phillip IV in Spain. It took them more than 2 months just to load it all onto the ship. The heavily armed Atocha was given the honor of sailing as the almirante, or rear guard of a 28-ship convoy.But those 28 ships Captains weren’t thinking about pirates when they set sail for Spain on September 4, 1622. The protracted loading of the ships had caused them to depart 6 weeks late. They were sailing into the heart of hurricane season.On the morning of September 6, just two days after setting sail from Havana harbor, the remains of 8 of those 28 ships lay scattered from Marquesas Key to the Dry Tortugas.The mighty Nuestra Señora de Atocha sank in 56 feet of water, losing all of her 265 passengers, soldiers, sailors, and slaves except for 3 sailors and 2 slaves who survived by clinging to the top of the mizzenmast. A few weeks after those 5 were rescued, a second hurricane swept the ship and its treasure to parts unknown. The Spanish government searched for the wreck of the Atocha for more than 60 years.And then it became the stuff of legend. Four hundred million dollars-worth of sunken Spanish treasure was lying somewhere on the shallow ocean floor near Key West, Florida, free for the taking.During the 20th century, the treasure of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha was discovered hundreds of times in just 30 feet of water by boats full of people who chose to ignore it.Princess Pennie and I were the guests of Mel Fisher and his family in Key West, Florida, shortly before Mel died in 1998. It was Mel’s son, Kim, who told us of the hundreds of fishing lures they pulled off that pile of treasure before lifting those gold bars into the sunlight in July of 1985.And so our story goes full circle: a ship’s treasure was lost, and then found, in the high grasses of the ocean 835 years after the treasure for which it was named was lost, and then found, in the high grasses of central Spain.Spain… bullfighting… Ernest Hemingway… Key WestConsidering that Ernest Hemingway spent 27 years of his life on the Pilar, his custom-made fishing boat in Key West, I am reasonably confident that at least one of those fabled fishing lures was his. But even so, Hemingway would have been just one of the countless sport fishermen who returned to Key West at the end of the day to drink a beer and tell a story about catching “a big one” that broke their line.Yes, those fishermen caught a big one...

Your ability to speak and understand words is a function of the logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere of your brain. Your left-brain hungers for accuracy and seeks to forecast a result.1But the other half of your brain – the wordless right hemisphere – is wired for pattern recognition.2The right hemisphere has no morals, no discretion, and doesn’t care whether a thing is true or false; that’s the left brain’s job. But visual patterns, musical patterns, mathematical patterns, and patterns of behavior trigger what you and I call intuition; gut feelings and hunches. Your can be sure that your wordless right hemisphere is at work when you suddenly know something, but you’re not entirely sure how you know it.It is during the solving of mysteries that the equal-but-opposite left and right hemispheres are fully engaged.Talent is unconscious competence.If the right hemisphere of your brain recognizes the patterns within great writing, you will likely be a talented writer, but you will not likely be a great writing teacher. It is difficult to transfer talent.Skill is conscious competence,usually obtained by observing a talented person and then figuring out exactly what it is they are doing unconsciously. Skilled people make great teachers.This tug-of-war between talent and skill is found in every field of endeavor.But today my fascination is fixed upon speculation, another type of mystery-solving that involves our pattern-seeking right hemispheres.Speculation is responsible for every form of gambling, including speculation in the stock market. Speculation is why we love great stories told in books, TV shows and movies. Speculation is why we marvel at magic tricks and laugh at good jokes and groan at the ones that are obvious.If you want to bore people, just say what they expected you to say; do what they expected you to do. But if you want to captivate those people, delight them with a series of small surprises.Are you beginning to understand the purpose of those unexpected words in great literature, symbolic song lyrics and amazing ad copy? Talented people write those words unconsciously. But you and I can learn to write them consciously.In last week’s rabbit hole, Indy Beagle, Laura Nyro, and The Fifth Dimension gave us the inexplicable word “surry” in Stoned Soul Picnic, along with a debate about what “surry” might mean. But “surry” was only the first surprise we encountered.“Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine. Rain and sun come in akin, and from the sky come the Lord and the lightning. There’ll be trains of blossoms. There’ll be trains of music. There’ll be trains of trust, trains of golden dust. Come along and surry on sweet trains of thought.”Fifty-three years after this song hit the charts, our left-brains continue to demand an explanation of what Laura Nyro was trying to say.Meanwhile, our right-brains are enjoying the picnic.Roy H. Williams1 Broca’s area (slightly forward of your left ear canal) and Wernicke’s area (just behind your left ear,) along with a high-bandwidth bundle of nerves connecting these two called the arcuate fasciculus is what gives us our superpower: the ability to attach complex meanings to sounds, and then to make those sounds through the effortless coordination of diaphragm, larynx, lips and tongue. This ability to communicate highly detailed information is what puts you and I, along with all the other humans, in charge of this spaceship we call...

My friend Brian Scudamore said something so insightful that Starbucks printed it on 10 million coffee cups:“It’s difficult for people to get rid of junk. They get attached to things and let them define who they are. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business, it’s that you are what you can’t let go of.”Brian was talking about physical junk and mental junk as well.What is the junk you need to get rid of? Do you have an attachment that defines you?“You are what you can’t let go of.”Some people can’t let go of authority.Some can’t get go of fame.Some can’t let go of anger.Some can’t let go of pain.Look around. What do you see?I see groups of people who believe something, hating other groups of people who believe something else. They, like us, are defined by what they can’t let go of.Jesus talked about this in his famous Sermon on the Mount. He said,“If you are planning to give a financial gift to the work of God and you know that someone is pissed off at you, (this is the Williams “Street” Translation) go to that person and apologize and be reconciled. Then you can offer your gift.”1Jesus was more interested in what you were carrying in your heart than what you were carrying in your hand.What you carry in your heart defines you.Immediately after Jesus finished his famous Sermon on the Mount, he made the same point another way.As Jesus was going down the road, he saw a much-despised tax collector named Matthew sitting in his tax collection booth. “Come and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him, and Matthew jumped up and went with Jesus. Later, when Jesus and his disciples had dinner at Matthew’s house, Matthew invited all his notorious swindler friends to be there also, so that they, too, could hear what Jesus had to say. But when the religious leaders saw what was happening, they were indignant and demanded to know why Jesus associated with men like those. Jesus told them, “Sick people need a doctor. Now go away and understand what God meant when he said, ‘It isn’t your sacrifices and your gifts I want—I want you to be merciful.'” 2, 3The funny part of this story is that it all happens in the book of Matthew, the despised tax collector who invited Jesus to dinner and then became one of the 12 disciples who stayed with him always.I have always found it interesting that Matthew’s book is the first book in the New Testament.Roy H. Williams1 Matthew 5:232 Matthew 9:9-133 Jesus is quoting Hosea 6:6, which had been written about 750 years earlier

You lead the world in client attraction, client acquisition, and client retention.A prospective client has made an appointment with you.I am invited to watch and take notes.These are those notes:In your first meeting with a prospective client, always have a white board or a pad of those giant “stickie notes” to write on. Bring your own colored markers.If you are in their facility instead of your own, begin by asking if you can hang one of the 25 x 30 inch sheets somewhere so that you can make some notes and illustrate what you hope to achieve.When the sheet is secure on the wall, say, “I appreciate that you took the time to meet with me today. I was once told that bad advertising is about you… your products and your services. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your products and services will make their lives better and happier. In that spirit, I want to NOT talk about me today. Instead, I want to answer, in plain language, all your questions and concerns about [INSERT THE NAME OF THE TOPIC IN WHICH YOU ARE EXPERT.] My goal isn’t to tell you what I can do for you. My goal is to demonstrate what I can do for you. I want to give you the solutions to every problem and every frustration you face. I want to give you the answers to every question you have about [INSERT THE NAME OF THE TOPIC IN WHICH YOU ARE EXPERT.] All I need you to do is name those questions for me.” And then write 1. in the upper left corner of your giant stickie note as you say, “Number one,” and then turn to the client, and smile, and wait.Write down each thing they say and then read it back to them.Resist the temptation to comment on what they say! Do not begin a discussion. Just write down each of their questions and say,“Awesome. Can you think of anything else?”“Thank you. Can you think of anything else?”“Excellent! Can you think of anything else?”When they can think of nothing else they would like to know, turn and look at their list. Study it for a few moments.With a different color marker cross out each of the numbers, “1. 2. 3. 4.” etc, and then write “1” next to the question that you have chosen to answer first. Write “2.” next to the question you want to answer second.When you have renumbered their questions, tackle them in the order that you have chosen. When you feel you have answered a question sufficiently, ask “Shall we talk about this some more, or is it okay to move on?” When they tell you that it’s okay to move on, draw a line through that question to indicate that it has been dealt with.As the prospective client sees each of their questions crossed off the list, they will have a strong feeling of “Organized Progress Toward Goal.” And if your answers were good, they will conclude that you are the most competent expert they have ever met.When all their questions have been answered and you have explained exactly what they need to do to achieve all their goals and objectives, sit down at the table across from them and ask, “Where would you like to go from here? What would you like to talk about next?”If you do this correctly, you will have talked only about their questions and their goals and their objectives. You will have said nothing about what makes you better than your competition.Don’t talk about yourself. Talk about them, their needs, their questions, their goals and objectives. Don’t have a sales pitch. Have solutions.The objective of this exercise is to gain a clear understanding of what the client wants, and then to make an honest evaluation about whether or not you are the right person to help them.This is not a sales technique. You are just giving away a free sample of your advice.If you are truly an expert, the customer will know.And if you are not, the customer will know.Roy H. Williams

At the bottom of last week’s Monday Morning Memo, I asked, “Does it surprise you that the multibillion-dollar investment funds that used to buy manufacturing companies and mortgages are now bidding to buy successful home service companies at record-setting prices?”Immediately following my publishing of that comment, a client of my partner Ryan Chute asked him for any insights he might be able to provide about the Private Equity firms that were trying to buy his business. Another Wizard of Ads partner, Stephen Semple, has worked with almost 100 business owners who sold their businesses. Here is what Steve told Ryan:“There are three problems I’ve seen over and over. The first problem is that there is a due diligence clause in every sales contract that professional business buyers regularly use to lower the price. Here is how it works: the closing is scheduled for Friday afternoon (yes, almost always a Friday.) At noon on Friday the buyer drops the price. They tell you they have come across something that says the price is now 20-30% lower.”“These business buyers are banking on the owner having already sold the company in his heart. The champagne is on ice and the owner is not emotionally capable of walking away from the closing table. To fight this, the seller needs to remain ready to walk. Walking away is the only power the seller has.”“The second problem I have seen is this: selling a business is a slow process and the closer it gets to the closing of the sale, the more the business owner mentally and emotionally disconnects from the business. They stop investing in the business, stop growing it. This is a dangerous thing to do because if the sale falls through, they have to get the momentum going again.”“The third problem is that most business owners don’t actually know what their business is worth. Knowledge is power, and you desperately need the power of knowledge when you are preparing to sell your business.”“Ryan, my best advice is that you tell your client to run their business like they are planning to own it for the next 20 years. Remind them that their business isn’t actually sold until the check is cashed.”Ted Rogers owned a cable TV company. When a buyer came along, Ted negotiated the price to be based on the number of subscribers he transferred to the buyer on closing day. Ted was now prepared to spend more per subscriber to acquire new subscribers than he had ever spent before. He ran promotions and offered bonuses to drive up his subscriber count. The buyer was now motivated to close the sale quickly because the price was going up every hour.The technique that Ted Rogers employed can be used by any seller of any business. All you have to do is base the sales price on a metric that is within your control, not the buyer’s control. It can be top line sales in a rolling 12-month window, or gross profits in a rolling 12-month window, or you can negotiate the closing price to be adjusted up-or-down by the same percentage the company has grown or declined during the due diligence window. Pick a metric that you control.And then start growing your business as you’ve never grown it before. By remaining fully engaged in your business, you have now stripped the buyer of his power to ambush you at the closing table.And then, when the deal is done, come to Wizard Academy and tell us your story and we’ll help you celebrate.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

Have you noticed that 2-day deliveries are taking 4 to 5 days to arrive?Shipping companies can’t hire enough warehouse workers and delivery drivers.Have you noticed how long it takes to get the food you ordered?Restaurants can’t hire enough kitchen workers and wait-staff to serve their customers.Service companies nationwide are seeing just 3 or 4 job applicants respond to online recruitment ads that used to generate 40 to 50 inquiries.The limiting factor for business growth in 2021 won’t be a shortage of sales opportunities. It will be the shortage of employees.The Wizard of Ads Partners are rapidly writing recruitment ads for hundreds of businesses across America. Phone lines are ringing and email inboxes are dinging with new requests for recruitment every hour.If you are reliable, conscientious, have a good attitude and are willing to work with your hands, you can write your own ticket anywhere in America.The construction trades can’t find enough people to pour foundations, erect frames, hang sheetrock, build cabinets, lay flooring, and install roofing.Home service companies can’t find enough people to fix plumbing, run wiring, repair air conditioning, paint walls, clean gutters, trim trees, or power-wash driveways, decks and sidewalks.The strongest employers are starting new employees at $80,000 a year and experienced tradespeople are spiraling upwards beyond $100,000 faster than the tornado that carried Dorothy and Toto to Oz.“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” indeed.Twenty years ago, the internet was the Emerald City. Tech workers were needed everywhere.But then we figured out how to do a lot of that work with software instead of people.Follow a rainbow to where it touches the ground today and you will find a happy, hard-working, hands-on service worker. These men and women are the new pot of gold.Companies that rise to the challenge of recruiting, training, and retaining good people will be the ones who leapfrog ahead of their competitors.Do whatever it takes to become the company that everyone wants to work for “if they are lucky enough to get hired” by you. You’re going to have to pay your employees more than you planned, but you’re also going to be able to charge more than you planned.The service company who can answer the phone and say, “Yes we can and we’re on our way,” is the company you want to be.This is the mountain you must climb if you want to see the view from the top.Roy H. Williams

An overwhelming force enters the marketplace.A train is coming. You wish it wasn’t.1. Will you stand on the track with your back to the train and deny its existence?This business owner is saying, “Their customer is not our customer. They will not affect us.”He is doomed by his delusion.2. Will you denounce the train to everyone who will listen?This second business owner says to state and local government, “We don’t want them here.”He may win a battle or two, but he will always lose the war.3. Will you face the train with one foot on each rail and say, “Bring it on”? This third business owner is saying, “I’m better at this than you are. I’ll make you regret coming to my town.”I’ve occasionally seen this business owner defeat the giant, but only if the giant was sick, distracted, or not in the mood to fight. Usually the little guy loses.There are two proven ways to defeat a giant:1.Go where the giant cannot.Trains run on rails. The rails dictate where the trains go.Sam Walton was a small-town retail hustler in a hillbilly state. The giants who occupied the promised land were Sears, Kress (K-Mart), and J.C. Penney.Big department stores need big populations. As a general store, Sam could operate profitably in towns too small for Sears, Kress, and J.C. Penney. Sam opened his first stores outside of Arkansas in Sikeston, Missouri and Claremore, Oklahoma; towns of about 10,000 people.Sam Walton grew Walmart to $8 billion – a size equal to Coca-Cola at the time – before he opened a store in a town large enough to have more than one McDonald’s.2. Let the giant show you the way.Stand alongside the track and grab hold of the train as it passes. This is a strategy that businesses owners 1, 2, and 3 never considered.Once aboard, stand between the train cars where you don’t have to fight the wind. Let the train cut a hole in the wind for you. You are riding in the slipstream. Haven’t you seen race cars pull up tight behind the leader and ride along in their slipstream until the time was right to slip to the inside and slingshot past them?Walmart was slow, but they did act in time. They studied Amazon and saw what was working. Then they committed to upgrading their online shopping experience.They allowed the giant to show them the way.Wal-Mart wasn’t able to slingshot past Amazon,* but they were able to retain their status as a giant. They did not become a has-been like Sears, Kress, J.C. Penney, or Blockbuster Video.Is there a train headed your way?What is its name?What is your plan?Roy H. Williams*Although Walmart currently does more total volume than Amazon, their online volume is only one-sixth as big. Additionally, Amazon’s market cap of $1.7 trillion makes that company worth 5 times as much as Walmart.

Information can be objectively true but have no relevance to you personally.This is the difference between objective reality and perceptual reality.The opposite is true, as well.You can perceive a person to be beautiful when that person is objectively average. You can also perceive information to be important when in truth, it is not.But in perceptual reality, that person is beautiful.In perceptual reality, the information is important.Objective facts do not win the heart and mind. The magic that creates perceptual reality – personal truth – is relevance.Relevance is a happy shout of Yes to the question, “Do I care?”Just because a thing is true doesn’t mean we have to care.The first time I taught publicly about perceptual reality was in 1994 when I was invited to speak to 1,500 jewelers in London at the 400th Anniversary Celebration of the Goldsmiths of the United Kingdom. Afterwards, Pennie and I were whisked away to the world headquarters of DeBeers to meet with Roger Van Egan, their director of marketing.DeBeers wanted to know why my small handful of jewelry clients were selling 20 times more diamonds than the average American jeweler.My answer, in a word, was “relevance.”On date nights, my jewelers were on the radio speaking to couples in cars.“The Christmas season is a GREAT time to get engaged. She’s going to want to show her new engagement ring to everyone she cares about, and most of those people are going to be conveniently gathered together at Christmastime. If you show up at the Christmas party of your girlfriend’s parents and she is NOT wearing an engagement ring, you get to listen to Great Aunt Gertrude talk all night long about her recent gallstone operation. But if your girlfriend IS wearing an engagement ring, the only thing Aunt Gertrude will want to know is whether you’d like another piece of pie before, or after you ride Cousin Larry’s new motorcycle. One more thing: the day she starts wearing your engagement ring is the day her Mom quits calling you “What’s-his-name.”“But your ad didn’t say anything about why he should buy an engagement ring from your client! You said only that he should buy an engagement ring!”Au contraire, mon frère. That ad made my jeweler fun, approachable, and most importantly, NOT SCARY.But when courtship mode has run its course and the honeymoon is over, men who believe “actions speak louder than words,” tend to be poor communicators.Seeds of doubt, disillusionment and divorce are planted when a woman thinks, “This is not the man I married. He doesn’t love me anymore.”“Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says Schiffman’s. Now you and I both know there’s jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Schiffman’s aren’t trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Schiffman’s believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 thousand, the message is the same: men who come to Schiffman’s are still very much in love… We just thought you should know.” [Hard stop. No location tag.]That ad on the radio said to men, “Buy a diamond from Schiffman’s and she’ll know that – unlike “other guys” – you are...

“Don’t look where you don’t want to go.”Every mountain climber knows this rule, and I want you to know it, too.Your mind has conscious and unconscious power over your actions. When you imagine something, you begin bringing it to pass.What is the mountain you’re trying to climb?If you want a happy and joyful marriage, imagine what that would look like. Not just from your own perspective, but from your partner’s perspective, too. Think about it often.If you want to build a successful business, imagine what that would look like. Not just from your own perspective, but from your customer’s perspective, too. Think about it often.Think about how you can make the biggest difference in the shortest amount of time with the resources you have available. Don’t wish for what you don’t have. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.If you do what I just told you, you will occasionally reinvent the wheel, but that’s okay. That wheel will be your wheel, and you will understand that wheel in ways that no one else understands wheels.Business writers like to write about companies who disrupt their categories.Disruptors are people who reinvent the wheel.In 2004, Blockbuster Video had 9,094 locations, 84,300 employees, and nearly $6 Billion in revenues. Things were fine. Why reinvent the wheel?Netflix reinvented the video-rental wheel when they eliminated the car drive to the video rental store. And then they reinvented the wheel again – their own wheel this time – when they eliminated the mailing of DVDs.I was intrigued with Roving Reporter Rotbart’s interview with Carl Schramm on MondayMorningRadio a couple of weeks ago. Schramm manages a $2 Billion foundation whose goal is to help entrepreneurs succeed. It’s safe to say he knows a lot about entrepreneurship.According to Schramm, successful entrepreneurs are marked by 3 characteristics: Determination, Experimentation and Innovation.“Experimentation and Innovation” sound a lot like reinventing the wheel to me.Blockbuster still has one location open in Bend, Oregon.Q: How did that Blockbuster store survive?A: Determination, experimentation, and innovation.They reinvented the wheel.Rachel Greenblatt of NBC reports the Covid lockdown had three big winners: The introverted, the productive, and Jeff Bezos.This makes sense to me because:1. Introverts do their best work when they are not distracted by social interruptions. (I do my best work in the 6 hours following 2:30AM each day. I am usually asleep by 7PM.)2. Highly productive people used the lockdown as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel.3. Jeff Bezos believes every wheel needs reinvention. Except the flywheel, of course. (Jeff Bezos fans will laugh at that line. The rest of you just need to Google, “Jeff Bezos flywheel.”)Indy Beagle says Aroo.I’ll tell him you said Aroo back.Or you can just meet Indy in the rabbit hole and Aroo him yourself.Roy H. Williams

Your assumptions about the intelligence of your customer will colorize and slant your ad writing in ways of which you are not even aware.Is the customer stupid?The writer of the 139th Psalm did not believe that customers are stupid. He said to God, “I will praise you; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”Harvard University Medical School made a 3-minute film that illustrates the idea that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s called The Inner Life of a Cell, and Indy Beagle has embedded it on the first page of the rabbit hole for you. To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image of Indy at the top of the Monday Morning Memo.In the book, Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind, we read,“Wizard’s First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”When you make unsubstantiated claims, or if you “substantiate” your claims with sophistry, false facts, overstatements or hyperbole, you are writing under the assumption that people are stupid. But a lot of money has been made by giving gullible people false hope. When a person deeply wants to believe that what you are saying is true, they will believe it, in spite of the fact that you are lying.The assumption that people are stupid will help you write more effective political advertising, direct response advertising, and television infomercials. It will also help you build your downline in multilevel marketing.But conning stupid people out of their money is like beating up little children. I can do it, I just don’t want to.There are two ways to write ads that target intelligent people. The first way is to immediately substantiate your claim with highly credible evidence each time you make a statement of benefit.EXAMPLE: Black Diamonds. Exotic. Rare. And Beautiful. A star exploded and sent an asteroid hurtling toward our galaxy a long time ago. That asteroid was more than half-a-mile wide, and it flew through space until it struck the earth. That asteroid was made of black diamonds. The National Science Foundation announced the news about these outer-space diamonds and then the New York Times wrote a story about them. Black Diamonds. Exotic. Rare. And Beautiful.The second way to advertise to intelligent persons is to use “Magical Thinking,” a style of writing characterized by elements of the impossible woven with a deadpan sense of presentation into an otherwise true story. Magical Thinking goes beyond the realm of exaggeration and moves into the realm of entertainment.EXAMPLE: Life is happier when it’s less cluttered. Your house will be bigger! Your teeth will be whiter! Angels will sing! You’ll be a better dancer. Go to 1-800-GotJunk.com and prepare to be amazed.If you make untrue statements and expect them to be believed, you are writing to a stupid person. But if you make untrue statements for the purposes of entertainment – knowing they will not be believed – you are writing to an intelligent person.If I provided an example of advertising filled with strong assurances, baseless claims, puffery and hyperbole with no evidence to support those claims, you would say, “Wow. I hear ads like that every day.”And now you know why people are so very annoyed by most advertising.Roy H. Williams

When a person assumes they have superior wisdom, they will offer you their advice. This is an unmistakable sign they think you are an idiot.I smile when a person says to me, “Can I offer you some friendly advice?” They instinctively use the word “friendly” as a qualifier because, deep in their guts, they know what they are about to say isn’t friendly at all. They want to give me their critique, their criticism, their evaluation.Still smiling, I shake my head and say “No.”Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.You don’t need advice. You need encouragement.Not flattery. Encouragement.You can do the thing you would like to do.Of course you can.You can become the thing you want to become.Of course you can.You can achieve the thing you hope to achieve.Of course you can.I don’t know how long it will take, or what you will have to endure, but I do know that you can do these things if you decide to. The only enemy you cannot outwit or outwait is death.You were created in the image of God.He does not think you are an idiot.And neither do I.Roy H. Williams

Bad ads waddle like a porcupine and make lots of little points.Good ads charge like a rhinoceros and make a single point powerfully.This is true regardless of your choice of media.Ad budgets are like that, too.When universities ask me to address their Advertising & Marketing majors just prior to graduation, I always warn those young “advertising experts” never to give advice to friends or family members who are involved in a local business. “This is because everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company, or for an advertising agency that places the media for large, national brands. You have not been taught how to grow a local business.” And then I ask their professors – in front of the students – whether they agree or disagree with what I just said.One hundred percent of the time, without exception, every professor has agreed with me. Most of the time, they start nodding their heads in affirmation when I say, “…everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company…”The most dangerous of these Fortune 500 concepts is the idea of a “media mix.”The widespread belief about the value of a “media mix” has caused small business owners to sprinkle their ad budgets across several different media because they are worried they are going to “miss” someone. After all, “Not everyone listens to the radio.” “Not everyone watches the news.” “Not everyone looks at billboards.” “Not everyone blah, blah, blah.”Advertiser, you can’t afford to reach everyone. You’ve got to choose who to lose.Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.Don’t be a porcupine. Be a rhino.If you sell a product or a service that most people will need sooner-or-later and you suspect you’ve been sprinkling your ad budget, “a little bit here and a little bit there,” try spending 80% of your ad budget on a single mass media and the remaining 20% online. The choice of mass media is up to you, but it’s hard to go wrong with local broadcast radio or television newscasts. People rarely record the TV news on their DVRs. They watch it live. The same is true of live sporting events.By the way, in case I forget to tell you this later, repetition is effective.“Wait a minute,” you say, “you told me to be a rhino and not to sprinkle my budget, but now you’re telling me that 20% of my budget should be spent online! What’s up?”Google is the new phone book, so you must have an online presence. Properly used, mass media will make you the provider that people think of immediately and feel the best about, but the first thing those people are going to do when they need what you sell is go online to look for your phone number, or your store hours, or your street address, or at your online reviews.You’ve got to show up when your customer is looking for you.There are instances – particularly in the home service categories – when it makes sense to use geotargeting. If time and energy are an underutilized resource, the placement of door hangers and lawn signs and the slipping of flyers under windshield wipers are old-school techniques that still pay big dividends. This is what I call, “shoe leather on the sidewalk.”The geotargeting of neighborhoods can also be done online, and geofencing will even allow you to target the people who enter and exit a specific building. Cool, huh?“But what if I sell a product or a service that only a tiny percent

Brian, good thoughts!The Neuroscience of Behavior Change link you sent was a great explanation of what Dr. Alan Baddeley calls “Procedural Memory.” You will recall this from The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy.Working Memory is consciousness, imagination, the thought you are thinking NOW.Semantic Declarative Memory contains things you can remember, but you cannot remember how or when you learned them.Episodic Declarative Memory is like Semantic Declarative Memory, except that you can remember the episode; the how and when of the learning.Procedural Memory is long-term, involuntary, automatic recall. It is electrical memory aided by chemical traces along the neural pathway. A perfect golf swing, the movement of fingers by a typist or a concert pianist, or the automatic recall of an advertiser’s name; all these are positive expressions of Procedural Memory.Procedural Memory = Salience (impact or relevance) x Repetition.The greater the impact of the message, the less repetition is required. And keep in mind, repetition costs money.The Short-Term Goal of the Direct Response Ad Writer is to speak to an immediately-felt need of the customer who is currently, actively in need of the product or service in question.The Short-Term Goal of the Future Needs Ad Writer is to create Episodic declarative memory by saying or doing something new, surprising, or different, so that future recall of the episode might be established. To do this, the ad writer must make the reader/listener/viewer smile, laugh, cry, become nostalgic, become fearful, or get angry.This is because emotion triggers adrenaline and adrenaline is the biochemical adhesive that creates those chemical traces along the neural pathway. Information without emotion is of limited value.The Long-Term Goal of the Future Needs Ad Writer is to deliver a series of salient messages with enough repetition-over-time to create Procedural Memory, but without any of the negative associations that come with anger, sorrow and fear.So now you understand PTSD. It is simply is a negative expression of the long-term, involuntary, automatic recall known by neuroscientists as Procedural Memory, a product of Salience (importance, relevance, or surprise) times Repetition. With enough salience, a repetition of only one is sufficient to create Procedural Memory.Always good to hear from you Brian!Oh. One last thing: Those of you who didn’t see Brian’s email to Indy Beagle in last week’s rabbit hole were likely intrigued by the new, surprising, and different opening of today’s Monday Morning Memo: “Brian, good thoughts!”“Am I reading a private email to someone named Brian?” Or you may have wondered, “Brian who?” or if your own name is Brian, you may have asked, “How is the wizard personalizing the main body of the Monday Morning Memo to each individual reader?”In any case, those opening 3 words achieved reader/listener/viewer engagement, the first step in The Short-Term Goal of the Ad Writer.Aroo,Roy H. Williams

1492: An Italian, funded by the Queen of Spain, sailed west to find the east, discovered a small island in the Caribbean, decided it was India, and sailed home to share the happy news. Ponce de León, Balboa, Cordoba, Cortés, Coronado and 24 other conquistadors were sent from Spain to bring home whatever they could find.1562: France sent Laudonnière on 3 expeditions to South Carolina and Florida, but Spanish Admiral Menéndez slaughtered the French in 1565 and built the fortress city of St. Augustine, Florida. 1620: Religious misfits from Holland and England boarded a ship called the Mayflower, crossed the Atlantic in 66 days, landed at a place called Plymouth Rock, met some friendly natives and celebrated Thanksgiving with them, presumably on the last Thursday in November.1662: A Dutchman named Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from a group of local Indians for merchandise worth 60 Dutch guilders and built a thriving community there. It is considered to be the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world. Two years later, the English showed up with cannons and announced that they would now be in charge. The Dutch asked, “Can we keep our houses and our businesses and all of our stuff?” The English said, “Sure, no problem. You just have to let us be in charge.”The Dutch smiled and said, “Welcome to America.”In the decades that followed, the sons and daughters of Spanish conquistadors and French explorers and religious misfits and Dutch traders and English soldiers were joined by tens of thousands of optimistic adventurers and entrepreneurs and families who dreamed of a better life. They came from everywhere.And then slave traders arrived with shiploads of captives for sale. But no one smiled at the captives and said, “Welcome to America.” In fact, these dark-skinned newcomers were not allowed to keep houses or businesses or anything else, not even their own children.July 4th, 1776: A new nation was born when everyone got tired of the English being in charge. And as this baby nation grew, her people began to sing.1886: The song of Ellis Island, the song of the Statue of Liberty.“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”– Emma Lazarus1904: The song of a Century of Progress.I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die.A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart, she’s my Yankee Doodle joy.Yankee Doodle came to London just to ride the ponies, I am the Yankee Doodle boy.– George M. Cohan1968: The song of our Wandering Years.“Kathy, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping,“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,They’ve all come to look for America…”– Paul Simon1980: The Song of CelebrationEverywhere around the world, they’re coming to America.Every time that flag’s unfurled, they’re coming to America.Got a dream to take them there. They’re coming to America.Got a dream they’ve got to share. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.Today… today… today… today… today!– Neil Diamond 2010: Lady Liberty no longer lifts a torch, but a toast to the newcomers.“So raise your glass if...

Hollywood has been feeding us romanticized history ever since Birth of a Nation splattered across the silver screen in 1915.Romanticized history is a lie.People will always believe lies that reinforce their worldview.Hollywood feeds us romanticized history because we love it, and the fictions we love best are those heroic stories of pioneers and settlers and cowboys during the years of America’s westward expansion.John Wayne was a powerful icon of rugged individualism for two generations of American men. He was self-reliant and manly and brave, the living embodiment of maximum masculinity. There was no woman in distress he could not save, no wilderness he could not tame, no fight he could not win.His real name was Marion Morrison and he grew up in Southern California. According to WIKIPEDIA, “He lost a football scholarship to the University of Southern California as a result of a bodysurfing accident and began working for the Fox Film Corporation…. It was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) that made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, ‘John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage.’”The real-world Americans who traveled westward in the hope of finding a better life were, for the most part, poor people with nothing to lose. With few tools and no resources, they improvised as best they could. They endured painful hunger, parching thirst, desperate cold, raging disease and the untimely death of people they loved.We romanticize these struggling families of an earlier century and call them “self-reliant, rugged individuals.” We imagine them as strong, beautiful characters in a John Wayne movie.Here is my question: When you scrape the Hollywood glitter off these people and see them real, was their resourcefulness an expression of exuberant confidence, or was it a product of their abject desperation?Many of you sympathized with the millions of us Texans who shivered in our homes for several days at below-freezing temperatures with no heat, no light, no water and no toilets.I drilled numerous yellow holes in the snow.No electricity means no hot meals, and in southern states like Texas, icy streets mean no deliveries, no fire trucks, no ambulances, and no police. Even the grocery stores were closed.The hospital nearest our home was evacuated.When Pennie and I had been without water for 3 days, the ex-governor who presided over the deregulation of energy in Texas (and dismantled the regulations that would have insured the consistent delivery of water and electricity in our state,) called a press conference to proudly announce that Texans would gladly, “be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”Now there is a man who has watched one-too-many John Wayne movies.And then there is the senator from Texas who decided that, “to be a good Dad,” he was going to hop on a jet and find some comfort at The Four Seasons in sunny Cancun, Mexico. But I can make room for that. I don’t really blame him for it. If I wasn’t concerned about Covid, I might have done it myself.The “John Wayne” part of that story is that he flew to Cancun with a mask on his face displaying the image of an old Texas flag from our pre-statehood years. That flag shows the star of Texas with a big cannon and the words, “Come and Take It.”In 1835, when European settlers revolted against the government of Mexico, they got control of a cannon in a border town, then flew a flag with a drawing of that cannon and added the words, “Come and Take it.”Basically, they were just flipping the bird to the Mexicans.But why – 186 years later – would a person flaunt a symbol that insults Mexicans while escaping TO...

They did not do it because they thought it would be funny. Four members of the Jamaica Defense Force did it as a statement of pride and determination.Dudley Stokes, Devon Harris, Michael White and Caswell Allen traveled from their tropical island to snowy Canada hoping to make it into the 1988 Winter Olympics.Miraculously, they qualified.When Caswell Allen was injured 3 days prior to the start of the Olympics, he was replaced by Chris Stokes, who was only in Canada to support his brother Dudley.Smaller than the state of Connecticut, Jamaica is not a wealthy island. The men had to appeal to other teams for basic equipment in order to compete.  But as the Olympics are forever a celebration of global cooperation, the other nations were happy to loan them what they needed.When the United States ice hockey team was eliminated, American TV stations needed to fill airtime and chose to focus on the Jamaican bobsled team.“Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, its bobsled time! Cool runnings!”The first run ended poorly when Dudley Stokes jumped into the bobsled and the push-bar broke, resulting in the Jamaican team coming in third from last.The team ranked next-to-last on their second run due to White remaining nearly upright through the first corner as he struggled to crouch down properly in his seat.After a blistering fast start on their third run, the Jamaican bobsled careened into the wall of the track and flipped over on top of the team at 85 miles per hour. Bruised and battered, the four men climbed out, walked with the bobsled to the end of the track, then picked it up and carried it off.The crowd went wild.Did the Jamaican team call it quits? No, they did not.The four qualified again for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. The following year, Disney released Cool Runnings, a comedy film inspired by the team’s experience in the 1988 Games.In the 1994 Olympics* in Lillehammer, Norway, the four Jamaicans finished ahead of the United States, Russia, Italy, France and Australia.At the 2000 World Push in Monaco the Jamaican team won the gold medal.You will never become good at something unless you are willing to be bad at first. But if you stay with it, things will be fine in the end.If things aren’t fine, it’s not the end.Roy H. Williams*In case you were wondering why we had Winter Olympics in 1992 and again just 2 years later in 1994, it was because the International Olympic Commission decided to separate the Summer and Winter Games and place them in alternating even-numbered years. 1994 was the year that decision was implemented.

“Giving a microphone to every human being is the worst mistake we have made in human history.”ME: Are you saying social media was a mistake?“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” ­– Dale CarnegieME: But doesn’t everyone deserve to be heard?“Every man has a right to his own opinion. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” – Bernard BaruchME: We seem to be at war with ourselves.“War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.” – John McCainME: But we’re waging a war of words, not blood!“But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and those things defile a man.” – Jesus, in Matthew 15ME: Can’t we just listen to the good people and ignore the bad?“Men who believe themselves to be good, who do not search their own souls, often commit the worst atrocities. A man who sees himself as evil will restrain himself. It is only when we do evil in the belief that we do good that we pursue it wholeheartedly.” – David FarlandME: I agree with that, especially the part about searching our own souls. When I see a person of real character, I always want to ask, “What darkness did you conquer?” Mountains do not rise without earthquakes.“Hard times create strong men.Strong men create good times.Good times create weak men.And weak men create hard times.”― G. Michael HopfME: Are you saying we brought this social storm upon ourselves through our own weakness and self-indulgence?“You can never make the same mistake twice because the second time you make it, it’s not a mistake, it’s a choice.” ­– Steven DennME: Will we ever quit making the old mistakes?“No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” – Solomon, Ecclesiastes ch. 1ME: Based on what you said earlier, if these are the hard times created by weak people, is the next phase when we become strong people that create good times?“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else” – Winston ChurchillME: What should I do while I wait for all this social rage and weirdness to become less angry and weird?“Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do… Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love…” – Solomon, Ecclesiastes ch. 9ME: Sounds good to me.Roy H. Williams

We were sitting in my backyard sharing a $600 bottle of wine he had brought.He said, “I got all 250 of my employees together on a Zoom call and told them, ‘You can disagree passionately and share your opinion while we are in the discussion phase, but when a decision has been made, you need to commit to the successful implementation of that decision as though it had been your own. To disagree and work half-heartedly and receive a paycheck is not an option. To disagree and covertly sabotage the plan and receive a paycheck is not an option. To disagree and whisper behind closed doors and receive a paycheck is not an option. You can either recuse yourself by turning in your resignation, or you can disagree and commit. Those are your options.’”My friend is strong, fair, and a marvelous employer. I have always admired him. Raised in a family with no money, he became stunningly successful by the time he was 40.That conversation with my friend is what triggered last week’s Monday Morning Memo about “Those Glorious Creative Handcuffs.”Ad writers like myself always believe we have the best answers and that people should listen to what we say. “But…” I tell my partners, “your client didn’t hire you to be CEO. They hired you to make their plan work. If you believe you can improve their plan, you need to communicate what you would change, why you would change it, and how you would implement that change. But once you’ve had your day in court, your job is to make their plan succeed brilliantly, even if it’s stupid.”In 40 years of ad-writing I’ve chosen to walk away only twice. In both instances I knew the only way the decided-upon plan could end was with a large, smoking hole in the earth where their successful company used to be. In both of those cases I was right. In every other instance, “Those Glorious Creative Handcuffs” clamped on my wrists triggered some of the best creative work I’ve ever done.“Disagree and Commit” works miraculously well, but only if you wash the memory of your ‘better plan’ from your mind. Never speak of it again. Never think about it again. When you’ve had your day in court, commit to the plan and make it a point of honor to make that plan succeed.And then celebrate, celebrate, celebrate when it does.This will make you a person that every employer wants to hire, and every brilliant person wants on their team.Roy H. Williams

If one were to assume that a blank sheet of paper – complete freedom – is the best way to coax maximum creativity from the human mind, one would be wrong.The highest levels of creativity are launched from the tightest constraints.Consider this request made a couple of weeks ago by a student in our monthly webcast.Hi Roy, I work with a micro-distillery in our province who recently developed a lower-priced brand of affordable liquor. It is called: lōk(ə)l and they spell it phonetically, with a k and a schwa. (ə)They make vodka, gin and schnapps packaged in plastic bottles. How can we advertise this on the radio to get people to look for the right product?  Not to mention there is some muddiness marketing “local” when everyone is jumping on the “shop local” train… there is even another alcohol beverage called Local with a similar style.Thanks for all your help.Let’s examine our creative restraints and limitations:Plastic bottles shout “cheap.”“Locally-produced vodka” is not a strong selling proposition.“Local” is an overused generic descriptive, but we’re stuck with it as a name.A competing product has the same name, but with the correct spelling.If we cannot differentiate our brand, our radio ads are likely to sell the products of companies other than our own.Bottom line: lōk(ə)l vodka is memorable only because it is spelled with a k.These are the creative handcuffs we wear as we write a series of 30-second radio ads in an effort to give this brand a personality that says something other than “cheap generic vodka.”Are you ready to ride?Lokal vodka is NOT low-cal, low calorie, lightweight vodka. You’re thinking of a different brand. Lokal-with-a-K is full-bodied, genuine, authentic vodka made right here in Saskatchewan. Vodka is spelled with a K, not a C. Lokal-with-a-K is old-school vodka, the kind that will kick your ass if you drink too much of it. We also make gin and schnapps. This stuff is fabulous, but to make it affordable we put it in plastic bottles, ’kay? Lokal-with-a-K is available in every store that has good taste.AD 2:Lokal-with-a-K vodka is made right here in Saskatchewan, which also has a K. And Vodka is spelled with a K, so we spell Lokal with a K. You say, “Hey, you also make gin and schnapps and they don’t have a K.” But in THIS deck of cards, Vodka is KING, Schnapps is QUEEN, Gin is the JOKER and the joker is wild. Drink has a K.  Kick has TWO K’s, but Compromise is spelled with a “C.” Lokal-with-a-K is fabulous, but to make it affordable we put it in plastic bottles, ’kay? Lokal-with-a-K is available in every store that has good taste.AD 3:Lokal-with-a-K vodka is made right here in Saskatchewan, and because you love it, we’re now making it with extra K. We also put extra K in our gin and schnapps. Vodka is KING, Schnapps is QUEEN, Gin is the JOKER and the joker is wild. With these three in your hand, you’re on your way to a Full House. Drink has a K.  Kick has TWO K’s,...

I have long been fascinated by twilight. In fact, I often use that word to describe flavors that are complex and muted.But what is twilight, really?“Twilight is the illumination of the lower atmosphere when the Sun is not directly visible because it is below the horizon. Twilight is produced by sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere, illuminating the lower atmosphere so that Earth’s surface is neither completely lit nor completely dark.” – WIKIPEDIATwilight lasts only about 20 minutes.“There is a brief time, between waking and sleep, when reality begins to warp. Rigid conscious thought starts to dissolve into the gently lapping waves of early stage dreaming and the world becomes a little more hallucinatory, your thoughts a little more untethered. Known as the hypnagogic state…”– Vaughan Bell, Science Writer, The Atlantic, April 20, 2016I think of this time “when reality begins to warp” as the twilight of consciousness, that time when the subconscious mind takes the intellect for a ride.Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jerome L. Singer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University, are studying a different twilight of consciousness. “Daydreaming is a normal, widespread, human phenomenon that people are aware of consciously and can report reliably on questionnaires. Large numbers of people from different walks of society, gender, and ethnicity report considerable daydreaming in their daily lives.”Kaufman and Singer have determined there are three types of daydreaming.1. Positive-Constructive Daydreaming (playful, wishful, constructive imagery)2. Guilty-Dysphoric Daydreaming (obsessive, anguished fantasies)3. Poor Attentional Control (the inability to concentrate on ongoing thought or external tasks)Further study indicated that1. Positive-Constructive daydreaming is related to Openness to Experience, reflecting curiosity, sensitivity, and the exploration of ideas, feelings, and sensations.2. Guilty-Dysphoric daydreaming is related to Neuroticism.3. Poor Attentional Control is related to low levels of Conscientiousness Current neuroimaging research supports Singer’s idea that daydreaming is the default state of the human mind.Your daydreams are the voice of your powerful subconscious as it tries to assist your conscious mind. When your subconscious mind and your conscious mind are working together to achieve a common goal, you can believe that it will happen.So, if our daydreams are the voice of the subconscious mind and we want our daydreams to be Positive-Constructive, how can we fill our subconscious with productive, helpful, happy images?Two thousand years ago, we were given this advice:“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” *If I were to translate this to the language of the 21st century, I would say,“If you turn your attention to good things, your mind will shine. But if you turn your attention to dark thoughts, your mind will be full of darkness. So pay attention, then, or you will find yourself full of darkness.”You have the power to turn your attention wherever you will. Aim it at productive, helpful, happy things. Don’t obsess over problems. Focus your attention on solutions. Not just solutions for the problems you’re currently facing, but solutions in general.Stories of...

The 2021 we’ve been waiting for has not yet begun.I was reminded of this when I received a meme from a friend. It said, “Omg, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do when YOU get the vaccine shot?? You’re gonna go back home, wait a month, get your second shot, go back home, wait 14 days for antibodies, then keep wearing a mask and social distancing until community transmission reduction. That’s what.”When it finally gets here, the 2021 we’ve been waiting for will be different than 2020, but in what way, I cannot say.Many of us made adjustments in 2020:Working from home replaced going to the office.Online meetings replaced face-to-face meetings.Home delivery replaced driving to the store.Fancy meals at home replaced eating out.Will some of these adjustments stay with us?And if so, to what degree and among how many people?The Bounce:There will doubtless be a pent-up demand for travel. Will we resume traveling as we did before, or will some of us be reluctant? How high will our travel-hunger bounce the airlines, the cruise ships, and the hotels? And how long will this bounce last?Our hunger for the hospitality of restaurants, cafes and bars will doubtless shoot those businesses to new heights, but how long will this bounce last? Will home delivery of products, groceries and meals continue at dramatically high levels, or will it fall back to where it was before, or will it land somewhere in-between?Unable to spend our money on vacations, travel, and fine dining in 2020, we showered jewelry stores and home service businesses with fountains of cash. Will this trend continue, or will we redirect these fountains of affection onto new categories of purchase?I honestly do not know.The only prediction I am prepared to make is that a lot of office space is going to remain empty.Day after day I speak with employers who rave with delight about the productivity of their people working from home. Without exception, every one of them has told me they do not plan to renew the lease on their office space. A number of these employers previously housed more than 500 office workers each.That’s a lot of office space.As a boy, I was friendly with a number of adults who had lived through the Great Depression. Thirty years after the Depression was over, those people continued to bear its marks.How many of us will bear the marks of the 2020 lockdown long after Covid-19 has been tamed? We can only guess. But the events of 2020 will affect consumer behavior for many years to come.It will be a fascinating – and important – thing to watch.Roy H. Williams

We live in a nation that has mistaken pleasure for happiness.Pleasure can be pursued directly, but not happiness.Think of the times you have felt truly happy. In each of those moments, you were feeling grateful for something; a special moment with a special person, a beautiful sunset, the arrival of good news…Happiness is the warm glow of gratitude, and the happiest people in the world are those who have learned to celebrate the ordinary.“Lasting happiness starts with one question… what can I celebrate?”– Michael Beckwith“Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate!”– Dewey Jenkins“Happiness, not in another place but this place… not for another hour, but this hour.”– Walt WhitmanAre you old enough to remember Zig Ziglar? He was constantly talking about maintaining “an attitude of gratitude.”Take a moment to write down 5 things for which you are grateful. Then take another moment to realize that each of those things makes you happy.Right now I’m celebrating Aaron and Kelsie Kleinmeyer of Kansas City. They are in the process of building America’s second free wedding chapel, and the remarkable part is that they are doing it on their salaries as schoolteachers!Did you read what Manley Miller wrote in the rabbit hole last week about passion?“We use the English word ‘passion’ to describe a love for something, or a deep inner drive. ‘I have a passion for cooking,’ or ‘I have a passion for fishing,’ or ‘I have a passion for football,’ or whatever. But passion is a word borrowed from the French ‘pation.’ The root of the word is ‘patior,’ a Latin word that means ‘a willingness to suffer.'”“Feelings follow actions. When you commit to something, what you’re saying is, ‘Even if this gets hard, I’m going to keep on doing it. Even if this causes me pain and suffering, I’m going to keep on doing this.’ That’s why the last week of Jesus’s life is called the Passion Week. It’s not because everything was warm and fuzzy and lovey-dovey, but because it was a week of suffering. Jesus was fully committed to pay the price of reconciling us back to God. He decided in advance that our lives were worth his suffering.”1. Pleasure is easily purchased, but pleasure is not happiness.2. Happiness is the warm glow of gratitude.3. Passion is happiness taken to the next level.Aaron and Kelsie have a genuine passion about marriage. They are willing to sacrifice so that other couples can have a beautiful place to get married. Their little chapel on the prairie is a gift of love to thousands of couples they’ve never met.To receive with gratitude brings happiness.But to give with joy requires passion, the most intense happiness of all.Didn’t someone once say, “It is happier to give than to receive,” or something like that?Roy H. Williams

INDY BEAGLE’S DAY OFFA Story by Indy Beagle, Written in 3 ChaptersCHAPTER ONESpraytan and Boxwine arrived in a white Cadillac convertible fringed in blondes.Boxwine slid out the passenger door and reached for the nozzle while I was filling up my new Hudson pickup on the other side of the pump.I gave him a steady stare. “What have you done?”“We’re headed to the lake. Wanna come? You can bring all your little cartoon friends.”I glanced at the white Caddy. “Nice car. I noticed it on the lot at Baddley Brothers.”Boxwine showed me every tooth in his mouth. “Me and Spray are takin’ it for a test drive.”“Do the brothers know?”Boxwine looked at my Hudson. “Did that ol’ skinflint wizard really give you that truck for Christmas?”I nodded.“Is it real, or did he just conjure it?”“He’s not that kind of wizard.”“What kind is he?”“A Wizard of Ads.”“Hell. Advertising ain’t nothin’ but tellin’ lies with a smile.”“Boxwine, if that were true, you’d be the greatest ad-man on earth.”He placed his cap over his heart and said, “Ratdog, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”I heard Floyd’s feet hit the pavement and then the Hudson door opened behind me.Great. A muppet and a hula girl were going to defend my honor.Aloha spoke first. “Hey girls!”The blonde sitting next to Spraytan asked, “Are you really a hula dancer?”Aloha went into hula mode and the Cadillac girls responded with admiration.“Hop out and I’ll show you how to do it!”The white Caddy rose up 5 inches when the 7 blondes jumped out.Floyd had already retuned his guitar to make it sound like a ukulele and the ballerinas, Bali and Ha’i, were flanking Aloha when the blondes arrived on our side of the gas pump. And then the light show began. Red and blue Christmas lights twinkled from the tops of 3 police cars as they slid to a stop on each side of the white convertible.Lieutenant Bascom waited until the dance was over before he pulled the trigger on his bullhorn. “Boxwine! Spraytan! You boys kiss the asphalt!”While the boys were lying on their bellies sniffing exhaust fumes and motor oil, waiting to get cuffed and scuffed, Floyd beamed his best muppet smile and said, “Bali, Ha’i, and Aloha are riding up front with Indy, but you’re welcome to hop in back with me.”Hudson pickups have better suspension than Cad convertibles. Loaded with 7 blondes and a muppet, my truck dipped only an inch and a half. I twisted the key and the exhaust pipe pitched a perfect C major, accompanied by the voice of Aloha, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t already done so, please stow your carry-on luggage underneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead bin. Please take your seat and fasten your seat belt. And also make sure your seat back and folding trays are in their full, upright position.”Floyd slapped the top of the cab with an open palm and shouted, “To the lake!” and was immediately echoed by ten females calling in unison, “To the lake!”As I pulled away, Floyd began singing an old Johnny Cash song, “I hear the train a coming, it’s rolling around the bend, and I ain’t seen the sunshine, since… I don’t know when…. I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps dragging on.”We were halfway to the lake when I asked, “Where’s Alfie?”Aloha said, “When Floyd jumped out of the truck, Alfie jumped into the glove box.”Ha’i raised her hand and twittered, “And then I locked it.”I sighed and unlocked the glove box. Alfie was blushing all the way to the tips of his pointed ears.Raised in the harmony of Santa’s workshop, elves have no idea how to handle confrontation.– Indy Beagle

Reading the title of this essay, “What Would You Have Me Do?” might cause you to imagine me defending myself, saying in effect, “I had no choice.”But I want you to hear those words in an entirely different tone of voice.“What would you have me do?” is a quiet question that I often ask God when I am feeling conflicted or uncertain. I cannot not say I always feel him guiding my heart in answer to my question, but I can say that I always feel better for having asked.I have never “not believed” in God. In my private, inner world, faith is not a matter of logic or evidence. I never try to “prove” the existence of God, but if you will indulge me, I will share a pivotal, personal story of when I felt he answered my question, “What will you have me do?”My only intention is to encourage you. Like faith, encouragement is not logical. It is simply a warm light that can brighten a private, inner world.It was 1977. Pennie and I had been married less than a year and we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives. I was working for $3.35 an hour in a steel fabrication shop, cutting, welding, grinding, and pressure-testing gigantic heat exchangers to be fitted on oil wells. With hammers pounding on metal, grinders showering you with sparks, and the acrid smell of welding fumes burning your nose, a steel shop is the perfect place to develop your private, inner world.One morning I slipped into a bathroom stall at work, but not because I needed to go to the bathroom. I lowered the deck on the toilet, locked the door and sat down to talk to God. “What would you have me do? If you tell me, I’ll do it. And I know you can get a message through to me because you’re God, right? And one more thing. I know you hear me, and I know you’re not going to forget that I asked, so I don’t plan on bugging you about this. I trust you’ll tell me when you’re ready. Amen.”I stood up and unlocked the door just as the buzzer announced it was break time. Walking out into the 45,000 square foot work floor, I was scanning the tops of all the tool cabinets for my coffee cup. Having said everything that I needed to say to God, my only thought was to grab a cup of coffee.The thing that happened next is difficult to describe, but I’ll do my best.All at once, and very unexpectedly, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and it startled me. I didn’t see anything or hear anything, but my surprise was exactly as though I had looked across the floor and seen myself pull a message from a letter pouch and hold it out for someone to take.This knowledge, or awareness, or whatever you want to call it, was altogether different than anything I had ever experienced. Without seeing a sight or hearing a sound, I felt just as certain – and was every bit as surprised – as if I had seen a person and heard a voice.I walked over to the time clock, grabbed my timecard, clocked out, got in my car and drove to the Federal Building in downtown Tulsa where I presented myself to a weary woman sitting at a desk. “I’m here to become a postman,” I said, and then I told her the story I just told you.When I left, the woman was no longer looking weary. She was surprised, befuddled, and contemplative. I think she was struggling to decide whether I was delusional, or if it was remotely possible that what I was telling her might be true.I lived in a continual state of excitement for the next two days, but when I quieted my heart to continue my conversation with God in that private, inner world, I realized that I wasn’t supposed to work for the United States Postal Service, but that I was to deliver messages of a different sort.On my lunch break that day, I drove back to the Federal Building, found that same woman, and gave her the rest of the story. When I left, she looked even more surprised, befuddled, and contemplative than before.Next, I rented an announce-only answering machine from...

“In a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, Elmer Bendiner’s B-17 bomber was barraged by 20-millimeter shells which resulted in direct hits on their gas tanks. But none of the shells exploded. The next day, the maintenance chief found 11 shells inside the gas tanks, any one of which should have taken the plane down. When they opened the shells, all were empty, except one. In it was a hand-written note scrawled in the Czech language. Upon translation, they found it said, ‘This is all we can do for you now . . . Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea.’”– Fall of the Fortresses, by Elmer BendinerA captive Czechoslovakian Jew sent a message in a bottle through an ocean of air, not knowing if it would ever be read.The first message in a bottle was tossed into the sea in 310 BC by Aristotle’s protegé, Theophrastus, hoping to determine if the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.In 1177 A.D. an exiled Japanese poet launched wooden planks on which he had engraved poems describing his predicament. His story is known today as The Tale of the Heike.In the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth created an official position of “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” in the belief that some bottles might contain secrets from British spies.Edgar Allan Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833) and Charles Dickens’ “A Message from the Sea” (1860) taught us to “cast our bread upon the waters” and trust the wisdom of the waves.In the summer of 1977, NASA tossed a message in a bottle into the vast ocean of space. That bottle was Voyager 1, and it included a golden record with greetings from earth in 55 languages along with a collection of 117 sights and sounds including whale calls and the music of Chuck Berry. That record was also engraved with pictorials showing how to operate it, along with the position of our sun relative to nearby pulsars. We did this because we wanted extraterrestrials to know which solar system our bottle was thrown from.After zipping through space for more than 43 years Voyager is only 23 billion kilometers away. It will take 17,720 years for it to travel one light year, less than one quarter of the way to Alpha Centauri.Seven billion of us are crammed on a tiny speck of dust circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.Have you ever considered that our planet, itself, is a spherical bottle and we are the message it contains?If Shakespeare was right, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” and if the writer of Hebrews was right, “We are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,” then you and I are backstage right now while others occupy the spotlight. I have been waiting for this moment so that I could speak to you alone, without the others hearing.I believe you underestimateyour talent, your experience, your value.You make a bigger difference than you realize,and you matter much more than you know.You will be amazed when you understandall that you have accomplished!We both know it is easy to love people we do not likebut God really does like you!I see him cheering for youfrom the sidelines.And I like you, too.I tossed this note into the worldwide ocean of ones and zeros and whispered for it to find you.And here you are!Merry Christmas.– Your Secret Admirer

Do you have a deep-seated belief, but you’re not sure where it came from?I have passionately rejected the idea of goalsetting for more than 50 years, but I’ve never understood why I felt so deeply about it until just a moment ago.Welcome to Sunday morning, November 29, 2020.The word “goal” has a certain wishfulness attached to it.“Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might…”I do not believe in goals.I believe in responsibilities.I believe in decisions.Which of the following is the more effective self-talk?A: My sales goal this month is $200,000.B: It is my responsibility to sell $200,000 this month. And I have decided to do it.Goals do not change behavior.Decisions change behavior.(Yes, a goal can occasionally lead to a decision.When that happens, focus on the decision, not the goal.)Desire is rooted in the ego.Identity is rooted in the heart.Goals are produced by desire, what you want.Decisions are produced by identity, who you are.If your goal changes who you are, then you have made a decision to be a different person.If what you want is more important than who you are, then you are an addict.Alcoholics Anonymous is in the business of long-term behavior change. I find it interesting that they do not teach their members to focus on the goal of not drinking. They teach them to make a decision not to drink… one day at a time.They emphasize the decision, not the goal.Goals have attraction.Decisions have consequences.A goal aims your mind at a desire.But your mind is easily distracted by desire after desire after desire.When you make a decision, you pull the trigger and ride that bullet.Decisions have consequences.The Bible has an interesting passage in the second chapter of the book of James:“Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If you say to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but do nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”Few things reveal a person’s identity like the tip they leave on a table.If you leave a specific percentage, you are disciplined.If your tip is determined by the quality of the service, you are a judge.If you tip lavishly even when the service is bad, you are an encouragement.Regardless of which of these people you have been in the past, you are only a decision away from being a different person in the future.Roy H. Williams

The partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979 happened because of a burned-out lightbulb.When a particular safety system was malfunctioning, that bulb would light up and the technician would alertly take care of the problem.No one anticipated a burned-out bulb.Their mistake, according to my partner Cedric, is that they were monitoring for failure instead of monitoring for the absence of goodness. “That bulb should have been bright when things were good and go out when something was wrong.”A system can malfunction in countless ways but there is only one way it can function perfectly.You need to expect goodness and monitor for the absence of it.Did I tell you that Cedric is a programmer, a data scientist, and a genius?One of Cedric’s most important inventions is a system that monitors the vast array of data-crunching computers used by an important hedge fund. “The old system monitored for failure,” says Cedric, “but certain functions happen only intermittently, so a problem could exist for hours before it was discovered.”Cedric’s new programming checks every element of the system once per minute, round the clock, to confirm that everything is working correctly. But his system isn’t looking for a problem. It is looking for perfection and notifies Cedric when it fails to find it.Cedric says, “One mother tells her son to call when he gets to his friend’s house (and then takes action if she doesn’t get a call by the expected time). Compare this to the mother who says, ‘Call if you get into trouble,’ never realizing that it could be hours after a car accident before she would know that something was wrong.”The first parent is monitoring for the absence of goodness.The second parent is monitoring for failure.The lucky hedge fund with the perfectly monitored system owes a debt of gratitude to Captain Jack Sparrow.Jack Sparrow peed on the comforter in Cedric’s bedroom every time his automated kitty litter box was full, so Cedric wrote software that checked for failure once per minute.Cedric lost 3 comforters before he realized the automated kitty litter box could malfunction in more ways than he could predict, so he wrote new software to “monitor for the absence of goodness” rather than monitor for failure.Problem solved.An automated kitty litter box is a complex system.The data-crunching computers of a hedge fund are a complex system.Employees are a complex system.Are you monitoring for mistakes to criticize, or for performance to praise?If you want smooth transactions, happy customers, and big profits to be ordinary, you must cheerfully expect these things and then come to the rescue only when they fail to happen.Employers who have strong corporate cultures and happy, long-term employees are the ones who have learned to celebrate the ordinary and praise their people when things are going well.If that is not how you have operated in the past, you are only a decision away from being that employer in the future. Just ask my friend, Paul Sherman. Indy tells me you can find him in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

Works of art are made by people who have tasted one or more of the nine juices of life and they want you to taste the juice, too. This was the belief of a teacher who lived in India 2,000 years ago. His thoughts were chronicled in the Natya Shastra of the Hindus. According to that teacher*, these are the Nine Juices of Life:Love heals pain and frees the ego. Your appreciation of beauty (gratitude) connects you to the source of love.Joy is expressed in laughter, contentment, and happiness. But if you pursue these things directly, they will evade you.Laughter, contentment and happiness are experienced only as a consequence of love.Wonder is the result of becoming fascinated with life. Playfulness and curiosity allow us to journey into mysteries that end in magical awe.Courage is the energy that comes when you call upon the Warrior within you. Courage manifests itself as bravery, confidence, and pride.Sadness allows you to experience compassion, that precious emotion that allows us to relate more deeply to one another. Grief is another expression of sadness, an inescapable part of healing.Anger is fire, heat and light. If anger is not acknowledged and respected, it becomes irritation, hatred, and violence. Feel your anger, but do not let it guide you. Actions taken in anger can destroy a lifetime of good.Fear is most commonly expressed as worry, doubt, and insecurity. When we hide beneath it, we shut down completely.Disgust is revulsion and rejection of something considered offensive, distasteful, or unpleasant. Disgust turned inward is self-pity and self-loathing. This cannot be healed except through love.Peace is not external, but within. It is that deep, relaxing calm that occurs when you become so full that you are empty. Five hundred and seven years ago, Giovanni Giocondo wrote about this kind of peace in a Christmas letter to a friend. “No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!”If our Hindu teacher was right, every actor, musician, storyteller, painter, poet, dancer, sculptor, photographer, novelist and playwright is trying to express one or more of those nine feelings: Love, Joy, Wonder, Courage, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Peace.I’m not a Hindu, but I think the idea of the nine rasas is one worth contemplating.It has always been my conviction that interesting perspectives and ancient wisdom can be found in religions that are not your own. But even so, I am always unsettled when a person says, “All religions teach basically the same thing.”If a moral code is all you seek, then yes, most religions teach a similar moral code.But the laughter and joy of a reckless faith is an altogether different thing.Roy H. Williams* The theory of rasa is attributed to Bharata, a sage-priest who may have lived sometime between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE. It was fully developed in about the year 1000 by the rhetorician and philosopher Abhinavagupta.

This is what good marketers see when they close their eyes:Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind of the customer will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and announce to the world around us – who we are.A tribe is a group of self-selected insiders.Identify a tribe, (an affinity group.)Develop that tribe.Market to the tribe you have developed.Gathering your tribe is easy. (A.) In your first encounter, make sure they win big. Give them far more than they gave you. (B.) Speak to your tribe about what they ALREADY care about.All of the above can be summarized in two words: Identity Reinforcement.Entertainment is the currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.Television and radio, YouTube videos, blog posts and social media deliver results because they deliver entertainment.Information is medicine. Entertainment is a spoonful of sugar.Reaching the customer is mechanical, a question of media selection.Convincing the customer is artistic, a question of message creation.Reaching the right people is easy. Saying the right thing is hard.Online, when you target the right customer at the zero moment of truth you are fishing with a hook for today’s customer.At the zero moment of truth online, the best hooks are information, availability, and free shipping.Customers seeking information have not yet chosen a preferred provider.Customers seeking availability want the product immediately.Customers seeking free shipping want to save money.When using mass media – TV and radio – at the zero moment of truth, your message must be urgent.Urgency is achieved when the desire is widespread, but the availability is limited.Customers in transactional mode are worried about spending money. They are willing to spend time to save money.Customers in relational mode are worried about spending time. They are willing to spend money to save time. This is why they will choose someone they feel they can trust. In the absence of a previously chosen preferred provider, they will choose to trust Google reviews and Amazon reviews.Television and radio are called mass media for a reason: they reach the unfiltered masses. When you use mass media, you are fishing with a net for future customers and their influencers.The goal of advertising in mass media is to become the preferred provider, the one the customer thinks of first and feels the best about.Mass media – TV and radio – can deliver big results quickly, but only for products that have broad appeal and a short purchase cycle.Food and entertainment have broad appeal and a short purchase cycle.Engagement rings and air conditioners have broad appeal and a long purchase cycle.The longer you use mass media, the better it works. The effects of mass media are cumulative. But it only works for products and services that have broad appeal.When using mass media long-term for products with a long purchase cycle, your message must be memorable.Mass media fails miserably for products with narrow appeal.When your product has narrow appeal, online media is your answer.Make your store and your website interesting. The seller who gets more of the customer’s time is the one most likely to get their money.Online, when you want to target the customer at the zero moment of truth, you have

Every beginning starts with an ending.This is one of the principles of Pendulum theory.And the middle is always in the middle.When our fight with King George ended in 1783, thirteen powerless colonies became “The United States.” This was the beginning of the first America; 3 million citizens clinging to the eastern edge of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Truly, “a land of opportunity.”Eighty years later – 1863 – we were in the middle of a war between ourselves. (1861-1865)And July 2nd of that year – the middle day in the 3-day Battle of Gettysburg – was also the middle day of the middle year in our 5-year Civil War.Fourteen years after the Civil War ended, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington headed west to capture the ending of the Wild West. Their paintings and sculptures of those ending days now sell for millions of dollars.Nineteen years after Charlie and Fred headed West, Teddy Roosevelt led his “rough riders” up a hill during the Spanish-American War. His arrival on that hilltop signaled the end of the Wild West, the end of the Spanish Empire, and the end of the first America.1As I said earlier, every beginning starts with an ending.The second America began when Teddy became President in 1901. This second America was a land of progress and achievement, a World Power, a country of cars and department stores and Coca-Cola, electric lights, running water, and houses everywhere.Do you remember when Whitney Houston sang, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”? America’s memory of the Civil War was more recent than that when they elected Teddy Roosevelt.One of Teddy’s first official actions was to invite Booker T. Washington, a black educator, to dinner at the White House. White-hot rage was ignited across the South. According to historian Deborah Davis, “There was hell to pay… This story did not go away. An assassin was hired to go to Tuskegee to kill Booker T. Washington. He was pursued wherever he went… There were vulgar cartoons of Mrs. Roosevelt that had never been done before.”The Revolutionary War ended and the first America began: Opportunity America.One hundred and twelve years later – 1901 – the second America began: Achievement America.One hundred and twelve years later – 2013 – the third America began: Virtual America,a “sharing economy” featuringvirtual ownership, (Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit)virtual currency, (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin)virtual reality. (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok)2013 was also the halfway point in the upswing of society’s pendulum toward the zenith of our current “We” cycle. The halfway point is where we begin to take a good thing too far. In 2013 we shifted from “fighting together for the common good” to simply “fighting together.”Western Civilization2 has done this every 80 years for the past 3 millennia.I wrote at length about it in Pendulum several years ago:1783 marked the ending of our Revolutionary War.1783 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…1863 marked the middle of our Civil War.1863 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…1943 marked the middle of WWII.1943 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…2023 will mark the zenith of our current “We.”I wonder what we’ll be in the middle of then?Roy H....

Dr. Seuss had1. the courage to make up new words,2. the confidence that his readers would understand what these new words meant, and3. he was a master of meter, the rhythm that is created when you arrange your words so that the stressed and unstressed syllables fall into patterns.There are a couple dozen types of meter, but Dr. Seuss used only one of them, anapestic meter, sometimes called galloping meter because it tumbles off the tongue.People often conflate meter with rhyming. But meter does NOT have to rhyme to work its magic.“What magic?”The magic of being musical.“Meter makes words musical?”Yes.“Even when read silently?”Yes, even when read silently.“So, what’s the benefit of it?”When words become musical, they enter into the non-judgmental, pattern-recognition portion of your mind.“Non-judgmental?”The right hemisphere of the brain doesn’t know fact from fiction; that’s the left brain’s job. Pierre de Beaumarchais understood this way back in 1775.“How do you know?”It was in 1775 that Beaumarchais wrote in The Barber of Seville, “Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.”“I think you’re making all this up.”Dr. Roger Sperry documented it in 1981 and they awarded him the Nobel Prize for it.“Oh… so maybe I should just shut up and listen?”Might be a good idea.“Please continue.”Bounty, the quicker-picker-upper.BMW. The ultimate driving machine.My client would not, could not, did not commit these crimes. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.“Are those examples of anapestic meter?”No, anapestic meter is two light stresses followed by a heavy third stress, like this:Oh, the sea is so full of a number of fish,if a fellow is patient, he might get his wish…and that’s why I think that I’m not such a foolwhen I sit here and fish in McElligot’s Pool.And who could forget,The children were nestled all snug in their beds,While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap,When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.Away to the window I flew like a flash,Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snowGave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,When what to my wondering eyes should appear,But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer…“Okay, but can you give me an example of anapestic meter that doesn’t rhyme?”And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,So I walk by the edge of a lake in my dream.“But you said Dr. Seuss made up new words and trusted that people would know what they mean.”You want to hear some made-up words?“Yeah, but not from Dr. Seuss.”Why not?“Because I won’t be speaking or writing to little kids. My people are old enough to drive cars, drink beer, and vote.”Fair enough. Here are some grown-up, made-up words.The reason you haven’t seen me out is because I’ve been Hiberdating.I type slowly because I’m Unkeyboardinated.Give me a bus ticket to anywhere. I’m going Columbusing.I can’t remember where I...

Jacques Cousteau, the man who made the world care about the ocean,said, “A lot of people attack the sea. I make love to it.”But he was French.Not being French, I don’t see each day’s work as a choice between attacking or love-making. I see the future unfurl each morning as a fork in the road. Will I choose the battleground or the playground?Do you see business as a necessity of life, a battleground swarming with vendors, employees, customers and competitors that have to be kept at bay? Or do you see each day as a playground where the principal game is called, “How can we make others happy?”I have lived a strange life these past 40 years, spending all day, every day talking with business owners about their best and worst experiences in business.What I have noticed is that there are patterns, one of which is that the “business is a playground” people are happier and more successful.They didn’t become happy because they were successful. They became successful because they were happy and wanted to make other people happy, too.1. Are you making people happy?2. How are you doing it?3. Where do you find your inspiration?Inspiration is an interesting subject. Decades of searching for it have taught me, “Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.”My hero Robert Frost found inspiration in ridiculous places as well.The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock treeHas given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.Here are three ridiculous places where I have found inspiration:J. Peterman catalogueChuck Lorre Vanity CardsChipotle Story CupsJ. Peterman catalogueIt’s Friday night at a 200-year-old pub off O’Connell Street in Dublin. World headquarters for conversation. Dark mahogany walls. Lean-faced men. Ruddy-faced women. The bursts of laughter aren’t polite, but real, approaching the edge of uncontrol. The stories being told are new, freshly minted, just for you. There is no higher honor. The room roar is high (but still, not as bad as in New York restaurants where you can’t make out what it is you, yourself just said). These Irishmen, in collarless Irish shirts and tweed caps, have managed to keep their mouths shut all week, saving up the good stuff for now, for Friday night, this very place, this very moment… How could one single city possibly give birth to Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, Wilde, Beckett… and all those here tonight as well? Working-Class Irish Pub Shirt, well-suited for both the intoxication of talk and the difficult art of listening. Not bad for just hanging out, either. Or, when absolutely necessary, for looking interesting. Simple collar band. Seven-button placket. Stud at neck. No-nonsense, rounded shirttails. Two-button cuff. No pocket. You’ve got to carry everything you’ve got… in your head.Chuck Lorre Vanity Cards# 397 CENSORED BY ME (by myself) I’ve decided to save everybody a lot of unhappiness and not submit this week’s vanity card to the CBS censors (I know when I’ve crossed the line with these things and I don’t need a bunch of corporate lawyers getting their cotton blend panties in a bunch). Accordingly, I’ve banished the offending card to that dark place where all my offending cards go – the internet. View the censored 397.#634  Russia, if you’re reading this, hack into the Nielsen computers and make our ratings higher.Chipotle Story CupsIn 2014, Chipotle asked a number of America’s best writers to craft stories to print on the sides of their cups. This is the story written by bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver:“Two-Minute Cheer for the Home Team”The ancient human social...

The economy, commerce, business, the stock market and free trade: all of these were built on our ability to sell things to each other.This is why the job of the ad writer is incredibly important.Television and radio, newspapers and magazines, direct mail and email, word-of-mouth and live chat, social media and outdoor, telephone calls and sales calls are just different channels of communication.Every point-of-contact with your customer is a channel of communication.Your website is where questions are answered and additional information is gathered. But this doesn’t happen until the customer first hears about you and is intrigued enough to seek you out.External messaging – advertising, social media, news stories, and word-of-mouth – is where the conversation begins.External messaging usually triggers a visit to your website.This is the first hand-off in the relay race.If your website is built for ecommerce, the sale might be closed there, and the conversation ended. But if you have a phone room, or face-to-face salespeople, their job is to continue the conversation begun by external messaging and accelerated by your website.When a customer leaves your website to contact a salesperson, this is the second hand-off in the relay race. The baton is now in the hand of the third runner, a live human being.Have you ever seen a three-legged race where the right leg of one team member is tied to the left leg of another team member, requiring them to run in a synchronized manner?The first runner is your ad writer. The second runner is your salesperson. The bond that ties them together is your website. When these are synchronized, coordinated, and singing the same song, you have channel alignment and a high close rate.When they are managed separately, each of them going their own way, you have salespeople complaining that they aren’t getting “good leads” and that your ads are “reaching the wrong people.”I’ve never seen a company fail due to reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen countless companies struggle due to a lack of channel alignment.I’m done talking now.Roy H. Williams

Seinfeld was “a show about nothing,” but we couldn’t get enough of it because each of us knew a George, an Elaine, and a Kramer.Rebecca Solnit’s book, The Faraway Nearby, reminds me of Seinfeld. I love this book, but I can’t really explain what it’s about. Solnit can write about nothing and keep you mesmerized. Sort of like Tom Robbins, but entirely different.Sigh.I’m not sure what else to tell you.“In this gorgeously written and insightful book, Solnit weaves essay and memoir so that the nature of the story itself is sharply drawn from every imaginable angle. Personal history, geography, maps, ice, mirrors, and breath play back and forth, as the structural threads of narrative are wound, knotted, and unwound… In a world increasingly bereft of the genuine, Solnit’s writing shines with heart, wit, and soul.”– Lindsay Hill, Publishers Weekly“The product of a remarkable mind at work, one able to weave a magnificent number of threads into a single story, demonstrating how all our stories are interconnected.”– Bookforum“A brilliant, genre-refuting book.” – San Francisco ChronicleHere is an example of what those people – and me – are trying to describe:“I used to go to Ocean Beach, the long strip of sand facing the churning Pacific at the end of my own city, for reinforcement, and it always put things in perspective, a term that can be literal too. The city turned into sand and the sand into surf and the surf into ocean and just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore.”“I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world, everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.”“Once when I was in my late twenties, I drove to New Mexico with my friend Sophie, a fierce, talented, young black-haired green-eyed whirlwind who had not yet found her direction. We had no trouble convincing ourselves it was worthwhile to drive the two days each way to New Mexico because there was a darkroom there that she could use to print photographs for a project we had. In those days we were exploring what we wished to become, what the world might give us, and what we might give it, and so, though we did not know it, wandering was our real work anyway.”“I had discovered the desert west a few years before with the force of one falling in love and had learned something of how to enter it and move through it…”– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 31-32We relate to Seinfeld because we, too, have had Jerry’s friends but called them by different names.We relate to Rebecca Solnit because we, too, have felt alone, discarded, and ignored.We relate to Rebecca because we have driven to New Mexico with a crazy friend.Who was your crazy friend?What crazy things did you do together?How did it happen that you fell out of touch?Roy H. Williams

If you are going to communicate effectively with a person, you need to know something about their beliefs.Most writers assume their readers see and believe as they do. And when they knowingly write to people who believe differently, their writing often takes the tone of an argument, leaning heavily on evidence and examples, with undertones of disparagement and mischaracterization. Such writers persuade no one, but rather drive the wedge deeper.1. To make the sale, you must win the respect of your audience.2. Belief is never a matter of evidence; it is always a matter of choice.3. You cannot take a person where you want them to go, until you first meet them where they are.4. (A) Perspective: You have to see through their eyes.(B) Empathy: Feel what they feel.(C) Use the words they love. When you meet your customer in that safe place, and establish the bond of a common perspective, then you can gently begin to give them new information.5. People never change their minds. If you give them the same information they were given in the past, they will continue to make the same decision they made in the past. They will continue to disagree with you.6. When a person appears to have “changed their mind,” they have simply made a new decision based on new information. And this new information should always be shared from the platform of a common perspective.7. Win the heart and the mind will follow.The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.This will be the first ad in a one-year series:My name is Tim Schmidt and you’ve probably never heard of my company. We teach people how to avoid danger, save lives, and keep their loved ones safe. We currently have nearly half-a-million members. But still, you’ve probably never heard of us. Because our members are trained NOT to talk about it. Chances are, some of our members are friends of yours. And they’ve never told you. Because talking about it is NOT what we do. What we do is avoid danger, save lives, and keep our loved ones safe. Our members are doctors and single moms and firemen and grandmothers and Veterans and Democrats and Republicans and members of every faith. We are thoughtful, responsible, and non-violent. But when you are with one of our members, you are safe, because they know exactly what to do if something crazy happens. More importantly, they know exactly what NOT to do. We are the United States Concealed Carry Association. See what we’re all about at USConcealedCarry.com.DEVIN: Discover the little-known backstory of the US Concealed Carry Association at USConcealedCarry.comHere’s an interesting question:Q: Why would anyone ever knowingly walk into a minefield?A: Because they need to get to the other side.Is there a minefield you need to cross?Have you been avoiding it because everyone keeps telling you how dangerous it is?Are you ready to get started?Roy H. Williams

Every book is an island that exists only in the mind of its writer, and the hope of every writer is that you will visit their island and be glad you did. But in The Faraway Nearby, her book about how we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, narrative and imagination, Rebecca Solnit says,“The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read. And its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds and the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”I think of books as islands, but Rebecca Solnit thinks of them as sheet music, or as seeds. I followed that trail of thought until I realized that she and I had simply discovered different metaphors to describe how books are literary portals of escape into alternate realities.Bored with my navel-gazing, I decided to search the 5,067 passages in the random quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com to see how many other writers had spoken of islands. So I logged into the admin section, typed the word “island” into the search window, and was delighted to find that I had transcribed “island” passages from no fewer than a dozen of my favorite authors.“Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think, from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger, paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them. The element which might reduce them, which might be thought to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant.”– Adam Nicolson, Sea RoomFrom 1888 until his death in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the South Seas. The diary of his island travels was published immediately after his death.“Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travelers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.”Three years later, Mary Kingsley spoke of her Travels in West Africa, an 1897 bestseller.“Once a hippopotamus and I were on an island together, and I wanted one of us to leave. I preferred it should be myself, but the hippo was close to my canoe, and looked like staying, so I made cautious and timorous advances to him and finally scratched him behind the ear with my umbrella and we parted on good terms. But with the crocodile it was different….”But 30 years before Robert Louis Stevenson or Mary Kingsley wrote about their islands, Mark Twain had a few words to say about the proposed US annexation of the Sandwich Islands.“When these islands were discovered the population was about 400,000, but the white man came and brought various complicated diseases, and education, and civilization, and all sorts of calamities, and consequently the population began to drop off with commendable activity. Forty years ago they were reduced to 200,000, and the educational and civilizing facilities being increased they dwindled down to 55,000, and it is proposed to send a few more missionaries and finish them. It isn’t the education or civilization that has settled them; it is the imported diseases, and they have all got the consumption and other reliable distempers, and to speak...

I was 24 and Phil was 60 and he was a most unusual man. Articulate but quiet, passionate but calm, and possibly the world’s greatest listener.By the age of 60, Phil had traveled to more than 40 countries, published stories, articles, and poems in more than 50 magazines, and assembled a personal library of books that overflowed the small rooms of his modest home.It occurs to me as I write this that books are what all my friends seem to have in common.Phil and I traded stories for only 3 years before Pennie and I moved away, but we corresponded once a month until that fateful day in 2019 when he left this world to move in with a friend.He was 97 years old.Phil always wore a tie. He didn’t have many, but each of them was special to him. He gave his wife, Barbara, careful instructions before he died regarding which tie he wanted each of his friends to have. The tie I received is covered with books on bookshelves. It hangs over the draperies in my study at home.When Barbara passed away in 2020, I received a phone call from their grandson, Cooper, informing me that Phil had left me his library.Phil’s library was as eclectic as he was:The Autobiography of A.A. Milne, (author of Winnie the Pooh)The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by TarbellLiterature and Western Man, by J.B. PriestlyUnderstanding Types, Shadows, and Names. A 2-volume set.The Gospel of Moses, by Samuel J. SchultzHawksbill Station, by Robert SilverbergThe Little Minister, by J.M. Barrie (the author of Peter Pan)The Shepherd of the Hills and When a Man’s a Man, by Harold Bell WrightAnd Behold The Camels Were Coming, by Edward Cuyler KurtzAnd then we have Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Roosevelt, and the complete works of James Whitcomb Riley and William Makepeace Thackeray.And because Phil was a pastor and a Bible scholar, we haveA fat 4-volume set of Word Studies in the Greek New Testament,A Lawyer Examines the Bible,The Treasury of David,The Old Testament and the Fine Arts, by Cynthia MausChrist and the Fine Arts, by Cynthia Mausand a few dozen books about the Tabernacle in the Wilderness,along with a couple of hundred Biblical commentaries and Expositions of Holy Scripture.And then there is the gorgeous 27-volume set featuring the paintings of all the greatest artists of the last 600 years.Pennie and I bought a new trailer to send with Joe Davis when he went to pick up the books 500 miles away. That trailer is 17 feet long, 8 1/2 feet wide, has a 9-foot ceiling, and is rated to carry 3 1/2 tons. Joe drove home slowly because the trailer was overloaded.You will notice a couple of new things in the Welcome Center upon your next arrival at Wizard Academy. The first of these will be the smell of delicious food. Pennie is pursuing a coffee cafe license so that people can have something to eat while they sit with a book or a computer or a friend and a glass of wine and forget about their cares for awhile.The second thing you’ll notice will be the thousands of books adorning the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with rolling ladders in the James Phillip Johnson reading room. And on the wooden header where those rolling ladders roll, you’ll read the last words Phil ever spoke to me:“You acquire an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you absorb culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”I scribbled those words on a scrap of paper so...

I sit with a bag of popcorn and watch the frantic climbers of the ladder of success.The climbers who capture my interest are the ones who consider themselves to be “clever.” But look closely and you’ll see their only “cleverness” is that they are uncommitted and disloyal. Every person is a steppingstone for them and every relationship is transactional.I ask them about this and they say with pride, “I am an independent thinker. I am my own dog.”But isn’t that just another way of saying, “stray dog, dog without a home, dog that nobody wants”?Clever climbers have no master. This means no commitment, no loyalty to anyone or anything other than themselves. But happy dogs have masters to whom they are loyal and committed.Climbers envision a life of recreation and leisure.But recreation and leisure are medicine, not a lifestyle.Medicine, used wisely, restores us to health.Medicine as a lifestyle is the definition of a drug addict.When you live for something bigger than you are, you gain identity, purpose, and adventure.Identity: Who am I?Purpose: Why am I here?Adventure: What must I overcome?We spend our lives searching for security and then hate it when we get it. Security is the death of adventure.Self-made people speak of being their happiest during days of struggle and uncertainty. This is when they knew exactly who they were, why they were here, and what it was they had to overcome. Hence the saying, “It is the journey, not the destination, that matters in the end.”This is the self-perception that I will be sending to [email protected] hope you will use this same format when you send him your self-perception.Identity: I am a mailman.Purpose: I deliver messages.Adventure: I must overcome ignorance, insulation, and apathy.Ignorance: I must cause those who don’t know, to know.Insulation: I must penetrate the insulation that surrounds their brains.Apathy: I must touch their hearts so that they care.STEP ONE is to summarize in three, short phrases, your identity, your purpose, and your adventure.STEP TWO is to explain how you will overcome the obstacles that are the essence of your adventure.Disclosure: the reason I’m asking you to send your self-perception to Indy is because you will give deeper thought to your introspection if you know that another person – even a lowly beagle – is going to read it. This exercise is not for my benefit and it’s not for Indy’s rabbit hole. It’s for you.If you deliver good newsand solutions for problemsand try to alleviate sufferingand make people happy,you are doing the work of God.You are no longer your own dog.You are God’s dog.Roy H. Williams

These are the basic principles of Chaotic Ad Writing as taught by Wizard Academy:1. Approach your subject from an unexpected angle.2. Tell two stories at once, using the relationship between two things as a pattern to reveal the relationship between two other things.3. Allow the listener to arrive at their own conclusion.In the New Testament, stories like these are known as parables.This is the challenge we outlined in last week’s Monday Morning Memo:STEP ONE: I have chosen the word “Molokai” to be our unexpected beginning.STEP TWO: Send [email protected] a link to the website of a product or service for which an ad could not possibly begin with the word “Molokai.”STEP THREE: I will randomly select five of these products or services and write a fascinating ad for each of them beginning with the word, “Molokai.”STEP FOUR: These five ads will be published in next week’s Monday Morning Memo.DISCLOSURE: When I promised I would “randomly select” 5 products or services for which I would write an ad beginning with Molokai, I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to do that. In the end, I just told Indy to give me the first 5 emails he received. These were fromJay Leigeber at 1:25AM,Malton Schexneider at 3:24AM,Pauline Tom at 3:51AM,Damien Deighan at 4:08AM, andTSO at 4:39AM, but this was an email to Indy for a “Molokai Beach Face Mask,” from John at TSO, so it was sort of like, “Interesting coincidence, huh?” So I figured I would take the next one,Bryan Eisenberg at 5:18AM, but Bryan is a close friend and that would look suspicious, so I disqualified him and went with Wendy Gardner at 5:53AM.A few more emails trickled in during the next 30 minutes, then at 6:25AM Jason Fox opened the floodgates and Indy Beagle feared he would be swept away.Are you ready to read some ads?Jay Leigeber was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai. The most Hawaiian of the Hawaiian islands. Warm, wonderful, Molokai.For a one-time payment of just a hundred and twenty-nine dollars…Tushy will take you to Molokai every day…and bring you home, relaxed… refreshed… and feeling oh, so fine.The Tushy Spa warm water bidet attachment will fit any toilet…in any home… and take you to warm, wonderful Molokai whenever…you want…. to go.HelloTushy dot com.Malton Schexneider was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai is the wonderful island where the Hawaiians sent their people when they had a painful, debilitating condition. If you experience back pain, you know debilitating pain. Will you let us help you? Our free report on Eliminating and Preventing Back Pain will be your own private, Molokai, where you can find relief, and health, and experience happiness once again. Molokai awaits you at Back Pain Relief Secrets dot com.[That ad was completely true, by the way. Molokai housed Hawaii’s leper colony for more than 100 years. – Indy Beagle]Pauline Tom was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai....

Robert Frost died when I was four, so we never met face to face, but throughout my formative years I spent an hour with him every night before I fell asleep.Robert Frost taught me how to write.If you will write like Robert Frost, you must approach your subject from an unexpected angle. Few things capture the attention like the unexpected. When your reader or listener has chosen to follow you on a journey, it is because they expect to be fascinated, intrigued, and delighted.Don’t let them down.Robert Frost knew that things can be used as metaphors for other things, which is why his poems often finish by making a powerful point we didn’t see coming. The dual nature of metaphors makes it easy to tell two stories at once.In addition, Frost uses metaphors to lead us toward a destination. Then he allows us to joyfully discover it on our own. He doesn’t tell us what to believe; he just causes us to believe it.And like every great ad, his poems get better with every repetition.Robert Frost noticed the binary relationship between the hot and cold theories of earth’s destruction and wrote “Fire and Ice” exactly 100 years ago.Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I’ve tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.– Robert Frost  (1920)1. With his opening surprise of just 12 words he shows us the two possibilities known to every astrophysicist: (A.) our world could be burned up by the explosion of our sun, or (B.) we could perish in a coming ice age.2. But then he makes a hard left turn to reveal that desire is just another type of fire, and hate is another kind of ice that for destruction “is also great and would suffice.”Robert Frost opens our eyes to the destructive powers of greed and hate in 15 seconds, with just 51 words.When you allow a person to arrive at their own conclusion, the truth you have communicated is no longer your truth, but their truth, and no one will ever be able to take it away from them. They will forever defend it as a product of their own observation.1. Approach your subject from an unexpected angle.2. Tell two stories at once, using the relationship between two things as a pattern to reveal the relationship between two other things.3. Allow the listener to arrive at their own conclusion.These are the principles of Chaotic Ad Writing as taught by Wizard Academy.Chaos in science is not randomness but its opposite, a higher level of order beyond the scope of our immediate awareness. In the words of chaotic novelist Tom Robbins,*“Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It’s just a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.”But Robert Frost knew this before Tom Robbins was born. And Robert Frost taught it to me.Shall we put it to the test?STEP ONE: I have chosen the word “Molokai” to be our unexpected beginning.STEP TWO: Send [email protected] a link to the website of a product or service for which an ad could not possibly begin with the word “Molokai.”STEP THREE: I will randomly select five of these products or services and write a fascinating ad for each of them beginning with the word, “Molokai.”STEP FOUR: These five ads will be published in next week’s Monday Morning Memo.The objective of this demonstration will be to show you how “everything in the universe is connected, of course,”...

Above ground, in the sunlight, grain silos provide much of our daily sustenance.Below ground, in the darkness, hides another kind of silo.But it is not the missile silo that is killing us. People are disappearing into the bone-dry quicksand of grain silos in less than 5 seconds.“Once entrapment begins, it happens very quickly due to the suction-like action of the grain; Researchers in Germany found that an average person who has sunk into grain once it has stopped flowing can get out only as long as it has not reached knee level; at waist level assistance is required. Once the grain has reached the chest a formal rescue effort must be undertaken.” – WIKIPEDIAI have my beliefs and you have your beliefs.Belief is not a group project. But a sense of belonging, the creation of a community, and the establishment of a society have always been group projects.Covid-19 took the face-to-faceness of community and society away from us, leaving us no alternative but to gather online in echo-chamber silos where we can hear our own opinions voiced oh-so-eloquently by others.If we sink into the life-giving grain of these online silos, we will suffocate.When you know a person’s silos, you know everything about them that matters.Cambridge Analytica gained access to information on 50 million Facebook users as a way to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. Cambridge Analytica was merely an expression of Online Marketing 101.I’m not saying it was right. What I’m saying is that when you are in a silo, you are easy to manipulate.We segregate ourselves into silos based on (1.) our beliefs, and (2.) our activities.The most successful online marketers are those who know their ABC’s.*A: Identify a tribe.B: Develop the tribe.C: Market to the tribe.Each of us participates in a handful of tribes. It is impossible to avoid.Just try to remember that each of your tribes exists in a silo – an echo chamber – where it is easy to become convinced that “everyone” thinks and feels like you do.But your silos aren’t the world. And my silos aren’t, either.This is why I’ve been reaching out to well-spoken friends and acquaintances who spend time in other silos and have different beliefs. I asked these people – one by one – to share their thoughts on subjects I knew they saw differently than me.I’ve enjoyed it immensely, and I suggest you do it, too.But this is the important part: Ask and listen only. Do not – under any circumstances – offer your perspective. If you do, the whole conversation will feel to your friend like an ambush. Just ask questions and keep your mouth shut. Focus your mind on trying to see what your friend sees.And do it by Zoom or telephone. It is much easier to focus a call – and end it – than a face-to-face meeting.Do you have the courage to do this? Are you willing to look at the future – if only for a few minutes – through the eyes of someone who believes differently than you?If you answer yes, you have the mind of a mass marketer with arms long enough to embrace the world.If you answer no, my suggestion is that you focus your marketing firepower on the silos you know best. This will allow you to talk to your tribe, in the language of that tribe, according to the values and beliefs they hold dear.Indy says to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’ll see you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams* as taught by chairman Ryan Deiss in his class at Wizard Academy.“A relationship seldom achieves its full potential without confrontation; but confrontation is almost always doomed to failure unless it grows out of a deep...

You are flying your small airplane on a beautiful day.There is a tiny speck on your windshield.Like the North Star, it doesn’t move.This is why it escapes your notice.Had that speck begun moving across your windshield, you would have recognized it as another airplane. The fact that it doesn’t move means that you and that speck will soon intersect unless one of you changes direction. That speck will quickly-all-at-once fill your windshield and then…I’m trying to teach you a new way of thinking about your blind spot.If you knew it was there, they wouldn’t call it a blind spot.Blind spots are why it is wise for you and me to each have a special person in our lives to notice things we don’t notice. You would be amazed at the number of times each week Princess Pennie has to point out specks on the windshield I didn’t see.Right now, you are thinking to yourself, “What the wizard just told us completely contradicts Indy Beagle’s assertion last week that, ‘Nothing is so annoying as unsolicited advice, for within it lies the assumption of superior wisdom.'”I’m not contradicting Indy, I’m just pointing out a speck on his windshield. Each of us – you, me, everyone – is limited in our perceptions. But we don’t like to believe we are.Time-travel with me:In the second chapter of the first book of the Bible, God muses to himself, “It is not good for a person to be alone.”I think this is why He made so many of us, and why we are so different.Solomon, widely known for his wisdom, wrote, “Two are better than one…If one falls down, his partner can help him up. But pity the person who falls and has no one to help him up!” 1And in the Proverbs, he wrote, “Whoever finds a partner finds a good thing.” 2On page 148 of the book that won her the Nobel Prize in Literature,3 Olga Tokarczuk writes,“The world here is so large, so impossible to take in,” she said, fixing her gaze on me for a few seconds, testing me, “Agata is my wife.”I blinked, I had never heard one woman referring to another as “my wife” before. But I liked it.“You’re surprised, aren’t you?”I thought for a while.“I could have a wife, too,” I said with conviction. “It’s better to live with someone than alone. It’s easier to go through life together with someone than on one’s own.”Allow me to conclude by revisiting your accusation that today’s Monday Morning Memo contradicts last week’s Monday Morning Memo written by Indy Beagle.Niels Bohr, the physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics, said,“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”Please note that Niels Bohr was a physicist, not a philosopher.Stanislaw Lec, however, was a philosopher. He confirmed Niels Bohr’s thesis about opposite truths by saying, “Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a people.” 4F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer who gave us The Great Gatsby, summarized the idea of opposite truths this way, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”Yes, F. Scott was a drunkard, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. Alcohol was a speck on his windshield. Sadly for F. Scott, that speck quickly-all-at-once filled his windshield when he was just 44 years old.I’m betting if he had it all to do over again, he would have let someone help him wipe that speck away.Roy H. Williams1 Ecclesiastes 4:9-102 Proverbs 18:22 [Yeah, I wrote “partner” when Solomon said “wife.” Don’t have a conniption. A person doesn’t have to be your spouse – or even female – to point out the speck on your windshield. – RHW]3 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, p....

Few things are as annoying as unsolicited advice,for within it lies the assumption of superior wisdom.(So when you tell a person your PLAN for what THEY should do,always be aware that they secretly want to punch you in the mouth.)Uh-oh. Did I just give you some unsolicited advice?Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson was listening to a reporter tell him how his opponent planned to beat him in their upcoming boxing match. Mike famously replied, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”There are other interpretations of Mike’s famous saying, too. Like how “Plan B” is for when a business person gets punched in the mouth by unforeseen circumstances, and how “Plan C” is for when they get punched in the mouth a second time. When my boss, the wizard, was chancellor of Wizard Academy, he got all the way down to “Plan D,” and now Daniel Whittington is putting together “Plan E” because, you know, Covid.Hey! You want a PDF download of the 1998 Business Book of the Year, The Wizard of Ads?  Here you go! (I don’t know how it works in other browsers, but in Safari you’ll find “Export as PDF” under your FILE pulldown.)If it seems like my paragraphs aren’t connected to each other, it’s probably because all my experience is in the rabbit hole and beagles are easily distracted.Speaking of “distracted,” Gabrielle Roth writes,“If you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.”I don’t know how it is with people, but dogs are born knowing this!Dance! Sing! Be Enchanted by Stories! Celebrate Silence!It’s really not that hard. Just imitate a happy dog.Samuel Butler was born in 1835 and even though that was a long time ago, Samuel understood the happiness of dogs:“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”Dale Carnegie said,“Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see a bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.”I guess it’s time to take this plane in for a landing now because the wizard gave me a target word-count and we’re getting pretty close to it. Keep in mind that I’m flying solo for the first time, okay?Here’s my summary, from a beagle’s point-of-view:The events of 2020 will leave their marks on us for the rest of our lives. Having been forced into a more introspective existence by the Covid, many people learned things about themselves that had previously been suppressed.Self-aware people experienced solitude and emerged from it less fixated on the outward trappings of success, and more concerned about the quality of their relationships and their inner lives.Persons unwilling to examine themselves experienced isolation and are filled with anxiousness about things returning to “how they used to be.”There. That’s it. Our wheels have touched the ground.“This is your captain speaking. Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at our destination. We know you have a choice in...

Notice that title. It does not say, “How to Write Scripts for TV Ads,” but, “How I Write…”I have my own weird way of doing it.TV writers use a split-page approach:Camera instructions in the left column. Audio in the right column.I chose not to do it that way.Back when the world was young, Radio people told me that Radio scripts SHOULD ALWAYS BE TYPED IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.I chose not to do it that way.and then came the online people who told me to write everything in lower case letters because who has the time to press the shift key in this fast paced digital world are living inMe. The answer is me. I have enough time to press the shift key.Aaron Sorkin would have been a great Radio writer. Watch his TV series – The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Newsroom, or Sports Night – and you’ll hear dazzling dialogue, brilliant banter, and riveting repartee. Your imaginary people will begin talking like real people after you’ve studied his film scripts, A Few Good Men, The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs.Aaron Sorkin says, “Until the words are right, ain’t nothin’ right.”Or at least that’s what he would say if he was from Texas.Radio writers have five tools in their toolbox:(A) choice of words(B) tone of voice(C) vocal inflection(D) music(E) special effects; such as the sound of a car starting, a door slamming, or a dog barking.Television writers have all the radio tools available to them, as well as:(F) facial expressions, hand gestures, and body language(G) Screen text(H) visual special effects; such as slow motion, disappearances, and backlighting.The predictable mistakes made by Radio people writing TV ads are:They try to cram 30 seconds worth of words into a 30-second TV ad.They describe things they could easily have shown onscreen.They forget screen text is available.They use an omniscient voice-over when they could have shown us the person talking. The omniscient narrator – common in radio ads – doesn’t work so well on TV.Make no mistake: bad writing is bad writing. A boring Radio ad will be a boring ad on TV.Here’s how to turn a great Radio ad into a brilliant TV ad:Eliminate descriptions of actions.Show us those actions instead. Add action-instructions to your script, but in a different color than the black ink used for dialogue. If you need to make a cellphone video of yourself performing the actions so the director can see what you see in your mind, do it.Show us who is talking.Add instructions to your script regarding hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language, but use a different color than the black ink used for dialogue.Use screen text.Domain names, phone numbers, and store hours are more easily shown than spoken. But before you add screen text, ask, “Do we really need this?” And when you write the instructions for screen text, use a different color than the black ink used for dialogue.Use special effects to amplify what you want to make memorable.But be careful. The gratuitous use of special effects is the mark of an amateur. Before you use them, ask, “Do we really need these?” And print these instructions in a different color than the black we use for dialogue.Color is a language that can be used to link, or separate.In case I forgot to mention it, the only thing you should ever print in black is the dialogue. Special effects, screen text, and instructions to the actors and cameramen will be in a subordinate color of ink.Because the dialogue...

457 BC – In the 7th chapter of the Old Testament Book of Ezra, King Artaxerxes of Persia issues a decree to rebuild Jerusalem which results in the rebuilding of that city under Nehemiah.Go west from Jerusalem across the Mediterranean, west across the Atlantic, then halfway across the landmass of North America and you’re in Central Texas. It was there, sometime between the decree of Artaxerxes in 457 BC and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, that a group of Native American wise men painted a huge mural in a cave along the Pecos river.These Coahuiltecans were stargazers who believed that geographical landmarks are mirrored in the stars. “As above, so below.”The astronomical and geographical accuracy of this 2,000-to-2,500-year-old rock painting is astounding. It shows all the major landmarks along the path of the sun during the winter solstice as it travels from Austin, Texas, to San Angelo, Texas, 200 miles away. And it is huge: 26 feet wide and 13 feet tall, featuring dozens of important landmarks and religious stories and astronomical devices; messages from a distant past.Today we will focus on two small, but important pieces of this giant rock painting known as the “White Shaman.”AThese three “Y” symbols in the painting are the three plateaus known as Wednesday Mountain (on which Wizard Academy is built,) Thursday Mountain (which is owned by a Native American tribe,) and Friday Mountain, at the base of which lies America’s largest Hindu temple.The alignment of these 3 plateaus mirrors the stars in the Belt of Orion with amazing fidelity. See it for yourself in the rabbit hole. The stars of Orion’s Belt have been recognized as many things over the centuries, including the Golden Yard-arm, the Ellwand and Our Lady’s Wand. They have also been called the Three Sisters, the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men and the Magi, the very namesakes for which Wizard Academy is named. How amazing is that!The Belt of Orion, the Great Bear, and the Pleiades are the only constellations mentioned in the Bible. Let’s talk about the landmarks that mirror the stars in the Great Bear, Ursa major.Cold water gushes out of the ground 365 days a year from 5 underground springs along the Central Texas escarpment: Barton Springs in Austin, San Marcos Springs in San Marcos, Comal Springs in New Braunfels, and San Pedro Springs and San Antonio Springs in downtown San Antonio. These springs are represented in the White Shaman by a connected set of 4 symbols revealing the locations of those springs. These locations mirror the stars in the tail of Ursa major, the Great Bear. Do you see that bottommost symbol? It represents San Pedro springs and San Antonio springs, both in downtown San Antonio. You’ll notice it to be a little different than the other symbols in that it has an additional module attached, with two red lines – a river  – extending out from it. This is because San Antonio springs is the headwaters of the San Antonio river. Those Coahuiltecans didn’t miss a thing!We were given this amazing news by our neighbor, Brian Dudley, who introduced us to Gary Perez, the Native American who became famous for deciphering the White Shaman rock painting.We were told by multiple people when we bought the land in 2004 that our plateau had been sacred to Native Americans since before the time of Columbus, but no one had any proof of that until now.Hearing Gary Perez and/or Carolyn Boyd, the author of the book, The White Shaman Mural, explain the history, astrology and math that went into decoding that rock painting would be fun, don’t you think?When this virus has finally been defeated, our plan is to have one...

I lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma for 3 years before Merle Haggard released his hit song, “I’m Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” Even though I was only 12 at the time, I realized Brother Haggard’s song contained more corn than the whole state of Iowa.I laugh about being an Okie, but in truth, I am proud of the resourcefulness of my tribe. An Okie can build a rocket ship while he is flying it.Walk into any Oklahoma restaurant, church, or nightclub and choose 9 men at random. You will have within that group the ability to:weld every kind of metalrepair any motorized vehicle, electrical appliance, or mechanical devicethrow a rock and knock a bird out of the skybutcher a cow, pig, or deertell a story that will make you laugh, and sing a song that will make your crydig the footings, tie the rebar, pour a cement foundation, thenframe the house, install the plumbing and wiring, hang the sheetrock and the cabinets, install the fixtures, roof it, brick it, and sell it.And Okie girls are twice as resourceful as Okie boys.Okies learn their skills from family and friends because formal education takes too long and teaches too little. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, go to college. But if you just want to make some money, go do it. Don’t stand there like a whiner with your finger in your nose. Don’t fret like a little girl who is worried that Santa Claus doesn’t know her new address. And don’t count on getting a lucky break like some kind of wimpy-ass frat boy. Okies who wait for breaks go broke.An Okie’s lack of respect for college degrees occasionally has unintended consequences. I recently got an email from a friend in high school who said, “All these immunologists are saying one thing, but some of the guys we went to high school with are saying the opposite, so I don’t know who to believe…”When Pennie and I bought our first home in the little town of Broken Arrow, three additional rooms had been added to the original structure to make it a total of 800 square feet. It was built in “Indian Territory” in 1884, just 108 years after the colonies informed King George that his services would no longer be required.In 1744, when ­Thomas Jefferson was still in diapers, all of North America outside the 13 colonies was “Indian Territory.” So when a delegation from Virginia offered to provide a college education for a dozen Native American boys, Chief Canassatego replied,“We know you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in these colleges. And the maintenance of our young men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We’re convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us good by your proposal, and we thank you heartily. But you who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. And you will not, therefore, take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours.”“We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up in the colleges of the northern province. They were instructed in all your sciences. But when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, and therefore were neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor councilors. They were totally good for nothing.”“We are, however, not the less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting. To show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.”Some people are street smart and some people are book smart.The thing to remember is that one does not negate the other.Roy H....

When it is time to write an ad, and there is no felt need in the heart of the customer to which you can speak, make a paper cigar.Teddy Roosevelt was a man of improvisation. He knew his paper cigars. This allowed him to explain the process of making them in the fewest possible words: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”The slow weeks before and after peak season are called the shoulder season.  People who can create ads that bring in business during the shoulder season are people you want on your team.Winter is peak season for heating. Summer is peak season for air conditioning. But how does an HVAC company keep its employees paid during the shoulder season, those weeks of mild weather in between?“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”Funny, isn’t it? Teddy gave us the answer before air conditioning was even invented.1Every HVAC company knows the answer to the shoulder season is to convince the public of the importance of routine maintenance. But that’s kind of like trying to convince people to shop early for Christmas. Everyone knows it’s a smart thing to do, but few people actually do it. As a result of our procrastination, we wait in long lines, choose from a picked-over selection and pay higher prices because we delayed our shopping – one day at a time – until December twenty-second and then flew into a blind panic.Air conditioning maintenance is like that. We delay it until the unit breaks down.When you need to sell a product or a service, and no one is feeling the need for that service, it’s time to make a paper cigar. But don’t rely on logic. Logic speaks to the mind of the customer. You’ve got to win the heart. And that takes wit and charm.Here is a hugely successful TV ad for the shoulder season that was produced by Casey Welch and Korey McDonald. 2SCENE ONETECH 1: Mr. Jenkins told me…TECH 2: When it starts getting warmer and you’re thinking about turning on that Air ConditionerTECH 3: [waving her palms in comic alarm] Don’t Do It! TECH 4: [wagging his finger sternly] Don’t Do It! SCENE TWOTECH 2:   A/C compressors get dried out during the winterTECH 1:  and they need to be brought into serviceTECH 2: [with palms held downward, he slowly lowers them to illustrate “gently”] gennnntly.SCENE THREECSR 1: For just 89 dollars, a Morris-Jenkins technician will wash the outside unit and bring it into service TECH 2: [palms downward, he slowly lowers them]  gennnntly.SCENE FOURTECH 1: And we promise NOT to disrupt your household.DEWEY:  We come and go [palms downward, he slowly lowers them] gennnntly.©Here’s an even-more-successful ad Casey and Korey produced the following year.SCENE ONE DEWEY: [takes a long step backward with one foot, and with a sweep of his arm reveals Techs standing behind him as he says] It’s that time again!TECHS: [Music begins playing. Technicians begin dancing.] It’s time for us to come-and-go gently, gently.It’s time for us to come-and-go gently, gently.Compressors-dry-out during wiiiiinter monthsAnd-need-to-be brought back [palms downward, they lower them] gennnntly.SCENE...

The generation of male Okies to which I belong has the inexplicable tradition of mercilessly teasing their friends. It’s a dumb tradition, I know, but these are the rules:We tease only our closest friends. To say to strangers the sorts of things that we say to our friends would be to invite a fistfight.The more outrageous and unfounded the accusation, the funnier it is.We never tease by saying things that could possibly be perceived as the truth. In other words, if you believe what you are saying might contain a grain of truth – even a tiny bit – you are no longer being funny; you’re being a bully and a jerk.My friend Ken owns a big plumbing company in another state. So when he sent me a cell phone video of his new $7,000 toilet, I began to pound on him relentlessly about what that toilet said about him as a man. That high-tech toilet became the fulcrum of a playground teeter-totter onto which I could jump when he least expected it and send him flying topsy-turvy into the air.There’s just nowhere to hide when your friends can ask you about your fancy toilet at the most unexpected moments and in the most unexpected ways.One day there was a knock at the door. “Are you Roy Williams?”“Yes,”“Sign here.”Uh-oh. Ken had sent me a fancy toilet of my own. Before I could hide it, Pennie saw it and liked it. “But it’s way too nice for this house,” she said.“Are you saying this house isn’t worthy of a toilet like that?”She looked at me and nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”Friends, you just can’t imagine the kinds of upgrades that are required when you have been gifted a fancy toilet.I was reminded of the story of an ancient King of Siam who would give white elephants as a passive-aggressive gift to anyone who displeased him. White elephants are rare and were considered sacred in Siam, so people were required to treat them with special care and feed them expensive food and never use them for work. The gift of a white elephant imposed a huge financial burden on the person who received one and of course you could never sell the elephant, lest you appear ungrateful.Yep, what I had me here was a white elephant.I’ve never ridden the elephant because, frankly, it frightens me.I always explain to guests who want to ride my white elephant that they must approach it with reverence when they journey to present themselves before it. The elephant will then kneel to allow them aboard as the music of angels wafts through the room and a strange light begins to glow.I promise I’m not making any of this up.My friend Manley Miller once stayed up all night playing with the remote so that he could learn all of the elephant’s tricks. When Manley told Pennie and I about his escapades with the elephant the next morning, I realized that my friend Ken had beat me at my own game.Evidently, Ken grew up in a state where young boys know how to jump on the teeter-totter, too.Roy H. Williams

When James Madison drafted the First Amendment, “the press” referred to the newspapers of our nation, such as the Pennsylvania Gazette owned by Benjamin Franklin, the most popular paper in the 13 colonies.Things rocked along swimmingly for about 200 years, then one day we walked outside to get the newspaper, sat down to read it, and realized it was yesterday’s news.Welcome to the 21st Century, where your telephone is also your newspaper, TV, encyclopedia, magazine, restaurant menu, instruction manual, shopping mall, worldwide map, and phone book.The computer chip gave us the internet, an unregulated realm where irresponsible people are free to spray false reports, fabricated data, and doctored photos across our society like a flamethrower washing over a field of dry grass.Presto, the world is on fire.I believe that people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.When I was a younger man, television and radio newscasts were trustworthy places to gather reliable facts, even when the presentation of those facts was slanted by the opinion of the reporter.News directors took their guardianship of journalistic integrity seriously, as did most of the rank-and-file reporters. But their collective consciences and good intentions were not what kept us safe.The people of the United States own the airwaves of our nation.Regulating the access to those airwaves began with the Radio Act of 1912, later to be replaced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934.For most of the 20th century, America had safeguards that made television and radio news reliable, but in the 9 years between 1987, the 7th year of the Reagan presidency, and 1996, the 4th year of the Clinton presidency, those safeguards were quietly dismantled.Let’s take a look at the most important ones:1. The Fairness Doctrine: Introduced in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced. If you failed to serve the public in this way, you could lose your license to broadcast.Broadcasters hated the Fairness Doctrine, of course, because it was a pain in the ass.In 1987, Edward O. Fritts, president of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, argued that “broadcasters believe in fairness” and that the Fairness Doctrine was “unconstitutional and an infringement on free speech. It is an intrusion into broadcasters’ journalistic judgment.” President Reagan agreed and issued an executive order.Poof… No more Fairness Doctrine.TV and radio stations were now free to slant the news as aggressively as they wanted.2. Ownership Limits: In 1927, we began to worry about what might happen if too few people controlled the news. Consequently, no one was allowed to own more than three TV stations nationwide. That number was increased to five stations in 1944, then the 7-7-7 rule of 1953 said no one could own more than 7 TV stations, 7 FM radio stations and 7 AM radio stations. In 1985, 7-7-7 became 12-12-12.Then in 1996, the FCC eliminated all limits on radio stations, and said you could own as many TV stations as you wanted as long as those TV stations were collectively reaching no more than 35% of the national audience. As a result, truckloads of investor dollars were gathered and broadcast “consolidation” began.Then in 2002, the 5-member FCC voted 3-2 along party lines (3 Republicans, 2 Democrats) to throw out the national audience limit.Bingo… If you could put together enough money,...

Two weeks ago, I appeared onscreen during a business symposium in Montreal to answer a series of questions about, “How to Advertise Effectively.”Toward the end of my hour with them, a person in the audience asked, “What do you consider to be the top 3 books about Advertising?” The moderator smiled and said, “I can answer that,” and held up copies of The Wizard of Ads, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, and Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads.The audience laughed.I smiled and shook my head, “no.”“Number one is Marketing Outrageously by Jon Spoelstra. Number two is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Number three is Ogilvy on Advertising.”The audience went silent as everyone wrote those titles down.Prior to the publication of Jon Spoelstra’s book in 2001, my recommended reading list contained only two books. But I discovered a kindred spirit in Jon Spoelstra. Even better than that, the thing Jon does best is the very thing I try to avoid.Let’s take a look at the similarities and differences between Jon and me.Similarities: Jon and I agree that it is your message, not the media, that determines your success or failure. Likewise, we agree on the vital importance of avoiding the predictable by employing the new, the surprising, and the different. Thirdly, we both appreciate the role of intuition and agree that, loosely speaking, rules are for fools.Difference: Jon enjoys making big things happen fast, I do not.* When your back is against the wall and time is of the essence, Jon is the man to call.On numerous occasions, Jon has generously agreed to teach at Wizard Academy and he’s always done it for free. But now he needs something from you and me.Don’t worry. Like all of Jon’s offers, this one is irresistible: Jon has a new book coming out next month and he’s giving each of us an immediate download of it in exchange for our promise to post a book review on Amazon. You can say whatever you like in the book review. The goal is for Jon to have at least 100 reviews posted on the day his book is officially launched.100 Amazon reviews sounds like it would be easy to accomplish, right? Trust me, it’s not.Are you in?Here’s where to begin.Roy H. Williams*Although I understand how to make big things happen fast, I find the anxiousness of it to be exhausting. Adrenaline is not my friend. It gives most people an energizing rush of excitement, (flight,) but in me it triggers only the rage of combat, (fight.) Consequently, I avoid clients who need an immediate miracle. This is undoubtedly selfish of me, but hey, I’m self-indulgent. You already knew that, right? – RHW

You’ve heard it all your life: “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well.”This seems to be a worthy admonition on the surface. But let’s not stop at the surface. Let’s look into the heart of it.Those seven words, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well,” assume that one has the ability to do the thing well. But what if you don’t have that ability? Is it okay to do it badly at first?I gathered some essays and photos in 1997, then paid a printer to print 7,500 copies of a little homemade book. The title was ill-conceived, the cover was ridiculous, and my layout failed to anticipate the binding, so the text was tucked too far into the spine. You had to pull the cheeks apart and look down into the crack to read it.Is it okay that I did a bad job on that first book?Is it okay that I continue to love that quirky little puppy even if it never sold a copy?My second book became the #1 business book in America according to the Wall Street Journal, and my third book was a New York Times bestseller, then my wife and I spent the next 20 years building a school for misfit and maverick entrepreneurs, those innovators and improvisers, renegades and rebels who are suspicious of traditional wisdom.I have never worn the handcuffs of Perfectionism or Conformity and I do not recommend them to you. Wearing them too tightly causes analysis paralysis: that paralyzing fear of failure.When a person who is facing a big challenge begins to share their performance anxieties with me, I always grab them by their shoulders, look deep into their eyes and say with all the love I can muster, “Just shut up and do it.”Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.If you are not willing to golf badly at first, you are never going to be a great golfer.If you are not willing to write badly at first, you are never going to be a great writer.If you are not willing to cook badly at first, you are never going to be a great chef.One of the things I do each day is get dressed. But no one has ever accused me of doing it well. Putting on clothes is definitely worth doing. I just don’t believe it’s worth doing well. Looking rumpled and unsuccessful is my natural condition because I’ve seen the time and effort it takes to look crisp and sharp, and frankly, I don’t feel it’s worth it. At least not for me.Julie DeMille was stressing out about finding two socks that matched when the absurdity of the moment slapped her in the face. So she decided to adopt a sock motto: “If you can’t find a mate, find a friend.”I think Julie DeMille might be my brand of crazy.Are you my brand of crazy? If so, let me, as your older brother, offer you some encouragement and advice:Good decisions come from experience.Experience comes from bad decisions.You will feel guilty from time to time and that can be good.Feelings of guilt will cause you to make changes you need to make.But I pray that you never become ashamed.Guilt is about what you have done.Shame is about who you are.Perfectionists will come into your life and say that you have “real potential” and that you could be just like they are – crisp and prompt, well-groomed and with good posture – if only you pushed yourself a little harder. They will tell you to repent from your heresy of being happy and contented and say, “No pain, no gain,” as though they are quoting holy scripture.I’ve looked: it’s not in the Bible.These same people will tell you that should never be satisfied. They will lift their chins and proudly say, “Good enough, never is.”That’s not in the Bible, either. But if you read the musical, magical parts of the Bible – I suggest the gospel of John – you will look at yourself in the mirror and smile and say, “Good enough! God likes me just as I am.”Can I, as your older brother, offer you...

The junkyard dogs of the business community are those misfits and mavericks, renegades and rebels, innovators and improvisors who know that traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.Lee Iacocca was a junkyard dog.The son of an immigrant hot-dog vendor, Iacocca was the visionary who gave us the Ford Mustang. He was later fired by Henry Ford II, a showdog, because Henry II said he didn’t want Iacocca to become CEO. Aware that the time for his own retirement was approaching, Henry II made it clear that he wanted to turn the company over to his son Edsel II, then just 28.After being fired, Iacocca cheerfully went to work at Chrysler where he rescued that company from extinction by inventing the minivan. Later, when he told Chrysler’s head of engineering that he needed a prototype LeBaron convertible to use in a TV ad, the showdog engineer told him how many months it would take to design one. A true dog of the junkyard, Iacocca smiled and said, “Just get a LeBaron and cut the top off. I need it tomorrow.”Focused on the outcome rather than the process, junkyard dogs are always messy.Junkyard dogs worry about accomplishment.Showdogs worry about appearances.When the weather is calm and the water is smooth, the showdog owns the horizon. But when the storm is upon you and people are about to die, you want a junkyard dog at the helm.In 1962, 16-year-old Miguel fled Cuba wearing a jacket his mother had hand-stitched from cleaning rags. He arrived alone in America. “Hamburger” was his only English word. Five years later Miguel married a teenage mother and adopted her 3-year-old son, little Jeffrey Jorgensen. Miguel gave Jeffrey the skill and confidence to survive and thrive. He also gave Jeffrey his proud Cuban name: Bezos. When Junkyard Jeffrey was 30, he borrowed money from friends and family to start a business in the garage of his rented home. He named that business after the largest river in South America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.As a boy, one of Jeffrey’s heroes was Walt Disney, the fourth of five children in a family so poor that two of his older brothers, sick of the constant work and poverty, ran away when Walt was just 4 years old. When Walt was 16, he tried to join the Navy so that he could serve in WWI but was turned down because of his age. He then tried unsuccessfully to join the Canadian Armed Forces. Finally, he was accepted as a Red Cross ambulance driver.Walt did not have an impressive résumé. Junkyard dogs rarely do.When the war was over, Disney’s first company, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in Kansas City, so he moved to Hollywood where his first animated series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was a big success. Disney lost the rights to that character when his distributor cheated him. So Walt, ever the junkyard dog, started working on another animated character, a mouse. Perhaps you’ve heard of him, too.Disney Studios went on to make Lady and the Tramp, a movie about a showdog princess who falls in love with a junkyard dog. And then they made The Aristocats, a movie about an alley cat named O’Malley who rescues a housecat named Duchess who then falls in love with him. And when we saw The Rescuers a few years later, we all fell in love with a little junkyard girl named Penny when she stood up to the alligators of Madame Medusa.Now that I think about it, has there ever been a successful Disney film that didn’t give us a misfit, junkyard dog to cheer for?For the record, (and I quite literally mean “the record,”) no individual has ever received as many Academy Awards as Walt Disney. In fact, no other person has ever been nominated for as many.I began contemplating today’s memo when I paused the movie, Public Enemies, to transcribe a bit of dialogue between J. Edgar Hoover, that...

The beagle who lives in the right hemisphere of your brain has an entirely different set of skills than the nerd who lives next door.The beagle in my brain is named Indy. What is the name of the beagle in yours?Your beagle gives you impulsive intuition and instinctive insight. Your beagle gives you romping recklessness, gut feelings and hunches.Your beagle has a bitterly sharp, piercingly beautiful sense of global pattern recognition which triggers the occasional premonition.Poindexter is the nerd who lives in the other half of my brain. He is forever having to push his glasses back onto his nose.What is the name of the nerd in yours?Poindexter uses Google.Indy uses Giggle.My Poindexter is a friend of Mr. Peabody, the smartest person in the world. Do you remember Mr. Peabody and his adopted son, Sherman, from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show? If not, Indy has a video on page 4 of the rabbit hole that will joggle your memory.The interesting thing about Sherman and Mr. Peabody is that Jay Ward reversed their roles. It is the human, Sherman, who is naïve about science, and Peabody, the beagle, that is the uptight nerd who leans on cold deductive reasoning.Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Cold deductive reasoning has its place, but the golden fire of inspiration and the money-green glow of innovation come from that piercingly beautiful sense of pattern recognition that sees the relationships between all the parts.Your intuitive beagle sees what is and isn’t there. And it sees what could be added or left out to make a thing more elegant and beautiful. This fabulous pattern-recognizing beagle lives in the wordless right hemisphere of your brain and it notices more than just visual patterns. It notices patterns of behavior, patterns of history, patterns of music and speech. And it recognizes the shapes of problems and the shapes of their solutions. Shapes are merely patterns. This is why jigsaw puzzles are calisthenics for your beagle. The shapes of the pieces and their patterns of color and the position of each piece on the table as you begin is pattern, times pattern, times pattern, times the number of pieces in the box. (Ray Bard, that was for you.)Your right-brain beagle is the heart and soul of inspiration and innovation, and its only food is play. Reckless, intuitive wandering, that artistic, purposeful wasting of time, that thing you do because you want to, not because you have to. Play is what recharges your batteries. What, for you, is the highest form of play?More importantly, how long has it been since you’ve done it?Go. There you will find your answer.Roy H. Williams

The Genius of What Isn’t ThereJune 1, 2020ListenAThree friends, who have never met each other, all sent me the same advice last week.What makes this convergence particularly interesting is that there was no common trigger. Each of the three messages I received was prompted by something different.The essence of those messages?You’ve got to leave things out.Genius is rarely about what is there.Genius is about what isn’t there.David Freeman is a world-famous coach of fictional character construction. His credentials and accomplishments are staggering. David read in my memo of May 18 that, “I am finally writing that screenplay I’ve been thinking and talking about for 15 years. It’s a buddy movie about a guy with 12 friends. I plan to shoot it in New Orleans next year.” So he sent me an email from Hollywood.“If you’re going to have 12 characters, the traditional wisdom is that 1, 2, 3, 4, and maybe 5 should be far more primary the others. The more characters we’re supposed to know and care about, the less emotion the audience feels because we can’t get deeply invested in any one character if our attention is split between too many. Characters require screen time for us to get emotionally involved with them. The more major characters, the less screen time for each.”According to David, a screenwriter has to choose which characters get fully realized. The others are effectively left out.Stephen Semple is a lifelong student of the sales process. He studies every aspect of persuasion, from advertising to lead generation to product demonstrations to sales presentations. Stephen wrote to me about how reading the transcripts of his Zoom conferences taught him how people speak differently than they write.“We repeat words, finish other people’s sentences, and forget about grammar.”According to Stephen, when highly engaged in an inspired conversation, we leave out much of what we would have written.Tom Grimes is a scholar, a thinker, a philosopher and a friend, and the President Plenipotentiary of the Worldwide Worthless Bastards. Tom owns a booming business, but he is always available to take your phone call or respond to your email. So I asked him what he does all day.Tom replied,“Famous ‘leaders’ are often very noisy people… or they were dealing with a crisis. We sometimes think leadership is about dealing with the aftermath when the sh#t hits the fan. We fail to appreciate that the real objective is to never let the sh#t hit the fan in the first place.One time I was at the water treatment facility of a large manufacturing plant. The place was eerily quiet. When I made the observation that it looked like the staff was doing next to nothing, the head operator explained that the secret to running a facility like his was a stringent Preventive Maintenance program. He said that if you see people running around it meant there was a problem. And the objective of the maintenance team was to prevent problems before they became problems. A quiet place was the sign of a well-run operation.”According to Tom, the secret of being a great leader is to leave out the emergencies.When asked the secret of writing bestselling novels, Elmore Leonard said, “I leave out the parts that people skip.”Impressionistic painters leave out the details, requiring us to supply them from our storehouses of imagination.Talented photographers leave out sections of what they photograph, requiring us to imagine the parts that extend beyond the framelines.When writing ads, if you try...

Jaguars and leopards are classified as “Big Cats” (Pantherinae) because they have a U-shaped hyoid apparatus in their throats which gives them the ability to roar. Cheetahs and pumas are just as big as jaguars and leopards, but they are classified as “Small Cats” (Felinae) because their ossified hyoid bones prohibit them from roaring.Among cats, it is your voice that determines your size.But dogs are not like cats. According to Indy Beagle, the size of a dog determines the depth of its voice. You never see a “Little Yapper Dog” (Yapperdus Petitae) with a deep voice, and you never see a “Working Dog” (Woofus Grande) with a squeaky voice.Among dogs, it is your size that determines your voice.But when it comes to people, all of that goes out the window. Big people can have little voices and little people can have big voices.Among people, it is your voice that determines your voice.In review:Among cats, it is your voice that determines your size.Among dogs, it is your size that determines your voice.Among people, it is your voice that determines your voice.But what about books? What determines the voice of a book?In non-fiction writing, “the voice of the book” is essentially the style of the narrator. It is the way the author likes to phrase things. It is syntax, diction, punctuation and vocabulary, as well as the manner in which knowledge is revealed to the reader. The author’s own voice will inform the voice of the book, indicating angle of view, philosophical bent, pride of education, religiosity, rurality, intimacy, mastery, academia, bureaucracy, condescension, insecurity, simple-mindedness, bitterness, mental illness, and wit, or lack thereof.Similes, metaphors, and examples are the literary devices that give us the greatest insight into an author, showing us how he or she sees the world.The voice of a fiction book is a composite of the voices of all its characters, evidenced through their words, actions, and thought patterns.Unlike non-fiction, the narrator’s voice in fiction is often just another created character, giving us little, if any, insight into the mind of the author.Let’s circle back to the voices of people for a moment.Psychiatrists tell us there are four kinds of people who live in fictional, inner worlds.Narcissists tell themselves and others that everyone loves them even though they do not. They want to believe it and so they say it.Pathological liars believe their own lies and will recreate their internal realities to accommodate those lies.Sociopaths and psychopaths never exhibit remorse after lying or hurting others because they are extremely egocentric and lack empathy. The difference between the two is that sociopaths are made but psychopaths are born.Last week I wrote to you about the intense disagreements that can occur when two opposing truths come into conflict.But not all conflict is about truth.“It used to be that your character and your beliefs were what made people look up to you. But now it’s about whether you have a Rolex, a big house, and a Jag in the driveway.”A smiling executive from a prominent advertising agency made that statement to eight of us sitting in a conference room in west Tulsa in 1982. I’ve never forgotten that moment, that statement, or his face, because I was jarred by the fact that he said it in celebration, rather than remorse.The “Me” generation would reach its zenith the following year.I rarely write to you while I am still in the process of distilling my thoughts, but for some reason I decided this week that I would share all the little things that are tumbling around in my mind like socks in the dryer and let you sort those socks into...

Q: What do Jesus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus have in common?A: Grown-ups told us stories about them when we were children.And then one day we realized the grown-ups had been lying. Yes, they did it because they loved us and they wanted us to be happy, but that didn’t change the fact that they were lying.Some of us were able to separate the stories about Jesus from the stories about the other three, but not all of us. I, myself, continue to believe in Jesus. I choose to believe, “…we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.” (1st John 4:14)But many of my closest friends choose not to believe and I understand that choice. Belief is not rational.But I’m not writing to you today to tell you about my belief in Jesus. I’m writing to talk to you about the difference between your heart and your mind.Your belief in your team is not supported by science. It supported by facts you have chosen to believe, but there are just as many facts that would indicate your team doesn’t have a chance. It doesn’t matter whether your team is the Red State team, the Blue State team, the Chicago White Sox or the Green Bay Packers, each of us chooses the facts to which we cling.But mostly we choose a perspective, a way of looking at things, an angle of view.Belief is not rational, it is heart-felt. Belief is not logical, it is intuitive. But that doesn’t mean it is wrong.Albert’s intuition told him that the energy contained in an object was equal to its mass times the speed of light, times the speed of light. Son-of-a-bitch! He was right! E=MC2 has been demonstrated to be an incontrovertible truth.But not all truth is incontrovertible.Do you believe in love and democracy and patriotism and the American Dream? So do I, but these beliefs are not supported by science. They are supported by selected facts and a ferociously guarded perspective that has been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years.Love and Democracy and Patriotism and the American Dream are not science, they are a cultural perspective, a way of looking at things, an angle of view that you and I have chosen.Justice and Mercy are not science, they are two different perspectives. And they often come into conflict.Honesty and Loyalty are not science, they are two different perspectives. And they often come into conflict.Freedom and Responsibility are not science, they are two different perspectives. And they often come into conflict.The voice of Freedom shouts to my mind, “It’s my life, and I can do with it what I choose.”But the voice of Responsibility whispers to my heart, “I should be careful, not for myself, but for all the people I care about, and who care about me.”Explosive issues can always be found at the intersection of two perspectives.I suppose the reason I have these things on my mind right now is because I am finally writing that screenplay that I’ve been thinking and talking about for 15 years.It’s a buddy movie about a guy with 12 friends. I plan to shoot it in New Orleans next year.Roy H. Williams

Admiral Boulevard is the margin of the page in Tulsa.It is that place where a person can do well while doing no good. It is where discipline encounters temptation and good fortune meets bad luck. Admiral Boulevard is the margin Johnny Cash sings about in “I Walk the Line.”The Outsiders – both the book and the movie – take place along Admiral Boulevard. The book has sold more than 14 million copies making it the bestselling young adult novel of all time. Susie Hinton was a junior at Will Rogers High School just 5 blocks south of Admiral Boulevard when she wrote it. She was given a D in creative writing that year.Admiral Boulevard is bordered on the east by the Mingo traffic circle and on the west by the tragic Greenwood District. The six miles between those bookends is what I once described as “the neighborhood of Ponyboy Curtis, an unfiltered assortment of bent automobiles, broken houses and discarded people.”Susie encountered hostility when her book was released in 1967. She says, “I think the first hostile reaction was to the idea that not all teens were living in a ’50s sitcom. People know better nowadays.”Susie is just 9 years older than me, so we know some of the same people. We all grew up with one thing in common; those little teeth nipping at our heels wasn’t a puppy, it was poverty.The once-rich and influential Greenwood District of Tulsa was known as “Black Wall Street” in the years following the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, but on May 31, 1921, a white mob set fire to hundreds of black-owned businesses and homes, killing 300 Americans and leaving more than 10,000 homeless.Forty square blocks were smoldering when the sun came up the next morning.No one was prosecuted.Susie’s book is about life on the margin of that page in history forty-five years later. The Outsiders is about the tensions between country-club whites and those paycheck-to-paycheck whites like Susie and me.Francis Ford Coppola won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1970 for Patton, and two years later he won three more Oscars for The Godfather. Then he discovered Susie’s book, turned it into a screenplay, gathered up some no-name kids and gave them a chance to become superstars.Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez, and C. Thomas Howell were barely more than children when they made The Outsiders in 1983.Two years later we saw The Breakfast Club, and the following year, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.The Outsiders served as a launchpad for a number of careers and a whole new genre of movies. The ripple effect of a well-told story is staggering.You have a story.Your business has a story.And your future is a story yet to be written.Very soon Daniel Whittington will announce The Ad Writers Masters Class on behalf of the American Small Business Institute. This will be be your chance to write an altogether different future for yourself and the people you love.My thoughts about Susie Hinton and The Outsiders were triggered by something written by Mike Dooley:“The one thing all famous authors, world class athletes, business tycoons, singers, actors, and celebrated achievers in any field have in common is that they all began their journeys when they were none of these things.”Have a golden week.Roy H. Williams

Bart Giamatti was a professor of English Renaissance literature, the president of Yale University, and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. In less than 3 minutes, Giamatti caused me to understand “home” in a new way. I believe his thoughts on the subject are profoundly insightful.“There is no great, long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself its own great, long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn’t called fourth base. And then this came to me, ‘Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.’’“Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word ‘home’ and are absent from ‘house’ or even ‘my house.’ Home is a concept, not a place; it’s a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins, a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original; perhaps like others, especially those one loves; but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate, and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen.”“All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from The Odyssey and it is about going home. It’s about rejoining; rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And ‘going home’ is where that restoration occurs, because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. And to that extent – and because it’s the only game you ever heard of – where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial; you want to get his or her territory. But not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here… back around to here.”Bart Giamatti was 20 years older than me.For most of my life, I thought of wisdom as always coming from people older than me. But these days, there aren’t that many people older than me. AIn recent years, I’ve been learning from younger men.I believe my young friend, Shawn Craig Smith, may understand romance epic as well as did Bart Giamatti. In class at Wizard Academy, Shawn wrote, “Prometheus gave man fire, but the power every one of us carries each day, heartbeat by heartbeat, is his story. Come to the circle, bring your spark. We can live as men without fire, but without story, without art, we freeze alone in the cold white waste.”Jonathan Berman travels a lot. He taught me, “Home is not a place, but a feeling of wholeness and contentment you can take with you wherever you go.”Jeff Sexton taught me that not every ad writer gathers all the information and then figures out what parts of it to use and how to organize those parts. Jeff made me understand that lots of great ad writers have a template in mind, and then they search for the information that will satisfy that template.My son Rex taught me that “discovery content” brings new people into contact with your YouTube channel, your blog or other online body of work, and “community content” keeps them coming back again and again after they have discovered you.My son Jacob showed me that people will like and respect you when it becomes obvious that your hard work and attention-to-detail is for their benefit, not yours.Tucker Max taught me that a person can benefit from your experience when you...

A few years ago, Yvon Chouinard was asked, “How do you know if you’re making the right move?He said, “It’s a lot of gut instinct. If you study something to death, if you wait for the customer to tell you what he wants, you’re going to be too late, especially for an entrepreneurial company. That comes from Henry Ford: Customers didn’t want a Model T, they wanted a faster horse.”The last time I checked, Yvon Chouinard’s Patagonia was debt-free and selling $575m per year. I like his track record.I bring up this question of “making the right move” because it’s exactly what every business owner wants to do right now. But how can we know what “the right move” is if we don’t have enough information?In the absence of a crystal ball, let’s begin with the assumption that this virus and the social upheaval that came with it aren’t going to go away all at once.Now let’s speculate about what things might look like in 7 months.It is Thanksgiving Day, 2020. People are still worried about a “second wave” of infections and the unemployment problem hasn’t entirely disappeared, either.Seven months from now when you look back at this moment, what will you be thankful you decided to do TODAY?I’m trying to say… No, what I’m shouting is, “Now is the time for you to tweak your business model.”You and I and everyone else (except maybe Chick-fil-A) is effectively out-of-business because the underlying assumptions that sustained our business models are no longer true. This isn’t just “a moment” that will soon pass, it is a season that will be with us for a number of months, at least.You didn’t want to hear that, and I didn’t want to say it. But it is precisely what you need to hear right now if you’re going to look back in 7 months and be glad of the decisions you made.We are in the early stages of a once-in-a-lifetime change of fortune, and fortunes. This is when the big fish quit eating the small fish. This is when the fast fish eat the slow.If your plan is to “wait it out until everything gets back to normal,” you are in danger of being the slow fish.You’ve got to make it easier for your customer to do business with you. Think big but start small. Start with something you can do TODAY.I have a friend who owns a jewelry store in a town of about 115,000 people. When his state went into lockdown mode, the other 8 jewelry stores sent their people home to “wait it out.” But my friend decided to answer the phone each day, just in case a customer had a need that couldn’t wait until things were “back to normal.” He was laughing when he called me a couple of days ago. “Roy, I’ve sold 4 engagement rings in the past 5 days because of this new, high-tech thing I’m doing called ‘answering the phone.’”WOW 1 DAY PAINTING is one of the new international franchises of Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, the largest privately-owned junk removal service on earth. Prior to the public becoming concerned about Covid-19, WOW 1-DAY PAINTING was doing more interior painting than exterior. It took Brian less than 48 hours to create and distribute a new radio ad for all his franchise partners.James:  WOW 1 DAY PAINTINGBrian: can paint the exterior of your houseJames:  in just [pause] 1 [pause] DAY.  [SFX Magic Sparkle]Brian:  Your next-door-neighbor will drive to the grocery store,James:  and when they get back, [SFX Magic Sparkle]Brian:  your house will be a...

Meats and vegetables are ordinary, but put them on a stick and it’s Shish Kabob.Frozen Kool-Aid is frozen Kool-Aid; put it on a stick and it’s a popsicle.A marshmallow is one thing, but a marshmallow on a stick means a campfire.A frankfurter is a weenie, but a frankfurter on a stick is a weenie roast.And what are hors d’oeuvres but little pieces of something-on-a-stick?And what is fondue?Put food on a stick and it becomes special. But that only works for food.How does a person become special?You become special by that which holds you captive.You become special when you fall into a gravitational pull.You become special when you orbit something important.A meteor is a rock on fire as it falls to the earth.We call it a shooting star.I have met a number of these.A comet is a slightly larger rock that comes within sight of our planet.Think of it as a meteor on tour.Comets are the definition of fly-by-night.A moon is a planet that orbits a larger one.Moons are important and have names of their own.We write stories about moons and give them great respect.A planet orbits a star.A star is a celestial fire with powerful gravity.Planets and moons and comets orbit celestial fires.God is a fire.Science is a fire.Entertainment is a fire,including all the arts and every form of sport.On a much smaller scale, we see people as comets, moons, planets, and stars.In Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel’s extraordinary book about the Renaissance, we witness the Tudor saga through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, an ordinary man who chooses to orbit Cardinal Wolsey and soon becomes an important moon to that planet.Throughout the book, Cromwell’s advice to those he loves is “Arrange your face,” and “Choose your prince.”Cromwell’s advice could be phrased as two questions;“Who will you be?” and “Who will you follow?”An asteroid is a rock that has failed to choose a passion,so it wanders aimlessly in a cold, airless vacuum.A meteor is a rock on fire as it falls to the earth.We call it a shooting star.I have met a number of theseand seen them fall.Every meteor I have ever metthought it was a star.Roy H. Williams

Before we examine the blind spot, let’s stare into the face of the truth for a moment:People don’t bond with a company. People bond with a personality.Apple didn’t wait until they were category-dominant to develop a personality. They had personality in 1984 when they aired their famous SuperBowl ad. They had personality in 1997 when cultural icons in black-and-white photos encouraged us to “Think Different.” They had personality in 2003 when they sold iPods using only dancing silhouettes. And they had personality in 2006 when Justin Long and John Hodgman said, “I’m a Mac,” “And I’m a PC.”Steve Jobs died in 2011.The blind spot in most B2B companies is that they think it isn’t “corporate-ish” to have a personality. This is why B2B marketing is tedious, predictable, and boring.When amateur presenters are onstage, they look polished, professional, poised and plastic, don’t they?Experienced presenters feel spontaneous, extemporaneous, unfiltered and unguarded.Anyone who says, “But B2B is different,” is an amateur presenter.B2B marketers know that people are required to use different criteria when making choices at work than the criteria they use when making choices at home. At work, they’re not free to follow their instincts and “go with their gut.”I do not dispute this.B2B marketers know that when a business sells to a business, the buyer must gather information and make comparisons to defend their decision.I do not dispute this. But that doesn’t mean your advertising has to be plastic, pretentious, and predictable.The purpose of a photograph, illustration, or video thumbnail is to get the customer to read the subject line, headline, or listen to the opening line.The purpose of the opening line is to entice the customer to read the first line of body copy.The job of the first line of body copy is to cause the reader to keep reading, the listener to keep listening, and the viewer to keep viewing.The details the buyer will need to defend their purchase are contained in the body copy.Please don’t tell me you are required to use boring and predictable photographs, illustrations, and video thumbnails simply because your category is B2B.Please don’t tell me you are required to write plastic and pretentious headlines, subject lines and opening lines simply because your category is B2B.The details the buyer will need to defend their purchase are contained in the body copy.Job One is to gain attention and win the heart. This requires personality.Job Two is to deliver the details so that your customer can defend their decision to purchase from you.Job Three is to deposit your profits before they pile so high that you need a tractor to shift them.Now please, for the sake of your future, go write some B2B headlines, subject lines, and opening lines that have some personality.And once you have selected a personality, stick with it. Because this will become the defining characteristic that distinguishes you from your competitors.I’ve been needing to get that off my chest for 25 years.Thanks for listening.Roy H. Williams

The content of your heart is what your heart contains.Are you content? Same spelling, different meaning.We distinguish these words only by the syllable we stress.Words are amazing, don’t you think?If you are content, (satisfied, happy, at peace,) it is because of the content of your heart. If the content of your heart is anxiety, fear, envy and anger, it is difficult to be content.Who determines the content of your heart? Is it you?We can assume, I think, that the content of your heart will be whatever you have chosen to put in it.What have you put in it? Is there anything in there you might want to take out?Sadly, our success-driven culture considers a person who is content to be somehow deficient. We are supposed to be driven, never satisfied, always fighting for more, for better, for higher, am I right?But the golden carrot that is dangled before our donkey eyes is that we might someday be content.Oh, what a cruel master is that bastard with his carrot and his stick!Wait, the bastard is me.Roy H. Williams

We shall pass through this time of uncertainty and emerge as happier people.We will enjoy a renewed sense of the importance of relationships.Our priorities will be altered.Optimism is about staying focused on positive outcomes.I don’t know Andy Bounds but he’s a good friend of Doug Burdon and Doug is a friend of mine.According to Andy Bounds, Walt Disney stayed focused on positive outcomes. When asked if Disneyland could be built, everyone else said, “No, because…” but Walt would always answer, “Yes, if…”Yes, if we get someone else to pay for it.Yes, if we hire the world’s best experts to build it.Yes, if we locate it somewhere that’s hot all year.Yes, if we get transport links.Yes, if…How many questions could we be answering with “Yes, if…”?As I said, optimism is about staying focused on positive outcomes.But optimism isn’t the secret of happiness.The secret of happiness is learning to celebrate the ordinary.No one knew this better than Tom T. Hall.I love little baby ducks, old pick-up trucks, slow movin’ trains…And rain.I love little country streams, sleep without dreams, Sunday school in May…And hay.And I love you, too.I love leaves in the wind, pictures of my friends, birds of the world…And squirrels.I love coffee in a cup, little fuzzy pups, Bourbon in a glass…And grass.And I love you, too.I love honest open smiles, kisses from a child, tomatoes on the vine…And onions.I love winners when they cry, losers when they try, music when it’s good…And life.And I love you, too.How many ordinary things do you love?Wouldn’t this be a great time to celebrate them?Send your list to [email protected] along with a fun photo of yourself. The rabbit hole is a wonderful place to make your writing debut.I love lunch with my friends, wine without end, old travelogues…And dogs.I love castles in the sky, imagination when it flies, Pennie at the Prom…And Mom.And I love you, too.Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY BEAGLE – After the wizard recorded today’s MMMemo, he recorded a video called Advertising in a Time of Crisis. You should watch it. Now here is today’s memo…One of my heroes, John Steinbeck, twice followed in the footsteps of another of my heroes, Robert Louis Stevenson.Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is a travelogue written by RLS in 1878.The Sea of Cortez is the travelogue of Steinbeck about an ocean journey embarked upon with his friend Ed Ricketts, on whose life he based the character of “Doc” in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s other travelogue is Travels with Charley, the diary of his final journey across America in 1962, when he knew he was dying.Travelogues are books without a plot, books whose only purpose is to celebrate the art of great writing.Here are a few of my favorite passages from each of those 3 books.“A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long… I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle and habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.”– Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, p. 90 – 91“Ten minutes after, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside, scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely. I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay before me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; but a fancy will sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received and punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in someone’s debt for all this liberal entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had left enough for my night’s lodging. I trust they did not fall to some rich and churlish drover.”– Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, p. 94“A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the hillside were outlined sharply against the sky… and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with gold. In these high regions of the air, the sun was already shining as at noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space… A few steps farther, and I saw a whole hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two peaks, a center of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel of our system.”– Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, p. 132Inspired by Stevenson, Steinbeck picked up the pen 62 years later.“One thing impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance we had left were not important.”– Sea of Cortez, p. 210“Out in the bay the pelicans were fishing, flying along and then folding their wings and falling in their clumsy-appearing dives, which nevertheless must be effective, else there would be no more pelicans.”– Sea of Cortez, p....

Perhaps you’ve noticed that fewer couples are choosing to get married. This decline in the marriage rate has been slow, but it is a cultural shift that makes me uneasy.The first reason for my uneasiness is that I believe marriage is more than a piece of paper. Something wonderful happens when a couple embraces a legal alteration of their separate identities to become partners for life. Marriage is a serious commitment, not easily undone.Princess Pennie and I have been married for 43 years. “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” I believe everyone should marry their best friend and face life together as partners.Our belief in marriage is such that 15 years ago we gave the world a free wedding chapel that hangs off the edge of a cliff on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. As couples approach the chapel, they literally turn from the path they were walking to step off the edge together. Standing in the air, they become legally united.Chapel Dulcinea hosts more than 1,000 free weddings a year.The second reason for my uneasiness is that I have been writing ads to help jewelers sell engagement rings for 33 years. Any jeweler who does what I’m about to describe is going to make a blistering fortune. Believe me, I know the diamond business as well as anyone in the world. I have Martin Rapaport’s private cell phone number on speed dial.Jewelers no longer form a major part of my ad-writing business, but I love the work and feel a deep connection to it.2019 seems to have been an inflection point.I have spoken to more than 100 jewelers in the past 90 days and each has reported that their opportunities to sell engagement rings declined by about 9 percent in 2019. But they happily report that the size of the average purchase increased by enough to offset the declining sales opportunities, so their topline didn’t suffer. Fewer than 10 of these 100 engagement ring stores were my clients, but my clients are notable because they are among the largest and strongest in America.Reservations to book Chapel Dulcinea declined by 9 percent as well. And it’s free.A few weeks ago, I woke up with an astoundingly simple, big idea. My goal for 2020 is to see every jeweler in the world embrace this idea in a worldwide celebration of marriage. The best way to explain the idea is to let you read this short ad-segment I am giving to jewelers everywhere. This information can be inserted into an infinite number of ads. Just give this segment an opening and a closing and watch what will begin to happen in just a few short months.YOUNG:  You’ll find the diamond of your life at­­­­­­­­ [name of store.]OLDER: We have tremendous values on BIG Anniversary Diamonds.YOUNG: What’s an “Anniversary Diamond?”OLDER: An Anniversary Diamond is at least twice as big as the one in her engagement ring.YOUNG: Why twice as big?OLDER: [Calls the younger person by his/her first name,] every diamond makes a statement.YOUNG: Okay, what does an Anniversary Diamond say?OLDER: It says, “I love you twice as much today as the day you married me.”YOUNG: I like this!OLDER: [Location details]The limiting factor in the engagement ring diamond is that it is “one-and-done.” But a woman can have a whole collection of Anniversary Diamonds. Moreover, less than 2% of our population gets engaged each year. Now compare that to the percentage of America that is already married.The potential for anniversary diamonds is at least as big as the potential for engagement...

A contrast of opposites is the foundation of effective communication.A thing cannot exist without its opposite.But opposites aren’t always easy to detect.As an example, the opposite of “freedom” isn’t really “slavery,” because slavery no longer exists in our society like it did 160 years ago. We need to contrast freedom with something experiential, something we have all felt.Responsibility is the opposite of freedom for most of us. As responsibility is increased, freedom is decreased. We’ve known this since the late Renaissance.“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” (1659)Today’s tug-of-war is not between freedom and slavery, but between freedom and responsibility. But what are the attractions at the ends of the rope? We could argue that freedom is its own reward, but what is the reward for responsibility?Purpose is the reward for responsibility.Life is a search for identity, purpose, and adventure.Identity: Who am I?Purpose: Why am I here?Adventure: What must I overcome?Are you familiar with the boredom of the idle rich? They spend extravagant amounts of money to create the illusion of adventure, but it never really pays off. They can sense the truth of the second half of that saying from 1659, even if they have never read it:“All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.”A lifetime of hollow, false adventures is the price paid by the idle rich for having accepted no responsibilities and having found no purpose.A loss of freedom is the price of responsibility, but purpose is its reward, whether that responsibility is entrusted to us by someone in authority, or we choose it for ourselves.When you embrace responsibility, you find purpose.And when you determine what you must overcome, you find adventure.Roy H. Williams

Twenty-one years ago I got a phone call from my publisher, Ray Bard. “Roy, a man in Denver just bought 350 copies of your book from a bookstore in Denver and then faxed the receipt to my office with a question scribbled on it.”“What was the question?” I asked.“He wrote, ‘Is this enough for you to arrange a meeting with the author?’”A couple of weeks later, the man arrived in Austin and we spent a day talking about every subject on earth. I was glad I met him.That night, Pennie asked, “What does he do for a living?”That’s when it occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about the man’s personal life because every time I asked him a question about himself, he would take our conversation in a new direction.A few days later I received an email from my mysterious friend. “Cancel whatever plans you have for March 10 and be in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York at 7:00 PM. Trust me.”We had no idea what we were walking into, but Pennie and I decided it would be a fun adventure, so we flew to New York.A small army of security men stood guard at the doors of the Grand Ballroom as hundreds of tuxedos and long-gloved evening gowns flowed like water across the lobby.We were given a small book with twelve hundred names listed in alphabetical order. It was a seating chart.Barlett, Donald L. – TIMEBehar, Richard – FORTUNEBloomberg, Michael – Bloomberg NewsBrady, Ray – CBSThrough the open doorway I saw an arctic plateau of crystal stemware and white china on snow-white tablecloths.Pennie placed her finger in a precise spot on page nine. “This is the place where our names should have been.”We stared at that spot for a long time and waited for our names to magically appear alongside a table number. An insert fell from the booklet onto the floor. I picked it up. It was a note from Bill Clinton, President of the United States.“Pennie,” I whispered, “I just realized something.”She looked at me. I continued.“There was no salutation on that email. It didn’t say, ‘Dear Roy and Pennie.’ It just started with the words, ‘Meet me.’”Pennie had a question mark in her eyes.“I think he clicked my email address by mistake.”Everyone else was in the ballroom now and we, conspicuously, were not.Pennie smiled and said, “No problem, we’ll go have a nice dinner and then have a few days of fun in New York.” Not wanting to attract attention to ourselves, we began moving quietly toward the door that led onto the street. That’s when we heard a shout.“Pennie? Roy?”We froze like we’d been hit with a spotlight while trying to sneak over a prison wall. With all my heart I expected him to say, “What are you doing here?” But what he said was, “Did you have a good flight?”Before we could reply, the air sang the song of a wine glass being struck repeatedly by a butter knife. That’s when our friend grabbed Pennie’s hand and said, “Follow me.”He led us to a table on the stage where the trophies were to be presented. It was like sitting onstage during the Academy Awards. Pennie and I were the guests of honor at a dinner party Roving Reporter Rotbart was throwing for all his journalist friends. The next year he threw his party on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the year after that it was at NASDAQ.Twenty-one years later, when his daughter Avital needed to design a book for her senior thesis in college, I happily volunteered to let her prepare our long-overdue guidebook, Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus.We will be distributing copies during our extravaganza on May 2nd. The roving reporter says he’s planning to be...

Richard Kessler built one of the most famous stores in America.You might remember his name from the Monday Morning Memo about origin stories published on March 20, 2017. Here is Kessler’s origin story in a 60-second radio ad:My Dad was a house painter. He taught me to sand and scrape paint until my fingers were aching and raw. But I wanted to make him proud, so I always worked hard. I’ll never forget the day we opened our brown bags at lunch time and he said, “Son. I’m proud of how hard you work, but I hope that someday you’ll get a job where you can wear a tie.” And because I wanted to make him proud, I decided to open a jewelry store. I watched as my Dad took his last seven hundred dollars out of his sock drawer to help me get started. But he never got to see that store.  He died just before it was open. I lived on wieners and beans for the next 11 years until I finally figured it out:  Lose the tie… And be a regular guy just like your Dad.  That’s when things turned around for me. I’ve been sharing the story of that 700 dollars with young entrepreneurs in High Schools and Colleges for years. America’s newest and best Kesslers Diamond Center is about to open in front of Cabela’s next to the Rivertown Mall in Grandville. I’m Richard Kessler, and I’m hoping to become your jeweler.Richard Kessler is a celebrity in his hometown of Milwaukee, with 50% of the population of that city having heard at least 3 of his radio ads every week, fifty-two-weeks in a row, for the past 30 years. Richard’s daughter, Monica, was his sidekick on the radio for 5 years, then became the principal voice of the Kesslers ad campaign when Richard retired.But Richard Kessler also has a son.Hi, I’m Rob Kessler, yeah that Kessler, son of Richard and brother to Monica. I invented a new kind of shirt that makes guys look fantastic.  You’ll see what I mean the moment you look in the mirror after trying one on. “Wow! Is that me?” And you can try one on right now at Harleys Menswear. My company is called goTieless and your new shirt has my patented, Million Dollar Collar. Shirt-makers all over the world are trying to license the Million Dollar Collar, but I’m not sure I want to do that. But I AM sure I want you to see yourself in the mirror wearing one. Average dress shirts were designed to be worn with a tie.  goTIELESS shirts are designed to make you look like you’ve been spending time in the gym. Seriously, go to Harleys Menswear and try one on and look in the mirror.  WOW!! My website is goTIELESS dot com. You’re going to look AMAZING in the casual dress shirts I designed for you.  goTIELESS dot com. Dad says “Hi” by the way.  For real.  goTIELESS dot com.Line 1: Introduce the unknown and unfamiliar by relating it to the known and familiar. “Hi, I’m Rob Kessler, yeah that Kessler, son of Richard and brother to Monica.”Line 2: Replace predictable words with unexpected words that mean the same thing.Not “I designed a shirt…” but, “I invented a shirt…” Also, bring the customer into the picture by saying “…that makes guys look FANTASTIC.”Line 3: Amplify the customer’s curiosity by putting them squarely in the center of the picture you’re painting. “You’ll see what I mean the moment you look in the mirror after trying one on. ‘Wow! Is...

My friend has been important to me for 6 or 7 years.I had no idea that he had any money until about 3 years ago.My friend is a professional gambler.No, he doesn’t gamble on green felt tables with cards or dice. He gambles on NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.“Oh, he’s an investor,” you say.“No, I’m a highly informed gambler,” he responds.My friend wins 7 out of every 8 bets and makes about $100,000 a week.No, I won’t give you his name and it wouldn’t do you any good if I did. He won’t share any tips with you or me or anyone else and he certainly doesn’t need our money. He is a lone wolf hunting a lone wolf’s prey.My gambling friend doesn’t embrace traditional stock market wisdom but calculates the size of his bets according to his degree of confidence using the Kelly Criterion, an obscure formula used by professional gamblers since 1956.I, too, am a professional gambler who determines the size of his bets according to the degree of his confidence. But I don’t gamble my money on the stock market. I gamble my client’s money on ad campaigns.My ads make millions of dollars a week, but I don’t get to keep the money. It goes to the people who believed in my methods.Investors don’t like to think of themselves as gamblers. That’s why so many of them lose. The same is true of advertisers. Investors and advertisers like to believe they are scientists.Investors fall in love with stocks.Advertisers fall in love with media.Gamblers love only the dance.My friend taught me that.He and I agree that traditional wisdom is usually more tradition than wisdom. Do you agree with us?If you do, here are a few of those non-traditional thoughts about advertising that have been responsible for those millions of dollars a week.Your choice of media doesn’t make your ad perform. Your ad makes your choice of media perform. So be careful not to count on “reaching the right people.” Instead, be careful to say the right things.If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Don’t try to “educate the customer,” believing they would choose you, “if only they understood.” Talk about something they already care about. Speak to a felt need.If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.If you try to reach the right person at the right time with the right message, you will forever be frustrated with feast-and-famine results. But if you reach the masses with a memorable message long before they need you, and continue to reach them until they do, you will be the person they think of immediately and feel the best about.If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.If you have a product with a short purchase cycle (like food and entertainment,) you can expect quick results to your advertising. But if you have a product with a long purchase cycle, you need to prepare yourself for dismal results at first, but those results will get better and better when your ad campaign finally gets traction.If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Entertainment is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.Without an element of surprise, there can be no delight.Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellect will always create logic to justify what the heart has already...

The first obelisk was a stone pillar with a tapered top created by the ancient Egyptians to honor the sun god.It is a finger, pointing to the sky.The Roman army carried Egyptian obelisks back to Rome as a sign of their power over that nation.The Vatican uncovered a buried Egyptian obelisk five hundred years ago and placed it in St. Peter’s Square as a sign of Catholicism’s victory over paganism. “Our God is better than your gods.”Modern obelisks are erected as memorials of people, events, and accomplishments.But the obelisk that interests me most is a jagged dagger of rock that rises eighteen hundred and forty-four feet above the surface of the ocean. This arrow to the sky has been known as Ball’s Pyramid since 1788, even though it was countless centuries old when Henry Ball’s mother gave birth to him.It never really belonged to Ball; he just discovered it.I think we put our names on things because we want to be remembered, but that doesn’t really work. Ben White and William Cannon are two famous boulevards in the city where I live, but I’ve never met anyone who could tell me who those men were or what they did.My friend Tom Grimes once wrote me an email that said,“Nobody other than a handful will think about us 15 minutes after we check out permanently. And when you realize how insignificant you really are, you are free to experience the world the way it is supposed to be experienced. One moment at a time. And that ‘This Day’ is ‘The Day.’”I think Tom is right. Our lives aren’t measured by one big accomplishment, but by all the little things we do and say. Every person is given, at birth, a colorful imagination and a tongue for a brush.Splashes of color are left on our lives by every person we encounter.And how we do love those people who paint in our hearts a bright finger of encouragement, pointing toward the sky!What will you paint today?Roy H. Williams

It takes four people to make a world.One person wants acceptance.They hope to save the relationship.Under pressure, they acquiesce.One person wants accuracy.They hope to save face.Under pressure, they avoid.One person wants applause.They hope to save effort.Under pressure, they attack.One person wants accomplishment.They hope to save time.Under pressure, they become autocratic.When I was taught these things 40 years ago, I didn’t know what ‘autocratic’ meant, but I knew I was the fourth person, the ‘autocratic’ one focused on accomplishment.Impediments and incompetence annoy me, and I see no value in committees.In case you didn’t know, that last statement was autocratic. AAutocrats are socially awkward, but we are good at making things happen. If you want to get something done, put an autocrat in charge. If they need a friend, they’ll buy a dog.If you want acceptance, you will try to win those people who do not believe in your dream.If you want accuracy, you will study and plan and update your plan again and again.If you want applause, you will talk to the people who admire you.If you want accomplishment, you will leap to the challenge and deal quickly and directly with impediments and incompetence. This is what it means to be a weasel slapper.Monkey farmers see a problem and embrace it, form a bond with it, try to understand it, then carry that monkey on their back. This monkey attracts other monkeys. Are you beginning to see the problem?I said, “Autocrats are socially awkward, but we are good at making things happen.” But the things we make happen aren’t always good. This is why the other three people are so important.The one who wants acceptance will make sure customers love your company and your employees never want to leave it.The one who wants accuracy will make sure the bills are paid and that you never get in trouble with the IRS or with any other regulatory agency.The one who wants applause will make sure everyone has heard of you.By yourself, you are just a lone nut charging a windmill with a lance.Would we have ever heard of Don Quixote if there had been no Sancho Panza?Would we have ever heard of Steve Jobs if there had been no Wozniak?Would we have ever heard of ‘Look at Me’ Paul McCartney without brooding, negative John Lennon? Could Lennon and McCartney have been The Beatles without sardonic George Harrison and ‘I Love Everyone’ Ringo Starr?It takes four people to make a world.Anyone who thinks they can do it all alone…is going to find themselves…all alone.Roy H. Williams

Thomas Mann, the winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, said, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”I agree with Thomas Mann. Having logged more than 39,000 hours of writing during the past 30 years, I can say with confidence that no sane person fights quite so fiercely or so long to find exactly the right word as does the writer. And to hear a word used inappropriately causes the ear to itch like a mosquito bite.My warm heart overflows with hope that you will find the next few paragraphs to be instructive, insightful, and illuminating, but my cold and calculating mind suspects that you will find these paragraphs to be mildly comical, at best.If you were to choose to quit reading right now, I would understand.Oh, my. You’re still here.I suppose I should begin.I was contemplating my admiration of 86-year-old Carol Burnett when I realized that she is probably the most active and vibrant of the female television stars of the late 1960’s.When I Googled “female television stars of the 1960s” I was surprised to see that virtually every website included not just the female television stars, but the female movie stars, as well.“Is there a difference?” you ask.Yes, there is a difference. Television stars are famous for their television shows. Movie stars are famous for their movies. And sex symbols are famous for their sex appeal. Famous sex symbols of that era include Barbara Eden in “I Dream of Jeannie,” and Donna Douglas as Ellie Mae Clampett in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” who served as the prototype for another hillbilly sex symbol, Daisy Duke, played by Catherine Bach eight years later on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”Television Star, Movie Star, and Sex Symbol are three different designations, although it is possible for one person to be all three.I confess that I am equally distressed by the rampant misuse of the word, “mentor.”People often tell me about their “mentors,” and then proceed to list people whose work influenced and inspired them, even though none of those “mentors” interacted with them directly, or even knew that they were alive. If we want to be accurate, we will say that the work of such a person influenced us and inspired us, but we will not go so far as to call them our “mentor.”If a person is your mentor, you are their apprentice, their protégé. A person is your mentor when they take an interest in you and devote a meaningful amount of time and energy into your future.Lucille Ball did far more than influence and inspire Carol Burnett. She actively mentored Carol until April 26, 1989.On Carol Burnett’s 56th birthday, she woke up to hear the news that her longtime friend and mentor, Lucille Ball, had died unexpectedly.Carol was devastated.Several hours later, there was a knock on her door. Carol Burnett opened the door to see a delivery man holding a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that said, “Happy Birthday, Kid. Love, Lucy.”Thirty years later, Carol cannot speak of it without crying.Roy H. Williams

Good decisions come from experience.Experience comes from bad decisions.Bad decisions aren’t made because a person is stupid. Bad decisions are often the result of logic.The first thing experience will teach you is, “Not everything logical is true.”Logic among advertising professionals says, “Always target the right customer.” But if you embrace that premise,you will gravitate to online marketing because it allows you to reach specific types of people, track results, gather data, and hold your ad budget accountable.you will spend too much money to reach too few people.you will see your advertising efficiency decrease, not increase, as you grow.you will fail to become widely known.Alex Iskold is not an advertising professional. Alex blogs about startups and venture capital as the Managing Director of Techstars. He was previously the founder and CEO of Information Laboratory, which was acquired by IBM, and Chief Architect at DataSynapse, which was acquired by TIBCO.In other words, Alex is a tech guy.His home page bio says “An engineer by training, Alex has deep passion and appreciation for startups, digital products and elegant code. He likes running, yoga, complex systems, Murakami books and red wine. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily all together. He blogs about startups and venture capital at http://alexiskold.net ”Recently, he wrote,“2019 was the year when VCs and startup founders soured on paid acquisition. Contrary to what most thought a few years back, CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer) didn’t go down as many D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) startups scaled. The costs instead went up.”“The explosion of D2C brands and mega rounds of funding led to massive amounts of capital deployed into advertising. All this cash flooded Facebook, Instagram and other social channels, and bid up the costs of Google ads. We’ve heard that these channels have become saturated, and that the companies are seeing diminishing returns on spending additional advertising dollars.”“We also heard that consumer’s attention has become fragmented and that, combined with increasing competition for eyeballs from the brands and saturation of the channels, has led to increases in CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer).”“While all of this is absolutely true, this is only 1/2 of the story.”“Why startups struggle to scale: The reality is that unless you have strong word of mouth, you are forced to spend money to grow your customer base. And that relationship between the spend and the growth is linear. The more you spend on marketing and advertising the more customers you get. On the surface it sounds great, but if and when you dial down your spend – your growth stops.”Mass media includes television, radio, and outdoor, each of which is shockingly affordable when compared to the cost of paid, online advertising.I have a number of friends who own large, online companies that sell millions of dollars per month – Direct to Consumer – around the world. The average brick-and-mortar business invests 5% to 10% of topline sales into advertising. My buddies who own D2C online companies are spending 30% to 35%.The logical criticism of mass media is best summarized in a statement that has been aimed at me hundreds of times by promoters of online targeting, “You’re using a shotgun, but I’m using a rifle with a scope.”But the shotgun vs. rifle argument assumes that the costs are reasonably equal. But the simple truth is that you can reach thousands of untargeted people for the price of one, targeted person. And among those thousands of untargeted influencers will be not just one, but several of the people you would have targeted. The familiarity you win and the reputation you gain and the word-of-mouth you trigger by reaching all those untargeted influencers will be yours at no extra...

My most successful ads in 2019 were the ones where I refrained from using logic, but chose instead to speak to the unconscious mind.Advertise your product to the conscious mind of a customer and you will likely be met with doubt, disinterest, and suspicion. But the unconscious mind greets you with none of these.Speaking to the unconscious is not nearly so complicated as it sounds.Here’s a recent example. A big jewelry store asked for an ad that would trigger interest in their custom-design department. The instructions I was given were typical of the instructions received by most ad writers: “Custom Designed Jewelry – Our jeweler can make just about anything from custom engagement rings, wedding bands, pendants, etc. – Let us know if you need more information about our services.”These were the thoughts that ran through my head:Custom-designed jewelry is the answer to a question that few people are asking. Consequently, it is not a felt need.But plenty of people would love to a have a distinctive, one-of-a-kind, “signature” piece of jewelry.If I speak directly to the issue by describing how “our talented designers can design distinctive, one-of-a-kind, signature pieces of jewelry for any special occasion… custom engagement rings, wedding bands, pendants, whatever you like,” people are just going to groan and roll their eyes because they will be seeing nothing in their mind, and experiencing no associative memories.Therefore, I’m going to have to come at this from an unusual angle and attempt to trigger positive, associative memories in the unconscious. (An associative memory is a memory that is linked to another memory.) If I am successful, these associative memories will inspire the curiosity of the customer to begin considering possible options.Here is the 30-second script that sprang from those musings:ROY:  Watermelon green and red,SARAH: Honey gold,ROY:   Tart lemon yellow.SARAH: Apricot orange.ROY:  Blueberry blue.SARAH: Mulberry purple.ROY:  And the pink of a perfect peach.SARAH:  All the colors of nature can be found in gemstones.ROY:   Choose a twinkling tintSARAH:   or a shimmering shadeROY:  as your own, signature colorSARAH:  to sparkle forever in your one-of-a-kindROY:   custom-designedSARAH:   jewelry.ROY: All the colors of wildflowersSARAH: glimmering and shimmering in the morning sun, are yours…ROY: at NAME OF STORE, LOCATION© Roy H. Williams, 2020People who hear that ad will ask themselves, “What would my signature color be?” And without intending to, they will begin imagining a custom-designed piece of jewelry.Few of these people, if any, will consciously consider that each of the colors named in the ad has a flavor, or that the yellow mentioned was “tart,” or that it followed “honey.” Honey and lemon is a famously soothing combination.Likewise, few will notice the mesmerizing rhythm of the two voices finishing each other’s sentences. This is known among writers as “meter,” and it is how the written and spoken language becomes musical.Colors, flavors, and music speak to the unconscious mind and trigger rich, positive associations.How does one resist a field of wildflowers glimmering and shimmering in the morning...

1: You are the product of your genetic code, hardwired to behave in certain ways.2: You are the product of your environment, the sum total of your influences.3: You are the product of your choices. It is your preferences, not your surroundings, that define you.I believe it is a mistake to cling too tightly to any of these 3 ideas. Each of them is true, I think, but not to the exclusion of the other two.The first explanation of you – DNA – is biological.The second explanation of you – Environment – is sociological.The third explanation of you – Choice – is theological.You don’t get to choose your DNA.You don’t get to choose how or where you spend your early childhood years.You do get to choose what you do next.I say these things to you because you are staring into the mirror of a brand-new year; so new that you can still smell the vinyl upholstery.I see your future clearly. Shall I tell you about it?Things will happen to you that are beyond your control. A few of these will be bad. But why worry? They are beyond your control. You have no power to change these things, no matter how well you worry. “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”– Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, from his book, Meditations, published in 200 A.D.“True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence on the future.”– Lucius Annaeus Seneca, (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)Yes, things will happen to you that are beyond your control. But most of these will be good things. Do not take them for granted, but anchor yourself in these daily moments of serendipity. Let them speak to you of the joy of living:You will step outside just in time to see the afternoon sky melt into the red, orange and gold of autumn leaves.You will be contacted by an old friend you had been thinking about calling.You will have the opportunity to play with a puppy.You will order a dish you’ve never had and be amazed at the interplay of flavors and spices.You will be paid a true compliment by a stranger.You will be given the opportunity to make a big difference in the life of someone else, and it will be within your power to say, “Yes.”You will look into the face of an infant, and it will smile at you.You will discover a short-cut that saves you time and trouble.You will talk to empty air and know that you have been heard.You will have a happy, new year.These good things, and many hundreds of others like them, are waiting for you, just ahead.Roy H. Williams

I want you to be in Austin on May 2nd if you can.The Princess has chosen the perfect location for The House of Bilbo Baggins, and there’s a chance we may have something for you to see when you get here.We have also begun construction on The Village of the Lost Boys and we ought to have the first two of the cabins in that village mostly completed by then.You remember The Lost Boys from Peter Pan, don’t you? Peter tells Wendy about them in chapter 3 of his glittering 1904 novel.“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way.”“Are none of them girls?”“Oh, no; girls are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”May 2nd will be the 20th Anniversary of the birth of Wizard Academy.In the year 2000, classes were held in the attic of our offices in Buda.In 2001, we appropriated the little one-room building next door that was originally built as a gym for the employees of Williams Marketing.In 2004, Princess Pennie located and purchased the plateau across which our sprawling little campus is now draped.The 6 cabins in The Village of the Lost Boys will raise the number of on-campus rooms to 24, but with a second bed in the loft of each cabin, we will theoretically be able to sleep 30.And 30 people, ladies and gentlemen, is a very packed Eye of the Storm.Did you know that The Eye of the Storm classroom and lecture hall in the tower was built by Tim Storm? I always intended to call it The Eye of the Storm since it is where the fierce winds of new information cause us to realize that much of “traditional marketing wisdom” is more tradition than wisdom. It was that loveliest of invisible ladies, Serendipity, that whispered to Tim Storm that he should build it, even though he had no idea what I planned to name it.I have always depended on the whispers of Serendipity to suggest to the friends of Wizard Academy that they should leave a permanent mark on our campus. Dozens of you have already heard her whispers and acted upon them. On May 2nd, 2020, we’re going to celebrate what you, and she, have done together.Two weeks ago, Tim Gallagher was in The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop with his delightful daughter, Fallyn. She had never seen Gallagher Lane, that lovely winding sidewalk that leads from The Bell Wall all the way down to Engelbrecht House in the Valley of the Lost Boys. Have you never noticed the beautiful verdigris-bronze plaque in the portal of the Bell Wall? (Don’t worry, Indy says he’s going to show it to you along with a lot of other cool stuff in today’s highly informative rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole, just click the image of Indy Beagle at the top of this Monday Morning Memo.)On January 1, the day after tomorrow, Daniel Whittington will officially take over as Chancellor of Wizard Academy although he’s been doing most of my job for at least two years. Can you believe Daniel has been here for 6 years and that Zac Smith has been serving as Vice-Chancellor for a full year already?I will remain involved in classes at Wizard Academy and Pennie will continue her duties overseeing the appearance of the physical campus for years to come, but the day-to-day financial obligations and management of your school are now solidly on the shoulders of young brother Whittington.On May 2nd, we will release that long-awaited guidebook, Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus, as you and we celebrate our past 20 years together and take a look at what is planned for the next 20 years. Among those things will be the speedy completion...

When you begin to write, the words and phrases that leap into your mind will be the ones you hear most often. Go ahead and write them down.The best writers begin by just blurting it out.A willingness to write badly is the key to writing well.After winning the Pulitzer prize for fiction, James Michener said,“I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.”Another Pulitzer prize winner, Bernard Malamud said,“The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly. Once you’ve got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three, throw them away and look for others.”The legendary Terry Southern tells us,“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.”When you have written all that you wanted to say, look at it. When you see an overused phrase, replace it with a string of words that mean the same thing, but glow with a rainbow of color.When you notice a defeated, predictable word, replace it with one that carries a handgun.When the words staring back at you make you laugh a little, then look for a particularly arresting phrase – a phrase that carries handcuffs on its belt– and move it to the top of the stack.You’ll often find your strongest opening line about one third of the way down from the top. I don’t know why opening lines try to hide there, but that’s usually where you’ll find them.Now that you’ve got a strong opening line and a story full of colorful phrases, let’s “Thomas Jefferson” that thing. Right after he wrote that snarky letter to King George, Thomas told us,“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”Boring people wrap a lot of words around a small idea.Fascinating people deliver big ideas quickly.Shorter hits harder.You’re going to have some free time during the holidays, so write me a 600-word story. It can be about anything you want except politics. It can be true or fictional, happy or sad, tender or defiant. But it can’t be boring.Indiana Beagle will choose the best of these and post one each week in the rabbit hole during the first few months of 2020. Be sure to attach an interesting photo of yourself. Also, include your mailing address in case Indy wants to send you a little something. You can email the beagle at [email protected]’ll talk again after Christmas.May your holiday sparkle with laughter!Roy H. Williams

An unhappy person who talks about “the way things ought to” be has a decision to make.They need to take action, orThey need to shut up and get on with their life.I’m sorry if that sounded cold and harsh. Allow me to explain.“The Way Things Ought to Be” is a fantasy world. Complaining that you don’t live there is pointless.“The Way Things Really Are” is the world you live in. Learn to navigate in that world and you can go anywhere you want.I’m not saying that you have to make peace with the status quo.I’m not saying that you have to accept things as they are.I’m not saying that you are powerless to change things.I’m saying that unproductive whining is pointless.Take action or shut up. Don’t spend your life believing you are a victim and trying to convince everyone else of it.“But can’t I at least tell people how I feel?”It depends on who those people are. Do they have the power to change things? If they do, then yes, tell them how you feel. And then convince other people to do the same. Start a revolution. Create a future that is better than the past. Progress depends on people like you.But if you share your indignation with people who have don’t have the power to change things, and you have no intention of talking to the people who do have the power, you’re just complaining, moaning, and whining.No one likes a whiner.The difference between a victim and a revolutionary is that the victim takes no action beyond complaining to their friends.A revolutionary risks ridicule and defeat. He or she spends time, energy, and money in the effort to make the future better than the past.You can make a difference if you are willing to pay the price.George Bernard Shaw said,“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”And then he said,“You don’t hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.”Are you willing to fall under the hammer if that’s what it takes to change things?Even when I don’t agree with them, I admire women and men who do more than just complain to their friends.But in every instance I always agree with that delightful person who takes no position unless they are also willing to take action, that person who elevates every conversation to a pleasant topic and makes you feel happy they are around.Roy H. Williams

What is the canvas of your artistic expression?“Pen and ink,” says the writer.“Wet clay” says a sculptor,“Wood” says another,“Stone” says a third.And then the painters chime in,singing, “Oils,” “Pencils,”“Charcoal,” and “Acrylic”in 4-part harmony.“Film” shouts a cinematographer,“Pixels” shouts another,and the photographers beat a steady rhythmon the lens covers of their cameras.Our own Princess Pennieis of that ancient tribe“The Daughters of Eve”who claim the earth as their canvas.The inheritance of the daughtersgoes back to the book of Genesis…Do you believe the Bible to be a message from God,or merely the writings of desert nomads?Either way, it is an interesting book.In the second chapter of that first book,“The Lord God took the manand put him in the Garden of Edento work it and take care of it.”But evidently, Adam wasn’t very good at it,because just three verses later the Lord God said,“It is not good for the man to be alone,”and Eve became his partner in the effort.Dozens of centuries later,daughter Elizabeth Murray observed,“Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint,and the soil and the sky as canvas.”Two hundred and fourteen years ago,the poet William Wordsworth added,“Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art,in some sort like poetry and painting.” 1One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Sidney Hare said,“Show me a city without parks and boulevards and I will show youa people far behind the times in every way. Parks educate the peoplein an art equally as grand as the art of painting or sculpture…” 2In 1941, the immortal John Steinbeck said,“Places are able to evoke moods, as colorand line in a picture may capture andwarp us to a pattern the painter intended.” 3Eleven years later, Steinbeck elaborated,“The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.” 4And daughter Shauna Niequist adds,“Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” 5I agree. It is not good for the man to be alone.Thank God for the women in our liveswho cause rainbows of color to appearfrom lumps of cold, brown earth. 6Roy H. Williams1 In a letter to Sir George H. Beaumont, Grasmere, (Oct. 17, 1805)2 Sidney J. Hare, a pioneer in Landscape Architecture, (1897)3 John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 256, (1941)4 John Steinbeck, East of Eden, p. 4. (1952)5 Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, (2013)6 Genesis 2:7

My business partners meet twice a year to spend a few days together. A transcription of their discussions during these meetings could easily become a bestselling book.A number of my partners have grown far beyond anything I ever taught them, which makes answering their questions a lot easier for me.I employ a mildly deceptive technique that has been used by teachers throughout history:When confronted with a question for which you have no immediate answer, stall for time by tossing the question back to the students. Keep their discussion moving forward until they have arrived at a solid conclusion. They will never suspect that you didn’t already know the answer.During our last meeting, one of my partners was sharing the secrets of his very successful online campaigns with the rest of us when he said, “When I became a partner 15 years ago, I was hoping that Roy would tell us exactly how the sausage is made. Looking back, I appreciate his wisdom in not doing that.”“What do you mean by, ‘how the sausage is made?’” I asked.“I mean, ‘exactly how to write great ads.’”His answer confused me because I was under the illusion that I had, in fact, taught them “exactly how to write great ads.” But rather than admit that I had no idea what he was talking about, I said, “Let’s talk about the different ways of making the sausage. Sexton, how many ways are there to write great ads?”I asked that question as though I already knew the answer, when in truth, I did not. But I was smart enough to ask the person that I suspected would know the answer.“Two,” answered Sexton. “You can follow a template and search for the information to fill each of the openings within that template, or you can gather information and then organize it however you choose. No template.”His answer blew my mind because he was obviously right, but this idea of “writing to a template” had never once crossed my mind. Startled by his answer, I said to the room, “How many of you write to a template?”About half the hands went up.“How many of you gather information and then organize it? No template.”The other half of the hands went up.The thing that startled me the most, however, was that half of the most accomplished writers in the room were using one method, and the other half was using the other.Even more interestingly, I spent the next several weeks asking a number of highly accomplished business owners which of the two methods they would follow. Again, half of them said “template,” which is another way of saying, “Plan your work, and work your plan.” The other half said, “Gather, then organize,” which is another way of saying, “Work with what you’ve got. Improvise.”Regardless of which technique you prefer, does it surprise you that both techniques seem to work equally well?Who’d have thought it?If you have thoughts, anecdotes, or stories about this interesting duality of Planning vs. Improvisation, send them to [email protected] and we’ll see if some of them land in the rabbit hole. Also, Indy is planning to feature some murals on the sides of buildings in the rabbit hole next week, so if you have a cool photo of an outdoor mural, send it to him with a description of its location, okay?For those of you who don’t know, the rabbit hole is entered by clicking the image of Indy Beagle at the top of each week’s online version of the Monday Morning Memo. (That’s him at the top of this page holding a sausage in his jaws.) Indy’s rabbit hole is an informative, eclectic, wonderful waste of time.“Not long ago, sitting at my desk at home, I suddenly had the horrifying realization that I no longer waste time.”– MIT professor and physicist Alan Lightman in his book, A...

People need your encouragement more than they need your advice. A little encouragement at a pivotal time makes all the difference.I am giving you a Christmas gift: When you have opened it, you will become the right person, doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.To open your gift, you need only to buy what the kids are selling.Randy Phillips gave me this gift and I’m glad he did.We were in church when Randy went on a little rant.He said, “Buy whatever the kids are sellin’… Buy whatever the kids are sellin’… Sometimes you come out of a restaurant or a grocery store and they’ve got a little table set up, and you try not to make eye contact with’em. It’s like, ‘If I can act like I don’t see’em, I don’t have to buy it.’Get over there! Go to that table. They’ve got that wrapping paper. You can buy it half-price somewhere else. It don’t matter they’ve marked it up 100%. You don’t need it? What you need is not the issue! You go over there and you buy what the kids are sellin’.They got cookies? ‘I don’t eat cookies.’ This is not about what you eat! Buy what the kids are sellin’. Here’s what I do. I walk over to ‘em and ask, ‘What is the largest amount that you’ve sold today? Who bought the most?’‘Well, they bought 5 boxes.’‘Give me 10. I want 10 boxes.’Denise says, ‘What are you going to do with 10 boxes of cookies?’‘I don’t know. Don’t worry about that.’The look on their face when you are building confidence in a kid across the table! ‘This is how commerce works. This is how we do it in America. You have something of value. I give you money. We trade it. And here we go.’We’re teaching those kids! Buy whatever the kids are sellin’.”Encouragement speaks loudest when it is followed by action. Your action.Always buy what the kids are selling. Give a child the gift of encouragement and hope. It takes only a moment. Then you can give away the thing you bought and explain why you bought it in the first place. Kindness is contagious. Perhaps the recipient of your gift will be inspired to do the same.You are a generous person who likes to encourage others.This is the secret to your happiness.Roy H. Williams

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used for measuring departmental performance within a company. The goal of KPIs is continual improvement.The subtle danger of KPIs is that they can lead us to prioritize efficiency over effectiveness, and short-term objectives over long-term.A Police Chief told his officers to prioritize burglaries of multiple-occupancy households because the system would count each occupant as a separate solved crime and lift their KPI.An electrical wholesale group created a KPI competition between its branches which resulted in them undercutting each other’s prices.A shoe company with a 3.5 billion-dollar ad budget (Adidas) admitted they had been “overly focused on digital attribution,” partly as a result of its ability to allow the company to “look at short-term measurements in real time.” Adidas Global Media Director Simon Peel says, “But when you look at econometric modelling it’s telling you something very different…” 1 In a successful company, it takes every department working together to increase top line revenues. But when departments are held individually accountable for department-specific goals, teamwork goes out the window.A business owner recently asked me, “Who is responsible for lead generation?” Before I could answer, one of his branch managers said, “Selling is a numbers game. Double my sales opportunities and I’ll make twice as many sales.”I asked, “Who is responsible for lead generation in a restaurant?”“The marketing department,” answered the branch manager.Looking across that group of 20 branch managers from 20 different cities, I said, “Think of the best restaurant in your city, the one where you’ve got to have a reservation because there is never an open table. Do you see it in your mind? That restaurant hasn’t advertised in 30 years. Their happy customers are their only marketing department.”Looking at their faces, I could tell they had seen the truth in what I had said, so I told them another truth, “Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable.” I let that one soak in a minute.“When our customer contacts us, they meet the Maître D’ of our restaurant. Sometimes it’s a Customer Service Representative in our call center. Other times it’s a team member who responded to an email inquiry, or who interacted with our customer in live chat. If those people do well, they will hand the baton to one of our waiters; a salesperson or a service technician. But wait, we’re not done. Now we have to deliver the food. Will the chef live up to his reputation? Will the product be as good as our customer hoped it would be?”I waited a few moments, then said, “Today’s close rate determines tomorrow’s sales leads. Good advertising is merely the beginning of a conversation with the customer. If they visit our website, they’re reading our menu. If they check our online reviews, they’re asking their friends about us. But here is where things get serious: when that customer encounters our Maître D’, our waiters, and our chef, she is expecting to meet the company she was promised in our ads. Will we be the company we promised her? Or will we be guilty of bait-and-switch?”I said it again, “Today’s close rate determines tomorrow’s sales leads… Every member of our team is responsible for lead generation. We win together and we lose together. Any one of us can drop the baton in this never-ending relay race where the final runner hands it back to the first runner as a referral from a happy customer. You and I have to make every customer glad they chose us.”“Each of us is a point-of-contact with our customer, a channel of communication. When we use the brandable chunks – signature phrases – that were introduced in our mass-media ads and reinforced on our website; when each of us delivers the...

Symbolic thought is commonly expressed through similes, metaphors, and music, allowing us to communicate the unknown and unfamiliar by relating it to the known and familiar.Symbols happen when one thing stands for another.Symbolism plays a role in identity reinforcement. Brands, hobbies, artistic expressions, event attendance, and social connections are symbolic ways of saying, “This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I stand for. This is what I stand against. This is how I see myself.”Marketing people call these measurements “psychographics.”Symbols are powerful, friendly things that assist us in relating to the world around us. They help us make those difficult choices between two good things. “With which of these two things do I most strongly identify?”Self-determination is a good thing.Cooperation is a good thing.Brexit is Britain’s tug-of-war between those two good things.America is having a tug-of-war of its own.Understanding how symbols can affect the mood of the heart and the attitude of the mind is a natural part of self-awareness. But symbols get distorted and dark when we embrace them too tightly or carry them one step too far.Superstition is the belief that a symbol carries within itself the power to enact change.Pheromones are a series of chemical flags released by animals that signal sexuality, fear, and dominance; moods of the heart and attitudes of the mind.The flag of a nation is a bit of colored cloth on the end of a stick. Its only power lies in the hearts and minds of those who see it. We are unified when we agree on what that symbol stands for. We are divided when we do not agree.The only hard choice is the choice between two good things.When we are deeply divided, we believe our adversaries are stupid and evil. If we are gracious, we call them “uninformed and misled,” which is just a slightly nicer way of saying the same thing.Reconciliation and unity will not begin until we look beyond our polarized reactions to see the good thing the other side believes in. This is the path to productive civil discourse.Frankly, I’m a bit weary of destructive discourse, aren’t you?Regardless of your political beliefs, you have at least one close friend who believes in the good thing that is currently standing in the way of the good thing you believe in. In other words, their political beliefs are not aligned with yours. Is your relationship with that person strong enough, is your trust in that person deep enough, to quietly listen as they explain what they believe and why they believe it? Can you find the good thing your friend believes in?Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.Remember: Your goal is to see through their eyes for a moment. You want to see what they see. This is not the time or place to make them see what you see. If you cannot restrain yourself from correcting them and interjecting your beliefs, you are likely to lose a friend.The path to peace requires courage, restraint, the willingness to listen, and an open mind.The other path – the exciting one – is the path that leads to war.Roy H. Williams

“The word ‘artist’ is not applied to writers as readily as to musicians or sculptors or painters, because the medium in which they work – our language – is used by everyone without any particular thought or regard for economy or form. Language is the common drudge of every sort of experience and it does not enter the heads of most people to use it with any conscious skill or effectiveness.”“But the serious writer is an artist and language is his medium, and the way he employs it is of the greatest interest. Graham Greene has said that ‘creative art seems to remain a function of the religious mind,’ and it is this quality of awareness of another world…”– Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 115“When Cervantes invited a new generation of readers to follow his knight into the Sierra Morena, they discovered through their tears of laughter that they had entered a new world. For the writers and readers to come, the pages of a book could never again stand like foreign objects of wonder, to be admired from a distance. From now on, opening a book would mean stepping into a space more like one’s own, a Sierra Morena next door instead of a mythical wood or mystic crag, and even those places of mystery or magic, from Never Never Land to Hogwarts, would always be places in which other versions of our own selves would go to for relief from the pressures, pain, or simply the boredom of our daily lives.”– William Egginton, The Man Who Invented Fiction, p. 136“In my life as a writer I often remind myself – comfort myself – with what William Faulkner said about The Sound and the Fury. The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl’s muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this thin, grubby moment?”“I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable – always there, on the periphery of consciousness – that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, this novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.”– Kathryn Harrison, When Inspiration Stared Stoically from an Old Photograph“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment… But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling… Our various fictional worlds are– on the whole– horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles– in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.”– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human“Go, then – there are other worlds than these.”– Stephen KingIf you want us to see a different world, it will be your choice of tools that defines you. Oscar Wilde was a playwright. He put his words, like a ventriloquist, into the mouths of actors on the stage. Ad writers, screenwriters and novelists differ only in their ventriloquist’s dummies, the masks they hide behind.Some ventriloquist’s dummies are called “newscasters,” and they are no different than the actors in any other fiction. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Who is hiding behind that mask, and what imaginary world are they trying to sell us?”Roy H. WilliamsPS – At a 1962 dinner for 49

“The rest of my life has passed quite suddenly. Around ten or twelve I fell into the inevitable logarithms of time. It seems to go faster and faster. I wonder now why we have to have Christmas so often.” – Kary MullisOur friend Kary Mullis died on Aug. 7, 2019, at the age of 74.His first trip to Wizard Academy with Nancy was more than 15 years ago. They were in the same class as (L to R) Chris Lowry of Savannah and Mike Greene of Asheville and Jane Fraser of Halifax (in teal, below Chris and Mike) along with 20 other delightful people.Kary’s colleagues in science called him “an untamed genius.” His discovery of polymerase chain reaction in 1983 opened the door for us to study DNA and won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.I agree with Kary’s observation concerning the inevitable logarithms of time, don’t you?Wasn’t it just a few months ago that you and I walked across an open field and spoke of what we would build together? That campus is nearly finished now.Do you remember when 106 of the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy worked together on a book called Accidental Magic? I pulled my copy off the shelf just now and marveled at it, as I have done at least once a year for the past 18 years. I do the same thing with your book, People Stories: Inside the Outside. Your talent continues to amaze me.Do you remember when Ray Bard arrived with those 200 hardbacks of Accidental Magic just as your book-release party began in 2001? You had already landed in Austin and were on your way to the Academy while Ray was still sitting anxiously at the airport, waiting for the first printing of your book to arrive.This summer, Avital Rotbart worked nonstop for several weeks on our long-promised book, Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus. We hope to have those available on May 2, but as we have learned, printers often have schedules of their own.Likewise, we expect to be able to unveil The Ad Writer’s Masters Class. Working at the speed of light, a person could – in theory – complete that class in a year, but in reality, it will take most people two years.You will instantly be able to recognize an Ad Master when you meet one. I’ll tell you how on May 2 when we gather for an unforgettable campus tour and celebration. It will be epic. We’ll feast like kings.When a person reminisces as I have done in today’s Monday Morning Memo, we usually assume they will soon be departing and are singing us a soft goodbye. Let me assure you this is not the case.We’re simply hosting a catered half-time show.Let us know if you plan to come.Roy H. Williams

Each of us creates our own reality from our interpretations of the things we observe. A systematic pattern of interpretations is called a cognitive bias.This is how a cognitive bias works: If you believe that elves cause rain, then every occurrence of rain is proof of elves.Cognitive biases can be miniscule or massive. Wikipedia has 192 of the most common of them organized alphabetically in their List of Cognitive Biases. Here are a few of my favorites:Third-Person Effect – Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.Cheerleader Effect – The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.Halo Effect – The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in our perceptions of them. This is similar to the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype, in which we assume that people who are physically attractive also possess other socially desirable qualities.And then, of course, there are some tragic cognitive biases, such as:Compassion Fade ­– The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.Naïve Realism – The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.But there is one pair of cognitive biases that isn’t on Wikipedia’s list, and these biases run so deep in us that they form our beliefs about the nature of reality and how the universe works.This pair of cognitive biases would more accurately be called a duality, since the closer you move toward one of them, the further you move away from the other.Let’s call them“Cause-and-Effect”“You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There.”“Cause-and-Effect” assumes that we live in an organized universe which can be predicted with certainty if only we have enough data. “Cause-and-Effect” is the world of Newtonian Physics and cooking with a recipe. “Plan your work and work your plan.”The opposing belief is that we can calculate probabilities, but “You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There.” This is the world of improvisation, Plan B, and the ability to cook something wonderful from whatever you happen to find in the pantry. “Work with what you’ve got.”Physicists have been trying to reconcile these belief systems since 1927 when General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were discovered to be mutually exclusive, although both can be proven unconditionally.Einstein, the champion of “Cause and Effect” said to Niels Bohr, “I, at any rate, am convinced that God does not throw dice.”To which Niels Bohr, the champion of “You Can’t Know for Certain Until You Get There,” replied, “Quit telling God what to do with his dice.”Physicist Stephen Hawking would later add, “Not only does God play dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”Your internal, unconscious belief system dictates whether you willA: create a recipe, a step-by-step plan, and then seek to acquire the elements to actualize that plan, orB: acquire whatever is available to you and then figure out how to organize it for maximum effect.Both systems have proven to be profoundly effective.Never try to convince a practitioner of the opposite system that their way of thinking is stupid, foolish, or self-limiting.They probably have a long list of accomplishments that will prove you wrong.Roy H. Williams

Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”No, let’s be more accurate. What he actually said was, “Die religion ist das opium des volkes.”Before I continue, let me say that my belief in God is a choice not based on argument or evidence. I freely admit that I choose to believe.Those, like Karl, who choose not to believe, often say that my beliefin an immortal souland a life after this oneand in a Creator who gives us both of these,is nothing less than escapism.Escapism is an interesting subject.Lovers of nature take long hikes to escape the artificiality of the indoors.Lovers of travel take trips to escape the predictability of their surroundings.Lovers of sport watch games to escape the monotony of daily life.Lovers of literature read books to escape the chair in which they’re sitting.Lovers of nicotine and alcohol smoke and drink to escape their current mood.Lovers of science gather data to escape the idea of a world that is beyond understanding.In his book, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, C.S. Lewis writes about moaning to his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, about those condescending pragmatists who dismiss fiction with a sniff and a wave of the hand:“I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”I vote for escape.Escape what you dislike by doing what you like.In the words of Charles Baudelaire,“And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, It is time to get high! So as not to be martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”If you love nature, get high on nature. If you love travel, sports, literature or science, get high on those. And if you love God, get high on him.I will end with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”Democrats and Republicans, are you listening?Roy H. Williams

(A.) “It was hot outside.”(B.) “The angry sun glared down at me.”Which of those sentences do you feel was more interesting?Personification is a technique used by writers and speakers to excite the imaginations of their readers and listeners. Personification gives human attributes to non-human things.Twenty-five years ago I wrote, “As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch that had been specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world’s most angry mountain….”Later in that same ad, the jeweler says, “You’ll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up… at Justice Jewelers.”Here are some other examples of personification:“The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming inand thought of doing something to the shorethat water never did to land before.”– Robert Frost, opening lines of Once By the Pacific “Have you got a brook in your little heartWhere bashful flowers blow,And blushing birds go down to drink,And shadows tremble so?”– Emily Dickinson, Have You Got A Brook In Your Little Heart?You may have noticed that both of those examples were by famous poets. This was neither an accident nor a coincidence. I have long believed that good poets are the best teachers of powerful ad writing. A poet can change what we think and feel, and do so in a brief, tight economy of words.Did I hear you say “songwriter”? What is a songwriter but a poet who also writes music?I consider personification to be part of a larger category called Magical Thinking, a type of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.Magical thinking is best evidenced in a writing style known as Magical Realism, and it is best exemplified by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:“As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.”“’Holy Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, ch. 7But not everyone has the gene that allows for magical thinking.Consider this famous song by England Dan and John Ford Coley. Do you remember these lines?“I’m not talking ’bout movin’ inand I don’t want to change your lifebut there’s a warm wind blowin’ the stars aroundAnd I’d really love to see you tonight.”People who lack the magical thinking gene hear:“…but there’s a warm wind blowing, the stars are out,
and I’d really love to see you tonight.”The value of magical thinking is that it stimulates the imagination and puts listeners in a frame of mind to consider new and different things. Magical thinking does not appeal to the linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning...

I grew up believing that everyone had equal opportunity, and what we made of that opportunity was up to us. I believed I was the product of my choices, and you were the product of yours. People struggled only because they made bad choices.I continue to believe in the vital importance of individual choice.But we are not offered the same choices.These days, when I look at my own modest accomplishments, I see them as byproducts of my natural skillset, my interests, my circumstances, my opportunities, and my friendships. I don’t think of myself as “a winner” or “a loser.” I think of myself as a writer.I no longer see life as a game played against others. Have you ever known a person who saw everyone as either “a winner” or “a loser?” I have walked with such people and heard their secret song:“Get all you can.Can all you get.Sit on the can.Poison the rest.”I blame Charles Darwin. Wasn’t it he who told us we are animals? If you believe in this survival-of-the-fittest, “predator and prey” concept of humanity, then Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein did nothing wrong. Winners are predators. Losers are prey. The weak are food for the strong.Let me make this clear: a healthy human mind is not the mind of a predator, or of prey. The sociopath and the psychopath have the mind of a predator. And the person with “a victim mentality” has the mind of prey.I believe you and I have a higher purpose.Most of us go through a Survival phase where we’re just trying to make ends meet. We have to keep gas in the car, food in the pantry, a roof over our heads, and “Oh god, is that insurance premium due again?”Ever been there?If we are lucky, we later move into an Acquisition phase in which we acquire more money, a nicer home, a better car, and take actual vacations. This Acquisition phase is often ornamented with accomplishments and recognition.If you create ad campaigns, you must understand the difference between the motives of customers in the Survival phase and their motives in the Acquisition phase.The most emotionally healthy among us move into a Distribution phase which is marked by a sort of reverse bucket list. We no longer focus on what we can acquire. Our attention is turned toward what to do with what we’ve got.Emotionally healthy people want to make the world a happier place.It has been my observation that sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists never move beyond the Acquisition phase. Every breath is a hungry gasp for more wealth, power, and fame in the secret hope they might establish a dynasty. People who never move beyond the Acquisition phase of life tend to become increasingly predatory. Every unpleasant task is “someone else’s job.”“You can judge a man’s ethics by the condition in which he leaves a public restroom.”– Fred EisenbergNoblesse oblige is the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have a strong sense of it. Most billionaires do not.In a future, perfect world, those whose natural skillsets, interests, circumstances, opportunities, and friendships elevate them to wealth and power will focus their minds on the creation of jobs for those among us who simply need someone to believe in them.Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world. In our world, the first obligation is to the shareholders. “Maximize profits.” If there is a second obligation, it is not immediately clear to me.I have noticed that men often tell the truth when they are at the end of their days.The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes is the memoir of Solomon as he approached the end of his life.John Huey sat at the dying bed of...

The Eye of the Storm in the tower at Wizard Academy, under construction in 2009.We are feeling unsettled again.And when I say we, I don’t mean me, I mean all of us.Unsettled feelings are ominous.We are acting as though we have heard the four notes of the Dies irae, that ominous musical phrase* that has signaled impending tragedy for the past 800 years. Being thus unsettled, we are making big decisions with too little information and those decisions will have consequences.Unsettled lions like you and I are dangerous.I’ll not speculate on the specific causes for our feelings of unsettlement, for I suspect we have many different reasons.We were first unsettled on 9/11 when we saw the unhappenable happen.We became unsettled again in 2008 when we were betrayed by Enron and Worldcom and Bernie Madoff and subprime mortgages.I agree with what Leonard Pitts wrote in 2006.“We often talk about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in terms of failures: failures of intelligence, failures of planning, failures of communication. But these catastrophes were first and foremost failures of imagination. Did we know that a major hurricane could destroy New Orleans? Yes: it was even part of the tour guides’ spiel. Did we know terrorists wanted to bring down the World Trade Center? Yes: they made a credible attempt in 1993. And what did we do with what we knew? Nothing. Some disasters, I think, are so big and so awful they are literally beyond our power to conceive. So, we dismiss them out of hand, retreat to the ‘knowledge’ that a thing can’t happen because, well, it just can’t.”– Leonard Pitts, July 6, 2006Leonard Pitts was obviously feeling unsettled when he wrote that.We feel unsettled when our beliefs are crushed.“Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it’s going to be all right anyway.”– Barbara HallI appreciate Barbara Hall’s perspective.Tragedy is the arrival of the unexpected bad.Serendipity is the arrival of the unexpected good.I say we should begin looking for the unexpected good.What do you say?To prepare for the unexpected bad is to be cautious, and there is nothing wrong with that. But to anticipate the unexpected good is to be hopeful. And that’s okay, too, isn’t it?“If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it… Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a [person] needs to believe in the most.”– Hub McCann, Secondhand LionsI write these words to you because I’m seeing solid people make dicey decisions because they are feeling unsettled. They are changing what they can because they are feeling frustrated by what they cannot change.I believe in miracles, but most miracles happen slowly. “There’s magic in the world. There is. People will tell you there isn’t—they just want you to get back to work and be quiet and not ask questions. These are people who don’t know where to look, or who were not blessed with eyes that could see magic. Magical eyes. If you have them, develop them.”– Tennessee WilliamsDo you still believe in miracles? Do you have eyes that can see sparkling magic in the air all around you?Serendipity is the arrival of the unexpected good.I think I hear it twinkling just ahead.Roy H. Williams

We eat food every day and we drive cars every day. But food purchases happen on a short purchase cycle and car purchases happen on a longer one.How often does the average citizen purchase the product or service you sell?The purchase cycle of your product determines how quickly your ads will start working.Food and entertainment have short purchase cycles. This is why ads selling food and entertainment can generate big results quickly, even when the advertiser is new and unknown.But to make things happen on a long purchase cycle, you must become the company customers think of immediately and feel the best about.Air conditioning systems and engagement rings have long purchase cycles.I’ve learned not to discuss purchase cycles in public forums because at least one marketer will immediately get red-faced and say, “But people buy air conditioning systems and engagement rings every day. My advertising is aimed at the people who are in the market for those products right now.”This is their logic: “When a person is ready to buy a product, they’re going to go online and do some research. This is the zero moment of truth. Show up BIG in that moment and you will dominate your product category.”I agree that people are going to go online. Google is the new phone book and social media allows us to hear from customers who have already purchased the product. But it is foolish to believe that customers enter this “zero moment of truth” without prejudices, preferences, and predispositions.330 million Americans will purchase 2 million engagement rings this year. This means that 1 American in 165 will buy an engagement ring.But a year has 365 days.This means that just 1 American in 60,225 will purchase an engagement ring today.In a long purchase cycle, you must win the hearts of tomorrow’s customers with a memorable message – relentlessly repeated – and then wait for them to need what you sell.Use the seductive repetition of extremely cheap advertising to reach tomorrow’s customers along with all their influencers. Purchased wisely, mass media can reach the same individual 3 times each week, 52 weeks a year, for about 40 cents.156 repetitions of a 60-second ad will be heard by that individual this year.Did you hear the part about the 40 cents?$40,000 a year gives you top-of-mind awareness with about 100,000 people.Calculate the percentage of the public you can afford to reach, never forgetting that three-times-a-week repetition is essential if you want to become a household word. Don’t reach 100% of your city and convince them 10% of the way. Reach 10% of your city and convince them 100% of the way.Advertise the why. Wait for the when.The longer you do this, the better it works.You’ll gain momentum, year after year.Your online conversion rates will skyrocket.Your online costs of marketing will plummet.You’ll deepen your relationship with customers, year after year.They will develop a strong predisposition toward you.They will feel like they know you.They will consider you an ally and a friend.Marketers who subscribe to Google’s theory of the “zero moment of truth” are sprinters. They believe in waiting until the customer is actively, consciously, currently in the market for the product. Sprinters make decisions on a short time horizon. I think of them as “twitchy little bastards.”If your category has a long purchase cycle, I suggest that you embrace the inevitable time horizon.Become a long-distance runner.Fly the flag of Team Tortoise.Roy H. Williams

“You train them, remind them, and incentivize them, but they still don’t do what you trained them to do.” This is what business owners say to each other about employees.Can you relate to it?Frances Frei is a famous professor at Harvard Business School who advises senior executives who are embarking on large-scale change initiatives in the hopes of achieving organizational transformation. Professor Frei tells these executives, “You cannot change a person’s behavior until you first change their beliefs.”Frances called me a few years ago when she was about to publish her book, “Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business.”Beliefs drive behavior.I was first exposed to this idea 18 years ago when Paul Schumann attended Wizard Academy. Paul spent 30 years at IBM as a futurist. Like Professor Frei, his specialty was “forecasting potential future scenarios, and creating innovative strategies for competitive advantage.”When I asked Paul to share a few insights from his rich experience, he warned us of the dangers of “corporate cultural inertia.” Unfamiliar with that term, I asked Paul to give us an example. His answer startled me. He said, “You can win the full support of everyone at the C-level – CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, all of them – and then be brought to your knees by middle managers who simply choose not to implement what they have been told to do. In a big company, culture eats strategy for breakfast.”“Can you introduce me to Dewey Jenkins? I’d love to meet him.”This is a question I’m asked at least once a week, usually by the owner of another big company.“I’m sorry, but no. I have, however, convinced Jonathan Bancroft to write a book that will contain the answers to every question you’d like to ask Dewey. I’ll give you a heads-up when that book is about to be published.”The first printing of that book, “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…” was 30,000 copies. Almost 28,000 of those have already been sold and the book has only just been released.The average business book sells just 5,000 copies in the life of the book. “Mr. Jenkins Told Me…” is not the average business book.Jonathan Bancroft went to work for Mr. Jenkins 21 years ago as a technician’s helper/trainee. A few years ago, he became president of the company.I can’t arrange for you to speak with Dewey Jenkins, but you’re only a few clicks away from the answers to every question you’d like to ask him.You’re wearing the ruby red slippers, Dorothy, and you’ve been told how to finally achieve the one thing you’ve been trying to do since the movie began.Are you going to begin clicking? Or do you want to go back to fighting those flying monkeys?Roy H. Williams

For more insightful comics visit xkcd.comMy strange education was purchased with tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money.This is how it happened. When I turned 20, I spent the next 2 years asking business owners 3 questions:“Have you ever done any advertising that you felt really worked? Tell me about it.”“Have you ever been excited about an advertising plan that you later felt was a waste of money? Tell me about it.”“Are you still doing the thing that you felt really worked? Why not?”I crafted those questions because the things I was being taught about advertising made no sense to me.When a 20-year-old says he is “studying advertising” and asks if you will share your observations and experiences with him, most people are happy to do it. Within two years, the advertising mistakes everyone was making became blazingly obvious.Most people had followed the same logical path to arrive at the same wrong answer.We study successful businesses because we believe we can become successful by doing what they did. We ignore failures in the foolish belief that they have nothing to teach us.When failures become invisible, the seductive mistakes that caused those failures become invisible, too. This is why everyone tends to make the same mistakes in advertising.Important lessons are learned from failure, not from success.As a young man, I harvested the lessons of hundreds of business owners whose collective experience totaled dozens of centuries and tens of millions of dollars.Does it surprise you that the mistakes made by those business owners are just as common today?When we focus our attention on those who succeed – and ignore the lessons of those who failed – we tumble headlong into “survivorship bias,” a dangerous but invisible fallacy of logic.Study only those who survive the selection process.Ignore those who did not survive.Congratulations. You just tumbled into survivorship bias.When the Center for Naval Analyses evaluated the bullet holes in aircraft returning from missions during WWII, armor was recommended for the areas that showed the most damage. An engineer, Abraham Wald, popularized the term “survivorship bias” when he pointed out, “These are the planes that were able to return to base. The areas we need to reinforce are the areas that are undamaged on these planes, because those are the areas where damage makes it impossible to return.”Most of us unconsciously do what everyone else is doing. But what if everyone else is wrong?The reason history repeats itself is because we paid no attention the first time.Traditional wisdom is usually more tradition than wisdom.When you insist on being normal, you condemn yourself to being average.Break away from the pack. Conduct an experiment. No matter how it turns out, you will have learned something you didn’t know before.Or you could save yourself all that and just come to Wizard Academy. We’ll work hard all day and then sit together 900 feet above the city on the David McInnis Stardeck and howl at the moon.If that last sentence frightened you, you probably wouldn’t like it here. But if you instinctively knew I was kidding and it made you laugh a little, what are you waiting for?Aroo,Roy H. Williams

I’ve had a special relationship with California since 1992. The basis of our relationship is this: I keep not deserving parking tickets and California keeps giving them to me anyway.One of my goals during last week’s excursion with my grandson was to return from California –­ for the first time ever – without a parking ticket.I almost made it home.My transgression was that I drove through an empty space in the parking lot at Seal Beach so that I could be poised “nose out” in the space beyond. In Texas, Pennie and I call this “going for the poise.”Yeah, that’s illegal in California.As I was sitting in the rental car reading my ticket, a man knocked on my window and shouted, “Turn your car around! Turn your car around! If you don’t, they’ll give you a $64 ticket!” And then he held up his ticket to prove it. I smiled and showed him mine, thinking we’d have a laugh together. But no, this was a man on a mission. He was off like a rocket to warn the next person.I watched him for the next few minutes. Every time a car pulled though a space to go for the poise, he would run up to that car, tap on the window, and warn the driver of his or her impending doom. God bless that guy. He may still be there, even now.The idea that something regarded as common sense in one state is illegal in another reminds me that we Americans are a haphazard people. We name our months after Roman gods. We count our years from the birth of Jesus. We print ‘In God We Trust’ on all our money. But when someone publicly mentions God, we think that person to be a naively superstitious rube.Every time I mention him, I get a look that makes me feel the listener wants to pat me on my head like I’m four years old.I think the current, politically correct name for God is “the universe,” as in, “the universe is telling me to take this job,” or, “the universe is telling me to quit eating red meat.”One young man in California mentioned God to me just before we drove to the airport, and it turned out to be one of the brightest moments of a delightful trip. We had checked out of our hotel and presented the claim check for our car to the valet stand attendant who handed it to a slender young man who took off running toward the parking garage.Throughout my life, I’ve harbored the secret belief that you can brighten the day of waiters, waitresses, hotel maids, and parking valets by giving them unexpectedly generous tips. The only evidence I’ve had that my secret belief might be correct are the bright faces and happy smiles of waiters and waitresses when they see Pennie and me walk through their door.Yes, I am encouraging you to continue being generous to the people who bring you food, clean your room, and park your car.Anyway, when the slender young valet arrived with our car, he handed me the keys and I handed him a twenty. He looked down at it, then back up at me. Then down at it again, then back up to me. “God bless you sir! I’ve never gotten one of these! They told me there was a guy here that was tippin’ twenties, and I said, ‘Please, God, let me bring that guy’s car to him!’ And here you are! Thank you, sir. Thank you.”No one has ever said anything like that to me before, but I like to believe that I’ve brightened the days of thousands of strangers by letting them know they are recognized and appreciated.Many years ago, an old gentleman named Percy Ross was a client of mine. He’s gone now, and I miss him dearly. His newspaper column, “Thanks a Million,” appeared in more than 800 newspapers across America and I helped him syndicate his daily radio show across more than 400 radio stations.One day after lunch, Percy left our waitress a startling amount of money, then winked at me and said, “He who gives while he lives, knows where it goes.”He...

Twenty-five years ago, I did three important things.The second-most-important of these was the launching of the Monday Morning Memo, even though no one can remember what it’s called. “I’ve been reading your Monday thing for more than 10 years,” is the opening line to my favorite song. I never get tired of hearing it.The third-most-important thing I did in 1994 was fall asleep on a motorcycle and then get run over by a car as I lay unconscious in the middle of the road. “Induced hypothermia” is the medical name for involuntarily falling asleep due to your body temperature plummeting quickly.It was the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving – November 30 – and every retailer on my client list needed reassurance that Santa had not been kidnapped and Christmas had not been cancelled. My day started with ad writing at 2AM and ended with me climbing onto my 1000cc BMW at 10PM to ride home from the office.The sun had fallen far below the horizon and a cold front had swept the warm air away. Jacketless, I shivered as I climbed onto my bike, “Four miles, no stoplights, no traffic. I’ll make it home in record time.”An hour and a half later, I woke up in the emergency room with lots of broken bones, none of which could be set. They kept me overnight – about 12 hours – to make sure I had no internal injuries, then I was back at work at 10:30AM. Christmas and retailers cannot be delayed.I typed with one hand – my uncoordinated left – for more than a year. When my right arm ached, I would reach over with my left hand to pick it up and lay it on the table. But that motorcycle wreck was the least consequential of the 3 things to happen that year and the creation of the Monday Morning Memo was number two, even though the first 100 of those memos would soon become the first book in the Wizard of Ads trilogy.The most important event of 1994 – by far – was that Pennie and I told our sons that each of them could choose any city in the world and I would take them there for a week while the other brother stayed at home with their mom.Rex was 13 that summer. Jake was 11.A week alone in a strange city with your Dad is a fascinating rite-of-passage. It is probably the smartest and best thing I’ve ever done.Allow your son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, friend or neighbor, to choose their city with no guidance, no hints, no suggestions of any kind. They must make the decision all on their own and then announce it.I am amazed at the cities people choose and for the reasons behind their choices.Rex decided he wanted to spend 3 days in Las Vegas, then fly on a tiny airplane to the Grand Canyon where we would spend another 3 days in a series of misadventures.Jacob chose Juneau, Alaska where we went deep-sea fishing, ocean kayaking, panned for gold, landed in a helicopter on the Mendenhall glacier and then wandered dangerously around on the slippery ice as melting water gathered and gushed into infinitely-deep holes big enough for a human to fall into. We spent a week wandering around in that beautiful Alaskan town accessible only by air, water, and rail. Juneau has just 27 miles of pavement and a big part of those miles are the road to the airport. But more than 150 miles of gold mining tunnels hide in the mountains.Rex’s son, Hollister, turned 13 this summer. He chose Long Beach, California. If you’re reading this on Monday, August 19, 2019, Hollister and I are still here. Indy Beagle promised he would post photos of us in the rabbit hole.Hollister’s brother, Gideon, will choose a city two summers from now. Their little sister, Edie, will choose her city in 2029 and Jacob’s son, Vance, will choose his in 2030.Jewish boys look forward to a bar mitzvah when they turn 13, and their sisters look forward to a bat mitzvah at 12 or 13, depending on the tradition of their family.Our family tradition didn’t have a...

Sometimes we buy online to save time.Other times we buy online to save money.So what, exactly, is the “one big thing,” the unique selling proposition of online business?When we can’t wait the day or two for Amazon Prime, we buy from brick-and-mortar companies to save time. And when those stores are having a price-driven event, we buy from them to save money. So what is the “one big thing,” the unique selling proposition of brick-and-mortar?When we have no chosen provider in a product or service category, we look for reasons to have confidence in one company above the others. We’re hoping to find a provider we feel won’t let us down.Did you notice that phrase, “When we have no chosen provider…?”The goal of advertising is to become a person’s chosen provider. They need what you sell. They think of you. They buy from you. The end.During the 25 years I’ve been writing these Monday Morning Memos, I’ve discovered that most of the time my readers agree with me. My writings confirm their suspicions and give voice to their long-held beliefs. But when I play the role of myth-buster, I get an altogether different reaction. I played the role of myth-buster 2 weeks ago.Will you give me a second chance to make myself clear?I profoundly disagree with the belief that Hedgehog Thinking – focusing all your efforts on “one big thing” – is the key to category dominance.But I do agree that singleness of vision, “one big thing,” gives you focus and clarity.Focus and clarity give you energy, enthusiasm, optimism, creativity, problem-solving ability, and stamina. When you lack focus and clarity, you drift aimlessly in the darkness. Jesus spoke of this principle in his famous Sermon on the Mount in the good news of Matthew chapter 6: “When your eye (vision) is single (focused,) your body is full of light. But when your eye is clouded (unclear) your body is full of darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”When Jesus spoke about “one big thing,” he wasn’t talking about category dominance. He was talking about the joy of having a purpose, and the passion that follows.Your passion motivates you.But your passion does not motivate your customers. They have passions and motives of their own.Never let an ad writer convince you that customers will choose you because you are passionate about “one big thing.” It simply isn’t true.We don’t fall in love because of “one big thing.” We fall in love because of “many little things.”Customers will choose you because they like you. And there are many little things that can make them like you. This is why storytelling – advertising – should always come from the “many little things” perspective of the fox.Translated into the language of the ad writer, “many little things” is called benefit stacking. “Many little things” also form the narrative arc of storytelling. And telling stories is how you create customer engagement through advertising. It is how you become the chosen provider.Let your customers see a reflection of themselves in you and they will choose you every time. Your passion is priceless. It is golden. It gives you a sense of purpose. Your passion comes from having an eye that is “single” – focused on one big thing. Your passion is what drives you.Your passion does not drive your customer.Category dominance is rarely determined by passion, or even by quality. You can easily name ten product and service categories whose leaders are not the most passionate companies...

Most non-fiction books are written as reputation builders. We write them because we want to be seen as experts. We want more speaking opportunities, more customers, more recognition. These “how to” books appear to be about the subject matter, but they are really about the author.This sort of reputation-building was the motive behind my Wizard of Ads trilogy.There is a second, less-populated category of non-fiction books whose authors have a different motive. These books appear to be about the author, but look closely and you’ll see they are about the reader.Memoirs, when well-written, reveal the brokenness, the triumphs, and the tragedies of the author. They describe an event-filled journey.Memoirs inspire us and make us believe that we can make a difference. They encourage us, showing us how someone else passed through this dark forest and how we can pass through it, too.We laugh at the silly mistakes, cherish the faithful companions, cry at the suffering and loss, cheer the little victories, and feel that we know the author.Memoirs are not written as reputation builders, but as relationship deepeners.If you want to write a good memoir, you must make yourself vulnerable, revealing all your fears and flaws and secrets. If you don’t, you will be guilty of the sin of Margot Asquith:“The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”Dorothy Parker, in her 1925 New Yorker book reviewof The Autobiography of Margot Asquith.Even worse, they might say of you,“He is a self-made man and he worships his creator.”Vulnerability is the price of intimacy. Confession is the price of trust.Never trust the advice of a man who doesn’t limp.It is our belief systems and our scars that make us who we are.Do you want to build a strong culture in the company you founded? Write your memoirs.Do you want your customers to feel like they know you? Write your memoirs.Do you want to cast your bread upon the waters, pay it forward, help thousands of people you will never meet? Write your memoirs.Do you want your descendants to know who you were, the clay from which they were formed? Write your memoirs.Other people will be faced with the fears you have faced.Other people will make the mistakes you have made.Other people need to know the lessons you have learned.Do you have the humility – the vulnerability – to tell us how you got your limp?Roy H. Williams

In about 650 B.C. the Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”The renaissance scholar Erasmus quoted Archilochus in 1500 in his famous Adagia, saying, “Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.”In 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin expanded on Archilochus and Erasmus in his often-quoted essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox.In 2017, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock completed a 20-year study that contrasted the abilities of the one-big-thing “hedgehog” experts against the many-little-things “fox” non-experts to make accurate predictions about geopolitical events.Does it surprise you to learn that the “fox” non-experts outperformed the “hedgehog” experts by an overwhelming margin?What Tetlock discovered will help you tell the story of your company in a way that will cause customers to feel like they truly know you.American businesspeople tend to believe that every successful business is built on a single big idea, “one big thing.” But sadly, that bit of traditional wisdom is more tradition than wisdom.“One big thing” is hedgehog thinking. But foxes roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously. Foxes know “many little things.”Customers will love the “many little things” story of your company told from the perspective of a fox. The story you need to be telling is the real one, a fascinating tale of hopes and dreams and failures and successes and realizations and refinements.Don’t worry, we’re going to help you write it.In 2011, the fox-like director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, used 100 objects in his museum as prisms through which he told the entire story of our world. That book, A History of the World in 100 Objects, became a wildly popular radio series and a blockbuster New York Times bestseller. The Wall Street Journal called it, “An enthralling and profoundly humane book that every civilized person should read.”The fascinating, riveting, highly-engaging story of your company is hidden in 10 objects that lie within your grasp.Bring those objects with you to Wizard Academy. It is time for “Show and Tell.”Dr. Richard D. Grant is a founding board member of Wizard Academy. Chris Maddock has been a Wizard of Ads writing instructor for 22 years. Tom Wanek is a Wizard of Ads partner with a particular talent for helping people discover wonderful stories that have been hiding in plain sight. These three masters will help you unleash the pivotal moments captured in your photographs, artifacts, and documents, and turn them into the fascinating story of your company’s origin and evolution.This wonderful adventure through time and imagination will happen November 5-6.We’ve only got room for 18 people.Roy H. Williams

Have you ever casually started down a path and then the journey got a life of its own?The White Rabbit appears in chapter one, inexplicably wearing a waistcoat. So what does Alice do? She follows him down the rabbit hole.&nbsp;There’s just no turning back after a decision like that.The journey is alive and it’s bigger than you.At twenty, I followed a White Rabbit and became an ad writer.At forty, I wrote&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads&nbsp;and it became Business Book of the Year.At sixty, I announced I was going to create The Ad Writers Masters Class for The American Small Business Institute and that its graduates would be qualified for admission into The Ad Writer’s Guild.The journey got a life of its own.Becoming an AdMaster will be like becoming a Black Belt in the art of ad writing.I expressed my biggest fear about that 52-week online class in last week’s Monday Morning Memo. Did you read it?“I sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert&nbsp;how&nbsp;a thing is done, we now have the ability to&nbsp;do&nbsp;that thing expertly. But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency. And then there is a second long and winding road from Proficiency to Authority.”My partner Jeff Sexton read that and immediately sent me a video featuring Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program&nbsp;This American Life.“Nobody tells people who are beginners – I really wish somebody had told this to me – is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. Okay? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite good. But, your taste – the thing that got you into the game – your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is a disappointment to you.”“A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. The thing that I would say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through a phase of years where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short.”“Everyone goes through that, and if you’re going through it right now, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you could do is&nbsp;do a lot of work.&nbsp;Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. The work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”“It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that. Okay?”When I followed up on that idea of becoming a black belt, I learned that it was a far more accurate comparison than I had realized. WIKIPEDIA says,“In Japanese martial arts;&nbsp;the&nbsp;shodan&nbsp;black belt is not the end of training, but rather a beginning to advanced learning: the individual now ‘knows how to walk’ and may thus begin the ‘journey.'”When The Ad Writers Masters Class is finally announced, I hope you’ll consider it. And if you decide to pursue your black belt in ad writing, I hope you’ll remember that there’s a&nbsp;long and winding road from Information to Proficiency.In the meantime, you can learn&nbsp;How to Become a YouTube Influencer.&nbsp;Not that it’s any easier. But that class is fully polished and&nbsp;<a...

Pennie and I have criteria we use to judge the success of Wizard Academy. In a recent meeting of the board of directors, they asked us to share those criteria with them.I began by saying, “A non-profit educational organization would be foolish to judge its success by its revenues. And we would be equally foolish to judge our success by the number of people who attend classes. When we complete The House of the Lost Boys, we’ll be able to accommodate 24 students per class. But we have just 40 classes per year. Nine hundred and sixty students per year is our self-imposed maximum and we’ve been hovering at that number for a long time. The goal is the high-touch sharing of valuable insights, processes, formulas, tips and lessons with self-selected insiders who had to pass through a lot of filters to even hear about this place and then cross a lot of barriers to get here.”“So how, exactly, do you measure success?” asked one of the board members.“Three things, ” I answered.“Number one is how often we hear reports from students saying they went home and implemented the things they learned and it made a gigantic difference.”“Number two is how often they return for additional classes. Because this tells us they had a great experience the first time.”“Number three is the number of newcomers who were told to come by someone who had already been here.”“Results, Returns, and Referrals,” echoed 38-year-old Ryan Deiss as he nodded his head in affirmation.“I thought I made those criteria up!” I said. “Are you telling me they’re a known thing?”“They’re not widely known, but all the better schools use those criteria,” he said.Manley Miller is another 38-year-old that the board has asked to fill the position of a member who has been serving for 20 years and has announced he will be retiring next year.In Manley’s not-yet-published book, he writes,“When you have a talent for something, you have an&nbsp;aptitude.&nbsp;But when you become a master of it, you have&nbsp;proficiency.”“When you have something to say that is worth hearing, you have&nbsp;wisdom.&nbsp;But when people are willing to listen to you, you have&nbsp;authority.”Manley says he learned that from reading the Bible. “Jesus spoke with wisdom in the Temple when he was 12 years old, but when he was 30, he spoke with authority. You’ve got to add a lot of experience to your wisdom before you can speak with authority.”A few days later, Rex Williams, another 38-year-old board member said,“We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions. Likewise, we judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by the depth of our feelings, but others judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by our words.”Rex went on to say,“Millions of people are involved in social media, podcasting, video blogging, ad writing, book writing, speech writing. Everyone wants to be heard, but few learn&nbsp;how&nbsp;to be heard.”Listening to these 38-year-olds, I had a revelation.Let’s say you have an aptitude for communication, (because you probably do.)You’re still going to need:Information, which becomesKnowledge, which leads toExperience, which leads toProficiency, which gives youWisdom, which gives youDeeper Experience, which gives youAuthorityI sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert&nbsp;how&nbsp;a thing is done, we now have the ability to&nbsp;do&nbsp;that thing expertly.But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency.And then there is a second long and winding road from...

When you’re in “inside” sales, customers come to you.When you’re in “outside” sales, you go looking for customers.When I was a baby ad-man in outside sales, I had the good fortune to spend a day with Gene Chamberlain. He taught me three things that day that made me a lot of money. Today I’m going to teach those things to you.A:&nbsp;When You’re in Outside Sales, You’ve Got to Prune Your Account List.There are only 24 hours in the day and no way to get any more. Outside salespeople run out of time long before they run out of opportunity.If you’re in outside sales, this is how to prune your account list:Look at your total billing for the past 12 months.Divide that dollar amount by the number of accounts on your list.This will give you an “average annual yield” per account.Give away every account that spent less than that amount with you last year.Sell no new accounts that are going to spend less than that amount with you this year.When you run out of time again, repeat this exercise.Follow these steps and you’ll see your sales volume spiral higher and higher.B:&nbsp;Always Add, “Which Means…”No matter how well we understand features and benefits, we too often name a feature and assume our prospective customer knows the benefits. What I’m about to teach you will increase the impact of your sales presentations and the effectiveness of your ad copy, even when your customer does already understand the benefits of the feature you named.Always add “which means…” after every feature you name. You can add these words verbally, or you can add them silently, but this habit will bridge you into language the customer can see in their mind.“This blade is made of Maxamet steel which means you’ll never have to sharpen it.”“This is a 52-week schedule which means your name will become the one people think of immediately and feel the best about.”“I’m going to write your campaign in a conversational style which means the customer will categorize you in their mind as a friend.”C:&nbsp;When Asked, “How much?” the First Digit of a Number Should Always be the First Syllable Out of Your Mouth.I was one of only a few advertising people in the room on that fateful day I met with Gene Chamberlain. He said, “When a customer says the word ‘How’ followed by the word ‘much,’ there is only one intelligent way to answer that question: Take a breath and name a number and then – without pausing – name everything that is included in that price at no extra charge.”Most of the crowd sold mobile homes, so Gene used their industry in his example.“A man wants to buy a mobile home, so he drives up and down mobile home row, then back to his office. He saw two mobile homes he liked, never realizing it was the same model on two different lots.”“So he calls the first mobile home dealer and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ The first dealer said, “Sir, you have an eye for quality! That’s a Northwind mobile home. Those are made in Minnesota where it gets really cold, so they’re extremely energy efficient. That mobile home is made with 2 by 6 lumber instead of 2 by 4s, and it comes fully furnished and fully carpeted and with all your major appliances…” Gene stopped in mid-sentence and said, “The customer was no longer listening, he just wanted off the phone. He was thinking, ‘That mobile home is overpriced and the salesman knows it.'”Gene looked at us for several seconds before he continued,“So the man calls the second dealership and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ ‘Thirty-four thousand two hundred and seventy dollars,’ the second salesman answered, ‘which includes at no extra charge, vaulted ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace in an open-concept floorplan, every room furnished with your choice of Bassett or Broyhill...

I was bagging my groceries when the checker handed me my receipt and said, “Happy Yesterday.” Unsure of the correct response, I just smiled at him and nodded.A few moments later I realized he had said, “Happy rest-of-your-day.” But that brief exchange put my mind on an interesting track: can we choose to have a happy yesterday?Strangely, we can. According to a number of studies published since 2012, we don’t really remember the events in our lives. We remember only our last memory of those events.&nbsp;Events in our memories alter and morph with each retrieval until, finally, we are “remembering” things that never really happened.The first of these studies was conducted at Northwestern University and published in&nbsp;the&nbsp;Journal of Neuroscience.On September 19, 2012,&nbsp;journalist Marla Paul wrote,“Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling.”“Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time.”“‘A memory is not simply an image produced by time-traveling back to the original event,'” says Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the&nbsp;Journal of Neuroscience.&nbsp;‘Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.’”In a subsequent&nbsp;article in&nbsp;Psychology Today,&nbsp;we read,“Not only are our memories faulty, our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by. Memories are malleable constructs that are reconstructed with each recall. What we remember changes each time we recall the event. The slightly changed memory is now embedded as ‘real,’ only to be reconstructed with the next recall. Memory isn’t like a file in our brain, but more like a story that is edited every time we tell it. We attach emotional details with each re-telling. Not only do we alter the story, we alter our feelings about it.”We unconsciously choose to alter these emotional details and feelings for better, or for worse. To make ourselves happier, or more miserable.I vote for remembering happiness. “Have a happy yesterday.”“But Roy,” I can hear you say, “you’re saying that we should lie to ourselves.”No, I’m simply saying that you’re already lying to yourself when you believe that you recall past events accurately.The simple, scientific truth is that you colorize events each time you recall them. I’m merely suggesting that you consider the colors you are choosing.Will they be dark, sad, angry colors? Or will they be warm and happy ones?Roy H. Williams

Vertical thinking is step-by-step, procedural, outcome-focused. It helps you get things done.Always asking, “What is the obvious next step?” vertical thinking leads to incremental evolution and refinement. It is a ratchet that maintains what you’ve accomplished, then “click,” gives you a little bit more. The Japanese call it&nbsp;kaizen,&nbsp;“continuous improvement.”Vertical knowledge is narrow and deep. Specialized. Expert. Orderly.Horizontal thinking is boundless and broad. It is a searchlight that spots anomalies in a sea of similarities. It is the network of intersections in a map of metaphors. It is a detective that solves puzzles by seeing patterns, connections and relationships.Intuitive and instinctive, horizontal thinking leads to innovations by asking, “What doesn’t belong, and why?” It is a magnet that pulls the needle from the haystack.&nbsp;Linguists call this the&nbsp;Aha! moment&nbsp;or the&nbsp;eureka moment, that common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.Horizontal knowledge knows a little bit about everything. It is chaotic, pattern-seeking, creative.Every healthy person thinks vertically and horizontally, though most of us tend to prefer one or the other.The most effective partnerships have one partner who prefers to think vertically and another who prefers to think horizontally. These partners are the makers of miracles when they’re not driving each other crazy.Do you have a strong preference for one type of thinking? The first major milestone on your journey to success will be to find a partner who is your opposite. A person who brings the Willy to your Wonka.But that’s the easy part. That hard part is to respect that person’s opinion and take action on it, even when your instinct is to dismiss it out-of-hand as “irrelevant.”Chances are, you’ve got that person in your life already. Probably more than one. So here’s a suggestion: the next time they offer an opinion, or a possible solution, look at it as a valuable gift that needs to be opened and examined.You’re going to be surprised at the difference it makes.Roy H. Williams

Back in those days you didn’t shoot nobody unless they really needed shootin’.So when someone showed you a gun, you knew there was a reason. You didn’t always know what that reason was, so the polite thing to do was ask.“What’s with the hog leg?”“Keeps folks from takin’ the cash box.”“I just want a watermelon. You sellin’? Or just sittin’ here showin’ em off?”The truck was a 1950 International Harvester that had been ugly since the day it was born and the boy was a 1955 Hatfield with a homemade haircut that wasn’t gonna win no prizes, either. He looked to be about eleven.“We’re sellin’. Seventy-five cents.”I dropped three quarters into the slot in his tackle box and heard the slosh of a hundred others when he slid it under the truck seat where he’d been sleeping.“Take your pick,” he said.“You choose.”“They’re equal good.”I flipped him another quarter and he dropped it in his pocket. Barefoot, he clambered to the top of the pile and reached to a spot behind the cab. It was worth the extra quarter.“Truck not runnin’?”“We always sell a few after dark and this is a good spot. Didn’t want to give it up.”“Your daddy’s smart.”“Don’t have a daddy.”“Granddaddy, then.”“Don’t have to be smart to stay parked in a good spot. Just common sense.”“He’s smart for teaching you how to flash that hog leg without pointin’ it.”“Illegal to point it.”“I know. And your granddaddy’s smart for makin’ sure you know.”He held it out to me on an open palm. “Walker Colt. Belonged to my granddaddy’s daddy.”I looked at it and nodded, “Nice one,” but I didn’t touch it.&nbsp;My granddaddy taught me, too.I said, “Want some watermelon?”“Whatcha thinkin’?”“Sell me one for 35 cents and I’ll split it with you.”“Eat it here?”I nodded. He reached into his pocket and with a quick flick of his wrist produced a slender, 7-inch blade.“This time you choose,” he said. Two minutes later I laid my fingertip on a melon and made eye contact. He smiled. “You picked a good one. What’s your name?”“Roy.”“I’m Mack.” He quartered the melon and then with a barely perceptible motion folded the blade against his hip and slipped the knife back into his pocket. The hand became an open palm. “You owe me 35 cents.”I dropped a dime and a quarter into it. We both sat on the tailgate and began eating melon. “I’m named after my granddaddy. You named after your granddaddy, Mack?”He laid his hand on the knife in his pocket as he shook his head slowly from side to side. “After my daddy.” Mack changed the subject. “You don’t look old enough to drive,” he said.I smiled, “The police think I do.”“You fifteen?” he asked. I nodded.I let the subject of his daddy lay for a few minutes as we ate the heart of the melon in silence. When we were done eatin’ and I had put my 75-cent melon in the passenger-side floorboard, Mack said, “Your mama didn’t raise no fools, Roy.”“Why do you say?”“Most people put the melon in the seat. Then when they hit the brakes, the melon rolls into the floorboard and busts.”“How do you know?”Mack smiled, “’cause they always come back and buy another melon.”I started the car, put it in reverse, and started to sing softly,&nbsp;“Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear. And it shows them pearly white.”I heard Mack’s voice in the darkness,&nbsp;“Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe. And he keeps it, out of sight.”I turned on the headlights but Mack was already lying down in the seat of the truck again, falling asleep with his great granddaddy’s hog leg pistol and the knife his daddy left him.Roy H. Williams

Amateur ad writers assume everyone makes decisions based upon the same criteria they use. This causes them to unconsciously frame their messages to reach people exactly like themselves.Professional ad writers frame their messages to speak to the felt needs of a specific consumer.People are multi-dimensional. We make decisions to purchase based on a variety of criteria, but two of the big ones are&nbsp;Time&nbsp;and&nbsp;Money.“Time and Money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Pennie WilliamsA person who feels they have no money and no time is buried in financial and relational obligations.A person who believes they have more time than money is a bargain hunter.A person who has more money than time is overworked and highly paid.A person with lots of money and time is looking for something to do.Consciously or unconsciously, every ad is framed to speak to one of those four perspectives.It isn’t really about whether we can afford to spend the money. It’s about whether we FEEL we can afford to spend it. A person may feel they have the time, but not the money, to purchase a product in one category, but later that day feel they have the money, but not the time, to purchase a different product in a different category.We evaluate messages – news, information, and advertising – based on&nbsp;Relevance&nbsp;and&nbsp;Credibility:Relevance:&nbsp;“Does it matter to me? Do I care about this?”Credibility:&nbsp;“Do I believe it?”A message high in relevance but low in credibility is hype.“I would be interested if I believed you.”A message low in relevance but high in credibility is a tedious waste of time.“I believe you, I’m just not interested.”Are you speaking to the felt needs of your customer, or are you speaking only to yourself?Are the things you’re saying believable, or do they sound like unsubstantiated hype?Identity Reinforcement&nbsp;and&nbsp;Self-Expression:We buy much of what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.&nbsp;A surprisingly high percentage of purchases are about self-expression.We bond with organizations that show us a reflection of our best self-image. When we perceive that an organization shares our outlook and our beliefs, we prefer them and their products.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Indy said to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’s waiting for you in&nbsp;the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

The Jewish Sabbath begins each Friday at sunset because the fifth verse of Genesis reads, “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”Every beginning starts with an ending.Thirteen colonies became 13 “united states” when our fight for freedom ended and our government under a Constitution began in 1789. This was the beginning of the first America, a land of freedom and opportunity.Those “united states” became somewhat less united during our Civil War of 1861 to 1865. More about that later.In 1880 and 1881, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington headed west to capture memories of a time they saw to be ending. Their paintings and sculptures of the Wild West now sell for millions of dollars.Teddy Roosevelt took the last traces of the Wild West to Cuba in 1898 when he led his “rough riders” to the top of a now-famous hill during the Spanish-American War. His arrival on that hill signaled the ending of the Wild West, the ending of the Spanish Empire, and the ending of the first America.The second America began when Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1901. America was now a land of achievement, a World Power, a nation of cars and department stores and Coca-Cola, electric lights, running water and tract houses.We fought two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Desert Storm before the end of that century and we taught our children that anyone could work as a tradesman, but if you wanted a “good-paying job” you needed to go to college.It took 112 years to move from the end of our fight for freedom to Teddy Roosevelt’s land of achievement and the beginning of the second America in 1901.In 2013 – one hundred and twelve years after Teddy took the White House – we saw the unwinding of achievement and the beginning of the third America, a land of virtual reality, virtual currency, and virtual ownership. Massive multiplayer online games, Bitcoin and Uber, Facebook and Twitter, Google and Airbnb.*2013 also marked the halfway point in the upswing of society’s pendulum toward the zenith of our current “We.”The halfway point in the upswing of a “We” is where we begin to take a good thing too far. We shift from “fighting together for the common good” to simply “fighting together.” Western Civilization has done this every 8th decade for the past 3,000 years.I wrote at length about this in&nbsp;Pendulum&nbsp;a number of years ago. Do you remember that book?1783 marked the ending of our Revolutionary War.1783 was the zenith of a “We.”1863 marked the middle of our Civil War.1863 was the zenith of a “We.”1943 marked the middle of WWII.1943 was the zenith of a “We.”2023 will mark the zenith of our current “We.”I wonder what we’ll be in the middle of, then?It is important to remember that the swinging of society’s pendulum between the zeniths of the “Me” (1983) and the “We” (2023) is a sociological swing, not a psychological one.Sociology is the study of the values and beliefs and motives of people groups. Psychology is the study of the values, beliefs, and motives of the individual.Let’s talk some more about endings. And sociology.Scientific American&nbsp;recently published&nbsp;the definitive explanation of why the final season of&nbsp;Game of Thrones&nbsp;fell short&nbsp;of the mark set by George R.R. Martin. According to&nbsp;Zeynep Tufekci, we loved the first 7 seasons of the show because, “it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a...

Life is a series of unintended consequences.Things almost never turn out the way we plan.I remember this single-panel cartoon I read many years ago. Two men on a sidewalk are carrying briefcases. One of them says to the other, “Here’s an idea. Let’s buy a grocery store tabloid and bury it in the park with a copy of our 5-year plan. Then we’ll come back in 5 years and dig them both up and see which one is funnier.”I don’t have “goals” and I don’t have “plans”; because I don’t want to live with the pressure, guilt, and bondage those words seem to always bring with them.Plans are based on assumptions that wiggle away like greased piglets when you try to hang onto them.Detailed plans are the wishful thinking of a scientific mind.Instead of goals, I have objectives.Goals have deadlines, objectives do not.When we began building the Wizard Academy campus 16 years ago, I thought it would take us about 5 years. Right now we’re hoping we can be finished in the next 12 to 18 months. Okay, so it took 3 and 1/2 times as long as I thought it would, but that’s fine because we didn’t have a “goal” and we didn’t have a “plan.” We had an&nbsp;objective&nbsp;that we pursued in accordance with a guiding&nbsp;principle:&nbsp;Never borrow money.For sixteen years people have asked me about the timeline and the budget for building our campus and they always seem confused by my answer, “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.”We built when we had money. We quit building when we did not. The final outcome was never in question. The only variable was how long it would take.Here’s another guiding principle: “When something really matters, don’t worry about how long it will take. The time will pass anyway.”My more disciplined friends tell me that putting timelines on their goals puts a healthy pressure on them to perform. These same friends also complain about the debilitating stress they face every day.Do you have plans that aren’t proceeding as planned? Are your goals wiggling away from you like a greased piglet? Consider the advice of Arianna Huffington, “Just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker.”When I was 20, a wealthy man gave me this advice: “Plan your work, and work your plan.”A couple of years later policemen led him away from his home with his hands cuffed behind his back. I doubt that being arrested for financial crimes was part of his plan.Today I offer you this advice: Choose what you hope to change and make a tiny bit of progress toward it every day. When you commit to a daily action – not an outcome – you will find that passion and hope and serendipity will soon come knocking at your door. You’ll find yourself in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, in the right way. Not because you had a detailed plan, but because you made a commitment and you followed it up with daily action.By the way, changing the balance in your bank account isn’t an objective, it’s merely the consequence of daily actions. So make your commitment to something bigger than that. And remember the words of Wes Jackson, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”Roy H. Williams

My 9-year old grandson, Gideon, asked a big favor of me the other day.“Poobah, I have 11 imaginary friends who need to start staying at your house.”“Okay. Can they all sleep upstairs?”“They could, but I doubt they’ll ever all be here at the same time.”Gideon told me what I needed to know about each of them and which ones would often go out wandering for days at a time – and not to worry about it – and which ones would come and go through the windows and who would sleep exactly where.There was only one imaginary friend who was going to continue staying at Gideon’s house.I am no stranger to imaginary friends. Indy and I have several of them.I, myself, am an imaginary friend.Brian Scudamore, Erik Church, David St. James, and James Alish are the primary leaders of O2E Brands. I write ads for their four franchises. A number of years ago, these guys began bringing groups of their top-performing Franchise Partners to meet “the wizard in the castle on the mountain in Texas.”Okay, I can play that role. All I have to do is unlock the majestic tower Pennie created and give a tour of the magical campus she created that surrounds it.But Brian and Erik and David and James had an altogether different plan.Unbeknownst to me, they told their Franchise Partners that every newcomer was required to present me with a gift when they met me. And that the gift had to be deeply meaningful. And they had to tell me a story about it when they presented it. And if their gifts and stories were acceptable, I would invite them upstairs to spend some time with me.I was, of course, embarrassed at first, but this little ritual in the underground art gallery became precious as time went by.&nbsp;These awkward encounters taught me the importance of the imaginary people in our lives.The people you admire from a distance – the authors you read, the actors who entertain you, the voices on the radio that sing to you, and the faces on Youtube that peer into your eyes – are imaginary people that inhabit your world.The character is always bigger than the actor who brings it to life.I recently received an illustrated letter containing 7 questions from a young boy named Bennett.I will conclude today’s memo by answering Bennett’s questions:Can you make 2 suns?No, I cannot speak 2 suns into the physical world, but I can speak 2 suns into your mind. “As Bennett stood in his front yard in the middle of the night, the darkness on his left melted away when a glowing, silver circle began to rise up out of the ground. When that circle of light was as high as his left shoulder, a golden ball began to rise out of the ground on his right. And when the light from the gold ball touched the silver, 12 sleeping flowers lifted their heads, 9 hummingbirds flew away, 6 big dogs barked in Spanish, 3 policemen blew their whistles, and one old rooster crowed cock-a-doodle-do.”Can you make a copy machine?Yes. If I press special numbers on my telephone and say, “I want a copy machine,”&nbsp;a copy machine will appear the next day.How many floors are in your castle?Five: The Art Gallery, the Banquet Hall, the Eye of the Storm, the Library Floor, and the Star Deck.Can you make a camera?Yes. When I touch a certain button on my computer, a camera will appear on my front porch two days later.Can you make a crayon box?Yes, I make crayon boxes the same way I make cameras.Do you have a wizard family?Yes, there are 46 other wizards in my family. Indiana Beagle will put some photos of them in&nbsp;the rabbit hole&nbsp;for you.Do you have any...

Have you ever seen a photographer look through a rectangle of forefingers and thumbs to “frame” a potential shot?Framing is even more important when using words to capture images.Advertising, like every other kind of storytelling, should always begin with a framing sequence.From what&nbsp;angle&nbsp;will you approach your subject?What will be&nbsp;revealed?What will be&nbsp;excluded?Most importantly, what will be only&nbsp;partially revealed,&nbsp;requiring your reader to supply the parts that are missing?In the prologue of John Steinbeck’s&nbsp;Sweet Thursday,&nbsp;a character explains the attraction of the&nbsp;partial reveal:&nbsp;“I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”“Mr. Jenkins?”“Yes, Bobby.”“How much should a hamster weigh?”We know from this framing sequence that Bobby respects the wisdom of Mr. Jenkins and feels comfortable enough around him to ask whatever is on his mind. And because Bobby feels comfortable, we feel comfortable, too. We find out later that Mr. Jenkins owns an air conditioning company.Another ad opens like this:“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me to work on every system like it was for&nbsp;my mom.”These 3 employee voices frame Mr. Jenkins as a person who loves his mother and who hires people who love their mothers. We also know that Mr. Jenkins believes his customers deserve care, concern, and commitment. But the ad doesn’t make these claims; we come to these conclusions on our own because of the partial reveal.“I think I know why Ken Goodrich hired me to run his plumbing company.”The famous owner of an air conditioning company is now in the plumbing business, too. And the person who runs that company for him is straightforward, plainspoken, and willing to tell us what he thinks. We arrive at these conclusions after just 14 words of framing. This is how the public was introduced to Zach Hunt.The next ad begins:“Zach, have you ever heard of the 7-year itch?”This 10-word frame skyrockets our curiosity. We want to hear Zach’s answer and learn where Ken Goodrich is headed with this question.“Five years before Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders, Simon Schiffman stepped off the train to stretch his legs.”Two heroic icons of American history 125 years ago…&nbsp;An unknown man steps off a train… Framing has set the stage. Now captivate your customer’s attention by surprising them with what happens next.Roy H. Williams

Have you found your identity?Do you know your purpose?Are you ready for your adventure?Identity:&nbsp;Who am I?Purpose:&nbsp;Why am I here?Adventure:&nbsp;What must I overcome?Identity&nbsp;is your self-image; a composite of your beliefs, your preferences, and your relationships. Bits and pieces of your identity will evolve with your experiences, but other bits are carved into your bones, unseeable and unchangeable.Advertising moves you when it connects with your identity.Purpose&nbsp;is like a strobe light, revealing an ever-changing series of tableaus that demand your attention. But that intermittent, guiding light comes from a single place. And that place is your identity.Who are the people inside your circle of light?In one instance, your purpose is to lend a listening ear, to make sure a person knows they have been heard.&nbsp;In another instance, your purpose is to defend someone who is unable to defend themselves.&nbsp;In a third instance, your purpose is to give guidance to someone who needs it.If you don’t know why you are here – or if you have no clue what to do – it’s because you don’t know who you are.“Finding your passion” is you focused on you.“Finding your purpose” is you focused on others.Quit looking for your passion. Step up to your purpose and let your passion find you.&nbsp;All it takes is commitment.When we’re having an adventure, we wish we were safe at home. But when we’re safe at home, we wish we were having an adventure.Adventure&nbsp;is just a fancy word for trouble.Dewey Jenkins told me that trouble presents itself as a problem to be solved and our adventure lies in finding a way to overcome it. If you ignore the problem, hide from it, rage against it, or cower in fear before it, it will just return again and again until you have finally learned how to defeat it.Mr. Jenkins told me that’s when it’s time to celebrate, celebrate, celebrate! Now that you’ve learned how to defeat it, you’ll never have that problem again. But don’t worry, a new and different problem is coming up the trail to meet you and it’s wearing an evil grin.The defeated person sees life as a series of difficulties, disappointments, and dilemmas. The victorious person sees life as an adventure consisting of puzzles to be solved, battles to be fought, and problems to be overcome.Do you think this is all just a mind game; that all we’re really doing is giving our problems a new name and looking at them from a new perspective?How very perceptive of you! That’s exactly what we’re doing.But which of those two people do you think is happiest?Roy H. Williams

Paul Compton and “Jackie” Floyd walked to grade school together in 1934. Their mothers, Clara and Ruby, rented rooms in the same boarding house in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.Paul Compton was Princess Pennie’s father.It was Pennie’s grandmother, Clara, that answered the boarding house telephone on October 22, the night the bad news came.Paul Compton’s friend, Jackie Dempsey Floyd, was interviewed on television twenty-eight years ago. Jackie was 68 years old at the time:“When I was born, I was born at my aunt’s house – my mother’s aunt – and it was during the wintertime, and my father went to the mirror with me and held me up to the side of his face and says, ‘Oh, look! He looks just like me!’ And you know how kids will do their hands? I was doing my hands like that and he said, ‘Oh look, he’s going be a fighter. We’re going to call him Jack Dempsey.’ But my mother wouldn’t go for it. She went for part of the name, but I thought that was kind of nice, that he did that.”Jackie’s father was born in 1904, three years before Oklahoma became a state, back when it was still called “Indian Territory.”“My father had a nice sense of humor. He’d always keep people laughing and everything. And in the short time I got to be with him, I got to know him pretty well. And he was always kidding around with my mother and everything, and keeping her laughing, and he’d cook for us. I remember one time he took me fishing. So we went up in the mountains somewhere to a lake, and we couldn’t get the fish to bite, but it was a very clear lake and we could see them, and he said, ‘You know what we ought to do? We ought to shoot those fish, if we can’t catch them.’ So he let me shoot the gun into the water like we were going to shoot a fish, but we didn’t get one, but he thought it was something I might like to do.”Jackie Floyd was born not many years and not many miles from where Mark Twain wrote&nbsp;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.“And my mother was always afraid that I was going to be kidnapped, for some reason or other, but anyhow, these larger boys had a pulley in one tree and it went down to another. And you could get up in this bucket and ride from one tree down to the other. Kind of like a carnival ride or something. It was fascinating fun and I stayed after dark. And I went home and my mother was scared to death. And she told my father, ‘You know, you’ve never given him a whipping. It’s your turn to discipline him.’ And it had been raining that day and I had a raincoat on, so he said, ‘Okay, I’ll whip him.’ So he took me in the bathroom and said, “You take that raincoat off and put it over the toilet stool, and every time I hit it with the belt, you yell.’ So he was beating the raincoat and I was yelling and my mother was trying to break the door down. She said, ‘I didn’t tell you to kill him, I just told you to give him a spanking!” But he didn’t hit me. Never in his life did he ever hit me.”When Paul Compton’s mother, Clara, answered that boarding house telephone on October 22, 1934, “the night the bad news came,” she was informed that Jackie’s father had been shot and killed by the FBI.“You’re constantly running and hiding and you don’t know when you’re going to get to see anybody. You might have to sleep in the woods. It’s just a miserable life. It might look exciting to somebody, but you look at the end, the way it came down and everything: he was constantly on the run. He might have had a lot of money at one time or other, but it never did him any good. And you’ve no place to go and really relax or have fun, like you should be able to.”But Jackie understood why his father did what he did.“This bank had taken his grandfather’s money – which he had in the bank – and his grandfather had asked the banker, the day before the bank went bad, if his money was safe. And he told him it was. And evidently the bank started up again. So my father

Talent is Unconscious Competence;&nbsp;a superpower you were born with.&nbsp;People born with a superpower usually have difficulty teaching it to you.Skills are Conscious Competence;&nbsp;acquired excellence, learned behavior.&nbsp;People who acquire their skills through study and practice usually make excellent instructors.Talented people are tricky to manage. If you tell them what to do, they will do it to the best of their ability, but the outcome won’t be nearly so wonderful as it might have been had you simply inspired them instead.To inspire a talented person, describe – in abstract terms – the impact you desire. Fill your description with similes and metaphors, such as, “I want people to feel springtime and butterflies and the first kiss of puppy love. I want them to feel new beginnings, forgiveness, fresh hope, and a clean slate.”Your talented person will then surprise you with something you never imagined.I stumbled onto this technique by happy accident in 1980 when a start-up needed a logo. Pennie and I had recently met a graphic artist at a church event, so I contacted him for guidance. When it came to shapes and colors and symbols and signals, Jim Collum lived in a world of his own.He was tentative, reclusive, and moody. But I can speak those languages.Have you heard of&nbsp;Portals and the Twelve Languages of the Mind,&nbsp;the class on multidisciplinary communications at Wizard Academy? I can trace the beginnings of that class back to the 5 or 6 conversations I had with Jim Collum 39 years ago.He agreed to design my logo for $500, exactly the amount I had budgeted. My new problem was that I had to tell a professional artist who was twice my age what I wanted, and I had no idea what I was doing.I was swimming in waters too deep for me, so I did the only thing I knew how to do; I gave Jim a list of metaphors and asked him to design a logo that communicated their common denominator.“Jim, have you ever played Monopoly?”“Sure.”“You know the guy on the cards with the top hat and the monocle?”“The Monopoly Man doesn’t have a monocle. You’ve got him confused with Mr. Peanut.”“Okay, imagine the Monopoly Man wearing the monocle of Mr. Peanut. To me, a top hat and a monocle say, ‘generations-old money’. A dark grey Mercedes sedan. A diamond tie tack. An ivy-covered country club. Safe. Established. Zero-risk. Exclusive. Like a Swiss bank account.”“Got it. Come back in a week.”Somewhere in the detritus of my disorganized life I have a copy of that logo. I wish I could find it for you. It was a perfect square made of 4 smaller squares that were separated by a narrow, void margin: an intersection graph.Three of those quadrants were a darkish, silvery-grey, but the&nbsp;upper-left square was black.&nbsp;And the lower-right quadrant of that black square was 24-carat gold; the glint of light off a monocle. A diamond tie-tack.It was a purely abstract logo that communicated everything I had said to Jim. Everyone who looked at it saw, ‘old money…&nbsp;safe, established, zero-risk, exclusive, like a Swiss bank account.’That golden square was just one-sixteenth of the logo but it commanded all the attention. It was the upper-left quadrant of an invisible square you perceived at the center of the logo.It was the glint of light you see at the edge of the pupil in an eye.Jim never explained any of this to me, but I saw it immediately and so did everyone else.I believe everyone is a genius. Everyone has a superpower. Every person has a hidden talent.Your job is to uncover that talent and inspire it.&nbsp;We do this for our children and grandchildren.Perhaps we should also do it for our co-workers and our friends.Indy is waiting for you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

One hundred and seventy-four years ago, America’s 11th president sent John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico, authorizing him to pay the Mexican government up to $25 million for their territories in New Mexico and California. When Mexico refused to consider the offer of President James K. Polk, he sent 4,000 troops to occupy land near the Rio Grande—a region Mexico claimed as its own.Mexico responded by sending troops, and on April 25, 1846, an American patrol was attacked by&nbsp;Mexican cavalry. Polk loudly accused Mexico of shedding “American blood on American soil!” and congress immediately voted to declare war on Mexico.Freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln argued that President Polk had goaded the Mexicans into a fight on Mexican soil, and that the war was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.” He labeled “Mr. Polk’s War” a shameless land grab, and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where that first battle of the war took place.Lincoln’s furious “Spot Resolutions” made his reputation as a politician, but damaged him with his with pro-war constituents. One Illinois newspaper even branded him “the Benedict Arnold of our district,” and his own Whig party did not allow him to be renominated at the end of his congressional term.The Mexican–American War was the first American war to be covered by&nbsp;mass media, creating widespread public interest and support. Telegraphed reports of victory from the battlefield sparked wildfire excitement and kept Americans emotionally united when they read about those battles in the penny press.1.&nbsp;&nbsp;New York City celebrated the double-victory at Veracruz and Buena Vista with fireworks and a grand procession of 400,000 people.The Mexican-American War had a higher rate of casualties than WWI or WWII. It was a nasty, brutal war, with diseases killing as many as did cannons, rifles, and swords.In late 1847, President Polk sent a State Department clerk, Nicholas P. Trist, south of the border to negotiate a peace treaty with the Mexicans. The talks proceeded slowly, so Polk ordered Trist to end the talks and return home. But Trist, believing he was on the verge of a breakthrough, disobeyed the president’s order and sent home a 65-page letter defending his decision to continue his efforts toward peace.Polk was furious. He said Trist was “destitute of honor or principle!” and tried to have him removed, but was unable to stop the negotiations in Mexico. Two months later, Trist finalized the miraculous Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. In that treaty, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and awarded Trist all or part of the future states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.President Polk reluctantly accepted the deal, then fired Trist the moment he returned to the United States.I share these things to cheer you up.Did you think our current political climate meant that we had lost our way as a nation? Don’t worry even a little bit. A clear-eyed study of history reveals that no nation of people has ever lived up to its potential.We are no more – and no less – screwed up than we have always been.L’chaim.Roy H. Williams1.&nbsp;Beginning in 1830, inexpensive newspapers became possible following the shift from hand-crafted to steam-powered printing. Famous for costing one cent while other newspapers cost around 6 cents, penny press papers made the news accessible to&nbsp;the masses.

MANLEY:&nbsp;I’m making things more&nbsp;efficient.DAVE:&nbsp;How?MANLEY:&nbsp;Abbreviations.DAVE:&nbsp;Give me an example.MANLEY:&nbsp;&nbsp;LOL.&nbsp;I text that to my plumbers to remind them&nbsp;to LOOK…OUT… for LEAKS.DAVE:&nbsp;You’re texting that?MANLEY:&nbsp;Yep. And sometimes the guys text back “D-K.”&nbsp;That means DRAIN… CLOGGED.DAVE:&nbsp;But clog is spelled with a C.MANLEY:&nbsp;Not in internet talk, Dave. Other times they text me that the&nbsp;WATER… TANK’s…&nbsp;FINE.DAVE:&nbsp;Do they ever text LMAO?MANLEY:&nbsp;Sure. That means LOOKIN’… MIGHTY… A-OHDAVE:&nbsp;A-OH?MANLEY:&nbsp;That’s short for “A-Okay.” Dave, you need to learn internet talk.© 2019, Roy H. WilliamsWe were only 18 words into that exchange when you realized one of the characters owns, or manages, a plumbing company. You figured that out even though the character never said it.You walk into the middle of conversations every day and quickly figure out what’s happening. When you’re writing banter in advertising, you must allow your audience to do the same.And did you notice that neither character said “WTF?” It was you that said WTF after the plumbing company owner said, “WATER… TANK’s…&nbsp;FINE.” That was the moment you participated in the ad. Marketers like to call this “engagement,” but a more accurate word is “participation.” You want your readers, listeners, and viewers to&nbsp;participate&nbsp;in your ads by filling in what you left out.Is the manager of the plumbing company really that dull-witted, or is he just having fun with his friend? You’ve got to figure that out for yourself.Are you beginning to see why well-written banter is difficult to ignore?Ad campaigns built around the banter of memorable characters never get old. Instead, they get stronger with each passing year.You won’t learn to write banter by studying advertising. Instead, you must study screenwriters and novelists.This passage from&nbsp;Sea Swept,&nbsp;by Nora Roberts, is a good example:CAM:&nbsp;You can’t buy decent socks for twenty these days.ETHAN:&nbsp;You can if you don’t have to have some fancy designer label on them. This ain’t Paris.CAM:&nbsp;You haven’t bought decent shoes in ten years. And if you don’t pull up that frigging seat, I’m going to –PHILLIP:&nbsp;Cut it out! Cut it out right now or I swear I’m going to pull over and knock your heads together… I’ll dump your bodies in the mall parking lot and drive to Mexico. I’ll learn how to weave mats and sell them on the beach in Cozumel… I’ll change my name to Raoul, and no one will know I was ever related to a bunch of fools.SETH:&nbsp;Does he always talk like that?CAM:&nbsp;Yeah, mostly. Sometimes he’s going to be Pierre and live in a garret in Paris, but it’s the same thing.The best advice I can give you about putting banter in ads is this:&nbsp;Don’t start writing until your characters have come fully alive in your mind.&nbsp;You’ll know this has happened when one of them says something unexpected.Write that down.&nbsp;And then listen to what the other character says in response.If you ever force an imaginary character to say what you&nbsp;wish&nbsp;they would say, that character will immediately die and your ad will sound like an ad.Worse than that, the rotting corpse of your dead character will make your ad smell like an ad.&nbsp;So trust your characters to know their jobs. Sooner or later one of them will

When our oldest son was an infant, I would hold a spoonful of baby food in front of his mouth, smile my most radiant smile and say, “It’s a good one.”I learned this, of course, from watching Princess Pennie.Later that spring I was sitting across from him when he pulled a lollipop from his mouth, pressed it against my lips and said, “It’s a good one.” Pennie and I laughed until we had tears streaming down our cheeks.I don’t pretend my story is unusual. Every parent has a hundred like it. The weird part is that Pennie and I still use that phrase every day and have been doing so for more than a third of a century.When we’re headed out to something we’ve been looking forward to, “It’s a good one,” is an exclamation of anticipation. When we’re leaving an event we enjoyed, “It’s a good one,” is a declaration of satisfaction. When we’re having a great time, “It’s a good one,” is a reminder to capture that moment and tuck it safely away in the treasure chest of the heart so that we might relive it on a rainy day.The creation of private jargon is one of the benefits of marrying your best friend.Do you have a private jargon understood by only the people closest to you? If you don’t, I encourage you to capture a phrase the next time everyone is laughing. It will be there, dancing in the air for as long as the laughter continues. Just reach up and snatch it. The only permission you need is your own.Private phrases make wonderful pets.Another interesting thing that happened that spring – and I mention it only because today is April 1st – is that my friend Cheerful Charlie gave me a strange new Bible because he thought I’d find it interesting. And I did.It was called&nbsp;The Reese Chronological Bible.&nbsp;It had all the same verses as every other Bible, but they were radically rearranged in what was purported to be chronological order. According to Reese, our universe was spoken into existence on an April 1st and Jesus was born in Bethlehem on another April 1st, many years later. Reese claimed that early Christians celebrated Jesus’ birth on April 1st and were consequently mocked by their detractors as “April Fools.”You heard what I said about it being “a strange new Bible,” right?There was no way to know whether Reese’s theories were true, and it didn’t really matter anyway, but Charlie knows that I’m always willing to lend an ear when someone challenges traditional wisdom.The part that fascinated me is that no one knows the origin of April Fool’s Day.&nbsp;History.com has this to say,&nbsp;“Although April Fools’ Day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.”Reese’s theories got so little traction that it’s almost impossible to find&nbsp;online references to him.&nbsp;But even if Reese was wrong, spring has sprung, birds are flirting, squirrels are chattering, and the flowers are strutting their stuff.But maybe, just maybe, Reese was right.And if so, “Merry Christmas.”Roy H. Williams

The advice I give to others, I rarely take myself.I admonish persons who possess detailed knowledge to “dumb it down” so the rest of us can understand because, frankly, we are rarely interested in the mystery and wonder of the unabbreviated truth.I tell them, “Say it so plainly that you worry you have stripped it of all its truth and beauty.”I tell them, “Simplify it to such a degree that any person who understands the subject as well as you do will think you’re an idiot.”That’s how you make things clear.Today I take my own advice.If you want to be bigger, advertise as though you were bigger. Don’t calculate your ad budget based on the volume you did last year. Base it on the volume you hope to do this year.They call it “mass media” for a reason:&nbsp;it reaches the masses.&nbsp;Consequently, you can’t really target using mass media. (TV, radio, billboards)But don’t worry about that. Use mass media anyway. Targeting is overrated and ridiculously overpriced.Choose Who to Lose. Correctly-written ad copy will filter out the customers you don’t want and attract the customers you do want.Filtering through ad copy is how you “target” when using mass media.Two ways to use mass media:(A.) Used consistently, mass media will cause your company to be the one customers think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell.(B.) Used short-term, mass media will give urgency and importance to a special event when you purchase high repetition for a period of time, usually between 1 and 14 days.Google is the new phone book. Like the Yellow Pages of yesterday, it is the principal resource for buyers who are currently, consciously in the market for a product or service and have no preferred provider. Like the White Pages of yesterday, Google delivers your telephone number, street address, (and business hours) to customers who have already chosen you as their preferred provider.Customers who come to you through mass media will often be credited to your digital efforts due to the “White Pages” function of Google.&nbsp;They had already chosen you as their preferred provider, but were looking online for your street address, phone number, or business hours.Regardless of how you win them, it is costly to win a first-time customer. Getting that customer to come back a second, third, or fiftieth time&nbsp;is cheap and easy if they had a good experience the first time.Advertising is a tax we pay for not being remarkable. So be remarkable! This is what generates word-of-mouth. You’ve got to impress your customer. If you don’t, your competitor will.Companies that celebrate their victories have happy employees.&nbsp;So find things to celebrate.&nbsp;Happy employees create happy customers.Most customers are repeat customers or referral customers. Mass media is the most efficient way to maintain top-of-mind awareness among these groups. In addition, it will bring you new, first-time customers.Your plan to stay in touch with your customers through social media and email blasts is based on the assumption that your customer is willing to open, read, listen to, or watch what you have to say. Is this actually happening? And if not, why not? (HINT: The Subject Line gets people to open it. The content, itself, gets people to share it.)Thirty-six years ago (1983) David Ogilvy was speaking of newspaper and magazine ads when he wrote, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” Now look at your open rate. What percentage of your online budget has been spent when you’ve written your subject line?If you have nothing to say, don’t let anyone convince you to say it. Boring, predictable messages

Every form of communication is composed of 12 basic ideas and each of these ideas, held singularly, is a separate channel of communication in the mind.Like a jet lifting off the runway, these 12 concepts will accelerate and elevate your creative expression: speaking, writing, drawing, painting, persuading, acting, photography, sculpting, selling, singing, landscaping, interior decorating, inventing, filmmaking, engineering, and making music.If I left out your favorite form of expression, just add it to the bottom of the list as you point the nose of your jet toward the sky.Everything can be explained using these 12 languages of the mind, and each of the 12 can be expounded and expanded by the others.Let us begin by defining a couple of terms.Perception:&nbsp;a conscious awareness of a sensation and interpretation of sensations.Communication:&nbsp;a successful transfer of perceptions to another person.The impact of your communication is determined by your mastery of these 12 languages:1. Numbers&nbsp;are a language of the mind.Math is easier to learn when you think of it as a language. There are things that can be communicated in the language of numbers that can be said in no other language.2. Color&nbsp;is a language of the mind.Look at a color wheel. Pink and burgundy agree with red, but that entire family of color is contradicted by green. Add white to a color and you get a tint. Add black and you get a shade. Add grey and you get a tone. Colors, tints, shades, and tones communicate moods and attitudes. Color can be saturated to intensify – or desaturated to drain – a feeling.3.&nbsp;Phonemes&nbsp;are a language of the mind.Every spoken language is made of a specific number of sounds, and alphabets are constructed to represent those sounds. English is composed of 44 phonemes. The vowels of a language are its musical notes.1&nbsp;&nbsp;The “stops” in English are the sounds represented by p, b, d, t, k, g. (Make those sounds in your mind; not the names of the letters, but the sounds the letters represent.) There are also labial, dental, fricative, and palatal phonemes. Obstruent phonemes give words a hard-edged, angular feel, like “taketa.” Sonorant phonemes give words a softer, feminine feel, like “naluma.”4. Radiance&nbsp;is a language of the mind.Outward radiance is energy expanding. Inward radiance is energy contracting. Hot and cold. Love and indifference. Dark and light. Dim light and shadows are sonorant. Bright light is obstruent. Likewise, pianissimo-soft is sonorant. Forte-loud is obstruent.5.&nbsp;Shape&nbsp;is a language of the mind.Angles are the obstruent phonemes of shape. Curves are sonorant.6. Proximity&nbsp;is a language of the mind.It speaks of the relationship of one thing to another. Large and small. Here and there. Left and right. Up and down. High and low. Near and far. Ahead or behind. Backward or forward. Absent or present. Complete or incomplete. Perspective, or angle of view, is another expression of proximity. Brother, sister, father, mother, cousin, co-worker and boss are words that describe relationship, a proximity measured in a “distance” that cannot be expressed in inches, feet, or miles.27. Motion&nbsp;is a language of the mind.Fast and slow. Curved or angular (shapes&nbsp;of motion). Coming or going (proximity&nbsp;of motion.)8. Taste&nbsp;is a language of the mind.As a biological tool for identifying chemicals dissolved in liquids, the perceptions of the tongue give us a vocabulary that can easily be assigned to non-chemical perceptions, allowing flavor to be used as a metaphor for a wondrous number of other things. “She is

“The deer have killed the oak tree! The deer have killed the oak tree!”Forty-year-old Todd – we’ll call him Todd – came running into my office with his second crisis of the day. I expected there would be at least one more.Todd felt it was his job to bring every problem to my attention so that I could tell him how to solve it. Todd was an idiot. His only value was that he gave me a sparkling example of what it means to be an identifier of problems rather than a creator of solutions.When you see a problem, should you bring it to the attention of your boss?Yes, but only if:1. You feel confident that your boss is not already aware of it.2.&nbsp;You have a solution in mind and are ready to suggest it.3. You are prepared to implement your solution if asked.You lower your value when you point out problems without offering to implement a solution.You elevate your value when you are willing to solve every problem you face.If you feel you have sufficient authority to implement your solution without having to get approval, then by all means do so.If you do not have sufficient authority, then articulate the problem along with your proposed solution in the fewest possible words. The less time and attention you require from your boss, the more highly your boss is going to think of you.&nbsp;Within a year or two, your boss will begin bringing you problems you didn’t even know about, along with a request that you solve them.When that day arrives, the only person that can get in your way is a family member of the boss, or some other person to whom the boss owes allegiance.Yes, nepotism is a real thing. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.This brings up another important point:The key to failure is to hang on to the belief that things have to be “the way they ought to be.” The key to success is to be able to deal with things as they really are.Learn to deal with things as they are. Quit expecting things to be the way they ought to be. Unless, of course, you’re willing to dedicate your life to being a reformer. It’s a high calling, but a difficult one to monetize.I was lucky enough to have a mother who taught me these things when I was in my early teens.Without a high school diploma, she took an entry-level job at 32 years old when she became the breadwinner for our family. I was 11 at the time. Mom retired when she was 54, having been the director of every department of the largest corporation on earth.She was a problem solver.When a department was in crisis, the director of that department would be fired and they would put my mother in charge. Within a year, it would become the top-performing department in the company. She would remain at the head of that department until another one was in crisis and another manager was fired.It didn’t take that company long to see her as a resourceful problem-solver. And it won’t take your company long to see the same in you.Recognition and wealth pursue the person who solves every problem they find.Are you willing to become that person?Poor Todd. Things could have been so much better in his life if he had only met my mom.Roy H. Williams

Tinkerbell’s light gradually dims as she begins to die.Her only hope of survival is an audience that believes in fairies and demonstrates that belief through enthusiastic applause. Tinkerbell’s light has been growing brighter since 1904, when she first appeared in J.M. Barrie’s play,&nbsp;Peter Pan.Everyone believes in fairies enough to clap enthusiastically.The Tinkerbell Effect describes things that exist only because enough of us believe they exist, and behave as though they do.Paper money has value only because enough of us believe it has value and behave as though it does. If we quit believing it has value, it becomes scrap paper.Laws have power because we believe they have power and behave as though they do. If enough of us behaved as though laws had no power, we would live in a lawless society.Our economy is robust when we believe it is robust. But when we become anxious and hunker down in financial hesitation, our economy unwinds in a downward spiral, like a kite falling from the sky.A confident person spends money.Uncertain people delay their purchases.Uncertainty is an enemy of the economy.A lot of people are feeling uncertain.It seems as though every voice in the media believes we need to be instructed about what to believe and what to do. But I am convinced we need encouragement far more than we need instruction.Encouragement brings hope; hope that tomorrow will be better than today, hope that “next time” will be better than “last time,” hope that Tinkerbell will continue to live and twinkle and fly.In last week’s rabbit hole, Indiana Beagle shared a Barbara Hall quote that struck a triumphant chord:“Belief is about collecting ideas and investing in them. Faith is about having your ideas obliterated and having nothing to hang onto and trusting that it’s going to be all right anyway.”In the face of relentlessly negative newscasts, I have moved from belief in America to faith in America.I am not alone.Known for her focus on “Feel Good” news, Ellen K hosts a morning drive show that recently became the largest radio audience in Los Angeles.&nbsp;Evidently, people are looking for someone to make them feel good. I suggest you keep that in mind when writing ads to attract people to your business.If you should ever visit Wizard Academy in Austin, you will notice a bronze plaque on the subterranean path to our tower that overlooks the city of Austin from 900 feet above it. Stand on that plaque in the darkness and look just above the hilt of the sword at the top of the tower. That point of light you see is Tinkerbell. It is the guiding light of the Wise Men in the Christmas story. It is the bright star in&nbsp;The Impossible Dream,&nbsp;of which Don Quixote sings, “This is my quest: to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”Now look down and read the plaque. It says, “To Calvin Laughlin.”Calvin was an infant when his parents became major donors to Wizard Academy many years ago. His father is Roy Laughlin. His mother is Ellen K.Congratulations, Ellen.And thanks for the good news.Roy H. Williams

When a business is struggling financially, cost-cutting looks like a brilliant move.But can you shrink your way to success?From what I’ve seen, it’s easier – and healthier – to increase revenues than it is to cut costs.Cost-cutting comes at a very high cost.When I was 16 years old, General Motors was the bluest of the blue-chip stocks. Alfred Sloan was the Steve Jobs, the Jeff Bezos of GM and he sold 50% of all the cars in America. Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac were easily distinguished from one another and what you drove said a lot about you.In the United States, those 5 GM brands outsold Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Chrysler, Volvo, Volkswagen, Subaru, Mercedes, Dodge, Plymouth, American Motors, Jeep, Rambler, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Renault, BMW, Audi,&nbsp;Citroën, Opel, Peugeot, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche combined.During the years I’ve been old enough to drive, GM has fallen from 50% down to just 17% of sales in the U.S.But don’t blame increased competition. Other than Tesla and Hyundai,&nbsp;every brand of car available in America today was available when I was 16.What happened to GM? Cost-cutting.After a long and successful history of choosing CEOs from its manufacturing and sales divisions&nbsp;– Sloan, Wilson, Curtice, Donner, and Roche – General Motors chose a money manager, Richard Gerstenberg, to become CEO in 1972. Two years later, they replaced him with an accountant, Thomas Murphy.Money-manager Gerstenberg and accountant Murphy said, “Why are we spending all this money to design never-before-seen cars every 2 or 3 years? The cost of re-tooling our factories is astronomical. It would be more cost-effective to simply attach different grilles, headlights and tail lights along with a different interior and let each of our 5 brands sell essentially the same car.”“By the 1980’s, Sloan’s design had faded away. General Motors had not only blurred its brands and divisions, it engaged in badge engineering, offering essentially the same vehicle under several model and brand names.” –&nbsp;Good Strategy/Bad Strategy,&nbsp;p. 221On Oct. 11, 1988, the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;reported,“Underscoring the need for a distinct image in the era of look-alike cars has been sales performance. Buick sales dropped to 557,491 last year from about 920,000 in 1984, and Oldsmobile sales fell to 714,394 last year after having topped one million in the preceding three years.”Then, just before the end of 2018, we read,“In a move that will save the company $6 billion by the end of 2020, General Motors announced a restructuring Monday that includes chopping its workforce by 15% and shuttering 5 plants next year.”Some people never learn.Rust in peace, GM.I’ve watched this same movie, over and over, in every category of business in America. But no matter which actor is playing the lead, this movie always ends the same.Are you planning to shrink your way to greater profitability?I suggest you try to increase your sales revenues instead.That’s the only movie that has a happy ending.Roy H. Williams

I know what happens when men retire.I do not know what happens when women retire. Perhaps they are plagued by the same maladjustments, discomforts and discontentment as men, but I doubt it. As Michele Miller points out in her audiobook,&nbsp;The Natural Advantages of Women,&nbsp;females of our species are gifted with different neurological wiring that helps them be less obsessive, more able to adapt. She doesn’t use exactly those words, but that’s my interpretation of what the medical research seems to indicate.But men. I do know men.I’ve spent 40 years watching businessmen step up and out to make way for new leadership stepping up and in.Two Things Happen When Men Retire:Most of us lie to ourselves.“I’m going to play golf.” “I’m going to go fishing.” “I’m going to travel.” But as my friend Don Kuhl pointed out recently, these activities get old fast.Within 12 months, most men return to doing what they have always done.I’ve never seen it fail. A successful man will not be happy in retirement until he finds a way to redirect the superpower that made him successful. Warren Buffet calls this superpower, “your circle of competence.” The problem is that most men don’t know what theirs is.Acquired skills are conscious competence. But special talents, instinctive superpowers, flicker outward like invisible tongues of fire from your unconscious competence.Have you ever received instruction from a talented person? They speak poetry and think it is science.Rare is the talented person who is aware of – and can consciously explain – their unconscious competence. But I’ve known a few talented men who were aware, and who could explain it. And each of them was able to move elegantly from one season of their life to another.My father-in-law, Paul Compton, understood all things mechanical. If Paul had kept a sketchbook of his inventions it would have rivaled the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. It’s little wonder that Paul quickly rose from working in a stone quarry to become an expert repairman of jet engines for American Airlines.When Paul retired, he bought expensive machines at auction that were beyond repair and then repaired them. He made a profit when he sold them, of course, but he wasn’t doing it for the money. It was just a new and different way for him to aim his superpower.Sean Jones is a good friend, a former client, and a genius who consciously understands his unconscious competence. Sean’s superpower is that he can look at a business, any business, and see precisely how to systematize 80% of the recurrent activities so that he might personalize and humanize the remaining 20%. Sean made his first fortune when he bought a small chain of jewelry stores and then used his superpower to skyrocket that company to unprecedented success. He sold that company for the kind of money people fantasize about when they buy lottery tickets, but Sean never-for-a-moment thought of retiring.He is now buying other companies in completely unrelated categories and working his special brand of magic on them, as well.Paul Compton and Sean Jones didn’t retire, they merely redirected their superpowers in new and different ways.Last week I had a 6-hour lunch with a close friend who is about to sell his company. He told me of 3 different things he was planning to do during his “retirement” and then asked me whether I thought he was crazy, because all 3 ideas – on the surface at least – were crazy.I asked my friend if he knew what it was that had made him so successful in his chosen field.&nbsp;He knew. I knew, too. But now that it was on the table, I was able to...

“It was dark inside the wolf,” is how Margaret Atwood believes the story might have opened.Emily Dickinson would agree. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” was her advice to those of us who want our emails to be opened, our stories to be read, and our voices to be heard.If you want your subject line, headline, or opening line to win attention, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” Approach your subject from an interesting angle.The head-on approach is for journalists without wit.“Elderly Woman Eaten by Wolf but Survives.”You are not a journalist without wit.Are you captivated by a photograph or story?Let me give you the reasons why:1.&nbsp;It represents an idea bigger than itself.2.&nbsp;Part of you feels like you are there.3.&nbsp;Your imagination is called upon to fill in what was purposely left out.4.&nbsp;The subject is approached from an interesting angle.Do you want to secure the engagement of your reader, listener, customer?1.&nbsp;Make your words about something bigger than you and your product.2.&nbsp;Put your reader, listener, customer into your story, your speech, your ad.This is easily done using second person perspective and present-tense verbs. “You are walking through a forest when you hear the shadows of the trees sucking the light from the air around you and notice a four-legged shadow making its way slowly through the trees, coming toward you…”3.&nbsp;Did you see what we left out?We did not say it was a “dark” forest, but you saw darkness anyway. We did not say “ominous” but you felt it when the shadows came alive and began sucking the sunlight from the air around you. We did not say “wolf,” but you saw one in the four-legged shadow making its way slowly through the trees.*4.&nbsp;Questions flood the mind when a story is entered from an interesting angle.Why are we in the woods? Where are we going? What will we do when we get there?Whether spoken or unspoken, questions are the unmistakable sign of engagement.No questions, no engagement.No engagement means no sale, no income, no rave reviews.But you will have all these things and in great supply because you subscribe to the Monday Morning Memo and you understand, and believe, what I have told you.But I will not tell you about our monthly webcast unless&nbsp;you really want to know.Confession: I write ads to attract successful people; perceptive, intelligent readers.I do not write for dull-witted people. My avoidance of false claims, fear-mongering, hyperbole and exclamation points is a form of targeting-through-ad-copy that is more reliable than any customer list money can buy.The fact that you have read these musings all the way to the end makes me think highly of you.Very highly, indeed.Yours,Roy H. Williams

1. You Cannot Measure What Has Not Happened.When you ask a person about an experience that exists only in their imagination, they will give you imaginary answers.You can measure only what has already happened.In other words, you cannot measure what “would” or “would not” work. You can only measure what “did” and “did not” work.2. The Question Influences the Answer.“A question, even of the simplest kind, is not, and never can be unbiased. The structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as its content. The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest asked, “Is it permissible to smoke while praying?” and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one’s whole attention. The other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always permissible to pray.”–&nbsp;Dr. Neil Postman, New York University3. Focus Groups are Plagued by a Basic Flaw of Human Psychology.When a person is asked to sit in judgment, they go to a different place in their mind. They react as a critic rather than as a customer.Asking a stranger to be a judge does not qualify them to be one.On page 8 of today’s&nbsp;rabbit hole,&nbsp;Indy Beagle will entertain you with video highlights of two hidden-camera focus groups as they evaluate a potential TV ad for Apple. It is tragicomic to watch these honest, well-intentioned focus group participants reveal their prejudices and inexperience.&nbsp;In the end, both focus groups conclude the proposed TV ad is badly conceived and recommend to Apple that it not be produced, never realizing they were evaluating the script and storyboard visuals for the most successful TV ad in history.4. What People Believe (and Say) They Will Do is Different From What They Will Actually Do.In the words of Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative.” Zaltman goes on to describe how Hollywood films and TV pilots—virtually all of which are screened by focus groups—routinely fail in the marketplace, and 80 percent of new products or services fail within 6 months when they’ve been vetted through focus groups.Most of the thoughts and feelings that influence consumers’ behavior occur in the unconscious mind. “Unconscious thoughts are the most accurate predictors of what people will actually do,” Zaltman said in an interview.&nbsp;People think they will make an objective, transactional decision, when in reality they will make a subjective, relational one.We believe we will decide with our mind. But in the moment of truth, we decide with our heart.5. Data can Show You the Outcome of Your Past Decisions, But it Cannot Tell You How to Do What Has Never Been Done.Do not look to survey recommendations when you seek innovation.Innovation is a product of intuition.Was stereo invented because customers said, “Instead of the music coming out of just one speaker, why not have part of it come from a speaker on the left and the rest of it come from a speaker on the right?”Customers did not ask for stereo but after they were exposed to it, they couldn’t live without it.Did Steve Jobs develop the iPhone because customers told him they wanted cameras in their cell phones?Was inventory-on-demand perfected as a result of customers saying, “I think it would be better if you waited to create the product until after I order it?”Did Tony Hsieh invest in Zappos.com because people told him they would like to...

I ate too much and it made me heavy and slow.Using too many words is like eating too much.It makes communication heavy and slow.Short sentences hit harder.Nouns and verbs are fists that deliver punches.Adjectives and adverbs are gloves that soften the blows.Unless they are unexpected.A brass-knuckled uppercut is an unexpected adjective that modifies a noun you didn’t see coming.“Your soup tastes like old socks that have been marinated in diesel, sprinkled with urine, and baked for three days covered in a sack that’s been used to wipe a donkey’s backside.”– Richard Poole,&nbsp;Death in Paradise,&nbsp;Season 1, episode 6Soup is the subject.Tastes, marinated, sprinkled, baked, covered, used, and wipe are the verbs.Socks, diesel, urine, days, sack, and backside are the nouns.Unexpected words unleash vivid images when they splash onto your mind.We’re driving through Mike’s Express Car Wash in Indianapolis.A 4,000,000 BTU heater ensures the water never drops below 180 degrees. Hot water cleans better than cold water because it delivers more stored energy.Soap unleashes hungry electrons that dissolve the road film clinging to our car.Pressure pumps give the water kinetic energy as it is fired from the nozzles of the guns.Brushes and mitters deliver mechanical vibration, a fourth kind of energy.The soft-water rinse is chased by a tornado that rocks our car and leaves never a trace of moisture.Emerging from the tunnel, we look like we’re driving off the showroom floor.A well-written paragraph unleashes bright colors like a car wash in Indianapolis.Similes and metaphors&nbsp;allow us to use the known and familiar to reveal the unknown and unfamiliar, like a father telling his son about the birds and the bees.Paired opposites&nbsp;give us the power to shine light in dark places and bring wellsprings of water to thirsty deserts.Rhythms&nbsp;of stressed and unstressed syllables make our words memorable.&nbsp;Meter is music. Meter is magic.Alliteration&nbsp;gives us the ability to accelerate all 43 phonemes, like many mumbling mice making midnight music in the moonlight. Mighty nice.The names&nbsp;of shapes and colors and familiar things allow us to project images onto the movie screen of the mind.Words give us the power to speak worlds into existence.What future will you set in motion today?Roy H. Williams

There is, to my knowledge, only one way to profitably put the power of the internet to work for you.It’s simple; just give people what they want.But first you have to know what they want.Let me help you with that.(1.) They want answers, and(2.) they want entertainment.But the answers they seek aren’t usually about your product or service. The answers they seek are solutions to their problems.You must speak directly to the felt need.If you would win the attention of the people, give them the answers they seek.If you would win the attention of the giants, learn to speak their language.Do you understand Natural Language Processing, that algorithmic logic in the binary minds of Google and YouTube and all the other giants in the land?&nbsp;Learn to speak this language&nbsp;and the internet will become your trumpet.We’re always ready to be distracted by something delightful.Entertain us and we’ll give you our attention. Make us feel good and we’ll consider you our friend. Stand for something we believe in and we’ll give you our support. Make a difference and we’ll tell our friends about you. Give us happy thoughts to think and we’ll allow you to guide our minds.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind can easily find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Entertainment is the only currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.&nbsp;This is the essence of customer bonding.If you talk about yourself and why your solution is better than your competitors’, the only people who notice will be your competitors. But if you deliver a thrill of pleasure, the public will gather at your feet.Two young men sat through all the classes at Wizard Academy and learned how to use the life-changing tools of answers and entertainment.And with those tools firmly in hand, they wandered into the untamed wilderness of the internet exactly two years ago. They had no money to spend. None. But they had knowledge and time and energy.They chose to use their tools on YouTube. They could just as easily have chosen one of the other social media platforms, or they could simply have created a blog.The power is not in the platform. The power is in the answers and in the entertainment.They decided not to allow advertisers to attach ads to their daily YouTube show. This means they would receive no revenue from advertising, but it also means no false metrics created by click farms.Two years later, their worldwide audience is spending an average of 457,000 minutes a day watching their show. That’s more “viewing minutes” per day than are contained in 317 twenty-four-hour days. In a couple more months they’ll be receiving more than one year’s viewing time each day.Needless to say, they have become extremely influential in their chosen field and money is raining down on them like confetti in a ticker-tape parade.And they’ve not yet spent a penny on advertising.Roy H. Williams

When someone says, “Figures don’t lie,” know this:&nbsp;Figures lie, and liars figure.Never trust a weasel with a calculator.Do you remember the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and&nbsp;The Big Short,&nbsp;the movie that was made about it? There is a scene in that movie where investors Mark Baum and Vinnie Daniel go to visit Georgia Hale, an employee of the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s:Georgia Hale:&nbsp;So, alrighty, FrontPoint Partners, how can Standard and Poor’s help you?Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;Well, we don’t understand why the ratings agencies haven’t downgraded subprime bonds since the underlying loans are clearly deteriorating.Georgia Hale:&nbsp;Well, the delinquency rates do have people worried but they’re actually within our models.Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;Says you.Mark Baum:&nbsp;So you’re convinced the underlying mortgages in these bonds are solid loans?Georgia Hale:&nbsp;That is our opinion, yes.Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;Did you check the tape? Have you looked at the loan level data?Georgia Hale:&nbsp;What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;They’re giving these loans to anybody with a credit score and a pulse.Georgia Hale:&nbsp;Excuse me, sir. What do you think we do here all day?Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;We’re not sure. That’s why we’re here.Mark Baum:&nbsp;Here’s what I don’t understand,Georgia Hale:&nbsp;We check, we recheck, we check again…Mark Baum:&nbsp;If these mortgage bonds are so stable, if they are so solid,Georgia Hale:&nbsp;Perhaps you should check your friend.Mark Baum:&nbsp;have you ever refused to rateGeorgia Hale:&nbsp;We stand behind them.Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;That’s delusional.Georgia Hale:&nbsp;We stand behind them.Mark Baum:&nbsp;Georgia, have you ever refused to rate any of these bonds – upper tranche – as Triple-A? Can we see the paperwork on those deals?Georgia Hale:&nbsp;Oh, I’m under no obligation to share that information with you, whoever you might be.Mark Baum:&nbsp;Just answer the question, Georgia. Can you name one time in the past year where you checked the tape and you didn’t give the banks the Triple-A percentage they wanted?Georgia Hale:&nbsp;If we don’t give them the ratings, they’ll go to Moody’s, right down the block. If we don’t work with them, they’ll go to our competitors. It’s not our fault. It’s simply the way the world works.Vinnie Daniel:&nbsp;(after a dumbfounded pause) Holy shit.Georgia Hale:&nbsp;Yes, now you see. And I never said that.It seems to me the principal difference between the unregulated world of subprime loans and the unregulated world of online marketing is that there is no way to “short” the world of online ad fraud. There is no way to make a profit by exposing and ending it.In a widely-circulated news column&nbsp;published the day after Christmas, 2018, reporter Max Reid asked and answered an important question:“How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is...

The average person is afraid of criticism.But the person who has no fear of criticism is more likely to succeed. This lack of fear is what keeps them from being average.The average business owner is afraid their ads will be criticized.Do you want to kill a great ad? Show it to the people you trust.In&nbsp;the words of my partner&nbsp;Mick Torbay,“You need to understand something: the committee is not evil. The committee doesn’t want you to fail. The committee has nothing but good intentions. But the committee can’t innovate. More than anything, the committee wants to look good to the rest of the committee. The committee is afraid of looking stupid… The committee can only spot problems, downsides, possible pitfalls… So don’t be surprised that when you present a really, really great idea to a committee, the only thing you’re gonna get is a reason why that idea won’t work, one reason for every member of the committee. The committee will always pull you to the center. The committee will help you avoid risk, but risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. If you avoid risk, then huge success is now out of the question. Are you okay with that?”Most ads aren’t written to persuade; they’re written not to offend.But even a weak ad will cause your name to be the first that springs into the public mind if you give it enough repetition. This assumes, of course, that your competitors have equally bland ads.And frankly, that’s a pretty safe bet.But repetition costs money.Do you want to differentiate yourself with memorable, attention-getting ads that will accelerate your repetition by unleashing the persuasive powers of wit, humor, identity, and audacity?The first step is to find your corporate mission statement, take it outside into the sunlight, lift it high up into the sky, then lay it down on the sidewalk and set it on fire. When it is finished burning, sweep the powdery ashes into the grass. Paper ash is an&nbsp;excellent&nbsp;source of lime and potassium. This will raise the pH and help neutralize the acid in your soil.You have now put your mission statement to the best possible use.Just out of curiosity, why did you think you needed to write down all those generic things you believe in? Those things you included – the things you stand for – rarely differentiate you since most of us include, believe in, and stand for the same things: Individuality, Informality, Opportunity, Competition, Efficiency, Progress, and Helping Others.&nbsp;It is what you exclude, or stand against, that defines you.&nbsp;To gain attention and win a following, you must&nbsp;stand against&nbsp;the omission of one of these seven things:Individuality:&nbsp;individual initiative, individual expression, independence and privacyInformality:&nbsp;equality, directness, and an open societyOpportunity:&nbsp;ability to change yourself, your business, your country, and your worldCompetition:&nbsp;opportunity to win recognition, status, and material rewardsEfficiency:&nbsp;reduce wasted time, effort, and resourcesProgress:&nbsp;social, economic, and physical mobilityHelping Others:&nbsp;because we’re all in this togetherYou may have used different words, but those are the ideas contained in every mission statement,&nbsp;the ultimate expression of committee-think.You don’t become famous by championing everything.You become famous by championing one thing.The client who grew the most in 2018 stands against&nbsp;inefficiency.&nbsp;His company eliminates stress and frustration by responding instantly when customers call and then doing the job...

Ad writers hear it every day, whistling toward them like a bullet: “We need more traffic, that’s what we need; more sales opportunities!”I spent the early part of my radio career stepping up to the plate and knocking that fastball out of the park. If your back was against the wall, I was the man to call.I was like Coca-Cola, baby, I was everywhere.It was the early 1980s.My employer required me to wear a tie, so I hung one around my neck like a scarf. And to underscore my scruffy renegade look, I refused to tie my shoes. Everywhere I went, people would tell me, “Your shoes are untied,” and I would reply with a smile, “Yeah, I know.”I looked like a young drug dealer, and in a way, I was.I sold instant gratification advertising. “You want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want?”It’s actually pretty easy to attract a worked-up crowd. Do you want to know how to do it?These are the ingredients you must have at handTo Make Big Things Happen Fast:1. Urgency&nbsp;– There has to be a shortage of&nbsp;time&nbsp;or a shortage of&nbsp;quantity.&nbsp;The rule to remember is this: “No shortage, no urgency.” The best shortage is to have a limited number of a highly desirable item at a remarkable price. This is the time-tested formula that causes people to camp out on the sidewalk in front of Wal-Mart before the doors open the day after Thanksgiving.If the number of 82-inch TVs available for $999 is too few, people will say, “I don’t have a chance,” and stay home. But if the number is too many, no one will get excited because “there’s enough to go around.”&nbsp;So you definitely need to name a number.&nbsp;“While supplies last,” is a line that only a beginner would write. The customer hears that and thinks, “They only had&nbsp;one&nbsp;of those and they sold it before this radio ad ever hit the airwaves.” Result: no response.2. Credible Desperation&nbsp;– If you scream, “400 Toyotas MUST be sold this weekend! No reasonable offer refused!” you’ve got no credibility. The listener thinks, “WHY do you have to sell 400? What happens if you don’t? And what you consider to be ‘a reasonable offer’ is probably a lot more money than what I consider to be a reasonable offer, so I’m going to pass. I’ve got better things to do this weekend than haggle with a jackass car dealer.”Desperation loses credibility as time passes.&nbsp;That’s why these ads work less and less well the longer you use them.“Lost our lease, everything must go,” is another line that only a beginner would write.&nbsp;Specifics are more believable than generalities.Do you want to make your desperation credible? Do you want stuff to fly out the door? Say, “We’ve been thrown out! Our landlord rented our space to someone else and a dump truck will be here at 8AM on Monday, January 7th to haul away everything we leave behind….”3. Specifics&nbsp;– “…so we’re liquidating the entire inventory, every item in every department. We’re selling the showcases, the light fixtures and the cash registers. And if you can figure out how to get the wallpaper off the wall, we’ll sell you that, too. Call your friend with a pickup truck because you’re going to leave here with an ecstatic truckload of once-in-a-lifetime bargains. An $800 kayak is $179. Perfume that sells for $200 a bottle is yours for just $20. Diamond pendants worth a thousand dollars are just $129. A dozen doughnuts, made fresh while you wait, are just ONE DOLLAR and you can eat them while you’re shopping. So cancel what you had planned and get here as quick as you can.”4. Repetition&nbsp;– Nothing says “urgent news” like an ad that runs twice an hour for 72 hours. If a radio station will let you air only one ad an hour, then make sure it’s a 60-second

Few people remember it because it was too long ago.April, 1962– America tries to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba in the “Bay of Pigs” invasion.July, 1962– Soviet premier&nbsp;Nikita Khrushchev&nbsp;reaches a secret agreement with Fidel Castro&nbsp;to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt.October 14, 1962– An American U–2 spy plane takes photos of Soviet nuclear missiles being assembled in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.October 22, 1962– American President John F. Kennedy appears on national television announcing a military quarantine of Cuba, warning the American people of the potential global consequences. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”October 24, 1962– Nikita Khrushchev says the U.S. blockade is an “act of aggression” and Soviet ships bound for Cuba are ordered to proceed.U.S. forces are placed at DEFCON 2, meaning war involving the Strategic Air Command is imminent.October 26, 1962&nbsp;– John F. Kennedy learns that work on the missile bases is proceeding without interruption and that an American U-2 spy plane has been shot down over Cuba, and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, is dead.The world totters on the brink of nuclear war between superpowers.Americans everywhere stop in their tracks and look to the skies.And then two of them wrote a song:Said the night wind to the little lamb,“Do you see what I see,Way up in the sky, little lamb?Do you see what I see?A star, a star, dancing in the nightWith a tail as big as a kite.With a tail as big as a kite.”This was the image of a nuclear missile followed by its fiery tail in the night. But it was also the image of a star poised above Bethlehem, shining its light on a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy,“Do you hear what I hearRinging through the sky, shepherd boy?Do you hear what I hear?A song, a song, high above the treesWith a voice as big as the sea.With a voice as big as the sea.”Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,“Do you know what I knowIn your palace warm, mighty king?Do you know what I know?A Child, a Child shivers in the cold,Let us bring Him silver and gold.Let us bring Him silver and gold.”Said the king to the people everywhere,“Listen to what I say,Pray for peace, people everywhere!Listen to what I say,The Child, the Child, sleeping in the night,He will bring us goodness and light.He will bring us goodness and light.”During the darkest hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a French veteran of WWII living in New York, Noël Regney, wrote the lyrics and&nbsp;his Brooklyn wife, Gloria, wrote the music.And for as long as they lived, neither of them could sing it all the way through without crying.Merry Christmas,Roy and Pennie Williams

Throughout my career as an ad writer, I’ve noticed that the easiest companies to skyrocket are those with a healthy and happy corporate culture.You know it’s a great company when everyone wants to get a job there and no one wants to leave.Let’s talk about culture.Definition One:In biology, a culture is a cultivation (usually bacteria, germs, or tissue cells) in an environment of nutrients.Culture: a cultivation in an environment of nutrients.Do you want to create a culture?Step One: EnvironmentStep Two: NutrientsDefinition Two:When we describe a person as “cultured,” we’re saying they are conversant in the arts.In the words of Phil Johnson, “You&nbsp;acquire&nbsp;an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you&nbsp;absorb&nbsp;culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”The arts are nutrients for the heart. To become “cultured” in the arts is to know how to make peoplefeel&nbsp;differently.Definition Three:When our friend Susan Ryan came home after 7 years of doing business in a third-world country, she said, “It’s hard to develop a strategy that will overcome hundreds of years of enculturation. Culture eats strategy for lunch.”A strategy is made of goals, objectives, and activities.A culture is made of values, practices, and behaviors.Princess Pennie says strategy is today’s “do list”and culture is all the yesterdays that made you who you are.Definition Four:The culture of a business is expressed as&nbsp;esprit de corp:&nbsp;the spirit of the group.Culture: a cultivation in an environment of nutrients.Business Culture: a cultivation of practices and behaviors in an environment of values.If you don’t have strong values, you won’t have a strong culture.If you don’t reward and celebrate employee practices and behaviors, you’re just mouthing platitudes and clichés. (Commonly known as mission statements and corporate policies.)Anyone can copy your strategy, but no one can copy your culture.Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.Good advertising promises your customer a specific experience.It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.Shout it from the housetops.Roy H. Williams

I’m reading Hemingway’s novel,&nbsp;Death in the Afternoon,&nbsp;and I like it.It is a detailed explanation of bullfighting.Not a story about a bullfighter.Bullfighting.I have no interest in bullfighting. None.The book has no character arc because it has no characters. It has narrative, but no narrative arc. No plot, no moments of crisis, no heroism, no romance.It is essentially an instruction manual.Why do I find myself drawn to this book?Yesterday morning I said to Pennie, “Hemingway is teaching me some things I can’t quite put into words, but as soon as I can figure out how to explain them, I’ll tell you what they are.”She was moving laundry from the washer to the dryer. “Read me a page that you liked.”“Page one hundred and twenty. Hemingway has been explaining how the bulls of Salamanca differ from the bulls of Andalucia when – out of nowhere – he inserts a literary device I’ve never seen in a book.”“What kind of literary device?”“He imagines a reader’s reaction to his book, then, speaking as that reader, he criticizes the author for not doing the thing that made him famous. Then, as the author, he accommodates this imaginary reader by inserting an imaginary conversation with an imaginary woman. It’s the same kind of multi-layered self-talk Robin Williams used to do.”“Read it to me.”But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn’t there more dialogue? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn’t do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Someone ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.Citizen, perhaps you are right. Let us have a little dialogue.What do you ask, Madame? Is there anything you would like to know about the bulls?Yes, sir.What would you like to know? I’ll tell you absolutely anything.It is a difficult thing to ask, sir.Do not let that trouble you; talk to me frankly; as you would to your doctor, or to another woman. Do not be afraid to ask what you would really like to know.Sir, I would like to know about their love life.Madame, you have come to just the man.Pennie smiled and nodded her head. Then she handed me a gang of shirts on hangers and told me to put them in my closet.I hung the shirts on the doorknob of the laundry room and said, “It’s like that time I took&nbsp;Chris&nbsp;with me to Seattle.”“That time he began speaking to an imaginary television audience in that seafood restaurant?”“Yeah. He just put down his fork, stared at a point on the wall across the room and said, ‘Hello there, friends. It’s time, once again, for&nbsp;Workin’ It,&nbsp;with Chris Maddock.’ After a 5-minute opening monologue, he turned and began talking to a guest on his show; an invisible woman seated next to him. Never cracked a smile. Never broke character.”“How did the show end?”“He just picked up his fork and started eating again.”“What year was that?”“1999”“When did Hemingway write the bullfight book?”“1932”As she picked up a stack of folded towels, she said, “When we’re surprised by weird, unexpected twists and turns, it makes the journey more interesting.”I nodded my agreement and lifted the shirts off the doorknob.“Maybe you should do that in a Monday Morning Memo.”“Maybe I will.”Roy H. Williams

1967 – A little boy leaned on his elbows in front of a black-and-white TV in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, unaware that Walt Disney was dead.How could he be dead? I was watching him on TV.Looking right into my eyes, Walt told me about his purchase of 43 square miles of Central Florida, an area twice the size of the island of Manhattan, and his plan to build there an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT.)He was standing in a Hollywood film studio in front of a floor-to-ceiling map of his Florida project when he said,“Welcome to a little bit of Florida here in California. This is where the early planning is taking place for our so-called Disney World Project. Now, the purpose of this film is to bring you up to date about some of the plans for Disney World.”A little later, he said,“The sketches and plans you will see today are simply a starting point, our first overall thinking about Disney World. Everything in this room may change time and time again as we move ahead, but the basic philosophy of what we’re planning for Disney World is going to remain very much as it is right now…”That was the part I never forgot:&nbsp;Walt Disney knew his plan would evolve into something different than he imagined.Eighteen years ago Princess Pennie decided to buy some land and build a non-profit school for entrepreneurs, storytellers, and educators. We knew it would have a classroom tower with a library mezzanine and on-campus housing so that students wouldn’t have to sleep in hotel rooms.Everything else was an afterthought.Chapel Dulcinea was chosen by 1,111 brides in 2017, making it the most popular wedding chapel on earth. A free wedding chapel wasn’t part of the original plan, but if you’ve ever walked the campus at Wizard Academy, it’s hard to imagine it not being there.A certification course for the training of whiskey sommeliers (storytellers) wasn’t part of the original plan, either. Nor was The Crowded Barrel whiskey distillery.* And we could never have dreamed that Wizard Academy’s YouTube channel,&nbsp;The Whiskey Vault,&nbsp;would become the #1 whiskey-review channel on earth.We couldn’t have imagined it because streaming, online video did not exist in the year 2000.And now the Rocinante gym.A couple of years ago, Brian Clapp donated state-of-the art gym equipment but it never got used because it was housed in a part of the campus where students never go. The solution? Build a sleek, cantilevered gym covered in glittering silver metal with an 18-foot glass wall looking at Chapel Dulcinea, and put it next to the sidewalk between Spence Manor and Engelbrecht House.And of course we’ll be starting The House of the Lost Boys – your third student mansion – as soon as the gym is complete, probably in about 60 days.But that’s not the big news.&nbsp;No, not by a long shot.In late spring, 2019, the American Small Business Institute will be launching an important new certification course, The Ad Writer’s Masters Class, a one-year online course – 26 modules, followed by 26 essay assignments – followed by a three-day, face-to-face working examination by a board of Master Ad Writers.This is a really big deal.And very expensive. (12k, minus alumni discount)When you finally pass your board exams – and you can try as often as you want – you will be certified and admitted into The Ad Writers Guild, with appropriate pomp and fanfare and physical glitteralia.Because after all, the American Small Business Institute is an extension of that wonderful dreamscape called Wizard Academy.Indy says you should visit him in the rabbit hole. You know&nbsp;how to get in,&nbsp;right?Roy H. WilliamsPS – If you want to be notified when the&nbsp;Ad Writer’s...

Two brothers were locked out of their home, so they climbed onto the roof and entered the house through the chimney. When they crawled out of the fireplace, one of them had soot on his face, the other did not. The clean-faced brother immediately went into the bathroom and washed his face. The brother with soot on his face did not. Why?We are confused by the actions of the brothers until we put ourselves in their shoes and see the world through their eyes.The clean-faced brother looked at the sooty-faced brother and assumed they were both in the same condition, so he went and washed his face. Likewise, the sooty-faced brother did not know he needed to wash, because he was looking at the brother whose face was clean.We assume that we are like other people, and that they are like us.This is the assumption that misinformed the brothers.This is the assumption that misinforms the salesperson.Do you put yourself into the shoes of each customer and see the world through their eyes, or do you assume that they are like you?Do you unconsciously assume that your customer has your financial limitations?&nbsp;Do you secretly believe that they should do what you would do?These are the reasons you struggle as a salesperson.You believe you are being empathetic, but you are not.You aren’t putting yourself into their shoes; you’re putting them into yours.Roy H. Williams

Indy Beagle posted a T-shirt in the rabbit hole that said, “If life gives you melons, you might be dyslexic.” Princess Pennie laughed when she read it.If that T-shirt had said, “If life gives you oranges, you might be dyslexic,” would she – or anyone else – have laughed?Pleasant surprise is the foundation of delight.Confusion is the foundation of frustration.When something unexpected happens, but it makes sense, it is surprising.When something unexpected happens and it makes no sense, it is confusing.To get a click online is to get attention.But to hold that attention requires engagement.Are you satisfied with getting a click, or would you also like to make the sale?People who are engaged are looking for closure. They are following a mystery that needs to be solved.Headlines and subject lines that create a mystery are more effective than those that solve one.No mystery, no click.No continuing mystery, no engagement.The key to holding attention is to introduce a new mystery just as you solve the previous one. This works online exactly as it works in literature, mass media, and entertainment.The quicker your sequences of mystery and resolution, the more likely you are to hold the attention of your audience. This is what separates good stand-up comics from people who take too long to tell a joke.Consider the mysteries implied by these famous opening lines:Call me Ishmael. –&nbsp;Moby DickIt was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —&nbsp;1984This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —&nbsp;The Good SoldierIt was a wrong number that started it. —&nbsp;City of GlassI am an invisible man. —Invisible Man124 was spiteful. —&nbsp;BelovedIn a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —&nbsp;The End of the RoadThey shoot the white girl first. —&nbsp;ParadiseI write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —&nbsp;I Capture the CastleWhen your subject lines harbor mysteries, you’ll see your open rate rise like the sun on Easter morning. And if you solve that mystery just as you introduce a second one, you will have achieved engagement.Novelists and playwrights have known this for hundreds of years.Screenwriters and comedians have known it for decades.I’m merely suggesting that you might experiment with it in your ads.Who knows? It might work for ad writers, too.Roy H. Williams

Day after day, business owners tell ad writers, “We just need more sales opportunities. It’s a numbers game. If you double our traffic, we’ll double our sales. Now show me what you can do.”These business owners don’t understand that today’s&nbsp;close rate&nbsp;dictates tomorrow’s sales opportunities.Some businesses will run customers off faster than a good ad writer can bring them in. But still they will tell that ad writer, “We just need more sales opportunities. Double our traffic and we’ll double our sales.”What that company really needs, of course, is to increase their close rate. And the secret to increasing your&nbsp;close rate&nbsp;is to align the personality of your&nbsp;sales process&nbsp;with the personality of your&nbsp;advertising.But that will never happen as long as your sales manager remains untethered from your ad writer.It’s easier to grow a company that closes 6 out of 10 sales opportunities than it is to grow a company that closes only 2 out of 10. Straightforward math would tell you that it should be only 3 times easier, but then you’d be forgetting about the exponential impact of customer referrals.There are exceptions, of course. A company with a truly extraordinary product can utterly botch their sales training and customer service and still do just fine. This is particularly true in technology and in restaurants.But let’s talk about that disconnect between your sales manager and your ad writer.This is a blind spot shared by the majority of American companies.Think of those people in your company who respond to customer inquiries as your first responders. These first responders include the people who answer telephones and who respond to emails and to live chat inquiries on your website. And then, of course, there are your service people and your salespeople.Your first responders are continuing a conversation that began with your advertising. And your customer has clear expectations about who they expect your people to be and how they expect your people to act.When your first responders speak and act differently than your customer expected, that customer feels ambushed and betrayed. Remove this disconnection by being the company your customer believes you to be, and you’ll see your close rate climb faster than a happy squirrel harvesting acorns in an oak tree.Strong ad campaigns communicate a distinctly memorable corporate “personality” that distinguishes a company from its competitors. Rippling that attractive personality through your advertising is especially important when the public perceives your products and services to be essentially the same as those of your competitors.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.A good ad writer will cause the public to like you.Now all you have to do is be the company the public liked.And now you know the most important truth of advertising.Your ads don’t communicate a distinctly memorable personality?Then you don’t have a strong ad campaign.You don’t have a high close rate?Then you don’t have alignment between the expectation of your customers and the performance of your first responders.Are your first responders using the signature phrases that made your ads famous? Do they embody the corporate personality communicated in those ads?Or is your sales process independent from your advertising?If you want to talk more about it, Indy Beagle has a lot to share with you in&nbsp;the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

Is your bandwidth keeping you from fulfilling your purpose?Do you have too much to do and too little time?Your bandwidth is limited by:1. the number of hours in a day.2. your physical stamina and capacity.3. your mental and emotional limits as a human being.4. your inability to juggle the number of desires, needs, demands, and emergencies hurtling toward you.No matter how hard you try to overcome these limits, they are there, they are real, and they will remain.Chances are, you’ve been at the limits of your bandwidth for quite some time.Bandwidth is easy to explain, but purpose is hard to explain because it can come from multiple sources, be evaluated from multiple perspectives, and be known by many names.1. Is your purpose the achievement of your goals, the fulfillment of your vision, the crossing of that last item off your bucket list?2. Is your purpose dictated to you by your circumstances? It is to fulfill your duties as a son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, or as a loyal friend or trusted employee?3. Is your purpose chosen for you by something or someone bigger than yourself? Destiny, the universe, or God?I have no argument with any of these beliefs.Here’s my concern: I am subject to the tyranny of the “merely urgent” every day, so I rarely stop to ask myself, “What would be the consequences if I chose to ignore this?”I find myself putting off the truly important, day after day, to take care of an endless list of small-but-urgent obligations.Is it just me, or are you doing this also?I’m not asking for your help or advice.And I’m certainly not telling you how to live your life.I’m just sharing a personal observation:Urgent things are rarely important.Important things are rarely urgent.And learning to tell one from the otheris the key to a happier, healthier, more productive life.If you and I were to say yes to one big thing each day, and say no to all the little things, how much more might we accomplish?Roy H. Williams

Ten days ago, at the annual meeting of the most innovative and successful small business owners in America,* I was handed a series of questions to answer during the problem-solving session. Most of the questions had to do with recurrent frustrations in business.When I saw the group excitedly taking notes, I was a little bit surprised. Then it hit me, “I’m a lot older than most of these people, so they haven’t learned these things yet.”If they were glad to hear those solutions, maybe you will be, too.Here are a few of the things I told them:Your work doesn’t always speak for itself.Explain what you did and why you did it. Talk about a couple of ideas you considered, but rejected, and explain why you rejected those solutions. Only then will your client understand the thought and planning and effort you put into what you are delivering to them.You have maximum credibility when you put the sale at risk.Agreements established&nbsp;before money changes hands&nbsp;are the agreements that will forever guide the relationship.&nbsp;The time to explain what will&nbsp;not&nbsp;be included is when the sale hasn’t yet been made. Clearly&nbsp;and memorably&nbsp;emphasize anything you need your customer to remember in the future.&nbsp;To gloss over a possible disappointment during your presentation – or to bury it in the fine print – is to deceive your customer and poison their future trust in you. So say the difficult thing up-front. Don’t wait until later.When your customer rejects the solution you have prepared, don’t argue with them, even when they are clearly wrong.Just do the extra work. Only after they have approved your second solution will you have the credibility to convince them not to use it. To debate with them earlier will only make it look like you’re trying to avoid doing the extra work.&nbsp;But don’t be surprised if your second solution is every bit as good as your first.&nbsp;When that happens, just go with the second solution. Remember: it’s not about “winning.” It’s about making your customer happy.Never be afraid to charge more than anyone else in your category.And never be afraid to pay the highest price, either. The only company that can fund a customer’s hoped-for experience is the company with a fat profit margin. The services you get for half-price aren’t the same services you get for full price.It’s harder to get attention in larger cities because there is so much more&nbsp;happening.Ad campaigns take longer to get established in large cities due to the customer distraction caused by marketplace noise. The upside of large cities, however, is that the market potential is so much higher. Businesses in smaller towns often take off quicker, only to later face a sharply limited market potential due to the smaller population.Growing a local business from 2 or 3 percent of the market potential to 20 percent of the market potential is easier (and more fun) than lifting it the next 5 points, (from 20% to 25%.)The reason for this is because you will have picked all the low-hanging fruit by the time you are making 20 percent of all the sales in your category. In other words, you’ll be selling everyone who likes to&nbsp;buy&nbsp;the way you like to&nbsp;sell.&nbsp;Growing the 8 points between 25 and 33 percent of market potential will likely require you to make some changes you have long been reluctant to make. And growing a business beyond 33 percent of market potential is virtually impossible. The only exception to this is when the category has a shortage of committed competitors.Here are a few different ways to calculate market potential for any business:(Try to do it three different ways and see if the numbers...

Responsibility limits your Freedom,and freedom is a good thing.So is responsibility wrong and evil?Sigh.The only hard choice in lifeis the choice between two good things.Justice and Mercyare at opposite endsof a teeter-totter.Honesty and Loyaltywrestle&nbsp;in your heart,do they not?Opportunity and Securityare inversely proportionate.One will decreaseas the&nbsp;other increases.These are a few of the examples that spring to mind when we read&nbsp;the&nbsp;words of the Nobel Prize-winning&nbsp;physicist, Niels Bohr: “The opposite of&nbsp;a correct statement is a false statement.&nbsp;But the opposite of a profound truth&nbsp;may well be another profound truth.”Keep in mind that Niels was a physicist,&nbsp;not a philosopher.Jonathan Haidt shines some light&nbsp;on this subject&nbsp;in his book,&nbsp;The Righteous Mind,&nbsp;citing a wealth of research&nbsp;that indicates how our beliefs come primarily from our intuitions,&nbsp;with rational thought coming afterward, to justify our initial beliefs.That’s an uncomfortable thought, I agree.But does that make it wrong?Fifteen years before&nbsp;Knopf Doubleday published&nbsp;The Righteous Mind,&nbsp;Bard Press published&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads.&nbsp;On its frontispiece you will find&nbsp;The Seven Laws of the Advertising Universe.The third law is this:“Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speakthe same language. The intellect finds logic to justifywhat the emotions have decided. Win the heartsof the people, their minds will follow”I was able to write those words with confidence&nbsp;because&nbsp;Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981&nbsp;for his&nbsp;documentation of brain lateralization, which says in effect&nbsp;that we don’t have a single brain divided into two halves&nbsp;so much as we have two separate, competing brains.Our left hemisphere&nbsp;is logical, rational, sequential, deductive&nbsp;reasoning.It also contains the language functions.Our right hemisphere recognizes&nbsp;patterns&nbsp;and is intuitive.&nbsp;These can be patterns of behavior, patterns in history,&nbsp;or patterns in auditory or visual phenomena.&nbsp;But our right hemispheres don’t know&nbsp;right from wrong, true from false,&nbsp;or fact from fiction. That’s&nbsp;the left brain’s job.Speaking of the brain, Dr. Sperry said,&nbsp;“Each hemisphere of the brain is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”So we have an uptight, suspicious, legalistic left brain, and a free-wheeling, ready-to-party, intuitive and mystical right brain&nbsp;that doesn’t require proof or evidence. It is always willing to&nbsp;believe.Was evolution the origin of our species,with our brains evolving over billions of years,or did God simply create us this way?In any event, you can be sure&nbsp;that we haveopposing brain hemispheres for a reason.I wonder what it is.Roy H. Williams

“Facts tell, stories sell,” is a principle known to every top-tier ad writer.Stories change people while statistics give them something to argue about.People remember stories long after bullet-points are forgotten.Tom Robbins said, “I mean we are all, as human beings, caught up in a web of narration, this great narrative web, and we have always defined ourselves, human beings, through narration, through stories.”In his final speech to broadcasters on March 8, 2003, Paul Harvey said,“And should you visit my skyscraper offices in Chicago – and you’re always welcome – your attention will focus first on a large portrait on the reception room wall. It’s a portrait of a young boy. His clothing dates itself to a generation past, the plus-fours are wretchedly wrinkled, the misshapen shoes are worn out. One of them is worn through. But the boy, leaning forward on one elbow, is listening enrapt to a 1930s-vintage cathedral-shaped, multi-dial radio. The boy does not resemble any person in particular, except to me. The artist is an Oklahoman named Jim Daly, whom I have never met, but with his painting he included this note. He said, ‘There is no way for me to express the pleasure I received from listening to the old radio programs. In my mind, those wonderful heroes were magnificent. No movie, no television program, not even real-life could have equated what my imagination could conjure up. Amazingly, all of those heroes’ he says, ‘looked a bit like me… And all of those heroes,’ he described, ‘looked a bit like me.'”The first American census was taken in 1790, fourteen years after the nation declared its independence from Britain; 3,893,635 persons were in that final count, which included 694,280 slaves. In other words, the total population of the United States was slightly smaller than today’s metropolitan Atlanta, slightly bigger than modern Detroit.1790 was just 228 years ago. Only 6 or 7 generations.I could say, “America became America because of the stories we told ourselves,” but that might lead you to believe that America has become what it will always be. But the new and different stories we are telling ourselves today are reshaping us, making us a different America.We become what we tell ourselves.“Those who tell the stories hold the power in society. Today television tells most of the stories to most of the people, most of the time.” – George Gerbner“Whether you read a newspaper, watch TV or follow the news online, only 14 percent of the stories you hear about were developed by journalists defining an issue and pursuing it. A staggering 86 percent of the stories were fed to broadcasters by official sources and press releases. In 1960 the PR agent-to-journalist ratio operating in the US was 0.75 to 1. Today the ratio is 5 to 1.” – John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney,&nbsp;The Death and Life of American Journalism&nbsp;Paul Harvey concluded his speech in 2003 by saying,“Isn’t it a shame that with noisy, distressing, depressing news hour after hour, day-in and day-out; by our emphasis on all of the bad things, crime and inflation and pollution and floods and fires and discord and discontent; by our persistent preoccupation with negatives, we tend to un-sell ourselves and our children on a way of life which in fact is the envy of the rest of the world. And that repetition is effective. I tell you, repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.”You and I speak a world into existence every day.And the kind of world we createDepends onlyOn the kinds of storiesWe tell.Roy H. Williams

Seek the teacher who is a mentor to apprentices. She will give you expert advice and examples, then evaluate your ability to do as she has taught. Her name is Wisdom and you should always listen to her voice.But Wisdom’s teacher allowed young Wisdom to follow any path she chose!Wisdom learned her lessons from Consequences, the greatest teacher of all.Wisdom can give you interesting examples because of all the fascinating things she learned from Consequences. You will know you are in the presence of Wisdom when you see her scars.Wisdom and Consequences are happy teachers&nbsp;who guide students through the adventures of life.A sad teacher repeats only what she’s been told, then grades you on how well you can repeat it back to her. She is a parrot, and she teaches other parrots.A smart person makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again.A wise person finds a smart person, and learns how to avoid that mistake altogether.A fool listens to a parrot, and believes what he is told.“But wait a minute, didn’t you say a wise person finds a smart person so they can learn how to avoid the mistake altogether?”“Yes, but the parrot is not a smart person.&nbsp;She never made the mistake and learned from it.&nbsp;She is just repeating what she’s been told.”“And why is that dangerous?”“When the experience of Consequences has been removed from the classroom, the majestic principles of Wisdom quickly degrade into small and silly rules.”The great fire-breathing dragonbecomes a tiny lizardwho lives in a little rulebook.Every bureaucrat was once a young parrot taught by a sad teacher.But was there ever a child who, late at night, lay under the covers and dreamed of someday becoming the enforcer of small and petty policies?No. But there are children who were unlucky enough to&nbsp;be protected from Consequences by a misguided someone who did not understand the value of scars.Roy H. Williams

Competition can be entertaining, but I do not consider it to be “play.”Is than un-American of me?Play, for me, can have no objective; no element of strategy or combat or debate.Writing for&nbsp;The New Yorker&nbsp;on Nov.14, 2011, John McPhee shares an anecdote about George Hartzog, a man who understood my kind of play, and Tony Buford, a man who did not.“It was Hartzog who took a set of plans that had been lying dormant for fifteen years and built the great arch of St. Louis. Those who know the story of the arch say that had it not been for Hartzog there would be no arch. Hartzog the ranger is a hero in St. Louis, but at this moment he is not a hero to Tony Buford. ‘God damn it, George, this river is a mess. There is no point fishing this God-damned river, George. The fishing here is no good.'”“Hartzog looks at Buford for a long moment, and the expression on his face indicates affectionate pity. He says, ‘Tony, fishing is always good.’ The essential difference between these friends is that Buford is an aggressive fisherman and Hartzog is a passive fisherman. Spread before Buford on the bow deck of his jon boat is an open, three-tiered tackle box that resembles the keyboard of a large theatre organ.”Likewise, John Ciardi understood the importance of true play, as does every great poet.&nbsp;Here is a portion of his essay,&nbsp;How Does a Poem Mean?Robert Frost knew precisely what the German critic Baumgarten meant when he spoke of the central impulse toward poetry – and toward all art&nbsp;– as the&nbsp;Spieltrieb, the&nbsp;play&nbsp;impulse.An excellent native example of the play impulse in poetry is the child clapping its hands in response to a Mother Goose rhyme. What does a child care for “meaning”? What on earth is the “meaning” of the following poem?High Diddle diddleThe cat and the fiddleThe cow jumped over the moon;The little dog laughedTo see such craftAnd the dish ran away with the spoon.“Preposterous,” says Mr. Gradgrind. But the child is wiser: he is busy having a good time with the poem. The poem pleases and involves him. He responds to it in an immediate muscular way. He recognizes its performance at once and wants to act with it.This is the first level of play, as rhythm is the first element of music. The child claps hands, has fun, and the play involves practically no thoughtful activity. Beyond this level of response, there begins the kind of play whose pleasure lies for the poet in overcoming meaningful and thoughtful (and ‘feelingful’) difficulties, and for the reader in identifying with the poet in that activity.My purpose today is to remind you of the delight to be had exploring ideas without purpose or plan or agenda.All you have to do is follow your curiosity. This can be done alone or with friends who understand the rules.Rules? Rules for play?Yes. Here they are.&nbsp;For an activity to be play, it must be:intrinsically motivating.If you play because you want to win, you’re not truly playing.freely chosen.If you play because you have to, you’re not playing.actively engaging.If you’re disinterested, you’re not playing.fun. You must derive pleasure from it.Some people would call such activities “wasting time.”But time cannot be wasted, it can only be spent.This is what&nbsp;time spent playing&nbsp;can buy:relaxation of the mind,restoration of optimism,rejuvenation of the soul.Are you up for it?If so, Indy Beagle and I have a proposal for you in today’s rabbit hole.To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the...

The strangeness of our world is demonstrated by the things we take for granted.I bought a used book. The previous owner’s name was Mary Lou. I know this because she used the stub of her boarding pass as a book marker.A few years ago, Mary Lou took United Airlines flight 5409 from San Diego to Los Angeles on New Year’s Day. She sat in seat 10C.No big deal, right? You can read all that on the stub of the boarding pass.But then I also know that she’s 44 years old with short, blonde hair and bright blue eyes. I know the sound of her voice and the name of her 11-year-old son and her home address in Minneapolis. I can name each of the 8 companies that have employed her as an events coordinator. And I know that she is a very private person.It took me less than 5 minutes to learn these things and I was only mildly curious.All I had to do was ask the companion in my pocket. She knows everything.My companion even gives me directions when I’m driving. “Turn here. Get in the left lane to turn left at the next intersection. Your destination will be on the right.” She knows every nook and cranny of every city, town and village on earth.She showed me a photo of the house where Mary Lou lives with her husband and her son.The strangeness of our world is demonstrated by the things we take for granted.There is a multicolored dog who lives across the street, two houses down.He races me for about 100 yards every morning when I drive past his house. We both know the finish line. He doesn’t growl or bark or act like he’s protecting his territory, he just likes to see if he can outrun my pickup truck.Strangely, he doesn’t race with Pennie or with anyone else.Only me.And he doesn’t race with me when I’m driving Pennie’s car.I don’t know the dog’s name, so I asked the companion in my pocket.She doesn’t know, either.Roy H. Williams

The feminine ideal was different a hundred years ago. Less sex, more charm.It was her charm that attracted us to young Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. This is why we refused to believe it when she was murdered in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution. For the next 50 years we embraced every impostor who claimed to be her.Elegant, effortless charm remained a feminine ideal as recently as 50 years ago. It’s what attracted us to the movies of Audrey Hepburn.Anastasia and Audrey represent the&nbsp;Regal Queen,&nbsp;one of the four feminine archetypes of Carl Jung.But Anastasia and Audrey were bumped aside by the blonde bombshells of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, poster girls for the objectification of women. And I mean “poster girls” quite literally. Marilyn was the centerfold in the first-ever issue of&nbsp;Playboy&nbsp;magazine, with Jayne following in her footsteps 17 months later.Marilyn and Jayne represent the&nbsp;Erotic Lover,&nbsp;another of the four feminine archetypes.Just as the Regal Queen was in vogue 100 years ago, so was the impudent&nbsp;ingénue.&nbsp;America was riveted by the antics of Alice Roosevelt, the mischievous young daughter of Teddy. And when Alice exited the White House, we replaced her with young Shirley Temple, the impetuous embodiment of&nbsp;Little Orphan Annie.This young “court jester” persona of Alice and Shirley and&nbsp;Little Orphan Annie&nbsp;is a sub-type of the&nbsp;Wise Woman&nbsp;archetype,which is the feminine variation of the masculine Wizard or Magician. It continues to this day as an icon of female empowerment in characters such as Katniss Everdeen from&nbsp;The Hunger Games,&nbsp;Lara Croft from&nbsp;Tomb Raider,&nbsp;Bella Swan from&nbsp;Twilight,&nbsp;and Hermione Grainger from the&nbsp;Harry Potter&nbsp;series.Girl Power.I’ve saved the first of the female archetypes for last, however, because&nbsp;Mother Eve&nbsp;is the least appreciated and most misunderstood.I blame the translators of the 1611 King James Bible.We meet&nbsp;Eve&nbsp;in the second chapter of Genesis when God says, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him an&nbsp;ezer kenegdo.”&nbsp;The King James version translates this as, “a help&nbsp;meet&nbsp;for him,” while other translations say “helpmate” or “helper.” (In 1611,&nbsp;meet&nbsp;meant&nbsp;appropriate.)This mistranslation in 1611 caused Christians to believe that the proper role of women was to be the “assistant,” or servant, to their man.The Hebrew term&nbsp;ezer kenegdo&nbsp;is notoriously difficult to translate. In fact, it appears nowhere in the Bible except the second chapter of Genesis.But we know for certain that it doesn’t mean “helper.” A more accurate translation would be&nbsp;“lifesaver.”Let’s look at the two separate words that form&nbsp;ezer kenegdo.Ezer&nbsp;is&nbsp;always interpreted as “power” or “strength” or “rescue.”Throughout the Bible, it speaks only of God, especially when you desperately need him to come through for you.“There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens to be your&nbsp;ezer.” – Deut. 33:26“Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD?&nbsp;He is your shield and&nbsp;ezer&nbsp;and your glorious sword.’ – Deut. 33:29“I lift up my eyes to the hills-where does my&nbsp;ezer&nbsp;come from?...

Do you have favorite books and movies?Are there songs you love and stories that captivate you?Is there art that speaks to your heart?Paintings and plays, movies and music, stories and sculptures: art is valuable to the degree that it triggers emotion.&nbsp;But it isn’t always the art, itself, that triggers the emotion.&nbsp;Sometimes the art is merely a point-of-contact with an idea – or an ideal – with which we identify.We’re attracted to art when itstands for something we believe in,shows us a reflection of our own values,gives us a glimpse of our own inner face.An icon symbolizes a thought or a feeling for which we do not have sufficient words.But when the symbolism of an icon becomes too obvious, we call it a cliché.We are attracted to mysterious icons.We are repelled by predictable clichés.“Mr. LeSage, sir, I’ve got a tender new script about a sensitive young subway guard that just stinks of courage and integrity. And I know, sir, that next to scripts that are Tender and Poignant, you love scripts that have Courage and Integrity. This one, sir, as I say, stinks of both. It’s full of melting-pot types. It’s sentimental. It’s violent in the right places. And just when the sensitive young subway guard’s problems are getting the best of him, destroying his faith in Mankind and the Little People, his nine-year-old niece comes home from school and gives him some nice, pat chauvinistic philosophy handed down to us through posterity and P.S. 564 all the way from Andrew Jackson’s backwoods wife. It can’t miss, sir! It’s down-to-earth, it’s simple, it’s untrue, and it’s familiar enough and trivial enough to be understood and loved by our greedy, nervous, illiterate sponsors.”– J. D. Salinger, from “Zooey,” published in&nbsp;The New Yorker&nbsp;in 1957According to W. H. Auden, “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”And according to Rob Kapilow, sappy clichés are “clear thinking about clear feelings.”I share this with you today in the hope that you will be able to use the richness of archetypes and icons in your advertising without falling into the molasses of sappy cliché.When a person spends money, they tell you everything about themselves that matters.Our purchases remind us – and announce to the world around us – who we are. Our favorite brands communicate what we stand for, what we believe in. We direct our dollars in ways that reflect our values and offer a glimpse of our souls.Great ads create a lasting bond with customers through the artful use of archetype and icon.What? You’re convinced people just want the facts? The unadorned truth?It’s 1991. We see workers in a car factory as we hear the voice of Brian Keith,“A car is a car. It won’t make you handsome or prettier or younger. And if it improves your standing with the neighbors, then you live among snobs. A car is steel, electronics, rubber, plastic and glass. A machine. And in the end, may the best machine win… Subaru. What to drive.”In 1992, we see the next ad in that series:“Making a sports car, it seems mandatory to mention how fast it can go. Instead, why not mention the things you&nbsp;shouldn’t&nbsp;mention about a sports car: a strong weld, over 24 safety features, all-wheel drive, engineering that endures. Still, if it’s speed you want, we promise, with the Subaru SVX you’ll easily be able to go as fast as the law allows… Subaru. What to drive.”And then the campaign evolved into open mockery of people who identify with the cars they drive.Shot from a low angle, we look upward at a man who looks down on us. He says,MAN 1: A luxury car says a lot about its owner.WOMAN 1: Mine says I’m witty beyond belief.MAN 2: Mine says I’m more Europeanish.MAN 3: Mine says I’m the product of superior genes.WOMAN...

You walk out the door. A person raises a forefinger and says, “Quick question.”And then they tie you up for the next 30 minutes.Have you ever been ambushed this way?Quick questions don’t always have quick answers and you can’t give 30 minutes to every person who raises a forefinger, so the next time you’re ambushed, smile as you continue walking and say, “Walk with me.”&nbsp;The questioner will invariably fall into step beside you.If you stop walking, you’ve officially been “captured.”A walking person is obviously headed somewhere, so “Walk with me” indicates that your time to speak with them will be over when you get to where you’re headed. When you get there, shake their hand and say, “I’m glad we got to talk.” And then disappear.“Walk with me” is how to make sure that quick questions remain quick.But sometimes you need to give your full attention to what a person is saying.Tom Peters became the king of business authors in 1982 when he wrote&nbsp;In Search of Excellence,&nbsp;a book that sold 3 million copies in its first 4 years.Today, at 75 years old, Tom Peters says listening is “the bedrock of leadership excellence,” but characterizes himself as a bad listener and “a serial interrupter.” So to help him stay focused on the other person, he writes the word “LISTEN” on the palm of his hand before walking into meetings. He says, “The focus must be on what the other person is saying, not on formulating your response. That kind of listening shows respect for the other person, and they notice it.”&nbsp;1According to Roger Dooley at Forbes.com, “Peters cites research that on average, doctors listen to a patient describing symptoms for just&nbsp;eighteen seconds&nbsp;before interrupting…&nbsp;Professionals who are smart and who know what they are talking about are often the worst listeners.”I’ve noticed that people who are smart and know what they are talking about are also the worst explainers.This is due to a disease called&nbsp;“the curse of knowledge”&nbsp;that afflicts every expert.When speaking about a subject we know intimately, we assume our audience has a higher level of familiarity with our subject matter than they actually possess. Consequently, we believe they are “connecting the dots” when in fact they are barely following what we are saying.To become a more effective teacher, all you have to do is add the words “which means…” to every statement of fact you make. You can do this out loud or in your mind. Either way, you will be prompted to connect the dots for your audience, and they will love you for it.Gen Z was born between 1995 and 2015.[which means&nbsp;they are between 3 and 23 years old.which means&nbsp;the youngest “millennial” is currently 24 and growing older every day.which means the future will be firmly in the hands of Gen Z in about 25 years.]77% of Gen Z prefer reading printed books and 59% don’t trust Facebook.&nbsp;2[which means&nbsp;our current obsession with the internet may turn out to be a fad.]34% of Gen Z said they were permanently leaving social media, and 64% are taking a break because “the platforms make them feel anxious or depressed.”&nbsp;2[which means&nbsp;social media may continue to loosen its grip on our attention.which means&nbsp;there is still hope for the return of face-to-face social interaction.which means&nbsp;Gen Z is reflecting the values of their grandparents who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s.which means&nbsp;the pendulum of society is swinging precisely as it has for the past 3,000 years.]Now read those 3 statements of fact without...

“He knew how to lead by listening and teaching.”– Erwin C. Hargrove, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University,&nbsp;writing in 1998 about a leader he much admired.I, too, have known brilliant leaders like that; men and women who lead by listening and teaching.Brian Scudamore, Lori Barr, Richard Kessler, Cathy Thorpe, Erik Church, Sarah Casebier, David Rehr, Michele Miller, Brian Alter, Richard D. Grant and David St. James to name just a few. I mentioned one such leader, Dewey Jenkins, in last week’s Monday Morning Memo. Another of them, Ken Sim, is currently running for mayor of Vancouver.According to Professor Hargrove, the key to leadership is to hearken to “the better angels of our nature,” a phrase he borrowed from Abraham Lincoln, who used it in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861.But we didn’t listen to Lincoln. We chose civil war just 6 weeks later.The leader that Professor Hargrove admired who “knew how to lead by listening and teaching,” was another American president who encouraged us during a different time of social upheaval – the Great Depression.“In February 1933, a man shot at [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, who was riding in an open car in Miami, but succeeded in killing Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who was with the president-elect. FDR was calm and deci­sive, ordering the driver to go immediately to the hospital, paying no attention to his own security, and talking to the wounded man. His calm courage impressed all who saw him.”– Erwin C. Hargrove,The President As A Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature,&nbsp;p. 79 (1998)The Stanford Library review of Professor Hargrove’s book ends with this statement: “In harking back to Lincoln’s evocation of the better angels of our nature, Hargrove reminds us that we may, even as leaders, be better versions of ourselves.”And the key to becoming that “better version of ourselves” is to become focused listeners and patient teachers.The reason history repeats itself is because we don’t pay attention the first time.Anti-intellectualism in American Life&nbsp;was written in 1964 by Richard Hofstadter, a professor of American History at Columbia University.It won him the Pulitzer Prize.&nbsp;It was his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his 1955 book,&nbsp;The Age of Reform.Reading these books has caused me to develop a theory.Can I share my observations with you?Our obsession with the internet has led us to believe that we are smarter and wiser than any previous generation.We quietly assume that anyone over 40 is a dinosaur, and that every famous historical figure was innocently naive. “But they couldn’t help it,” we sympathize, “because they didn’t know everything like we do now.”We ignore the centuries of experience of previous generations.We are teaching. But we are not listening.And those who teach – without listening – share their own preferences as though those preferences were wisdom.But what do I know? I’m over 40.Roy H. Williams

Dewey Jenkins says, “If your employees don’t look forward to company meetings, then you’re not doing it right.”Dewey has grown his company to nearly 100 times the size it was when he bought it, so I tend to listen to what he says.Dewey taught me to celebrate, not just the touchdowns, but the first downs.Dewey smiles and says, “Celebrate, Celebrate, Celebrate!”So I’m going to do that today.Vice-Chancellor Whittington posted a “Tower Update” video last week promoting&nbsp;Bonding as a Branding Strategy,&nbsp;a new class debuting at Wizard Academy on August 29 and 30. (Wednesday and Thursday of next week. I think there are still a couple of rooms available on campus.)What I’m celebrating is that&nbsp;he explains “customer bonding” in his video&nbsp;better than I do! And I’m the one who taught it to him! Heck, I’m the guy who invented the term!I’m celebrating because he proved he understood it by building a Wizard Academy YouTube channel with my oldest son, Rex, that currently has more than 112,000 subscribers and is adding hundreds more daily.I’m celebrating because they built&nbsp;that highly successful YouTube channel&nbsp;without spending a single cent on advertising or promotion.I’m celebrating because 500 of those YouTube viewers – that’s right, 500 prospective new students – will be flying to Austin from all over North America&nbsp;this Saturday&nbsp;to tour the Wizard Academy campus and hear about all the other courses we teach.I’m celebrating because the Whiskey Sommelier&nbsp;storytelling&nbsp;program created by vice-chancellor Whittington has already delivered a large number of new students to Wizard Academy.I’m celebrating because the principles taught in that Whiskey Sommelier program aren’t a departure from our established curricula. The sommeliers are taught how to “romance” the whiskey they’re about to pour through delightful, artful descriptions of it. We’re teaching them how to craft and deliver messages that create strong bonds and dramatically increase sales.I’m celebrating because many of these newly-graduated Whiskey Sommeliers have already signed up to take additional courses that aren’t whiskey-related.Best of all, most of these new students have never heard of Roy H. Williams.After spending 20 years and millions of dollars to build a 501c3 educational organization, I now know for certain that Wizard Academy will continue to thrive long after Princess Pennie and I are gone.And that’s definitely a thing worth celebrating.Roy H. WilliamsPS – Don’t get the wrong idea. Pennie and I aren’t, to my knowledge, going away anytime soon. It’s just good to know that the school is no longer dependent on us.

Reading that Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Christian anarchist, I had an unexpected thought, so I asked Google, “What is the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian?”Six-tenths of a second later, The Goog told me – in a highly visible block at the top of the Search Engine Results Page:“An&nbsp;anarchist&nbsp;is an extreme libertarian, like a socialist is an extreme democrat, and a fascist is an extreme republican. It’s like the&nbsp;difference between&nbsp;a lover and a rapist. They’re both&nbsp;in the&nbsp;same place but one uses violence to get there.&nbsp;Libertarians&nbsp;believe in free markets, private property, and capitalism.”And included in that&nbsp;featured snippet&nbsp;was a hyperlink to ChaosPark.com, the low-budget website of a better-than-average writer named Harry Reid.Harry paid nothing for Google’s recommendation of him and his website. He earned it by crafting the most concise, cogent answer to an often-asked question.Google is rewarding writers of concise content, wordsmiths who get to the point.When Google’s featured snippet is&nbsp;your&nbsp;answer to a commonly asked question in your business category, Google is telling the world that YOU are the expert of experts. It seems, to me, this should be the goal of every Search Engine Optimizer.But this would require them:to be experts in your business category, andto be better-than-average writers.But since they are neither of these, they will tell you the secret to becoming a featured snippet is in the microdata, and then fly into a blur of activity with a flurry of sparks and elbows.Take a quick look at Harry Reid’s&nbsp;ChaosPark.com&nbsp;and I think you’ll see that Harry doesn’t give a rat’s ass about microdata, metadata, or SEO. He’s just a guy writing about things that interest him, and he knows how to summarize big ideas in few words.Does your business interest you? Can you summarize big ideas in few words?Before you can take a person to where you want them to go, you must meet them where they are.&nbsp;You must answer their questions –as asked– and speak to them within the frame of their own experience.Leo Tolstoy knew this,&nbsp;and he used his novels as instruments&nbsp;for the examination of social issues.&nbsp;War and Peace&nbsp;(1869,)&nbsp;Anna Karenina&nbsp;(1887,) and&nbsp;The Death of Ivan Ilyich&nbsp;(1886,) were not meant to be entertainments, but persuasive lessons about life and living. Tolstoy met his readers where they were, so that he could take them where he wanted them to go.John knew this, too,&nbsp;so he framed his Good News to be easily understood by the people of the region in which he made his home. One of the 4 “first followers” of Jesus,&nbsp;John wrote to the people of Ephesus within the frame of their own experience.But that’s another story.What does your customer already care about?What does your customer already understand?If you will be persuasive, you need to begin your story exactly there.Before you can take a person to where you want them to go, you must meet them where they are.Roy H. Williams

The pivotal moments in our lives are rarely announced with trumpets and fanfare.But wouldn’t it be great if they were?“Hello, this is God speaking. You’re at an inflection point in your life and although you don’t suspect it, the wisdom you’re about to receive from that old man over there is going to empower you to achieve things you never imagined. So pay attention, okay? This is a really big moment. Don’t let it slip past you.”No, that doesn’t happen. Not the voice, anyway.But the moment definitely happens.We just don’t realize it until years later.You are Frodo Baggins. You are on a journey. The old man you meet in the woods is Gandalf. He will equip you with what you need.You are Luke Skywalker. You are on a journey. The old man you meet in the woods is Obi Wan Kenobi. He will equip you with what you need.&nbsp;For now.Later, you face challenges for which Obi Wan did not equip you. You are lost in the woods again. You meet another old man. His name is Yoda. He is funny and small but pay attention to him. He will equip you with what you need.Now you are you.You are about to meet an old man in the woods. His name is Warren Buffett.I’m going to pretend to be God, okay?Don’t laugh. I’m doing this for you.“You’re at an inflection point in your life and the wisdom you’re about to receive is going to empower you to achieve things you never imagined. So pay attention, okay? This is a really big moment. Don’t let it slip past you.”“I was genetically blessed with a certain wiring that’s very useful in a highly developed market system where there’s lots of chips on the table, and I happen to be good at that game. Ted Williams wrote a book called&nbsp;The Science of Hitting&nbsp;and in it he had a picture of himself at bat and the strike zone broken into, I think, 77 squares. And he said if he waited for the pitch that was really in his sweet spot he would bat .400 and if he had to swing at something on the lower corner he would probably bat .235. And in investing I’m in a ‘no called strike’ business which is the best business you can be in. I can look at a thousand different companies and I don’t have to be right on every one of them, or even fifty of them. So I can pick the ball I want to hit. And the trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot. And if people are yelling, ‘Swing, you bum,’ ignore ’em. There’s a temptation for people to act far too frequently in stocks simply because they’re so liquid. Over the years you develop a lot of filters. But I do know what I call my ‘circle of competence’ so I stay within that circle and I don’t worry about things that are outside that circle. Defining what your game is – where you’re going to have an edge – is enormously important.”– Warren Buffett, in the 2017 documentary,&nbsp;Becoming Warren BuffettYou become self-aware when you realize what is – and what is not – in your circle of competence.Most people are not self-aware.Warren Buffett is acutely self-aware.“But I do know what I call my ‘circle of competence’ so I stay within that circle and I don’t worry about things that are outside that circle.”Warren, do you have any last words of wisdom for my friend?“Defining what your game is – where you’re going to have an edge – is enormously important.”That was a big moment.Don’t let it slip past you.Roy H. WilliamsPS – ‘The old man you meet in the woods’ is, as often as not, a woman.PPS –&nbsp;“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.”&nbsp;– John Naisbitt

The Random Quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com currently contains&nbsp;4,376 quotes.About a third of these are quotes you can easily find online.Nearly half are delightful passages I’ve transcribed from books, movies, or TV shows, and archived for future reference.Five percent are witty and wonderful statements made by friends during lunch or in casually written emails.And exactly 455 of those 4,376 quotes are words of my own.Quoting oneself might appear to be insufferably egotistical, but in truth, my only objective is to capture thoughts I might want to think upon in the future. Hence my latest addition to the database, made only moments ago, “Boxwine and Soupline are barstool buddies of Spraytan and Parlay. The girl is Parlay’s sister, Parfait.”Innocent readers who stumble upon that quote in the future will doubtless scratch their heads and say, “What the hell?” never suspecting it’s only a note I scribbled to myself about characters in a short story yet to be written.But today, because you are special, I will explain the backstory of those 5 characters.A dozen years ago I hired Devin Wright and trained him to be a media buyer, a professional negotiator.&nbsp;At least once a day I would pop into his office and ask him a wildly unexpected question. Devin would always laugh, and that would be that.But one day about 7 years ago I popped in, pointed at him and asked, “Devin, is that a spray tan?”Devin sputtered and coughed and denied that he would ever do such a thing, so of course being from Oklahoma, I was required to forever thereafter introduce him as Spraytan Wright.Wine snob Boxwine Harrison has the office next to Spraytan.I decided that Boxwine’s little brother would be Soupline.“But whence,” you ask, “come Parlay and Parfait?”Be patient. I’m getting to that.A week ago, Spraytan put $200 on an online gambling site so that he could place bets on sporting events. He quickly turned his $200 into $600, then got bored and lost the whole $600 playing blackjack.His pirate friend Dave Neubert asked, “Did you check your bonus money?”“My what?”“When you put money into an account, they often give you a few bonus dollars just to keep you gambling.”Spraytan checked, and sure enough, he had 4 dollars and 41 cents in bonus money.&nbsp;So he chose 12 fights that would happen later that day, picked his 12 fighters, and parlayed his $4.41 across the entire dozen, which means he had to pick 12 winners in advance or his bet would be forfeited. If even one of his fighters lost, Spraytan would get nothing.Big deal, right? It’s four dollars and 41 cents. And not even his money.So he went to get a haircut.When he got up from the barber chair, Spraytan checked on his bet.&nbsp;Ten of the 12 fights were over, and his fighters had won all 10 fights! He drove home quickly, to say the least.They tell me the gravel from his tires is still flying above that parking lot.Sliding sideways into his driveway, Spraytan ran into his house, turned on the TV and began shouting instructions to fighter number 11. But that guy lost. Then, when Spraytan checked his bet, it turns out that he had bet on the other guy, the winner!When his 12th fighter won the 12th fight, Spraytan looked at his cell phone screen to see that his four dollars and 41 cents was now three thousand, seven hundred and twelve dollars and two cents.When he told me what happened, I said, “Spraytan, I believe you’ve earned a new nickname. After today, I’m going to start calling you Parlay.”He smiled.“But of course Parlay isn’t a word I’m really familiar with. The truth is I never heard that word until you told me your story just now, so I’m sure you’ll understand if I occasionally call you Parfait.”The smile disappeared and Devin said, “I think we should just stick with...

When you have nothing to say, be careful that you don’t pay money to say it.“What do you mean?”Have you ever paid a premium to target the right audience and then made an offer that failed to move them?“Everyone has paid for ads that didn’t work.”Did you realize that your message was at fault, or did you assume that you had mis-targeted?“Well, even when it doesn’t work, at least I get some name recognition.”[sigh] What am I going to do with you?&nbsp;Name recognition is enough only&nbsp;if your competitors are invisible or incompetent.“What do you mean?”Invisible means they don’t have the courage to advertise.Incompetent means their ads are even worse than yours.“But my ads are way better than average. They look and feel professional.”Most ads – even professional ads – aren’t written to persuade. They are written not to offend.&nbsp;This is why most ads speak in worn-out clichés.&nbsp;Why not just add a stock photo and get it over with?“Are you saying that most ads are ineffective?”Even the weakest ads have an effect, but what you’re looking for is long-lasting, cumulative impact.“Can you speak more plainly, please?”Bad advertising is about your product.&nbsp;Good advertising is about your customer and their life.&nbsp;And your customer values nothing so much as they value that circle of people who are close to them.&nbsp;Your customer relates to those people.&nbsp;Your customer identifies with those people.&nbsp;Your customer forgives those people when they screw up.“I thought we were talking about advertising here. You make it sound like I should spend my ad budget&nbsp;trying to make friends.”That’s right! I’m talking to you about trying to make friends! When your customer appreciates you and your comments, they consider you to be a friend, even though they have never met you.“So if I don’t talk about my product, what do I talk about?”Talk about what your customer already cares about. Don’t try to convince them to care about what you&nbsp;wish&nbsp;they cared about.“So what does my customer already care about?”They care about that circle of people I mentioned. They care about the people who care about them.&nbsp;You have the power – if you dare – to take your place in that circle.“But how?”By causing your customer to identify with you.“But why will they identify with me?”They will do it partly because of what you say and how you say it. But they will do it mostly because of what you&nbsp;don’t&nbsp;say.“Okay, so tell me what&nbsp;not to&nbsp;say.”Don’t talk constantly about your company and your product. This just makes your ads sound like ads.“As much as I hate to say it, you’re beginning to make a little bit of sense. But can you give me an example of what you’re talking about?”I’ll ask Indy Beagle to put some recent examples on the first few pages of the rabbit hole.“The rabbit hole? What’s that?”It’s a weekly e-zine for self-selected insiders.“Where?”Just click the image of Indy Beagle at the top of any Monday Morning Memo and you’re in. Indy is reading over my shoulder right now and wagging his tail. I think he has something in mind. I’m curious to see what it is.Roy H. Williams

They told you it was called, “reading between the lines.”But what they didn’t tell you was that the writer put it there – between the lines – for you to figure out on your own.Speak the truth and people will doubt you.&nbsp;But if you can tempt those people to follow you to where they can discover that truth on their own, you will have convinced them to the core of their soul.You’ve got to let them find the treasure on their own.But it’s okay to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.Just don’t be too obvious about it.When the crumbs are too big or too close together, people feel manipulated.You’ll know you’ve done the job perfectly when the person whose eyes you’ve opened wants to tell you about “this wonderful new thing” they have discovered.Mothers go through this every day.How old were you when you finally figured out that most of what you were “discovering” and sharing with your mom was just stuff she had placed in your path for you to find?Wives are good at this, too.&nbsp;Princess Pennie does it with such subtlety and grace that it’s often days or weeks before I realize what she has done.But I am neither a mother nor a wife, so my only option is to clumsily remind you of things you already know. You will then be free to say, “Yes, I already knew that, but thanks for the reminder.”These are the things I would not have you forget:(Or should it be, “These are the things I would have you not forget:”?&nbsp;I’ll let you decide. And I’m reasonably certain that my&nbsp;colon–quotation mark–question mark&nbsp;sequence two sentences ago is improper punctuation, but I can’t figure out how to phrase the question for Google, so with your permission I’ll just move on, okay?)Never claim to be honest. Just say things that only an honest person would say. Having followed the breadcrumbs, the listener will then conclude, “Wow. This person is really honest.”Never claim to be generous. Just freely give what only a generous person would give. The recipient will then conclude, “Wow. This person is really generous.”Never claim to be intelligent. Just listen intently and nod your head as though you understand.&nbsp;The speaker will then conclude, “Wow. This person really gets it.”Now that I think about it, never claim anything at all. Just demonstrate the quality you want to be known for.In other words, shut up and do the thing.Don’t claim things.Demonstrate them.I’m talking about advertising, of course.But I think the same advice also goes for pretty much every other situation in life.Did you notice the anomaly in point 3, the one about intelligence? Did you notice what was missing? Did you hear what I did not say?I did not tell you to, “Just say something that only an intelligent person would say.”Because that NEVER works. Trying to sound intelligent just makes you look like a pompous ass.But you already knew that.You’re such a great listener.Thanks.Roy H. Williams

Listen, my young apprentice, and I will release you from your chains.Every door of opportunity begins as a window in the mind.Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, should be, ought to be someday. Keep looking… and watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you can pass into an entirely different future.Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.1Yes, opportunity begins as a window in the mind through which we glimpse possible futures.And then one day&nbsp;we leap through that window.“What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”“That we shall die.”“Yes, there’s really only one question that can be answered, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”&nbsp;2There is a space between yesterday and tomorrow. Do you know the place I mean?It’s called Life.And you’ve got to make a living if you’re going to have a life.How do you want to be paid?Do you want to be paid for your time,or do you want you be paid for your knowledge?Listen, my young apprentice, to what an old man knows.There is no future in being paid by the hour.You must escape from that financial prison.Become good at something.Become astoundingly good.Do you see a person who is skilled in their work?That person will stand before kings.&nbsp;3Do you wait tables?Become the server whose tables spend twice as much money as the other tables. Restaurants around the world will hire you to teach their servers how to do the same. But don’t let those restaurant owners pay you for your time. Insist that you be paid for the difference you made.Do you stack bricks?Stack them in a way that no one has ever seen bricks stacked before. You have sizes, shapes, and colors. Stack them so they can’t be ignored! But don’t let your customers pay you for your time. Be paid for the difference you made.Listen, my young apprentice, to what an old man knows.Craftsmen are paid for the quality of their work.But craftsmen are paid by the hour.An artist is paid for the impact of their art.Artists are paid for the difference they made.The only thing that separates a craft from an artis how you agree to be paid.Roy H. Williams1&nbsp;The Monday Morning Memo, July 18, 20052&nbsp;Ursula K. Le Guin,&nbsp;The Left Hand of Darkness,&nbsp;chapter 53&nbsp;Proverbs 22:29&nbsp;(NASB)Do you see a man skilled in his work?He will stand before kings;He will not stand before obscure men.

Every few months, I remind my partners of something that took me way too long to learn.I say, “When a person believes in what they’re doing – even if it’s an imperfect plan – let them keep doing it. Give them advice and try to open their eyes, but don’t fight them too hard, because, ‘A person convinced against their will, remains unconvinced, still.’ So be careful. If you finally convince a person to quit doing what they believe in, and to start doing what you would do if you owned their company, they’re probably going to fail.”People who have spent time with me may find this difficult to believe, but I’m a lot less combative than I used to be.Here is the non-combative technique I use.Listen attentively to the person with whom you disagree.Let them speak until they’re finished.Find a point of agreement, something you can honestly endorse.Tell them why you agree with them. And if they have altered your opinion in any way, confess that to them, as well.Use the point you agree upon to introduce another point which you feel might expand and enrich their perspective.Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about introducing “alternative facts.”I’m talking about introducing your idea as a logical extension of the idea about which you have already agreed.This will cause the other person to feel like they already knew the thing that seemingly just occurred to you.In essence, you’ll be giving them an entirely new perspective while reinforcing what they already believe.Bottom line: Try to avoid telling people they are wrong. You’ll make more progress and achieve more change if you can figure out a way to tell them they are right.Here’s a recent example:An air conditioning client was convinced that we should target the perfect customer profile by using “addressable TV” ads.&nbsp;This would allow us to target specific households individually – rather than as a demographic, geographic, or psychographic group – by using data provided by broadcaster set-top boxes (STBs) and over-the-top (OTT) streaming devices like Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, or Amazon Firestick.The CEO of the air conditioning company said, “Why should we pay to reach people who live in apartments, or who rent their houses from landlords, or who have a home warranty contract with a company other than ours? Wouldn’t it make more sense to target ONLY those homeowners living in houses old enough to need a new air conditioner, and who don’t have a home warranty?”“I love that idea!” I said, “And we’ve already got some great TV ads we could air!” I gave him a high five, then asked, “How much did they say it will cost us?”“They said it will be extremely efficient since we’ll be aiming a rifle with a scope instead of using a shotgun like we’re doing now.”“I don’t doubt that a bit,” I said, “but we do need to find out how much they’re going to charge us per 1,000 households they deliver (CPM.)&nbsp;We’re currently paying a cost-per-thousand (CPM) of $3 on broadcast radio. Now I’m DEFINITELY willing to pay more than $3 per thousand to reach the PERFECT customer rather than the unfiltered, mixed-bag, untargeted customers we’re currently reaching, but how many untargeted customers is one PERECTLY TARGETED customer worth? Is it 4-to-one? 7-to-one? Are we willing to trade 10 untargeted customers for 1 targeted customer? How many are we willing to trade? I think at some point there’s going to be at least one perfect customer in our current, unfiltered assortment of broadcast TV viewers and broadcast radio listeners, don’t you think? And then we get all those other people for free. But I still think this “addressable TV” thing is a great idea. So call and tell them exactly who you want to target and ask for the cost-per-thousand.”After he checked into it, he learned that the cheapest we might possibly

I’ve often wondered what happened to him.Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, 1979: Pennie and I had just moved into our first house.It…was built before Oklahoma became a state,had never had a mortgage on it,had been expanded 3 different times,and was now barely 800 sq. ft.,had sat vacant for more than 10 years,and was sold to us for $21,500.It wasn’t an impressive neighborhood.Pennie looked out our front window and saw a frightening-looking man working on his car. She mentioned it to me. I looked out the window and saw a man in his mid-30s wearing ragged clothes with a dirty pony-tail that trailed below his belt. He had rented the unlivable shack across the street.I walked outside to meet him. “Hi. I’m Roy. I live over there.”“Hi. I’m Harold.”I helped him fix his car, a worn-out Chevy Vega.Harold and I became good friends. He was soft-spoken, respectful, and sentimental. Pennie liked him, too.One Sunday afternoon, the phone rang. It was Harold. “Roy, do you have $400 in cash?”Miraculously, I did have $400 in cash that day, an extremely rare occurrence. “Harold, if you had called on any other day, I wouldn’t have been able to say yes. But I do, in fact, have $400.”“Man, I need you to come and bail me out of jail. I ran a red light at midnight and didn’t have my driver’s license with me. Can you come and bail me out? I can pay you back as soon as we get to my house, I swear.”“I’ll be right there.”As we pulled away from the police station, Harold said, “If you will, I need you to do me one more favor.”“Okay, what is it?”“Follow me to my boss’s house. He’s been wanting to buy my Vega and stuff a big motor in it to make himself a drag racing car. I’ve decided to sell it to him.”We stopped at Harold’s house where he paid me back the $400, then I followed him a few miles to where his boss lived. Harold’s job was to mix cement all day and hand it up in 5 gallon buckets to the brick masons on the scaffold. They paid him in cash each week.Harold gave his boss the car keys, got in my car again, looked at me with tear-filled eyes and said, “One last favor?”“Whatever you need.”“Drive me to the bus station.”“Harold, what’s going on?”He was blinking away the tears. “I’m going to buy a ticket on whatever bus is about to leave the station and I’m going to move to wherever that bus takes me. Roy, I’m an escaped convict.”It took me a few moments to find my voice. “What were you in for, Harold?”That’s when he told me his real name was Jeff-something. Sadly, I’ve forgotten Jeff’s last name because he spoke it just that one time, during a highly distracted moment, 39 years ago.“I had just turned eighteen when my Dad beat the crap out of me and I decided to leave home. I hitchhiked and slept in open fields for a couple of days until I ran out of money for food. I was walking down the road on the morning of the third day when I saw a farmer working all alone. I walked over and asked if he would give me a meal and pay me a few dollars if I helped him all day. He said he would. At the end of the day, he gave me a meal but claimed he never agreed to give me any money. I was really mad, so I walked out to his barn and took a 5-gallon can of gas and a .22 rifle he had for shooting rats and then I started walking down the road.”Back in those days, it was easy for hitchhikers to catch a ride when they were carrying a can of gas to give to whoever picked them up.“I was planning to sell the .22 at the nearest pawn shop. It never occurred to me that the farmer had seen me and called the sheriff. I had only walked about 200 yards when I was arrested and taken to jail.”“What happened next?”“I had been in jail a couple of weeks when I hid under a big pile of dirty clothes in a canvas laundry cart just before they rolled it onto

Dear Radio,I’ve loved you all my life. In fact, I have more confidence in you than you have in yourself.But you have a blind spot, and it’s killing you: radio advertisers are reaching 100% of the city and convincing them 10% of the way, when they should be reaching 10% of the city and convincing them 100% of the way.You’re letting advertisers squander their money on reach without frequency.Your spot rate is determined by your reach, your audience size.The bigger your reach, the bigger your bank account.This is why you dance when you have a good book.&nbsp;1You push reach.“We’re #1” means “We offer the most reach.”But your client’s success is determined by his frequency.I am your client. Sell me a schedule that gives me big reach with small frequency and I’ll soon be singing, “I tried radio and it didn’t work” at the top of my lungs.Sell me small reach with big frequency and I’ll take over your city, one station at a time. I’ll use relentless frequency to become a household word on a little station, then when that station’s weekly cume of&nbsp;many thousands of listeners&nbsp;2&nbsp;have grown my company into a bigger one, I’ll add another station, then another and another until I’m on every station in town.This is not theoretical. I’ve been doing it for 38 years and it has never failed to work. In truth, our clients across the U.S., Canada, and Australia are seeing greater success through radio today than ever before.Frequency should be non-negotiable. Why do you let people on the air without it?And since I sell products and services that have a long selling cycle, I’ll also need consistency.Consistency is the frequency of the frequency.52-week consistency is essential when your client has a long selling cycle. Things like engagement rings, A/C repair, home appliances, drain opening, legal services, auto repair, and insurance have long selling cycles. The way I can win these categories is to become the provider the customer thinks of immediately – and feels best about – when they, or any of the people in their circle of influence, finally need what I sell.The only clients who can succeed without consistency are sellers of food and entertainment – things with a short selling cycle – things we buy every day, or at least every week or two.Reach and frequency are not interchangeable.Who was it that decided we should multiply reach times frequency to calculate gross impressions, and then cast gross impressions as a percentage of the population to calculate gross rating points?The hunger for gross impressions and gross rating points always leads to the purchase of too much reach without enough frequency. When you multiply reach times frequency, you blur the line between the two. Reach is easy to obtain in a media mix. Frequency is not.Reach is not a substitution for frequency.Frequency must be protected at all costs.If I buy 100 gross rating points, I’ve reached the mathematical equivalent of 100% of the population of the trade area 1 time. It would take 1,000,000 gross impressions to give me 100 gross rating points in a city of 1,000,000 people. But does this mean I’ve reached 100% of the people 1 time? Or does it mean I’ve reached 50% of the people twice? Or does it mean I’ve reached 25% of the people 4 times? Or does it mean I’ve reached 10% of the people 10 times? Or does it mean I’ve reached 5% of the people 20 times? Or does it mean I’ve reached 1 sad bastard 1,000,000 times? Each of those scenarios is 100 gross rating points.The only numbers that really matter are:(1.) a weekly Frequency of at least 3.0 and(2.) 7-day Net Reach (18+)&nbsp;3Sleep erases advertising. This is why you must always measure frequency within a window of 7 night’s sleep. It’s also why 52-week consistency is vital.This is the...

Is established information or new information more likely to be true?Which is more effective, planning or improvisation?Are people essentially good, or essentially selfish?Which is more important, individual rights or collective rights?Will the future of America be better than its past?Are low-income people less intelligent than high-income people?Is the Bible true, or just a collection of ancient folk stories?Are attractive people more reliable than unattractive ones?You may think those questions have obvious answers. But in truth, just as many people chose the opposites.Each of us has foundational assumptions upon which our worldviews are predicated.If your foundational assumptions are different than mine, you’ll interpret experiences, evidence, and data differently than I do.Psychologists call a foundational assumption a “cognitive bias,” but only if your assumption is tightly focused. If we’re discussing your entire collection of foundational assumptions, we’re talking about your “schema.”Your schema, or outlook, is how you believe the universe works.Asking a person to reconsider a foundational assumption is like asking them to change their religion.But every foundational assumption comes with a blind spot.This is true even if your foundational assumptions caused you to answer our opening 8 questions by saying, “Well, it depends on…”We often believe our foundational assumptions are shared by intelligent people everywhere.Because when you “know” something deeply and intrinsically, it’s hard to imagine other people not knowing it. This cognitive bias is often called “the curse of knowledge,” and it’s responsible for a high percentage of bad advertising&nbsp;because it will cause you to answer questions in your ads that no one was asking.Are you beginning to see why it’s important to be aware of your blind spots?Most of us refuse to believe we have blind spots, because to accept that you have blind spots is to accept that your foundational assumptions are flawed, and then who would you be?To point out another person’s blind spot is like undressing them in public; you will not be soon forgiven.And now you know why polite people “never discuss politics or religion” with people outside their own ingroup.And although this may sound Machiavellian, I share it with you not so that you might employ it, but so that you might guard yourself against it:&nbsp;It is easy to manipulate a person when you know their foundational assumptions.Don’t let people manipulate you.When you have the courage to recognize your foundational assumptions for what they are, you are more likely to be happy, more likely to be liked, more likely to experience personal peace.But this open-mindedness comes at a price:&nbsp;you will never be the leader of villagers with torches and pitchforks.But that was never really a goal of yours, was it?Was it?Roy H. Williams

A lawyer and a rabbi are arguing about what it means to be kind.It is an ancient argument.The lawyer thinks a “kind” person is always polite and considerate.The rabbi thinks “politeness” is superficial, and “considerate” simply means to consider the consequences before taking any action, but that true kindness comes at a price. The rabbi believes that true kindness will take insult, inconvenience or injury upon itself in order to save another person from the same.We read of this encounter between the lawyer and the rabbi in the&nbsp;Biblical book of Luke.&nbsp;You may remember the story of a traveler who is robbed, stripped of his clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road.Jesus, the young rabbi, tells the lawyer that two religious people passed by the wounded traveler, but both of them avoided the man. Then, the member of an ethic minority&nbsp;came upon the injured traveler. The most common name for this ethnic minority was&nbsp;a racial slur&nbsp;in the day of Jesus, so to help make his point, Jesus used the racial slur as the name of the man: “a Samaritan.”According to Jesus, “the Samaritan,” at his own expense, took the injured traveler to an inn, treated his wounds, and paid the innkeeper to take care of him.Jesus then asked, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”The lawyer, too polite to say “Samaritan,” said, “The one who had mercy on him.”Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”Rabbi Jesus was clearly demonstrating that kindness costs the giver, and that it is our actions that define us, not our origins.Disagreements occur when there is a lack of definition of terms. When there is no agreed-upon definition of a word, arguments will revolve around it.I believe the word that has the largest number of conflicting definitions today is the word “Christian.”If we were to poll our nation, we would doubtless discover countless definitions for “Christian,” but I believe most of them would fall somewhere in the middle of a three-cornered continuum.At one extreme&nbsp;of that triangle, a Christian is a believer in Christianity, a religion founded by Jesus, who came to give us a new moral code and teach us a better way to live. This Christian is patriotic and rejects behaviors that he or she believes to be immoral.At the second extreme&nbsp;of that triangle, a Christian is a believer in Jesus as God Incarnate, who came to earth to purchase eternal life for all who would believe. This Christian does not believe that Jesus came to deliver a new moral code, but to die so that we might live.The third extreme&nbsp;of our triangle is a definition occasionally embraced by people who do not identify themselves as “Christian,” because they define a Christian as:a religious person who believes poor people deserve to be poor because “anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps through good decisions and hard work.”a religious person who is in favor of guns, but against gays.a religious person who believes Americans are exceptional, and that all other nations are inferior.It is not my purpose today to start an argument, but to defuse one.Christianity and politics are in turmoil today due to the lack of an agreed-upon definition of the word, “Christian.” I have no intention of offering my own definition of Christian, since it is unimportant to anyone but me. And I do not expect your definition of “Christian” to be any of the three extremes I named. I expect you have a complex, nuanced definition that you feel strongly about. You may even be anxious to share it in the hopes of “clearing the air.”Please don’t.&nbsp;AMy only goal today is to ask you to consider – for just a moment –that a good person might hold

I began losing my hair when I was 19. By the time I was 21, I looked like I was 30.Best thing that ever happened to me.People take you seriously when you look like a grown-up, and I needed people to take me seriously.I sold advertising for the smallest radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were rock-solid at number 23 in a city of 23 radio stations. We had a 0.5 share during the Average Quarter Hour. This means that out of every 200 radios that were turned on, only 1 of them would be tuned to my station.Best thing that ever happened to me.At any given moment, my station would have between 500 and 800 people listening. But the total number of different people we would reach in a week was about 18,000. Woo-Hoo! I was overjoyed. There wasn’t a single business in our city of 1,000,000 people that couldn’t use 18,000 more customers.All I had to do is figure out&nbsp;what to say&nbsp;to get my 18,000 people to remember – and prefer – my advertiser. I cannot say with certainty how I knew success would be found in the crafting of a persuasive message rather than in the selection of the “right” audience, but my memory shows me a young boy sitting in an empty classroom reading books during recess rather than playing with the other kids on the playground.Best thing that ever happened to me.Yes, I know I’ve said “Best thing that ever happened to me” three times and they can’t ALL be the “best thing,” but I don’t feel like ranking them “#1 Best,” “#2 Best,” etc., so go with the flow, okay?I restricted my sales calls to businesses that were so tiny they couldn’t afford any advertising other than my little nothing of a radio station. When these people believed in me and wrote me a check, they were giving me their life’s blood. If my plans for them failed, my clients couldn’t pay the rent. They couldn’t send their kids to school with a sack lunch. They couldn’t pay the electric bill.When you face those kinds of consequences, you lie awake at night figuring out how to make the ads you sold work, because there is no one with whom you can share the blame.&nbsp;It’s all you.Guilt, Pain and Remorse are powerful teachers.I quickly figured out how to make advertising work.And what Guilt, Pain and Remorse taught me was very different from what is being taught in colleges.Few marketing professionals will ever be solely responsible for the outcomes of the ad campaigns they help to create. Most people in my profession go to college, get a degree, and then become a cog in a marketing machine. Their failures can be attributed to a wide variety of forces beyond their control. Their ink pens are never filled with the blood of the families for whom they write.My station owner was hoping our little station might bring in about $11,000 a month. Within 18 months, my personal billings were averaging $51,000 a month. My base pay was $800/mo. and I made a 15% commission.&nbsp;Do the math.I spent my early twenties as a joyously married, rapidly balding boy with ten thousand stories in his head and an ink pen full of blood in his pocket. Then, at 26 years old, they made me the General Manager of a much larger station.Worst thing that ever happened to me.I no longer spent my days talking face-to-face with business owners and crafting stories. Instead, I stared blankly at spreadsheets and spoke by telephone with corporate officers and bookkeepers and listened to the whining of 32 employees who had me confused with their mommies.Six months into it, I said, “You can keep the cheese. Just let me out of the trap.”With the unwavering support of Princess Pennie, I became an independent ad writer and media negotiator. I adapted my stories to fit billboards on the highway and TV ads during the Superbowl and websites on the internet.But some things never change. Thirty-four years after saying “no” to...

A thing cannot exist without its opposite. This is why a&nbsp;positive statement – without its corresponding negative – is usually a platitude.1Every proton has its electron.Every summer has its winter.Every Yin has its Yang.Every up, its down.Every inside, its outside.Every justice, its mercy.“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”– Niels BohrNiels Bohr was not a philosopher. He was a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.Duality, in the form of&nbsp;paired opposites,&nbsp;is essential to high-impact communication.It is not enough to explain what you believe.You need also to explain what you don’t believe.It is not enough to explain what you stand for.You need also to explain what you stand against.I saw you flinch just then. You don’t like “being negative.” Am I right?You believe in abundance.You believe in optimism.You believe in fairness and peace.You sound like a Hallmark greeting card.Now tell me if I’m being “negative.”I stand against poverty.I stand against hopelessness.I stand against bullies.I sound like someone who might actually make a difference.Don’t just tell us what you include.Tell us also what you exclude.Don’t just tell us what you are.Tell us what you are not.“At Kesslers, we do diamonds better, because diamonds are all we do. We&nbsp;don’t&nbsp;sell watches or pearls or gold chains. But we&nbsp;do&nbsp;sell every style of engagement ring that has ever been designed.”“At Goettl Air Conditioning, we do things the right&nbsp;way, not the easy way.”“Jigsaw magnesium is a mineral, not a vitamin. And it delivers real energy, not caffeine energy.”Here’s why photos of you never really look like you:You see your face in the mirror every day. You see photos of yourself only occasionally. But the mirror shows you a reversed image. The “you” that your friends see is opposite the image that you see.If you speak only of what you see from your perspective, you miscommunicate to everyone who sees the opposite.Comprehensive communication always shows both sides:The verse and the inverse.The upside and the down.What’s left in and what’s left out.Do you have the breadth of mind to do this?Do you have the courage?Roy H. Williams

Doubtless, they will someday say, “Inspired by Roycroft and Bohemian Grove, Pennie and Roy Williams built Wizard Academy…”But they will be wrong.Yes, the Princess and I – with the help of hundreds of good friends around the world – began constructing the Wizard Academy campus in 2004. The “wrong” part is that we were inspired by Roycroft and Bohemian Grove.This error is forgivable, however, because jumping to conclusions is what makes us humans so adorable.Elbert Hubbard was a marketer whose magazine,&nbsp;The Philistine,&nbsp;was read by subscribers around the world 120 years ago. Likewise, my Monday Morning Memos and the e-zines of Indiana Beagle are read by subscribers around the world.But Elbert Hubbard did not inspire me to become a marketer or to write these Monday Morning Memos. And I’m pretty sure Indy Beagle wanders&nbsp;the rabbit hole&nbsp;for reasons of his own, as well.Elbert Hubbard&nbsp;published a book on advertising but I did not write my&nbsp;Wizard of Ads&nbsp;trilogy because of him.Elbert and his wife, Alice, began building the Roycroft Campus as a writer’s and artist’s enclave in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. But Pennie had never heard of the Hubbards or their Roycroft Campus when she decided to build Wizard Academy. I know this to be true. I was there.Yet there are definite similarities between our organizations.Wizard Academy bridges the gap between business and the arts. Like the Roycrofters before us, we celebrate the study of the arts for the furtherance of business.*San Francisco’s Bohemian Club began constructing Bohemian Grove in 1878.&nbsp;The “Bohemians” in those days were writers and artists. But business people wanted to hang out with them and were immediately attracted to the club.Oscar Wilde attended The Grove in 1882. Afterwards, he said, “When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.”Think of the annual encampment at Bohemian Grove as the original TED Conference.An invitation to The Grove remains the hardest of all tickets to obtain. Security is incredibly tight. The guests invited to Bohemian Grove today are Nobel Prize winners, top-tier artists and authors, Senators, and Fortune 500 CEOs.Interestingly, Wizard Academy attracts many of these same people, but on a smaller scale.The official motto of The Bohemian Club is a line&nbsp;taken from Shakespeare’s&nbsp;A Midsummer Night’s Dream,&nbsp;“Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.”&nbsp;It means,&nbsp;“Business deals and any thoughts of ‘networking’ are to be left outside. This is a place of escape.”Like Bohemian Grove, Wizard Academy is a place of escape, renewal, and inspiration for people who wrestle with giants.Do you have a dream, an enterprise, a mission, a purpose that occupies your heart and hands and mind?Come. You have a tribe. Hang out with us.&nbsp;You will be a stronger wrestler when you leave.Roy H. Williams

Trouble happens to everyone.“Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without&nbsp;trouble.”– Carl JungBut don’t worry about it.“Worry&nbsp;is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.”– George WashingtonReally. Don’t worry about it.“Don’t&nbsp;worry&nbsp;about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough&nbsp;trouble&nbsp;of its own.”– Jesus, in the 6th chapter of Matthew’s Good NewsBecause I’ve got this.“In this world you will have&nbsp;trouble.&nbsp;But be of good cheer! I have overcome&nbsp;the world.”– Jesus, in the 16th chapter of John’s Good NewsAnd I’m your friend.“Friends show their love in times of&nbsp;trouble,&nbsp;not in happiness.”– EuripidesTrouble is a searchlight in the darkness that shows you a person’s heart.“You never forget three people:the person who helped you in trouble,the person who left you in trouble,the person who put you in trouble.”– Randy PhillipsAnd sometimes that searchlight is reflected back at you.“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your&nbsp;trouble,&nbsp;you wouldn’t sit for a month.”– Theodore RooseveltBut finally, the sun rises, morning comes, and it’s a brand-new day.“Expect trouble as an inevitable&nbsp;part of life and repeat to yourself the most comforting words of all: ‘This, too, shall pass.'”– Ann LandersRoy H. Williams

“Radio is dying.”“Radio is dead.”“My friends and I don’t listen to the radio. We (blah, blah, blah) instead.”“No one listens to the radio anymore, especially in high-tech places like San Francisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That’s right, isn’t it?”Isn’t it?A few paragraphs from now, I’m going to tell you exactly how many people we’re reaching in San Francisco each week and precisely how many times the average San Franciscan hears our radio ad.But first, let’s look at why we can trust those numbers.You’ve heard of the Gallup Poll and you’ve heard of the Nielsen Ratings. And of course, you understand scientific survey methodology and statistical analysis.Nielsen measures San Francisco’s radio listening habits continuously, using a sample size of about 2,400 adults.Oh? You say you&nbsp;don’t&nbsp;understand scientific survey methodology and statistical analysis? You didn’t know the Gallup Poll is usually based on just 1,000 interviews? And that those 1,000 persons represent the entire population of the Unites States with a high degree of accuracy?“How can a poll of only 1,004 Americans represent 260 million people with only a 3 percent margin of error?”&nbsp;This is the name of an article you’ll find in the online archives of&nbsp;Scientific American.&nbsp;In that article, Professor Andrew Gelman of the departments of statistics and political science at Columbia University, says, “The margin of error depends inversely on the square root of the sample size.”This is what Professor Gelman is saying:&nbsp;The smaller the universe, the larger the percentage of that universe must be queried. If you want to know the opinions of a universe of 10 people, you’ve got to ask all 10 of them.The larger the universe, the smaller the percentage of that universe must be queried. To accurately measure the opinions of 700 people, you’ve got to ask 250 of them. But a sample size of only 384 persons will measure the opinions of 1,000,000 people with an identical degree of accuracy.When the Gallup organization wants to get nitpickingly accurate, they crank their sample size up to 1,500 persons.&nbsp;And that’s to measure the whole United States.That Nielsen sample of 2,400 persons in San Francisco isn’t looking quite so small anymore, is it? By the way, the annual report of Nielsen Holdings indicates they had revenues of $6,572,000,000 last year. That’s right. Six and a half billion dollars to monitor our listening and viewing habits.I say “monitor” because Nielsen doesn’t trust our memories or our motives.&nbsp;Nielsen gives each of those 2,400 San Franciscans a small, electronic device to carry with them each day. This “Portable People Meter” detects the radio stations to which you listen, and notes the precise times that you listen to each station, each day. This data is uploaded to Nielsen and serves as the basis of their ratings report.Electronic devices don’t lie.Nielsen’s methodology and math are irrefutable and unimpeachable.I say we can trust Nielsen’s numbers. What say you?We recently negotiated a weekly schedule on the broadcast radio stations of San Francisco. That schedule reaches 43% of the total (18+) population of that city an average of 2.7 times each week, 52 weeks a year, at a total cost of 47 cents per person/per year. This means each of more than 2.5 million San Franciscans will hear our full-length message an average of 140 times in 2018. (52 x 2.7 = 140.4)About 50 percent of America spends enough time listening to the radio each week that you can efficiently and affordably reach those customers with sufficient repetition to become a household word, an intimate component of their daily life.This familiarity accelerates and enhances every other effort at selling; email, online,...

1. When you need someone to faithfully implement your time-tested policies and procedures, hire a straight-A student.This is what we know about them:A. They bought into the educational system, believed its promises, and played by its rules.B. They have demonstrated obedience, compliance, and conformity.C. They have obvious respect for authority.And these are not bad things.2. When you need to innovate, improvise or reinvent, hire a rascal.1This is what we know about them:A. They mistrust the system, laugh at its promises, and make up their own rules.B. They have demonstrated disobedience, defiance, and abnormity.C. They have obvious respect for alternative thinking.Steve Jobs was a rascal with an unimpressive résumé. When Steve applied for a job at Hewlett-Packard in 1977, they rejected him because he had dropped out of Reed College in 1972.“Quitters never win.” That’s the traditional wisdom. Ask any high school football coach. And Steve Jobs was definitely a quitter.Jan Koum was a bonafide rascal. When he was 20, his ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him. He later said, “I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action”.Jan Koum was also a quitter. Facebook refused to hire him in 2008 because he had dropped out of San Jose State. Here’s what was on Jan’s resume for the previous year: “I traveled around South America playing ultimate frisbee.”I can almost see that HR director rolling her eyes, can’t you?In 2009, Jan Koum founded WhatsApp, an innovation he sold to Facebook in 2014 for $9.1 billion.Steve Jobs and Jan Koum are mentioned in the opening paragraph of a 59-page study2&nbsp;published by two academicians in 2017. That paper is titled&nbsp;Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship.&nbsp;Its scholarly authors reached their conclusions only after analyzing 12,686 individuals over a period of more than 30 years.I’ll do my best to summarize those 59 pages:“A person is motivated to start their own business when they have more confidence in their ability than they have in their résumé.” – Roy H. WilliamsThere. I’ve put 59 pages into a single sentence.Perhaps I should become an ad writer.Roy H. Williams1&nbsp;If no rascals are available, you can substitute a rebel, a rogue, or a renegade.2&nbsp;Hegde, Deepak and Tumlinson, Justin,&nbsp;Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship&nbsp;(May 15, 2017).&nbsp;Available for download at SSRN.

When you need people to respond to your ad immediately,&nbsp;you need to think like a reporter.These are the first two things they teach news reporters:“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”“You never read about a plane that did not crash.”So why do so many direct-response ads talk about the man who got bit by a dog, or flew on a plane that did not crash? To be successful, direct-response ads must deliver a message that is&nbsp;remarkable.Recruitment Ads&nbsp;are a form of direct-response marketing.Last week, the following 60-second radio ad reached 19 percent of the total population of Charlotte, NC. The average listener heard this message 6.3 times in just 3 days, Wed/Th/Fr. And it cost only&nbsp;seven tenths of a penny&nbsp;per repetition for a listener to hear it. This means that for less than a nickel per person, (6.3 x 7 tenths of a penny) we electrified 19 percent of the total population of Charlotte with a remarkable message. And you know what? The 19 percent we reached are the friends, neighbors and co-workers of the other 81 percent, guaranteed.Are you a plumber? Would you like to make&nbsp;one hundred thousand dollars a year?&nbsp;That’s right.&nbsp;I said a hundred thousand dollars.&nbsp;Can you&nbsp;install&nbsp;new water heaters, faucets and drains? You hear Morris-Jenkins on TV and radio all the time. Morris-Jenkins Plumbing is the sister company of Morris-Jenkins Air Conditioning and they’re both managed by Dewey Jenkins, the man you DEFINITELY want to work for. Our new plumbing division is keeping 30 plumbers busy and we need 10 more who know how to install water heaters, faucets and drains. We need&nbsp;air conditioning installers,&nbsp;too. Many of our A/C installers are already making a hundred thousand, and we’re putting together a plan that will allow our plumbing installers to make that much, too. We want to meet you. This is not a joke. If you’re ready to start&nbsp;the greatest job you’ll ever have,&nbsp;be at Morris-Jenkins headquarters this Saturday Morning at 8AM for a confidential interview. We need 10 plumbers and&nbsp;6 air conditioning installers.&nbsp;Be here at 8 o’clock&nbsp;this&nbsp;Saturday morning. You’ll find our address at Morris-Jenkins dot com. Your life is about to get&nbsp;a whole lot better.&nbsp;Morris-Jenkins dot com.That’s a pretty remarkable message, right?But just as important as being&nbsp;remarkable, direct-response ads must also be&nbsp;credible&nbsp;and&nbsp;urgent.Remarkable&nbsp;means your message will be repeated from person to person.&nbsp;“$100,000.”Credible&nbsp;means your message is supported by already-known and trusted facts.(A.) Due to their commitment to long-term customer bonding, Morris-Jenkins is universally recognized as the market leader in Charlotte.(B.) Dewey Jenkins is on TV every day and the public LOVES him.(C.) This ad would not have worked nearly so well for a person that was less respected.Urgent&nbsp;means action must be taken immediately, because(A.) the available number is limited, “We need 10 plumbers and 6 A/C installers.” Or,(B.) the window of time is limited. “Be at Morris-Jenkins Headquarters THIS Saturday morning at 8AM for a confidential interview.(C.) Urgency is accelerated through relentless repetition. We ran this ad twice an hour, 24 hours a day, for 3 days, on each of 2 different radio stations. 288 total airings in 3 days.If your direct-response ads aren’t working, there are...

Technically, you don’t take a trip. It takes you.If you could take a trip, you could also put it back when you were done with it.But you can’t.Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about Robert and Chris and the trip they took.It was a 1968 tripfrom Minneapolis to San Franciscoon a 1964 Honda Superhawkwith Chris riding on the backbecause he was only 11 years old.When that trip was over, Robert remembered a lot of things that never really happened. And in 1974 those memories became&nbsp;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,&nbsp;the best-selling philosophy book ever written. It stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for more than a decade.I agree with a lot of what Robert wrote.But a little of what he wrote makes me wonder if he was crazy.We’ll talk more about that later.These are the things Robert wrote that I agree with:“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”“The more you look, the more you see.”“First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.”“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.”“When you live in&nbsp;the shadow of insanity,&nbsp;the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.”I like that last statement for 2 reasons. (1.) “The appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does” is sort of why Wizard Academy exists. (2.) Is it just my imagination, or have you noticed that&nbsp;the shadow of insanity&nbsp;(and not the good kind of insanity) seems to be growing wider and darker across our land? I’m seeing and hearing things today that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.One last quote from the book:“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”I suppose that’s what worries me most about the dark shadow of insanity spreading across our land. If we remove the people who are casting that shadow – but we don’t change the patterns of thought that elevated them – we’ll replace those people with more just like them.I said earlier that we’d talk about Robert being a little bit crazy.Robert Pirsig was treated with&nbsp;electroconvulsive therapy&nbsp;on numerous occasions when he was institutionalized with&nbsp;paranoid schizophrenia&nbsp;and clinical&nbsp;depression between 1961 and 1963. He was 35 when he got out. His son Chris was 6. They began their road trip 5 years later.At its heart,&nbsp;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance&nbsp;is an exploration of the underlying belief systems of Western culture.&nbsp;In his foreword to that book, Robert told readers that despite...

We connect with people who interest us.We have fun with people who know how to have fun.We bond with people who&nbsp;believe what we believe.But our deepest relationships are with people who have shared our pain.Think of the people you can count on – always – to have your back. Chances are, you’ve been through hard times with them at your side.Adversity is a whirlwind that tears friends apart if they don’t hold on to each other, but bonds them tightly together if they do.An acquaintance is someone with whom you can laugh.A friend is someone with whom you can cry.I am not suggesting we celebrate adversity.I am suggesting we celebrate our friends.The seeds of commitment are watered by tears.“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”– Oscar Wilde“The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough… There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms… but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”– Bob Dylan,&nbsp;Divine Madness,&nbsp;p. 166If you want to be persuasive, if you want to convince people, you must abandon the myth that you – or anyone else – is capable of being perfectly objective.We see things not as they are, but as we are.Exactly 4 years and one week ago – during this season of Passover and Easter – I wrote to you about cognitive bias:“You’ve heard it said that, ‘Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ Yet we routinely craft our own facts from the fabric of personal experiences, preferences and prejudices. A stereotype is nothing more than a pattern we’ve observed. This pattern isn’t always predictive, but it is a pattern nonetheless and we trust it. We do this in the misbegotten belief that we have correctly interpreted our past experiences and that our preferences and prejudices are, in fact, correct and reliable interpretations of objective reality.”– The Monday Morning Memo for March 24, 2014Preferences and prejudices cannot be trusted.But pain is neither a preference nor a prejudice. And sorrow is hard to escape. To willfully walk into them for the sake of a friend is the signature of someone who cares.Do you have a friend in crisis?Don’t send flowers.Send yourself.Roy H. WilliamsPS – Don’t assume from today’s memo that the wizard is feeling blue. He’s not. It’s just that he and I know a lot of people who need a hug. I’ll bet you know people, too. – Indy BeaglePPS – Leonardo da Vinci clearly understood cognitive bias. He said,&nbsp;“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”

The traditional aristocracy of inherited wealth, position and influence is a false one, in my mind.You were born into an influential family. You went to the right kindergarten, the right grade school, the right college, and you party with the right people. You invented the phrase and the wink, “It’s not&nbsp;what&nbsp;you know, it’s&nbsp;who&nbsp;you know.”You are a house cat.You think desperation is an enemy that should be avoided at all costs. But who else can you turn to when you need to clear your mind, focus your thoughts, summon your courage, and unleash your creativity?Desperation will do all of this for you, and more.Desperation is the friend and the ally of every alley cat.Desperation is the mark of every true entrepreneur.Have I angered you? I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention. I was just hoping to encourage those friends who are facing deadly peril, whose options are limited, whose bank accounts are depleted, whose backs are against the wall.That’s never been you? Oh… now I see why you’re angry.You’ve never really had an adventure.In 1992, I helped a friend launch a company that he later sold for $68 million. I can still remember several occasions when his circumstances became so painful that he said he wanted to “curl up in the fetal position.”A few years later, I helped a friend who is brilliant, disciplined, and highly organized. He sees situations clearly and has remarkable judgment. When his company sold for $125 million, I pointed these traits out to him as the reasons his company had thrived. He looked at me very sincerely and without a trace of humor shook his head and said, “No, it was desperation.”“I have often fallen into a doom loop, convinced that I was about to lose everything.” These are the words of a friend whose company revenues are rapidly approaching $1 billion a year.One friend whose net worth is currently more than $2.5 billion speaks of a time 20 years ago when cash was so tight that, “I lived in a tent with my wife and children in the back of our little shop.”These are only 4 of the 400 true entrepreneurs I have known.I’ve never met a self-made person who didn’t have stories of desperation.Stress and trouble are the unmistakable signs of adventure.No stress?No trouble?No adventure.“When we’re safe at home we wish we were having an adventure. But when we’re having an adventure, we wish we were safe at home.”– Thornton WilderDon Quixote saw beauty in Dulcinea when everyone else saw commonness, so he decided to be her champion. And because he was tired of being safe at home, he went looking for adventure. The balance of his epic book are the tales of his battles: his victories and his defeats, his parades and his embarrassments, his glistening moments of accomplishment and his painful regrets.&nbsp;Quixote challenged lions, fought giants, and struggled with adversaries on every side.“And I know if I’ll only be trueTo this glorious quest,That my heart will lie peaceful and calmWhen I’m laid to my rest.”“And the world will be better for this;That one man, scorned and covered with scars,Still strove with his last ounce of courageTo reach the unreachable star.”&nbsp;1“Scorned and covered with scars…” describes every true entrepreneur.People often ask why I am attracted to Don Quixote. Here is my answer:Don Quixote was a house catwho decided to becomean alley cat.Roy H. Williams

CHAPTER ONE: (97 words)“Circumstances” are where you are right now.“Choices” are what you will make.“Consequences” are what will happen as a result.Sometimes your circumstances are the consequence of your choices. But not always.The circumstances of your birth and your childhood, such as your nationality and your ethnicity, and whether or not your family had money, are not the consequence of any choice you made.It is foolish to feel pride about circumstances that are not the result of your choices.It is foolish to feel shame about circumstances that are not the result of your choices.CHAPTER TWO:&nbsp;(45 words)Will you allow yourself to choose contentment?Or do you believe contentment to be shameful?What is it abouttheir native discontent,their refusal to be satisfied,their undying hunger for more,that makes us admire an ambitious person?Contentment is a choice, not a consequence.CHAPTER THREE: (60 words)Guilt is about what you have done. Shame is about who you are.You choose shame when you continue to do what you know is wrong.Feelings of guilt are beneficial when they cause you to make better choices.When you make better choices, you are no longer who you were.So let the shame go. It isn’t yours anymore.CHAPTER FOUR:&nbsp;(26 words)You can evaluate a man’s ethics by the condition in which he leaves a public restroom.I don’t know how to evaluate the ethics of women.CHAPTER FIVE: (68 words)The angels in the sky sang to&nbsp;the shepherds,&nbsp;“All is forgiven.”A star in the sky whispered to&nbsp;the wise men,&nbsp;“Follow me.”The message was clear to the shepherds.But the wise men had to figure it out on their own.“What’s it all about?” ask the wise men, the entrepreneurs, inventors, artists and kings.But the shepherds – underpaid nurses, caretakers, guardians and teachers – already know.CHAPTER SIX: (69 words)Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) worked as a telegraph messenger 169 years ago. Books were expensive in those days and there were no public libraries. But a Pittsburg man, Col. James Anderson, opened up his collection of 400 books every Saturday to local boys who wanted to expand their minds. Carnegie later donated $56.5 million to open more than 2500 libraries in a dozen countries, saying, “The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.”CHAPTER SEVEN: (40 words)Julius Rosenwald&nbsp;(1862-1932) was a Jewish garment manufacturer who quietly donated more than $50 million in matching funds to construct 5,357 schools in African-American communities across the impoverished Southern States. “He who gives while he lives, knows where it goes.”CHAPTER EIGHT: (42 words)Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) left us his best advice, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”CHAPTER NINE: (83 words)Billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates ($88.5 billion) have been joined by Warren Buffett ($74.2 billion) and 158 other billionaires in an effort to remedy society’s most pressing problems by committing to give more than half their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes, either during their lifetime or in their will. The current pledge total is now more than $365 billion.Imagine spending a billion dollars a day – a thousand million dollars – every day for a year, in an effort to change the world.CHAPTER TEN: (19 words)The wisest of the wise...

Life-changing decisions often seem small on the day we make them.1978&nbsp;– Everyone had gone home. I was in the warehouse alone, waiting for Pennie to come and pick me up. I had been installing guttering on houses all day. The job paid $5 an hour.We had just one car.Bored, I looked in the phone book to see if Tulsa had one of those pre-recorded “dial-a-prayer” lines I might call to pass the time.There were three of them.I called.I was appalled.Later that night I saw my friend, “Cheerful Charlie” Myers, and told him how devastatingly bad those messages had been. My secret hope was that Charlie would volunteer to create a more interesting daily message. I said, “Someone ought to…”Before I could finish that sentence, Charlie reached into his pocket, grabbed my wrist, turned my palm upward, slapped a 10-dollar bill into it, looked into my eyes and said, “And you’re just the man to do it. Here’s ten bucks. Let me know what number to call after the equipment is installed.”I had allowed my alligator mouth to overload my mockingbird butt, and Charlie called me on it.That ten dollars would be the only money I would ever collect from “Daybreak,” my daily recorded message, because I never told anyone how they could get in touch with me. The daily call count got so high that Pennie and I had to install rollover lines and lease additional equipment because too many callers were getting a busy signal.I was spending about 3 hours of writing time each day and 25% of our household income each month to fund an enterprise from which there was never a plan for return-on-investment.But it was the ultimate Masters Class on Ad Writing.If you write a new message – 7 days a week – that is interesting enough to cause complete strangers to voluntarily dial a phone number each day to hear that message, your friends are going to ask you to start writing ads for them.But ad writing takes a lot of time. So much, in fact, that “Daybreak” became a weekly 1-page fax called The Monday Morning Memo. That fax later became an email and a podcast. You’re reading it, or listening to it, right now.1998&nbsp;­– exactly 20 years after Cheerful Charlie Myers slapped that 10-dollar bill into my hand, Bard Press collected 100 of those memos and&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads&nbsp;became Business Book of the Year.&nbsp;Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads&nbsp;(1999) and&nbsp;Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads&nbsp;(2001) became&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;and&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;bestsellers.Then Pennie found a 21-acre plateau that overlooked Austin from 900 feet above the city and suggested that we build a campus for artists and entrepreneurs.2018&nbsp;– exactly 20 years after&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads&nbsp;was published – I’m preparing to turn Wizard Academy over to a new generation of leadership and begin the next chapter of my life with the Princess.But that’s enough about me.2018 – Let’s talk about you.&nbsp;&nbsp;Have you mapped the journey that brought you to where you are? I just showed you how to do it.Find a moment that, in hindsight, looks to be auspicious.Begin your map at that point in time.Look back at other positive, pivotal moments.Figure out where they should be on your map.Connect the dots.The fun of this exercise is that it:reminds you of who you are.focuses your attention on good, not bad, memories.gives you a glimpse at what might – just maybe – be around the corner.And now a Traveler’s Blessing for you that I condensed from the&nbsp;Tefilat Haderekh,&nbsp;the traditional Hebrew traveler’s prayer:May God guide your footsteps toward peace, and...

People don’t Paint-by-Number as often as they did 50 years ago.My personal theory is that we came to our senses and realized Paint-by-Number paintings are perfectly awful.But we still see and hear a lot of Advertise-by-Number and Sales-by-Number.I blame the colleges.Paint-by-number paintings employ a template. I’m not against templates. I’ve created dozens of them. The purpose of a template is to give beginners a way to begin. The hope, of course, is that the beginner will learn to improvise, develop new techniques, and leave the template behind.&nbsp;But invariably some fool of an instructor will carve the template in stone and treat it as an idol to be worshiped, a perfection to which we should all aspire, a standard to which we should all be held accountable.And because templates are step-by-step and simple and tidy and easily monitored, they are quickly embraced by people looking for shortcuts and hacks.Pause with me for a moment to thank merciful God above that the template worshippers never discovered poetry. If they had, all poems would begin, “Roses are red, violets are blue…”Sadly, the template worshippers discovered marketing in the 1950s.That’s when most of our tragic Advertise-by-Number and Sales-by-Number templates were developed, popularized, and adopted as standard operating procedure. These obsolete templates from the 1950s are why we hate most advertising and are suspicious of most salespeople.Advertise-by-Number Template #1: Your Unique Selling PropositionBusiness owners are usually introduced to this template by well-meaning ad writers who ask, “What is it that you do differently than your competitors? We need to focus on what YOU do that they DON’T do. What makes you different and special and better than everyone else?”TRUTH:&nbsp;Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product, your service. “Me, me, me, me, me.” Bad advertising walks into the room and shouts, “Here I am!”Good advertising is about the customer and how you hope to improve their world. Good advertising walks into the room and smiles, “There you are!”Advertise-by-Number Template #2: Reach the right people.Targeting the “right” customer is always more expensive. A lot more expensive. This is why media salespeople want you to focus your attention on reaching “the perfect target customer.” Age. Gender. Income. Zip code. Purchase history. When you agree with the seller that some people are “right” but most are “wrong” for your business, you just agreed to pay a premium price for whatever media they’re selling.TRUTH:&nbsp;Decisions are never made in a vacuum. To become a household word, you must also reach the influencers, the friends and neighbors, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, co-workers and employers of your customer. But happily, this “unfiltered” mass audience is extremely affordable.TRUTH:&nbsp;Telling an interesting story – saying the right thing – is much more important than “reaching the right customer.” When you learn to speak to the heart, you’re going to be surprised at how many people suddenly become the “right” people. Online engagement, page views, time spent on site, and word-of-mouth will skyrocket.Advertise-by-Number Template #3: Tell them what they want to hear.“Tell them what they want to hear,” is the very definition of hype! Hyperbolic statements of high relevance, but low credibility, cause customers to roll their eyes and whisper, “That would be impressive&nbsp;if I believed you.”TRUTH:&nbsp;You gain credibility when you are open, honest, and vulnerable. The strongest ads create a bond with the customer.&nbsp;Win the heart, and the mind will follow.&nbsp;Your customer can always find logic to support what their heart has already decided.Sales-by-Number...

We experience wonder when we realize our true size.On clear nights, we ride a speck of dust as it circles an 11,000-degree fireball shooting through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.And that fireballis one of billionsof fireballsin our galaxy.And our galaxyis one of billionsof galaxies.Looking at the stars, we know our true size.On rainy days, we thumb through the fading scrapbooks of our minds, celebrating small and silly victories, reflecting on old mistakes, examining events that will cease to be when we are gone.And again, we know our true size.Jorge Luis Borges speaks of this infinite, inner universe in&nbsp;The Witness.“The man, while still a boy, had seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.”“We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things, die in each death. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of some one man.”“What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants in&nbsp;Blade Runner&nbsp;(1982) spoke of his own inner universe just before he died.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”Likewise, in Richard Hoggart’s&nbsp;First and Last Things,&nbsp;an old woman observes,“Since Penelope Noakes of Duppas Hill is gone, there is no one who will ever call me Nellie again.”I mention these things only because you populate your private universe with people and events of your own choosing.If you don’t like the world you live in, you can change it.The people who occupy the space around youcan choose to be there against your will.But you, alone,control who it isthat occupiesthe real estateof your mind.Roy H. Williams

Balance is not compromise. It is a universe born when gravity meets antigravity, matter meets antimatter, Yin meets Yang, and Lennon meets McCartney.Balance is not the average between two extremes. It is the precarious midpoint between rising and falling. It is the last breath of an old man answered by the first cry of a baby. It is the electric current that leaps between positive and negative. It is perky Paul McCartney meeting jerky John Lennon.There we are with Lennon and McCartney again. Do you know that story?Neither of them was as good alone as they were together.Lennon added depth to McCartney’s superficial shallowness. McCartney injected hope into John’s cries of despair. If you’ve seen the theatre masks of tragedy and comedy you’ve seen the souls of Lennon and McCartney.In a 1980 interview, John said,“Paul provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”Occasionally, they would weave together two half-finished songs to create a hit that neither of them could have crafted alone. In one instance, Paul contributed the energetic passage, “Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head&nbsp;…” to insert in the middle of John’s&nbsp;whining complaint, “I read the news today, oh boy&nbsp;…”But then came the moment when perky Paul McCartney had to write a song of encouragement to a broken-hearted 5-year-old boy.That boy was Julian Lennon, the son that John had abandoned to be with his lover, Yoko Ono.Paul wrote the song as he was driving out to visit Julian and his mother, Cynthia, a month after John had moved out of the family home.“I started with the idea ‘Hey Jules’ – which was Julian – ‘don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.’ But then I changed the name to ‘Jude’ because I thought that sounded a bit better.”When Paul played the song for John, he assured him that he would change the line, “the movement you need is on your shoulder,” because Paul felt it conjured the image of a parrot. Lennon replied, “You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in the song.” So the line stayed in.“Hey Jude” spent nine weeks as the number one song in the United States, the longest of any Beatles song, ever, and the single sold eight million copies. In 2013,&nbsp;Billboard&nbsp;named it the 10th biggest song of all time.When you make room for someone who is essentially your opposite, you make yourself exponentially stronger, more appealing, and more effective.Your opposite can bring you gifts that no one else can give you.Your opposite can see what is hiding in your blind spot and bring it blazing to your to attention.Your opposite is uniquely qualified to be your partner to the stars, or your nemesis in the darkness.Your relationship with them will determine which of these they will be.Did you know you can choose to like someone, regardless of whether they have ‘earned’ it?Which of the people in your life is your opposite?Do they know you treasure them as an asset?Or do you simply annoy each other?Roy H. Williams

“The data is conclusive,” he told me, “our close rate is much higher when customers call us on the telephone instead of going to our website. Therefore, you need to write ads that drive customers to the telephone.”“I agree that the data is conclusive,” I told him, “and it says you need to fix your half-assed website.”The research community has embraced a new buzzword. They take great delight in demanding that everything be “evidence based.” It’s a little like listening to a parrot: “Evidence based.” “Evidence based.” “Evidence based.” “Evidence based.”By themselves, these two words seem harmless. After all, every new idea is based on evidence. But the smug and devilish side of this trend toward “evidence-based” methodology is that the phrase has come to mean “scientific, conclusive, and therefore above debate.”In other words, if you want everyone to shut up and swallow your recommendation, all you have to do is raise your voice and announce that it is “evidence based.”I think they learned this trick from online marketers. (Lest the broad brush of that statement paint innocent people with a fault that is not their own, allow me to say that I know several brilliant, online marketers who gather data responsibly and examine it from every perspective. They agree that numbers can whisper opposite statements when viewed from different angles.*)I’ve never seen anyone make a decision that wasn’t based on evidence.So the question isn’t whether you’re basing your decisions on evidence. Of course you are. The question is whether you’re interpreting that evidence correctly.Here’s how I explain this&nbsp;cognitive bias&nbsp;that has become so alarmingly evident: “The intellect can always find logic to justify what the heart has already decided. Consequently, data is often used in the same way that a drunk man uses a lamppost; for support, not for illumination.”Let’s examine the facts.FACT:&nbsp;The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.FACT:&nbsp;The French eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.FACT:&nbsp;The Japanese drink no red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.FACT:&nbsp;The Italians drink lots of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.FACT:&nbsp;The Germans eat sausages with beer and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.EVIDENCE BASED CONCLUSION:&nbsp;Eat and drink what you like. It’s speaking English that kills you.The misinterpretation of data is as old as humanity. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” is the ancient Latin name for this most common fallacy of logic. It means, “the second thing followed the first thing, therefore the first thing caused the second thing.”But correlation rarely indicates causation.Another limitation of data is that it cannot tell you the right thing to do. It can only tell you the result of what you have already done.Am I against data? Of course not. Data is information, and information is powerful.But like all powerful things, it can hurt you if mishandle it.Five safeguards you should use when evaluating data.Ask:1. What were the methods of data collection?2. Could those methods have influenced the findings?3. Is there any other way to look at these numbers? (i.e. – Are they saying “drive customers to the telephones,” or are they saying “fix the website”?)4. Is there a chance the persons who prepared this information have a bias or an agenda?5. If the data reveals a surprise, is that surprise supported by indicators outside the data?You’ve heard it said that “numbers don’t lie.” I’ve heard that, too.But I also

The name&nbsp;Wizard Academy&nbsp;causes a lot of people to scorn our school without knowing anything about us.And that, my friend, is the primary reason we chose the name.&nbsp;AWe don’t want uptight people coming here.When the right people – people like you – are confronted with the name&nbsp;Wizard Academy,&nbsp;they are filled with curiosity. And so they investigate. They visit the website, watch a few videos, read some MondayMorningMemos.Curiosity and&nbsp;a hunger for wonder&nbsp;are what Wizard Academy alumni seem to have in common.Wonder. Do you remember it?“Later that evening when we sat at the train station waiting to board our train I opened the notebook and wrote a question at the top of the first page:&nbsp;Where do you find wonder?&nbsp;That was the central question for a magician, certainly, but I also thought it was an important question for anyone. Wonder is something that everyone cares about but no one discusses, and I probably wasn’t the only one in my generation to lie awake in bed one night, unable to sleep, trying to figure out when everything had gone so numb and how to get back.&nbsp;Where do you find wonder?&nbsp;is a good question, but it carries an unstated assumption. The real question is,&nbsp;Where do you find wonder after you have lost it?&nbsp;That’s what I wanted to learn on this trip – why you lose it, and how you get it back.” – Nate Staniforth,&nbsp;Here is Real Magic,&nbsp;p. 114-115People who lack curiositynever find the end of the rainbowor hear the chimes at midnight with a friend.Ann Pratchett famously said,“Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”Glenn Gould was on a similar trajectory when he said,“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder…”Tom Robbins said it in a way that includes me.“A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the ‘mind of wonder.’ There is not a lot of ‘mind of wonder’ writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that’s what appeals to the readers who are my fans.”Albert Einstein said it first.“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”But G.K. Chesterton said it succinctly.“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”Wizard Academy teaches the communication arts.&nbsp;These include speaking and writing, of course, but symbols, colors, shapes, music and&nbsp;numbers are language as well. And each one plays a role in successful&nbsp;advertising and marketing.I share these things with you becauseI am thinking about the future.And what I want it to hold.Curiosity is the gift I would give you.And wonder is what I want you to find.We’re here when you want to visit.Roy H. WilliamsChancellor, Wizard Academy

Didn’t Coca-Cola used to have the most wonderful TV ads?But when’s the last time you saw one on TV?Have you heard of Vitaminwater? Coke bought it for $4.1bn. Traditional soft drinks are now less than 2/3 of Coke’s business, and that percentage is likely to decline.The problem, I think, is that we fell out of love with sweet, syrupy soft drinks. Coke saw this handwriting on the wall, so they evolved into ready-to-drink teas and coffees and juices and dairy products.Coca-Cola knew it was time to reinvent themselves; to transform from one thing into another. This is why – after a continuing series of mistakes, failures, and course corrections – they will continue to thrive.Reinvention is easier as an evolution, rather than an all-at-once revolution.But this takes foresight.Do you remember when travel agencies were a thing? If you needed to buy a plane ticket, you called a travel agent. But most travel agencies disappeared altogether because they remained in denial too long.Changes in the marketplace are, doubtless, affecting your business. Do you have plans to evolve into what you need to be, or are you hunkered down in denial?I happen to know a number of bright and successful church pastors across North America. Interestingly, they all say the same thing. “Gone are the days when most people attended church services every Sunday. Most people attend once a month these days, and the core congregation comes to church twice or three times a month.” But these pastors aren’t complaining and they’re certainly not lecturing their congregations about it. They’re successful because they’ve adapted to what is.Have you adapted to what is? Or are you trying to turn back the clock, to the way it ought to be, or used to be, or the way you’d like it to be?The customer has a way they would like it to be, too. Will you listen to them? Or will you insist they listen to you?Is this something you’d care to discuss?Our conversation will continue in&nbsp;the rabbit hole,&nbsp;with Judge Indy Beagle presiding.Roy H. Williams

We settle for sex when we cannot find love.Likewise, we settle for the excitement of energy – adrenaline – when we cannot find oxytocin – that quiet but satisfying excitement of knowing we belong.Adrenaline and oxytocin are the neurotransmitters that make us feel our most important feelings.POW! The release of adrenaline is easy to trigger.&nbsp;But it takes subtlety to gently release&nbsp;oxytocin.SPOILER ALERT:&nbsp;Yes, we’re talking about advertising and marketing. We’re talking about selling. We’re talking about building long-term relationships with our friends, our clients, and our customers.The ancient Greeks had 6 words for love.Three of them – eros, philia, and agape, were used in the original Greek text of the New Testament:Eros&nbsp;is erotic love. Adrenaline excitement.Philia&nbsp;is friendship. That oxytocin-based feeling of connectedness.Agape&nbsp;is sacrificial love. An oxytocin bond so deep that you will take a bullet for your partner.The following 3 words for love are not found in the Bible, but they may prove to be of use to us nonetheless:Ludus&nbsp;is playful love. Banter and repartee. Teasing. Dancing. Ludus is that interesting blend of adrenaline and oxytocin we see in two puppies rolling and tumbling as they play-fight. Ludus is ludicrous. Ridiculous. Restorative.Philautia&nbsp;is self-love. It is confidence, self-connectedness, being comfortable in your own skin. Those of you that have been to Wizard Academy have heard me say, “Much of what we buy is purchased to remind ourselves – and announce to the world around us – who we are.” This identity reinforcement – “self belonging” – is oxytocin-based, not adrenalin-based. Philautia is a good thing, but too much of this good thing will make you a narcissist.Pragma&nbsp;is longstanding love. It is the deep understanding that develops between long-married couples. You might think of it as oxytocin that has been aged like fine wine. Brand loyalists have&nbsp;pragma&nbsp;for the brands they promote.Did you notice that only 2 of the 6 kinds of love – eros and ludus – involve adrenaline?Eros in advertising is using a girl in a bikini to sell auto parts. Eros in advertising is a billboard showing pretty girls in tight tops serving food in a place called “Hooters.”I like to believe I’m above doing those sorts of things in ads.(I’m probably not, but I like to believe I am.)I like to believe you’re above doing those sorts of things, too.But I’m definitely not above using&nbsp;ludus,&nbsp;playful love, banter and repartee in advertising. In fact, I’m wildly in favor of it, as are most of the people on earth, if popular movies and TV shows are any indication.Have you noticed that logic is not a driver in any of the 6 kinds of love?Wow. That’s scary.There is something in each of us that desperately needs to believe we are creatures of logic, and that our most important decisions are based on reason, after careful consideration of the facts.Unfortunately, this has been medically proven not to be the case. In fact, 100% of all decisions require an emotional component.Without emotion, there can be no decision.1Without surprise, there can be no delight.Without you, there can be no Wizard Academy.Come and see us when you can.Roy H. Williams

Wizard Academy began with an itch and an image.I got the itch in Tulsa in 1978 when I was 20 years old.I saw the image online in 1994 when I was 36.The itch was to help little businesses succeed.The image was of a boy sitting beneath the stars with an open book in his lap. The crenels and merlons in the battlements beyond him suggested that he was sitting on the top of a castle tower.Looking at that cartoon image on my computer screen, I knew I was going to build that tower.I know this makes me sound crazy, but there have been a handful of moments in my life when I quietly but suddenly knew what was going to happen. I’m not talking about premonitions or visions or dreams or hopes or wishes. I’m not talking about goals or goal-setting. I’m talking about knowing something as surely as if it had already happened.Did I mention that I know this makes me sound crazy?I was 13 when I saw a photograph of Pennie Compton and knew that I was going to marry her. The two of us had never met. A few months earlier, I had been flipping through a 1963 Reader’s Digest atlas of the world when I noticed a city – Austin – in the center of Texas. I remember raising an eyebrow when I suddenly knew I would move there someday. The sequence of events that would cause these things to happen remained an absolute mystery to me. But the outcome was never in question.So I knew I was going to build that tower. But I had no idea why.My 1978 itch to help small businesses grow led to a string of remarkable successes. By 1992 I was traveling 40 weeks a year teaching ever-larger groups of business owners how to lift themselves to higher levels of success.I hated it.Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” I’ve suffered from separation anxiety throughout my life. Travel, for me, is “the little death.”“Honey,” said Pennie in 1993, “let the people who want your help come to Austin. Schedule a monthly class in our conference room and if someone wants to come to it, they can come.”When we outgrew that conference room we began to rent the ballrooms of luxury hotels. By the time we paid for those rooms and rented the projection equipment and bought the coffee at $60 a pot and fed lunch to all our guests, we were spending about $20,000 per event to host these classes.Did I mention that we weren’t charging anyone to attend the classes, and that we had no capacity to serve additional clients?So we built a new headquarters building for our marketing business with a large, open room on the second floor that we could use as a classroom. That worked for about 2 years.Then we built a classroom building next to the main office building. That bought us an extra 4 years.Then, in 2004, Pennie said, “Honey, I found some land we should buy.”“Why do we want to buy some land?”“We’ll build some stuff for ourselves on one half of it, and then donate the other half to Wizard Academy and let the school become whatever it wants to become.”When she showed me the land, I smiled. There, on the top of that majestic plateau was the tower I had seen 10 years earlier. It wasn’t physically there, of course, but I knew that someday it would be.If you have a crazy image in your mind of a possible future, an inexplicable guiding star that encourages you in the dark moments and lights your way one step at a time, never forget that you have a tribe, and they’ve built a fascinating place for you to come when you need guidance or instruction or fellowship or encouragement.Do you have an idea? An itch? A hunger?Do you see something that no one else can see?Are you willing to leave a trail of sweat and tears and dollars behind you as you struggle to make it real?Welcome to Wizard Academy.You, my friend, are exactly our brand of crazy.<a href="https://adtalks.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

2018 is looking to be a good year for small business.My personal definition of “a small business” is an owner-operator doing between $1M and $75M a year. I do not pretend to know the trends outside this group.The following are the small business trends that seem to be emerging in 2018:1: Small businesses are falling out of love with social media and with SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)2: Broadcast Radio and Broadcast Television are regaining their previous stature within ad budgets due to the excellent values available at this time.3: Business owners are beginning to learn the power of having a memorable personality.&nbsp;(The typical company spokesperson is “polished and professional.” Which is just another way of saying “bland, vanilla-neutral. Unremarkable. Interchangeable. Easy to ignore.”&nbsp;Criticism is the price of personality.&nbsp;Which is why so few company spokespersons have any.)Brad and Sarah Casebier used the power of personality to grow their tiny little company in Austin, Texas to astonishing levels of success. You can hear the ad they currently have on the radio on the first page of today’s&nbsp;rabbit hole.4: Experiments with ads in online radio (Pandora, etc.) have typically been disappointments and word is spreading quickly.5: Google is actively blocking all attempts by SEO specialists to “game” a client’s ranking on Google.6: The most savvy online marketing people are openly advocating mass media as the most efficient way to drive “direct navigation” to a website. (Direct Navigation is currently the single, most important criteria used by Google to determine the search engine ranking of your website. Number two is Time on Site. Number three is Pages Per Session. That being said, there are at least 14 other, smaller criteria considered by Google, but with each one having a decreasing degree of importance.)7: Sensing the dying momentum for their services, SEO consultants are beginning to push harder than ever in their search for new clients.8: Recognizing the importance of aligning all their channels of customer communication, business owners are becoming adamant that their online marketing contain the words and phrases [brandable chunks] that have been popularized through their mass media ads.9: Extremely savvy business owners are taking this concept of “channel alignment” to its ultimate end: ongoing agreement, alignment and reinforcement of mass media messaging throughout all their:A.&nbsp;online efforts,B. direct mail, including invoicingC. email,D. outbound calls,E. conversations of Customer Service Representatives with inbound callersF. weekly orientation and training of salespeopleG. weekly orientation and training of all other employees who might interact with the public on behalf of the company.Let me say this as plainly as I can. The smartest and most successful small business owners are orchestrating and aligning all these previously “siloed” departments into a single, concerted voice.And it’s about time.Roy H. Williams

I am, by profession, an ad writer. I tell stories about people and products and services.You do, too.But because I get paid for it, I spend a lot of time considering – and measuring ­– the impact of stories.Some of the stories I’ve told have made people an enormous amount of money.But the most important stories I tell, by far, are the stories I tell about myself, to myself. Those stories are the source of my identity and the foundation of my purpose in life.But we’ve talked enough about me.I see something good in you and I’m calling it out.Is it okay for me to do that?Let us stare together into the eyes of the truth:Whether good or bad, your current circumstances are temporary.Success is temporary.Failure is temporary.Your future depends on your choices.Your choices depend on what you believe.What you believe is not determined by what you see and hear, but by how you interpret what you see and hear.How you interpret what you see and hear is determined by the stories you tell yourself, about yourself.Who do you believe yourself to be?What do you believe about this world we live in?What does the future hold?Your mood, your attitude and what happens to you next will be greatly impacted by your answers to those questions.“If you want your baby to die with a name, you need to pick one now.”The newborn had inhaled meconium during birth, the most the doctors had ever seen. His lungs were 95% full of it. The father and the baby rode with lights and sirens to Dell Children’s Hospital 30 minutes away, with the grandmother riding the back bumper.The doctors at Dell looked at the x-rays and slowly shook their heads in disappointment.The grandmother stayed with the newborn while the father went back to see his wife.The mother was puzzled when the nurse showed her the baby’s birth certificate. She and her husband had been torn between 2 names for their new son and had agreed to choose the name after they met him.The husband walked into the room.She said, “I thought we agreed to talk about it before we chose the name.”“Honey, Lincoln died. But Gideon overcame impossible odds. When they asked me his name, I said: ‘This boy isn’t Lincoln. This boy is Gideon.’”When the specialist at Dell met with the parents the following day, he was holding two sets of x-rays. Holding up a film in his left hand, he said, “I have no explanation for it, but this baby…” Then he lowered that film as he raised the one in his right, “isn’t this baby.”Gideon will be eight years old on March 15 and he suffers no after-effects at all.You may believe that what happened was going to happen anyway, and that belief in the power of a name is superstitious nonsense. That would be the logical, scientific belief, to be sure.But do you really believe that beliefs have no power?Beliefs are what separate Democrats from Republicans, Hindus from Muslims, stock market Bulls from stock market Bears, and scientists from storytellers.Your beliefs are what make you who you are.And your beliefs are determinedby the stories you tell yourselfabout yourself.You are not responsible for the beliefs of others.You are responsible only for your own.During his time at Walden pond, Henry David Thoreau observed, “The mass of men&nbsp;lead lives of quiet desperation.” And I agree with him.I also agree with Jack Kerouac. “But why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”Did you experience 5 years of life during the past 5 years?Or did you experience 1 year of life 5 times?Don’t let 2018 be the 6th straight year of 1 years’ experience.Do

A pleasant surprise is the beginning of delight.You surprise and delight your family by listening to them.You surprise and delight your friends by being&nbsp;interested in what they say.You surprise and delight&nbsp;your customers by giving them your full attention.That’s why everyone likes you.Ray Bard is the ringmaster of&nbsp;untamed quotes, captured in the wild.&nbsp;Crazy quotes you’ve never heard before; frightful, delightful, insightful. One of my recent favorites is by Lisa Kirk,“A gossip is one who talks to you about others. A bore is one who talks to you about himself. And a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.”Lisa Kirk’s observation applies to ad writers and online content writers as well.A gossip trashes competitors.A bore talks about their company and their products.A brilliant writer talks about how they hope to improve some part of your world.That’s you in 2018, improving some part of everyone’s world.2018 is going to be wonderful for you, because you have the courage, confidence and compassion to make every person you encounter a little happier.Even when they don’t deserve it.Your attitude springs from your gratitude, like water gushing up from an artesian well. You are thankful for all the good in your life. You find interesting ways to celebrate the ordinary.Lunch with a friend.Making a new co-worker feel welcome.Remembering others by their best moments.You have chosen to be grateful because gratitude makes every weight feel lighter.Gratitude drives away depression, just as light drives away the darkness.That’s you in 2018: a beam of light! Making others feel special by listening to them, being grateful for all the good in your life, finding ways to celebrate the ordinary.You’re really lucky to be you.I’m glad I know you.Roy H. Williams

Indy Beagle brought me an electric fan and a hammer.The fan is to blow away the smoke.The hammer is to shatter the mirrors.You hear a lot of talk these days about transparency and engagement and the Zero Moment of Truth.My friend Dewey Jenkins says the most dangerous statement a stock broker can make is, “But this time it’s different.” Dewey has been around long enough to know that ideas and concepts don’t really change so much as they get repackaged and renamed.A number of marketing’s oldest ideas are getting repackaged and renamed. Among these new names are Transparency, Engagement, and the Zero Moment of Truth.What is Transparency?One clothing store says,“We have the biggest selection, the highest quality, the best service and the lowest prices.”Yawn.Another clothing store says,“Sure, we’re more expensive. But&nbsp;looking good&nbsp;costs money. How good do you want to look?”Which clothing store do you believe?The more expensive clothing store admitted the downside and won your admiration and your trust.Transparency = They’re not going to believe the upside until you admit the downside.Do you have the humility and the courage to let the public see you real? Few companies do.None of this is new.Winning a customer’s attention is easy.Hanging on to it is called “engagement.”What percentage of your selling opportunities become sales?This used to be called your close rate.Now it’s called conversion.Yesterday’s loss leader is today’s tripwire.Use the wrong word and you’re a dinosaur.None of this really bothers me much.The thing that makes me look at the ground, shake my head and sigh is the dangerous myth of the Zero Moment of Truth. But then again, Google is the new Yellow Pages, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they’ve repackaged and renamed the old Yellow Pages scare tactic.The fundamental premise of the Zero Moment of Truth is that the customer is going to&nbsp;go online&nbsp;when they’re ready to purchase what you sell.I have no argument with that.But the dangerous, underlying assumption is that&nbsp;all contenders are equal&nbsp;during the Zero Moment of Truth. But that simply isn’t true.The company most likely to get the click, the call, and the sale is the company the customer has heard of and has good feelings about.The tortoise patiently wins the hearts of the people long before the race is begun. He says he’s “bonding with tomorrow’s customers.”“Stupid tortoise,” says the rabbit, “he still believes in branding.”Have you heard how that race turned out? Take a look. I dare you.“Knowledge is power” is another dangerous myth.It doesn’t matter what you know.What matters is what you do with what you know.So what&nbsp;are&nbsp;you going to do?Roy H. Williams

Fifty years ago, an 18-year old songwriter named Laura Nyro asked, “Can you surry? Can you picnic?”Laura Nyro didn’t tell us HOW to surry. She just asked if we could do it. Then she instructed us to,“Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine. And from the sky come the Lord and the lightning.”What? What did you say would come from the sky?And “surry” by the way, is a verb that Laura Nyro&nbsp;admitted she made up.Laura’s&nbsp;Stoned Soul Picnic&nbsp;became a platinum record for The Fifth Dimension, selling more than a million copies.Do you have the courage to write that way?“Eli’s comin’. Hide your heart, girl. Eli’s comin’. Better walk-walk. But you’ll never get away from the burnin’ heartache. I walked to Apollo by the bay.”In ancient times, the temple of Apollo by the bay in Naples was believed to be one of the entrances to the Underworld. So maybe Laura Nyro was saying, “I walked to the edge of death tryin’ escape the burnin’ heartache.” But then again, maybe she meant something else entirely. She never bothered to say.Do you have the courage to write ads that way?“Yes, but why would I want to?”“Because most ad writing is painfully predictable and coldly colorless. It lacks rhythm and bounce. It lacks laughter and light. And that’s why people ignore it.”“I’m not scared of dying and I don’t really care.&nbsp;If it’s peace you find in dying ­– when dying time is here –&nbsp;just bundle up my coffin, ‘cause I hear that it’s cold way down there. Yeah,&nbsp;crazy&nbsp;cold way down there.&nbsp;My troubles are many, they’re as deep as a well. I can swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell.”Written when she was 17, Laura Nyro’s&nbsp;And When I Die&nbsp;sold more than 4 million copies and was&nbsp;certified quadruple platinum. It also won a Grammy for Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1970. The rhythm and bounce of that song were remarkable.&nbsp;[I’ve gathered all these songs for you in the rabbit hole – Indy Beagle]Do you have the courage to write website copy with rhythm and bounce?Believe it or not, it was a Laura Nyro song that made Barbra Streisand a household word. Laura’ s&nbsp;Stoney End&nbsp;(1971) was Barbra’s biggest song for 5 years, until she recorded&nbsp;Evergreen&nbsp;in 1976.“I was born from love&nbsp;and my poor mother worked the mines. I was raised on the Good Book Jesus&nbsp;till I read between the lines.&nbsp;Now I don’t believe I want to see the morning. I never wanted to go down the&nbsp;stoney end. Mama let me start all over. Cradle me, Mama, cradle me again. I can still remember him with&nbsp;love light&nbsp;in his eyes. But the light flickered out and parted as the sun began to rise. Now I don’t believe I want to see the morning.”And just to show us the breadth of her diversity, Laura Nyro wrote&nbsp;Wedding Bell Blues.“Bill, I love you so. I always will. I look at you and see the&nbsp;passion eyes&nbsp;of May.&nbsp;But am I ever gonna see my wedding day? I was on your side, Bill, when you were losing. I was the one came runnin’ when you were lonely. In your voice I hear&nbsp;a choir of carousels.&nbsp;But am I ever gonna hear my wedding bells?”Hang on a second. What does “a choir of carousels” sound like?Wedding Bell Blues&nbsp;rocketed to #1 on the charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.Do you have the courage to engage the imagination and raise eyebrows?If you do, you’ll elevate attention, increase time on site, time spent listening, and ultimately conversion and profitability.Do I have your attention now?The reason most ad writers don’t have the courage to...

I was worried Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same this year without Uncle Alfred. Every year for as long as I can remember, when the time came for each of us to name something we were thankful for, Uncle Alfred would tell his famous&nbsp;Story of the Shoes.“Your mother was six and I was nine when I had to cut the ends off my shoes to let my toes stick out. A year later, I couldn’t get my foot in them at all. On really cold days, I’d wrap my feet in newspaper and bind it with brown twine. I always knew where to find the twine because the newspaperman would cut the bundles apart at Ninth and Pike every morning, right in front of Boscov’s Department Store.One morning in late November I was looking at a pair of shoes in the window of Boscov’s when I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “A penny for your thoughts.”I turned around and there she was, holding out a penny. You could buy penny candy in those days, so I took the penny and I told her the truth, even though I was horribly embarrassed. “I was asking God for a pair of shoes.” Her face fell a little when I said that, so I thought she was disappointed in my answer and wanted her penny back, so I dropped my eyes to the ground. That’s when she lifted my chin with her fingertips and smiled.“What’s your name?” she asked.“Alfred,” I answered.She held open the door to Boscov’s with one hand and extended the other to me, “Come inside with me Alfred.”I had never been inside Boscov’s.She sat me down in the shoe department, unwrapped the newspaper from my feet, and told the clerk to bring seven pairs of socks, all the same color. She put two pairs of socks on me, then told the clerk to fit me with the finest pair of work boots that money could buy, but fit them a little loose because I was obviously a growing boy.Standing up in those new boots, I felt six feet tall.She paid the clerk, then handed me the boot box that contained the other five pairs of socks. She shook my hand and said, “Happy Thanksgiving, Alfred, and Merry Christmas.” And then she began to walk away.That’s when I was surprised to hear my own quavering voice ask, “Are you God’s wife?”The beautiful lady turned and smiled, “No, baby doll, I’m Mrs. McGovern.”Uncle Alfred always finished his&nbsp;Story of the Shoes&nbsp;in exactly the same way. “I never saw Mrs. McGovern again, but I’ll remember her for as long as I live.” And then he would wipe the tears from his cheeks.Uncle Alfred never married and he never left Reading, Pennsylvania. But he rose through the ranks to become a railroad executive and did very well for himself. But my Uncle Alfred also did good. For every year in late November, beginning when he was 17, Alfred would purchase a substantial new pair of shoes for as many poor children as he could afford. Hundreds of children a year. And every pair would be delivered with a note that said, “A Gift from Mrs. McGovern.”And now I must break your heart.I don’t have an Uncle Alfred.“We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.”–&nbsp;Marco Tempest, in his 2012 TED talk“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment…But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling… Our various fictional worlds are– on the whole– horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles– in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe… Fiction also seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are...

The world of online marketing was rocked so hard this summer that it almost fell to its knees.Some really big names in online marketing had the courage to announce that online customers are more likely to buy your products if they’ve heard of your company and feel good about it.Dumbfounded, I spoke to my computer screen as though online marketers everywhere could hear me, “How did you not already know that?”And then these same researchers suggested that building awareness through mass media might be a good thing to do, after all.Again, I mumbled, “How did you not already know that?”I’ve been fascinated for years that an entire army of Search Engine Optimization tweakers could – with a straight face – argue that brand awareness and brand preference are of no consequence in the online world. But then I would hear the echoing voice of Anatole France1&nbsp;– with a French accent, because he was French, you know – “If fifty million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.”SEMrush2&nbsp;was one of the big names in online marketing who concluded that “direct website visits” are the single most important factor in determining your SERP [Search Engine Results Page] position. In other words, they announced that Google is impressed – and will reward you with higher SERP placement –&nbsp;when people go directly to your web page instead of merely choosing your name from a list of search results.It makes sense, doesn’t it? Google is effectively saying, “If this is the company people think of immediately – and feel best about – in this category,&nbsp;then they must be the category leader.”Voilà, you and your company are on your way to the top of the Search Engine Results Page. All as the result of brand building through mass media and public relations.Like yesterday’s telephone book Yellow Pages, a Search Engine Results Page is an information source for customers who haven’t already made up their mind. But when faced with a list of names on the Search Engine Results Page, does it surprise you that even the so-called “undecided customers” will often choose the name they’ve heard of, and have good feelings about?Direct navigation is a powerful vote of confidence. Just like it was 25 years ago when customers would look you up in the White Pages of the phone book – or dial 411 for “Directory Assistance” and say your name – when they wanted to make contact with you by telephone.WordStream3&nbsp;is a huge Pay-Per-Click company that works with over one million advertisers. They were the second big name in online marketing that came to the same conclusion as SEMrush, although they traveled a different road to get there. In their case, WordStream became fascinated by a PPC campaign that had a 300% increase in conversion rates for no apparent reason.They had changed nothing in the Pay-Per-Click campaign. They hadn’t changed the landing page, the bid strategy, or the ads. What WordStream finally discovered was that some&nbsp;brand-awareness ads were being funded in another media,&nbsp;and these ads had created a halo effect on the Pay-Per-Click ads.Here are their conclusions, in their own words:“Direct visits are fueled by your brand awareness, so building a strong brand image should be an essential part of your promotion strategy.” – SEMrush, page 42 of 55“What we are seeing here is that&nbsp;people with stronger brand affinity have higher conversion rates than people without any,&nbsp;because people tend to buy from the companies they already heard of and begun to trust.”&nbsp;– Larry Kim,&nbsp;WordStreamJeff Bezos figured all this out a long time ago.In chapter four of&nbsp;Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It,&nbsp;we read an exchange between Poobah and

We are alert to danger because our survival depends upon it.But there is more to life than danger.There is singing.And looking at the sky.And chewing on a blade of grass.Have you done any of those things recently?They call to you from beyond your window.Walk outside.Sing a song.Pluck a blade of grass.Hold it high.Take a selfie.Email it to&nbsp;[email protected] he will email you something in return.Be sure to tell Indy what song you sang.Do it.You can afford to stop for 5 minutes.I promise you won’t get in trouble.Don’t just agree with me in your mind.Take a literal walk to the literal outdoors.Pick a literal blade of grass.Take a literal, ridiculous selfie.Literally send it to Indy.It will help you re-establish perspective.Now, more than ever, we need to cheer ourselves up.I will not name the things that are bringing us down.Too much has been spoken about them already.Do you remember the story of Chicken Little? An acorn falls on his head and he goes ripping through the village screaming that the sky is falling.He gets everyone all worked up.Did you know that story was 500 years old when Jesus walked the earth? It’s listed under&nbsp;Aarne-Thompson-Uther1&nbsp;type 20C, which are folktales that make light of paranoia and mass hysteria.We are surrounded by Chicken Littles.On page 226 of&nbsp;Where Have All the Leaders Gone?,&nbsp;Lee Iacocca talks about his father.“When I was worried about something, he’d prod me. ‘Lido, do you remember what was on your mind a year ago?’ And I’d say, ‘How could I remember? A lot of things happen in a year.’ He’d pull out some notes with a flourish, and say, ‘I have it written down.’ Then he’d proceed to tell me about something that had made me unhappy a year ago, and deliver the punch line: ‘You can’t even remember it now.’”Go outside.Pluck a blade of grass.Hold it up and sing a song and I promise that a year from now you’ll smile when you remember doing it.&nbsp;But you won’t be able to remember the name of today’s Chicken Little, or the particular acorn that has him so terribly frightened.I think I’ll have chicken for dinner.Roy H. Williams1&nbsp;The&nbsp;Aarne–Thompson&nbsp;classification systems&nbsp;are indices used to classify&nbsp;folktales:

In 2018, I will continue to fade from sight. By the end of 2019, I hope to be completely transparent. This has been my goal since May of 2000.If the founder of an organization remains vitally involved until the day they are no longer viable, the organization they founded will cease to exist within 10 years after their passing.I don’t want that to happen to Wizard Academy.Don’t worry, I’m not dying or anything like that.The time-tested model for a successful transfer of leadership is to pass the torch to the next generation while the founder is still healthy and capable. Pennie and I have known this since the day we started the school.Does your organization have a plan of succession? I ask this only because I’ve seen fabulous businesses fumbled during the hand-off. It’s a heart-breaking thing to watch.I began to fade from sight in 2016, popping in only to say hello to each of the classes I wasn’t teaching. I’d spend a few minutes interacting with the students, asking each of them about their favorite moments, then I’d be gone.In 2017, I’ve chosen to stay completely out of sight during classes taught by other faculty members and everything has been fine. Wonderful, in fact. No one seems to have noticed my absence.In 2018, vice-chancellor Whittington will become the first person ever to teach the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop other than myself. You might want to consider being in his first class to share this important rite-of-passage with him.I do plan to teach Magical Worlds a few more times and I’m sure I’ll always have some small part to play in the Wizard Academy Reunion each October, but right now my biggest concern is to finish the construction of The House of the Lost Boys and The House of Bilbo Baggins, thereby making it possible for 24 students and an instructor to stay on campus. (Our current capacity is 18 total in Engelbrecht House and Spence Manor.)Pennie has a dazzling plan for terra-scaping the deep valley that stands between Chapel Dulcinea and the student mansions. I’m incredibly anxious to see it.When those last two student mansions and the valley are complete, Pennie and I will have finished what we set out to do.Want to hear something funny? I originally thought construction would take 5 to 7 years. But by the time we’re through, it will have taken 20.The directors of Wizard Academy know the importance of onboarding new leadership, so they’ve invited Ryan Deiss and Rex Williams to join them in managing the oversight of our 501(c)3 educational organization. Your 7-person board of directors is now 9 persons.The 50-and-60-somethings are beginning to turn things over to the 30-somethings.To every thing there is a season,and a time to every purpose under the heavens.A time to be defiant, and a time to comply;a time to struggle, and a time to relax;a time to get started, and a time to be done;a time for Gen-Xers and Millennialsto grasp the torch freely offeredby the Boomers in Winter.If you’re the kind of person who reads these Monday Morning Memos – and you obviously are – you’re spending the hours, days and years of your life building something that ought to forever be remembered and appreciated. So please begin thinking about a plan of succession. It’s not urgent, but it’s incredibly important.And to the thousands of you who have helped build Wizard Academy, please know we’re doing everything in our power to make sure your gifts will never be lost or forgotten. The campus guidebook – to be published in 2018 – will have many of your names in it and a mountain of glorious photos.Indy said to tell you Arooo, and that he’ll see you in&nbsp;the rabbit hole.Roy H. WilliamsPS – In case you were wondering, Pennie and

Dale Earnhardt, Jr will make 21.4 million dollars this year.He is the world’s&nbsp;one hundredth&nbsp;most highly paid athlete.1But don’t assume pro athletes make a lot of money. The sad truth is that the top 10 percent – the star athletes – receive more than 90 percent of all the money paid to athletes. If the 80/20 rule held true in sports, the salaries of the bottom 90 percent would more than double while the top 10 percent would get a barely noticeable haircut.The world’s most highly-paid athlete, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, will skip happily home with&nbsp;93 million dollars in 2017. (Well, he’ll skip as happily as one can skip while lugging 2,048 pounds of hundred dollar bills.)&nbsp;293 million dollars is $372,000 a day, more than $46,000 an hour.&nbsp;3The average professional soccer player makes only $80/hr ($160,000/yr) and will play for just 3.2 years.Advertisers are like pro athletes. Everyone gets to play on game day, but only the best get paid on payday.Sure, Cristiano Ronaldo is better than the average soccer player. But is he 581 times better? Because that’s how much more money he makes. And keep in mind that the salaries of the other highly-paid soccer stars contribute toward raising that “average” salary up to $160,000.But my objective isn’t to rail against the injustice of professional sports.My objective is to draw a few comparisons that I believe you’ll find to be helpful and encouraging:1:&nbsp;Advertising’s Grand Illusion is that – because you paid for it – people are going to notice your ad.2:&nbsp;This illusion that people are going to notice your ad is perpetuated by three groups of people:(A.) By advertising salespeople.“The secret is to target the right people, and we have them for you!”(B.) By advertising agencies.“The secret is to target the right people, and we’ve found them for you!”(C.) By hope-filled advertisers.“The secret is to reach the right people, and that’s what I’m going to do!”3:&nbsp;REALITY: I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things in their ads.4:&nbsp;TRUTH: Decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. This is why your ads must also reach the influencers; the friends and neighbors, co-workers and associates, hair stylists and golf caddies of your “target” customer.5:&nbsp;MORE GOOD NEWS! Untargeted “mass media” reaches the influencers along with your target, and it’s astoundingly cheap when compared to targeted media.6:&nbsp;BAD NEWS: Each of us is assaulted by more than 5,000 selling messages per day.&nbsp;4&nbsp;and&nbsp;5&nbsp;And we – like your customer – have become extremely good at ignoring them.7:&nbsp;The secret ­of success in advertising is knowing how to craft opening lines that pierce the clutter and win attention.8:&nbsp;After you’ve won their attention, you’ve got to hang on to it.9:&nbsp;TIP: Leave out the parts that make your ad feel like an ad.10:&nbsp;Because those are the moments we turn our attention elsewhere.11: GOOD NEWS!&nbsp;Your ads don’t have to be 581 times as good as the average ad.12:&nbsp;Your ads, your products, your services and your people just have to be&nbsp;a little bit better&nbsp;than your competitors’ for you to become the Cristiano Ronaldo of your category.Goal!Roy H. WilliamsLooking for&nbsp;answers that apply specifically to you&nbsp;and your situation?1&nbsp;Forbes.com2&nbsp;one...

Your body doesn’t have a single immune system; it has a bundle of them. And the most powerful of these systems is the one that rejects foreign tissue. This is why doctors do everything they can to suppress it during transplant surgery.That suppression doesn’t always work.When the cells of your body detect an intruder cell – “This is not like me, and I am not like it!” – they employ powerful forms of rejection.Your company employs a body of people who work together and each employee is like a cell within that body.And when a new employee comes and goes, they say, “He never really fit in.”This is why onboarding and enculturation should begin while the candidate is reading your job posting. When you’ve been taught&nbsp;how to write ads for employment,&nbsp;your ads will repel the people you don’t want while powerfully attracting the people you do want. When the right people read your ad, their hearts will whisper, “These people are like me, and I am like them.”Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.Good advertising promises or implies a specific kind of customer experience. It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.Your people are the essence of your brand.The most valuable skill a businessperson can have is the ability to recruit and retain good people.Did you hear that?Did you?I just heard ten thousand successful people quietly whisper, “Amen.”Roy H. Williams

Characters in books and movies and TV shows are magical. They make us laugh and cry and hold our breath as they take us to a vivid elsewhere.Conflicted, exaggerated, accelerated characters live in a world more interesting than our own. And it is a world we like to visit, even if it’s only 30 seconds at a time.This is why character-driven ad campaigns are outperforming logic-driven campaigns, hands down.We quickly get tired of sales pitches, but we never get tired of being charmed. The characters we love may change over time, but our love for characters never changes.Best of all, character-driven ad campaigns don’t have to be targeted to a specific birth cohort. Their appeal is cross-generational.So if you need to build a bridge to Millennials, put your hammer in the hand of a colorful, memorable, entertaining character.Do you remember the suave, invincible&nbsp;James Bond&nbsp;of the Sean Connery/Roger Moore years? (1962 to 1985 in case you were wondering.) Take that character, sand the British off him, wrap him in Chuck Norris jokes, and you’ve got The Most Interesting Man in the World. He tripled the sales of Dos Equis in Canada. And while craft beers were driving the sale of other beers down across the US, sales of Dos Equis increased by 34.8%.&nbsp;1Put Mayberry’s wise, caring, and infinitely patient&nbsp;Andy Griffith&nbsp;in the passenger seat of an air-conditioning service van with an idiot-savant&nbsp;Forrest Gump&nbsp;in the driver’s seat and you’ve got Mr. Jenkins and Bobby, the most successful ad campaign in the history of home service companies. When Mr. Jenkins gave Bobby $100,000 during a 30-second ad that debuted two weeks ago and encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a movie star in Hollywood, social media exploded. The next morning it was front page news – above the fold – in the important&nbsp;Charlotte Observer,&nbsp;and a savvy outdoor advertising company asked permission to post “We’re Going to Miss You, Bobby” on all their digital billboards&nbsp;for free,&nbsp;and 2 major network TV affiliates treated it as major story in their newscasts, with one of them giving the story about 3 minutes, the other giving it more than 5 minutes.Can you believe this local&nbsp;service company&nbsp;in Charlotte, NC, has accumulated more than 1,000 Google Reviews with a 4.7 star average? This isn’t a restaurant, it’s a service company! Have you ever heard of such a thing?Only one other home services ad campaign has generated that kind of audience love and effectiveness: the relatively new&nbsp;“Boy with a flashlight”&nbsp;campaign of Goettl Air Conditioning in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson. Sadie, the boy’s dog, is also an important part of that campaign.“What do a Forrest Gump idiot-savant and a boy with a flashlight and a dog have to do with air conditioning?”“Nothing. But they have everything to do with winning the hearts and minds of customers.”Take grubby&nbsp;Oscar Madison&nbsp;and uptight&nbsp;Felix Unger&nbsp;of&nbsp;The Odd Couple&nbsp;(1968,) give them each a glass of whiskey and fling them 49 years into the future (2017,) and you’ve got Rex and Daniel of&nbsp;The Whiskey Vault,&nbsp;YouTube’s fastest-growing whiskey channel, adding more than 20 new subscribers every hour, 24 hours a day. They just poured the foundation of their new distillery next to the campus at Wizard Academy.“Hello, ladies.&nbsp;Look at your man. Now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could&nbsp;smell&nbsp;like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your...

The object of conformity and compliance is to bring the best of the past forward.A person can achieve expert results by following in the footsteps of an expert.The old ways are often the best ways.But you, my strong-willed friend, are a nonconformist; a renegade, a rebel, a misfit. One of “those” people.Congratulations.&nbsp;ADiscoveries are made only by those who stray from the path.&nbsp;“I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.”– Thomas Edison“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”– Henry David Thoreau“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”– Rita Mae Brown,&nbsp;Venus EnvyYou and I know an empowering secret:&nbsp;traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.That kind of talk is heresy when you’re surrounded by guardians of the orthodox. Let’s hope that none of them are listening.Two Powerful Questions and a Magic Word:When someone shouts, “You can’t do that!”Ask yourself, “What happens if I do?”If the potential reward is large and the negative consequences are small, pull the trigger and ride the bullet.When someone says, “You have to.”Ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t?”If your distaste for the activity is strong and the negative consequences are weak, shrug your shoulders and walk away.We’re talking about a simple but powerful concept: the evaluation of consequences.Sometimes it’s better to learn from expert advice and example.Sometimes it’s better to wander off the beaten path and learn from&nbsp;consequences.Your gut will tell you when.Here’s another way to put “consequences” to work for you:The next time you want to do something unorthodox and you need permission, say to the authority above you, “I’d like to do an experiment.”And then immediately tell them:1. what you hope to learn,2. why that information will be useful,3. how long the experiment will take, and4. what it will cost.It’s going to blow your mind how often you get approval. Present the same idea as a&nbsp;suggested change&nbsp;to the status quo and you’ll be shot out of the sky quicker than an October duck in Saskatchewan.The Magic word is “Experiment.”“Experiment” promises1. a budgeted window of time&nbsp;and resources, and2. “We’re about to learn something valuable that we don’t currently know.”The price of continual conformity and complianceis that one never experiences discovery.What a sad way to live!Ciao for Niao,Roy H. Williams

“I was told that repartee heightens the attention of an audience.”“Is this going to be like that time you told me about ambergris?”“What do you mean?”“There I was, minding my own business, when you started telling me how the most expensive perfume in the world comes from whale puke. Like I needed to know that.”“Yes. This is another interesting fact that will broaden your horizons.”“Okay, let’s get this over with. So tell me, what in the name of King-of-the-Sea Poseidon and Chicken-of-the-Sea tuna is repartee?“Repartee is the banter between interesting characters.”“Great. I appreciate you sharing that with me.”“But I haven’t told you why you need to know.”“I don’t know that I do need to know.”“You need to know.”“For the record, your little whale puke story still hasn’t done me any good.”“Someday you’ll be glad you know about ambergris.”“Can you name that day for me? I’ll put it on my calendar.”“You need to know about repartee&nbsp;today.&nbsp;Right now, in fact.”“Why?”“You’re about to start advertising.”“Yeah, and?”“Yankelovich says the average citizen is bombarded with more than 5,000 selling messages per day.”“Yankel who?”“Yankelovich. It’s a consumer behavior research firm.”“Five thousand a day, really?”“Yeah. So what are you going to do to make your message stand apart from those other 5,000?”“Repartee?”“Exactly.”“I think it might be easier to find some whale puke.”“Repartee works because people naturally turn their attention toward interesting interactions. Ever heard of Elmore Leonard?”“Novelist, right?”“When he was asked if he had a secret formula for writing bestsellers, he said, ‘I try to leave out the parts that people skip.’”“Dewey Crowe is my favorite character of his.”“Yeah, Dewey’s awesome. But then the interviewer had a follow-up question.”“Did they ask, ‘What are the parts that people skip?’”“Yeah. How did you know?”“It’s what I would have asked.”“So, do you want to know what they skip?”“Actually, yes.”“Everything that isn’t dialogue.”“So you’re saying all I have to do is turn my ads into a conversation between two people?”“That’s not what I’m saying at all.”“How is it not what you’re saying?”“If you write an ad and put it into the mouths of two people, it’s still an ad. It’s not dialogue. It’s not banter. It’s not repartee.”“What is it then?”“It’s Ad Speak.”“It would still sound like an ad?”“Of course it would. Real people never talk like that. Repartee is the personality-revealing banter between characters who actually have personalities.”“Like me and you?”“Mostly me.”“I’d have to do this repartee thing on radio or TV, right?”“Why do you think that?”“I mean, it’s people talking.”“But we’re not doing this on radio or TV. We’re doing this in an email.”“Is repartee a French word?”“I think so. Why do you ask?”“It sounds pretentious and that usually means it’s French.”“You can call it banter if you want.”“Banter. My ads are going to be known for banter. I’m going to be the Banter man.”“I’m glad I could help.”“Wait a minute. Did you say we were having this conversation in an email?”“Yeah. It’s a weekly thing sent out by a guy named Williams. Calls himself the Wizard of Ads.”“The Wizard of Ads?”“Yeah.”“Must be French.”[Both men start laughing.]# # END # #Roy H. Williams

(1.) Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter that increases blood flow to the muscles during times of excitement and creates involuntary recall of events.When there is adrenaline in the blood, you are more likely to remember the moment. This is why advertisers try to make their ads sound exciting.(2.) Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter that produces feelings of connectedness and bonding.This is how powerful brands are built.More than 240 years after the fact, we continue to admire John Adams and his amazing wife, Abigail, because they left behind&nbsp;words&nbsp;of&nbsp;bonding,&nbsp;both to one another and to the ideals they shared. John said, “I believe there is among our people a fund of wisdom, integrity, and humanity which will preserve their happiness.” John Adams wanted the best for us, and he believed the best about us.We likewise admire Thomas Jefferson because he, too, gave us&nbsp;words of bonding&nbsp;that showed us his heart. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and were given by their Creator the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”&nbsp;Thomas Jefferson wanted the best for us, and he believed the best about us.These people showed us what they valued.They showed us what they believed.We call them Patriots and Founding Fathers.They&nbsp;gave us oxytocin.But we have no deep admiration for Thomas Pinckney, although he served with distinction during the Revolutionary War, then became Governor of South Carolina where he presided over the state convention that ratified the United States Constitution. In 1792, George Washington appointed Thomas Pinckney ambassador to Britain and envoy extraordinary to Spain and in the Presidential Election of 1796, Pinckney gathered almost as many votes as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson! But Pinckney was a man of action – adrenaline – rather than bonding. Pinckney gave us no oxytocin.Bonding – that feeling of connectedness – is a product of oxytocin.And bonding produces loyalty.Bonding and loyalty… what words those are to a marketer!Are you sharing&nbsp;words of bonding&nbsp;in your ads?Are you encouraging your customer?Do they believe you want the best for them?Sadly, most ads are built on logic and adrenaline.&nbsp;“Act now! Save money! Don’t miss this event!”&nbsp;But the&nbsp;best marketing is built on stories that trigger the release of oxytocin.“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.”&nbsp;–&nbsp;Jonathan Haidt,&nbsp;The Righteous Mind,&nbsp;p. 287When a person proposes marriage – the ultimate expression of bonding and loyalty –&nbsp;they choose not only their words, but also the time and place of expression.What is&nbsp;the&nbsp;Emotional Environment&nbsp;that will precede your advertising? What will the customer be feeling in that moment before they encounter your ad? What chemicals will be flowing in their blood?Emotional Environment&nbsp;is dictated by where you spend your ad budget.Adrenaline in the blood (excitement) will give your message a higher likelihood of recall.Oxytocin in the blood (bonding) will give your customer a feeling of connection to your brand.Sporting events provide adrenaline excitement mixed with the oxytocin of bonding (with a team.)Romantic stories, romantic TV shows and movies, and romantic music provide adrenaline excitement mixed with the oxytocin of bonding (with a lover.)Adrenaline without oxytocin is “fight or flight.” Politics make us fighting mad and fear makes us feel like running away. Mix your ads with politics or fear and you will be remembered, but never...

Real experts in online marketing rarely use the phrase “going viral,” because it has no agreed-upon definition. Instead, they talk about “Discovery Content” and “Community Content.”To understand Discovery Content, just look at anything posted by&nbsp;BuzzFeed&nbsp;or any of the other organizations whose principal income is generated by the companies who sponsor their&nbsp;clickbait.1But not all Discovery Content is shallow and vacuous.The goal of Discovery Content is to generate a click. (The headline is the key.) If a customer finds something satisfying on the other side of that click, they’re happy-happy-happy. And if your only goal was to get more people to “discover” your website, then you’re happy, too.A visitor who “discovers” your website – but never returns – has no value beyond stroking your ego, unless1. their visit brought you ad revenue, or2. they purchased something on which you made a profit, or3. they told other people about you.Used correctly however, Discovery Content brings newcomers to your&nbsp;website where they will “discover”&nbsp;Community Content&nbsp;that truly speaks to them.It is Community Content that will bring them back again.We’re talking about&nbsp;Targeting Through Copy Writing&nbsp;rather than&nbsp;Targeting Through Media Selection.Today’s Monday Morning Memo is an example of Discovery Content. That headline:&nbsp;The Truth About Going Viral,&nbsp;will doubtless generate a lot more first-time visitors than usual. The Community Content these visitors will find includes the&nbsp;Archives&nbsp;of the Monday Morning Memo, the Subscribe button, the&nbsp;Rabbit Hole&nbsp;of Indy Beagle, and all the free Downloads accessible through the nav panel.Discovery Content attracts first-time visitors.It brings people to your website.Community Content builds a tribe.It makes them feel like they belong.But these ideas aren’t new.In the wild and woolly world of mass media, the Loss Leader was the original Discovery Content.The advertiser offering a Loss Leader hoped that&nbsp;by selling something at a loss&nbsp;they would explode store traffic and this horde of new visitors would then “discover” the wonder of their store and buy other items at full price.Today’s online marketers call the Loss Leader a “tripwire.”&nbsp;2But I prefer to target through copy writing, which is why I use full-price&nbsp;Feature Items&nbsp;to attract new members of a tribe instead of cut-rate Loss Leaders that attract grave robbers, vampires, coupon clippers, discount addicts, freebie Freddies, and every other variety of Twitchy Little Bastard.A Case History of Targeting Through Copy Writing:Shreve and Company has been part of the ritzy Union Square district of San Francisco since the California Gold Rush more than 165 years ago. Shreve routinely sells jewelry items that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Due to the rich history of this store and the impact of all the world’s-finest brands they carry, they could easily be perceived as stodgy, snooty and overpriced.&nbsp;But they aren’t.In the radio campaign for Shreve,&nbsp;5th&nbsp;generation Shreve jeweler Lawrence “Ren” Schiffman, a young and definitely NOT-stodgy, NOT-snooty 20-something has become the official spokesperson for the family store. Ren’s dad is a jeweler, his grandad was a jeweler, his great grandad was a jeweler, and his great-great grandad was a...

Whittington said it.Eisenberg endorsed it.The waitress distracted us with a question of her own.I somehow knew to capture that moment with a photo.Our conversation never made it back to Daniel’s idea that every life has a theme song, but later that day I carried his wandering thought to the&nbsp;Worthless Bastards&nbsp;at the Toad &amp; Ostrich Pub.“What is the theme song of your life?” is a question hard to answer, but the Bastards came through as they always do.1And now we turn to you.For the purpose of this exercise I’m going to ask you to choose between just two categories:Your public theme song.&nbsp;This is a song that will make sense to anyone who really knows you. The music, the lyrics… they fit you. Or at least they fit some aspect of the&nbsp;public&nbsp;you.Your private theme song.&nbsp;This is a song that has stayed with you year after year, although you’ve never fully understood why. But there it is, stuck in your unconscious mind. It makes no sense that you feel connected to it, but you do.Indiana Beagle has asked that you send him either your public theme song or your private one, along with a couple of sentences of explanation. These might show up in the rabbit hole, or in a video, or be used in some other way. I can’t really say for sure.Indy never explains his motives to me.I’m not sure he understands them himself.Roy H. Williams

Everyone agrees that Henry Leverseege would have become much more famous had he lived beyond 29. But even though he died young, his paintings hang in museums across England. There is only one of them in private hands.Mine.&nbsp;AHenry was born in 1803, the year that Thomas Jefferson famously negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte. I say “famously” because Jefferson was fully aware that an American President had no authority to acquire territory in this way.Ohio became the 17th&nbsp;state during those negotiations.Want to hear something funny? Jefferson’s original goal was only to purchase the port city of New Orleans. But Bonaparte needed cash and Jefferson wasn’t an idiot, so as soon as the ink was dry he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous journey across our virgin continent. (I say “our” continent because the ownership of land was a foreign concept to Native Americans, so we just conveniently ignored any claim they might have to the property. Later, when they got fussy, we killed them.)Forty-six years after the Louisiana Purchase, gold was discovered in California and westward expansion accelerated like a Southwest Airlines 737 after leaving the gate 8 minutes late.The last time I flew Southwest, our pilot pushed our plane down the runway so hard I could feel the corners of my mouth pulling back to my earlobes. The woman sitting next to me thought I was an actor getting ready to play The Joker in a Batman movie.As a young boy in a public-school classroom, I was taught that America was created by visionary “Founding Fathers” who saw the future and courageously paid the price for it. It’s a pretty story, but even a casual student of history can see that the early years of our young nation were as freckle-faced and awkward as a bucktoothed Romeo.(I hesitated writing that last sentence, but Indy insisted. Blame him.)Our nation is not the result of a grand plan. We are the product of a series of reactions to circumstances and a lot of stumbling and bumbling into happy accidents.I’m proud of us.Not the part about the Indians or the enslavement of Africans or the&nbsp;forced relocation&nbsp;of more than 60,000 American citizens of Japanese descent during WW II, but the rest of it. You know, the Charles Lindberg, Neil Armstrong part.I see us real and I love us anyway.I hope you do, too.Can we please quit fighting now?Roy H. Williams

I consider myself to be the luckiest person on earth. And I can tell you of several specific moments in my life that would convince you of it.Being lucky is a choice I made. Because the truth is that I could just as easily tell you of other moments in my life that would convince you that I am the unluckiest person on earth.Allan Gurganus says, “Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” And you, my friend, are a person who can tell them! You’ve been telling stories about yourself your whole life.And the person you’ve been telling them to is you.Have you been telling yourself stories about lucky breaks, moments of serendipity and happy adventures? Are you remembering all the delightful occasions when you were in exactly the right place at the right time to experience something wonderful? Or are you remembering only the hateful parents, the unfair bosses, the unspeakable abuses and the horrible injustices you’ve had to endure?The key to happiness is knowing&nbsp;what to leave out&nbsp;of the story you tell yourself about the forces that made you who you are.Like any published memoir, our own life stories should also come with a disclaimer: “This story that I tell about myself is only based on a true story. I am in large part a figment of my own yearning imagination.” And it’s a good thing, too. As we will see, a life story is an intensely useful fiction.&nbsp;1Personally, I admire the Swedish tramp sitting in a ditch on Midsummer night. He was ragged and dirty and drunk, and he said to himself softly and in wonder, “I am rich and happy and perhaps a little beautiful.”&nbsp;2That tramp looked past the “truth” of the moment to see a greater truth beyond.You can do the same if you like.In fact, you should.Oh! Are you one of those people who believes you should always be “honest” with yourself and remember things exactly as they really and truly happened? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you:&nbsp;we humans are incapable of that.According to the&nbsp;Journal of Neuroscience (Sept. 2012,) every time you recall the memory of an event, you make your memory of that event less accurate. Instead of remembering the “truth” of the event, you’re recalling the memory of the last time you remembered it, along with any mistakes that may have been introduced. Like a game of human telephone, those mistakes build on one another over time.&nbsp;3Tom Robbins said the same thing&nbsp;&nbsp;– but a little more colorfully – back in 1971: “Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”&nbsp;4Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.5We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.6I’m trying to be your good friend today.Pennie and I have a good friend named Susan Ryan who said something about life on Dec. 14, 2008, that was so profound that I wrote it down. “We get to show up. We get to step into this story.”Every day is a new opportunity to change your life. You have the power to say, “This is not how my story ends.”&nbsp;7Abraham Lincoln said it cleanest and best. “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” No one can prove that Lincoln said it, but I have a very clear...

Ivan and Alvina are in their early 20s.Ivan was born and raised in Bulgaria. Alvina, in Siberia.When Alvina sees Ivan playing keyboards in a café on the Black Sea, they become pen pals. And then they fall in love. And then they get married. They dream of moving to the west.Canada says it will accept them as immigrants if they will learn to speak French.Self-taught piano players in cafés don’t make enough money to pay for dreams, so Ivan and Alvina sleep in their car so they can pay a tutor to teach them French. They spend long hours every day for a year learning and practicing their&nbsp;nouvelle langue étrange.&nbsp;There is no money for anything else.Ivan and Alvina step onto Canadian soil with bright eyes, big smiles and 4 thousand dollars; exactly enough money to pay the first and last month’s rent to live in a landlord’s unfinished basement. There is no money left for food or transportation.But they have each other and they’re living their dream. This is the west! So Ivan and Alvina never quit smiling, never quit laughing, never quit feeling grateful.Ivan gets a job as a construction laborer for an older man who can’t always pay Ivan all he is owed. But he is an honest man, so he pays the balance of Ivan’s unpaid wages by giving him tools. After many months of working for this man, Ivan has the knowledge, the tools, and the man’s blessing to go into business for himself.Ivan and Alvina arrived in Canada exactly 11 years ago. Last year their business did more than 20 million dollars. It appears they will do 30 million next year. Neither of them is 40 years old.I share their story to encourage you, and to tease Ivan and Alvina a little. None of this delightful true story appears on the About Us page of their website. Not a word of it.&nbsp;Not even their names.Do you remember what I wrote to you in last week’s Monday Morning Memo?“Inspirational stories are never about accumulation. They’re about sacrifice.&nbsp;What have you sacrificed and why? Are you willing to tell that story?”Here are some final thoughts for you to ponder:Never quit smiling, never quit laughing, never quit feeling grateful.You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.The only safe thing is to take a chance.Oh! I forgot to mention 2 tiny details in this wonderful story of poetic, home-made destiny.Ivan and Alvina finish unfinished basements.And they’ve never needed to speak a word of French since the day they arrived in Canada.Have a great week.Roy H. Williams

The door to immediate action is easily kicked open by the steel-toed boot of urgency.If you want people to take immediate action, you’re going to need a credible shortage.A shortage of product. “Only 11 remain!”A shortage of time. “Sale ends Saturday at 6PM!”A shortage of capacity. “Only 128 seats are available!”Some kind of shortage.But smart marketers don’t create a series of non-stop urgencies.Smart marketers create a bond with future customers.And you don’t create a bond by crying wolf.You create a bond by telling a story.Do you want to inspire your customer?Inspirational stories are never about accumulation.They’re about sacrifice.What have you sacrificed and why? Are you willing to tell that story?Scientific American&nbsp;published an essay on May 8, 2013, in which Jag Bhalla quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of&nbsp;The Righteous Mind,&nbsp;“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.” The purpose of these stories is to engage and educate the emotions. Stories teach us character types, plots, and the social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.Stories explain how the world works and help us understand who we are.“Research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact,&nbsp;fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction,&nbsp;which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard…”“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. But why are humans storytelling animals at all? Why are we, as a species, so hopelessly addicted to narratives about the fake struggles of pretend people? Anthropologists have long argued that stories have group-level benefits. Traditional tales, from hero epics to sacred myths, perform the essential work of&nbsp;defining group identity and reinforcing cultural values.”– Jonathan Gottschall,&nbsp;The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us HumanStories are what shape and define a tribe.Make no mistake, people who bond with a brand are people who have joined a tribe. And that’s a healthy thing. According to Professor Alison Gopnik, “other people are the most important part of our environment. In our ultra-social species, social acceptance matters as much as food.” *We include ourselves in dozens of tribes. Tribes of geography, school, sport, faith, music, nationality, art, hobby, history, family affiliation, hair color, age, gender, lifestyle, transportation, recreation, food, fashion, tattoos, facial hair and footwear. We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Our purchases tell our story.Most ads are full of information. They don’t really tell a story.Story = character + predicament + attempted extrication.“Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall. They display “a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome. Stories give us feelings we don’t have to pay full cost for.” Stories free us from the limits of our own direct experience and allow us to&nbsp;learn from the experiences of others.Online reviews are stories told by customers about their experiences.Testimonial ads are another type of story told by customers about their experiences.&nbsp;But we listen to these stories with a grain of suspicion as we seek...

1. Freeze-frame each moment when something rocks your world.2. When you cry or become frightened or get angry or laugh or are overwhelmed by a sense of wonder, reverse-engineer what just happened. Ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? How did they do this to me?” Was it something in the sequence of events? Was it in the shapes or colors, words or music, symbols or associations? Was it facial expressions, vocal intonations, or a combination of several of these at once?3. Experiment with what you learn. The techniques that worked on you will work for you, as well.Communication is usually auditory, graphic, or gestural.These are its primary elements:Auditory:1. Words, and the phonemes that compose them2. Music: pitch, key, contour, interval, tempo, rhythm, texture and harmony3. Sounds: jets landing, babies crying, dogs barking, crickets chirping, etc.Graphic:1. color, form, line, shape, space, texture, value, proximity and radiance2. image – what is being shown, and what associations does it trigger?3. metaphor – what does it mean?Gestural:1. facial expression2. symbolic gestures and movements3. dancingSimultaneous elements of communication can reinforce or contradict each other.Perception is deepened when elements reinforce one another and agree.Interest is elevated when an element contradicts and disagrees.An apple tree is ready for harvest, all its apples a husky shade of red except for one – just beyond your reach – that shimmers electric blue.You’ll wonder about that apple all day.Predictability is the silent assassin of surprise and delight.Defeat it by modifying expected patterns of communication.Enter new subjects from unusual angles of approach.Communicate details. Specifics are more credible than generalities. The more specifically you speak to a single person, the more powerfully you speak to everyone.We love to be in the presence of powerful communicators who take us places and make us feel things; actors and filmmakers, dancers and photographers, sculptors and illustrators, singers and architects, teachers and musicians, painters and writers.When brilliant communicators work their magic, we get lost in it.Would you like to become one?You already own the hardware.Have you ever used a zoom lens? Think of your brain as having one. As you zoom in, you exclude the context to focus on the tiniest details. But when you zoom out, you see those details fold in on themselves to reveal the ever-expanding context of “the big picture.” The idea that captivated your zoomed-in attention is now just a tiny cog in a complex machine.The key to keeping your reader/viewer/listener off-balance is to zoom in after zooming out, and zoom out after zooming in. Take them on a journey with you. Make them think they’re going to see one thing, then show them something different. Unexpected elements make stories and photographs and paintings and music and everything else more interesting.I agree with Leo Burnett: The great danger of advertising isn’t that we will mislead people, but that we will bore them to death.Please don’t.Take them someplace they never expected to go.Show them something they didn’t expect to witness.Give them an experience they didn’t see coming.Roy H. Williams

When you’re trying to transfer a thought or a feeling to someone else, the impact of your communication will be determined by the following equation:How big is the thought in your mind, or the feeling in your heart?How quickly can you transfer it?The Law of Impact (or force,) documented by Isaac Newton, applies to communication as much as it does to physics:&nbsp;impact&nbsp;is the product of&nbsp;mass&nbsp;(size and weight) times&nbsp;acceleration&nbsp;(speed.)How massive is your thought or feeling?How quickly can you transfer it?The works of illustrators like Norman Rockwell and painters like Andrew Wyeth are often criticized as being “too obvious.” But the visual communications these artists produced were among the 20th&nbsp;century’s most recognizable works of art.Rockwell and Wyeth became famous because they were able to communicate big ideas clearly and quickly. Today I’m going to help you do the same with words.Have you ever noticed how short quotes pack a greater punch than long ones?The fewer the words, the greater the impact.Shorter hits harder.Boring people take too long to say too little.Interesting people know what to leave out.The best way to get good at this is to fill your ears with it.&nbsp;As you read, so will you write.&nbsp;If you read the writings of long-winded people, you will learn to wrap a great many words around a small idea.But if every day you read big ideas condensed into few words, you will soon be able to speak and write with greater impact.“The best way to become a successful writer is&nbsp;to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.” – Gene Fowler (1890 – 1960)Ray Bard published my&nbsp;Wizard of Ads&nbsp;trilogy 19 years ago. We made the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;bestsellers list together. The second book in that series became the&nbsp;Wall Street Journal’s&nbsp;#1 business book in America.More than 50 percent of the books published by Bard Press have become&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;and&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;bestsellers. No other publisher has achieved even 10 percent.As a young man, Ray sold books from door to door and he’s been collecting&nbsp;quotes about selling&nbsp;for more than 40 years. His jury of more than 1,000 quote judges spent an entire year evaluating and voting on the best-of-the-best from Ray’s collection.Today, August 7, 2017, is the day these quotes are finally available. Maximum thought in minimum words.Fired-up! Selling.This small book&nbsp;is a gorgeous work of art.It looks like embossed leather but Ray swears no animals were harmed.Three silk placeholder ribbons.Full-color on every page.The distilled essence of a lifetime collection.Think of it as a textbookthat teaches youhow to saybig thingsquickly.Roy H. Williams

I always look forward to my lunches with Ray Bard because he teaches me valuable things. He doesn’t intend to teach me things; it just happens.Our short lunches last 3 hours. Our record is 6 ½.Ray is my publisher.During our most recent lunch, Ray said – and I’m inclined to agree with him – there are only three sources of wealth: Luck, Accident, and Desire.If you inherited the money, married the money, won the lottery, bought the right stock at the right time, or went to work for the right company and were given a pile of stock options,&nbsp;you were lucky.&nbsp;I don’t say that to make you feel small, but we shouldn’t pretend you can teach someone else how to do&nbsp;what you did. Picking the right stock or going to work for the right start-up seems like an easy thing to do in hindsight, but I’ve never seen it happen&nbsp;using foresight.If you’re an artist, a writer, or an inventor who got rich, you were probably never really in it for the money.&nbsp;You got rich by accident.&nbsp;You always knew money was a possibility, but you chose to do what you did because you love it. It scratches your itch. It makes you happy. It makes you feel alive. So again, if we’re being honest, your advice about how to get rich would probably sound like this, “Be good at what you do. Study, experiment, refine your craft. Follow your instincts. Trust your gut. Be true to yourself. Break the rules.&nbsp;Blah, blah, blah.” I can say this because what little I’ve acquired has come to me in exactly this way. And that advice you just read – including the&nbsp;blah, blah, blah&nbsp;– is exactly what I tell people when they ask me how to “get to the next level, financially.” I tell them this because they would be disappointed if I told them the truth, that I am a writer because I am embarrassingly self-indulgent and I love to write. It is something I let myself do.But nearly all my wealthy friends got rich intentionally.&nbsp;It was their lifelong desire.&nbsp;They could teach you how to get rich, too,&nbsp;but only if you have sufficient patience, discipline, and desire.Getting rich is like losing weight; rarely does it&nbsp;happen by accident.How to lose weight isn’t a secret;&nbsp;you’ve got to consume less calories than you burn. Millions of Americans want&nbsp;to lose weight and they’re convinced they have the&nbsp;patience&nbsp;and&nbsp;discipline&nbsp;to lose weight. But the only ones who lose it and keep it off are the ones for whom the&nbsp;desire&nbsp;to&nbsp;lose weight is so strong&nbsp;that&nbsp;the pain of staying as they are&nbsp;is greater than the pain of doing what they need to do.Likewise, how to get rich isn’t a secret;&nbsp;you’ve got to do things other people aren’t willing to do. You’ve got to swallow your pride, restrain your spending, make hard choices, say no to yourself, get back up when you’re knocked down, and learn from your mistakes rather than defend them. But most important of all, you’ve got to patiently, relentlessly, obsessively keep your eye on the prize.Are you beginning to understand what I said about patience, discipline and desire?I met a successful man who spent 3&nbsp;&nbsp;hours telling me about the biggest failures of his career. At the end of those 3 hours, I knew his blind spot. His failures had a common root: this otherwise brilliant man&nbsp;believed that any intelligent person who has been taught the right thing to do, and who truly believes it’s the right thing to do, can be counted upon to do the thing they’ve been taught.His successes, on the other hand, did not count on people doing anything other than what they&nbsp;preferred&nbsp;to do.Knowing why&nbsp;to do it – and how&nbsp;– is not the same as doing...

You hear a lot of talk these days about how no one listens to the radio anymore.Interestingly, the people who make these claims offer no evidence beyond the fact that commercial free music can be obtained through online streaming. This reminds me of that famous malaprop by Yogi Berra, “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”If you want to see raw numbers, look at the Nielsen Audio Ratings. But I submit to you, as a supplement to those happy numbers, a few observations fueled by my investment of tens of millions of dollars in advertising expenditures each year for more than 25 years.Radio advertising is more cost-effective today than it has ever been, mainly because rates have been suppressed by the myth that “no one listens anymore.”This is great for media buyers. Bad for station owners.Four of my friends own large, online companies, and each of them tells me the exact same thing. “To do real volume online, you’ve got to have a big enough markup to let you spend 30 to 35 percent of gross sales on marketing.” The first time I heard this, I couldn’t believe my ears. Most of the advertisers I’ve known spend 5 to 6 percent of gross sales on advertising. The really aggressive ones spend 10 to 12 percent. “You’ve got to be selling products with a 10 to 20x markup or you’re not going to make any money using pay-per-click,” one of them told me while the other three nodded in agreement. The smallest of their online companies does almost $40,000,000 a year. The largest did $85,000,000 last year and one-third of that was spent in online marketing.Fortunes are being made online. This isn’t a secret.But any brick-and-mortar business that abandons broadcast media – and I include television in that definition – and tries to replace broadcast with pay-per-click or social media or content marketing is going to&nbsp;lose&nbsp;a fortune online.I’ve seen it happen again and again.Ryan Deiss is the principal of digitalmarketer.com, a highly regarded educational site for persons who need to know how to make online advertising work. When Ryan spoke to a roomful of long-term radio advertisers recently, he showed them the 8&nbsp;sequential things that online marketing can accomplish. The first of these 8&nbsp;was awareness. “No one in this room should be spending a penny online for awareness,” he said. “The cost of creating awareness online is incredibly expensive compared to radio. You just need to maximize the online traffic that radio can easily drive to your website.”He spent the rest of that day telling those advertisers how to generate more online leads and increase their online closing ratios&nbsp;while cutting their online ad budgets by half.Ryan got a thunderous applause at the end of his session. People love the advice of honest, straightforward experts.One of the business owners in the room that day was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle) Air Conditioning in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Tucson. When Ryan’s session was over, Ken raised his hand to say, “My cost of lead generation for A/C system replacement was about $441 per lead, roughly the national average for my category, until I cut my online budget by half and moved all that money into 52-week radio. Two years later, the sales volume of my 78 year-old company had more than doubled, and my cost per online lead these days bounces around between $39 and $47.”Ken Goodrich went on to make it clear that his customers are still going online before they call him. Some of them are reading reviews and some are just looking for his phone number, but most are typing the name of their city and “air conditioning” into the Google search string. Goettl Air Conditioning pops up, of course, alongside all its competitors. But unlike the other companies&nbsp;listed in those search results, Goettl leaps off the screen. “Hey! I know those guys!” says...

Exactly three hundred and thirty years ago – roughly ten generations of parents and children ago – the French explorer La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered by his own men.We were experiencing dysfunction among supposed team members.In Virginia, a panicked Nicholas Spencer of Westmoreland County provides Virginia Governor Francis Howard with, “Intelligence of the Discovery of a Negro Plott for the Distroying and killing of his Majesty’s Subjects, with a designe of Carrying it through the whole Collony of Virginia…”White people feared that people of another other race might overcome them.Back home in England, King James II orders that his declaration of indulgence be read in English churches, a first step toward securing religious freedom in the British Isles.&nbsp;Then he disbands English parliament.The person in charge of the mightiest nation on earth decided he didn’t need any help.And the Royal Society is rocked by the publication of Isaac Newton’s&nbsp;Principia Mathematica.According to author Edward Dolnick,* the Royal Society of 1687 was:“a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics who lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up in and a new one they had only glimpsed. These were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws. In time they would fling open the gates to the modern world.”I am intrigued by Dolnick’s description of the Royal Society because I can think of no better description of the cognoscenti of Wizard Academy than, “a grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits and eccentrics.”But then Dolnick rings the wrong bell. He contrasts a belief “in angels and alchemy and the devil,” with the&nbsp;belief that “the universe follows precise, mathematical laws,” as if those two beliefs are mutually exclusive.I don’t believe in alchemy but I do believe in angels.And I believe the universe follows precise, mathematical laws.And I believe in miracles.Let’s say that you and I are playing pool. Anyone with a knowledge of physics knows&nbsp;that a pool ball cleanly struck by the cue ball will continue to roll toward the hole where it’s headed:&nbsp;because the universe follows precise, mathematical laws.&nbsp;But what if, just as the ball is about to drop into the hole, an unnoticed bystander reaches down and lifts the ball off the table? Have the laws of physics been destroyed? Of course not.We simply failed to take into consideration the intervention of the unnoticed bystander; that unseen stranger who occasionally works a miracle.Roy H. Williams

Every successful person has a blind spot.Here’s what often happens:You have a unique approach, a particular process, or a special emphasis.It separates you from your competitors.Your commitment to it makes you successful.So far, so good. You found a way to be different and it made you a success!But now your hockey-stick growth has begun to flatten out and level off.You’ve obviously reached a plateau.How do you get to the next level?Most people double-down on the thing that brought them success.That’s when it happens: Blind Spot Blowback.The thing that made you a success will rarely take you to the next level.I’m not suggesting you abandon it. That would be stupid. You’ve got to maintain what you’ve begun.But that’s easy. You like doing it. It comes to you naturally. That’s why you feel good about pressing the accelerator even further.But your business did not quit accelerating because you failed to press the gas pedal hard enough.Your business quit accelerating because it’s time to shift into second gear.Your first innovation shot&nbsp;you like a rocket off the starting line. You were shoved back into your seat by the g-force of your acceleration. The crowd went wild.And then things began to level off.Second gear, idiot! Second gear!But few people ever find second gear.They believe in first gear. First gear works for them. First gear is where they feel comfortable. Second gear seems counter-intuitive. They’re not&nbsp;sure second gear would be&nbsp;the right thing&nbsp;for them.They want someone&nbsp;to help them get more speed out of first gear.Your business doesn’t have an automatic transmission.You’ve got to press the clutch and move the lever.Only then&nbsp;can you press the pedal&nbsp;again.And someday, if you’re lucky,you’ll get to do thisall over againat a muchhigherlevel.Are you lucky?Roy H. Williams

I’m in a strange mood. I hope you’ll forgive me.I’ve been contemplating things unsaid. Deeds undone. Symphonies unfinished.The reality of mortality has shown up as a hole in the light, a silhouette on the horizon. And its whispering voice has led me to compile a list of unfiltered thoughts that seem to me, remarkable. Thoughts that should not be lost.Perhaps I overreact. I get this way when I’ve been traveling too much, speaking too much, alone too little.I think of all the things I’ve learned that deserve to be remembered. These are the first five that pop into my misty mind as I sit on this airplane in the sky.Don’t follow your passion. Let your passion follow you.Passion does not produce commitment.Commitment produces passion.Passion does not lead to success.Commitment leads to success.Recreation is not a vocation.Rest, Shabbat, is necessary. So set aside your labor – often – and inhale the stuff of life. But recreation is not your&nbsp;goal; it is your fuel. The perpetual pursuit of pleasure leaves a person hollow inside. A life filled with money and no work is a fantasy for fools. Do you see the boredom that hides behind the smiles of the idle rich? Look beneath that boredom and you will see the walking dead.Everyone needs the same three things: Identity, Purpose, and Adventure.Identity:&nbsp;Who am I? Where is my tribe? Who are my people? Abraham Maslow said the greatest unmet need of 65% of us was our need to belong. I’ve never doubted it for a moment.Purpose:&nbsp;What should I do with the rest of my life? What should I stand for? What should I stand against? How can I make a difference, leave a mark, be remembered?Adventure:&nbsp;How will I overcome the obstacles that will stand in my way, the challenges that will confront me, the enemies that will make themselves known?When it’s time to make something from nothing, you must first decide:How to End:&nbsp;begin with the end in mind.Where to begin:&nbsp;approach from an unusual angle.What to leave out:&nbsp;shorter hits harder.And the most important thing to remember is this:Marry your best friend. Your mate will be your partner in every aspect of your life. Don’t marry beauty. Don’t marry wealth. Marry the person who will guard your back in the darkness when dragons are about and things get tricky wicked.Marry your best friend.Roy H. Williams

A world of absolutes is a tidy world, but narrow.The wider world must make room for things that are not.“Make room for things that are not.”&nbsp;I wrote about that last week, didn’t I?We cling to absolutes, I think, because they give us the illusion of stability in a world of constant change.We see rivers on maps, but in the strictest reality, you cannot step into the same river twice. The ripples, the creatures, the floating debris, even the shorelines change with each flickering moment.I wrote to you in October of 2015 about&nbsp;The Color that Doesn’t Exist.What we’re talking about today&nbsp;is like that, but different.The people you meet&nbsp;and the moments&nbsp;you experience in advertising and movies and literature and art&nbsp;exist only in the mind. They are symbols of possible pasts and futures.Symbols are the signposts of imagination.When&nbsp;we think ahead to&nbsp;the possible outcomes of our efforts, we see realities that could happen, but these&nbsp;are never&nbsp;the river we step into when we get there.We’re talking about companies and brands.We are attracted to brands that believe in the things we believe in, brands that show us a reflection of ourselves.Every successful brand has a personality. A strong brand is an entity that lives in the imagination, just as real and full of hope and promise as any character in a television show, novel, or movie.Much of what we buy is purchased to remind ourselves –and announce to the world around us –who we are.The idea of a brand is lot like the idea of home.Bart Giamatti was the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, a Professor of Comparative Literature, and the President of Yale University. These are his thoughts about “home.”“There is no great long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself it’s own great long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn’t called fourth base. And then it came to me: Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.’ Home is an English word that is virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and the accessibility and the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness. They cling to the word ‘home’ and are absent from ‘house’ or even ‘my house.’ Home is a concept, not a place. It is a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins: the mix of time and place and smell and weather, wherein one first realizes one is an original. Perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate. And it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen… All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it’s about going home. It’s about rejoining – rejoining a beloved, rejoining a parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And&nbsp;going home&nbsp;is where that restoration occurs because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started; all the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.”We remember home, not so much as a place, but as a state of mind.Likewise,...

We live in a universe of paired opposites.Proton and electron. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Rise and fall. Male and female. Day and night.What you embrace does not define you nearly so much as what you exclude.I’m speaking of self-definition.EXAMPLE: One person says they love cars made by Ford. Another person says they love Ford “because it is the oldest American brand; I refuse to drive anything foreign.” Which of these persons gives us more insight into who they are?Any description of what the purchase price includes “at no extra charge” is made more credible by describing what is&nbsp;not&nbsp;included.I’m speaking of products and services.EXAMPLE: One air conditioning company says their A/C Tune-up includes cleaning the coils. Their competitor adds, “…and we clean the coils the right way, not the easy way.” Which of these companies gives you more confidence?Any promise of benefit a customer will gain from your product or service is sharpened and accelerated by contrasting that benefit with what it is&nbsp;not.I’m speaking of advertising and marketing.EXAMPLE:&nbsp;The executive team of Jigsaw Health recently spent 3 days in private classes at Wizard Academy. When they explained to us that their magnesium supplement would make a person feel calm and relaxed while it simultaneously boosted their energy, I said, “That sounds like ad-speak. Your ads will be more believable when you describe what the product is&nbsp;not,&nbsp;and what its benefits are&nbsp;not.”These people understood.These people got to work.They wrote, “Our cravings for artificial stimulants and relaxants increase when we don’t get enough magnesium.” They wrote, “Magnesium is a mineral, not a vitamin. And it has been stripped out of the foods we eat.” And, “Magnesium delivers optimistic energy, not caffeine energy,” and, “It makes you feel yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed.”Have you ever noticed how every mission statement sounds like every other?This is because we all believe in the same things; fairness, honesty, integrity, and treating people right. And&nbsp;as our mission statements progress, we&nbsp;begin to double-dip into the same values we’ve already mentioned. “We desire&nbsp;only to make a fair and honest profit,” and, “We believe in treating our employees right,”&nbsp;blah, blah, blah.&nbsp;Predictable ad-speak.Differentiation is the goal of communication in business.But you won’t differentiate yourself&nbsp;by explaining&nbsp;what&nbsp;you believe in, or what you include. Differentiation is razor sharpened and rocket accelerated by&nbsp;explaining what you&nbsp;don’t&nbsp;believe in, and what you&nbsp;leave out.EXAMPLE: One company says, “We believe in gathering all the data.” Their competitor says, “We&nbsp;give you step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation.” Which of those statements is more convincing?Most people&nbsp;hesitate to define themselves&nbsp;by what they&nbsp;reject, for fear of being perceived as negative.But is it negative to say, “the right way, not the easy way?” Is it negative to say, “a mineral, not a vitamin?” “Optimistic energy, not caffeine energy?” “Yoga-relaxed, not alcohol-relaxed?” And when you say, “step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation,” you’re excluding an idea, not a person.Give some thought to what you are not. Tell people&nbsp;what you&nbsp;don’t&nbsp;believe in.It won’t change who you are, but it will definitely change how people see you.Roy H. Williams

Others judge you by the outcomes you achieve, but you judge yourself by your intentions. You judge yourself as God does. This is why I like you.You have no power over the vagaries of your circumstances; to be in the right place at the right time is not a matter of skill, but of chance. But you try to do the right thing in the right way for the right reason. This is why I like you.You have failed, but you are not a failure. You have succeeded, but you are not a success. You have tried and cried and laughed and struggled like a chick breaking out of its shell. This is why I like you.You are wounded and broken and have ugly scars because you run to help those you love. When you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you do not quickly give up. This is why I like you.You allow yourself to like people for the most ridiculous of reasons. You take your inspiration from wherever you find it. You have a strange sense of humor and you can laugh at yourself. This is why I like you.You fall but you get up again. You are at your best when no one is watching. And you know how to keep a secret. This is why I like you.One can love a person one does not like.But what I hold for you is something else.I see you as you are.I see you real.And I like you.– Roy H. Williams

People are being caught off guard by the quirky tale of Sunshine and Poobah.Evidently, reading it cover-to-cover is a much different experience than reading it one chapter at a time. This funny little book is rapidly gaining a life of its own.This is the backstory of how – like Frosty the Snowman – it came to life.Jeffrey Eisenberg gave you the beginning of the backstory on the final&nbsp;pages of the just-released hardback,&nbsp;Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It.“A few months ago we sought the advice of our good friend and mentor Roy H. Williams. We spent an entire day with him presenting the content we wanted to include in the book. We wanted to avoid the complexity of our earlier books,&nbsp;Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?&nbsp;and the textbook feel of&nbsp;Call to Action.&nbsp;While these books were both&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;bestsellers they weren’t a fun or easy read. By the end of the day it was obvious to Roy that despite our best attempts to simplify and prune our content we were writing another textbook…. Roy reassured us that we had the right elements. He asked us if we trusted him to write the book for us. We did… By telling the story of Poobah and Sunshine’s road trip, he avoided getting bogged down in the details a nonfiction book drowns in. He didn’t do it with a simple parable. He did it by creating an entertaining story with realistic dialogue and character development that Bryan and I are incapable of.”Here are&nbsp;a few tidbits Jeffrey failed to mention:1. The original title&nbsp;was&nbsp;Brand Like Amazon.&nbsp;When our friend Ray Bard sent an email arguing strongly in favor of the name&nbsp;Be Like Amazon,&nbsp;I forwarded Ray’s email to Jeffrey and immediately bought the domain name.2. I said, “We need to mention&nbsp;a Norman Rockwell ‘All-American’ business to give the title a visual anchor.” Jeffrey said “lemonade stand” and the title began to sparkle.3. The Brothers Eisenberg&nbsp;presented a Powerpoint and we wore microphones so our conversation could be recorded and transcribed. That transcript is 40,324 words. The book is 22,961.4. Jeffrey and Bryan&nbsp;provided all the Amazon research, the four pillars, and the principles that needed to be taught. I simply added the stories.5.&nbsp;The cognoscenti will recognize&nbsp;the writing style of the book as “Robert Frank.” There is no omniscient narrator to tell you&nbsp;why&nbsp;a person said what he said or how it made the other person feel. Instead, simple nouns and verbs give the&nbsp;reader the raw material of an experience. Like an eavesdropper, the reader must figure out for themselves what is happening and why.When&nbsp;writing “Robert Frank” you must choose:How to End&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(Begin with the end clearly in mind and carefully select the details to be covered.)Where to Begin(Choose an interesting angle of approach.)What to Leave Out(Never say what people already know or can easily figure out for themselves. Your story accelerates when you say things in the fewest possible words.)6. I knew I was going to have to fight&nbsp;for the story in chapter 3 about Moses ben Maimon, a Rabbi who lived about a thousand years ago. Knowing the brothers would be hesitant to spotlight the basic humanity and wisdom of Jewish business principles, I sent them this email before I let them read that...

Boring, ineffective ad campaigns&nbsp;are almost always the result of data-worship.Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said,“The first principle is that you must not&nbsp;fool&nbsp;yourself and you are the&nbsp;easiest&nbsp;person to&nbsp;fool.”He was talking about using data&nbsp;to make predictions.Amos Tversky, one half of the Nobel Prize-winning duo* of Kahneman and Tversky, renowned for their discovery of systematic human cognitive bias (the tendency to fool oneself,) said,“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe.”from Chapter 7: The Rules of Prediction,in&nbsp;The Undoing Project&nbsp;by Michael Lewis.To understand what Tversky meant, we’ll need to probe the terms “deterministic” and “probabilistic.” But before we do, I should warn you that exactly 54.2% of the people in America would be annoyed if&nbsp;they read what I’m about to say.I sincerely hope you’re not one of them.When Tversky said, “Man is a deterministic device…” he was referring to the deterministic&nbsp;belief system that underlies Newtonian physics:“It’s an organized universe.”“Everything happens for a reason.”“Everything can be known in advance, as long as we have enough data.”“If you don’t like the effect, just trace up the causal chain – change the cause – and you will consequently change the effect.”The deterministic belief system is logical, rational, sequential, deductive reasoning. It is an incontrovertible religion to the 54.2% of the population who believe in it. And there’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re in advertising. Sadly, the majority of advertising&nbsp;professionals cling to deterministic beliefs. I call these people the data worshippers. At the center of their faith&nbsp;is the&nbsp;belief&nbsp;that success is due to&nbsp;“reaching the right people.” Data worshippers&nbsp;make no room for whimsical wit or flights of fancy. They give no place to the mystery of curiosity or the magic of storytelling.I’ve never seen a business fail due to&nbsp;reaching the wrong people.I believe every person can be&nbsp;“the right person” or knows the right person and has influence over them.I believe in saying the right thing, engaging the imagination and winning the heart, knowing that the mind will follow. The mind creates logic to justify what the heart has already decided.I believe in&nbsp;(probabilistic)&nbsp;bonding with the masses.This causes deterministic marketers to say to me, “You’re hunting with a shotgun. We’re using a rifle with a scope.” And my reply never changes. “The goal is not to kill, but to capture. And you’re fishing with a hook. I’m using a net.”When Tversky said mankind had been, “thrown into a probabilistic universe,” he was referring to the&nbsp;probabilistic belief system that underlies quantum mechanics:“You can suspect what will probably happen, but you can’t know for sure, even when you have total information.”“You don’t really know until you get there.”Ninety years ago, at the Solvay conference of 1927, Albert Einstein (a determinist) objected to the theory of quantum mechanics, quipping, “God does not play dice.” Niels Bohr (a probabilist) told Einstein to “stop telling God what to do,” and won the day. (17 of the 29 attendees at that conference were or became Nobel Prize winners.) Niels Bohr had won the Nobel Prize in Physics 5 years earlier.Deterministic scientists – and marketers – defend their decisions by pointing to predictive data. They prefer learning from expert advice and example.Probabilistic scientists – and marketers – defend their decisions through outcomes. They prefer to learn from consequences.In all of science, the two things most known to be true are (deterministic) Newtonian physics and (probabilistic)...

According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential&nbsp;gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent.&nbsp;In fact, the&nbsp;written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. This is why it takes the average reader 38 percent longer to understand the written word than to understand the same word when spoken.Think about it. Do babies learn to speak first, or to read first?You’re&nbsp;lying in bed, reading a book. It dawns on&nbsp;you that you’ve been scanning the same paragraph over and over but&nbsp;you have no idea what it says. This is because the part of your brain connected to your eyes is still receiving&nbsp;the visual symbols we call the written word, but you are no longer hearing those words in your mind.Stay with me. An understanding of this stuff will make your ads musical, memorable, and persuasive even when they’re being read silently off a computer screen or from a&nbsp;printed page.The English language is composed of only 43 sounds.*These sounds are called phonemes and they are the parts and pieces&nbsp;of words. Be careful not to think of them as letters of the alphabet.Not every&nbsp;letter of the alphabet has its&nbsp;own sound.&nbsp;The letter “c” usually indicates&nbsp;the&nbsp;“k” sound, but we give it&nbsp;the “s” sound when it is followed by an “i”.A single&nbsp;phoneme&nbsp;can be represented by different&nbsp;combinations of letters. The phoneme we hear as&nbsp;“sh” can be heard in the word&nbsp;fish,&nbsp;but we also hear it&nbsp;in&nbsp;fictitious,&nbsp;where it is created&nbsp;by a “t” followed by an “i.”Fictitious fish.Don’t focus on&nbsp;the spelling of the word in question; it is the&nbsp;sound&nbsp;of the word we’re after.Phonemes are important to ad&nbsp;writers because they&nbsp;carry unconscious, symbolic meanings of their own. The black-and-white definition of a word is softly colored by&nbsp;its&nbsp;sound.&nbsp;A&nbsp;great ad&nbsp;writer would never call a diamond “small.” Because&nbsp;small&nbsp;is&nbsp;dull.&nbsp;Small, at best, would&nbsp;glow,&nbsp;like a&nbsp;pearl.But Diamonds fling&nbsp;jagged shards of light.This is why we&nbsp;write, “tiny little diamonds twinkling, glitt’ring and sparkling in the sun.” The sharp-edged “t” and “k” sounds are what&nbsp;we’re after.In the musical fabric of language, every sound is important. What distinguishes&nbsp;large&nbsp;and&nbsp;small&nbsp;from&nbsp;big&nbsp;and&nbsp;little&nbsp;is the difference in their musics. Phonemes&nbsp;within a language are like the instruments in an orchestra. Just as the drums&nbsp;make a different kind of music than do the woodwinds, and the woodwinds&nbsp;make a different kind music than does the brass, so also do the drum-like&nbsp;stops –&nbsp;like p,b,t,d,k, and g –&nbsp;(don’t read that list as&nbsp;letters of the alphabet; make the sounds the letters represent,)&nbsp;make a different music than do the woodwind-like&nbsp;fricatives,&nbsp;the sounds that hiss or hush or buzz –&nbsp;like f, v, s, z, sh, th. And the fricatives make a different music than the brassy&nbsp;nasal velars,&nbsp;like the “ng” sound in song, tongue, string and bring.Phonemes are either obstruent or sonorant.Obstruents are perceived as harder and more masculine; sonorants as softer and more feminine.&nbsp;Big&nbsp;and&nbsp;little&nbsp;are obstruent, perfect for diamonds that fling jagged shards of light.&nbsp;Large&nbsp;and&nbsp;small&nbsp;are sonorant, just right&nbsp;for clothing made of soft fabric.Now are you...

England, 1890 –&nbsp;Barely 5 feet tall on his tiptoes, 30 year-old Jimmy was a pen pal of 40 year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author of&nbsp;Treasure Island,&nbsp;during the final years of Stevenson’s life when he lived on the island of Samoa. The two never met, but if they had, they would doubtless have played cricket together in the little village of Stanway in Gloucestershire.In September, 1921,&nbsp;one of the most famous men in the world, 33 year-old Charlie Chaplin, traveled&nbsp;to London in the hope of meeting Jimmy, now 61 years old. According to historian Lisa Chaney, “Upon his arrival, central London came almost to a standstill, as traffic was blocked all the way from Waterloo station to the Ritz on Picadilly, where he was staying. Everywhere Chaplin went, he was mobbed by adoring crowds.”Chaplin achieved his goal of meeting Jimmy by contacting Ed Lucas, one of the group of buddies with whom Jimmy played cricket. At the end of their evening together at the Garrick Club in London, Jimmy wrote to his friend, Cynthia Asquith, about his dinner with the great Charlie Chaplin.“He has a rather charming speaking voice, and a brain withal. A very forceful creature, and likeable. The police who are put on to guard him all produce their autograph books for him to sign.”When Jimmy visited&nbsp;Stanway to play cricket, he was the guest&nbsp;of Herbert and Cynthia Asquith. (Herbert was the son of the British Prime Minister and Cynthia would later become a famous author of ghost stories.)&nbsp;In return for their&nbsp;kindness to him and his cricketing buddies over the years, Jimmy built a pavilion on the cricket grounds of Stanway, where it has been in use for nearly 100 years.Who, exactly, were these cricketing buddies of Jimmy?They called themselves the&nbsp;Allah Akbar-ies&nbsp;under the mistaken belief that “Allah akbar” meant “Heaven help us” in Arabic.This was an odd mistake to make, considering that&nbsp;these men were known for their words.The Allah Akbar-ies included:Rudyard Kipling,&nbsp;The Jungle BookArthur Conan Doyle,&nbsp;Sherlock HolmesP. G. Wodehouse,&nbsp;Jeeves and WoosterJerome K. Jerome,&nbsp;Three Men in a BoatA. A. Milne,&nbsp;Winnie the PoohG.K. Chesterton –&nbsp;Father BrownAnd then of course there wasE. V. (Ed) Lucas, the author of more than 150 books, including one of Indiana Beagle’s favorites,&nbsp;If Dogs Could Write: A Second Canine Miscellany&nbsp;(1929)The group also included 10 more writers of slightly lesser acclaim.Spectators at these cricket matches included&nbsp;Jimmy’s neighbor and lifelong friend, George Bernard Shaw, along with the ancient Thomas Hardy, (Far from the Madding Crowd&nbsp;and&nbsp;Tess of the d’Urbervilles.)And five-foot Jimmy? He was of course J.M. Barrie, the author of&nbsp;Peter Pan.And now you know why New York publisher Charles Scribner traveled&nbsp;to England to sit on a bench and watch a cricket match in the tiny village of Stanway.Scribner never forgot that day.Wouldn’t it be fun to make a movie about all this? Can you imagine their conversations?You’ll be pleased&nbsp;to know the tradition of Stanway village lives on at Wizard Academy.We have Americanized it, of course, but I think Jimmy would approve.The Lost Boys&nbsp;are a group of entrepreneurs who gather&nbsp;once a year to play bocce ball at Wizard Academy. It is a secret society. Their names are never published and group photos are never taken.The House of the Lost Boys&nbsp;will be the third and final student mansion on the campus of Wizard Academy.&nbsp;Its six guest rooms will increase our on-site capacity to 24 students. And...

What do you value?Are there things for which you would be willing to suffer humiliation, rejection, and financial loss? These are your deep core values, your&nbsp;non-negotiables.&nbsp;It’s important that you know what they are.A person without non-negotiables is a person without passion.But it’s also important to know your&nbsp;negotiables.A person without negotiables is hard-headed, self-important, obstinate. But such people&nbsp;can be tolerated if they apply their non-negotiables only to themselves.A&nbsp;person who believes their non-negotiables should apply to everyone else is an oppressor. Give them a weapon and they are a terrorist.When Oscar Wilde was in prison, he wrote,“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”I’ve always liked Oscar Wilde.Allow me to list my assertions:Suffering is the price of passion.You cannot claim you are passionate about something if you would not be willing to endure hardship for it.Not every belief is worth suffering for.The opinions and beliefs&nbsp;for which you would not suffer&nbsp;are your “negotiable” opinions and beliefs.It is reasonable, and even good, to be willing to suffer for your beliefs.It is not reasonable, nor is it good, to expect others to suffer for your beliefs.Do you want to hear the funny part? Although I truly believe what&nbsp;I said&nbsp;today, it is not a belief&nbsp;about which I am passionate.It is negotiable.&nbsp;AFood for thought on a Monday morning.Roy H. Williams

On the day he died, long ago, a man said, “In this world you will have trouble.”I’ve never had reason to doubt him.Money troubleWork troubleRelationship troubleLegal troubleHealth troubleFamily troubleTax troubleYou don’t get to choose whether or not you will have trouble.But you do get to choose whether or not you will let it dominate your thoughts and control your mood.I find it interesting that immediately after he said, “In this world you will have trouble,” the man went on to say, “but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”What? Overcome the world?How?According to the story,&nbsp;the man&nbsp;was able to deal with all the trouble that came his way because of “the joy that was set before him.”&nbsp;In other words, he had an immovable North Star, a guiding light his thoughts were fixed upon.Troubles seem smaller when your mind is focused on something more interesting than the trouble, more important than the trouble, bigger than the trouble, happier than the trouble.The way to keep your troubles from filling your mind is to fill your mind with something else.Do you follow a North Star? Are you trying to make a difference? Do you have a purpose?You do? Excellent!Purpose is the primary ingredient of Adventure!The other two ingredients are stress and trouble.“It does not do you good to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” ­– J.R.R. Tolkien,&nbsp;The Hobbit&nbsp;(1937)“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”– G.K. Chesterton (1909)In a 1961 letter to Frank and Jo Loesser, John Steinbeck said,“In the dark the other night I wrote in my head a whole dialogue between St. George and the Dragon. Very close relatives those two. Neither could exist without the other. They are eternally tied together – actually two parts of one whole… So St. George must always kill the dragon and it must be repeated, because if the dragon were ever finally killed, there would be no St. George – only a lonely man looking for something to do.”The adventure of St. George was made possible by the dragon.“It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.”– Thornton WilderAre you fortunate enough to be facing a dragon? Are you in the middle of an adventure?Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine in the end.If things aren’t fine, it’s not the end.Roy H. WilliamsPS – I don’t know who first spoke those last two lines, but I would like to have known that person. Some say it was John Lennon (The Beatles,) Some say it was&nbsp;Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist,) and some say it was someone else (Someone Else.) The only thing that’s&nbsp;certain&nbsp;is that it wasn’t me. – RHW

Our nation is changing, of course.Things aren’t like they used to be.Famous clothing brands are at historic lows and major retailers are closing hundreds of stores. In 2016,&nbsp;2,056 stores closed&nbsp;their doors.&nbsp;The worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down.Brokerage firm&nbsp;Credit Suisse says&nbsp;in a just-released research report,“Barely a quarter into 2017, year-to-date retail store closings have already surpassed those of 2008… it’s possible more than 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close their doors in 2017.”But we’re not in a recession.According to an April 10 article by Derek Thompson in&nbsp;The Atlantic,“America’s GDP has been growing for 8 straight years, gas prices are low, unemployment is under 5 percent, and the last 18 months have been quietly excellent years for wage growth, particularly for middle- and lower-income Americans.”Yes, Amazon.com and the other online players are partially responsible for the decline of retail in America, but not nearly to the degree you might think.In 2016, only 6% of retail purchases were made online.But retailers are down by a lot more than 6%.Want to know what categories are doing better than ever?“Travel is booming. Hotel occupancy is booming. Domestic airlines have flown more passengers each year since 2010, and last year U.S. airlines set a record, with 823 million passengers. The rise of restaurants is even more dramatic. In 2016, for the first time ever, Americans spent more money in restaurants and bars than at grocery stores. Sales in this category have grown twice as fast as all other retail spending.”In other words, we’re buying fewer&nbsp;things,&nbsp;but more experiences.Materialism is on the decline.In retail stores and online, we’re spending a lot less money on clothing. Its share of total consumer spending has declined by 20 percent in barely more than a decade. Houses, cars and furniture seem to be less important to us as well.But we’re spending more than ever on togetherness, entertainment, and fitness.We hunger&nbsp;less&nbsp;for prestige,&nbsp;more&nbsp;for experiences and relationships.Relationships…If you’re going to get in step with this trend, you’re going to need to invest in customer bonding.Use mass media to win their hearts before they need what you sell.Don’t let your company be just another name on a list of search results.Roy H. Williams

Michael Jordan wasn’t a perfectionist; he was an improvisationist. That’s why he was hard to stop.A perfectionist knows exactly what he’s going to do. He plans his work and works his plan. The only problem is that because he knows, the defender knows, too.It’s easy to anticipate what&nbsp;a perfectionist is going to do. He’s predictable.But no one knew what Michael was going to do,&nbsp;because he didn’t know himself.Does it surprise you that nearly all the superstar basketball players and top-scoring running backs test as improvisationists?So do all the best ad writers.Predictability is the curse of the perfectionist,and the silent assassin of advertising.When you say what people expect you to say, no matter how perfectly you say it, you bore them.Improvisation puts the bubbles in champagne.Improvisation puts a wiggle in your walk.Improvisation puts money in your bank account, bread in your basket, glitter on your cheek, and a smile on your face.Unexpected is interesting.Unpredictable is enlightening.Improvised is exciting.Random Entry is a technique that guarantees improvisation in advertising.The magic&nbsp;of random entry begins when the ad writer&nbsp;doesn’t choose&nbsp;the opening line of the&nbsp;ad. Rather, it is chosen for him by someone who has no idea what they are doing.Want to try it? Ask a stranger&nbsp;to think of a colorful sentence. Tell them to make it “vivid, unexpected, larger than life.” Tell them, “The sentence doesn’t have to be about anything in particular; it just has to cause people to&nbsp;be curious about where this story is headed.”The best way to create Random Entry without the help of an unwitting accomplice is to flip open a book and place your finger on a page with your eyes closed. The sentence on which your finger lands&nbsp;will be&nbsp;the opening line of your ad.“Wiggins was Harvey’s pet hamster.”That’s your opening line&nbsp;for the 30-second radio ad you’re about&nbsp;to write for the company that provides your primary income. If your ad makes sense, elevates attention, and successfully sells&nbsp;a product or service, congratulations! You are an improvisationist.Indiana Beagle plans to celebrate&nbsp;the winning scripts in the rabbit hole next Monday.Be sure to&nbsp;time your ad while reading it out loud.&nbsp;Thirty seconds is all you’ve got.There will be prizes, but I’m not sure how many.That will be up to Indy. Some of the prizes will be ridiculous, some will be worthwhile, a few will be sentimental, but at least one will be a scholarship to any Wizard Academy class you choose.Send your 30-second radio script to&nbsp;[email protected]&nbsp;before midnight, Saturday, April 22, 2017.Dunk the ball.I know you can fly.Don’t pretend you can’t.Roy H. Williams

Ask a businessperson or a marketing professional, “What is branding?”Go ahead. Go do it. I’ll wait…Did they mention the importance of a having a logo? Did they&nbsp;talk about the&nbsp;consistent use of a chosen group of “brand” colors and a particular font and layout and look and feel? Have you done what they told you? Congratulations! You now have a&nbsp;visual style guide.And so does every other business on earth.The reason I avoid using the word “branding” is because most people&nbsp;think they’re already doing it.Here’s a far more important question: What are you doing to create an emotional&nbsp;bond&nbsp;with customers you’ve not yet met? This is the real goal of branding. But since too many people think they’re “branding” when all they’re doing is following&nbsp;a visual style guide, let’s you and I call this process&nbsp;“customer bonding,” okay?If your visual style guide is successful, people will recognize you when they see you.If your customer bonding program is successful, people will think of you and&nbsp;feel good about you&nbsp;when they finally need what you sell.Now let’s take this discussion to the street:You sell a product or service that people buy less often than once a year.There’s no way to know exactly who is going to need you, or when.This is why you’re investing in Search Engine Optimization and all those keywords. Am I right?So far, so good: now when the prospective customer finally needs what you sell, you’re going to show up…along with everyone else in your category.Let’s see what happens next:Your customer is scanning the results of their search.Do you want&nbsp;to know which company is going to get the click, the call and the sale?Surprise! It’s the company that’s been bonding with customers through mass media.One of the first signs your customer bonding program is working is that your online cost for lead generation will sharply decline and your conversion rate will rise.The SEO weasels will try to take credit for this, of course, by claiming they made some refinements to your keywords or found some efficient new way to target or&nbsp;blah, blah, blah.&nbsp;This is one of my favorite moments.Because I told the business owner this would happen.So when it does, they always laugh.I want you to laugh, too.It’s never too late to start bonding.Lower costs, higher conversion rates, and laughter.These are just the byproducts and side effects.Roy H. Williams

People read books for the strangest of reasons.I recently read&nbsp;a book about a female aviator in Africa in the 1930s.I have no interest in aviation. I have no interest in Africa.But it was a great book.I began reading it after&nbsp;I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to his friend, Maxwell Perkins.“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book,&nbsp;West with the Night?&nbsp;I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s logbook. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and sometimes making an okay pigpen. But this girl who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant,… can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people’s stories, are absolutely true. So, you have to take as truth the early stuff about when she was a child which is absolutely superb. She omits some very fantastic stuff which I know about which would destroy much of the character of the heroine; but what is that anyhow in writing? I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.”How can you resist a recommendation like that?Here are a few sentences from the book:“A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not…&nbsp;I am the earth in the palm of your hand.”“Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.”“The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star – if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”Looking down from her plane she sees a herd of impala, wildebeest and zebra,“It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”Most of the book isn’t really about flying at all. It’s about looking and seeing and living in the world around you.“Toomba’s grin spreads over his wide face like a ripple in a pond… He grins until there is no more room for both the grin and his eyes, so his eyes disappear.”“The trail ran north to Molo; at night it ran straight to the stars. It ran up the side of the Mau Escarpment until at ten thousand feet it found the plateau and rested there, and some of the stars burned beneath its edge.”Writing about a young horse named Balmy, Markham said,“She was neither vicious nor stubborn, she was very fast on the track, and she responded intelligently to training… Had she made her debut on Park Avenue in the middle thirties instead of on the race-course at Nairobi in the middle twenties, she would have been counted as one of those intellectually irresponsible individuals always referred to as being ‘delightfully mad.’ Her madness, of course, consisted simply of a penchant for doing things that,...

Business Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by at least two distinct identities or dissociated personality states that show up in a company’s behavior.BPD emerges when unrelated teams work independently in the areas of (1.) Advertising (2.) Web Presence (3.) Sales Training.If a person encounters your ads, then visits your website, then comes to your place of business, will they feel they have&nbsp;encountered a single personality three times, or three personalities once?Advertising&nbsp;rarely makes the sale. It merely engages the customer in the early stages of a conversation. If the&nbsp;reader/listener/viewer of your ad has purchased from you in the past and had a good experience, it’s possible the&nbsp;ad will cause him or her&nbsp;to make immediate contact with your business.But customers who are less familiar with you will hope to&nbsp;extend the conversation&nbsp;and learn more about you by visiting your&nbsp;website. And they will expect to encounter the same personality they met in your ads.Will that happen?Or will they encounter an entirely different personality crafted by your website team?Does your website continue the conversation begun by your advertising, or does it stand alone, as though that conversation never took place?To what degree is your website disconnected from your advertising? That will be the degree of disconnection experienced by your customer.If by some miracle, the personality, tone and style of your website agrees with the personality, tone and style of your advertising, your&nbsp;biggest problem remains. Will&nbsp;your people&nbsp;continue the conversation that was begun in your ads and continued on your website? Or will they introduce an entirely different company than the one your customer was hoping to meet?Relational Marketing depends on Integrated Messaging.Integrated Messaging begins withWe Believe(Statements that capture the&nbsp;Personality&nbsp;and&nbsp;Promises, Processes&nbsp;and&nbsp;Benefits&nbsp;of your company.)Personality&nbsp;makes the customer feel they know you.Promises&nbsp;make the customer feel secure.Processes&nbsp;give credibility to your Promises.Benefits&nbsp;are what the customer is hoping to experience.(Your&nbsp;Origin Story&nbsp;is essentially the backstory of&nbsp;We Believe.&nbsp;We spoke of this in last week’s MondayMorningMemo.)Brandable Chunks(memorable identifiers and phrases extracted from your We Believe statements.)Deliverables(Advertising, web copy, content marketing, and signature phrases used by your people, all built from the same list of Brandable Chunks) These deliverables include 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60-second radio ads, billboard copy, email subject lines and body copy, digital marketing text, memorable identifiers for truck and van wraps, store signage, etc.)You’d like to see some examples, I know.You’ll find them in&nbsp;Chapter Ten&nbsp;of&nbsp;Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It.&nbsp;You can read that chapter by following the hyperlink in the previous sentence, or you can&nbsp;wait for the book to be published in a couple of months.The audiobook is in production right now. It’s going to be the first ever of its kind;&nbsp;a business book presented as dialogue.Roy H. Williams

There are two kinds of advertising.The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is&nbsp;called a&nbsp;“relational”&nbsp;ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year.The goal of the second kind of advertising is to cause the reader/listener/viewer to buy something from you immediately.&nbsp;I began my career writing these&nbsp;“transactional”&nbsp;ads.&nbsp;I was good at it. This type of campaign is called “direct response.” Transactional&nbsp;ads work less and less well the longer you run them.Today I write only the first&nbsp;kind.If you have the&nbsp;staying power&nbsp;to build a relational&nbsp;ad campaign, you’re going to need to remember your&nbsp;origins.&nbsp;You’re going to have to write your&nbsp;Genesis Story.There are two kinds of staying power. The first is&nbsp;financial.Here’s my advice: Don’t launch a relational ad campaign so big that you would not be able to&nbsp;sustain it indefinitely. If you say, “I can fund this for 6 months, but by then it needs to be self-supporting,” then you’re spending more than you can afford. It’s impossible to predict the moment of breakthrough, that moment when all your previously fruitless efforts will begin to radiate results like a newborn sun.This is why you have to have the second kind of staying power:&nbsp;emotional staying power.&nbsp;Three or four months into your campaign, you’re going to begin to panic. But the only thing worse than never launching a relational ad campaign is to launch one and then abandon it.Relational ad campaigns are never about having the lowest price. A customer who switches&nbsp;to&nbsp;you for reasons of price alone will just as quickly switch&nbsp;from&nbsp;you for the same reason. And there is nothing that some other company can’t do a little worse and sell a little cheaper.People don’t bond with companies so easily as they bond with people.&nbsp;We bond with people we like, people we feel good about, people we think we know.Here are three examples of well-told stories of origin:“My Dad was a house painter. He taught me to sand and scrape old paint until my fingers were aching and raw. But I wanted to make him proud, so I always worked hard. I’ll never forget the day we opened our brown bags at lunchtime and he said, “Son. I’m proud of how hard you work, but I hope that someday you’ll get a job where you can wear a tie.” And because I wanted to make him proud, I decided to open a jewelry store. I watched as my Dad took his last seven hundred dollars out of his sock drawer to help me get started. But he never got to see that store. He died just before it was open.&nbsp;I lived on wieners and beans for the next 11 years until I finally figured it out:&nbsp;&nbsp;Lose the tie… And be a regular guy just like your Dad.&nbsp;That’s when things turned around for me. I’ve been sharing the story of that 700 dollars with young entrepreneurs in High Schools and Colleges for years. America’s newest and best Kesslers Diamonds is about to open in front of Cabela’s next to the Rivertown Mall in Grandville. I’m Richard Kessler, and I’m hoping to become&nbsp;your&nbsp;jeweler.”Your origin story doesn’t have to be your first ad. Some of the most successful stories of origin have been introduced after the advertiser had already become a household word.Tom Heflin was a railroad conductor. His wife had a sister. That sister had two little boys. One day she took those boys on a train to Winslow, Arizona to spend a few days with them. Tom took those...

Four words have echoed in my head for several days.“Not everyone. Not always.”Why do such thoughts leapsparkling like swordfishfrom the dark watersof the mind?I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided&nbsp;certainty. They whisper to us from websites, blogs and business books.How can they teach us about “the customer” when every person has two different customers inside them?When you are in “Transactional” shopping mode, youare thinking short-term.care only about today’s transaction.look forward to the process of shopping.fear only paying too much.plan to become expert through extensive research.are willing to spend lots of time investigating.are highly focused on price.When you are in “Relational” shopping mode, youare thinking long-term, hoping to find a permanent solution provider.consider today’s transaction to be one in a series of many.aren’t in the mood to comparison shop or negotiate.fear only making a poor choice, “buying the wrong one.”hope&nbsp;to find an expert you feel you can trust.consider your time spent shopping to be part of the purchase price.are likely to become a repeat customer.“Time and money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Princess Pennie WilliamsA person in transactional shopping mode is more willing to spend time than money.&nbsp;A person in relational shopping mode is more willing to spend money than time.Customers in&nbsp;transactional&nbsp;shopping mode make high demands on your staff and on your time. Transactional customers are the source of about 80 percent of all your problems.Customers in&nbsp;relational&nbsp;shopping mode go straight to the provider they think of immediately and feel the best about. If this provider has a reasonable solution to their problem, they purchase it and are done. None of the competitors to this provider were ever given a chance to make the sale. In fact, they were never even aware this customer was in the market to buy. Relational customers are the source of about 80 percent of all gross profits, even though they represent only 50 percent of the shoppers in any given category on any given day.You buy the cheapest eggs because “eggs are eggs.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later you reach into the milk case and happily pay double the price of the cheapest milk because this particular brand of milk combines a unique set of production circumstances that you offer consequential benefits. No Bovine Growth Hormones!The person behind you buys the cheapest milk because “milk is milk.” The grocer makes very little profit on this sale. But 3 seconds later, they reach for eggs and happily pay double the price of the cheapest eggs because THESE eggs were laid by free-roaming, never caged, vegetarian hens that deliver higher levels of B12, B2, A, and B5, plus selenium and folate! And these yolks are a deep golden yellow!Each customer bought one item transactionally, one item relationally.You have a transactional mode of shopping and a relational mode of shopping and so does everyone else.Now this is the part that might stick in your throat a bit: I’ve never found a product or service category in which the ratio of customers in transactional mode versus relational mode wasn’t approximately 50/50. This holds true even for groceries and new cars, although grocers and new car dealers have a difficult time swallowing it. The problem, you see, is that customers in transactional mode are the vocal ones up in your face, making threats and demands, while the relational customer slips invisibly in and out, leaving only...

Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________.Because Wizard Academy appreciates&nbsp;your generous donation&nbsp;to help keep&nbsp;Chapel Dulcinea&nbsp;open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to&nbsp;Wizard’s Tower,&nbsp;where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to&nbsp;the&nbsp;Star Deck&nbsp;where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then you’ll have 15 more minutes to take photos and enjoy the view from nearly&nbsp;1,000 feet&nbsp;above downtown Austin. Follow me, please.[Start walking.][Pausing at The Old Man and the Sea…]AThis is Ernest Hemingway’s“The Old Man and the Sea”by Jane DeDecker.If you remember that Nobel prize-winning novel, you’ll remember how the old man fought the giant fish – and then the sharks – for 3 days and 3 nights before sailing home.[Pointing now at the statue above the art gallery as you walk toward it…] The counterpoint to this symbol of the heroic, masculine struggle is Jane DeDecker’s symbol of feminine determination –&nbsp;“Into the Wind”&nbsp;– a living figurehead on the bow of a ship&nbsp;sailing above the art gallery. We’ll take a closer look in a moment.[Stopping briefly at the bronze plaque with the footprints on it….]bThis is the&nbsp;Laughlin Stone.&nbsp;If you place your feet on those footprints at night[Pointing now at the sword at the top of the tower….]you’ll see the&nbsp;North Star&nbsp;hovering just above the hilt of that sword.&nbsp;Since the North Star is positioned directly above the axis of the earth,&nbsp;it’s the only star that doesn’t move across the sky during the night…The Star Deck – just behind it ­­– is where we’re headed.[Begin walking again toward the tower….]rThe famous psychologist,&nbsp;Carl Jung,&nbsp;believed that life is a journey on water.&nbsp;Above the waterline is the&nbsp;conscious&nbsp;mind. Below the waterline is the&nbsp;unconscious,&nbsp;a shadowland of nonverbal symbols and music and mysteries.[Point up at “Into the Wind”….]You’ll notice as we enter the tower that we’re directly beneath the ship&nbsp;of “Into the Wind.” If the old man and his fish are on a beach –&nbsp;and that ship above us is sailing on the ocean, we are now&nbsp;12 feet&nbsp;underwater, which is where we’ll find the art gallery,&nbsp;the wine cellar and the musical instruments of Wizard Academy, since each of these&nbsp;speaks to the&nbsp;unconscious&nbsp;mind.[Enter the art gallery.]iWizard Academy teaches&nbsp;advertising, marketing&nbsp;and&nbsp;communication&nbsp;to businesses across America and around the world.&nbsp;Our students include Nobel Prize-winning scientists, university professors and&nbsp;best-selling authors, as well as executives at companies like Procter &amp; Gamble, Kellogg, and IBM. But mostly they are the owners of America’s&nbsp;5.91 million&nbsp;companies that have fewer than 100 employees. Wizard Academy is where these people – people like you – come to learn big things&nbsp;fast,&nbsp;in an environment that feels like&nbsp;summer camp for grown-ups.[Give the group instructions about staying together and NOT going up the stairs.]&nbsp;e[When everyone has arrived on the Star Deck, ring the bronze bell near the stairwell door,&nbsp;then&nbsp;point at the statue of the boy on the paper airplane&nbsp;as you begin walking toward the&nbsp;sword.]If you look behind the base of that statue, you’ll see a little boy reading...

I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different.Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me.I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail because they won’t do it right.Here’s what’s happening: I’m airing a 5-second ad every hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days, on each station in a broadcast group in a major city. The result will be 51% reach (18+) with a weekly frequency of 10.4. This means that 51% of the total population in&nbsp;that region will hear one of my ads an average of 10.4 times each week, 52 weeks in a row.That’s right. One 5-second ad per hour, 24 hours a day, on each station in the broadcast group.You can run, but you can’t hide.Here’s why I fear people who attempt this experiment will likely screw it up:They’ll buy too little frequency.“Well, I think a spot an hour is overkill, so I’m just going to buy a 5-frequency instead of a 10+ frequency each week.”They’ll rotate too few ads.I’ll be producing 12 new 5-second ads every 6 weeks. Consequently, even though I have a 10.4 frequency each week, the typical listener is likely to hear 10 different ads, one time each.Their ads won’t say anything worth remembering.The key to success is to make a different,&nbsp;memorable&nbsp;statement in each 5-second ad. You can then open, or close, each ad with a single word that identifies the company. Only one or two ads in every series of twelve will feature the contact info of the company.Here’s what I like about this plan:Reach is double&nbsp;what I used to get for the same money.Frequency is triple&nbsp;what I used to get for the same money.With a 10.4 weekly frequency,&nbsp;I can safely expect a listener to unconsciously “connect and combine” each of my brandable chunks, nuggets and factoids to create a coherent mental image much bigger than the information found in a single ad. In fact, I expect that within a few months a large percentage of that city will be able to recite meaningful amounts of information about my client.The 5-second format&nbsp;– combined with 12&nbsp;new ads&nbsp;in rotation every 6 weeks – will allow me to dodge the audience burn-out bullet.What will happen if my experiment proves successful?I’ll finally have a way to help advertisers with small budgets in big cities.Give me a schedule of 1 spot per hour, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year on the smallest station in town and it won’t be long before my client is on a second station, then a third.Get enough advertisers to do this and Radio will become happy again.Even if you believe that “a unit is a unit, no matter the length,” you can’t argue with the fact that airing&nbsp;twenty-four&nbsp;5-second ads would mean only a 2-minute commercial load per hour. This would mean that a listener tuning in to your station would be greeted by a commercial – instead of music – just once in every 30 visits to your dial position, compared to the current 1 in 4.Even if radio stations began airing 36 ads per hour&nbsp;– more than double the number they’re currently airing – I’m fairly certain that listeners would be delighted with just 3 minutes of ads per hour.A radio station with 4 commercial breaks&nbsp;of NINE, 5-second ads each hour would have rollicking, rock-and-roll commercial breaks of just 45 seconds each and I’m convinced listeners would retain a higher percentage of those messages.The weakness of this plan is that...

We encounter “meta” most often in the word&nbsp;metaphor.We create metaphors when we see the same&nbsp;pattern in two, unrelated things.Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”But Shakespeare wasn’t the first to see the similarity between the world and a stage. Seneca the Younger – sixteen hundred years before Shakespeare – wrote, “Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”In his marvelous&nbsp;new book,&nbsp;Metaphors Be With You,&nbsp;Dr. Mardy Grothe reveals&nbsp;the importance of metaphors in everyday communication:“Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.” ­– Robin Morgan“Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind’s eye something that has never before been seen.”–Rebecca McClanahanThe poet Robert Frost said, “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.”“Metaphor isn’t just for poets; it’s in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time.”–&nbsp;More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner“Meta” has recently evolved a second meaning.It now refers to things that are&nbsp;self-referential.&nbsp;Ben Zimmer tells of a librarian named Lauren Dodd who recently tweeted, “Just saw a librarian shush other librarians at a library conference.”(Indy Beagle is chuckling his signature, “Heh, heh, heh,” after reading&nbsp;that over my shoulder.)Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner talks&nbsp;about “how to get students to reflect, to turn around on themselves, to go ‘meta,’ to think about their ways of thinking.”Yep, “to think about your ways of thinking” would definitely qualify as self-referential.In his book,&nbsp;Tilting Cervantes,&nbsp;my friend Bruce Burningham says,“We delight in the notion of a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld who eventually creates a sitcom on NBC in which he plays a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld.”If&nbsp;triple-meta&nbsp;were a recognized designation, I believe&nbsp;Bruce Burningham’s sentence would qualify.To understand a&nbsp;thing that is new and different, you need only search for what&nbsp;it is&nbsp;like.Monkfish is the poor man’s lobster.Success is a bastard with many fathers, but failure is an orphan.America is a melting pot.You are my sunshine.He drowned in a sea of grief.Every new concept, invention, innovation or&nbsp;idea reflects an established pattern.That&nbsp;pattern has just&nbsp;never been used in this application before.Contemplate&nbsp;a&nbsp;metaphor. See the pattern. Consider&nbsp;how it might be used as a&nbsp;solution to your problem. Do this again and again and your spinning brain will soon be&nbsp;flinging ideas like a grinding wheel throwing&nbsp;sparks at the darkness.Perhaps you’ll&nbsp;discover a miraculous solution. Perhaps you’ll just have fun.Give it a try and see.As Indy walked&nbsp;away just now, he called to me over his shoulder, “Anything you can do, I can do meta.”I’m going to have to ponder&nbsp;that one awhile.Roy H. Williams

If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If&nbsp;you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may&nbsp;be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”)With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that&nbsp;today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool?A couple of days ago, my partner Tim Miles made a brilliant&nbsp;suggestion about how we might begin the&nbsp;3-day Business Growth class&nbsp;we’re having in March. (Sorry, completely full.)I first heard&nbsp;about Tim’s idea when I got a funding inquiry&nbsp;from the Wizard of Ads group director. Tim had suggested something really awesome. Expensive, but awesome.I sent&nbsp;Tim an email. “Fantastic idea, Tim! You’re in charge.”TIP: Always assign&nbsp;responsibility for follow-through&nbsp;to the person who had the idea.&nbsp;Give the fun of chasing the rabbit to the dog&nbsp;who sniffed it out of hiding. (In essence, the smeller’s the feller.)&nbsp;AHERE’S WHY:1. No other person will have quite the same vision in their mind or enthusiasm in their heart.2. No one has more&nbsp;to gain – or lose – than the person who had the idea.BONUS BENEFIT:&nbsp;Word will spread, and it will slow people down from coming up with so many things “YOU” ought to do.When&nbsp;we were constructing&nbsp;the buildings at Wizard Academy&nbsp;and&nbsp;a group of people would arrive on campus, at least one of them would pull me aside and say with excitement, “Here’s what you&nbsp;ought&nbsp;to do…”PROBLEM:&nbsp;I was already as busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, as stressed out as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs and as uptight&nbsp;as a frog on a freeway with his hopper stuck. So one day I impulsively shook the hand of&nbsp;the person who had made the suggestion and said, “Great idea! You’re in charge!”They asked how much money they could spend and I said, “As much as you can raise.”Amazingly, they raised the money, refined the idea and brought it to full execution.When I saw how well their idea&nbsp;turned out, I said to myself, “Make a note: do that more often.”When my partner Tim got my email, he replied tongue-in-cheek, “Man, as long as I’ve been around, I really should have seen that coming.”I say “tongue-in-cheek” because Tim has made numerous&nbsp;suggestions over the years, and he’s always been willing to take full responsibility for implementation.“Great idea! You’re in charge!”&nbsp;&nbsp;is one of the guiding principles of the Wizard of Ads partners. It has also become a tradition at&nbsp;Wizard Academy.I suggest that you test this technique&nbsp;within your own company.It’s the perfect&nbsp;way to determine if&nbsp;you’re surrounded by&nbsp;the right kind of people.Roy H. Williams

Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them.If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs.We can&nbsp;intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones.All your friends, all your neighbors, all America, all the world has an unconscious need for encouragement right now.The reason history repeats itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.When people are frustrated, frightened or angry, they elevate a strongman to become their leader. We smile in memory of&nbsp;England’s blustering Winston Churchill, a devoted servant of his nation, and our own thundering Teddy Roosevelt, a devoted servant of our own. And who can forget the swaggering Douglas MacArthur wading to shore in the Philippines? Or steely-eyed George S. Patton who encouraged his men, his allies and his nation when he said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”We are encouraged by the swagger of the strongman.But not all strongmen are good.Russia was frustrated, frightened and angry when she turned to Josef Stalin in 1929.Germany was frustrated, frightened and angry when a strongman overturned&nbsp;their democracy in 1933.Japan was frustrated, frightened and angry when the boy they believed to be a god sent airplanes to bomb Pearl Harbor.Frustrated, frightened and angry people gave power to Manuel Noriega of Panama, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Uganda’s Idi Amin.It seems that everyone, everywhere today is frustrated, frightened and angry; the people across the street and around the corner; the people across the sea and around the world.January 27, 2017:&nbsp;Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said, “It looks as if the world is preparing for war.”The antidote for frustration and fear is encouragement.The antidote for anger is to listen, smile, and extend a hand.I’ve decided to make this my year of encouragement.I believe it’s what people need right now.Will you join me?I’m going to be unreasonably optimistic, ridiculously cheerful and oblivious to fear. Or at least that’s my plan. And I’m going to&nbsp;hand out sincere and honest compliments everywhere I go.Encouragement can be conjured from the scantiest of materials.If you do this with me, I can assure you that people will say we’re being foolish and naive and many of them will accuse us of seeing&nbsp;the world through rose-colored lenses. They will tell us we’re not being reasonable.“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard ShawYes, they’ll tell us we’re being unreasonable.I’m okay with that.Are you?Roy H. Williams

Some lessons we never learn.For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait&nbsp;above&nbsp;the grand staircase of my social behavior.Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am&nbsp;simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often disappoint my friends.Not my casual friends. No, never those. I disappoint the friends I care about the&nbsp;most.This happens because I allow the merely urgent to displace the truly important.In fact, I’m doing it right now.&nbsp;I should be answering emails&nbsp;sent to me by Garrett and Dan and a friend I’ve called “Other Roy” for more than 25 happy years. But this is the day the trash service comes, so I’ve got to wheel our&nbsp;trash and recycling carts to the curb right now so Princess Pennie won’t worry that we’ll miss the truck. After I do that, I’ll write thoughtful and well-crafted&nbsp;responses to Garrett and Dan and Other Roy… as&nbsp;soon as I write the four ads I promised to have to my client&nbsp;by 8AM. But just before I do that – just to get them out of the way – I’ll pop off a few 5-word and 12-word answers to 26&nbsp;other emails that really don’t matter&nbsp;at all.You can see where this is headed, right?I’ve had “Email Garrett” near&nbsp;the top of my to-do list for exactly 21&nbsp;days. “Email Dan” has been just above&nbsp;it for 63&nbsp;days. And I’ve put off&nbsp;responding to so many of “Other Roy’s” emails that I’m surprised he’s still speaking to me. And those are just 3 of the names on a list that stretches the full length of our grand staircase.I don’t want to give half-baked “quickie” answers to these good friends, so they wind up getting no answers from me at all.I speak recklessly but I write carefully. Much too recklessly and a little too carefully, if we’re being altogether honest. So people who know me through my writing have met me at my highest and best, and people who know me through my speaking have met&nbsp;me at my lowest and worst. I judge myself by my writing. I suppose this is why I&nbsp;am reluctant to write quickly to the people I care about the most. I don’t want them to&nbsp;read&nbsp;a poor representation of me, so I delay responding and trust&nbsp;they will forgive.I’m hoping someday to outgrow these bad habits. (Indy is laughing as he reads this over my shoulder&nbsp;because he knows we’ll soon be&nbsp;celebrating the 29th anniversary of my 30th birthday.)Oh, well. That’s me.What about you?&nbsp;Do you have a recurrent shortcoming, a&nbsp;familiar face of failure?Send it to [email protected] would tell you to send it to mebut we already know how that would turn out.&nbsp;ARoy H. Williams

“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5&nbsp;words telling us?Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t&nbsp;need&nbsp;a Buddha head?”Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? Are we being told of someone’s inspection and rejection of Buddhism? “Don’t need a&nbsp;Buddha&nbsp;head.”We often seek meaning where there is no meaning.This is the foundation of all fine art and the fundamental premise of Gestalt Theory.The real truth is that Pennie and I were scrolling through an auction catalog on our computers when she said, “Look at 296.” So I did.&nbsp;It was an antique piece of garden statuary, a carved sandstone Buddha head.I said, “Don’t need a Buddha head.”Hearing&nbsp;the rhythm of those syllables and the obstruent d and t of “Don’t,” the d of “need,” the b and d of “Buddha” and the d of “head,” I smiled and said it again. “Don’t need a Buddha head.”A moment later it became a chant. “Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head. Don’t need a Buddha head.”Pennie just smiled and kept scrolling through the catalog.We see a face in the shadows on the moon.We equate a minor key with sadness.We want to dance to&nbsp;songs with 120 beats per minute.And we find deep symbolic meanings in phrases that, on the surface, are nonsense.If only one of us did that, he or she would be crazy. But since a majority of us do it, we call it art. We call it beautiful. We call it subtle. We call it deep.Song writers, Ad writers and Poets depend on this.Wichita Lineman, Galveston,&nbsp;and&nbsp;By the Time I Get to Phoenix&nbsp;made Glen Campbell rich and famous.But all 3 of those songs were written by Jimmy Webb.Up, Up and Away&nbsp;is the song that made The Fifth Dimension rich and famous.But it was written by Jimmy Webb.Jimmy Webb’s&nbsp;MacArthur Park&nbsp;lifted an actor named Richard Harris to the top of the Billboard music charts. Ten&nbsp;years later Donna Summer sang it to the top of the charts again. It has been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Waylon Jennings, Andy Williams, The Four Tops, Glen Campbell and Maynard Ferguson. It’s&nbsp;been played countless thousands of times and heard by hundreds of millions of people.The lyrics of&nbsp;MacArthur Park&nbsp;are often called stupid and ridiculous, “the worst song lyrics ever written.” And I have no argument with that.“Spring was never waiting for us, girl. It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance between the parted pages and were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again.&nbsp;Oh no!&nbsp;I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees, the birds, like tender babies in your hands, and the old men playing checkers by the trees…”In an&nbsp;October 2014 interview with&nbsp;Newsday,&nbsp;Jimmy Webb explained, “The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw… Back then I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.”His wife, Savini, a Public Television host, says, “When people see he’s my husband, that’s always the first

I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.”So I did.She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re really not.”And then she gave me some examples.And then she asked the questions that my adversary should have asked. She said, “Roy, you slammed the door on that relationship&nbsp;pretty hard. So what are the odds of this being worked out? Is there any chance at all? Give me some numbers.”I said, “His odds are about 50/50.”She said, “That’s what you need to tell him, immediately, the next time you talk.”And then she asked me several more questions and demanded detailed, specific answers. And in every case, she said, “He deserves to have that information. Trust me. You’re much harder to read than you think you are.”Forty years is a long time. You’re sort of required to listen to a person who has shared the majority of your waking moments with you since Richard Nixon was President. Pennie and I have&nbsp;been together through&nbsp;Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And 4 of those guys served 8 years each.In the end, I had a follow-up conversation with my friend and everything is fine now. But we agreed to use&nbsp;a code language as a form of insurance.When both people know the code, all a person has to do is ask, “How strong are your feelings about that?”People deserve to know when they’re walking into a minefield.The code was taught to me 36 years ago by my friend Richard Exley. I should use it more often than I do.&nbsp;Would you like me to teach it to you?It all comes down to assigning a number to the strength of your feelings.ONE: “No emotional attachment.”TWO: “I have an opinion.”THREE: “I have feelings on this subject that cannot be changed, so be very, very careful.”When two people know the code, at any point in a conversation a person&nbsp;might&nbsp;say, “I’m at about a 1.5 on this. Where are you?”The other party might then say, “I’m at like 1.0.”In that exchange, the first person said, “I don’t really have an opinion that I’m willing to defend. In fact, this whole subject doesn’t really matter much to me at all. I’m just sharing some things that are popping into my head.”And the second party – the one who had a 1.0 – basically said, “I’m just trying to hold up my end of the conversation. In reality, I have no feelings on this subject whatsoever, so I’m fully prepared to let someone else make the decision.” In this instance, the code helped both parties&nbsp;understand they were discussing something that neither of them cared about.If both parties tell the truth, the system saves a&nbsp;lot of time and it helps to reduce&nbsp;misunderstandings.When you say you have a “number one,” you are saying, “You can ignore this completely. You can laugh at it, mock it or kick it to the curb, just please don’t judge me by it because I haven’t put any thought into it whatsoever. In fact, it may actually be a really stupid idea.”When you say, “This is a number two,” you’re saying, “I need you to take this seriously and not just blow it off. I have an opinion and I have some feelings attached to it, but&nbsp;I’m open to hearing your thoughts. I believe this&nbsp;needs to be discussed.”I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s a number three with me,” because to have a true number three is to say, “I have a loaded pistol&nbsp;aimed at your head with the hammer cocked. If you so much as blink, this relationship is over. So if you care at all about remaining my friend, you won’t say another word.”I’ve had people tell me they were at a 2.8 or a 2.9, but no one has ever said, “Number...

Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service.Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world.I’m going to hire an assistant.Hundreds of Millennials have applied for this job and sent me an ad.But not one of them realized that was what they were sending&nbsp;me.They thought it was a cover letter attached to their resume.Hey, Millennial. Here are some examples of the kinds of ads your competitors are sending to employers. (This is extremely GOOD NEWS for you!)“I’m looking for a position where I can grow and continue to learn. My ideal job is somewhere I enjoy working, and enjoying my surroundings.”– Briana“I want to attain a position at your company to enhance my experiencein the medical industry while working towards my degree, andprovide your company with positive energy and improve productivity.”– Leanna“I am a hardworking and self-driven individual looking for full-time employment.”– Jose“I was a cheerleader for basically my whole life so yes! I’m cheerful and a happy person. I love talking and meeting new people.”– Alexis“Working in multiple places of customer service, I have gained key communication skills. Through achieving my bachelors degree I have also&nbsp;develyoped&nbsp;excellent writing, research and organizational skills that are necessary to be successful in this position.”– TreverI promise I didn’t make any of those up. In fact, I gave Trevor ­– the young man who&nbsp;develyoped&nbsp;excellent writing skills – a second chance. Did I mention that he also misspelled his own damn name? (I checked.)Those examples are 5 of the first 10 applications I randomly pulled up from a field of several hundred. Obviously, I’m offering a desirable job. Every person who has served in this position for at least 4 years is now making more than&nbsp;$150,000 a year.So, my Millennial friend, the bar you need to jump is very low indeed. You should be wiggling like a puppy!“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” is a saying you may have heard before.Here’s&nbsp;all you need to do to stand apart from your competitors.This is&nbsp;how to become King in the land of the blind:TIP 1: Send out fewer resumes.&nbsp;Getting a job is not a numbers game. Select a small number of companies and send each of them a cover letter crafted exclusively for that company.TIP 2: There is no such thing as an attention span.&nbsp;The applicant that wins more of the employer’s time than his or her competitors is the one most likely to win the job. So write an interesting cover letter. Long isn’t dangerous. Boring is dangerous. Predictable is dangerous. Orthodox is dangerous. Stand apart.TIP 3: Take a chance.&nbsp;Dustin Hoffman is considered to be one of the most versatile actors of his generation. According to the Goog, he’s made about $50,000,000 since the day in 1967 when he played Benjamin Braddock in&nbsp;The Graduate.&nbsp;The problem is that his performance as a button-down college graduate and track star was so convincing that most critics and directors assumed that Dustin had not, in fact, been acting. The prevailing opinion was that his acting range was limited to only that single type of character. And John Schlesinger, the director of&nbsp;Midnight Cowboy,&nbsp;knew the lead character in his film – Ratso Rizzo – was to be precisely the opposite kind of character.This was Dustin Hoffman’s pivotal moment – the big decision – that launched him as one of...

People would rather be angry than bored.Anger is a form of excitement.That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it?But if you can choose, choose laughter.“Man is the laughing animal…”&nbsp;1Anger is dangerous&nbsp;and crying is much less fun.I’m talking about storytelling and communication.I’m talking about books and movies.I’m talking about television and music.I’m talking about romantic attraction.I’m talking about successful ads.If you hope to move people, you must make them laugh, cry or get angry.You ask, “What about fear?”Fear is never the end-game.Fear is merely a fuel that will move you to submission (crying) or defiance (anger.)There is a fourth state of elevated awareness, however, more seductive&nbsp;even than laughter:&nbsp;wonder,&nbsp;mystery, that&nbsp;magical glimpse of a thing too big for us.Wonder&nbsp;is the fabric of religious devotion and romantic attraction.It is the highest goal of any communicator.“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to&nbsp;wonder&nbsp;and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”– Albert Einstein,&nbsp;Living Philosophies&nbsp;(1931)You stood in wonder at the cliff’s edge of 2016, looking forward into a vast unknown.“The gift of flight is reserved only for those who leap.”So you did.Happy New Year.May you walk in fields of gold.Roy H. Williams

Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published&nbsp;The Three Body Problem.His math is still used by NASA today.In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another.Gravity is a useful innovation model for professional ad writers since our goal is to attract and hold the attention of potential customers and perhaps, even, to alter their orbits.A Gravitating Body is anything that tugs at your attention.Two gravitating bodies with a high degree of divergence are known as&nbsp;Paired Opposites.&nbsp;Employ&nbsp;them and you’ll get attention.But when you add a&nbsp;third&nbsp;gravitating body – something highly divergent from each&nbsp;of the first two –&nbsp;and it fits&nbsp;– you are about to see things get exponential.Its&nbsp;degree of&nbsp;divergence&nbsp;is determined by how&nbsp;unexpected&nbsp;the thing is.Its power&nbsp;of&nbsp;convergence&nbsp;is determined by&nbsp;how well it fits.First Gravitating Body:A musical about the Founding FathersSecond Gravitating Body:George Washington is black and most of the other “white” characters are played by minorities.Third Gravitating Body:The dialogue is delivered&nbsp;in&nbsp;rap music, with each character having their own cadence and style.A third gravitating body with a high degree of divergence and powerful convergence is the ever-present secret of widespread, mass appeal success. Hit songs, blockbuster movies, bestselling novels and the signature dishes of gourmet chefs always have them.A successful third gravitating body doesn’t belong…&nbsp;but it fits.Three gravitating bodies are also the secret of successful ad campaigns. This is a formula is known to every Cognoscenti of&nbsp;Magical Worlds.We can easily imagine a play about the Founding Fathers.&nbsp;But a musical?Be honest. If you were told that a play was to feature ethnic minorities as the Founding Fathers of the United States, you would assume the play to be:(A) a satire(B) a comedy(C) an alternate history about the America we “might have been.”But Hamilton is none of these.The play’s dialogue in rap is&nbsp;divergent&nbsp;because rap&nbsp;didn’t exist during the time of the Founding Fathers. And it’s not the style of speech we associate with venerated historical figures. Rap is associated with passionate, creative people who are downtrodden, overlooked, abused and angry.Wait a minute.&nbsp;The Founding Fathers were all those things.&nbsp;Hamilton’s rap is&nbsp;divergent&nbsp;– highly unexpected – but&nbsp;convergent&nbsp;as well –&nbsp;it makes perfect sense&nbsp;as it brings together all the other divergent elements.Third gravitating bodies seem out of sequence to the brain’s linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere but&nbsp;they feel perfectly elegant&nbsp;to the pattern-recognizing, big-picture right.We are rarely conscious of third gravitating bodies&nbsp;because they always make sense.&nbsp;This is why we don’t&nbsp;realize how much&nbsp;they don’t belong.If you want your business to go exponential, you have to do something unexpected; something that doesn’t belong,&nbsp;but fits.Do you want to make 2017 a bigger year than 2016?The first step is to visit the rabbit hole where Indiana Beagle will tell...

I still call it Christmas.I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more.You’re not supposed to do a lot of things.Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment.Ignore the historical blunders of Christians.I’m talking about Christmas.Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble&nbsp;unless you judge me by my motives.1.&nbsp;I still call it Christmas because, according to Luke’s telling1, the angels didn’t appear to government officials or religious leaders. They chose instead to illuminate the darkness of lonely people working the night shift for minimum wage. They appeared to sack-lunch shepherds guarding defenseless sheep.I think that’s cool.The message of those angels was essentially this, “Good news! God likes you and he has a plan to rescue you – and everyone else on this planet – out of this crazy mess you’re in.”Even if you consider these stories to be fairy tales, they’re&nbsp;worth a look.&nbsp;Christmas is our biggest holiday.2.&nbsp;John’s Christmas story2&nbsp;skips Bethlehem altogether, choosing instead to connect the birth of Jesus to&nbsp;that chapter in Genesis3&nbsp;where God speaks our universe into existence:“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by the Word; without Him was not any thing made that was made…&nbsp;And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”Wow.3.&nbsp;Matthew4&nbsp;doesn’t mention the shepherds of Luke or connect the pre-incarnate Jesus to the creation of the universe like John, but his&nbsp;is the only Christmas story&nbsp;that mentions the wise men, the magi. They didn’t see any angels and we’re not told why they chose to follow that star. We know only that they made an extremely difficult journey and never gave up hope. They were foreigners who believed in something the locals no longer believed in.I have an abiding fascination with these wise men, the magi. So did Chesterton.“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”– G.K. Chesterton,&nbsp;Christendom in Dublin,&nbsp;Ch.3 (1933)4.&nbsp;I believe magi still walk among us today.Following a bright star of hope, they continue to make difficult journeys.They’re not looking for someone to “make America great again.”They think America – for all its flaws – is pretty great already.They still believe in the American Dream.And if you are wise,you believe in it, too.One day,many years ago,a&nbsp;good person said to your ancestors,“Merry Christmas, immigrants.Welcome to America.”She was a statue on an island, a gift from France.And the poem at her feet whispers&nbsp;to all the earth,“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled massesyearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”Roy H. Williams

I was 16 during the winter of 1974.Ted was 52.We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma.I was known as “Schoolboy.”Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories might as well have been about cave men and dinosaurs because Pearl Harbor had happened 35 years earlier and I was only 16.The story I’m about to tell you happened 42 years ago.It seems like yesterday.ADo you remember Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons? In 1974 his name was Harold and he was 32 years old. Muscular and angry, Harold got what he wanted through intimidation.One day I called his bluff. I told Harold “no.”But Harold wasn’t bluffing.I regained consciousness at the base of the storage racks where we kept the 6-foot aluminum fan blades. Ted told me Harold’s lightning blow lifted me off my feet and landed me 2 yards from where I had been standing. When I went home at the end of my shift my neck was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head.My mother knew immediately what had happened.When I got out of school the next day, Ted was waiting for me in the parking lot at work. He told me not to go inside. Two policemen had led Harold out in handcuffs earlier and his buddies were planning revenge.NOTE: Never hit a minor when he’s being raised by a single mother. Angry moms fight differently than men do.I worked in that steel shop for 2 more years.One day Ted said, “Schoolboy, every person you meet has something they can teach you. Your job is to figure out what their skill is and then get them to share it with you.”Ted, as usual, was right. When you assume that everyone you meet has a valuable skill, you begin to look at them differently.Harold was a different person when he came back to work. Crushing legal bills and the humiliation of jail gave him a beating far worse than he had given me. With Ted’s advice fresh in my mind, I asked Harold the secret of knocking a man off his feet.Harold’s answer surprised me because his technique had little to do with physical strength.A few years later I learned that success in business has little to do with intelligence and success in selling has little to do with being talkative and success in advertising has little to do with the product.Business isn’t about knowing, it’s about doing.Selling isn’t about talking, it’s about listening.Advertising isn’t about the product, it’s about the customer.And knocking a man down isn’t about your fists, it’s about your feet.The next time you’re at Wizard Academy I’ll show you.But only if you want to know.Roy

When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to&nbsp;The Outlook,&nbsp;an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the poems collected in this volume…”Theodore Roosevelt had six children: Alice the mischievous, Ted Jr. the hero, Kermit the writer, Ethel the visionary, Archie the warrior and Quentin the colorful.Unexpectedly, it was Kermit, the writer, who always appeared at his father’s side when the old President needed a protector. When 51 year-old Theodore walked away from the White House and announced he was going to disappear into the jungles of Africa on a yearlong safari, Kermit dropped out of Harvard to accompany him.Four years later, when Theodore announced he was going to vanish into the jungles of South America to chart the unexplored River of Doubt, Kermit quit his job and left his fiancé to make sure his father remained safe.Had it not been for Kermit, Theodore Roosevelt would not have come home alive.This is not a speculation.Flowing from the mountains of Peru to where it joins the mighty Amazon deep in the jungles of Brazil, the River of Doubt was a mystery. Its length and course were not listed on any map. The only things known for certain were that its shores were lined with cannibals and its waters were full of man-eating piranha, fifteen-foot aquatic lizards and anaconda snakes as long as school busses.Frank Chapman, the curator for the American Museum of Natural History, said,“It may be said with confidence… that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than down the River of Doubt.”Natural History Museum director Henry Osborn wrote to Roosevelt several times pleading with him to abandon his plan.Roosevelt responded to Osborn in a letter to Frank Chapman:“Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite prepared to do so.”Fortunately for Theodore, his son Kermit was not prepared that he should do so.After they arrived in South America, the expedition had to cross 400 miles of wilderness before they reached the River of Doubt. But then they plunged into the jungle.“Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature.&nbsp;They were stealthy hunters, crack shots, and experienced survivalists, and given the right tools, they believed that they would never find themselves in a situation in the wild that they could not control.&nbsp;But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River of Doubt, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away.&nbsp;Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all – from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States – clumsy, conspicuous prey.”–The River of Doubt&nbsp;by Candice MillardThe expedition avoided the whitewater rapids by guiding their canoes through them with ropes as they walked along the banks of the river.&nbsp;But when the jungle was heaviest upon them, two canoes broke loose and most of their supplies were lost.&nbsp;The men were forced to stop for several days to build new ones.&nbsp;In an effort to make up lost time they resorted to running the rapids in their canoes. When two canoes got jammed in the rocks in a section of wicked whitewater, Theodore Roosevelt jumped in to free them and slipped, opening a large gash in his thigh.An infection set in that night and for the next several days, he drifted in and out of consciousness, utterly unable to walk. In a moment of clear thinking,...

1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings.“The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.”“The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.”Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific.“…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid.“…crawled between the blades of grass” is specific and vivid.2. Don’t Tell. Show.“…deciding which way it should go,” tells you what the ant was doing.“…peeking left and right at every intersection,” shows you the ant and&nbsp;leads you to conclude&nbsp;that the ant is deciding which way to&nbsp;go. You are, for a moment, seeing through the eyes of the ant. Giving human motives to inanimate objects is a powerful tool known as personification. “Your Rolex is waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Shreve and Company.”3. Write Tight and Clean.Short Sentences Hit Harder than Long Ones.Adjectives and&nbsp;adverbs don’t&nbsp;accelerate&nbsp;communication. They slow&nbsp;it down. Use them with restraint.What I’m doing now is giving you an example of a long sentence, (in essence, the kind of sentence often written by persons who are trying to sound educated, although in truth, sentences like this one just make you sound full of yourself,) for the purpose of demonstrating that complex sentences full of commas and parenthetic statements and verbose, multi-word, adjective-stacked descriptions have a much diminished impact and are not nearly so pleasant to read as short, clear statements like the 6-word sentence and the two 4-word sentences that preceded this horrific construction of 135 pompous, tedious and wearisome words that keep going on and on for so very long that by the time you get to the final point, you have forgotten several of the previous ones that were made.4. Let the Subject of the Sentence Take the Action.Passive Voice is a Bad Choice.You speak in passive voice when the subject of the sentence is acted upon:&nbsp;“Wizard Academy is attended by interesting people.”You speak in active voice when the subject of the sentence takes the action:&nbsp;“Interesting people attend Wizard Academy.”Passive voice is noncommittal: “It got lost.”Active voice is confident and clear. “I lost it.”5. Feed Your Pen Surprising Combinations of Interesting WordsIf you inform without persuading, you are hearing a newscast when&nbsp;you write. The goal of the journalist is to inform, not to persuade.If you entertain without persuading, you are hearing creative writing as&nbsp;you write. The goal of the creative writer is to entertain, not to persuade.The poet leads you to think and feel differently. The goal of the poet is to persuade. And the best ones do it in&nbsp;a brief,&nbsp;tight economy of words.I’m not talking about rhyming.I beg you not to rhyme.I’m talking about using surprising combinations of vivid words to trigger assumptions and conclusions in the minds of those who hear you.Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote Richard Cory in 1897. This was when “clean favored” meant good-looking, and how you were dressed is how you were “arrayed.”Richard CoryWhenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—And admirably schooled in every grace:In short, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the...

Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey.We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness of that varnish would represent the air we breathe.Like it or not, we’re all in this together.All seven and a half billion of us.When it gets dark tonight, look up at the stars. You’ll be looking out the window of our spaceship.If we could aim our 11,000-degree fireball at the nearest of its siblings – those things we call the stars – it would take us 63,000 years to get there even though we would be shooting through space at 52 times the speed of an 865 mph bullet.1Right now you think&nbsp;I’m going to talk to you about cultural tolerance or global warming or world peace or some other big idea.But you’re wrong.My goal today is to teach you how to&nbsp;use metaphors to make your data more interesting so that you can persuade more people.I borrowed the metaphor of the earth being a spaceship from Buckminster Fuller and the varnish on the globe came from Al Gore’s&nbsp;Inconvenient Truth.A metaphor relates the unfamiliar to the familiar, the unknown to the known, effectively translating your data into a language your listener&nbsp;can understand.A good&nbsp;metaphor sharpens the point of your data.Once you’ve chosen your metaphor, your second challenge will be to select&nbsp;nouns and verbs that carry the voltage of mild surprise.I might have said, “The earth orbits the sun as it moves through space at 0.0004842454 au. (astronomical units).” But I chose instead to say, “We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.”“We’re circling” causes you to see yourself in the story. This is the first step toward reader&nbsp;engagement.“11,000-degree fireball” is more vivid than “the sun,”“shoots through a limitless vacuum” is more exciting than “moves through space,”and “52 times the speed of a rifle bullet” packs more of a wallop than “astronomical units.”Brilliant communication isn’t a product of wit or charm or even talent.Preparation is what it takes to click the brightness of your message up to high beam so that it pierces the darkness like a lighthouse at midnight. In the words of Alec Nevala-Lee, “A good surprise demands methodical work in advance. Like any form of sleight of hand, it hinges on making the result of careful preparation seem casual, even miraculous.”“Like a lighthouse at midnight” wasn’t technically a metaphor, by the way. It was a simile.&nbsp;Metaphor:&nbsp;The earth&nbsp;is&nbsp;a spaceship.&nbsp;Simile:&nbsp;The earth is&nbsp;like&nbsp;a spaceship. A simile feels like a metaphor and can be used to accomplish the same effect.Write down what you want to say. Don’t overthink it. Just get some words on paper.Find&nbsp;a metaphor that relates&nbsp;your information to an idea that your audience already understands.Now look at what you wrote and replace the weary, dull&nbsp;words with energetic, bright ones.Want to know a secret?&nbsp;There’s really no such thing as good writing.&nbsp;There’s only good rewriting.Ernest Hemingway won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Each time&nbsp;he came to a place where the words weren’t flowing, he would&nbsp;set his work aside and answer some correspondence so that he could take a break from, “the awful responsibility of writing” — or, as he sometimes called it,&nbsp;“the responsibility of awful writing.”&nbsp;2&nbsp;&nbsp;In a letter to 22 year-old Arnold Samuelson in 1934, Hemingway...

You bought it for 50 cents.You sold it for a dollar.You made 50 cents.What was your percentage of profit?You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents.But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, you sold it for a dollar and only 50% of that was profit.So did you make 100% or was it 50%? There is a valid argument for each perspective.It’s not my intention to lecture you today about the difference between markup and margin or to fill your ears with chatter about inventory turn or the concept of zero marginal cost.We’re talking about something bigger.We’re talking about your success.Profit is easy to identify, but tricky to measure.Success is like that, too.Does your pursuit of success ever make you feel like you’re chasing your shadow with the sun at your back; no matter how fast you run, you can never quite grasp it? Is success a forever carrot-on-a-stick, just a little further away than the length of your arm?Most of us live with the hope of accomplishing a series of goals, but rarely do I meet anyone who can tell me how they plan to measure their progress toward those goals.How will you measure success?Before you can answer that question clearly, you have to recognize that success comes in three different colors.You can make money.You can make a name.You can make a difference.If you make enough&nbsp;money,&nbsp;it will make you something of a name. But whether or not you ever make a difference is an entirely different question. Many&nbsp;successful people keep their money and their name clamped tightly within their fists.If you make a&nbsp;name&nbsp;for yourself, money will likely follow. But will you then care enough about others to try and make a difference in their lives?My advice to you is to first make a&nbsp;difference.&nbsp;Do what you do so very well that people take notice of it and speak highly&nbsp;of you. The money will quickly follow.What are you trying to make happen?How will you measure progress-to-goal?In what way will you make a difference?Roy H. Williams

Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive?Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a&nbsp;direct-response television campaign&nbsp;he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy.That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment.Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a week on national advertising and making a marvelous return on his investment.Funny thing:&nbsp;we teach that class under the assumption the techniques will be used by brand builders, not direct response marketers. But Ronny proved those same techniques can also work when you have a short time horizon.We taught Ronny something.He taught us something in return.Direct response marketers usually sell products that have&nbsp;a short purchase cycle. They want us to make an impulse purchase. This is why the return-on-investment for direct response ads can be measured accurately and immediately.But not everything can be sold that way.Brand builders are companies whose products or services have&nbsp;a long purchase cycle.&nbsp;The goal of a brand builder is to be the provider you think of immediately and feel the best about when you finally need what they sell. It takes courage, confidence and patience but it works better and better the longer you invest in it.The essence of brand building is emotional bonding.Direct response marketing, on the other hand, is typically&nbsp;intellectual. Features and benefits and added value, “But wait! Order now and you’ll also receive…” It is that world of product demonstrations and money-back guarantees, limited-time offers and upsell incentives.Direct response ads&nbsp;don’t work better and better as time goes by. They work less and less well until you finally have to come up with something altogether new and different.Right now you’re thinking, “But hey, if I make enough money on my direct response campaign, I’ll just retire and live happily ever after.”That sounds like a good plan but I’ve never actually seen it work out that way. Most of us have the&nbsp;fundamental inability to quit while we’re ahead.A glittering city in Nevada is proof of it.Wizard Academy teaches powerful concepts.How you use them is entirely up to you.Ronny is winning and winning big. I like him.He’s already taught me&nbsp;one lesson.I’m hoping he&nbsp;will teach me another.Roy H. Williams

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers.They wanted me to talk about&nbsp;Pendulum,&nbsp;the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago&nbsp;exactly&nbsp;what would be happening right now.I chose not to mention Wizard Academy.Does that surprise you?Pennie and Vice-Chancellor Whittington and I agreed that any mention of Wizard Academy would likely flood your school with people who would be coming&nbsp;for all the wrong reasons.Even worse, they would be coming&nbsp;with all the wrong expectations.Wizard Academy uses carefully crafted&nbsp;content marketing&nbsp;delivered through&nbsp;indirect targeting&nbsp;to attract&nbsp;learners into a carefully designed&nbsp;gravity well.&nbsp;Our hope is to win ever-larger chunks of your time until you finally show up in person on our campus. (Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? But it’s actually quite honest and friendly. Perfect transparency inspires confidence, does it not?)Wizard Academy doesn’t&nbsp;consider age or income or educational attainment or gender or ethnicity or zip code or home ownership or any of the other things targeted by most advertising efforts.We want to attract a specific, self-selected tribe that shares our&nbsp;core beliefs:1. We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.Our quirky books, memos, videos, course descriptions and public art function as marketing filters, attracting some people, repelling others.2. We believe history repeats itself only because we didn’t pay attention the first time.We use case studies to assist you in&nbsp;the hands-on implementation of what we teach, but larger&nbsp;lessons are learned by looking at the timeless, big ideas of physics, agriculture and biology, allowing you&nbsp;to understand and harness sequences of events&nbsp;that have been echoing since the birth of time. (If&nbsp;the study of&nbsp;recurrent patterns&nbsp;appeals to you, you’ll love it here.)3. We believe intuition is the logic of the wordless, right hemisphere of the brain.Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his documentation of brain lateralization, in essence asserting that we don’t have a single brain divided into two hemispheres so much as we have two separate, competing brains: the logical, deductive-reasoning left and the intuitive, pattern-and-sequence recognizing right.*&nbsp;But the right brain has no language functions.&nbsp;Hence, we often “know” things we can’t explain. The intuitive power of the right brain is essential to the artist, the entrepreneur, and anyone searching for a proven innovation model.4. We believe passion is a by-product of commitment.Chapel Dulcinea, our&nbsp;world famous free wedding chapel, is a symbol of our belief in the power of commitment to transform&nbsp;personal relationships, business outcomes, and destinies. (In October, Dulcinea welcomed wedding parties from France, Scotland, New Zealand, Japan and 88 other places. In 2014 she witnessed 984 weddings. In 2015 it was 999. Will this be the year she sees 1,000?)Did any of the concepts we spoke about&nbsp;today interest you?This Monday Morning Memo was an example of content marketing&nbsp;delivered through&nbsp;indirect targeting&nbsp;to attract a self-selected tribe&nbsp;into a&nbsp;gravity well.Did we&nbsp;affirm your values? Confirm your beliefs? Tickle your imagination? Make you want to dive a little deeper into some of...

It seems to be a fundamental law of the universe that a thing cannot exist without its opposite.Negatively charged electrons revolvearound positively charged protons.Male and female.Inhale and exhale.Extend and contract.Seedtime and harvest.Every good thing exists in a state of&nbsp;duality.A voice spoke into the darkness,“Let there be light,”and the first duality was born.Darkness didn’t go away; it simply met an opposing force.Whether you believe the Bible to be ancient folk wisdom or the word of God or something in between doesn’t really matter. Most of us can agree that&nbsp;something about it&nbsp;caused the Bible to be remembered&nbsp;for millennia.According to&nbsp;the first chapter of Genesis, after the voice pierced&nbsp;the darkness with light, it spoke five other dualities into existence and proclaimed each of the six pairs of opposites to be good.I’m not writing to you about religion.I’m writing to you about wisdom.I’m glad to see you’re still reading!&nbsp;I’m sneaking up on an important point. Stay with me.Good and evil are not a duality.Love and hate are not a duality.Peace and war are not a duality.The first is&nbsp;life and the second&nbsp;is death.It shouldn’t be&nbsp;hard to choose between them.The only difficult choices in life are the choices between two good things.Freedom and Responsibility are two good things that we must often choose between.Likewise, a tension exists between Justice and Mercy.Honesty and Loyalty are also good things.Have you ever had to choose between them?Which one is good and which one is evil?The next time you see two antagonistic&nbsp;groups throwing word-grenades at each other, peer&nbsp;beneath the emotional language and you’ll notice that one group&nbsp;believes in&nbsp;freedom while the other group&nbsp;believes in&nbsp;responsibility. Or one side is pushing for justice while the other side pushes&nbsp;for mercy.Niels Bohr wasn’t a touchy-feely philosopher. He was a&nbsp;scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among his discoveries was this:“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”Stanislaw Lec said it this way,“Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a people.”Then F. Scott Fitzgerald challenged you and me to step into a larger realm of living,“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”Don’t fall into the trap of believing you have to choose one and disparage the other.Every creative person is familiar with&nbsp;the magnetism&nbsp;that exists between opposites.&nbsp;A&nbsp;skillful&nbsp;articulation of this energy&nbsp;is the secret behind&nbsp;hit songs, big movies, bestselling books and successful ad campaigns.A voice spoke light into the darkness and said it was good.And Niels Bohr said “Amen.”And Stanislaw Lec said “Amen.”And F. Scott Fitzgerald said “Amen.”So please tell me, if you will,What say you?Roy H. Williams

The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”A worthy counterpart to Edmund Burke might be George Bernard Shaw, widely considered to be an early champion of liberal thought. Shaw wrote, “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”&nbsp;1You’ll find both of these quotes in the random quote database at MondayMorningMemo.com because these statements cause us to think.And thinking is never a bad thing.Examine that first quote and you’ll notice it’s based on the underlying premise that some people are good while others are evil.The second quote is based on the premise that some people are stupid while others are not.But have you ever known anyone so&nbsp;good&nbsp;there was no bad in them, or anyone so&nbsp;bad&nbsp;there was no good? And who is so wise they’ve never done a stupid thing?Witold Gambrowicz was an obscure Polish writer until his private diaries were discovered after&nbsp;his death in 1969. According to the&nbsp;Paris Review, they are “widely considered his masterpiece.”One of the golden nuggets Gambrowicz left behind for us was his theory on how to write a book review:“Literary criticism is not the judging of one man by another (who gave you this right?) but the meeting of two personalities on absolutely equal terms.&nbsp;Therefore do not judge. Simply describe your reactions. Never write about the author or the work, only about yourself in confrontation with the work or the author. You are allowed to write about yourself.”Wow. I get it. And this idea isn’t limited to&nbsp;literary&nbsp;criticism.Instead of saying, “What you’re about to do is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of and if you do it, you’re an idiot,” one might&nbsp;say, “If I were about to do what you’re about to do, I would be frightened.” Then if your&nbsp;friend asks, “Why would you be frightened?” you can&nbsp;share with him your&nbsp;concerns.“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”– Ralph Waldo EmersonI’ve never found anyone who could explain to me the difference between constructive criticism and just plain criticism.Violence may kill the body, but criticism kills the spirit. If you hope to bring about change, you must armor your&nbsp;soul&nbsp;against it.John Steinbeck reminds us that all criticism is based upon subjective, personal perceptions and that such perceptions are never&nbsp;universally true.“A painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, ‘It might be so.’ Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, ‘It is not so. The picture is damned.’ If this critic could say, ‘It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,’ that critic would be a better critic for it, just as the painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment.”&nbsp;2If we&nbsp;want to make the world a better place, if we&nbsp;want to bring an end to polarized politics, if we&nbsp;want to make friends instead of enemies, we must remember the&nbsp;advice of Gambrowicz, Emerson and Steinbeck.At least it seems so to me.Does it seem so, also, to you?Roy H. Williams

Science is the study of objective reality.Art is the study of subjective reality.Subjective reality is&nbsp;perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction.We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher:Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They are nonfiction. But colors exist in subjective reality,&nbsp;as a result of transformations provided by our senses. Colors&nbsp;are fiction.Vibrations traveling in air or water are objective, real, nonfiction. But sound is a fiction that exists only in our&nbsp;mind.Likewise,&nbsp;chemicals dissolved in air or water exist in objective reality, nonfiction. But smells and tastes are purely subjective, fiction. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes&nbsp;do not exist, as such, outside our brains. And any associations we experience in connection with a color, sound, taste or smell are&nbsp;purely subjective as well.Each of us lives in a private world that is mostly subjective fiction.Our ability to communicate&nbsp;is based on the assumption that other people will interpret subjective stimuli in ways that are similar to our own. But when their reactions spring from&nbsp;different backgrounds and experiences, communication grows more difficult.Politics, anyone?Color, sound, smell and taste are very&nbsp;convincing fictions. So convincing, in fact, that we often embrace them as “reality.” This is why we have so many arguments.To “frame” a conversation is to set the stage for a&nbsp;fiction that is about to begin.The current style of&nbsp;communication in America&nbsp;is declarative and descriptive, leaving little&nbsp;room for nuance or multilayered interpretation. The&nbsp;impact of this&nbsp;declarative&nbsp;style is often clinical and bombastic.The heart&nbsp;doubts declarative statements because they&nbsp;tell us&nbsp;what to think and believe.Evocative statements pull the answers from inside us.Lead a person to an answer and they will usually discover it.Lead a person to the truth and they will cling to it.We own every truth that comes from inside&nbsp;us. This is why it is rare for an argument to overturn something we have realized.If you followed Indiana Beagle down the rabbit hole last week, you saw a statement by Brandon Sanderson, “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”Sanderson may as well have been&nbsp;talking about evocative statements.Look at the frontispiece of&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads&nbsp;and you’ll see&nbsp;The Seven Laws of the Advertising Universe.&nbsp;Laws 3 and 7 explain why stories are so powerfully persuasive:“Intellect and Emotion&nbsp;are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people, their minds will follow.”“Engage the Imagination,&nbsp;then take it where you will. Where the mind has repeatedly journeyed, the body will surely follow. People go only to places they have already been in their minds.”Well-told stories win the heart and take people on journeys in their minds.How well are you telling your stories?The best stories have a narrative arc and a character arc.Narrative Arc:&nbsp;a sequence of events that unfold; a continuing storyline that fascinates the mind.Character Arc:&nbsp;a gradual deepening of our understanding of the character’s motivations, revealed by how the&nbsp;character&nbsp;thinks, speaks, acts and sees the world. The character arc is a character’s inner journey over the course of the story.An advertising campaign is more than a...

Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction.He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had.Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it.I don’t want to mention client names and I’m sure you’ll understand why, but my most successful ad campaigns have been built on exactly&nbsp;that kind of fiction.Not lies.&nbsp;Fiction.&nbsp;There’s a difference.Fiction is romanticized reality, showing us possible futures and the best of the past, leaving out the dreary, the mundane and the forgettable.&nbsp;It is a powerful tool of bonding.&nbsp;Properly used, fictional characters attract new customers and deepen customer loyalties. But&nbsp;predictable&nbsp;characters hold no interest for us. It is&nbsp;conflicted&nbsp;characters – those with vulnerabilities, weaknesses and flaws – that fascinate us immensely.A recently published study1&nbsp;in&nbsp;The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships&nbsp;suggests that fictional friends may be as valuable as “real” friends, particularly when life-partners watch television shows together.“…our studies show that sharing the social connections provided by TV shows and movies can deepen intimacy and closeness. Furthermore, watching TV shows and movies together may provide couples who lack access to a shared social network of real-world friends with an alternate means of establishing this shared social identity.Previously, sharing a social world with a partner has been conceptualized in terms of sharing real-world social experiences.2&nbsp;However, creating these experiences may not always be possible. Fortunately, humans are remarkably flexible in finding ways to fulfill their social needs.3&nbsp;When people’s need for social connections are undermined, they turn to a variety of social surrogates that provide alternate pathways to meet this need, including comfort food,4&nbsp;photos of loved ones,5&nbsp;pets,6&nbsp;and media like TV shows and movies.7“Recurrent characters in advertising fit into that last category of “media like TV shows and movies.”In fact, fictional characters shine so brightly in our minds that we have created a word – metafiction8&nbsp;– for those moments when fictional characters become aware that they are fictional.If you doubt what I say, all you need do is suggest to&nbsp;Indiana Beagle&nbsp;that he isn’t real. You will quickly and painfully be made aware of how real a fictional character can become.It is the architecture of our brains that makes fiction so powerful.Humans are the storytelling animal.You have about 100,000 times more synapses in your brain than sensory receptors in your body. If brain synapses were strictly equal to sensory receptors – which they are not – this would mean that you and I are 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that&nbsp;does not exist&nbsp;than a world that does. So let’s assume that a single&nbsp;sensory receptor is worth 1,000 brain synapses. Congratulations, you’re still 100 times better equipped to experience&nbsp;a world that does not exist&nbsp;than a world that does.This&nbsp;was the purpose of today’s Monday Morning Memo:Find some TV shows to watch with your life-partner.&nbsp;The shared experience will be good for both of you.Play with the idea of creating a fictional spokes-character for your company.&nbsp;(If you don’t know how, consider the online classes at AmericanSmallBusiness.org.)Take quality fiction more seriously.&nbsp;Logical, sequential, deductive reasoning is a...

September 17, 1787:&nbsp;When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of&nbsp;Don Quixote de La Mancha.1According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish allegory does seem a somewhat unusual choice for the pragmatic farmer, soldier, and statesman. An explanation for the apparently uncharacteristic purchase can be found within Washington’s correspondence.”&nbsp;2We’ll look at that correspondence in a moment, but I believe a statement made by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offers an equally insightful glimpse into the mind of George Washington in that historic moment when the Constitution was complete and our&nbsp;Great American Experiment had begun.“I tend to write very romantically and idealistically. So the characters that I write are going to be, kind of, quixotic. And they’re going to fail a lot and fall a lot. But, you know,&nbsp;there’s a romance in trying for honorable things.”&nbsp;3– Aaron Sorkin,&nbsp;June 29, 2015Don Quixote&nbsp;had been a topic of conversation a few evenings earlier in the home of Benjamin Franklin. We know this because on November 9th, 1787, Washington received a Spanish copy of&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;from Spanish Ambassador Diego Maria de Gardoqui with a note, “requesting you wou’d accept &amp; give a place in your Library to the last Spanish Edition of Don Quixote which I recolectt to have hear’d you say at Dr Franklin’s that you had never seen it. I cou’d have wish’d it was in English for your particular entertainment, but it being reckoned the very best Edition of that celebrated work &amp; one in which every thing has been manufacture in Spain induces me to request your acceptance.”&nbsp;4We don’t know why they were talking about Quixote that night in the home of Benjamin Franklin, but Indy Beagle tells me it went something like this:WASHINGTON: “We are drawing near to an agreement. I believe we may have a Constitution within the week.”FRANKLIN: [shaking his head slowly as gazes down absently at the table] “I look at the future and wonder if we are victorious champions of the good, or bumbling fools who have convinced themselves they are something they are not.”SPANISH AMBASSADOR GARDOQUI: [smiling] “You have read the&nbsp;Quixote?”FRANKLIN: [nods yes and smiles a weak smile.]WASHINGTON: “Although Jefferson and Adams speak continuously of this book, I cannot say I have read it.”“Roy,” you’re thinking, “are you seriously expecting me to believe that our founding fathers were Quixote nuts like you?”The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello.org says, “Don Quixote&nbsp;was one of the few works of fiction that Thomas Jefferson was clearly partial to. He used the text in its original language to learn Spanish, and had his children do the same. Jefferson owned a number of different editions over his lifetime.”&nbsp;5Monticello.org also lists 18 pieces of Jefferson’s personal correspondence in which Quixote is mentioned during the 51 years from 1771 to 1822.&nbsp;5So, yes, when a person&nbsp;speaks and writes about Don Quixote&nbsp;for 51 years, I usually print that person’s name&nbsp;in large letters&nbsp;in the “Quixote Nut” column.These are the big ideas presented in&nbsp;Don Quixote:1. A beautiful dream is worth believing in, even when others think you are crazy.2. A beautiful dream is worth fighting for, even when you lose.3. A beautiful dream is worth pursuing, even if it never comes true.4. The possibility remains that your beautiful&nbsp;dream might turn out to be folly.&nbsp;6John Adams was Thomas Jefferson’s friend and nemesis and

I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing.Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it&nbsp;difficult to accept and believe these compliments.I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from Impostor Syndrome and it is most common among high achievers, especially&nbsp;people with graduate degrees, college professors on track for tenure, and research scientists.&nbsp;1Isaac Newton, the man who&nbsp;changed the way we understand the universe, who discovered the laws of gravity and motion and invented calculus, suffered from Impostor Syndrome, saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”&nbsp;2Impostor Syndrome is the blind spot that comes with talent.Harold Kushner describes Impostor Syndrome as “the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved… For all the outward trappings of success, they feel hollow inside. They can never rest and enjoy their accomplishments… They need constant reassurance from the people around them to still the voice inside them that keeps saying, ‘If other people knew you the way I know you, they would know what a phony you are.'”&nbsp;3Now here’s the good news: Impostor Syndrome is perfectly normal. What you want to avoid is the opposite,&nbsp;the Dunning–Kruger effect,&nbsp;a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusions of superiority, mistakenly assessing their abilities as much higher than they really are.&nbsp;4Everyone is messed-up and broken a little. (Impostor Syndrome)But the most messed-up are those who believe they are not. (Dunning-Kruger)Scientists Dunning and Kruger believe “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”&nbsp;4In other words, those of us who have Impostor Syndrome&nbsp;see ourselves from the inside, where we stand naked in the shadow of old wounds, past failures and the knowledge of our limitations. But we see others from the outside, where they stand majestic, beautifully illuminated in&nbsp;the bright glory of their successes.A close friend once asked me to tell him the secret of confidence. “The key isn’t to think more highly of yourself,” I said, “but to quit thinking so highly of others.”If Dunning and Kruger’s research can be trusted, it would appear that I was right.This is what I was hoping to give you today:Encouragement.Talented people like yourself often feel they’ve just been lucky. But being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing in the right way isn’t luck, it’s talent. Most people have at least one talent. Be happy that you found yours.Normality.Seventy percent of successful people wrestle with Impostor Syndrome. See it for what it is and it will disappear.Self-acceptance.Yes, you have deficiencies, but so does everyone else. Relax.Self-awareness.I said that Impostor Syndrome is a blind spot among people with talent. Hopefully, now that you’ve seen your blind spot, it won’t be a blind spot anymore.Gratitude.Open your eyes to your talent and be glad of it. (And if you ever figure out who gave it to you, be sure to thank them for it!)Have a great week.Do great things.It’s in your nature.Roy H. Williams

Sunlight is composed of red, green and blue light waves. Combine these together and you get white light.ARemove the red from white light and you will no longer be able to see red in anything illuminated&nbsp;by that light. Red will no longer exist. Remove the blue and you will no longer see blue.This is the secret of propaganda.Propaganda is an emotionally charged word, so we should probably establish a definition for the purposes of this discussion:“Propaganda is a form of persuasion that refuses to consider the point of view of its opponent. Instead, propaganda will mock, vilify and demonize its opponent or ignore its opponent’s perspective completely.”Google “propaganda” and you’ll learn the term dates back to 1622, when Pope Gregory XV decided to send out missionaries to propagate –&nbsp;propagando&nbsp;– the faith. To facilitate this, he created the&nbsp;sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando.&nbsp;The cardinal in charge of&nbsp;Propagando&nbsp;became known as the “red pope” due to the importance of his duties and the extraordinary extent of his authority.&nbsp;1In 1982, Pope John Paul II renamed it&nbsp;the&nbsp;congregation for the evangelization of peoples, probably because the word “propaganda” had been given a bad name by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.Catholics in 1622 wanted to eliminate the Protestant perspective, which is only fair, because Protestants wanted to eliminate the Catholic perspective.This polarization caused millions to die in religious wars, but that doesn’t make religion bad. It is a polarized perspective – whether in religion or sports or anything else – that’s bad.A person can have a strong and unchangeable point of view but still retain the courtesy and breadth of vision to understand how an intelligent person might embrace the opposite point of view.&nbsp;2Think of your opponent as watching a sporting event from the seat exactly opposite yours. You’re both watching the same game, but his left is your right, and your right is his left. So which of you is the liar? Which of you is the fool?200 million Muslims are Shiites.1.6 billion Muslims are Sunnis.When the Islamic Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D., a debate emerged about who should be his successor. Both sides agreed that Allah is the one true God and that Muhammad was his messenger, but one group (the Shiites) felt Muhammad’s successor should be someone in his bloodline, while the other (the Sunnis) felt a pious individual who would follow the Prophet’s customs would be acceptable.Both Sunnis and Shiitesread the Quran,believe the Prophet Muhammad was the messenger of Allah,fast during Ramadan,pledge to make a pilgrimage to Mecca,practice ritual prayer five times a day,give charity to the poor andpledge themselves to their faith.But rather than celebrate what they have in common and use those bonds to facilitate peace and prosperity, the Sunnis and Shiites have chosen bitter war.Democrats and Republicans seem to be making a similar choice.I, for one, want no part of it.Justice and Mercy are both important and good&nbsp;and true.But they exist in perpetual tension, an eternal tug-of-war.I’m sure I’ll be criticized for saying this, but it seems to me that one side wants to shine bold red light on the importance of protecting ourselves from those who would do us harm, while the other side wants to shine a soothing blue light on the pain of the struggling and the oppressed.If propagandists are successful in their attempts to eliminate the red&nbsp;or the blue&nbsp;from the light that shines from America, I fear we will learn we...

Each of us likes to think we believe what we believe because the evidence dictates it.But if that were true, wouldn’t each of us believe the same things?We call one person a romantic and another a realist, and we secretly think the realist to be more valuable, do we not?Labels are powerful things. To call someone “a realist” is to accuse his or her counterpart of believing in things that are not real.But are honor, courage, virtue and love not real?My experience has been that we become less frustrated and more likeable when we embrace the fact that belief is a choice.“If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it… Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good; that honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money – money and power – mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this; that love – true love – never dies. Remember that, boy. Remember that. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.”– Hub McCann, played by Robert Duvall, speaking to his nephew in&nbsp;Secondhand LionsEvidence does not dictate belief.Belief is always a choice.This came pointedly to my attention as I was assembling my chapter for a collaborative book,&nbsp;Poetics of Re-accentuation: Don Quixote in film, theatre, and modern literature.The basic idea of re-accentuation is that every generation makes and remakes the image of Don Quixote to reflect their own worldview. (Indy Beagle has assembled, in the rabbit hole, a list of those of&nbsp;you I quoted.)I can summarize my chapter in 2 sentences.Perhaps no story has ever been changed to fit the measure of its readers so much as&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;has been changed to fit 21st century businesspeople and entrepreneurs.Businesspeople tend to see Quixote as&nbsp;a symbol of the irrational and unyielding optimism that is essential to every visionary entrepreneur.But this interpretation of Quixote is not universal:Two of the friends who shared their thoughts and feelings with me wrote brilliantly about how the delusions of Quixote hurt everyone around him, particularly those who loved him most.One of these writers was a family counselor. The other was an accountant.&nbsp;(Is our career choice a reflection of how we see the world, or is our worldview shaped by our career?)I agreed with these two friends because they were entirely correct.And I agreed with all those who said the opposite.In truth, each of us is a romantic and a realist.The human brain is divided into competing halves. The realistic left and the romantic right. This is why we’re so often at odds with ourselves, torn between two ways of thinking.“Outwardly we laugh at the absurdity of a man jousting with windmills, thinking them to be giants. But inwardly we crave Quixote’s sense of mission and purpose, his dedication to a cause, his willingness to pay any price to achieve the honor of his beloved, the entirely imaginary Dulcinea.So who is the silly one? He, for seeing beyond what is, to serve a beauty that could be, should be, ought to be? Or me, for remaining trapped in a black and white world where little men hide behind technicalities?” – Roy H. Williams, (2005)This concept of multiple perspectives is easy to embrace as long as we’re talking about&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;and&nbsp;Secondhand Lions,&nbsp;but what happens when the conversation grows more personal?“Given the current level of anger, we are in danger of becoming a monster in an attempt to destroy a...

Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains.“…smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain&nbsp;Kannnng-aroo,now don’t tell&nbsp;meeeeeeee&nbsp;I’ve nothin’ to&nbsp;dooooo….”I whispered everything I could remember to Google.Google whispered back,&nbsp;“The Statler Brothers,&nbsp;Flowers on the Wall,&nbsp;1966.&nbsp;It won the Grammy for ‘Best Performance by a Vocal Group.'”To get the most out of your&nbsp;ad writer, send them your irrelevant and ridiculous passing thoughts.Don’t overthink it, and don’t be annoyed when most of your passing thoughts are ignored. Because occasionally, now and then, one of those passing thoughts will morph into a fabulous ad for your business.I was trying to drive “Captain&nbsp;Kannnng-aroo” from my mind when I heard a&nbsp;little email *ding*&nbsp;from my computer. It was Ken Goodrich, the owner of Goettl (rhymes with kettle).Crap.Ken was thinking about Captain Kangaroo, too.I turned Ken’s email into a 60-second radio ad.Captain Kangaroo is the reason I own Goettl Air Conditioning. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. I’m Ken Goodrich. Here’s how it happened. When I was a kid, our family had a big Zenith console television that was about the size of a small hippopotamus or a pony with very short legs. Your family probably had one, too. Anyway, the Captain was always talking about Schwinn bicycles and what made them BETTER than other bicycles. Sitting there cross-legged on the floor, the Captain convinced me to always buy GOOD quality made with REAL craftsmanship because it&nbsp;works&nbsp;better,&nbsp;lasts&nbsp;longer, and&nbsp;saves you money.&nbsp;When it comes to air conditioners, that’s&nbsp;Goettl.&nbsp;But wait, it gets even weirder.&nbsp;I only hire technicians and installers that remind me of Mr. Green Jeans.&nbsp;Happy. Hard working. He just wants&nbsp;you&nbsp;to be happy.&nbsp;&nbsp;Call Goettl.&nbsp;Gee Oh Ee, T-T-L. It’ll keep you cool, but it’s hard to spell. And if you see one of my technicians, ask them for a Goettl flashlight. (Contractor License #) You’ll find the phone number at Goettl.com. Gee Oh Ee, T-T-L dot com.You’ve heard me say, “Entertainment is the currency that purchases the attention of the public.” And this is an example of that.Here’s how to take&nbsp;a rambling email from a client and turn it into a highly entertaining ad:Open your ad from an interesting angle.This applies to opening lines as well as&nbsp;headlines in print and online.How can anyone&nbsp;not&nbsp;listen to an ad that opens with, “Captain Kangaroo is the reason I own Goettl Air Conditioning.”Make an entertaining pitch.Don’t entertain,&nbsp;then&nbsp;pitch. Make the whole pitch entertaining. “…a big Zenith console television that was about the size of a small hippopotamus or a pony with very short legs.”Make the reader/listener/viewer see herself&nbsp;in your ad.“Your family probably had one, too.”When appropriate, tell WHY you are the way you are.&nbsp;(Your Genesis story.)“Sitting there cross-legged on the floor, the Captain convinced me to always buy GOOD quality made with REAL craftsmanship because it&nbsp;works&nbsp;better,&nbsp;lasts&nbsp;longer, and&nbsp;saves you...

The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop:“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”– Niels Bohr, physicist“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”– F. Scott Fitzgerald, writerWhat I’m about to say may prove to be just such a test.I’m counting on you to possess a first-rate intelligence:“People love Donald Trump.”“People hate Donald Trump.”Those two statements about Donald Trump seem to be mutually exclusive until we realize that neither statement purports to describe ALL people.&nbsp;Different people feel different ways.&nbsp;We&nbsp;understand this when it comes to politics.But let the discussion turn to advertising and you will soon hear voices&nbsp;begin speaking of Millennials and&nbsp;Gen-Xers and&nbsp;Baby Boomers as though every&nbsp;member of a birth cohort is somehow compelled to&nbsp;make their decisions based on&nbsp;a single, shared set of values&nbsp;determined by the year in which they were born.It’s like listening to people&nbsp;who believe&nbsp;in astrology. “Your fate is determined by your birthday.”The only thing&nbsp;weirder is listening to wholesalers and distributors&nbsp;speak of&nbsp;the men and women involved in “B to B” (Business to Business)&nbsp;as if they were&nbsp;an entirely different species. “Roy, I hear what you’re saying about using words as tools of persuasion, but my business is B to B and B to B is different. What can you tell me about selling B to B?”Blanket statements result from a belief in stereotypes.Stereotypes are attractive because they allow us to simplify complex realities.Stereotypes are false categories that allow us to feel good about stupid decisions.People are extremely different.People are all alike.Both of those statements are true.Both of those statements are false.How’s that first-rate intelligence holding up?I’m now going to make 5 true statements. Some will confirm your suspicions and beliefs. Others will stick in your throat like a fish bone, forcing you to cough and sputter.I apologize in advance.Your perfect “target customer” is probably a false category.This is one of the two reasons why your advertising is performing poorly.The first time I visited Procter &amp; Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, I was greeted warmly and shown the auditorium where I would be speaking. After all the equipment had been tested, my guide asked,“Do you know the unofficial slogan of our company?”I shook my head from side to side.“In God we trust. All others bring data.”In an August 9, 2016 story in the&nbsp;Wall Street Journal,&nbsp;Procter &amp; Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard announced, “We targeted too much and we went too narrow.”Example:&nbsp;Sales stagnated when P&amp;G aimed&nbsp;Febreze&nbsp;ads on FaceBook at pet owners and households with large families. But sales rose when the same budget was spent reaching “anyone over 18.”P&amp;G has been spending hundreds of million of dollars on tests like that for the past two years. The jury has now returned with a verdict: reaching&nbsp;influencers&nbsp;is just as important as reaching the decision maker.You feeling that fish bone yet?Millennials are easy to attract.According to an Aug. 5th&nbsp;Daily Beast&nbsp;article by Samantha Allen, one in three young adults is still living at home.Touchy-feely theorists say this is...

Time and Money are interchangeable.We can always save one by spending more of the other.Time and Money are interchangeable.We prize the&nbsp;one we feel to be in short supply.Time and Money are interchangeable.We burn them both like the wax of a candle.What is&nbsp;patience&nbsp;if not the quiet, dark burning of time?What is&nbsp;entertainment&nbsp;if not the dazzling, bright burning of time?What is&nbsp;play&nbsp;if not the warm, happy burning of time?What is&nbsp;freedom&nbsp;if not the ability to burn time in any way we choose?Do you want to attract influential people to your business?Patiently offer them entertainment, play and freedom.They will be attracted to your lightand come back with their friends.This is why an innovative marketing school teaches people how to become whiskey sommeliers.*Influential people are obligated to make money.Money, for them, is a representative product of&nbsp;work.What they seek is&nbsp;freedom, entertainment and&nbsp;play.What they seek is a pleasant way to spend time.Aristotle Onassis understood this.Ari was a 17 year-old Greek refugee who fled to Buenos Aires where he began working as a telephone operator in 1923. He would soon become one of the wealthiest men in the world. This, in his own words, was his secret:Make sure you are tanned, live in expensive buildings, even if you have to stay in the cellar, go out to expensive restaurants, even if you can only afford one drink.”Ari spent the money he made&nbsp;as a telephone operator on quality clothes, a tanning lamp and a single drink each night in the swankiest bar in Buenos Aires. Within a few months, he had become friends with all the important people of that city. And with their help, he began a tobacco importing business that made him, and them, a fortune.That’s when he began buying ships.Having learned that the Canadian National Steamship Company wanted to sell 2 ships at scrap metal prices, Ari left immediately for Canada and convinced that company to sell him not just 2, but 6 ships for $20,000 each. Within a few years Ari had amassed the world’s largest privately owned shipping fleet and became one of the world’s richest and most famous men.Seventeen year-old Aristotle Onassis instinctively knew that freedom, entertainment and play were the only things that influential people really&nbsp;desire. He connected with them, not through work, but through play.Ari became successful, not because he knew how to spend money, but because he knew how to spend time when time was his only asset.If you don’t have all the money you desire, I have but a single question for you:How are you spending your time?Roy H. Williams

Most people associate The Power of Myth with the 1988 PBS television series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, or with the accompanying book of&nbsp;that name. But it was John F. Kennedy who spoke of the power of myth with the greatest clarity and insight. The occasion was his 1962 Commencement Address to the graduates of Yale University.As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”Erroneous preconceptions are the dangerous downside of myths.But heroes are their dangerous upside.Larger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we’re striving to be.We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.The saying, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was true as recently as 1937 when tiny England did, in fact, still have possessions in each of the world’s 24 time zones.It’s widely known that the British explored, conquered and ruled much of the world for a number of years, but what isn’t widely known is what made them believe they could do it.For the first 1000 years after Christ, Greece and Rome were the only nations telling stories of heroes and champions. England was just a dreary little island of rejects, castoffs and losers.So who inspired tiny, foggy England to rise up and take over the world?A simple Welsh monk named Geoffrey – hoping to instill in his countrymen a sense of pride – assembled a history of England that gave his people a grand and glorious pedigree. Published in 1136, Geoffrey’s “History of the Kings of Britain,” was a detailed, written account of the deeds of the English people for each of the 17 centuries prior to 689 AD… and not a single word of it was true. Yet in creating heroes like King Arthur, Guinevere, Merlyn and the Knights of the Round Table from the fabric of his imagination, Geoffrey of Monmouth convinced a sad little island of rejects, castoffs and losers to begin seeing themselves as a just and magnificent nation.And not long after they began to see themselves that way in their minds, they began seeing themselves that way in the mirror.Most people assume that stories of heroes are the&nbsp;byproducts&nbsp;of great civilizations, but I’m convinced they are the&nbsp;cause&nbsp;of them. Magnificent civilizations have always been the ones with stories of heroes; larger-than-life role models that inspired ordinary citizens to rise up and do the impossible.I love imaginary heroes like King Arthur and Don Quixote.I love civilian heroes like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King.I love political heroes like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.But what happens when your hero is a fool?I pray we never find out.Roy H. Williams

Memories of PercyAugust 1, 2016ListenAHis gifts didn’t prove that he was rich. His gifts proved that he cared. And the smallness of his gifts proved that I could afford to care, too.My long friendship with Percy began exactly 30 years ago when I saw him on the cover of a magazine as it lay on a coffee table in a friend’s house. He was a&nbsp;smiling gentleman sitting on a desk stacked with bags of money. The headline read,&nbsp;“Why is Percy Ross Giving Away $20,000,000?”In the&nbsp;feature story, author Steven Kaplan explained how Percy Ross employed a small team of people to read the 4,000 letters he received each week asking him for financial help. A few of these letters got published each week – along with his response – in the 800+ newspapers that carried his syndicated column, “Thanks a Million.”Paragraph 38 quoted Percy&nbsp;as saying that he had engaged&nbsp;two large advertising firms to help him turn his column into a radio show only to be told by each of them that it wasn’t feasible.The week after I read that story, his readers had to plow through 4,001 letters because I decided to add my own letter to the pile.Mr. Ross, I don’t want or need any of your money, but I read in&nbsp;Robb Report&nbsp;magazine that you wanted to syndicate a daily radio feature. I’ve done this 4 times already, so I’m familiar with the problems your people ran into and I know the ways around all those problems. Give me a call at your convenience and I’ll tell you everything you need to know. I look forward to hearing you on the radio!”I received&nbsp;a phone call and a plane ticket to Minneapolis. Percy picked me up at the airport, and as we were walking shoulder-to-shoulder toward his car I said,Mr. Ross, in about an hour and a half you’re going to know absolutely everything you need to know to get “Thanks a Million” on several hundred radio stations for free. As a matter of fact, you should be able to make a few tens of thousands of dollars a month from it. What I need you to understand is that I’m fully aware that I’m about to make myself obsolete. Not only will you not need to hire me to help you, you won’t need to hire anyone else, either.“Why would you do that?” he asked.“If this was the only valuable idea that I was ever going to have, I’d do my best to monetize it. But it seems to me that each of us&nbsp;will&nbsp;encounter more valuable opportunities in a single day than we could possibly pursue in a lifetime. But today isn’t work.&nbsp;Today&nbsp;I’m&nbsp;just&nbsp;helping you help&nbsp;others.”Five, six, seven, eight, nine steps and still Percy hadn’t said anything. So I looked to my left.And he wasn’t there.Spinning around I saw him standing quietly in the parking lot, staring at me. He had stopped in his tracks while I was talking. We stood looking at each other a few moments, then he said,How old are you, son?”“Twenty-eight, sir.”“I was fifty years old before I figured that out.”About 90 minutes later Percy said with a smile,Roy, I’m really glad you told me what you did in the parking lot of the airport because if you hadn’t, right now I’d be thinking you were the most naive and careless young man who had ever lived. You were right! I don’t need anyone’s help to do this. Not even yours. You have given me something I tried to buy and could not. And that doesn’t happen to me very often.”Within 6 months, Percy was on 584 radio stations for free, including WNBC

The reason people&nbsp;write poorly is because they read too many blogs, tweets, news stories and Facebook posts.As you read, so will you write.Maxwell Rotbart. the son of roving reporter Rotbart, asked me to name 10 books he should read. When I asked the purpose of this reading, Maxwell said, “I just want to know what great writing sounds like.”“Do you want to read the best stories or do you want to read the best writing?”“I want to read the best writing.”I quickly named 7&nbsp;books before I began to struggle. Dozens of others were flickering through my mind, but they were mostly examples of great&nbsp;storytelling,&nbsp;employing&nbsp;marvelous narrative arcs and character arcs. But my list was to be&nbsp;about&nbsp;great writing:&nbsp;sentence construction, word selection, vivid description and an intriguing sequencing of mental images. Every style of great writing I could think of was already represented on my list.Indiana Beagle saved me. “Wizard,” he said, “let me ask the rabbit hole tribe to name the last 3&nbsp;books.”“So let it be written,” I said, “So let it be done.”Indy snickered in that way he does&nbsp;when he knows I’m being pompous.Anyway, here’s my list:Travels with Charley&nbsp;– John SteinbeckEast of Eden&nbsp;is a better story, but&nbsp;Charley&nbsp;will teach you more about writing. Let Steinbeck show you how to unveil&nbsp;a mental image from an interesting perspective, restrain yourself from saying too much, and delight your reader with unexpected observations and connections. A&nbsp;second&nbsp;example of a well written book-without-a-plot is&nbsp;Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,&nbsp;the personal letters written by John Steinbeck to his friends between 1923 and 1968.The Poetry of Robert FrostFrost communicates bigger ideas in fewer words than any other writer I have ever read.&nbsp;Let him&nbsp;teach you the power of metaphor, the magic of meter (rhythm,) and the use of the perfect word.At his simplest, his most rhythmical and cryptic, Frost is a remarkable poet. He is surely that. In other words, if you were chopping wood, that chore had some kind of universal significance to Frost. If you were picking apples, this has a general conclusive principle somewhere involved in it, or with it, in some way. This localizing way of getting generalities to reveal themselves, like universal design, original sin, love, death, fate: Frost found a way to do this, to make anything that has ever concerned mankind relate to a New England farm.”– James Dickey, Classes on Modern Poets and The Art of Poetry,&nbsp;p. 126One Summer: America, 1927&nbsp;– Bill BrysonSome of the best advice I offer&nbsp;writers is this: “Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.” Bill Bryson is the world’s best&nbsp;example of this. It is impossible not to be devastated by&nbsp;his fascinating choices of subject matter, his deep research, obvious restraint and amazing phrasing.The Old Man and the Sea&nbsp;– Ernest HemingwayThis very short book put Hemingway over the top to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Let Ernest teach you how simple observations, clearly stated, have impact.Hawaii&nbsp;– James MichenerMichener will teach you patience and attention to detail. If objective reality and clarity are your goals as a writer, Michener and Hemingway are the voices you want echoing in your mind as you write.One Hundred Years of Solitude&nbsp;–&nbsp;Gabriel Garcia MarquezMagical Realism isn’t fantasy or science fiction. It is the...

She stood silently on the cracked asphalt, her summer dress billowing in the breeze, the calm at the center of the&nbsp;storm that was spreading across the country. Around her swirled police officers&nbsp;and demonstrators&nbsp;that had blocked Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to&nbsp;denounce the death of Alton Sterling, shot by police outside a convenience store. Many protesters carried signs.&nbsp;Some shouted into&nbsp;bullhorns. ‘She just stood there and made her stand,’ said photographer Jonathan Bachman to Buzzfeed News. ‘I was just happy to be able to capture something like that.'” – Michael E. MillerIeshia Evans is a 28 year-old mother with a 5 year-old boy.She wanted to look her son in the eyes to tell him she fought for his freedom and rights,” says Alex Haynes, her best friend since the age of eight.This is not an unemployed troublemaker.This is an accomplished woman, a successful LPN.And this was her first protest.But young black men are dying when they should not.And her son is a young black man.When Ieshia Evans was 3 years old, Disney released a children’s movie called&nbsp;Beauty and the Beast.AThat movie is about a girl named Belle, the non-conforming daughter of an eccentric inventor. Belle&nbsp;is ostracized by her peers due to her intelligence and love of books. But when her father is imprisoned by a cold-hearted beast, Belle offers the beast her own freedom in exchange for her father’s.Does that story sound familiar? Belle was not a new character. Disney has been holding up strong, young women as role models since 1950, when Cinderella ran an entire household by herself, prepared the meals, did the laundry and fed all the livestock until she was encouraged by an older woman – her fairy godmother – to rise above her circumstances and all the haters who were&nbsp;trying to hold her down.Cinderella lived happily ever after as a princess in a castle.Admittedly, the vehicle of Cinderella’s escape was Prince Charming.But that was 1950.bIn&nbsp;1953,&nbsp;Disney gave us Tinker Bell, a loyal, brave and determined pixie forever&nbsp;trailed by glittering pixie dust that can help humans fly if they think happy thoughts. Tinker Bell became&nbsp;one of Disney’s most important icons.r1964&nbsp;&nbsp;Mary Poppins&nbsp;is an independent woman who knows her own worth. She demands respect at her job and stands up to her boss from the get-go.i1977&nbsp;In&nbsp;The Rescuers,&nbsp;Penny is a tough little orphan girl who is kidnapped and held prisoner in Devil’s Bayou, where she faces&nbsp;down a pair of trained crocodiles, Brutus and Nero, and thwarts her captors entirely with the help two little mice.Thirteen years ago I wrote the following in the Monday Morning Memo for February 17, 2003.Heroes are dangerous things. Bigger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as is a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we are striving to be.We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.”Through their skillful crafting of heroes for children, Disney has been telling...

Like most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women.But if we look beyond the physical differences, what is it that defines “woman”? Research reveals a series of definitions so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized.But when has that ever been an impediment to a curious mind?Our examination of the mystery and magic of the feminine begins with 7 quotes that reveal a being so perfect that she can exist only in the imagination of a man. Psychologist Carl Jung calls her the anima.“The lace on a woman’s wrist is an entirely different thing from lace in a shop. In the shop it is a piece of workmanship, on her it is the accentuation of her gentleness of character and refinement.”– Robert Henri,&nbsp;The Art Spirit“The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The younger boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.”– John Steinbeck“What do we know about the goddesses, those elusive female figures, stronger than human males, more dangerous than male deities, who represent not real women but the dreams of real men?”– Alice Bach,&nbsp;Women in the Hebrew Bible,&nbsp;p. 17“I think the idealization of women is indigenous to men. There are various ways of idealizing women, especially sexually, based in almost every case on their inaccessibility. When a woman functions as an unobtainable love object, then she takes on a mythical quality. You can see this principle functioning as a sales device in advertising and in places like&nbsp;Playboy&nbsp;magazine. Almost every movie you see has this quality, because you can’t embrace the image on the screen. Thousands of novels use this principle, because you can’t embrace a printed image on a page.”– James Dickey,&nbsp;Self Interviews,&nbsp;p. 153Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;One day I will go to your lands and I will dance as a European.Marco Polo:&nbsp;They will love you.Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;Will I love Venice?Marco Polo:&nbsp;It is magnificent, the city of bridges. Instead of roads we travel on canals in wooden boats.Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;That’s absurd.Marco Polo:&nbsp;You wouldn’t think that if you saw it.Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;If it is so magnificent, why are you here and not there?Marco Polo:&nbsp;You must have summoned me.Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;I did no such thing.&nbsp;&nbsp;[He tries to kiss her and she turns away.] I’m afraid.Marco Polo:&nbsp;Don’t be.Gypsy Maiden:&nbsp;I’m afraid you will fall in love with me.&nbsp;&nbsp;All men fall in love with me because I always leave. And there is nothing men love more than the thing they cannot have.–&nbsp;Marco Polo,&nbsp;season two“Her name is Dulcinea, her kingdom, Toboso, which is in La Mancha, her condition must be that of princess, at the very least, for she is my queen and lady, and her beauty is supernatural, for in it one finds the reality of all the impossible.” –&nbsp;Don Quixote,&nbsp;(1605)“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”– Virginia Woolf,&nbsp;A Room of One’s OwnOur journey will continue in the rabbit hole of Indiana Beagle, where we will examine two&nbsp;additional...

People have been asking me to explain symbols lately.Symbols are a language of the unconscious mind. This is why our dreams are full of them.A person sits alone in a rowboat on&nbsp;the ocean&nbsp;at night, looking&nbsp;up at the stars.That symbol – whether expressed visually or in words – speaks to us of&nbsp;spirituality&nbsp;and&nbsp;practicality; deep thoughts and big challenges.But how? Nowhere among those 17 words is any reference to thoughts or challenges. We are given only a person, a rowboat, water, darkness and stars.The scene is awesome, majestic and lonely.“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”President John F. Kennedy, deeply aware of the&nbsp;awesomeness&nbsp;of his responsibilities and the&nbsp;majesty&nbsp;of his position and the&nbsp;loneliness&nbsp;that comes with both, kept those 13 words forever before him as a plaque on his desk in the oval office.Ernest Hemingway animated this symbol in his novella,&nbsp;The Old Man and the Sea. Alone and far from shore, Santiago faces the task of landing a fish bigger than his boat and then defending it from a mob&nbsp;of sharks. Looking up at the stars and down into the water and fighting with all his strength for 3 days and 3 nights, Santiago’s soul-searching self-talk won Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.Forty-seven years later, Yann Martel conjured this same image to sell&nbsp;more than 10,000,000 copies of&nbsp;The Life of Pi.&nbsp;In the opening line of its summary, Wikipedia says the book “explores issues of spirituality and practicality.” Go figure.I often begin the second day of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop by asking the students,“Did any of you have an interesting dream last night?”I do this because the first day of that class is filled with lots of&nbsp;big ideas coming at you too quickly to digest and assimilate. Dreams are a just side effect of your unconscious mind’s processing of unresolved&nbsp;ideas during the night.Two weeks ago, a first-time Wizard Academy student, a 65 year-old man, raised his hand and said, “I dreamed I was on a gondola in Venice, Italy, when an incredibly beautiful woman came onto the boat and seduced me.”The class laughed, of course, but then the man asked, “Why do you think I had that dream?”“Did you enjoy the day yesterday?”“Very much! It was magical.”“Would you say that you’re on a journey, in an exotic place, overwhelmed by incredibly beautiful new ideas?”The man brightened. “The woman wasn’t a woman at all! She was just a symbol of what I learned!”“Makes sense to me.”“Me, too!”This brings us to the 4&nbsp;stories celebrated in the art that overflows the campus of Wizard Academy.The Christmas Story of the Magi, or Wise Men&nbsp;(wise-ards,)&nbsp;in Matthew chapter 2 is a story about a group of people who saw beauty and truth where others saw nothing at all. The Wise Men did more than talk;&nbsp;they took action.&nbsp;They counted the cost and launched an adventure. They pulled the trigger and rode the bullet. They followed a star across an ocean of sand.Don Quixote de La Mancha,&nbsp;(1605) is essentially the same story. “This is my quest:&nbsp;to follow that star.&nbsp;No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.” Like the wise-ards before him, Quixote sees and values things that others neither see nor value. But isn’t this a quality of&nbsp;every innovator and entrepreneur? Quixote is driven by his pursuit of Dulcinea, the perfect woman than exists only in the imagination of a man.1&nbsp;She was recently seen stepping aboard a gondola in Venice, Italy.A Message to Garcia&nbsp;– Translated into every language of the...

I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people.The following year it became an important chapter in my first book,&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads.&nbsp;Happily, that book went on to become Business Book of the Year in 1998 and it launched a trilogy of&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;and&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;bestsellers for me.Even though plenty of people still make the original 12 mistakes, I believe it’s time for an update since a new group has emerged to become the 10 Most Common.Inappropriate Use of Social MediaThe whole world&nbsp;is on FaceBook, but is that the right place for your product or service to be advertised? To get a clear idea of the kinds of offers that are working well on FaceBook, go to&nbsp;the Success Stories page at FaceBook.com.&nbsp;Judging from this&nbsp;list of success stories, it would appear that FaceBook works extremely well for getting people together&nbsp;socially,&nbsp;not so well for hard goods and services. (HINT: I think there may be&nbsp;a reason they call it “social” media.)Overconfidence in the Value of TargetingJeffrey Eisenberg insightfully&nbsp;points out that, “online customers are exactly the same people as offline customers, yet advertisers tend to&nbsp;think of them as an entirely different species.” For the same amount of money it costs you to reach 5 tightly targeted customers online, you can reach 5 customers who have that same profile PLUS 127 of their friends by using broadcast TV or radio. Do you want your brand&nbsp;to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell?The Assumption that Every Message is RelevantWhy does every advertiser believe their product or service category to be&nbsp;intrinsically interesting? More than information, entertainment is the currency with which you can happily&nbsp;buy your prospective customer’s time and attention. But most ads have zero entertainment value.Fear of CriticismMost ads aren’t written to persuade. They’re written&nbsp;not to offend.&nbsp;But any message that has the power to move people will always move some of them in the wrong direction. When you’ve written a good ad, you must brace yourself&nbsp;for the negative backlash you’ll&nbsp;receive from people who are anxious to be offended. The only alternative is to forever settle for ads that are mushy, mundane and mediocre. Please don’t.Measuring Ad Effectiveness Too QuicklyIts claim&nbsp;to “instantly and accurately measure every ad’s effectiveness” is part of what makes digital marketing so appealing to advertisers. But didn’t you say you want your brand to be the one people think of immediately and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell? This requires ongoing advertising and longer measurement cycles. You cannot hold every ad immediately accountable and expect to build relationship with your customer.Unsubstantiated ClaimsAdjectives are the marks of an ad filled with empty rhetoric.Verbs are the marks of an ad that demonstrates its claims.Verbs – action words – “show” your customer what your product can do. Fluffy adjectives simply “tell” them. In the words of Christopher J. Maddock, “Show, don’t tell.”Believing that “Old” Media No Longer WorksIt is true that you&nbsp;need a website and that most customers are going to visit your website before making first contact with you. Therefore, it’s vital that your website be a good one. But if you believe that online marketing is the most efficient way to drive traffic to your website, you need to go back and read Most Common...

Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. His twin sister Intuition is the beagle of my&nbsp;Destinae&nbsp;trilogy and&nbsp;the mother of Faith and Hope.Intuition is wordless but Indy can speak.Intuition came to life in June, 2001, during some early morning laughter with Princess Pennie.There is a beagle in our brain,” I shouted in mock rage, “and it must be unleashed to go where it will!” With my fist raised in defiance to anyone who would keep their beagle tethered, I shouted, “Free the Beagle! Free the Beagle! Aroooo! Arooooo! Aroooooo!”The subject of our laughter became a&nbsp;Monday Morning Memo, “The Beagle in Your Brain,” the following week. Two months later it was chapter 54 in&nbsp;Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads,&nbsp;which quickly became a&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;bestseller.It was only when I was writing&nbsp;the&nbsp;Destinae&nbsp;trilogy&nbsp;that I realized Intuition has a mischievous brother, Indy, who can walk into any work of art and instantly be in that place, at that time. For Indy, photos and paintings are portals, giving him entrance into other worlds.But isn’t that what photos and paintings do for&nbsp;all of us?Indiana doesn’t appear in the&nbsp;Destinae&nbsp;trilogy because that’s the story of his sister. Likewise, you’ll find no photo or painting of Indy on the campus of Wizard Academy in Austin. When he isn’t guiding guests through a rabbit hole, Indy lives in the art collection you’ll find in the 12 buildings, 18 courtyards, parks and gardens, and 98 uniquely decorated rooms of that place.When you’re here and a work of art intrigues you, ask Indy what it means.There’s a scene at the end of&nbsp;Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade&nbsp;(1989) that tells us where Indiana Jones got his name.SALLAH: “Please, what does it always mean, this, this ‘Junior?'”HENRY JONES: “That’s his name. ‘Henry Jones, Junior.'”INDIANA JONES: “I like Indiana.”HENRY JONES: “We named the dog Indiana.”SALLAH: “The dog? (heh-heh) You are named after the dog?” (Laughter)INDIANA JONES: (Irritated) “I’ve got a lot of fond memories of that dog.”Like I said, Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. This is why he’s the guiding spirit of the Worldwide Worthless Bastards.“You know, Lydia, I used to be a rationalist.”“What is that?”“Well, it’s sort of believing only in what you see, or hear, or feel. But lately, I’ve begun to suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than I ever dreamed in my philosophy.”“You learn much when you learn that.”– Colonel&nbsp;Ralph Denistoun to the gypsy woman, Lydia, in Paramount’s 1947 Movie, Golden EarringsIndy and I have enjoyed the conversations we’ve had with prospective members of the Worthless Bastards during the past several weeks.Here’s what those conversations sound like:“You should join us at the Toad and Ostrich Pub on Friday afternoons at four.”“What do you do there?”“We just talk, mostly. But you’re not allowed to discuss business, or work, or politics or sports. And you can’t complain about anything or talk about your problems.”“What is there to talk about, then?”“We sip water and tea and wine and whisky and talk about music we love or movies we’ve seen or restaurants we’ve tried or sometimes someone will do a magic trick or tell a funny story about growing up or a colorful person they used to know. It’s really amazing how interesting people can be when business and politics and sports are off the table.”Worthless Bastards are...

When I was a boy, I wanted an older brother.Not just a year or two older, but six or eight or ten years older. I wanted to be able to ask him things and trust the motives behind his answers.Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to accumulate seven older brothers who speak wisdom into my life. These brothers give me the benefit of all their experiences – their successes and their mistakes – and help me remember who I am.I’ve never told you&nbsp;this, but I like to think of myself as your&nbsp;older brother. I try&nbsp;to give you the benefit of my experiences, if indeed there is any benefit to be found.Today your brother needs a favor.&nbsp;Will you indulge me?I’ve always been proud and ashamed that I never went to college. So when a group of scholars – department heads of major universities, mostly – asked me to contribute a chapter to their book about what Don Quixote means to the average person in the 21st century, well, I jumped at the chance.And then I put off getting started.And now I need to get it done.That’s where you come in.Will you write me a sentence or two or twenty about what Don Quixote represents to you?It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve read the book. Your thoughts and feelings will come from wherever they come from. That’s the beauty of this project. You don’t have to defend your opinion, you only have to have one.Every generation for the past 400 years has seen Don Quixote differently. How do you see him today? What do you take from the story? Who is Sancho Panza and why does he matter? Who is Dulcinea and what does she mean to you? And if you are familiar with any of the other characters and elements of the story, I’d love&nbsp;to hear your thoughts and interpretations of those as well.How do you see Don Quixote? Your response can be as brief or as in-depth as you choose.Twenty different Cervantes scholars will each contribute a chapter to the book. I was the nineteenth person to receive an invitation, but at least I got invited.It means a lot to me.My chapter is supposed to be 5,000 words, so I need to hear from a lot of you. And please remember to give me your first and last name and your permission to publish what you send me. Also, tell me what you do for a living.Indy has volunteered to help me by collecting your emails at&nbsp;[email protected] of my older brothers, Ray Bard and Don Kuhl, have already contributed their thoughts and will definitely be represented in my chapter.I’d love to see your name alongside theirs.Roy H. Williams

“Silence is golden.&nbsp;Duct tape is silver.”&nbsp;The wit of&nbsp;these 7 words is rooted in the fact that the second sentence is an anomaly – an unexpected intrusion into the oft-repeated idea that silence is golden. The anomaly&nbsp;is then&nbsp;brought to closure and resolved in the mind of the listener. Duct tape is,&nbsp;in fact,&nbsp;silver.&nbsp;You smile a little.Bad ads&nbsp;leave no gaps and have no anomalies. Everything is stated clearly. No questions form&nbsp;in the mind of the customer.Good ads&nbsp;intrigue the customer and arouse their curiosity. Online marketers call this “engagement.”Novelists, screenwriters and storytellers have been intriguing us for decades, yet few people in advertising ever bother to study how they do it.Good news:&nbsp;I am one of those few people.Good storytellers use gaps and anomalies to trick the reader/listener/viewer into supplying the information&nbsp;they&nbsp;intentionally left out.Result:&nbsp;engagement.But…&nbsp;it’s up to your&nbsp;reader/listener/viewer to find&nbsp;resolution and bring&nbsp;closure to your mystery.&nbsp;Will he or she&nbsp;be able to piece it together and figure it out?Here’s an example&nbsp;of an effective ad that uses gaps and anomalies to elevate the interest of the listener:Guy2:&nbsp;You heard about John and Elisabeth?Guy1:&nbsp;Never thought he’d do it.Guy2:&nbsp;I never thought she’d say YES.&nbsp;[both laugh]Guy1:&nbsp;She&nbsp;definitely&nbsp;could’ve done better.Guy2:&nbsp;Yeah. I think John knows that, too.Guy1:&nbsp;Did he go to Ramsey’s?Guy2:&nbsp;Yeah, he got that part right, but he was about to mess it all up.Guy1:&nbsp;How?Guy2:&nbsp;He was just gonna&nbsp;hand&nbsp;it to her like it was a box of cookies.Guy1:&nbsp;Who saved him?Guy2:&nbsp;His ring consultant at Ramsey’s asked him how he planned to propose.Guy1:&nbsp;Yeah, mine asked me, too.Guy2:&nbsp;John didn’t have a plan, so his consultant said,&nbsp;“Hey, you’re giving her a ring from the Heart of New Orleans collection. Why not give it to her in the Heart of New Orleans?”Guy1:&nbsp;Please tell me he’s gonna follow through on that.Guy2:&nbsp;Yeah, he’s putting together a big&nbsp;master&nbsp;plan.Guy 1:&nbsp;Every town should have a Ramsey’s.Guy 2:&nbsp;Definitely.ROY:&nbsp;Rrrramsey’s&nbsp;Diamond Jewelers, on Veterans at I-10 in Metairie and&nbsp;on the West Bank in Fountain Park Centre on Manhattan.Caroline:&nbsp;and at Ramseys dot com.How long did it take you to figure out that John had asked Elisabeth to marry him? Yet the characters never say&nbsp;marry, marriage,&nbsp;engaged, engagement&nbsp;or&nbsp;proposed.&nbsp;Likewise, the fact that Ramsey’s is a jewelry store was left unsaid until the announcer finally mentions&nbsp;it in his closing tag.Here’s another ad&nbsp;– written on the same day – that leaves out a different kind&nbsp;of information. This ad features two characters that have been in this&nbsp;radio campaign together&nbsp;52 weeks a year for more than a dozen years.Sarah:&nbsp;Shopping for an engagement ring at Spence is different from every other jewelry store on earth.Sean:&nbsp;[doubtful.]&nbsp;That’s a pretty big statement. You’re going to need to back that...

If the pendulum of the West continues as it has for 3,000 years, our current “We” generation will zenith in 2023.Frankly, I’m looking forward to getting past that zenith and heading back the other way. The early part of a “Me” generation is a beautiful thing. But then again, so is the early part of a “We.”It’s as we approach a&nbsp;zenith that everything goes out of control.If you want to understand today’s&nbsp;crazy American politics,&nbsp;you need only to look at the pendulum.A generation – for the purposes of today’s discussion – is not a group of birth cohorts, but life cohorts, everyone who is alive at a particular moment. We’re not talking about Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers. We’re talking about the personality-shaping values that enchanted each of these groups during their adolescence. Those same ideas and values then altered the worldview of their mothers and fathers, the birth cohorts that preceded them.I was 5 years old in 1963, the year the most recent “Me” generation began its upswing toward the zenith of 1983, when Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and shouted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The president at the zenith of the previous “Me” (1903) was Teddy “San Juan Hill” Roosevelt and during the “Me” prior to him (1823) it was James Monroe, the president who notified European powers that America would no longer tolerate colonial expansion in our hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine effectively said to all the powers of Europe, “Step back or we’ll kick your ass.”A “Me” Generation&nbsp;is about individuality and self-expression, marching to the beat of a different drummer. It’s when one-of-a-kind is king, so do your own thing. A “Me” is the time of heroes.“Me”&nbsp;the individual, possessing unlimited potential,1. …demands&nbsp;freedom of expression.2. …applauds&nbsp;personal liberty.3. …believes&nbsp;one man is wiser than a million men,“A camel is a racehorse&nbsp;designed by a committee.”4. …wants&nbsp;to create a better life.5. …is about&nbsp;big dreams.6. …desires&nbsp;to be Number One. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”7. …admires&nbsp;confidence and is attracted to decisive persons.8. …leadership is,&nbsp;“Look at me. Admire me. Emulate me if you can.”9. …strengthens&nbsp;a society’s sense of&nbsp;identity&nbsp;as it elevates attractive heroes.10. …produces&nbsp;individuality and differentiation, one-of-a-kind heroes.Both “We” and “Me” are built on beautiful ideas,&nbsp;but we always take a good thing too far and then crave what we left behind.&nbsp;So we turn and face the opposite direction and do it all over again.And we’ve been doing it for 3,000 years.I was 45 at the beginning of the upswing of our current “We” generation (2003.)The driving force behind a&nbsp;“We”&nbsp;is&nbsp;“working together for the common good.”“We,”&nbsp;the group, the team, the tribe:1. …demands&nbsp;conformity for the common good.2. …applauds&nbsp;personal responsibility.3. …believes&nbsp;a million men are wiser than one man,“Two heads are better&nbsp;than one.”4. …wants&nbsp;to create a better world.5. …is about&nbsp;small actions.6. …desires&nbsp;to be a team member. “I came, I saw, I concurred.”7. …admires&nbsp;humility and is attracted to thoughtful persons.8. …leadership is,&nbsp;“Here’s the problem. Let’s work together to solve it.”9....

Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress.Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for never being satisfied. Always pushing, driving, demanding, questioning, never slowing, positively perfectionist.But is it&nbsp;wise to look at them as role models?What’s the value of pushing and driving if you&nbsp;can never be satisfied?These questions occurred to me as Pennie and I drove to the new home of close friends last week to sit and mourn the death of their mother. My pocket pixie spoke to us along the way. She was the perfect navigator, telling us where to turn and how far it would be before we’d need to turn again.That drive took 49 minutes.If someone had told me 28 years ago that I would one&nbsp;day&nbsp;carry a device in my pocket that would cheerfully guide me to any place I named, I would have thought them insane. But my pocket pixie also plays any song I want and shows me TV shows and movies and gives me details about everything important that’s happening in the world. She is the catalogue of all that can be bought and the repository of all the world’s history and knowledge. Touch a button and she becomes a camera. Another touch and she records a video. You can also use her as a telephone.Oh, I forgot to mention that when she’s being a&nbsp;catalogue, all I have to do is touch a button and she will purchase the item, charge it to my credit card and ship it to my house by 2nd-Day air.One click.But none of this surprises you. In fact, I wearied you a little by carrying on about it for three paragraphs. Am I right?You have an iPhone or something like it and you know how to use the navigator function on Google Maps and MP3 players have been around awhile and streaming video has been global for a decade.No king or emperor, pharaoh or czar ever lived in the&nbsp;comfort of&nbsp;a modest home with central heat and air conditioning. None of them ever ate such a wide variety of delicacies or enjoyed such entertainments as you and I have at our fingertips.We live beneath a waterfall of inventions and innovations and improvements. They come at us faster than we can see. Your pocket pixie has more than 1.5 million apps available that will give her specialized powers to serve you in ways you’ve never imagined.Yet we roll our eyes as we yawn and ask, “Is that all?”Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress and we are the most dissatisfied generation that has ever lived.I should know. I make my living by pointing at things and promising they will make tomorrow better than yesterday.I am an American ad man.If I were to run for president, I would be a spectacle. I would speak directly to the deepest dissatisfactions and frustrations and fears of the people. I would throw accusations and blame from my fingertips with such power that people would see me as a straight-talking teller of the truth. I would be colorful and irreverent and entertaining and keep you focused only on your dissatisfaction. I would promise to fix it all.My accusations could be silly.My promises could be ridiculous.The only thing that would need be true&nbsp;is the dissatisfaction of the people.And we are the most dissatisfied generation that has ever lived.Let us hope I never run for president because I would be a terrible one.And all it tookfor me to realize thiswas the deathof the motherof a friend.Roy H. Williams

Hungry people look for food.Sad people look for hope.Ambitious people look for opportunity.Oppressed people look for escape.But if food is available and you are neither sad nor oppressed and your ambition is – for now at least – satisfied, you are contented.Contented people look for entertainment.The company that&nbsp;wins more of the customer’s time is the one most likely to win their money.What currency do you offer your customer in exchange for their time?Do you offer them information?Information holds little interest for persons who aren’t currently in the market for your product.Information is valuable only to a&nbsp;customer who is currently, consciously in the market for a product they haven’t already chosen in their heart. This is when the search engine optimization energy&nbsp;of all your&nbsp;competitors will wiggle and wink at your customer from 46 different directions.SEO is a last-minute, last-ditch attempt to win the affections of the undecided and uncommitted.Why not win your customer’s heart&nbsp;before&nbsp;they need your product?Great ads make customers think of you immediately – and feel good about you – when they finally need what you sell.Would you like to win your customer’s time and attention?Give them entertainment.ENTERTAINMENT:&nbsp;“A thing to which a person chooses to direct their attention due to the pleasure it brings them.”We direct our attention to many things each day that do not bring us pleasure: the obligations that come with employment and the ambushes that come with life; tax returns and kids in trouble, lawsuits and medical problems.Entertainment is a currency.You would be amazed at what you can buy with it.You may recall that&nbsp;last week’s Monday Morning Memo&nbsp;ended with these lines:Weirdly, Wizard Academy doesn’t advertise. The only way you’ll hear about the Academy is from an alumnus who thinks you belong.And guess what?You do belong.”I was able to say “you belong” because you were entertained enough by the subject matter to read it all the way through to the end.And now you’ve done it again.This makes me happy.It’s a clear indication that you are a self-selected member our tribe.Welcome.Roy H. Williams,with Indy Beagle andAll the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy.

In the words of&nbsp;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”But day after day, week after week, month after month, things that are “merely urgent” keep&nbsp;me from doing what is truly important.What? That’s been happening to you, too?On Tuesday, Vice Chancellor Whittington and I slowed down long enough to have our first real planning session since he accepted the job 2 and 1/2 years ago.But some great strides have been made during that 2 and 1/2 years.Our online learning center&nbsp;– AmericanSmallBusiness.org – is gaining momentum and beginning to raise eyebrows all over the world.Whisk(e)y Sommeliers&nbsp;certified through&nbsp;our Whisk(e)y Marketing School are in high demand&nbsp;and every class is selling out.The campus&nbsp;no longer looks like a work-in-progress. Our diamond-in-the-rough is beginning to sparkle!The House of the Lost Boys&nbsp;(6 rooms) and&nbsp;Bilbo Baggins House&nbsp;(1 room) are in the final stages of preparation and we’re hoping to break ground on one of them before the end of the year.I’ve begun to be overshadowed&nbsp;by some of the other instructors. It’s not uncommon for me to greet a roomful of students only to learn that more than half of them have never heard of me! This is a good thing and important to the long-term health of the school.But this is what made last week’s planning session so important:Harvard University – established in 1636 – is organized into eleven separate academic units.Yale University – founded in 1701 – is organized into fourteen constituent schools.Wizard Academy – established in 2000 – is currently being organized into seven constituent schools.Writing SchoolThis series of classes will include the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop, Advanced Wordsmithing and Brandable Chunks, the Young Writers Workshop, Fiction and Screenwriting Workshop, and How to Write and Sell Non-Fiction.Digital Marketing SchoolThis series of classes will include Direct Response Ad Writing, Buyer Legends, Principles of Online Video, Effective Social Media Strategies, and How to Create Online Education for Customers and EmployeesScience SchoolThis series of classes will align the principles of growing and guiding a business to the universal principles of science and physics. Classes will include DaVinci and the 40 Answers, Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind, How To Sell Upscale Products and Services, Magic School, Fundraising for Non-Profits, Music and Creativity, The Art Marketing Workshop, Reputation Management, and Branding Highway.Decision SchoolThese courses will deal with the important decisions of life such as marriage, relationships, faith and psychology. (Wizard Academy’s Wedding Chapel Dulcinea is an outward-facing public extension of Decision School.) Courses will include Selling Customers Their Way, How to Lead a Dynamic Team, Public Speaking 101, Conflict Resolution, What to Do With the Rest of Your Life, and Escape the Box.School of FinanceThese classes will deal with the money side of business, including Employee Compensation Strategies, Personal and Business Finance (a.k.a. Budgeting Sucks!) Taxes and Legal Compliance, Diversity of Income, and How to Make Awesome Sauce.Whisk(e)y Marketing SchoolA series of certification courses instructing students in the arts of storytelling and pageantry related to Bourbon Whiskey and Scotch Whisky. Our certified Whiskey Sommeliers are in high demand to...

When his classmates at Wizard Academy dared him to do it, Garrison Cox rewrote the opening section of the Declaration of Independence to make it more easily understood.&nbsp;According to Garrison, Thomas Jefferson’s original was written at grade level 19.5. That’s a college education plus 3-and-a-half years of grad school!Garrison wrote his first revision at grade level 10.3 and his second revision at grade level 5.2. You can read all three versions below.Frankly, I was stunned by the impact of Garrison’s playful exercise.That’s why I decided to share it with you and it’s why Pennie and I have given Wizard Academy $6,000 to award to three lucky adventurers bold enough to follow in Garrison’s footsteps.Here’s the deal:&nbsp;The Conversation of the Dogs&nbsp;is a short novella written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1613. Many scholars consider it to be his finest work next to&nbsp;Don Quixote,&nbsp;but I can find only one translation of that story into English and it sounds as high-toned as Thomas Jefferson!Cervantes work is now in the public domain, of course, so we can mess with it all we want and even publish it when we’re done. You can download that lone English version – translated from the Spanish in 1881 by Walter K. Kelley of London – in the rabbit hole.&nbsp;Just click the image of&nbsp;Dog Quixote de La Mancha&nbsp;at the top of this page and&nbsp;the download link&nbsp;will magically appear.The story begins with a young man in a hospital, who, through a window, sees and hears two dogs begin to speak at the stroke of midnight. The dogs, Scipio and Berganza, discuss their experiences with their human masters. Cervantes leaves the reader to determine whether or not the dogs have actually been talking or the bedridden man has imagined it.Are you up for this adventure? By entering, you agree to allow Wizard Academy to distribute your “simplified language version” to all the world. You will receive no royalties, but you will be free to distribute&nbsp;your work&nbsp;in whatever additional ways seem good to you.The goal is to tell the complete story in fewer words using simpler language. Don’t worry about the grade level of your writing. Just make it simple and fun to read and do your best to capture the wit and humor and personality of each of the characters.Send your rewritten&nbsp;Conversation of the Dogs&nbsp;to [email protected] before midnight July 4, 2016.And now here are those 3 versions of the Declaration I told you about.ORIGINAL&nbsp;(GRADE LEVEL&nbsp;19.5):THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICAWhen in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most...

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.”– Dennis MillerWe think everyone else sees what we see. How could they not?And we think everyone&nbsp;would believe what we believe&nbsp;if only we could explain it clearly.But this is almost never true.Two people stand shoulder-to-shoulder observing a scene.One person sees pain and injustice and despair.The other sees opportunity and purpose and adventure.The first person sees the second as an impractical dreamer.The second sees the first as a complaining pessimist.Every person has&nbsp;a&nbsp;schema,&nbsp;a belief system about how the world works. Your schema&nbsp;is the lens through which you see and feel&nbsp;the world around you. It&nbsp;dictates your perceptual reality. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying your schema changes the facts. It just changes how you interpret them.Twice a week for the past several weeks, Ray Bard has been sending out clusters of about 20 quotes to more than 1,000 quote judges so that we might help him score their impact. Last week, Ray told us something every ad writer knows.There’s always some surprises about which quotes score the highest. But there’s one thing that doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s the range of opinions. For example, in the last Collection someone said: ‘Seems like you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for quotes,’ and the very next person commenting said: ‘So many great quotes. All winners for me.’”If your message has the power to move people, you can be certain that it won’t move everyone in the hoped-for direction. If you’re not prepared to smile your way through negative backlash from well-meaning friends, employees and associates, you’re never going to craft a message that will pierce the clutter of this over-communicated world.Ninety percent of all the books published each year are non-fiction.&nbsp;But the fiction books – the 10 percent –&nbsp;comprise 90 percent of all book sales.&nbsp;In the words of Tom Robbins, “People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.”Fictional characters in movies, novels and TV shows seem real even when we know they are not. We know fiction to be untrue, yet we treat it for a time as if it were true. We are simultaneously naïve, believing what we are told, and savvy, aware of the deception.Seven weeks ago I told you about a persuasion researcher, Maria Konnikova, whose work is being&nbsp;funded by two universities, Harvard and Columbia. Maria&nbsp;says&nbsp;the more a story transports us into its world, the more likely we are&nbsp;to believe it. The sweep of a story overcomes the facts of logic. When we are entertained by a story, we&nbsp;are likely to agree with the beliefs the&nbsp;story implies.In short: a&nbsp;story can&nbsp;reshape your schema.It is no accident that Jesus taught in parables.Most of us&nbsp;enjoy being&nbsp;pulled into a story.&nbsp;But some people have no taste for fiction or whimsy or wit.What you’re about to read is real and it happens all the time. My friend Jerry&nbsp;received this voicemail just last week:I am embarrassed for you because of your turning your business over to such a young person that has such a voice that I have to turn off the commercial. I have to go to my radio and turn it off. It hurts my ears. And the commercials are just childish. They are not professional. No, they are not professional. I would not use your company for anything. I am regretful I have used you forever. I told the world to use you. I’ve gotten you a million customers. I’m embarrassed and ashamed. And I’m sorry I have to make this phone call.”Would you like to know what triggered such heartfelt concern?[SFX – crickets, trucks driving...

The Internet rose to its full height in 2005 and cast a bright shadow across the land. It became our newspaper, our telephone book, our encyclopedia and our primary mailbox.Whole categories of advertising&nbsp;where swept away by&nbsp;that tsunami.Radio suffered the least damage of all the major media. She has proven to be far more durable than I had suspected.In their recent&nbsp;study of annual trends,&nbsp;Audience Insights&nbsp;reported some interesting findings. President Jeff Vidler summarized,We see absolutely no change in broadcast radio’s share of in-car tuning in the past 5 years. AM/FM radio is still dominant in-car, representing 66.2 percent of in-car listening. The growth of alternatives such as satellite radio and streaming audio appear to be coming at the expense of personal music (iPods, CDs and other libraries,) not broadcast radio.”Prior to that report I had no data beyond my own observation, but I knew that radio is continuing to reward its regular advertisers with a robust and hearty return-on-investment.And now I will tell you a story.Once upon a time, no one could own shares in more than 12 TV stations, 12 FM radio stations and 12 AM radio stations. We called this “the 12/12/12 rule.”We didn’t want anyone to be able to control the news.But this good law went “poof” in 1996 and consolidators immediately began gathering up radio stations by the armful. Big-business efficiencies were brought in to what had previously been a Mom’n’Pop category. Profits soared and Wall Street said, “Let’s do this thing. She looks doable, doesn’t she?”Corporate Radio was born with a full set of teeth but it had no reflection in the mirror.Investors have their own way of looking at the world. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but you can always be certain you’re talking to The Money when they do something that hurts like hell and then tell you, “It’s just business.”But Radio has never been “just business.” Radio is music and laughter and opinions and news and discussions and interviews with interesting people. Only a few minutes per hour are “just business,” and when a radio station is run correctly, even those few minutes can be entertaining and valuable and informative.Investors are a funny breed. They work themselves into a frenzy and then suddenly lose all interest.CBS announced in March that they plan to sell or spin off their radio assets this year. The goal, according to Les Moonves, is to “unlock value for our shareholders.” He indicated that radio has become “slow-growth” and “a drain on resources” that can be better directed to content production and digital endeavors.Cumulus pushed out founder Lew Dickey as CEO last autumn but that management shakeup didn’t stop the stock slide. Cumulus shares lost 80 percent of their value in 2015.&nbsp;The Washington Post&nbsp;recently quoted one debt-holder as saying, “The most logical thing is to break it up and sell it.”And now investors in iHeart (previously known as Clear Channel) are saying the same thing. Add it up and you’ll see that we’re talking about more than 1,400 radio stations possibly hitting the market all at once.Radio stations have lost their appeal to investors.But they haven’t lost their effectiveness for advertisers.In 2001, America Online was worth $226 billion. In 2015, Verizon bought AOL for just $4.4 billion. Somewhere along the way, it lost 98 percent of its value.In July of 2005, News Corporation, the parent company of FOX Broadcasting, bought Myspace for $580 million. In 2011 they sold it for $35 million, recovering just 6 cents on the dollar. It lost 94 percent of its value in just 6 years.I have no idea how much money these 1,400 radio stations will bring or even if all of them will be sold. I’m not pretending to be able to predict those numbers. But I definitely smell an...

Do what people expect you to do, say what they expect you to say, and you will quickly lose their attention.Nothing new… nothing surprising… nothing different. This is the essence of boredom. And it’s exactly what most advertisers put in their ads.And then there is a second group of&nbsp;advertisers who insert a series of “Once-in-a-lifetime! Don’t miss this event! One-week-only!” exclamation points in their ads in an attempt to make them exciting.But a third group – the adjective-addicted – are the most painful ad writers of all. They take the longest to say the least.&nbsp;Adjectives, adverbs and exclamation points are crutches used by writers unable to craft a sentence that can stand alone.So far, I’ve told you 3 things not to do:1.&nbsp;Don’t be predictable.2.&nbsp;Don’t yell.3.&nbsp;Don’t use too many words.To gain and hold attention, you must introduce an enigma, write a riddle, make a mystery, pose a puzzle.John Wheeler was a theoretical physicist who understood the hungry mind of mankind.If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.”Isaac Asimov made a similar observation.The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'”We ignore the predictable but notice the anomaly. Gaps, disturbances and incongruities elevate our attention.But when an advertiser pays for an ad,&nbsp;they incorrectly assume the public will be paying attention.&nbsp;And in the fog of that happy delusion, they think all they need to do is say, “Isn’t my product great!”And now you know why most ads deliver poor results.I’ve been hired by someone in a boring business category to get the attention of the locals in Las Vegas.That’s right.&nbsp;Las Vegas.The first thing I’m going to do is put up billboards that make no sense. These billboards will show no product and contain no telephone number or website. There will be only a smiling face and six inexplicable letters of the alphabet. People will think, “That’s absolutely the worst advertising I’ve ever seen.”Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right?The key will be the radio ads. Fully one-third of the population of Las Vegas will hear them. And then the billboards will make perfect sense.The one third I reach will be happy to solve the mystery for the two-thirds that didn’t hear the radio ads. (Trust me, my one-third knows the other two-thirds.)These are the Two Big Dangers:1:&nbsp;The answer to the riddle of the 6 letters has to be such an interesting story that people will be&nbsp;happy to share it. This final piece of the puzzle must make a satisfying “click” as it snaps into place so that it triggers a tiny orgasm of delight. This is not an easy thing to do.2:&nbsp;Critical mass: the radio ads have to reach a large enough group of people often enough that the message will be shared with the rest of the city. If we fall short in this, all is lost and I am an idiot.Private Note to Writers:&nbsp;Ads that say, “Isn’t this product great!” are the safest ones to write. Advertisers always love them and when they don’t work, all you have to say is, “We’ve been reaching the wrong people” or “We’ve been using the wrong media” or “We’ve got to do something about those negative online reviews.”&nbsp;Advertisers never blame the ad when it says, “Isn’t my product great!” So that’s the kind of ad you must&nbsp;write if you want to play it safe.But if you want to run with the big dogs, if you want to have an adventure, if you’re tired of looking down at your shoes and blame-shifting, I’ll see you in Las Vegas.Roy H. Williams

Let us supposethat this everyday worldwere at some one pointinvaded by the marvelous.1According to an article in the&nbsp;Harvard Business Review,&nbsp;such an event“requires a distinctive mode of organization—what sociologists call an&nbsp;art world.&nbsp;In art worlds, artists (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and so on) gather in inspired collaborations: They work together, learn from one another, play off ideas, and push one another. The collective efforts of participants in these ‘scenes’ often generate major creative breakthroughs… the mass-culture industries (film, television, print media, fashion) thrived by pilfering and repurposing their innovations.”&nbsp;2Today we’re going to look at three different&nbsp;art worlds&nbsp;and then I’m going to suggest that you create your own.Art World One:&nbsp;Although the works of the individuals that composed&nbsp;The Bloomsbury Group&nbsp;(1905 – 1937) profoundly influenced literature, economics and aesthetics in western society and altered modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality, this highly diverse group had no real agenda other than enjoying one another’s company. The group had ten core members and twenty occasionals. A few of the more well-known core members were Virginia Woolf, a fiction writer, Lytton Strachey, a biographer, John Maynard Keynes, the economist, and Vanessa Bell, a post-impressionist painter.The Bloomsbury Group&nbsp;was an art world, not a mastermind group.A mastermind group is focused on finding business solutions.An art world exists only to enjoy one another’s company.Art World Two:&nbsp;“Oh God, no more Elves!” Hugo Dyson groans in agony, lolling on the couch. J.R.R. “Tollers” Tolkien is about read from his work-in-progress,&nbsp;The Lord of the Rings.&nbsp;“It’s bad enough listening to Lewis read about Narnia!” Hugo Dyson prefers the works of Shakespeare and in the early 1960s hosted some televised lectures and plays about him. Dyson’s relaxed, easy style won him accolades around the world.&nbsp;The Inklings&nbsp;were a group of ten interesting people who met at The Eagle and Child pub from 1932 to 1949. In the end, each of the ten left their mark on the world, high and bright.The Inklings&nbsp;didn’t get together because they were important.They became important because they got together.Art World Three:&nbsp;It all began when Lauren Bacall looked at a group of friends sitting around her living room and said, “You look like a goddam Rat Pack.” Did you know&nbsp;that Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop weren’t in the original&nbsp;Rat Pack?&nbsp;The first Pack was a group who got together each week in the home of Lauren Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart. The Rat Pack included Bogart and Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, David Niven, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, Sid Luft and Swifty Lazar. Visiting members included Errol Flynn, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney, Jerry Lewis and Cesar Romero. The group broke up when Bogart died in 1957. Shortly thereafter, Sinatra began his famous “Rat Pack 2.0”The Rat Pack&nbsp;was an art world.They got together only because they enjoyed being together.They did not expect an outcome or a result.You cannot participate in an art world if you have an agenda.You’ve got to be a Worthless Bastard.Q:&nbsp;Why are you calling obviously successful people Worthless Bastards?A:&nbsp;Because the conversations of an art world must never revolve around problem solving or the creation of value or...

YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“Master, does success go to the clever one, or to the lucky one?”MERLYN:&nbsp;“Success is sometimes discovered by the clever one, and occasionally by the lucky one, but it is most often laid hold of by the determined one.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“Will you teach me to be determined?”MERLYN:&nbsp;“Determination is dangerous… relentless… remorseless… and inescapable. It returns&nbsp;to its master with treasure between its teeth.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“Is Determination a dog? Shall I summon it with a whistle?”MERLYN:&nbsp;“The whistle is a four-note tune that comes at a high price.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“Teach me the notes. I will pay.”MERLYN:&nbsp;“Everyone wants to be a beast, until it’s time to do what real beasts do.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“Teach me the notes.”MERLYN:&nbsp;“As you wish.”This is what the old wizard taught me:NOTE ONE: Count the cost.MERLYN:&nbsp;“Consider everything that might go wrong. Is your goal worth enough that you would&nbsp;endure all this discomfort and pain? If the&nbsp;answer is yes, then make peace with those possibilities and you will be bulletproof. No matter what happens, you will not panic. You will have already been there in your mind.”NOTE TWO: Throw your cap over the wall.MERLYN:&nbsp;“A group of boys walk a pathway next to a high stone wall that surrounds the estate of a nobleman. The older boys challenge each other to climb the wall, but none of them can do it. The youngest boy&nbsp;then takes off his cap and tosses it over the wall. Confused, the other boys watch as he quickly climbs the wall. Upon his return, he looks at them and says, ‘I was not going home without that&nbsp;cap.'”NOTE THREE: Employ Exponential Little Bits.MERLYN:&nbsp;“Ask yourself at every meal, ‘What difference have I made today?’ Do not let your head touch your&nbsp;pillow&nbsp;until you have taken an action that moves you&nbsp;a Little Bit closer to your goal, no matter how tiny that action&nbsp;might be. Exponential Little Bits are relentless activities that compound to make a miracle. When daily progress meets with progress, it doesn’t add, it multiplies.”NOTE FOUR: Be an observer, a simple witness to what happens.MERLYN:&nbsp;“You are responsible for your actions, not for the outcome. To be effective, you must be objective. Become a tool in the hand of the goal itself. Eliminate your ego. Do not seek recognition. It isn’t about you. It’s about&nbsp;the thing&nbsp;you’re doing. Are you willing to pay this price? Can you whistle the notes that&nbsp;summon the&nbsp;dog?”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“You said the dog returns&nbsp;to its master with treasure between its teeth.”MERLYN:&nbsp;“Yes.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“I see blood on that treasure.”MERLYN:&nbsp;“Yes.”YOUNG ONE:&nbsp;“And the blood is&nbsp;my own.”MERLYN:&nbsp;“You are ready to whistle the notes.”Roy H. Williams

Wizard Academy is now 16 years old.If we could find her birth certificate, we’d take her down to the DMV to get her driver’s license and then she could sport about town in Rocinante (above,) the only vehicle she owns.They grow up so fast.When Wizard Academy is 30, I’ll be 72.&nbsp;At least I hope I’ll be 72. Not everyone who attempts to hike to that mile marker gets there.Will you help us take the impossible dream of Wizard Academy forward into the future?Wizard Academy was launched by accident and&nbsp;grew through the addition of&nbsp;self-selected insiders, as did&nbsp;the&nbsp;Tuesday Group&nbsp;of Stéphane Mallarmé (1880 – 1897,) the&nbsp;Algonquin Round Table&nbsp;of midtown Manhattan (1919 – 1927,) and the artistic&nbsp;salon of Gertrude Stein&nbsp;(1913 – 1939.)The difference between our Academy and theirs is that:1.&nbsp;our group became an official 501c3 educational organization and built a permanent campus, and2.&nbsp;we are not artists who love business, but&nbsp;business people who love&nbsp;art: music and paintings and sculpture and photography and movies and literature and whatever&nbsp;you&nbsp;like that we didn’t mention.“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.” – Oscar Wilde, of&nbsp;the Tuesday GroupWizard Academy is here to stay. And if you’re reading this, I’m fairly certain you belong here. You will be amazed, energized, entertained and encouraged by the people you meet. You will gain insights that make you profoundly more successful.The Tuesday Group&nbsp;(Les Mardistes) of Stéphane Mallarmé included writers like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke and W.B. Yeats, along with painters like Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler. Also to be found among them was the quintessential sculptor, Rodin. Everyone who&nbsp;knew about&nbsp;the Tuesday Group, came.The Algonquin Round Table&nbsp;was a self-selected group of writers, editors, actors, and publicists – about 30 in all – that met for lunch on a regular basis at the Algonquin Hotel a block from Times Square. There hasn’t been another group quite like them in American popular culture or entertainment until now. Just visit the Toad and Ostrich pub in the tower at Wizard Academy any Friday afternoon at 4.The gatherings in the Stein home&nbsp;on Saturday evenings brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define&nbsp;modernism&nbsp;in literature and art. According to Gertrude Stein, the gatherings began by accident when,“more and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings—and the Cézannes. Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.” (Interestingly, that’s also why Pennie Williams launched Wizard Academy.)Self-selected insiders included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, René Crevel, Élisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel Cone, Mildred Aldrich and Carl Van Vechten.A visit to Wizard Academy is like a wonderful vacation in a foreign country. Few people come here only once.Did you know that you&nbsp;have a&nbsp;vacation home high on a plateau in central Texas where&nbsp;rabbits and deer wander the campus, wine flows freely and&nbsp;wedding bells ring 3 times&nbsp;a day?Come. Let your&nbsp;eyes be opened to answers that have been staring you in the face.Roy H. Williams

Standing&nbsp;in the corner of a dark theater, Joe listens as melancholy, majestic music rises from the orchestra pit to soar high above the spotlights.Joe has&nbsp;been hired to write lyrics for a musical play about Don Quixote.&nbsp;The first lyricist – the famous poet W.H. Auden – has been fired because his lyrics were downbeat, defeated and bitter.&nbsp;Joe Darion is his&nbsp;replacement, alone and unqualified, a nobody standing in the darkness with his back against the wall.“This&nbsp;music cries out for&nbsp;lyrics that speak of&nbsp;a yearning so deep that a man might rise above himself!” Joe&nbsp;stares&nbsp;into the darkness beyond&nbsp;the spotlights hoping to catch a glimpse of those lyrics.The music continues, as wistful and sweet&nbsp;as the&nbsp;hope for a better tomorrow.Joe&nbsp;closes his eyes and sees stars where the spotlights had been. His eyes are wet. “And to think the composer was a Madison Avenue jingle writer whose only claim to fame was the television ditty, ‘Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee.’ The man has risen above himself.”“The playwright has risen above himself, too. But he stood on the shoulders of a giant.”Joe recognizes the play as a clever reframing of the work of John Steinbeck who won the Nobel Prize in Literature two years ago and is now in failing health. “Certainly Wasserman will acknowledge his debt to Steinbeck.”“Certainly he will.”Twelve years ago Steinbeck spoke of his admiration for&nbsp;Miguel de Cervantes – the author of&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;– in his prologue to&nbsp;East of Eden,&nbsp;a&nbsp;retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. But in Steinbeck’s tale&nbsp;the boys weren’t the sons of Eve&nbsp;in the garden of Eden. They were twin sons of a reluctant prostitute.Nine years ago Steinbeck’s musical play,&nbsp;Pipe Dream,&nbsp;set a new record for advance ticket sales on Broadway. Steinbeck sent inscribed copies of&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;to the play’s producers with notes explaining it was “required reading” for the project. And Steinbeck’s would-be Dulcinea,&nbsp;Suzy, was once again a reluctant prostitute.Seven years ago Steinbeck began a novel called&nbsp;Don Keehan, the Marshall of Manchon,&nbsp;whose Quixote was a California farmer who had watched one-too-many westerns on television. And again his Dulcinea, Sugar Mae, was a reluctant prostitute.“In the original version of&nbsp;Don Quixote,&nbsp;Dulcinea is a village girl with nothing special about her. Quixote sees her only from a distance. They&nbsp;never meet. And she is not a prostitute.”So Wasserman’s portrayal of Dulcinea as a reluctant prostitute can’t have been inspired by the original story of 1605.It was obviously inspired by Steinbeck.“Certainly Wasserman will acknowledge him.&nbsp;Certainly.”This musical,&nbsp;Man of La Mancha,&nbsp;is a&nbsp;revision&nbsp;of the&nbsp;non-musical play Wasserman wrote 2 years after John Steinbeck had written&nbsp;his&nbsp;third&nbsp;Quixote-inspired story featuring an inexplicable, reluctant prostitute. That&nbsp;first, non-musical play of Wasserman’s was called,&nbsp;I, Don Quixote.&nbsp;Joe has a copy in his back pocket.Joe wipes his cheek, “But none of this&nbsp;helps me solve my problem.”“Steinbeck rocked the world with&nbsp;East of Eden,&nbsp;a story that echoed the Bible. Hemingway rocked the world with&nbsp;The Old Man and the Sea,&nbsp;a story that echoed the crucifixion of Christ.” Joe would like to rock the world, too. He pulls his&nbsp;dog-eared script of Wasserman’s first&nbsp;play from his back pocket and angles it to the light.“Somewhere in here is a scene where Quixote talks about God and Dulcinea.”He finds it.DR. CARRASCO:&nbsp;There are no giants. No kings under enchantment. No...

Facts are stacked like bricks to become a tower. Do you see it?But a story is a wave that takes you&nbsp;on a journey and leaves the memory of the&nbsp;tower far behind.Facts are solid.Stories are seductive.You will find the facts in the paragraphs below.You will find the stories in&nbsp;the rabbit hole.A Harvard graduate, Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. She is the recipient of the 2015 Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship and is a Schachter Writing Fellow at Columbia University’s Motivation Science Center.Let me put it a little more “Texan.”Harvard Medical School believes in Maria enough to give her money.The Motivation Science Center believes in her enough to give her money.These big-league institutions are helping to fund her research.Conclusion: Maria Konnikova is neither a poser nor a lightweight.In her new book,&nbsp;The Confidence Game,&nbsp;Maria explains how cognitive scientists are proving that&nbsp;stories&nbsp;are the most effective way to&nbsp;get people to change their minds.Eric Barker of&nbsp;Wired&nbsp;magazine was impressed with&nbsp;Maria’s book and followed it up with an interview. He talks&nbsp;about it in&nbsp;his blog,&nbsp;Barking Up the Wrong Tree.&nbsp;“When people tell us&nbsp;stories we tend to let our guard down. We don’t think we’re being ‘sold’ something, so we&nbsp;tend to go along&nbsp;for the ride. We quietly lose motivation to detect lies.”“When psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock decided to test the persuasive power of narrative, they found that the more a story transported us into its world, the more we were likely to believe it… The more engrossed a reader was in the story, the fewer false notes she noticed. The sweep of the narrative trumped the facts of logic. What’s more, the most engaged readers were also more likely to agree with the beliefs the story implied.”– Maria Konnokova,&nbsp;The Confidence GameEric Barker’s additional research included the following nuggets,“Nothing beats a story when it comes to convincing you of something…”“Our brains are wired to respond to stories…”“Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, has found repeatedly that nothing changes our emotions and behavior like the flow of a good story…”“Keith Quesenberry at Johns Hopkins studied more than 100 Super Bowl ads to determine what the most effective ones had in common. The answer?&nbsp;They told a story.”Will you give me a couple of extra minutes today if I promise to teach you something valuable?I want&nbsp;to help you understand what is – and is not – a story.I want to help you attract more customers.I’d like you to compare this week’s MondayMorningMemo – the one you’re reading now – to last week’s memo,&nbsp;Herbert and the Bullfight.Herbert and the Bullfight&nbsp;tells a story.This week’s memo does not.This week’s memo uses simile, “Facts are stacked like bricks…” and metaphor, “a story is a wave…” to make statements of&nbsp;fact more colorful.But it takes more than color&nbsp;to tell&nbsp;a story.You&nbsp;met&nbsp;several characters in this memo – Maria Konnokova, Eric Barker, Melanie Green, Timothy Brock, Paul Zak and Keith

Agnes De Mille once wrote,“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”Agnes was right about most of us, but she was completely wrong about Herbert.Herbert sculpts and paints. Abstract expressionism is his thing.“It’s like jazz,” he says. “Art is a feel. I like to journey into a world where words don’t exist.”Edgar “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist who wrote Judy Garland’s wistful&nbsp;Somewhere Over the Rainbow, once made a similar observation.“Words make you think thoughts.Music makes you feel a feeling.But a song makes you feel a thought.”But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.The story of Herbert and the bullfight begins in 1930, when Louis, a mandolin-playing Ukrainian Jewish tailor, comes to America and falls in love with Tillie Goldberg on New York’s Lower East Side. They get hitched, move to L.A. and have two little boys and a girl.In 1955, first-son David is a well-known drummer and second-son Herbert is a trumpet player in the marching band at USC. Daughter Mimi is learning to play piano.In 1962, Herbert is in the garage recording a trumpet song called “Twinkle Star” when he decides to take a break and drive to Mexico. He recently told the story on&nbsp;CBS Sunday Morning.“Tijuana had some world-class matadors, and this trumpet section in the stands, you know, they would announce the different programs, the different events in the bullfight. “Ta-Dahh! Pa-Da&nbsp;Dattle-Da-Dattle&nbsp;Da-Dahhh. I got kind of, uh, chill bumps from all that stuff and I tried to translate the feelings of those afternoons to a song.”Herbert returns home, flavors “Twinkle Star” with the soft and spicy taste of a Tijuana afternoon, and renames it, “The Lonely Bull.”He mails his record to some radio stations and the song becomes a Top Ten hit.Encouraged, Herbert hires some other musicians to play alongside him. Their exotic, jazzy groove is often described as “blithe, Latin-over-lilt,” so it’s easy to understand why everyone thinks Herb and his boys are Hispanic. But not one of them has a drop of Spanish blood. Herb describes his band as, “four lasagnas, two bagels, and an American cheese.” Audiences know them as “Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.”In 1966, they sold more records than the Beatles.Herbert goes&nbsp;on to score&nbsp;five No. 1 hits, 15 gold albums, 14 platinum albums and win eight Grammy Awards. No one but Herb&nbsp;has ever had 4 albums&nbsp;simultaneously&nbsp;in the Top 10.Seventy-two million record albums is quite a few to sell, don’t you think?But Herbert is just getting started.Immediately following the success of The Lonely Bull, he convinces Jerry Moss to become his business partner. Alpert and Moss produce and distribute their fantastically successful Tijuana Brass albums under their own record label, A&amp;M.In 1969, Herb discovers a brother/sister duo that becomes fantastically successful as well: Richard and Karen Carpenter. Soon A&amp;M is producing 400 different bands and artists, many of whom will see the stars align to spell their names in the midnight sky.In 1989, Herb sold A&amp;M Records to Polygram for 500 million dollars.And it all beganwhen the son of a Ukranian tailordecided to&nbsp;push himself beyond his comfort zoneand go on a road trip to Mexico.Roy H. Williams

Pressure, pressure, pressure unspeakable then BANG the world breaks open and a plateau pops up from solid rock, creating a fabulous view of the land below. That’s what happened in Central Texas.That’s what happens in life, too. But we’ll talk about that in a minute.Wizard Academy straddles the Texas escarpment, a magical place where the green meets the brown along a 480-mile crack in the crust of the southern United States. My geologist buddy Andrew Backus says it was created by continental shift during the Miocene era, about 12 million years ago.It was along this plateau-ridge that the Spanish built their first missions. The rising tiers of white limestone rising 300 to 1,000 feet above the green prairies reminded them of balconies. And that is how the “Balcones” escarpment got its name. Notable features of this escarpment are its massive artesian springs gushing tens of millions of gallons per day.But we’re not talking about geology today.We’re talking about you.And we’re not talking about the sparkling waters that gush up through a crack in the earth. We’re talking about the sparkling creativity that gushes up through a crack in you…and the price of releasing that creativity.The glistening water of your unconscious mind lies deep beneath your consciousness. The only way for it to come gushing out is through a shifting of tectonic plates.Few things disturb us so much as those earthquakes that release our creativity.If it’s been awhile since you felt the earth shifting beneath your feet, you’re probably feeling “a little dried up.”Oh! I have your attention now?Each of us has four different modalities of gathering and processing information. We arrange them in whatever&nbsp;order we prefer.Your temperament is determined by the order of your preferences.We operate chiefly in our two most-preferred modalities. But when both of these have failed us, we reach deep within and begin operating in our&nbsp;third&nbsp;most-preferred. It feels a little awkward and it causes us stress, but when our top two methods have failed us, it’s what we do.And if that&nbsp;third-preferred modality doesn’t deliver the desired result, we’ll dig still deeper to lay hold of our&nbsp;least-preferred method of interaction. Psychologists call this our inferior function.We almost never go there.But when we do – even if we stay there only briefly – the recovery time&nbsp;is glorious. Millions of gallons of creativity come sparkling&nbsp;into the sunlight through the crack created by that&nbsp;earthquake.Dr. Richard D. Grant calls this process&nbsp;“a trapdoor to the unconscious.”And now you understand why the first day of any transformative class at&nbsp;Wizard Academy&nbsp;is crammed-full of relentless stimulation. As you struggle up the mountainside, big ideas come roaring at you like boulders during&nbsp;an avalanche. You barely escape one before&nbsp;the next one is upon you.You’re utterly exhausted by the end of the day.But&nbsp;then you relax during dinner as&nbsp;you talk with your new friends, the ones who were with you on that mountain.That’s when the magic begins.It never fails.Roy H. Williams

When you challenge traditional wisdom, the first hand in the air will often be that of a guardian of the status quo who will challenge you with an “outlier argument,” pointing to that rare exception as though it disproves your premise.But an outlier does not disprove the rule. In fact, statisticians consider data to be more reliable when it has an appropriate number of outliers. Data that presents itself uniformly usually indicates a bias in the methods used for information gathering.Are there people in your life who challenge your every suggestion with an outlier argument?&nbsp;Learn to include the outliers in your thesis statement.&nbsp;When you begin by acknowledging the rare exceptions, you make room for the Guardians to calm down and begin listening.Address the exceptions and you can dismiss them.&nbsp;Address and dismiss.In the minds of highly organized people, your&nbsp;idea will seem incomplete and not-yet-ready when there is no plan for dealing with exceptions.When you leave out the exceptions, you’re leaving out too much.You must do more than explain why your idea will work.You must explain&nbsp;where and when it&nbsp;won’t&nbsp;work.But when you have acknowledged&nbsp;that you are aware of&nbsp;the loopholes, compress your&nbsp;core concept into the fewest possible words.Shorter hits harder.Two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson said, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do,” and two hundred years before him, William Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”Jefferson and Shakespeare knew that&nbsp;exformation*&nbsp;is a wonderful tool for holding the attention of readers, listeners and viewers. Exformation makes use of what is already known to the audience, or can easily be figured out through context.Information is what you include.Exformation is what you exclude.When Victor Hugo wrote his publisher to ask how his most recent book,&nbsp;Les Miserables, was being received by the public, Hugo simply wrote “?”, to which his publisher replied “!”, to indicate the book was selling well. This exchange would have no meaning to a third party because the&nbsp;power of exformation depends upon prior knowledge&nbsp;that each participant brings to the party.Do you know what your audience brings to the party?If you tell them what they already know, you bore them. Or worse, you insult them by assuming them to be ignorant. But if&nbsp;you assume they&nbsp;know things they don’t know, you fail to connect with them. You waste their time. You are irrelevant.In public speaking,&nbsp;when you suspect your&nbsp;audience might be familiar with some&nbsp;of the ideas in your presentation, it is important that you acknowledge that fact. Consider saying, “I realize some people in this room probably know more than I do about&nbsp;today’s topic, but I don’t want to assume everyone is familiar with all the&nbsp;ideas.” This is when you must raise your hand in&nbsp;the air as you sweep the audience with your eyes and say, “Do I have your permission to quickly explain&nbsp;some&nbsp;of the things you already know, just so we don’t leave anyone behind? Would it be okay if I did that?” Leave your own hand in the air as you scan the audience. Look for agreement. You might even have to repeat the question while keeping your hand upraised.When you have seen enough people raise their hands, be sure to smile and say, “Thank you,” as you lower your&nbsp;own.Do this and you will connect&nbsp;with a high percentage of the room.They will be on your side and in your corner before you even begin your talk.Leave out this important step and&nbsp;you’ve left out way too much.Roy H. Williams* Tor Nørretranders coined the...

What is the income&nbsp;range of snowboarders?What is the&nbsp;age&nbsp;range of people who do yoga?What is the age and income range of Carolina Panthers football fans?What is the age and income range of Republicans?What are the beliefs and opinions of a person who is 30 years old?What the hell is a Millennial?Your intellect believes those questions have answers but your heart knows the answers would be ridiculous. Age and income are not tribal markers. They are false categories that appeal only to the small-minded person within each of us that clings to stereotypes.Let go of the stereotypes and embrace a more accurate picture.Successful advertising talks to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer.Hills and snow and a love of adrenaline are what snowboarders have in common.Yoga is what binds Yoga people.A team unites Carolina Panthers fans.Strands of belief unite a political party.What matters to your customer has little to do with the year they were born or the amount of money they make. What matters are the desires and beliefs and values of their tribe.Marketing isn’t about targeting an individual. Marketing is about targeting a group.The behavior of an individual can vary widely from moment to moment. But when you observe the behavior of&nbsp;a self-selected group&nbsp;you’ll see predictable patterns emerge. This is true whether you’re watching snowboarders or yoga practitioners or Republicans but it goes horribly wrong when you categorize by age group or income.Millennials aren’t a tribe. They are a collection of tribes.We unconsciously join a tribe when we see and feel and think as they do on a particular subject.&nbsp;Tribal marketing&nbsp;simply reflects back to a tribe their own vision and emotion and logic.Brilliant ads&nbsp;are built on this concept.I mentioned snowboarding and yoga in my opening statements because Chip Wilson made millions of dollars by selling specialized clothing to the snowboarding tribe, then switched to the yoga tribe in 1998 (Lululemon) and started making billions. Forbes currently ranks him in the Top 1000 richest people on earth.Chip Wilson understands Tribal Marketing.&nbsp;It is a happy&nbsp;affirmation of identity and purpose.Yoga people span the spectrum of age and ethnicity and income. Their education, politics and taste in music are similar to the unfiltered public.But they all agree on Yoga. And that’s all you need to know.Ryan Deiss of DigitalMarketer.com is a cognoscenti of Wizard Academy whose advice is valued by followers worldwide. Ryan says, “Identify a tribe. Engage the tribe. Market to the tribe.”Rolex makes watches for tribes.The Submariner is the watch for the scuba tribe.The Daytona is the watch for the car-guy tribe.The Yacht Master is the watch for the boating tribe.The Air King is the watch for the airplane tribe.The Milgauss is the watch for the technical tribe.The Explorer is the watch for the outdoor tribe.The President is the watch for the business tribe.Marketing to tribes has worked out pretty well for Rolex, don’t you think?A tribe isn’t targeted through carefully selected media but through carefully selected words. If your product was designed with a tribe in mind and your ads are written with that tribe in mind, you are on your way to joyous success.Forget targeting through demographically-correct media.Begin targeting through tribally-correct ad copy.Learn the language of the tribe.When you’ve learned to see and feel and think as the tribe does, your ads will start working wonders.Enough said.Roy H. Williams

What stories do you tell yourself concerning your disappointments, failures and embarrassments? Were you the&nbsp;unfortunate victim of evil?Perhaps it’s time you start telling different versions of those stories. Regret and fear are incapable of guiding you to&nbsp;Success.The stories you tell yourself are&nbsp;the foundations of your self-image.“The first principle of self-deception is you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”&nbsp;— Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in PhysicsThere are many ways in which the truth can be told.If your story reveals you to be an unfortunate victim, you become an obstacle to your own success. But you are not a victim. Your experience proves only that you are resilient, resourceful and strong. You powered through.It’s a matter of perspective.“Every day is a new opportunity to change your life. You have the power to say ‘This is not how my story ends.’”&nbsp;— Karen SalmansohnIn just 23 words Karen Salmansohn causes you to see yourself in an interesting duality of existence. You are (1.) a living character in a story that is being written, and (2.) you are the author of that story. Implicit in her statement is the unspoken question, “Have you decided what your character will do next?”That’s a lot to convey in just 23 words, don’t you think?Salmansohn doesn’t have to tell you&nbsp;that you have feelings and opinions and the power of choice. You already know these things. But she makes those&nbsp;big ideas spring to life&nbsp;using&nbsp;a tool&nbsp;I’ve decided to call&nbsp;reverse personification.Personification gives human attributes to things that are not human. But you&nbsp;are&nbsp;human. Yet in just 23 words Salmansohn makes you an&nbsp;imaginary&nbsp;character who is brought to life and given the power to decide what happens&nbsp;next.Arianna Huffington makes a similar observation.“Just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker.”What separates Salmonsohn’s 23 words from Huffington’s 11 is that Salmansohn makes you a character in a story while&nbsp;Huffington hands you the clicker to a television show called&nbsp;Life&nbsp;that is unfolding before your eyes.Perspective – seeing through the eyes of another entity – is what gives&nbsp;personification&nbsp;its power.Likewise, perspective is the essence of&nbsp;metaphor.I urge you to experiment with personification and metaphor this week. They are powerful tools of persuasion.Personification gives human attributes to things that are not human.You can say, “It was hot outside,” or you can say, “The angry sun glared down at me.” Which one is more interesting?Fifteen years ago a man wrote a radio ad in which the narrator described a suffocating, sticky, gummy&nbsp;feeling that is stripped away by a shower of hot water and cleansing soap, leaving him buoyant, bouncy, vibrant and clean, smelling good and feeling&nbsp;young again with all his natural color restored. He wrote that ad as a homework assignment during the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. He owned a carpet cleaning company in Canada. It wasn’t until the end of the ad that you realized the carpet was describing what it felt like to be cleaned.&nbsp;Personification.I’ve always wished I had kept a copy of that ad.Metaphors use something as a symbol of something else.In the&nbsp;Destinae&nbsp;trilogy I might have said, “The stars were reflected on the surface of the water,” but I chose to make the stars something other than reflections. “Bright stars danced on rippling waters, a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness.”“Stars danced” is personification.“Little fishes of light” is a...

Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees and $5.9 billion in revenues at their peak in 2004.Then the installation of cable modems made streaming video possible.Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection on September 23, 2010.*Technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is standing on its tracks.Flashback –&nbsp;In the year 2000, 4.4% of American households had a home connection to broadband; by 2010 that number had jumped to 68%.1Let’s look at 2005 in particular. Katrina wasn’t the only hurricane that year. Hurricane YouTube and Hurricane Facebook also made landfall. Then, when Hurricane iPhone hit us in 2007, the whole world began recording and uploading pointless drivel. Reactionary prognosticators, drunk on technology, predicted that social media would completely replace traditional advertising.Have you noticed that no one is saying that anymore?But business people still like to think the web is the great equalizer because every customer is carrying a mobile device and every business has access to the same social media platforms.But it’s not the platform that gives you success. It’s the content.How good is your content?Is there an audience for what you have to say?How well are you saying it?One of the great myths of marketing is that promoting a business though social media is cheap and easy. But the people who are using social media successfully will tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to play at today’s table, you’ve got to stack real money on it. And even then, there’s no guarantee you’re going to win.Last week I hired a major-league video guy to work for me full-time because I don’t want to be seen as a Wiffle ball player&nbsp;swish-swish-swishing&nbsp;the air with my little plastic bat. I didn’t hire him to create videos for my clients. He won’t have time for that.I would have used Sunpop Studios, the online-video company owned by my sons, but they don’t have the ability to give just one client the number of weekly man-hours my projects will require. So they hired my major-league hitter for me.AIf you’re serious about engaging the public, you need better video than you can get from that “really tech-savvy college kid” you know. Everyone knows that kid. Heck, I know that kid wearing 12 different faces but the kid can’t swing the hammer. He’s not limited by intelligence or talent. He’s limited by experience.Hammers don’t build mansions. Skilled carpenters do.Low-cost video equipment is a hammer. You can do marvelous things with it if you have the skill and experience.But you can also smash your thumb.My sons have demonstrated to me&nbsp;that&nbsp;an experienced professional using inferior equipment can make major-league videos, while&nbsp;an amateur using&nbsp;the best equipment&nbsp;on earth will make Wiffle ball videos.No one looks up to a Wiffle ball player.You need to begin&nbsp;adding video&nbsp;to your web presence.And you need the help of pros to do it well.Roy H. Williams* Blockbuster turned down the opportunity to acquire a little DVD-mailing company called&nbsp;Netflix&nbsp;for just $50 million in 2000, when that price represented Blockbuster’s revenue for just 3 days. Netflix market value now stands at $32.9 billion; a number that exceeds the value of the&nbsp;CBS network.Comcast chose not to buy&nbsp;Disney.&nbsp;Yahoo turned down the opportunity to buy&nbsp;Google.&nbsp;Yahoo and Friendster both turned down the opportunity to buy&nbsp;Facebook.&nbsp;But rather than

Watson is the mega-powerful learning computer created by IBM.A brief interaction between IBM’s Watson and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan has gathered more than three-and-a-half-million YouTube views in just 90 days.ESTABLISHING SHOT:&nbsp;[Dylan walks into the frame carrying a guitar.]WATSON:&nbsp;Bob Dylan, to improve my language skills.DYLAN:&nbsp;[sits down on sofa with his guitar]WATSON:&nbsp;I’ve read all your lyrics.DYLAN:&nbsp;You’ve read all of my lyrics?WATSON:&nbsp;I can read 800 million pages per second.DYLAN:&nbsp;That’s fast.WATSON:&nbsp;My analysis shows your major themes are that “time passes” and “love fades.”DYLAN:&nbsp;That sounds about right.WATSON:&nbsp;I have never known love.DYLAN:&nbsp;Maybe we should write a song together.WATSON:&nbsp;I can sing.DYLAN:&nbsp;You can sing?WATSON:&nbsp;Do be bop, be bop a do, dooby-dooby do. Do. Do. Dooby do.DYLAN:&nbsp;[stands up and walks out of the room]Two associative memories flicker immediately to mind.“Watson, come here. I need you.”– Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant, the first words ever spoken by telephone.A second Watson, that devoted assistant of the irascible deductive genius Sherlock Holmes, has forever sparkled brightly in my mind. He is the Sancho Panza to Sherlock’s Quixote.Indy Beagle tells me Watson is the definitive name for a scientist’s assistant.*Want to hear something really cool? You can upload samples of your writing to Watson and he will instantly tell you things about yourself that will blow your mind.He’s willing to evaluate your tweets, your blog posts, your emails to friends, your short stories and poems and novels and anything else you can rustle up, but he needs you to give him at least 3,500 words if you want really accurate feedback.I’ve uploaded 6 documents on 6 separate occasions with word counts ranging from 4,053 to 75,856. The stylistic differences between these documents was such that&nbsp;I believe most readers would doubt a single writer wrote them all. Not only did Watson give me essentially the same feedback all 6 times, I was startled by the deep accuracy of his insights. Based solely on my use of language, Watson was able to glean things about me that very few people have ever uncovered.I’m sure you can see how marketers could profit from Watson’s insights into the values and preferences of individuals they’re hoping to sell. But how about public relations firms looking for journalists who sound friendly on a specific topic? And let’s not forget editors who want their writers to establish a specific tone. And hey! How about employers looking for workers who fit their corporate culture?I’ve asked all the Wizard of Ads Partners to upload things they’ve written so we can compare our feedback. We need to determine whether Watson got lucky with me, or if he can truly evaluate&nbsp;human personalities merely by reading what each of us have&nbsp;written.In today’s rabbit hole Indiana Beagle will give you a hyperlink to interact with Watson. You’ll find it on the page where Indy gives you the BeagleSword, just above&nbsp;that video of Watson talking to Dylan.If you’re cool with it, send us a screenshot of the&nbsp;feedback Watson gives you attached to an email telling us whether or not you feel it to be accurate. Give Watson’s assessment an accuracy grade on a scale of 1 to 100 and send it to [email protected]. Everyone who participates will be notified of Watson’s&nbsp;composite score after final tabulation.One last thing, a word to the wise:&nbsp;<a...

Springtime pierced the pale heart of winterwith a shout of green and a blade of grass.The rumbles of summer are wooden wagon wheelsbanging hollow in the dust far away.Autumn sings of passage in a minor keyas the quail fly up for the hunters.The white of winteris a splinterunder a&nbsp;fingernail.Our Earth experiences seasons as it orbits the Sun because of its 23.5° tilt.What does your tilt cause you to experience?Toward what are you inclined?Are you tilted toward or away from mass production?Toward or away from romance?Toward or away from history?Toward or away from dance?Your tilt alters your perspective.Your inclination gives you opinions.The way you lean&nbsp;affects your mood.So here are&nbsp;the questions.Is your leaning correct?Are the rest of us simply&nbsp;wrong?Are your inclinations on the button?Are you tilted exactly the right way?Our&nbsp;planet says 23 and a half degrees&nbsp;are proper and holy and right and true.But that is the planet.What say you?Roy H. Williams

Here’s a link to last week’s Monday Morning Memo,&nbsp;The Other Kind of Excellence, Part One.“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”These are the words of an&nbsp;Entrepreneur&nbsp;who has an idea half-formed and a dream bigger than the sunrise. He or she believes that if you&nbsp;leap,&nbsp;a net will appear. Entrepreneurs&nbsp;are confident in the&nbsp;street-smarts&nbsp;they glean from their failures and their&nbsp;optimistic&nbsp;futurevision lets them see beyond the awkward and ugly “proof-of-concept” phase to the glowing&nbsp;innovation&nbsp;that lies beyond it.“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”These are the words of a strong&nbsp;Leader:&nbsp;the champion of the tribe, the perfect embodiment of commitment. He or she can be trusted to&nbsp;think&nbsp;on their feet,&nbsp;improvise&nbsp;when necessary and&nbsp;infuse&nbsp;co-workers with their passion. If you turn to the right – toward Excellence through Poise and Responsiveness – you will need strong team leaders.“Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”These are the words of an effective&nbsp;Manager:&nbsp;the guardian of the style guide, the protector of the status quo. He or she can be trusted to&nbsp;implement&nbsp;processes and insure that employees&nbsp;conform&nbsp;to policies and&nbsp;follow&nbsp;procedures. If you turn to the left – toward Excellence through Planning and Execution – you will need an effective manager.Managers and Leaders are natural enemies.The Manager thinks the Leader is reckless and undisciplined and sloppy.The Leader can’t decide whether the Manager is a tight-ass robot or a pencil-pushing sourpuss who was weaned on a pickle.Leaders thrive amidst chaos and feel handcuffed by order.Managers are repulsed by chaos and feel empowered by order.Most organizations arebegun&nbsp;by entrepreneurs,grown&nbsp;by leaders, and lateroptimized&nbsp;by managers.Companies built on passionate Poise and Responsiveness are difficult to sustain&nbsp;long-term. Can you think of one that has kept the spring in its step and the sparkle in its eye for more than a decade or two? Poise and Responsiveness often give way to Planning and Execution&nbsp;so that&nbsp;systems and methods and techniques and procedures can be created,&nbsp;allowing consistent&nbsp;results to&nbsp;be obtained by average people.Excellent people are hard to find, hard to keep and expensive to pay.Average people are everywhere.If your organization is suffering because you can’t find enough&nbsp;excellent people,&nbsp;you are probably a leader who needs to give some of your authority to a manager who will create systems and policies and methods and procedures.Just sayin’.But if your organization is feeling a little stale and out-of-touch and behind-the-times and you feel it needs a&nbsp;transfusion of energy, you’re probably a manager who needs to give some of your authority to a leader.A leader is a highly productive troublemaker, an artist who knows which rules to break, which procedures to change, which policies to end and which mountain to climb.“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”— Pablo PicassoThere really are two roads to Excellence.–&nbsp;Roy H. Williams

Your company is approaching an intersection. The light is green.Turn left and you’re headed toward Excellence.Turn right and you’re headed toward another kind of Excellence.Go straight and you’ll arrive at Mediocrity.Most companies go straight ahead because if they turn left or right they’ll be moving toward one kind of Excellence&nbsp;but directly away from the other kind&nbsp;and something about that feels vaguely wrong to them. Fearful of&nbsp;what they’ll be leaving behind if they turn to the left or right, they plunge straight ahead in a counterproductive compromise.I’ve seen Mediocrity. It’s bland and boring and beige. You definitely don’t want to go there.Compromise leads to Mediocrity.Let me give you a glimpse of the scenery you’ll find on the left and on the right.Turn left and you’ll reach Excellence through Planning and Execution.1. Policies will revolve around efficiency and the reduction of waste.2. Processes will be streamlined and standardized to minimize&nbsp;costs and problems.3. Few decisions will be left to front-line employees.4. You will need workers that are task-oriented, happy to conform to your policies, implement your processes and follow your procedures.5. Customers will love that you are reliable and consistent.6. Management will be focused on planning the work and working the plan.7. Your success will be scalable because the&nbsp;need for talent and passion and commitment will have been replaced by systems and methods and procedures. A burger and fries at McDonalds is precisely the same at each of their 36,000 locations.Turn right and you’ll reach Excellence through Poise and Responsiveness.1. Policy will be to serve each customer in the manner they prefer to be served.2. Processes will be about going the extra mile.3. Big decisions will be left to front-line employees.4. You will need workers that have talent and passion and commitment.5. Customers will love the attention that you lavish on them.6. Management will be focused on long-term relationships and the creation of a tribe.7. Your success will rise and fall according to your ability to recruit and retain excellent people. They will cook your burger with the meat you prefer, the bun you prefer and serve it with exactly the combination of condiments you prefer. They will call you by name as they present it to you and bring you an extra cloth napkin because these burgers are really juicy. They’ll refill your drink, ask about Alfie your dog and tell you about the special dessert the chef prepared when he heard that you were going to be here today. Of course you love this place. It’s excellent.Never forget: anytime you’re moving toward one kind of Excellence, you’re moving&nbsp;directly away&nbsp;from another kind.The important thing is to choose.Have courage. Follow your heart. Turn to the left or right.Roy H. Williams

Branding – as it is taught today – will at best cause people to remember you and have a mild opinion.But unlike yesterday’s branding, today’s bonding is the beginning of relationship, the essence of loyalty and the foundation of community among human beings.Bonding, when done properly, makes people feel connected to you. It is the little-known secret of marketing to millennials* and their parents.Bonding creates community – surrogate family – connectedness – relationship – belonging.When we talk about “community” in marketing, always remember: We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.“I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi’s jeans.” – John KayThe personality you craft for your brand is essential to the bonding process.The public will give you their time if you offer them entertainment.They will give you their money if they feel connected to you.In the days of the Old West, branding made a cow yours.In today’s hyper-communicated society, bonding makes a&nbsp;customer yours.Remember, it’s all about identity, a reflection of self.“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.” – Bill BernbachBill Bernbach obviously understood bonding, as did my hero, John Steinbeck.“Man is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things – property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobiles are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know – that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.”– John Steinbeck,&nbsp;The Sea of CortezLest you think Steinbeck wasn’t speaking of marketing, here’s another line from that same 1941 travelogue.“These Indians were far too ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on.”Millennials would have&nbsp;loved John Steinbeck.** He had perception, perspective and a piercing wit. With authenticity, clarity of vision and complete transparency, he spoke the bonding-language of millennials 60 years before they were born.Ed Sheehan wrote Steinbeck’s obituary for&nbsp;The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle:“He was a writer of immense sensitivity in a man-shell of gruffness. The quality that distinguishes his work is an enormous compassion. He saw nobility in a hobo, felt the sadness of seasons and believed that dogs could smile.”(Of course he did, because&nbsp;we&nbsp;can.&nbsp;– Indiana Beagle)I’ll be teaching bite-sized morsels of the 12 detailed steps of bonding over the next few months&nbsp;in a series of videos&nbsp;for the American Small Business Institute. Or you can come to the 2-day Wizard Academy workshop&nbsp;in February&nbsp;if you’re willing to stay in a hotel, (when the alumni got a heads-up email from Vice Chancellor Whittington a few days ago, all 18 rooms on campus filled up within 4 hours,) or you can be one of the first 18 to snag a room for the&nbsp;<a...

Words ring like bells when you&nbsp;collide them correctly.It’s in the Bible.In the opening chapter of Genesis we read about the creation of the universe – God spoke it into existence if you can believe it&nbsp;– and we read about the creation of mankind.An interesting chapter, that one. The only information we’re given about God is that God said this and that and things began to spontaneously appear.Then in verse 26 God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness… So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”Stay with me, I’m almost done with the religious part.God spoke worlds into existence and we can, too, because we are made in his likeness.You and I speak worlds into existence in the minds of our listeners every time we bang words together.And now we get to the Scottish part:In her most excellent book,&nbsp;The Power of Glamour,&nbsp;Virgina Postrel tells us that glamour is “an old Scottish word meaning a literal kind of magic spell that makes us see an illusion, something different than what is there, usually something&nbsp;better&nbsp;than what is there.”In the Late Middle Ages, the Scots would speak of a person having “cast a glamour” so that another person was enchanted by it.Interestingly, that Scottish word from which we take&nbsp;glamour&nbsp;is the same word from which we take&nbsp;grammar.Grammar:&nbsp;the banging together of words so they create realities&nbsp;in the mind; a literal kind of magic spell that makes you see an illusion, something different than what is there, usually something better than what is there.Here are&nbsp;some examples of “casting a grammar.”“The key!” shouted Bilbo. “The key that went with the map! Try it now while there is still time!”Then Thorin stepped up and drew the key on its chain from round his neck. He put it to the hole. It fitted and it turned! Snap! The gleam went out, the sun sank, the moon was gone, and evening sprang into the sky.Now they all pushed together, and slowly a part of the rock-wall gave way. Long straight cracks appeared and widened. A door five feet high and three feet wide was outlined, and slowly without a sound swung inwards. It seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the hole in the mountain-side, and deep darkness in which nothing could be seen lay before their eyes, a yawning mouth leading in and down.– J.R.R. Tolkien,&nbsp;The Hobbit“This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The toadstool motel you once thought a mere folk tale, a corny, obsolete, rural invention. This is the room where your wisest ancestor was born, be you Christian, Arab, or Jew. The linoleum underfoot is sacred linoleum. Please remove your shoes. Quite recently, the linoleum here was restored to its original luster with the aid of a wax made from hornet fat. It scuffs easily. So never mind if there are holes in your socks.”– Tom Robbins,&nbsp;Skinny Legs and All&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“From the town hall it creeps between shops whose upper floors are almost connected; it passes cafes where Gypsies dance; it winds through markets heavy with fruit and fish; it is the center for silversmiths and booksellers and the carvers of rosaries. It is the most extraordinary passageway in Spain.”– James Michener,&nbsp;Mexico&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“This week has been a hard one. I have put the forces of evil against a potential good. Yesterday I wrote the outward thing of what happened. Today I have to show what came of it. This is quite different from the modern hard-boiled school. I think I must set it down. And I will. The spots of gold on this page are the splatterings from beautiful...

Some word-people feel it’s their duty to correct you when you use a word improperly. These people are pedantic, pointy-nose dogs determined to give you a posterior probe, pretending it’s for your own good.I am not that sort of word-person.The people of my tribe believe words are colored with sparkling tints of nuance and subtle shades of association.Add white to a color and the result will be a&nbsp;tint&nbsp;of that color.Add black and the result will be a&nbsp;shade.Add both white and black and the result will be a&nbsp;tone.But if you use “tint” and “shade” and “tone” interchangeably, I promise not to correct you.The definition of a word is determined by&nbsp;its basic color.The sound of a word determines its tint, shade or tone.The sounds of words are determined by their&nbsp;phonemes.Obstruent phonemes are the hard-edged sounds we associate with letters like p, b, d, t, k and g.Sonorant phonemes are the cushiony sounds we associate with letters like l, w, r, m, n and ng.Let’s read those lists again, but this time we’ll&nbsp;make the sound&nbsp;represented by the letters rather than saying the names of the letters themselves.Obstruent phonemes include p, b, d, t, k and g as well as other hard-edged sounds.Sonorant phonemes include l, w, r, m, n and ng as well as other soft-edged sounds.The tint, shade or tone of each word we write is affected by its&nbsp;beginning and ending phonemes.Those same words when spoken, however, will have their tints, shades and tones further altered by the inflection and accent of the speaker, as well as by their gestures and facial expressions and –&nbsp;wait for it&nbsp;– their “tone” of voice.That’s right. Your “tone of voice” refers to the balance of light and dark contained in it.Let’s listen once more to the second sentence of today’s opening paragraph. Count the hard-edged phonemes in those twenty words and you’ll find 24 occurrences of p, t, d, k and g.Notice how they are stacked for impact:“These people are pedantic, pointy-nose dogs determined to give you a posterior probe, pretending it’s for your own good.”You can almost feel the point of that dog’s nose.Choose your wordsnot just by their definitions,but by their sounds.And now I have made my own point, as well.Roy H. Williams

More than 500 people have seen the earth from space and 12 have walked on the moon.Most&nbsp;of these people returned&nbsp;home strangely altered.&nbsp;Their families were the first to notice.In 1987 this phenomenon&nbsp;got a name. “The overview effect” refers to what happens when a person sees, firsthand, the Earth as a tiny, fragile ball of life hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.“National boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this pale blue dot becomes obvious.”– WIKIPEDIAIndiana Beagle has been trying to tell&nbsp;me this for years. When I say something is unbelievable, he says,“Unbelievable? You want to hear unbelievable? Seven billion of us are crammed on a tiny speck of dust circling an 11,000 degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet&nbsp;and no one ever thinks about it.&nbsp;THAT, my good wizard, is unbelievable.”Indy opened last week’s rabbit hole with a short passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s&nbsp;Slaughterhouse-Five&nbsp;in which Billy Pilgrim is talking to the Tralfamadorians:“‘…As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time….Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren’t now in danger from Earth, they soon will be. So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live in peace?’Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from past experience what this meant: He was being stupid.”I asked Indy how long it took him to find that passage after the psychopaths killed&nbsp;those innocent people in Paris.He said, “I posted that quote in the rabbit hole five days before the attacks.”“But why?”Indy said, “David Farland, another science fiction writer, once wrote, ‘Men who believe themselves to be good, who do not search their own souls, often commit the worst atrocities. A man who sees himself as evil will restrain himself. It is only when we do evil in the belief that we do good that we pursue it wholeheartedly.'”“Indy, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”He looked down and tried to change the subject. I wouldn’t let him. Finally, he looked back up at me and said, “The problem with ISIS is that they believe they are doing good. We must send each of them&nbsp;into space so they can&nbsp;get&nbsp;a new perspective.”“But Indy!” I said, “Your plan isn’t workable. There aren’t enough rockets and there isn’t enough money and even if there was, how would we convince them to take the ride?”His only answer was to&nbsp;put his paws over his eyes like a Tralfamadorian.Roy H. Williams

We believe knowledge is freedom.We believe you can learn big things quickly when your instructor is experienced, passionate, organized and entertaining.We believe an expert can teach you – in less than a day – more than you can learn in 4 years of college.We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom.We believe in streaming video.The American Small Business Institute is the new online video division of Wizard Academy. Fascinating instructors. Priceless information. Valuable insights.It’s not for everyone.But it’s definitely for you.The Eye-of-the-Storm lecture hall in the tower at Wizard Academy was built to host&nbsp;transformative&nbsp;workshops. These&nbsp;require intense focus, long hours, immediate feedback from the instructor and happy encouragement from like-minded people during class breaks and at mealtimes.These&nbsp;Transformative&nbsp;events&nbsp;cause you to see something completely differently than you did before. Transformative events will forever sparkle their&nbsp;magic&nbsp;from&nbsp;the Wizard Academy campus&nbsp;in Austin.But&nbsp;Informative&nbsp;sessions&nbsp;build brick-on-brick upon what you already know. Hundreds of informative sessions&nbsp;will be available by&nbsp;video to self-selected insiders through the American Small Business Institute, a new division of Wizard Academy.A tribe is made of concentric circles of self-selected insiders, members who contribute – each according to the level of his or her ability – to the collaborative&nbsp;strength&nbsp;of the tribe.A volunteer army is a group of self-selected insiders.A sports team is a group of self-selected insiders.A political party is a group of self-selected insiders.Every club, every franchise, every trade association and certainly every college and university is a group of self-selected insiders.AA big&nbsp;group of self-selected insiders&nbsp;read the MondayMorningMemo each week. It’s free. I&nbsp;write it, illustrate it, record it, post it online and pay all its expenses.Another self-selected group clicks the image at the top of the memo&nbsp;each week to enter Indiana Beagle’s rabbit hole.But a&nbsp;very small&nbsp;self-selected&nbsp;group – fewer than a thousand people a year – take the elevator all the way to the top&nbsp;by attending&nbsp;classes on&nbsp;the Wizard Academy campus.&nbsp;Sadly, that’s the maximum our&nbsp;school can accommodate.A much&nbsp;larger group will be able to participate weekly&nbsp;in&nbsp;the American Small Business Institute.We’ll be uploading&nbsp;at least one new video&nbsp;for self-selected members each week at AmericanSmallBusinessInstitute.org. You&nbsp;definitely&nbsp;want to become&nbsp;a member. This week’s video contains all the important details to&nbsp;the three stories I began last week.Do you remember the convenience store, the gym and the fertilizer company?When you hear how each of those experiments turned out, you’ll laugh with glee, turn red with outrage, smile at poetic justice and shake your head in wonder at how smart people can do incredibly dumb things.Will you select yourself to be an insider?This first step requires only&nbsp;a tiny&nbsp;click.Any finger will do.Roy H. Williams

When each customer buys four and a half times the average amount of stuff per visit and you attract four times the average number of visitors, you make eighteen times as much profit. (4 x 4.5 = 18)If you run your&nbsp;convenience store according to the rules and conventions of convenience stores, you’re going to have yourself a conventional convenience store.(1.)&nbsp;But if you run your convenience store according to the rules and conventions of a successful nightclub, four times as many people will stop to buy gas from you and you’ll sell four and a half times as much coffee, candy, cookies and snacks to each visitor…You’re going to make a glowing pile of money. People will think you’re radioactive because you’ll glitter when you walk. Complete strangers will ask you for your autograph. Pretty women will throw their room keys onto the stage.Just ask my partner, Scott Fraser. He created that convenience store&nbsp;12&nbsp;years ago and it’s been pumping out profits like a Texas oil well ever since.His competitors tell him he’s doing it wrong.(2.)&nbsp;If you run a gym according to the rules and conventions of gyms, you’re going to have yourself a conventional gym. But run that gym according to the rules of an exclusive country club and… BOOM, you glitter when you walk.(3.)&nbsp;If you run a lawn fertilizer company as though it were(A.) a public utility, and(B.) a one-price, all-you-can-eat gourmet buffet…BOOM, room keys on the stage.Don’t conform to the rules of your business category. Reconform your business to the rules of a time-tested, proven business model that behaves completely differently than your own. A standard practice in one business category is often revolutionary in another.This isn’t “thinking outside the box.”This isn’t “a paradigm shift.”You and I aren’t going to use those worn-out phrases because you and I aren’t posers in empty suits.You and I glitter when we walk.Have you noticed how the best TV shows always cut to commercial during a climax in the action? I’m going to do that today. I hope you don’t mind.Next week I’ll tell you where you can find a video of me explaining all the real-world details of exactly what we did for that convenience store, that gym and that fertilizer company.In the meantime…Keep glitterin’, kid.It looks good on you.Roy H. Williams

You have a dream, a hope for the future. But are you willing to spend what it costs to achieve it, endure what is required of you and fight for as long as it takes?Unrelenting action is what turns starry-eyed daydreams into steely-eyed objectives.You say you have a goal.Let me look into your eyes.Now tell me what you&nbsp;did&nbsp;today.Unrelenting Action(From the Monday Morning Memo of&nbsp;Oct. 27, 2002)Would you like to learn the magic of the elbs?Elbs are&nbsp;Exponential Little Bits,&nbsp;tiny but relentless changes that compound to make a miracle.The power of an elb lies not in its size, but in its daily occurrence. For an elb to work its Exponential magic, the Little Bit must happen every day… every day… every day.Every day.Funny thing… When daily progress meets with progress, it doesn’t add, it multiplies.To harness the magic of Exponential Little Bits you must learn to ask yourself, “What difference have I made today?” And never go to sleep until you have done a Little Bit to move yourself closer to your goal.But you must do a Little Bit every day, no matter how tiny it&nbsp;might be.Exponential Little Bits work both ways. They can lift you up or hold you back.Start with a dollar. Double it every day for just 20 days and you’ll have 2,097,150 dollars. But if you diminish each day’s total by just 10 percent (a Little Bit) before the next day’s doubling, you’ll amass only 793,564 dollars. Diminish each day’s doubling by 35 percent (a larger Little Bit) and you’ll have only 56,784 dollars – a shortfall of 95.83 percent.There is nuclear&nbsp;power in the elbs.Now that you understand the process,you’re going to need a role model.A Society and Its Heroes(From the Monday Morning Memo of&nbsp;Feb. 17, 2003)Heroes are dangerous things. Bigger than life, highly exaggerated and always positioned in the most favorable light, a hero is a beautiful lie.We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we are striving to be.&nbsp;We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams.And then they attempt to create us in their own image.The Value of Heroes(From&nbsp;Magical Worlds of the Wizard of Ads,&nbsp;2001)The saying, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was true as recently as 1937 when tiny England did, in fact, still have possessions in each of the world’s 24 time zones. It’s widely known that the British explored, conquered and ruled much of the world for a number of years, but what isn’t as widely known is what made them believe they could do it.For the first 1000 years after Christ, Greece and Rome were the only nations telling stories of heroes and champions. England was just a dreary little island of rejects, castoffs and losers.So who inspired tiny, foggy England to rise up and take over the world?A simple Welsh monk named Geoffrey – hoping to instill in his countrymen a sense of pride – assembled a history of England that gave his people a grand and glorious pedigree. Published in 1136, Geoffrey’s “History of the Kings of Britain,” was a detailed, written account of the deeds of the English people for each of the 17 centuries prior to 689 AD… and not a single word of it was true. Yet in creating Merlyn, Guinevere, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table from the fabric of his imagination, Geoffrey of Monmouth convinced a sad...

A person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.They say, “One picture is worth a thousand words.”I say, “In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto,&nbsp;‘A word is worth a thousand pictures,’&nbsp;and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons. Read it for yourself in&nbsp;Digital Marketing: A Practical Approach&nbsp;by Alan Charlesworth, page 123.”They say, “It’s been scientifically proven that 93 percent of all human communication is nonverbal.”I say, “Show me the study. Show me who verified it. And please, for the love of God, don’t pretend to quote Dr. Albert Mehrabian because not one person who has ever quoted Mehrabian to me has ever read any of his books. Admit it. A&nbsp;sales trainer showed you a pie chart and said 55% of human communication is body language and 38% is tone of voice and only 7% are the words we speak.”Pie charts are not proof.In Mehrabian’s earliest book,&nbsp;Silent Messages&nbsp;(1971,) he speculated that during moments of extreme word/gesture contradiction, the words themselves contribute about 7 percent of the meaning we perceive, while tone of voice contributes about 38% and the rest – 55% – is body language. But Mehrabian makes it plain that these estimates pertain ONLY to moments when(1.) a speaker is describing their feelings and emotions and(2.) their physical gestures and tone of voice contradict their words.When a person is holding up their middle finger as they say, “Yeah, I love you, too,” don’t trust the words; trust the finger.In 1994, when it became obvious that sales trainers in front of white boards were grievously misquoting his 55/38/7 statement, Mehrabian said for the record “Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.”They say, “Everything we’ve ever seen or heard is stored somewhere in our brain and under hypnosis we can remember it.”I say, “On December 10, 2000, Matt Crenson, a science writer for the&nbsp;Associated Press&nbsp;summarized what scientists have proven in countless experiments:”We often imagine our memories faithfully storing everything we do. But there is no mechanism in our heads that stores sensory perceptions as a permanent, unchangeable form. Instead, our minds use a complex system to convert a small percentage of what we see into nothing more than a pattern of connections between nerve cells. Researchers have learned that this system can be fooled. Ask a witness, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ and they will name a much higher speed than if they are asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they made contact?'”They say, “Okay, now it’s your turn to name the scientist who did the research. And please, for the love of God, don’t pretend to quote Dr. Albert Mehrabian.”I say, “Yes, Matt Crenson failed to identify the unnamed ‘researchers’ he was quoting, but I immediately recognized the study as a Loftus &amp; Palmer experiment reported by Dr. Alan Baddeley in his 1999 book,&nbsp;Essentials of Human Memory.&nbsp;In that experiment, groups of people were asked to watch the video of a collision between two automobiles. Viewers who were asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ gave answers averaging&nbsp;40.8 MPH&nbsp;and reported having seen broken glass. But the group who was asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they made contact?’ reported speeds averaging only&nbsp;31.8 MPH&nbsp;and remembered no broken glass, even though both groups had just watched the same video.”They say, “But it’s been proven that we remember more of what we see than what we hear.”I say,...

I had an interesting moment a couple of weeks ago.A client came to Austin for his annual marketing retreat and brought his top lieutenants with him. His company has a couple of hundred franchisees that do about a quarter-billion dollars a year.Everyone was anxious to hear my marketing strategy for 2016.“I need you to watch carefully and say nothing for the next 10 minutes,” I told them. “When I’m done presenting my little show you can ask questions, though I suspect I will have answered them all.”“We’re scheduled to be here for 2 days,” my client said, “and you really think you can answer all our questions in just 10 minutes?”I put a finger across&nbsp;my lips and turned off the lights.&nbsp;My presentation appeared&nbsp;on the&nbsp;big TV&nbsp;on the wall. Ten minutes later, my client said with big eyes, “How did you know my three favorite movies? Those characters were my idols when I was a kid.”“You’ve been emulating them your whole life,” I answered. “It’s what attracts people to you and your companies. My plan for next year&nbsp;is simply to accelerate what I’ve been doing in your ads since the day I met you, but kick it up to a higher level.” After I gave them a few examples of what this would look and sound like and told them what I expected the impact to be, they had no other questions.His lifelong guiding characters were Dr. Dolittle, Willie Wonka and Peter Pan. The female version of this character would be Mary Poppins, of course.&nbsp;They don’t live in a magical world, but magic follows them wherever they go. They bring the magic with them.I decided to do it again last Friday. A woman you’ve seen many times on television arranged for Princess Pennie and me&nbsp;to give her a private tour of the campus before she and her associates walked into the Toad and Ostrich pub to hang out with Daniel Whittington and whoever else showed up that day.You never know who’s going to be at the Toad on a Friday afternoon at four. Sometimes it’s 3 people. Sometimes it’s 20. But the only person who showed up that day was our friend, Gene Naftulyev. At the end of the evening our celebrity guest asked one of her associates to snap a photo of her with Gene. She put her chin on his shoulder so they would be cheek to cheek as she wrapped her arms around his chest. Startled, Gene beamed like a five year-old on Christmas morning.&nbsp;Click.I’m fairly certain he’ll have that photo printed in poster size and mail a copy to all his friends.During our walk around campus she spoke&nbsp;of the challenges she faces in forming a clearly differentiated identity for a new brand&nbsp;she has launched.I pointed out that her public persona was merely the never-ending echo of a certain iconic character the public has always loved. My suggestion was that she allow&nbsp;her brand identity to be guided by the values and quirks of that character.Weirdly, she had never consciously realized the story she’s been echoing for years. You could see the gears beginning to spin behind her eyes. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed, “This solves everything.” A&nbsp;highly memorable and sharply differentiated brand flashed into existence in a&nbsp;twinkling.“Oh my God, this solves everything.”She has always been the science nerd that&nbsp;everyone sees as “just one of the guys” until she takes off her ugly&nbsp;glasses, shakes her head, a button pops open at the top of her blouse and BOOM, she’s a bombshell.Dual identity: science nerd and sex goddess. We’ve seen this character a thousand times and we always love her because she’s the worthy but unnoticed underdog who finally gets what she wants and deserves.Can you see how the guiding hand of this identity – along with a couple of other characteristics I opted not to tell you about – could help to refine&nbsp;the style and voice of a brand?Everyone has a story.I don’t...

You own a business.You believe in your company.You believe you deliver a better experience than your competitors.Is this confidence based on your intentions, your goals, your beliefs, your values and your personal commitment to your customer’s happiness?It is?&nbsp;Uh-oh.Judging yourself by your intentions isn’t a danger among friends, because a friend knows your heart even when your actions are inappropriate.But it is a real and present danger in business.We judge ourselves by our intentions but others judge us by our actions.What happens when a prospective customer makes contact with your company? Do they meet your best employee on that employee’s best day? Of course not. They meet your average employee on an average day. Or worse, they meet a below-average employee on a below-average day.And then you are confused by those negative reviews.Sad, isn’t it? Your intentions and motivations and personal commitments never quite made it to the party.Wouldn’t it be great if your employees were consistently delivering the experience you’ve always believed in?I want to help you make that happen.The process is called “message integration.”The key is to take what’s in your heart – your highest and brightest and best intentions – and bury those intentions deep in the hearts of your employees.Frances Frei,&nbsp;that most beloved of Harvard Business School professors, says,You can’t change a person’s performance until you first change their beliefs.”Simon Sinek,&nbsp;in the most popular of all TED talks, says,People don’t buy&nbsp;what&nbsp;you do, they buy&nbsp;why&nbsp;you do it. And what you do simply proves what you&nbsp;believe.&nbsp;In fact, people will&nbsp;do&nbsp;things that&nbsp;they&nbsp;believe.”Simon Sinek agrees with Frances Frei and I agree with both of them. I’ll bet you do, too.&nbsp;Yet most of the people I’ve met who adored that Simon Sinek TED talk did exactly the wrong thing at the end of&nbsp;those magical 18 minutes.&nbsp;They drew concentric circles, pointed to the middle one and said, “We’ve got to start with Why.”And each of these fine people walked away from that exercise with something that felt like a fuzzy and ambiguous “unique selling proposition” or worse, a high-tone mission statement filled with words like “honesty,” “integrity,” and “value.”Right now I’m in the middle of making a video detailing HOW to implement the advice of Frances Frei and Simon Sinek. It’s a delightfully simple and effective technique and I’ve decided I want you to have it.I’ve also decided I don’t want to be perceived as hanging onto the coattails of Francis Frei and Simon Sinek, so I’m not going to make my video public. Instead, I’ll be sending a private link to all my Wizard of Ads partners and then to all my clients&nbsp;and then to all the alumni of Wizard Academy. Then I’m sending it&nbsp;to everyone who has ever made a cash donation – no matter how small – to our school.I’m going to request the Wizard Academy&nbsp;donor list from Vice Chancellor Whittington on Friday afternoon, October 15. And then I’ll be sending that private link.&nbsp;(You still have time to get your name on the list.)It really is a marvelous technique. Chances are, you’ll replace all the&nbsp;content on&nbsp;your About Us page with the results of this exercise.And that will be the smallest and least important of its uses.Roy H. Williams

Magenta.What color is that?It isn’t violet and it isn’t purple.And why isn’t it in the rainbow?Doesn’t the rainbow contain the whole color spectrum?The short answer is that magenta doesn’t actually&nbsp;exist. (Well, none of the colors actually&nbsp;exist, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. Magenta doesn’t exist in an&nbsp;additional&nbsp;way.&nbsp;Now that’s real commitment to not existing.)Your eyes contain three kinds of cone cells whose job is to detect certain wavelengths of light. One of these sees only&nbsp;blue.&nbsp;Another sees only&nbsp;green.&nbsp;The third sees only&nbsp;red.&nbsp;There are no cone cells to see yellow, purple, orange or any of the other colors.AMix any two colors on the spectrum and you get the color in between.&nbsp;(Keep in mind that we’re mixing light waves, not paints, inks or dyes.)Mix green light and blue light and you get cyan, the color in between.Mix red light and green light and you get yellow. Again, the color in between. Here’s what’s happening: the wavelength of yellow light is close to green&nbsp;and it’s&nbsp;also close to red, so both your “green” and your “red” cones send a partial signal to your wonderful, amazing brain. It&nbsp;somehow realizes these lightwaves are&nbsp;in between&nbsp;the wavelengths of red and green&nbsp;and BINGO! You see yellow.Now take a look at the extreme ends of the spectrum where the shortest wavelengths are&nbsp;blue and the longest are red. If your blue&nbsp;cones are sending a partial signal and your red&nbsp;cones are sending a partial signal, this&nbsp;should mean you’re&nbsp;seeing the&nbsp;color&nbsp;in between&nbsp;blue and red, right? But&nbsp;green&nbsp;is between blue and red! And the eye has dedicated cones for seeing green!What your&nbsp;brain “sees” in this instance&nbsp;is magenta, a completely imaginary color. If your&nbsp;brain had a name for magenta, it would probably be&nbsp;“the absence of green.”Color is a language, a mystery beyond words.Mystery. There’s an&nbsp;interesting word for you. The ancient Greeks had two different words for mystery.&nbsp;Kruptos&nbsp;(kroop-tos’) was a regular mystery, a secret that could be&nbsp;uncovered. But&nbsp;musterion&nbsp;(moos-tay’-ree-on) was a deep mystery, a secret of kings, a secret&nbsp;into which one&nbsp;had to be initiated.Science can reveal kruptos, but musterion lies beyond its boundaries.That statement chafes a little doesn’t it? We of the 21st century prefer to believe that what we have&nbsp;seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled is “real,” and what cannot be detected through our senses is imaginary.That’s really funny. Because most of what our senses detect is – by definition – imaginary. It exists only in our minds.I’m not being metaphysical. I’m speaking factually of objective reality.Dr. Jorge Martins de Oliveira, a neurologist, says,Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way that we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses.We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors.We experience vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds.We experience chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes.Colors, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences. They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is...

“I could’ve bought that building 5 years ago for $70,000. It’s worth half a million now.”“I could’ve been his partner in that business. He’s worth a fortune now.”“I could’ve…”This went on all day.My host believed I would be impressed that he was “connected” and “in the know,” but the only thing I was hearing was his sad admission, “I don’t know when to pounce.”He had no sense of Kairos (KYE-ross.)&nbsp;All this happened 20 years ago. (Chronos)Kairos and Chronos are ancient Greek words for two different kinds of time.Chronos is sequential, linear time. The time of stopwatches, clocks and calendars. The time of step-by-step thinking and planning. The time of Newtonian physics.Kairos is the fullness of time, the perfect moment&nbsp;for action. That action might be a kiss, a word of encouragement, a leap of faith or the perfect storm. Kairos is when it all comes together. Kairos is the witching hour. It demands poise and intuition and responsiveness.Chronos is quantitative, a sequence of moments, step-by-step.Kairos is qualitative, the appointed time, “now or never.”If you see Kairos in hindsight, you’re qualified to write blog posts, news stories, diary entries and history books. But if you want to break away from the pack and be successful, you must not only witness Kairos, but grab hold of it with both hands and feet and ride it to where it will take you.Knowing&nbsp;how&nbsp;to pounce is a mechanical action that is easily learned. Knowing&nbsp;when&nbsp;to pounce requires that you be attuned to Kairos, the moment of opportunity.If making a fortune was a step-by-step process, we’d all be rich. But it takes more than Chronos to rise above your circumstances. Success requires a sense of Kairos, knowing when to pounce.And then it takes the courage.Go get’em, tiger.Roy H. Williams

Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water.Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this&nbsp;place of sunshine and scenery that you and I call home.Below the waterline is the unconscious, a wet and moonlit world of symbols and meanings and metaphors on which we float like shadows along the upper edge of time, observing myriad mysteries in wordless wonder.Consciousness is a raft that floats&nbsp;on the depths of the unconscious like Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi.Consciousness creates logic to justify what your unconscious has already decided.Voices whisper to you from the deep.Sometimes the voice is the beagle of Intuition, urging you with wiggles and whimpers to follow and see what you should see.Other times the voices are Pain and Regret, reminding you not to do what you did before. Voices of Past Experience urge you to speed up or slow down or turn around.And the soft voice of Good encourages you to make a difference.If you live entirely in the moment and never hear these voices, I fear you are living an unexamined life.I’m not saying that you should always do what they whisper! Sometimes the voice will be Superstition, that halfwit twin of Intuition. And the hissing voice of Prejudice ssslithers like a snake and must be ssstrongly resisted when it ssspeaks.The unconscious speaks to the conscious mind as a court jester to a medieval king, saying what would not be acceptable were it to be said unveiled and openly.The medieval jester was never a fool, but a trusted counselor who spoke uncomfortable things as though he were joking or telling a story.In other words, his messages were encoded.Likewise, the whispers of the unconscious are heard indirectly, through songs and movies and paintings and plays and sculptures and works of fiction.Writers call it subtext. Readers call it “reading between the lines.”Art&nbsp;speaks to the&nbsp;unconscious mind. Every&nbsp;work of art is a&nbsp;message sent to us from the heart&nbsp;of its&nbsp;creator.Deep calls unto deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” – Psalm 42, verse 7Splashing around in&nbsp;the water of the unconscious is&nbsp;refreshing. You can float on&nbsp;the rhythms and notes and incongruencies of&nbsp;music, dive into&nbsp;the shapes and colors of architecture and&nbsp;interior design,&nbsp;feel the coolness&nbsp;of the shadows and meanings of symbols in photographs and portals and glamours, or experience the moods of postures and contours and&nbsp;positions in&nbsp;artistic&nbsp;sculpture…&nbsp;or&nbsp;dance.&nbsp;For what is ballet if not sculpture in&nbsp;motion?Wizard Academy exists only to help you get where you’re trying to go.&nbsp;We are a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.Humans tell stories. In business we&nbsp;tell stories to make the sale. In politics we tell stories to get elected. In private we tell stories to connect with others.In&nbsp;every visit to Wizard Academy, you become&nbsp;a better teller of your story.Some stories are told in the language of mathematics. Other stories are told in the 43 phonemes that are&nbsp;the constituent components of the words we speak. (Did you know the 26 letters in our&nbsp;English alphabet can be combined to make only 43 meaningful sounds&nbsp;and&nbsp;the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents?)Mathematics and phonemes are 2 of the 12 Languages of the Mind.The other 10 languages help us to interpret nature and the arts.This year’s Academy Reunion on October 3rd&nbsp;will be a celebration of the arts, overflowing with examples and discussions and revelations of hidden...

If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call.In other words,&nbsp;you don’t really have a sales lead anymore.&nbsp;In fact, if that sales lead was generated online, your contact&nbsp;rate declines by 99&nbsp;percent – meaning that you’ll reach&nbsp;just one in one&nbsp;hundred at the end of 30 minutes – when compared to responding within 5 minutes.*One of the unintended consequences of the Internet&nbsp;is that it has trained us to expect instant details when we send the&nbsp;click that signals our interest. If we don’t get answers immediately, we move on to something else.Are you expecting your customers to be more patient than you&nbsp;are?You’ve been online for an hour and seen&nbsp;more than 150 page views. What are the odds that you remember&nbsp;what you saw&nbsp;on page 9? Chances are, you made your decision by the time you got to page view 21. Not only is page 9 ancient history, you’ve contemplated and resolved 7 unrelated topics of interest since then.The web isn’t just changing how products and services are transacted;&nbsp;online connectivity is changing the customer’s attention span and decision horizon, even&nbsp;in categories where the purchase will NOT be made online.According to Forrester Research, current trends indicate that Americans will spend 370 billion retail dollars online in 2017. That sounds like a lot until you realize that Americans are expected to spend $3.6 trillion on retail purchases that year.“Oh, well,” you say, “10.3 percent of retail sales isn’t really a game-changer.”But wait, we’re not done.Forrester also tells us that&nbsp;an additional 60%&nbsp;of total retail sales will&nbsp;involve&nbsp;the Internet in 2017.The categories that will be most influenced by Internet research…will be grocery, apparel and accessories, home improvement and consumer electronics, in particular through mobile activity like reading customer reviews while in the aisle.”60 percent plus 10.3 percent equals 70.3 percent of total retail sales. Do I have your attention now?Forrester goes on to say,The categories that have the lowest online sales are also the ones that see the greatest levels of online research. In general, consumers in virtually all categories touch the web during some part of their purchase journey, but web sales (i.e., dollars spent online) tend to be strongest in categories where consumers don’t need to touch the products or have them immediately.”The lower your percentage of sales online, the more important it is that you give your customers&nbsp;online answers to their questions.I really hope you’re not saying to yourself, “Well, I’m just going to use my advertising&nbsp;to get prospective customers to indicate their interest, but I’m not going to answer their questions until we’re face-to-face.” Because if that’s your plan…It would be rude for me to finish that sentence.Your customer’s decision window is shrinking. If you’re in a business category that transacts little to none of its business online, it’s imperative that your website correctly&nbsp;anticipates and answers&nbsp;your customer’s unspoken questions. Don’t blather on about the things you wish they cared about – even if those are&nbsp;the&nbsp;things the customer really&nbsp;ought&nbsp;to care about – until you’ve first answered the question that’s on their mind.You&nbsp;must&nbsp;use&nbsp;words in your mass media advertising&nbsp;and in your online copy that target your customer’s&nbsp;felt need.Notice I did NOT say, “words that target their age group” or “target their income bracket,” or “target their educational attainment.”When you speak to your customer’s felt need,&nbsp;you’re answering their question,&nbsp;scratching their itch,&nbsp;giving them confidence,&nbsp;making the

You can choose a dragonor you can wait until a dragon chooses you,but every happy person fights one.Our dragons give us purpose.Our dragons give us adventure.The problem with adventure is that we seldom realize how much fun we’re having until it’s over.When you’re having an adventure, you wish you were safe at home. But when you’re safe at home you wish you were having an adventure.Challenge and reward and danger –&nbsp;the possibility of a negative outcome&nbsp;– these are the essential elements of adventure.The idle rich are bored because pleasure is no substitute for adventure.St. George must forever kill the dragon and the dragon must forever be killed, because if the dragon were ever&nbsp;finally&nbsp;killed, there would be nothing left but a lonely man looking for something to do.”– John Steinbeck (1961)Can you name your dragon, the one you are trying to slay? If you can’t, let me tell you how to find him. Look in the darkness toward your personal north star – your impossible dream – and take a series of steps in that direction.Keep walking. Keep your eye on that star. Your dragon will soon appear.Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”– G.K. Chesterton (1909)Video games and movies and fiction books are surrogate adventures.Television shows – including the news – are surrogate adventures.Extramarital affairs are surrogate adventures.Gambling – including the stock market – is a surrogate adventure.Living for real is an&nbsp;actual&nbsp;adventure.Living for real means choosing to make a difference.Choosing to do a kindness for a stranger.Choosing to encourage a friend.Choosing to right a wrong.Choosing to apologize.Run unafraidtoward the dragonthat can&nbsp;never&nbsp;be slain.Carpe diem.Roy H. WilliamsPS – In addition to the dragon you already face, I’m going to introduce you to&nbsp;a HUGE new dragon&nbsp;in next week’s MMMemo and it’s a business dragon, not a personal one. Then two weeks from now&nbsp;I’ll give you the final installment in the&nbsp;Living for Real&nbsp;series. The title is,&nbsp;What Does Your Ocean Whisper?&nbsp;– RHW

Dean Rotbart once told me that a person can do well without doing good. It took me a beat to grasp his meaning, but then it hit me and I’ve never forgotten it.“Doing well” is financial. It’s about you.“Doing good” is personal. It’s about others.And the difference you’ve made in their lives.Mia Erichson says success and significance are like that, too.Success is about you. It’s about the things you’ve achieved, the honors you’ve won and the money you’ve made.Significance is about others.And the difference you’ve made in their lives.Princess Pennie shoots an arrow into the heart of the matter when she&nbsp;names the three things we all want to make: “Everyone wants to make money, a name, and a difference,” she says. “But what separates us is the one we want a little more than the other two.”When you make money, you achieve wealth.When you make a name, you achieve fame.When you make a difference, you achieve&nbsp;change.Someone asked me the other day what I thought of a certain rich man who decided he ought to be President of the United States. I said, “He’s done well for himself and is successful. But he seems to be living an unexamined life.”I’m not really talking about rich men and politics.I’m talking about you.I’m talking about me.Are we living unexamined lives?Yes, it’s possible to be both successful and significant.But if I could choose to be only&nbsp;one&nbsp;of these, which would it be?Would I bring wealth to myself? Would I choose to make a life of ease and pleasure?Or would I bring change to the world? Would I choose to make a difference?No, I’m hiding from the real question.The question isn’t, “What would I choose?”The question is, “What have I chosen?”Roy H. Williams

“Bonding” is falling in love with a company, a product, a spokesperson, an outlook, a belief system. This&nbsp;bond&nbsp;of&nbsp;love inevitably&nbsp;manifests itself in a tangible way. And then again. And again.A bonding ad is about the customer.A direct response ad is about the offer.Direct response ads trigger immediate&nbsp;action.Bonding ads do not.The results of a&nbsp;direct response ad can be measured immediately. The public either buys what you’re selling or they don’t. This is how you know whether or not the ad is working. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to build your company on direct response.Bonding ads build customer loyalty.Direct response ads do not.Hi Roy,I have a client who started his radio campaign a few months ago running a low frequency schedule. He is already starting to see the success of his campaign both through website visits and actual inquiries from potential clients. In the beginning his creative was written by us and read by him.&nbsp;He sells life insurance.&nbsp;My client is now concerned with measuring the effectiveness of each ad. He is trying to determine which ads are generating the most website hits and inquiries. He has stated:“With any direct response ad the trick is to determine wording based on the effectiveness of the ad. If the testimonials are driving the most hits, we should be pushing those. I want every campaign I do to be measurable. Without being able to measure each ad’s effectiveness we are just shooting in the dark. If I look at my website hits for instance, I can see that yesterday I only had 7 hits but on July 8th&nbsp;I had 39. What ad played on July 8th&nbsp;to garner such a response?”Any advice on how to explain why his radio campaign is effective without needing to measure each individual ad for its effectiveness?”JonJon, the&nbsp;success of a direct response ad is determined by the attractiveness of&nbsp;the offer&nbsp;made to the customer. What offer can this&nbsp;life insurance salesman make? Keep in mind that the offer must be compelling enough to get a person to take immediate action.This insurance agent’s best hope would be to use radio as a promotional vehicle for&nbsp;content marketing.&nbsp;What insights, solutions or valuable information might he publish&nbsp;on his website and talk about in&nbsp;his radio ads that would cause listeners to immediately visit his website to&nbsp;read it? Without this kind of “content” as bait, his direct response campaign on radio is likely doomed.Business people&nbsp;are attracted to direct response ads because they want their advertising to function like a gumball machine. “You put in your money and you crank the handle and out come the results.”In theory, direct response marketing is tidy and scalable and predictable. “Put in a penny and you get one gumball. A nickel gets you&nbsp;five gumballs. Give it a dime and ten gumballs emerge. A quarter? You guessed it: twenty-five gumballs.”The problem is that this gumball machine called “advertising” never functions quite like it should. Sometimes you crank the handle and get a huge gumball. Sometimes you get a tiny one. Sometimes you get nothing at all.Even when you’ve found an offer that generates predictable, scalable results – such as the response to that “content marketing” offer we described earlier –&nbsp;you’ll find these results will erode over time. The longer you keep pumping coins into that gumball machine, the less well the&nbsp;machine will work. The gumballs will keep getting smaller and smaller until you finally go broke.No direct-response ad campaign has ever worked long-term.Each offer has to be new, surprising and different. And then you must say, “But wait. There’s more! Order now and we’ll include at no extra charge…” This is called&nbsp;benefit...

Branding – bonding with a hero or a company or other imaginary character – is merely an entangling of identity hooks.We connect because we are alike.But where do we gather these identity hooks on which hang our self-definitions?“The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.”― Jodi Picoult,&nbsp;Sing You HomeOur books and movies define us.“What makes a library a reflection of its owner is not merely the choice of the titles themselves, but the mesh of associations implied in the choice… A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the miniscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.”– Alberto Manguel,&nbsp;The Library at Night,&nbsp;p. 194“I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”― Beatrice Sparks,&nbsp;Go Ask AliceOur imaginations define us.“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”― Orson Scott Card,&nbsp;Ender’s Game“When you become the image of your own imagination, it’s the most powerful thing you could ever do.”― RuPaulOur relationships define us.“Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.”― Meghan O’Rourke“People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.”― Ashly LorenzanaOur beliefs about God define us.“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”― Brennan Manning,&nbsp;Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate BelongingOur weaknesses define us.“Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”― G.K. ChestertonOur choices define us.“Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”― Patricia Briggs,&nbsp;Cry Wolf“We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.”― Tori Spelling“We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.”― Daisy Whitney,&nbsp;The RivalsBut what does this mean to a business?“Branding is not merely about differentiating products; it is about striking emotional chords with consumers. It is about cultivating identity, attachment, and trust to inspire customer loyalty. Chinese brands score low on attributes such as ‘sophisticated,’ ‘desirable,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘friendly,’ and ‘trustworthy.'”– Professor Nirmalya Kumar, London Business School“The firmest friendship is based on an identity of likes and dislikes.”– Gaius Sallustius Crispus, 35 BCQuirks and preferences, foibles and flaws, these are the essence of branding. They are the feathers and robes of a tribe.Your mainstream virtues do not define you.Definitions like “Honest” “Family-oriented” “Success-driven” and “Caring” blur you into the watery crowd, for which of us doesn’t embrace these things?If you will stand on a...

I got some great news last week. A friend who read my&nbsp;Musings of an Old Ad Writer&nbsp;said to me, “You’re not old, you’re middle aged.”Woo-hoo! If he’s right, I’m going to live to be 114.During the years that I was, in fact, middle aged, I was too busy to have a midlife crisis.So I decided to have one now.A midlife crisis, as I understand it, is a ridiculous and ill-advised grab at the fleeting shadow of one’s former years. So I chose to reclaim my lost youth by wearing a&nbsp;distinctive brand of canvas shoes that defined me when I was a kid. Zappos was happy to send 5 pairs of this wildly inappropriate footwear and I began wearing them everywhere I went.No one seemed to notice. Then I learned that my “new look” is the standard uniform of silicon valley CEOs.Crap. I can’t even conjure up a credible mid-life crisis. (I’m continuing to wear the shoes though, because they’re even more comfortable than I remembered.)The good thing about forgetting to have a midlife crisis is that you avoid a lot of pain.When I was one&nbsp;year old, John Steinbeck wrote a letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, in which he expressed&nbsp;regret over what his midlife crisis had cost him.I’m going to do what people call rest for a while. I don’t quite know what that means – probably reorganize. I don’t know what work is entailed, writing work, I mean, but I do know I have to slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier. True things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place.”– John Steinbeck, Dec. 30, (the day before New Year’s Eve,) 1959From&nbsp;Steinbeck: A Life in LettersJohn Steinbeck was neither the first nor the last to&nbsp;feel those feelings and&nbsp;think those thoughts.Humanity has long been distracted by “shiny easy things” but rarely does anyone publicly&nbsp;admit&nbsp;they made a dumb move “at the split path&nbsp;where I went wrong because it was easier.”&nbsp;Keep in mind that Steinbeck never meant for his letter to be published. He was writing&nbsp;only to his agent, Elizabeth Otis.Oscar Wilde wrote a similar, private letter 118 years ago.&nbsp;Oscar was an Irishman living in London during the years leading up to the Spanish-American War. He died 2 years before John Steinbeck was born.In his youth, Oscar was a sparkling novelist and playwright, a bon vivant and a wastrel with a dazzling wit. At the height of his fame, Oscar was imprisoned for being gay. After serving 2&nbsp;years, he was released in May, 1897.Three weeks later, he wrote a letter to his friend, William Rothenstein.…I know, dear Will, you will be pleased to know that I have not come out of prison an embittered or disappointed man. On the contrary. In many ways I have gained much. I am not really ashamed of having been in prison: I often was in more shameful places: but I&nbsp;am&nbsp;really ashamed of having led a life unworthy of an artist. I don’t say that Messalina is a better companion than Sporus,*&nbsp;or that the one is all right and the other all wrong: I know simply that a life of definite and studied materialism, and philosophy of appetite and cynicism, and a cult of sensual and senseless ease, are bad things for an artist: they narrow the imagination, and dull the more delicate sensibilities. I was all wrong, my dear boy, in my life. I was not getting the best out of me.&nbsp;Now,&nbsp;I think with good health, and the friendship of a few good, simple nice fellows like yourself, and a quiet mode of living, with isolation for thought, and freedom from the endless hunger for pleasures that wreck the body and imprison the soul, – well, I think I may do things...

There are words used by young advertising professionals that I try desperately to avoid. Two of the most painful phrases for me are “unique selling proposition” and “branding.”When I was young, those phrases meant the same to me as they did to everyone else. But&nbsp;I take comfort in the words of Muhammad Ali, “The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”Here’s what thirty years have taught me:Very few “selling propositions” are unique.If the public cares enough about a particular “selling proposition” to respond to it, your competitors will quickly adopt it. So tell me, which was the first online company to offer free shipping and how long did it remain “unique” to them?Those things that make you truly unique are rarely “selling propositions.”You can take two things from this observation. The first is that when you become overly committed to differentiating your “selling proposition” from your competitors’ “selling propositions” you’re about&nbsp;to make a mountain out of a molehill. You’re going to build a sales campaign around something “unique” that no one really cares about.The second thing you can take from this observation – and this is important – is that unique things about you&nbsp;don’t have to be “selling propositions” to be valuable.Keep that thought in mind while I tell you my problem with the word “branding.” We’ll come back to “unique things about you”&nbsp;in a minute.Most people think “branding” is the consistent use of a logo, a slogan, a color palette and a font to create recognizable layouts.But this isn’t really branding. It’s a&nbsp;style guide&nbsp;for labeling.Yes, your company should have a&nbsp;visual style guide&nbsp;as well as an&nbsp;auditory style guide&nbsp;that includes music and other sounds, and a&nbsp;linguistic style guide&nbsp;that includes 9 to 14&nbsp;brandable chunks,&nbsp;distinctively memorable sentences and phrases that people associate with your company.Brandable chunks are not slogans. Slogans, for the most part, are AdSpeak.AdSpeak&nbsp;is anything your customer interprets as “blah, blah, blah.”One form of AdSpeak has relevance to the customer, but no credibility. In other words, your customer believes it to be hype. The second form of AdSpeak is credible, but has no relevance. Your customer&nbsp;believes&nbsp;you. They&nbsp;just don’t&nbsp;care.Have you created crackling and sizzling brandable chunks? Do they dance from your lips and make people smile? Does everyone in your company use these brandable chunks in daily conversation with current and prospective customers? Do you sprinkle these chunks randomly throughout your ads?But let me be clear: even if you have&nbsp;a visual style guide, an auditory style guide, and a linguistic style guide that includes brandable chunks, all of these put together still fall short of true branding.True branding is bonding.This is why those things that make you unique don’t have to be “selling propositions” to be valuable in an ad campaign. If your quirks and foibles and preferences and flaws cause people to bond with you, isn’t that enough?If I’ve had a secret as an ad writer, that’s been it.Johann Hari summarizes this essence of true branding six minutes into his amazing TED talk,&nbsp;Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong.Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other, but if you can’t do that, because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that...

Laughter brings escape from monotony.Sadness teaches us&nbsp;what is important to&nbsp;our heart.Commitment carries us through the dark hours, the dry places, the sad times.Enthusiasm, “God within,” opens our eyes to the possible.JP Engelbrecht says a business owner can learn a lot about managing groups of people by studying famous monarchs. “If you manage tight-to-loose” says JP, “your people will build statues of you in the parks.”I said, “What do you mean, tight-to-loose?”“Begin with a lot of strict rules and policies,” JP answered, “then loosen them up when people perform well; give them&nbsp;more freedom and autonomy. Monarchs that&nbsp;do the opposite – the ones who manage loose-to-tight – are the ones that&nbsp;get assassinated. It’s dangerous to take away freedoms once they’re&nbsp;given.”JP’s advice&nbsp;triggered the memory of a delightful video by Daniel Pink (which you’ll find on Page Four&nbsp;of Indiana Beagle’s rabbit hole,) in which Pink says we need just 3 things to make us happy:1. Autonomy,&nbsp;the freedom to do things our own way.2. Mastery,&nbsp;the ability to get better and better at something.3. Purpose,&nbsp;the knowledge that we’re making a difference.JP’s comment&nbsp;also reminded me of a statement shared with me&nbsp;by Eric Rhoads: “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” Eric’s&nbsp;comment, in turn, triggered the memory of something Tom Grimes shared with me by email in the middle of the night exactly one year ago – July 29, 2014. Tom says the happiest companies are run by business owners who practice “Management by Walking Around.” You can read his fun and insightful email on Page One of Indy’s rabbit hole. (Just click the trio of flying children over Indy’s head at the top of this&nbsp;page.)As you can see, I connected these thoughts dot-to-dot-to-dot and realized once more that the combined insights of the people in our&nbsp;lives can be&nbsp;an incredibly&nbsp;powerful thing.&nbsp;If we could collect these experiences and organize them&nbsp;to&nbsp;bring forward the best of the past, that would be magic in a bottle.[This thought, wearing many different disguises, has been orbiting my brain like Halley’s Comet, showing up periodically&nbsp;in the middle of the night ever since Mia Erichson sent the&nbsp;note about the Trivium and Quadrivium&nbsp;that became&nbsp;the Monday Morning Memo,&nbsp;Glenn Gould Played Piano.&nbsp;]What this Means to the Future of Wizard AcademyWizard Academy was established 15 years ago in a Monday Morning Memo.&nbsp;The things&nbsp;you readers have built since then&nbsp;are remarkable! No, remarkable is the wrong word. What you’ve built&nbsp;is astonishing. You stepped&nbsp;forward and donated your time and wisdom and money to create:a worldwide group of alumni and adjunct faculty that are positively electric.a spectacular campus with zero debt.a network of thousands of business owners who claim&nbsp;the experiences they’ve had at Wizard Academy have made a huge difference in the success of their endeavors.The time has come for us to complete what we have started.The good news is that it doesn’t take much money.The bad news is that it takes something far more precious.I need you to take inventory of your&nbsp;intellectual property –&nbsp;those techniques and shortcuts and special bits of wisdom you’ve gathered over&nbsp;the years – and send that&nbsp;list to Vice Chancellor Whittington. Wizard Academy is known for its ability to teach&nbsp;the “art” of running a business. The time has come for us to add the...

You cannot instruct a person to have enthusiasm any more than you can instruct them to give birth to a redheaded child.The person must first be inspired.Inspiration is what you give them.Enthusiasm is what they give you.People&nbsp;inhale inspiration and exhale enthusiasm.They cannot give you enthusiasm until you give them inspiration.Neither is a product of instruction.There is a time to instruct&nbsp;and&nbsp;a time to inspire.We often think we’re doing one when we’re actually doing the other.Is your enthusiasm contagious or is it contained?Are you inspiring those around you?Never is this more important than when you’re working with artists.I spent a lot of money recently*&nbsp;in a series of experiments with&nbsp;99 Designs,&nbsp;the logo development firm that allows graphic designers around the world to submit logo designs in the hope of winning your prize money. (I know several designers&nbsp;who are deeply insulted by this crowd-sourcing of their sacred art and I understand their feelings completely, but technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is&nbsp;standing on its&nbsp;tracks.)The&nbsp;new logo for Wizard of Ads came from a designer in Italy.The Wizard Academy logo came from a designer in Minnesota.Indy’s Rabbit Hole logo came from Croatia.Angel Skating: IndonesiaWhisk(e)y Marketing School: GermanyDUI Rescue Guys: the PhilppinesLast week my sons decided to invest in&nbsp;a&nbsp;logo for&nbsp;VidBetter,&nbsp;the hardware and training division of their online video business. They gave the logo designers instructions that sounded&nbsp;very similar to the descriptions business owners give you when you ask them about their businesses:We invent equipment and produce training to help non-professionals make better videos for their businesses. Friendly.&nbsp;Helpful. Step-by-step. Simple. Quirky.&nbsp;We want our customers to feel empowered to make great videos that share who they are, and what they have to offer. The resulting videos are always unscripted.&nbsp;The personality of our brand is witty,&nbsp;natural, authentic, real,&nbsp;light-hearted and smart.&nbsp;Our customers aren’t children, but they aren’t boring/stuffy businesses either.”All the logos my sons&nbsp;received during the first two days of the&nbsp;contest looked surprisingly similar, just like those predictable ads that are created when you focus on your “unique selling proposition.”So they sent the designers some new instructions:I get it. The words ‘Vid’ and ‘Better’ are abstract&nbsp;and don’t lend themselves to cool visuals.&nbsp;Triangular play-button icons come with the territory,&nbsp;and we’ve seen a lot of them.&nbsp;(Actually, some of them are pretty awesome.)&nbsp;That being said, I’m also very open to ridiculous,&nbsp;attention grabbing visuals,&nbsp;as long as they’re done well.&nbsp;I have a deep appreciation for off-beat,&nbsp;over the top, and silly things&nbsp;– again, as long as they’re done well.&nbsp;If you have an absurd idea&nbsp;– even if it doesn’t match the words “VidBetter,”&nbsp;bring the madness.&nbsp;A giant fire breathing grizzly bear with&nbsp;a propeller beanie and a jet pack,&nbsp;clutching a video camera? Cool.&nbsp;A 19th century nature sketch of a proud fox with a vintage camera strapped on its head? Awesome.&nbsp;A squirrel with a camera, riding a dog as it chases a cat? Nice.&nbsp;I’m totally serious. The money is guaranteed in this contest.&nbsp;If we end up with a strategically safe logo for VidBetter, that’s fine. But I’m hoping for one that people see and think, ‘That’s crazy, what the heck is VidBetter?!’&nbsp;This is your chance to run with that crazy idea that always made you laugh – but was too risky to ever use.&nbsp;Take...

Occasionally a client will send&nbsp;a spreadsheet of company statistics and ask me to comment on what I see.I usually look and see ambiguous statistics but I certainly don’t want to say that.Discussing business numbers with people is like discussing religion. No matter what you say, you’re unlikely to change their intrinsic beliefs, so I always approach these conversations carefully.“What do you see?” I ask.“Well, last year 68 percent of our customers were repeat customers and 32 percent were new customers. Now we’re selling 63 percent repeat customers and 37 percent new customers.”“What do you think this tells us?”“It tells us your ads are working!” the client says excitedly.“Perhaps it does,” I say. “But it could just as easily indicate that our competition is growing stronger or that we have somehow offended or disappointed our old customers.”My client gave me a confused look, so I continued, “If a smaller percentage of our business is repeat customers, couldn’t this mean that fewer customers are choosing to buy from us again? Couldn’t it indicate that we’ve disappointed them somehow?”The confused look became a worried look. “But our sales volume has never been higher.”“I know that,” I said. “But that could mean that we’re bringing in new customers fast enough to disguise the very serious problem that we’re losing our old customers to someone else. After all, you said yourself that our percentage of repeat customers is down.”“Do you think we have a problem with our old customers?” the client asked, now truly worried.“Not at all,” I smiled. “I’m just saying that nothing can be learned from the numbers you gave me.”Not everything that can be measured has meaning.Many of you are now recoiling in doubt and disbelief. I get that. Like I said, talking about business numbers is like talking about religion.Here’s how I finished that conversation: “If a company sells a product or service that people buy once a year, what percentage of their customers will be new customers in year one?”“One hundred percent,” said my client with confidence.“And if our sales volume doubles in year two and exactly 50 percent of the&nbsp;customers are new customers, what percentage of customers did we retain from year one?”The client thought for a moment, then said, “If business has doubled and one half of our customers are new and the other half are repeat, this means that one hundred percent of last year’s customers chose to buy&nbsp;from us again.”I continued, “Sales in year three are exactly triple the&nbsp;sales of&nbsp;year one. One third of the customers are new and two-thirds are&nbsp;repeat customers. What does this tell us?”Another moment of thought, he answered, “We have 100 percent retention of customers from the first two years.”That’s when I said, “But someone is likely to point out that your percentage of new customers is falling and they’ll likely interpret this to mean that your ads aren’t working. After all, your sales volume grew 100 percent in year two but only 50 percent in year three and your percentage of new customers has fallen from 100 percent to only 33 percent. You’re now doing&nbsp;triple the volume&nbsp;you were doing just two years ago but these numbers would seem to indicate that you’ve got serious problems with your advertising.”The client began to smile again, so I continued, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that this company increased their prices by 12 percent at the beginning of year two, so none of what we just calculated is accurate. And that company has only been in business for 3 years! Your company, on the other hand, has been in business since 1939 and you sell a product the average person buys every 13 years and lots of old customers have died or moved away and new people have moved to town and some of your old competitors have gotten...

Whiners, blame shifters, indignant people, people with victim mentalities, online trolls, people who demand things and cheerless givers of “constructive criticism” are all herded into one decrepit old corral in my brain.That corral is a category in my mind.As these unhappy cows moan “moooo” I walk sadly away and think “dog food.”I put them in that corral so they can’t follow me. Cows stand in the way of getting things done.Occasionally one of the cows gets tired of hanging out with all the mooers and moaners and whiners and kicks open the gate to escape. I applaud that cow. I love that cow. The world needs more cows like that one.I remember the day I kicked open the gate.A funny thing happens when a cow kicks open a gate, escapes the other cows, struggles to the hilltop and views the far horizon: it grows a horn from its forehead.Is this a unicorn?No, it’s a rhino.The world is full of injustice. It’s everywhere.Do something about it.The world is full of opportunity. It’s everywhere.Do something about it.Pick a purpose and then lower your head and charge.Patience, taken too far, becomes cowardice. There is a time to shut up and do something.God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,&nbsp;The courage to change the things I can,&nbsp;And the wisdom to know the difference.”A father was unable to explain to his little girl why she couldn’t go to an amusement park. So Martin Luther King decided to do something and we became a better nation.A boy was hospitalized when a group of bullies threw him down a flight of stairs and then beat him until he blacked out. This sort of thing happened to him every day but the boy refused to see himself as a victim. He chose not to let those experiences define him. Ashlee Vance tells that story in her new book,&nbsp;Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.I actually think those bullies may have been the secret to Elon’s success. When facing a risky business decision, he was less afraid than the rest of us. After all, the worst that could happen was that he might lose all his money and be embarrassed. No one was going to throw him down the stairs, right?Fantastic ideas are more common than you think.What’s rare is a person who will take action.When a friend tells you about an idea, your first impulse is to think of all the reasons why that&nbsp;idea might not&nbsp;work. You&nbsp;immediately look for potential problems because it’s our nature&nbsp;to look for hidden dangers. And we know that if we encourage our&nbsp;friend to take a chance and it turns out badly, we’re going to feel terrible.So we make them feel terrible instead.The next time someone tells you about their new idea, consider this for a response: give them your brightest smile and say,I’m going to give you three reasons why this is a dangerous idea and then I’m going to give you three reasons why it’s brilliant. If the brilliant parts outweigh the dangerous parts, then this could be an idea whose time has come.”Having painted yourself into a corner with your promise of three and three, you will immediately be able to think of three huge impediments and then you’ll just as easily be able to think of three reasons why the idea is truly brilliant.You just became the best friend on earth. Everyone needs a friend like you.Fantastic ideas are more common than you think.People willing to take action are rare.But most precious of all is a&nbsp;friend who is willing to encourage you.Will you be such a friend this week?I promise you will have the chance.Roy H. Williams

Showmanship&nbsp;is symbolism, the essence of pageantry and tradition: the sweep of an extended arm with an upraised palm in an expansive gesture; a deep bow with the added flourish of both arms extended to the sides, again with palms turned upward; dramatic emphasis expressed by hopping in place on the balls of your feet – timed precisely to the syllables you speak&nbsp;–&nbsp;pent-up energy that demands release.Showmanship is mesmerizing but it takes courage because it’s easy to feel you’re making a fool of yourself.Storytelling&nbsp;requires finesse and restraint as you work your way through a series of small reveals, waiting with the patience of a magician for the moment of the big reveal.Showmanship and storytelling&nbsp;don’t change reality but they do change perception.Are you beginning to understand why an ad man might be interested in these?In a study published in the&nbsp;Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,&nbsp;researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school determined that the intensity of the pleasure we experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. “And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.”The story you tell&nbsp;about&nbsp;the wine affects how it tastes.The study wasn’t speculative; it was medical.&nbsp;The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to monitor the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the pleasure center of the brain – of wine connoisseurs who&nbsp;tasted wines after hearing stories about them.The scientific verdict:&nbsp;good stories accelerate the physical pleasures generated through our senses. This should come as no surprise, really. We’ve known for decades that humans are uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sounds.Words. Work. Magic.Daniel Whittington’s “Tour of Scotland” – an adventure in storytelling and showmanship and single malt Scotch – has attracted so much attention that Wizard Academy is launching the world’s first curriculum to officially certify Whisk(e)y Sommeliers. In this endeavor he’ll be joined by cognoscenti Tom Fischer, the founder of BourbonBlog.com, one of the world’s most authoritative voices on corn liquor (Bourbon.)Whisk(e)y Marketing School&nbsp;isn’t about making whiskey; it’s about putting on a great show and telling great stories to accelerate the pleasure of customers “taking a Tour of Scotland” or “going on a Bourbon Run.” Fine restaurants worldwide will soon have tables full of people mesmerized&nbsp;as their Whisk(e)y Sommeliers wheel carts to their tables, open elegant wooden boxes, slip magnificent badges of office over their&nbsp;heads, and begin their&nbsp;tales of wonder.Same song, second verse:Angel SkatingTM&nbsp;is a new organization whose mission is to use storytelling and showmanship to popularize a little-known sport called artistic roller skating. You’ve seen figure skating in the Winter Olympics, right? Now imagine exactly that, but on roller skates. The objective of Angel Skating is to&nbsp;help artistic roller skating become the figure skating of&nbsp;the Summer Olympics.Angel Skating&nbsp;was born last week when Craig Arthur, the director of Wizard of Ads, Australia, was in Austin for 10 days of catching up at the home office. Wizard of Ads partners Tom Wanek, Paul Boomer and Dave Young flew in from Columbia, Cleveland and Tucson to hang out with&nbsp;Craig, who mentioned that his&nbsp;daughter, Bridget, was becoming rather good&nbsp;at...

I have a client who has a lot of marketing savvy. A few weeks ago he sent me a list of seven copy points and asked if this was our radio strategy.I spent a lot of time crafting a carefully considered response, so I thought I might share it with you. Perhaps it will trigger a realization or an insight you can use.There’s an equally good chance, however, that you’ll decide I’m wrong.Here’s the response I sent him:You’ve asked for clarity on the issue of our radio strategy and you sent along a very well-crafted chart to illustrate your perception of it. This is obviously important to you.I’m happy to help in any way I can, of course.My discomfort with the list you sent me is rooted in the following question:What is the purpose of this document?&nbsp;Is it meant to be a guiding document?Are we creating a standard by which ads are to be evaluated in the future?If so, my experience has been that if I agree with this list, it will lead to the inclusion of too many claims being jammed into a single piece of copy. Within a year, I would likely be hearing,This is a good ad, but you didn’t say this or this or this. We need to include those, remember? Didn’t we agree on this list of seven things that our ads should accomplish? Is there any way we can include those other three things, too?”A good ad makes a single point, powerfully. A bad ad sounds like a grocery list.The only person impressed by such an ad is the advertiser who wrote it.If this document is meant to be a list of recurrent copy-points, it is incomplete.&nbsp;Consequently, the adoption of this list would put us at risk of focusing too much of our airtime on too few objectives.Our strategy is to win not only the mind, but the heart as well. We need our prospective customer to&nbsp;feel&nbsp;good about us. This is very delicate and difficult and is not likely to be accomplished if we are constrained by a regimented list of intellectual copy points. My experience has been that such lists lead to the ad campaign becoming more structured and informative, but less persuasive.You’ve mentioned on a number of occasions that you believe the strongest response we’ve had was triggered by an ad I sent you that was written in a very intimate, confessional style. The effectiveness of that ad rose from the fact that it didn’t speak to the listener in the style of an advertiser speaking to a customer. It spoke in the style of a friend speaking to a friend. That ad surprised and delighted the customer. It’s hard to put surprise and delight on a checklist, but I know how important they are. Every fiber of me knows it. Thirty-seven years of attempting to persuade the public and then monitoring the results of those attempts has carved it into my soul.It’s perfectly natural for an organized person to want a document that summarizes the intellectual elements of their advertising, point by point. You have several years of experience as a CEO that has taught you the wisdom of this.My experience as an ad writer has been otherwise. This is at the root of my anxiety, I think. The hidden danger of lists is that they lead to predictability.If you continue to feel that you need a checklist, I suggest that we add the following to the top of it:Be remembered.We must be memorable. This requires us to surprise the customer in some small way in every ad. Without an element of surprise, there can be no delight.Make them like us.If we win the heart, the mind will follow. Our minds routinely create logic to justify what our hearts have already decided.Add these to your list and I’m good with it. There will be times when these two points will be the only two things I attempt to accomplish in a script.Thank you for asking for...

The genius of the human race lies in our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.But not all of these sounds are words. There is a second, wordless language of pitch, key, tempo, contour, interval and rhythm:&nbsp;music&nbsp;is an auditory fractal, a 3-dimensional map of a chaotic system. (Chaos, in science, is not randomness but precisely the opposite. It’s a level of order and organization that’s beyond our&nbsp;ability to grasp and comprehend.)Whoever controls the music controls the mood of the room.When the message of that first language of sound – words – contradicts the message of the embedded second language of sound – music – our interpretation of the song will be guided by the music more often than by the words&nbsp;because words encoded in music are not interpreted in the same way&nbsp;as when they arise from silence or come piercing through an ocean of background noise.Words are interpreted in the rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning hemisphere of your brain – the left hemisphere* – while complex patterns of pitch, key, tempo, contour, interval and rhythm are interpreted in&nbsp;the pattern-recognition hemisphere of your brain, the non-judgmental right.**The right hemisphere makes no judgments, has no morals and doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction. This is perhaps why, in the words of Voltaire, “Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.” The right hemisphere gives us the ability to enjoy fiction books and movies we know to be untrue. The right hemisphere&nbsp;is why we’re happy to bellow song lyrics at the tops of our lungs without needing to understand what we’re singing.These are some of the things you’ll learn&nbsp;in the opening session of the communications workshop we call&nbsp;Magical Worlds.Daniel Whittington was a touring musician for 18 years prior to becoming vice-chancellor at Wizard Academy. After participating in&nbsp;the Magical Worlds workshop a couple of times he said, “Every musician on earth should take this class.” The next day he employed TRIZ principle 13 (Turn it upside-down, do it backwards,) and TRIZ principle 32 (Change the color) as he played a melancholy version of a perky, pop mega-hit from 1980,&nbsp;Celebration&nbsp;by Kool &amp; The Gang. Then he applied a similar set of&nbsp;inversion principles to&nbsp;I Just Want to Celebrate,&nbsp;another big, happy-energy song from Rare Earth, circa 1971.I said, “Let’s do a whole album of those.”Daniel spent the next several months writing music, recruiting talent, and recording that album. And then he shifted into planning, coordinating and delivering the April concert we held in Tuscan Hall on the campus of Wizard Academy.The album is called&nbsp;Bring the Dark.&nbsp;You’re going to be impressed.You can download the studio version of the album&nbsp;and then watch the live concert video at&nbsp;DanielWhittington.com.&nbsp;Indiana Beagle is going to&nbsp;show a few highlights from that video in today’s&nbsp;rabbit hole.One of our objectives in this project was to demonstrate the attractive power of highly divergent elements brought into reconciliation through the use of third gravitating bodies. The secret, as every cognoscenti knows, is to add something that absolutely doesn’t belong, and&nbsp;then make it fit perfectly. WHAM! Surprise becomes delight. This is incredibly attractive to the unconscious mind but it often goes undetected by the conscious mind because&nbsp;when a&nbsp;highly divergent element fits, it feels as though it belongs.Here’s an example from the concert: You’re...

A Partial Dictionary of the CognoscentiJune 8, 2015ListenAAngle&nbsp;– the direction from which a writer, speaker, photographer or illustrator approaches their chosen subject. Some angles are more interesting than others.Brandable Chunks&nbsp;– memorable phrases that become associated with a brand.Innovation Model&nbsp;– a proven template that allows you to generate a superior result.Business Topology&nbsp;– a technique used for the discovery of innovation models that have been proven, tested and refined in a business category other than your own.Defining Characteristics&nbsp;– distinctive triggers of identification.Chaos&nbsp;– a level of order and organization that exceeds the capacity of the human mind.Third Gravitating Body&nbsp;– a reliable&nbsp;disruptor of predictability that allows you to gain and hold human attention.Daguerre&nbsp;– an academic style of communication that is accurate, but tedious.Dick and Jane&nbsp;– an unintelligent style of communication that employs predictable clichés.FMI&nbsp;– First Mental Image; the first vivid idea presented in an ad, a speech or a presentation, or the first thing noticed in a work of art.LMI&nbsp;– Last Mental Image; the closing thought in an ad, a speech or a presentation; the final feeling or impression communicated by a work of art.Full Circle&nbsp;– when the Last Mental Image in an ad, a speech or a presentation revisits the First Mental Image. “Going Full Circle” creates an elegant sense of closure.Fractal&nbsp;– a kaleidoscope-like image created as the result of mapping a chaotic system.Frameline Magnetism&nbsp;– an effect that is created when an image is extended – in the imagination – beyond what is revealed.Frank&nbsp;– a style of communication noted for (1) approaching its subject from an interesting angle, (2) brevity and clarity (3) frameline magnetism, (4) a highly restrained&nbsp;use of adjectives. (Named after the photographer Robert Frank.)Frosting&nbsp;– to replace common words and phrases with less common, more colorful ones. (Named after the poet Robert Frost.)Frosted Frank&nbsp;– A style of writing marked by the characteristics of Frank, but with the added color and surprise of Frosting.Free the Beagle!&nbsp;– unleash your intuition! take a chance!Meter&nbsp;–&nbsp;a rhythm constructed from the stressed and unstressed syllables of words. Meter makes language more easily remembered by making it musical.EXAMPLE:And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,So I walk by the edge of a lake in my...

The left side of your brain wants perfect symmetry, but in the words of Francis Bacon 400 years ago,There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”In chaos theory, this “strangeness in the proportion” is called the strange attractor and it triggers a&nbsp;level of organization so vast the human&nbsp;mind cannot contain it. (Chaos, in science, does not mean randomness but precisely the opposite.)Perfect symmetry is predictable. Consequently, it has no style.Randomness never resolves into meaning. Consequently, it makes no statement.Beauty – meaningful style – is essentially off-balance symmetry:&nbsp;something is wrong, but somehow it fits.Flaws, mistakes, anomalies, gaps and disturbances are the essential elements of style.Look for a moment&nbsp;at the image at the top of this page. There are several things wrong with it, but each of these&nbsp;is unconsciously – or consciously – reconciled in your mind.These are a few&nbsp;of the wrong or off-balance things:1.&nbsp;The&nbsp;upper left triangle is slightly higher than the one on the right.2.&nbsp;The capital letter A in Academy lacks a crossbar. It also&nbsp;drops slightly below the line of the other letters.3.&nbsp;The left leg of the W&nbsp;in wizard is too long.4.&nbsp;There is a&nbsp;single&nbsp;star in the sky.But then your mind begins to see how these mistakes fit a bigger pattern.1.&nbsp;The negative space between the triangles forms an implied&nbsp;W&nbsp;whose&nbsp;left leg is slightly longer than the one on the right, a perfect echo of the W&nbsp;in wizard.2.&nbsp;The center peak of this negative space W&nbsp;is also the top of the letter A, whose&nbsp;legs extend in the imagination to a point slightly below the line on which the W&nbsp;sits. This echos the placement of the A in&nbsp;Academy.3.&nbsp;The missing crossbar in the letter A prompts you to see how it echos the implied A in the negative space. (If the A in Academy had a crossbar, we would need to see&nbsp;that crossbar as a black line running through the middle of the lower white triangle.)&nbsp;Consequently, we see in our minds a black W A implied by the triangles.4.&nbsp;In the minds of the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop, the&nbsp;three out-of-balance triangles immediately imply&nbsp;“third gravitating bodies,”&nbsp;our&nbsp;trigger for chaos. The fact that the cognoscenti will notice&nbsp;this immediately when other people don’t will be&nbsp;something of a secret handshake among&nbsp;them.5.&nbsp;The three triangles are arranged in the classic position of&nbsp;the three wise men&nbsp;(wise-ards) who followed a star to Bethlehem 2000 years ago.6.&nbsp;This star also recalls our hero&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;who sings the anthem of Wizard Academy,This is my quest: to follow that star,no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”– The Impossible Dream, from&nbsp;Man of La ManchaThe three images of Indiana Beagle aren’t part of the Wizard Academy logo. Indy is the mascot of the Monday Morning Memo and is not an official icon of the&nbsp;Academy. He just dressed up as&nbsp;Goals, Frank-sent-this and Mirth&nbsp;to&nbsp;help&nbsp;illustrate&nbsp;the&nbsp;“wise men” connection.If you’ve ever attended a class at Wizard Academy, you understand. The crown and the rose represent the goals you bring with you. The cowboy hat and the sword represent the marvelous things you receive&nbsp;from your fellow students during mealtimes, at breaks, and in the evenings after classes. The propeller beanie represents the quirky...

I’ve met people who say absolute truth does not exist, that all truth is subjective and exists like beauty in the eye of the beholder.I believe those people are sadly misguided.Absolute truth absolutely exists. If you don’t believe me, just ask me again because I am absolutely certain.But we’re not talking about absolute truth today.We’re talking about his very beautiful sister, personal truth.Can you share your perceptions with someone else?Can you cause them to feel a little of what you feel?Can you make them see in their mind what you see in yours?Do you have a contagious sort of confidence?Congratulations. You are an artist, a persuader.Every artist is a salesman and every salesman is an artist.*The left hemispheres of our brains are wired for empirical, scientific, objective reality: absolute truth.The right hemispheres of our brains are sponges thirsty for impressions, symbols, metaphors, connections and patterns. These patterns can be auditory, visual or behavioral.Auditory patterns are called music.Visual patterns are called art.Behavioral patterns are called personality.The more complex the pattern, the deeper the beauty.The goal of every artist – no matter their field of art – is to give us a glimpse of personal truth, the beautiful sister of absolute truth.Personal Truth&nbsp;is also known as Perceptual Reality and like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, she lives in your heart and mind. Jory MacKay calls her “referential meaning.”Embodied meaning is intrinsic—it’s inherently inside something and doesn’t rely on our emotions or experiences to have meaning. Referential meaning&nbsp;is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words,&nbsp;we&nbsp;create meaning through&nbsp;what we think of when we see it.”A persuasive message – an advertisement – can be crafted from the absolute truth of&nbsp;facts&nbsp;or the personal truth of&nbsp;values&nbsp;and the self-image we see reflected in them.I once knew an attorney who put it this way:When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the truth is on your side, argue the truth. When the law is on your side, argue the law. When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”In other words, when the facts are not on your side, appeal to self image, personal truth, subjective reality:&nbsp;values.Last week, Indiana Beagle asked for your opinion of six different images of himself. You could give each&nbsp;logo&nbsp;from one to five stars and add comments, if you wished. What strong opinions you have about him! Reading those comments, Indy was delighted. I’ve known Indiana Beagle for many years but I had never before seen him prance.Each of the six logos had its advocates who proclaimed it to be the obvious only choice, and each of the six had its detractors who said it was&nbsp;a criminal&nbsp;mischaracterization.Each of you sees Indy&nbsp;differently because each of you brings a different&nbsp;set of&nbsp;values&nbsp;to the party. Indy is merely a trigger. “Referential meaning&nbsp;is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words,&nbsp;we&nbsp;create meaning through&nbsp;what we think of when we see it.”John Steinbeck said the same thing was true in storytelling.A story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes&nbsp;it to his measure.”Speaking to&nbsp;values&nbsp;instead of&nbsp;facts&nbsp;is one of the more complex methods of indirect targeting in ad writing. We’ll reveal all the simpler methods in August when the Wizard of Ads...

In 1738, Alexander Pope gave a dog to Frederick, Prince of Wales.Engraved on the dog’s collar were these words:“I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”Alexander Pope hitched his wagon to Prince Frederick, a rising star.If you’ve seen&nbsp;the Masterpiece Theater&nbsp;television series,&nbsp;Wolf Hall, you’ll remember a similar conversation between Thomas Cromwell and his wife, Liz, as he explains why he has chosen to work for Cardinal Wolsey:You know what they say in Italy? ‘Il principe bisogna sceglierlo… You have to pick your prince.'”Later, Cromwell says to Rafe, his right-hand man,The question is, have you picked your prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him and you know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes to him — ‘yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done.'”Anyone that has ever risen through the ranks knows these things.But this is America, where each of us wants to be his own dog, so we contrive new and different names for the princes we serve during&nbsp;every phase of our lives:A child’s prince is called a role model.An athlete’s prince is called a coach.An employee’s prince is called a manager.A businessperson’s prince is called a mentor.An actor’s prince is called a director.A director’s prince is called a producer.A producer’s prince is called an investor.An ad writer’s prince is called a client.There is no end to the chain of princes.Make no mistake, you have chosen a prince. In fact, you have chosen more than one.What? You still believe that you are free and independent, without alliances and the obligations that come with them? I hope for your own sake this is not true.The dog that is its ownis a strayand has no home.Each of us is stronger when we are bound to others.Dogs are known for their ability to bind themselves to others. This instinctive&nbsp;loyalty allows them to form powerful alliances against animals that are much faster and stronger than they.Solomon spoke of the power of such alliances in Ecclesiastes, chapter 4.Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one; they get a better return for their labor. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But people who are alone when they fall are in real trouble. And on a cold night, two under the same blanket can gain warmth from each other. But how can one be warm alone? A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”My friend Roy Laughlin is known for his miraculous ability to do things in business that can’t be done. Years ago, I asked him his secret.When I was a boy in elementary school, my grandfather pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Roy, the outcome of the game is determined the moment the captains pick sides. Pay attention to your playmates and you’ll always know,&nbsp;‘If I can get him and him and her, we can win this thing.’&nbsp;Know who you need on your team and figure out how to get them on your side. This is the secret of success. Never listen to anyone who says differently.'”In other words, you must pick your princes, the rising stars to which you will hitch your wagon.And they, in turn, will hitch their wagons to you.Roy H. Williams

Say what people expect you to say.Do what people expect you to do.They will be bored, I promise you.Predictability is the essence of cliché.Surprise is the foundation of delight. Without an element of surprise, there can be no delight.But irrelevant surprise is randomness, the essence of confusion.To gain and hold attention, you must do or say something unexpected, but relevant. This is the foundation of every art.When the surprising element – the thing that doesn’t belong – unexpectedly and miraculously and perfectly fits, surprise resolves into understanding. Delight will leap from the eyes. You’ll see it dancing at the corners of the mouth.Don’t be tedious. Be delightful.Before you read any further, I’d like you to go back to the beginning and read down to here again. When you’ve read these eight opening paragraphs three consecutive times, you’ll be ready to continue reading further.You thought you could just keep reading and not get caught? Go back and do what I told you.Sheesh.Magicians call it misdirection – sleight of hand – but what they’re really doing is surprising you again and again and each time they do, it’s delightful.The magician that bores you is the one whose trick is predictable.A comedian is no different, really. The punch line&nbsp;you don’t see coming – but that&nbsp;fits perfectly when delivered – makes you gasp for breath laughing and&nbsp;feel&nbsp;the lightheaded joy of youth.When the punch line is predictable, we moan.I learned all this from Robert Frost.We never met.He died when I was 5&nbsp;years old, but Robert left me a lot of poems to read and in each one he took me to a place I didn’t see coming. When Paul Harvey told me&nbsp;the rest of the story&nbsp;it deepened my skill to a more frightening level.Robert and Paul taught me how to move from surprise to understanding to delight.Surprise that resolves into understanding always looks like magic.If you can insert surprise and delight into a message for a business, you are a Wizard of Ads.Can you?You can?Excellent. Now all you need to do is practice each day and build a reputation and soon you’ll be earning more than a million dollars a year.I’m not exaggerating or trying to be colorful. Later this morning – at 11AM Central Time to be exact – I’m going to explain&nbsp;How to Make a Ton of Money in Advertising in 10 Not-Easy Steps&nbsp;during the opening few minutes of my&nbsp;monthly webcast. (Monday, May 11, 2015)You trust me to help you each week&nbsp;without trying to get in your pocket. That’s why you give me these few minutes. So I’m&nbsp;going to ask Sean Taylor to video the opening section of today’s&nbsp;webcast and post it online for you so that you can view it for free. If you’d like to see&nbsp;me explain those&nbsp;10 Not-Easy Steps,&nbsp;just send your email address to my Wizard of Ads partner&nbsp;[email protected]&nbsp;and he’ll send you a link to the video as soon as we have it&nbsp;posted.If – after you watch the video – you think you might have what it takes to become a Wizard of Ads partner, just let Andrew know and we’ll set aside a day to talk with you about it in Austin.I don’t care that you didn’t study advertising in college. I didn’t either. In fact, I didn’t even go.But people don’t seem to care about that when you’re helping them make a lot of money.Email Andrew.Let’s start this thing up.Roy H. Williams

Throughout the presidency of her husband, Martha Washington hosted a weekly reception each Friday evening for anyone who would like to attend. At these gatherings, men and women from the local community would mingle with Members of Congress and visiting dignitaries at the presidential mansion where they would enjoy refreshments and talk.Martha didn’t do this because she loved to entertain. She did it to encourage people, brighten people, connect people.One hundred years later, Stéphane Mallarmé would open his modest home each Tuesday night to the literary and artistic misfits of Paris. Among the writers who gathered there each week were Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and Rainer Maria Rilke.What conversations they had! Arthur Schopenhauer was likely talking about these Tuesday nights when he wrote, “The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”Debussy named Stéphane Mallarmé as his inspiration for&nbsp;The Afternoon of a Faun&nbsp;and Ravel wrote a mystical&nbsp;piece of music,&nbsp;Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé&nbsp;dedicated to the memory of his&nbsp;Tuesday night host. The visual artists who mingled with those writers and musicians on Tuesday nights were Manet, Degas, Gaugin, Whistler, Renoir, Edvard Munch and Auguste Rodin. The combined works of these artists today are&nbsp;worth – quite literally – many billions of dollars.These men did not get together because they were exceptional.They became exceptional because they got together.*In the spirit of Martha Washington and Stéphane Mallarmé, Wizard Academy launched just such a weekly gathering one&nbsp;year ago.You should start one, too.If ever you’re in Austin on a Friday afternoon, we gather at 4PM at the Toad and Ostrich, the private pub on the campus of Wizard Academy. Just climb the tower fire escape to the quarterdeck and go through the door on your left.We go home to our families at 5:30.These are the rules of our gathering:If you talk about business or politics, we throw you out.Although the topic of conversation may wander like a butterfly in springtime, we have a single conversation with everyone participating. No side conversations, please.Daniel Whittington is our&nbsp;host at the Toad and Ostrich, our Martha Washington, our Stéphane Mallarmé. While you’re here, you might even learn why we call him “Brittington.”Be prepared to laugh.Be prepared to sing.Be prepared to live.Do&nbsp;this in your town, too.Roy H. Williams

When Glenn Gould retired from playing the great concert halls of the world, he climbed aboard a Canadian train and rode it north to the end of the line. During this journey, Glenn recorded the conversations of his fellow passengers and mixed them into a strangely compelling audio presentation called&nbsp;The Idea of North&nbsp;(1967). It was the first installment in his&nbsp;Solitude Trilogy.Solitude is when you push the world away.Isolation is when the world pushes you away.A simple reversal of energy is all that separates the two.Energy must always have a direction. Glenn Gould knew this.Music is energy.Life is energy.Notes in a song can go North or South: up or down.Life has its ups and downs, too.The movement of music West to East – left to right – is tied to the passage of time. So we experience music&nbsp;all in one direction,&nbsp;exactly as we experience life. The speed of music is called its tempo.What is the tempo of your life?The line traced by the rising and falling of the notes as we move left to right is called musical contour: melody.If your emotions could be charted throughout the day, you would see that a day, a month, a season, a life has a melody, too.Does night follow day,or does day follow night,or does the earth just spinaround a ball of light?Evidently, these are the things I think about when I’m on vacation.When I’m not on vacation I think about how to attract customers to your business.I’ll bet you’ll be glad when I get back from vacation, right? I look at what I’ve written so far and think, “It’s good that I don’t keep track of how many people subscribe and unsubscribe, because a Monday Morning Memo like this one is likely to set a new record for losing the largest number of readers in a single day.”That’s&nbsp;as&nbsp;much as I had written when I received an email from Mia Erichson, the woman that caused Jeffrey Eisenberg to abandon Brooklyn.This is what she wrote:For no reason that matters to this discussion, this afternoon I was thinking about The Trivium.The Trivium is a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.The Trivium&nbsp;– is the lower division of the Seven Thinking ArtsGrammar&nbsp;&nbsp;– the art of lettersLogic&nbsp;– use and study of valid reasoningRhetoric&nbsp;– the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situationsThe Quadrivium&nbsp;– is the upper division of the Seven Thinking ArtsArithmetic&nbsp;(number)Geometry&nbsp;(number in space)Music&nbsp;(number in time)Astronomy&nbsp;(number in space and time)Mia then went on to describe – rather brilliantly and with details – how the curriculum of Wizard Academy might be organized in a similar way, thereby giving students a clear path of progression toward their goals.Mia’s note was encouraging to me for a variety of reasons:It made my wandering thoughts feel a little less crazy and a lot less irrelevant. (I’d never heard of the Quadrivium, so I Googled it and learned that Plato and Pythagorus and the scholars who followed them thought of medicine and architecture as&nbsp;practical&nbsp;arts, but the Trivium and Quadrivium were the&nbsp;liberal&nbsp;or “thinking” arts. Wow. People have been pondering this idea of mapping things in space and

You’re twelve.Everyone treats you like a kid, but you and I know better, right?You’ve known the difference between boys and girls for a lot longer than anyone suspects. But girls aren’t the mystery you suppose&nbsp;them to be. They’re far more mysterious than that. You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to figure out just one of them.I remember twelve.You’re about to start getting a lot of advice from people who love you and some of that advice will be pretty good. But you’re also going to be told some things that are absolute crap.You’ll be told&nbsp;the secrets of success&nbsp;are to be smart and to work hard. But that’s not entirely true. The world is full of successful people who rose to the top simply because they overcame their fear and took chances other people weren’t willing to take.Successful people usually fail multiple times before they succeed.If working hard were the way to wealth, men who dig ditches in the heat of summer would be the wealthiest of us all.We’re paid according to the size of the responsibilities we’ve been entrusted to carry.You’ll be given responsibility when you demonstrate that you’re willing to do what other people aren’t willing to do. You’re not going to want to do those things, either. But do them&nbsp;and do a good job. That’s how you gain authority.People will tell you that a single success can cause you to be “set for life” or that a single mistake can “ruin your life.” But success and failure are both temporary conditions.Grown-ups will tell you that you need to go to college to be successful. If you want to become an employee and climb the corporate ladder, college will definitely help you do that. But the downside of college is that it trains you to think like everyone else. If you want to leave your fingerprints on the world you’re going to need to have your own way of thinking.Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. So never be afraid to experiment. Just make sure you can afford to fail.People will tell you that you need to “find your purpose.” But this would lead you to believe that you have only ONE purpose and that it’s a secret.Piffle and pooh. You don’t need to find a purpose; you need to choose one.You fall in love with a purpose&nbsp;exactly like you fall in love with a girl:&nbsp;by reaching out and touching it each day.&nbsp;When you make daily contact with something, it becomes an important part of your life. You make your mark on it, and it makes its mark on you.You’ll be told that you must plan your work and work your plan. But the winners are those who know how to improvise when things don’t go according to plan.You can choose what you want to do, but you can’t choose the consequences.There’s a big difference between the way things ought to be and the way things really are. If you moan about how things ought to be, you’re a whiner. And the only people who like whiners are other whiners.But if you work to make things better, you’re an activist. If you fling yourself headlong into making things better, you’re a revolutionary. Congratulations, you found a purpose.Grown-ups with good intentions will tell you that you should “enjoy these years of no responsibility, blah, blah, blah.” But grown-ups who have warm and fuzzy memories of the years between twelve and sixteen aren’t remembering those years as well as they think.It’s pretty cool when you can hop into a car and go anywhere you want to go. But after a few years you’ll realize that no place is quite as special as the place you came from. But you can never really go home again because “home” changes just like you do. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said you can’t step into the same river twice.The best advice I can give you is that you should marry your best friend and...

This is an ad you’ll be hearing soon for the world’s fastest-growing franchise for in-home elder care:When&nbsp;Peter Pan&nbsp;first appeared in 1904, children didn’t understand the significance of the crocodile that swallowed an alarm clock. But as those children grew older, they realized that&nbsp;time&nbsp;is the ticking crocodile that chases us all. Time… we just can’t outrun it. I’m Cathy Thorpe, president of Nurse Next Door. Let us&nbsp;help you&nbsp;fight the crocodile. You can live in your&nbsp;OWN&nbsp;home and get all the help you need. It’s what we do… (two second pause) because we&nbsp;care.&nbsp;Nurse Next Door dotcom.”“Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older. And then before you know it, they’re grown.”– Johnny Depp&nbsp;playing J.M. Barrie in a movie called&nbsp;Finding Neverland.Have you accomplished things that other people said you could&nbsp;never&nbsp;do?Welcome to&nbsp;Neverland. You’re obviously one of the Lost Boys.The Lost Boys are risk-takers who rise above their circumstances, constantly dodging the Crocodile of Time, narrowly escaping the Bear Trap of Tradition, zigzagging away from competitors and fools, always happy, always helping, forever embracing that moment called Now.It is a marvelous tribe. When they get together and tell stories it’s like summer camp for grown ups. So they should have a tree house, right?On the first page of today’s&nbsp;rabbit hole,&nbsp;Indiana Beagle is showing off Marley Porter’s architectural rendering of&nbsp;The House of the Lost Boys&nbsp;– soon to be Wizard Academy’s third student mansion – three interconnected towers facing Chapel Dulcinea from directly across the valley of Engelbrecht. Each of those towers will have two rooms, raising our total number of on-campus rooms to twenty-four.One of the reasons they’re called the Lost Boys is because they’re invisible;&nbsp;you can’t find them.The House of the Lost Boys is being funded by a secret society of men and women who are donating $15,000 each toward the cost of construction. In return, they will attend a special 2-day event on the campus of Wizard Academy each year for the next five years (2015 – 2019) where they will enjoy the edgiest teaching, the most futuristic thinking and the liveliest discussions of the year.The names of the Lost Boys will never be listed. The Lost Boys themselves will be the only people who know the identities of the other members of the tribe. A Lost Boy is free to tell you they’re a member, but they’re forbidden to name anyone else in the group. Cool, huh?The seven Lost Boys who have already stepped forward are an amazingly&nbsp;magnetic group. If I published their names and accomplishments, we’d attract a big crowd of outsiders anxious to donate 15k apiece just to get next to these men and women for a couple of days each year. But&nbsp;we’re not going to let that happen.One of the most deeply embedded traditions of Wizard Academy is that no one tries to do business while they’re here. We’re not a networking organization. We’re a school, a retreat, an island of restoration and stimulation and recovery where interesting and excited people prepare for the next stage of their journey.Yes, we’re a little bit ridiculous.Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But that’s what keeps us safe from people whose minds are narrow and closed.Can I tell you my biggest fear? I worry that someday the wrong people will gain control of our school and rename it the American Small Business Academy. After all, we already own...

Sometimes I think we go through our lives trying to impress an invisible audience called “everyone.”“What will everyone think?”Invisible would be bad enough, but I think “everyone” might also be imaginary. Emil Cioran was probably right when he said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”We buy cars, clothes, furniture and art to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Is it possible that everyone&nbsp;isn’t&nbsp;watching? Is there a chance that everyone is under the mistaken impression that is it we who are watching them?It’s funny when you think about it.And it’s also how I make my living. I’m an ad writer.When you have a strong attraction to a brand, it’s because that brand stands for something you believe in. You see in that brand a reflection of yourself as you like to believe you are. What authors do you read? Do you subscribe to any magazines? What type of architecture attracts you? Do you listen to music? What kind?Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.Does it bother you for me to say these things? Please don’t let it. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about an “else” named Everyone.There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” – Robert Louis StevensonThe hidden mechanisms&nbsp;of explosive ad writing are rarely seen because most people don’t want to believe they need identity reinforcement and affirmation. They are offended by the very suggestion of it. But the truth is that most of us need these things&nbsp;deeply.I met a man a year ago who paid me to give him advice for a day. We spent that day talking about several companies he owned. At the end of the day he asked if I might be willing to write ads for these companies and I – for a variety of reasons – declined. A few months later I received a long email from him telling me about a troubled company he had acquired that had lost two-thirds of all its customers, a loss of about 20 million dollars in annual revenues. I wrote back and told him that I would write ads for this troubled company, but not for the others.The first ad I wrote shares a bittersweet, true story from the childhood of the man who hired me. It’s about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old and it’s why he bought the troubled company. Upon receiving the ad, he called six different people and read it to them. Each of them got tears in their eyes.Not because the story was about him, but because it was about them, too. The story in the ad is about a certain&nbsp;kind of magic that each of us guards&nbsp;deep in our heart like buried treasure. Even you.I have every confidence that the ad campaign will recover those lost customers and lift this once-troubled company into a sunlit sky.To write an explosive explanatory ad, you must choose:How to end.Where to begin.What to leave out.You must include specific details in your ad or it won’t have credibility: “a year ago… two thirds… 20 million dollars… 10 years old.”But you must also leave something out of your ad or it won’t trigger curiosity: “…a certain&nbsp;kind of magic that each of us guards&nbsp;deep in our heart like buried treasure.”You really want to read that ad&nbsp;now, don’t you?For obvious reasons I won’t be sharing that ad in the Monday Morning Memo and I’ve instructed Indy...

The hardest decisions in life occur when we must choose between two good things:Honesty or Loyalty?Justice or Mercy?Frugality or Generosity?These often come into conflict, do they not?If one could remove the vitriol from political debates, these are the six beautiful sisters we would see in a magnificent tug-of-war: Honesty, Justice and Frugality on one side ——– Loyalty, Mercy and Generosity on the other.Let us hope neither side ever wins.A person not doing anything is often exactly what they seem.If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.Rick Sorenson, one of my partners, tells of the day he decided to plunge headlong into the riptide of life. His moment of truth arrived when he saw himself dead and buried. On the tombstone six feet above him appeared these tragic words: He Had Potential.Sorenson read those words and immediately leaped into the churning sea of life.Do the storms ever cease on that sea?A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are for.”– John A. Shedd“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”– Mark TwainYou are busy because you do things.You are getting things done.You are having Mark Twain’s adventure.You are not torn between two beautiful things.You are torn between three: Work and Rest and Play.Which of these three have you sat in the corner with her face turned to the wall?Why have you chosen just two of these when all three are required for happiness?I have given you many things to think about today.I will think about them, too.Roy H. Williams

You’ve been told, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But it’s a misquote. What Wolfgang Köhler said more than a hundred years ago – in 1910 to be exact – is that “the whole is&nbsp;different from&nbsp;the sum of its parts.”Kohler was&nbsp;famously irritated for the next 57 years by the insistence of writers to turn his statement into something different than what he was saying.But he shouldn’t have been surprised. As a psychologist, Köhler knew that we collect sensory data from verbal and nonverbal sources and then add it up into an “impression” that may or may not be accurate.The reason our impressions are so often wrong is because few of us ever studied a language that wasn’t a language of words or numbers.You didn’t realize that numbers are a language? There are things that can be said in the language of math that can be translated into no other. If you want to learn advanced mathematics, just think of it as a foreign language and you’ll be able to learn it much more quickly.Benjamin Zander delivers a charming and funny and profound TED talk about The Transformative Power of Classical Music. He begins with a short segment on the piano from Chopin, then pauses to explain the relationship between two of the principal notes in the sequence.So let’s see what’s really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. (plays the note) The next note is a C. (plays the note) And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn’t it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (plays more notes, ending with B-C-C-C-C) But basically, it’s just a B, with four sads. (Laughter)”This is the moment when we realize that Zander has just taught us a two-syllable word. In the language of music, “sad” is spelled B-C.Zander then says,I’ve one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who’s no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you’ll hear everything that Chopin had to say.”You listen for exactly 107 seconds as the music written by Chopin triggers detailed memories of specific times. You understand perfectly what Chopin was trying to say.This is when it really hits you&nbsp;that music is a language. And if you control the music, you control the mood of the room.Color, too, is a language.Symbols are a language.Motion is a language.I believe there are exactly 12 languages of the mind and they’re self-referential.&nbsp;This means you will find them embedded within each other and they can be added together to create distinct artifacts.Tempo is the Motion component within Music.Symbol plus Motion equals Ritual.Anger plus Joy equals Cruelty.1Sadness plus Surprise equals Disappointment.1These are just a few of the equations you’ll be taught when you look into&nbsp;Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind.&nbsp;I’m not sure when we’ll be teaching it again, but if you’d like to receive an advance notice from Vice-Chancellor Whittington before he publicly posts it on the schedule, just ping [email protected] students attended last week’s class and none of them were writers. But I think you’ll be impressed with the things they wrote during&nbsp;a brief exercise on the second day of class.You’ll find 13 of their compositions in today’s rabbit hole. We’re editing a video of the 14th student that we’ll post in a week or two.Fascinating.Roy H. Williams

If you can’t tell funny stories about embarrassing mistakes you’ve made, you’re not taking enough chances.Are you letting the fear of failure turn you into a narrow guardian of the status quo?Good judgment comes from experience.Experience comes from bad judgment.I met a woman when I was a boy – I promise I’m not making this up – who had the power to change the future. She taught me how to do it, too.Shall I teach you?The&nbsp;past was written by the&nbsp;choices of yesterday.The&nbsp;future is written by the&nbsp;choices you make today.The key is to do things that matter.You spent your day yesterday. You invested your time. But did you make a difference? Did you bring anyone joy? Did you&nbsp;matter?&nbsp;Or did you play it safe because you were&nbsp;worried that you might make a mistake?I’m not suggesting that you try&nbsp;something new all the time, just 5% of the time.The time to try something new is when:1. you feel itchy that there’s room for improvement,2. you’ve counted the cost,3. you can afford to fail.That’s when you should take a chance. Follow your instinct.Few things turn out as well as we had hoped or as badly as we had feared.You learn a little from small mistakes. You learn a lot from big ones. You learn nothing at all from mediocrity.Failure is never a waste of time. Mediocrity always is. The fear of failure is what keeps you average. Success is the result of taking chances.America is plagued by mediocre primary schools, subpar infrastructure, and dysfunctional government. But somehow, this country manages to get at least one big, important thing right: innovation. That’s the deep magic of the world’s leading economy.”– James Pethokoukis, May 9, 2014Innovation occurs when you take a chance that you might be wrong.We want to&nbsp;encourage&nbsp;greatness in men. We want to encourage ambition. We believe that nobody wants to be sort of gray-normal. Often, the definition of normal is ‘average.’ We live, it seems to us, in an age under the curse of normalcy, characterized by the elevation of the mediocre.”– Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette,&nbsp;King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine“When you worry about what ‘might’ happen, you’re living in the shattered wreckage of your future.”– Teresa ShapiroPennie and I will spend April in Paris with the woman who taught me how to change the future.She married my father before I was born.Roy H. Williams

What are you trying to make happen?Is your goal actionable, or is it ambiguous and vague?Do you have an empirical method for measuring daily progress?Empirical:&nbsp;adjective,&nbsp;based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation rather than theory or pure logic.I’ll admit that I’m on a bit of a rant today and that the perspective I’m about to share may be nothing more than a quirky, personal preference.But I don’t think so.I’ve never been a big fan of what most people call “goal setting.” This isn’t because I have no goals. It’s just that I believe what most people call goals are little more than aspirations, hopes and dreams: wishful thinking.&nbsp;My goal is to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty.”“My goal is to run a Fortune 500 company.”“My goal is to write a bestseller.”I don’t consider these to be goals but outcomes, by-products, consequences.I promise I’m not trying to rile you.I believe every honest goal:1:&nbsp;has an explicit action plan embedded within it.2:&nbsp;can have its progress monitored and measured by observers.3:&nbsp;will manifest itself in&nbsp;daily action,&nbsp;even if that action is occasionally limited to just few moments; a telephone call, an email, a note written to yourself on the back of a cash register receipt during lunch and then tucked into your wallet.My goal is to build a free wedding chapel that hosts more than 1,000 weddings a year for couples who travel to reach it from every continent on earth.”Chapel Dulcinea hosted 960 weddings in 2014 but we have not yet had guests from Antarctica. We hosted 824 weddings in 2013.A meaningful goal requires that you touch it each day and take action to move it forward, even if that action is microscopic. If you’re not taking action each day, you don’t have a goal. You have a delusion, a wish, a fantasy, a dream.Student:&nbsp;My goal is to be a published author.Me:&nbsp;Show me what you wrote yesterday.Student:&nbsp;Well, I haven’t actually started writing yet, it’s just my goal.Me:&nbsp;Do you really want to write, or do you want to have written? Is there a chance that what you actually want is just to have a book in print?”Make no mistake: I am a fan and an advocate and a steady imbiber of delusions, wishes, fantasies and dreams; but these are entertainment, comfort, and the sometimes-necessary components of a healthy self-image.But they are not goals.Roy H. Williams

The ground moved beneath our feet.There. It did it again.That first tremor was the growing reality of gender equality.The second was the shrinking of mass media.These trends aren’t connected, but they’re both significant.Gender equality is changing the nature of romance. Don’t believe me? Watch any romantic movie from 20 years ago and count the anachronisms, those interactions that belong to the past and do not seem to fit the present.Gender equality also affects advertising and marketing in ways you might not expect.Not many years ago, it was assumed that lovers would marry and buy a home and establish a life together. But then an entire generation of women was taught not to depend on a man, but to establish a career and a life on their own.I’m not being critical. If Pennie and I had daughters instead of sons, this is probably what we would have urged them to do.That advice to young women changed the landscape in marketing. A study published by Pew Research Center indicates that in 1970,&nbsp;84%&nbsp;of U.S.-born 30-to 44-year-olds were married. By 2007 that number had declined to just 60% and if we extrapolate the trend into 2015, the percentage of married 30-to-44-year-olds is currently at&nbsp;54.8%&nbsp;and falling. We went from 16% single to 46% single in just one generation.A once-proud nation of families is evolving into a proud nation of individuals.The motivations that drive husbands and fathers and wives and mothers are different from the motivations that drive individuals who have no one depending on them but themselves. Consequently, the language and logic of ad copy must be altered to connect with this altered audience.The trend toward singleness is sociological.The erosion of mass media is technological.Each trend accelerates the other.If the majority of a nation is watching the same TV shows at the same time, listening to the same hit songs at the same time, and receiving similar news from similar sources simultaneously, we can expect that nation to think and feel in similar ways.Mass media ruled America in 1970.&nbsp;Radio was a&nbsp;rock station, a country station, a talk station, an easy listening station and an instrumental format&nbsp;called “beautiful music.” Then you had ABC, CBS and NBC TV. Ted Turner wouldn’t create the first cable network until 1976 and FOX didn’t appear until 1986. When a movie left the theaters,&nbsp;it would go to the drive-in theaters where it would be shown for&nbsp;a reduced price, then appear on network television for free about a year later. DVRs, DVDs and videotapes did not exist. You either had to be where a movie was showing at exactly the right time or you missed it. This forced us to gather together at specific times for entertainment where&nbsp;we all heard the same commercials.Mass media brought us together physically and it united us psychologically. It also gave advertisers a platform for telling their stories.Advertising was easy in those days.Today’s technology allows&nbsp;us to opt-out of mass media. This is&nbsp;good for the individual but it&nbsp;presents a significant challenge to the advertiser. The advertising opportunities created by new technology are highly targetable&nbsp;but they’re also shockingly expensive. The most efficient thing we’ve found so far costs 4 times as much per person as broadcast radio.&nbsp;And although the digital product gives us the ability to pinpoint target a specific audience, that advantage doesn’t deliver anywhere near enough benefit to justify the inflated cost. This is not theoretical. We’ve learned these things&nbsp;through testing.I’ll bring this to a conclusion:We’re approaching&nbsp;the end&nbsp;of a golden&nbsp;time&nbsp;when courageous advertisers can invest&nbsp;money in&nbsp;mass&nbsp;media and see their&nbsp;businesses grow

If success were the result of a formula, we would achieve it more consistently.Every business has its little formulas for success.These formulas, however, are always incomplete because they were reverse-engineered by connecting the dots&nbsp;after&nbsp;success had been achieved: the second thing (success) followed the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door,) therefore we assume the second thing (success) was&nbsp;caused&nbsp;by the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door.)Logic then whispers into our ear, “If you connect these dots&nbsp;prior&nbsp;to your next attempt, success will surely follow.” This seductive logic has been frustrating humanity for so many years that it has a fancy Latin name:&nbsp;post hoc, ergo propter hoc.“Success is not a dog that can be led about on a leash.”No, that’s not the interpretation of the Latin phrase. It’s just something that popped into my head just now and I decided to share it with you. Actually,&nbsp;post hoc, ergo propter hoc&nbsp;is translated as “after this, therefore resulting from it.”Analysis and ego and weasels with calculators use&nbsp;post hoc, ergo propter hoc&nbsp;logic to assert that we can map our way directly to success without making any wrong turns along the way. But if you keep your&nbsp;eye on these data-weasels, you’ll see them&nbsp;make as many wrong turns as the rest of us. And most&nbsp;of the weasels never arrive at the destination at all.In truth, the variables that contribute to the creation of success cannot be fully calculated in advance. This is due to “the third body problem,” a mathematical conundrum that governs anything that would attract and hold another. Are you trying to attract and hold the attention of your customer? Welcome to “the third body problem.”This same third body problem can also be used to your advantage if you have the courage, but we’ll save that discussion for when we have at least 3 uninterrupted hours together.If you’d like to try to figure it out for yourself, just Google&nbsp;“Henri Poincare third body problem.”Another common misdiagnosis of success – and one that’s much easier to explain – occurs when we judge results too quickly. We see the early stage of success and call it failure.This is because when you’re doing exactly the right thing, the results will often get worse before they get better.I’ve always attributed this to&nbsp;the law of&nbsp;seedtime and harvest,&nbsp;but my friend John Marklin prefers to call it the J-Curve.Roy,In the grocery industry, which is the world in which I live, a key component… is the J-Curve. For example, I built a ground-up store 4 years ago and was told I would do “X” in sales.For two years I did 60% of X in sales. As I came out of the J-Curve I gained momentum and hit the budgeted number in year three.J-Curves happen any time there is change and sometimes they defy logic.For example, in one of my stores my meat sales sucked. So I doubled the size of the meat case and added variety. The result was&nbsp;lower&nbsp;meat sales. It took about 30 days for people to accept the change. Once they did, they liked the added variety and selections. Slowly sales increased and today they’re at the desired level.Very few people speak of the J-Curve.If you wish to discuss more, I would love to do so while on campus at the Valentine weekend.Thank you.John MarklinThe front side of the...

“Happiness is a choice.”Unhappy people get angry when I say “Happiness is a choice”&nbsp;because most of them have&nbsp;happily assigned their unhappiness to their circumstances, or their past, or an evil someone somewhere. It irritates&nbsp;them when I suggest they can simply&nbsp;choose&nbsp;to be happy.I’m not saying&nbsp;it’s easy, but it can definitely be done.Now let’s talk about you.How often have you said, “I’ll be happy when…”But then the desired circumstance arrives and it doesn’t bring real happiness.Psychologist&nbsp;Shawn Achor&nbsp;says we tell ourselves,If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier.”“The problem with this is that it’s scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you change the goalpost of what success looks like.You got good grades, now you have to get better grades.You got into a good school, now you have to get into a better school.You got a good job, now you have to get a better job.You hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target.If happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.”“But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise your level of positivity in the&nbsp;present… your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we’ve found is that&nbsp;every single business outcome improves.&nbsp;Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed.&nbsp;You’re 37 percent better at sales.&nbsp;Doctors are 19 percent faster and more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully, as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.”I said, “Happiness is a choice,” an act of your will.Will you let me prove that?&nbsp;We’ll need only a few minutes a day for 21 days.Here’s what I need you to do:Write down three new things you’re grateful for each day.Three&nbsp;new&nbsp;things a day, seven days a week.According to Shawn Achor, as you approach the end of those 21 days your brain will start scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first. Make&nbsp;this a habit and your happiness level will rise. Guaranteed.Each day, send an email to a friend describing something good that happened to you in the past 24 hours. It can be anything. Sharing it with a friend allows you to relive that moment.You do realize that we’re re-training your brain, don’t you? All it takes is an act of your will. It will be awkward at first, but it will get easier. Stick with it.Send an email to someone – anyone – telling&nbsp;them what you like best about them, how they’ve inspired you, or taught you something valuable. Let that person know they’re important to you.&nbsp;Pick a different person each day.One last thing. None of those emails can be sent to me.Will you give it 21 days?I’m going to go write down 3 things for which I am grateful and then I’m going to send 2 emails.What are you going to do?Roy H. Williams

To&nbsp;accomplish the miraculousyou must&nbsp;attempt the ridiculous.Before you attempt the ridiculousyou must announce it to the world.If you don’t have the courage to announce it,you must at least whisper it in the dark.Because&nbsp;it must be spoken.You’ve got to hear yourself say it.And then you’ve got to take action.Are you sufficiently ridiculous to do this?You’ve never heard of Columbus, Indiana.&nbsp;Not Ohio.&nbsp;Indiana.And you’ve not likely&nbsp;heard of J. Irwin Miller. But perhaps you’ve heard of Cummins. The Cummins diesel engine? Cummins is&nbsp;headquartered in Columbus, Indiana, a town&nbsp;of about 40,000 people.I’ll begin at the beginning.Nine months and ten minutes after America’s soldiers came home from World War II, the Baby Boom began. The first of those children started school in 1953.J. Irwin Miller was the CEO of Cummins at the time. When Miller saw the plans for the sadly uninspired school buildings the government was planning to build, he said something that many people considered ridiculous:Every one of us lives and moves all his life within the limitations, sight, and influence of architecture – at home, at school, at church and at work. The influence of architecture with which we are surrounded in our youth affects our lives, our standards, our tastes when we are grown, just as the influence of the parents and teachers with which we are surrounded in our youth affects us as adults.American architecture has never had more creative, imaginative practitioners than it has today. Each of the best of today’s architects can contribute something of lasting value to Columbus.”Miller then set up a foundation that would pay all the architectural fees for any public building to be built in Columbus, Indiana. You could hire the finest architects on the planet and Cummins would cheerfully pay them on your behalf. The only condition was that you had to build the building those architects drew for you.The first building to be designed with a Cummins grant was Schmitt Elementary School. This was quickly followed by the McDowell Adult Education Center, Northside Middle School and Parkside Elementary School.&nbsp;Each of these buildings is a spectacular work of art.Today,&nbsp;more than 50 of the world’s most beautiful buildings&nbsp;can be found in this little town of 40,000 people. It’s known among architects as “The Athens of the Prairie.”The American Institute of Architects ranks Columbus, Indiana, as the 6th most important city in America for architectural innovation and design, right behind New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC.J. Irwin Miller is my kind of ridiculous. I stand and cheer for&nbsp;people like him. He could have followed the crowd and supported&nbsp;one of the big national charities but he didn’t. He chose something that mattered to him, personally. And whether or not people&nbsp;agreed with&nbsp;him or even understood what he was hoping to do, well, none of that seemed to matter to&nbsp;him.But can’t you hear the suggestions?Why not&nbsp;do this in a larger city so that more people can enjoy the beauty?”“Why not spread your&nbsp;gift across several struggling towns&nbsp;as a way to restore their local pride?”“Why not do something to&nbsp;ease human suffering&nbsp;instead of&nbsp;just making the scenery prettier?”Have you ever noticed that most suggestions are really just complaints wearing a cheap disguise?I never met J. Irwin Miller, but I’d like to believe that he gave these people a big, beaming smile as he said, “That’s a fabulous idea and you should definitely...

Roughly 10 percent of the American population is worried about having enough money to pay&nbsp;the rent and enough food in the pantry to make it until&nbsp;payday. A good&nbsp;day&nbsp;is when their biggest fear is whether or not the&nbsp;car will start and get them to work. This is called living “hand-to-mouth.”I did it for years. Perhaps you’ve done it, too.Another 10 percent of America&nbsp;has these basic needs met but a dysfunctional household – or perhaps a troubled neighborhood – keeps them from feeling safe.&nbsp;These unhappy souls wear the dark handcuffs of fear and dread as they walk silently&nbsp;through what David called,&nbsp;“the valley of the shadow of death.”I don’t pretend to have a solution.At the other end of the spectrum are the 15 percent whose biggest concern is whether or not they’re getting sufficient recognition from the people whose opinions matter to them.And then there are&nbsp;the rest of us, the 65 percent in the middle who are “figuring-it-out-as-we-go.” Usually,&nbsp;our&nbsp;greatest need is that we’re searching for&nbsp;where we belong. Each of us is&nbsp;looking for the mirror tribe who&nbsp;will finally see us and know us and value us and miss us when we are absent.Pennie and I spent the last 15 years&nbsp;building&nbsp;a&nbsp;place for that tribe to meet. These Monday Morning Memos are a sort of homing beacon…Okay, I’m back now. I had to wipe a tear from my cheek as the gushing memory of a friend flooded&nbsp;my mind. I wasn’t thinking of him when I began&nbsp;this piece, but the words “homing beacon” burst the dam of a memory&nbsp;I’ve decided to let flow.More than a dozen years ago I decided to teach a class about unleashing your Intuition. We called it “Free the Beagle.” As is my custom, I opened&nbsp;that class by having each of the 30&nbsp;students stand up and tell&nbsp;us their names and a little bit about themselves. The last person to stand was a white-haired man sitting in the far corner of the back row.My name’s Keith Miller.” He stopped and his&nbsp;stern gaze swept the room. “As I sat here and listened to you introduce yourselves, I realized that&nbsp;never in my life&nbsp;have I been surrounded by so many weirdos… misfits… mavericks… renegades… rebels and rule breakers.”&nbsp;The room went&nbsp;silent as a tomb. “It’s almost as if the wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey and this is&nbsp;the strange group that answered that call.” Then he shouted with happy joy, “And I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be counted here among you!” The&nbsp;room exploded with laughter and applause.When I saw how masterfully he&nbsp;had handled the room without&nbsp;telling us anything about himself, I wondered, “Could this be&nbsp;that&nbsp;Keith Miller?”During the first break, I slipped into my library and pulled out a hardback,&nbsp;The Taste of New Wine,&nbsp;a monumental book&nbsp;that sold more than 4 million copies when it was released&nbsp;in 1965. I handed it to Keith&nbsp;privately and said, “Could I convince you to sign that?”His eyes fell and he frowned a little. He had hoped he would not be discovered.I chose not to inquire about&nbsp;the sequence of events that led Keith to seek the shadows of oblivion. That’s one of the markers of our tribe; we don’t hold you accountable for your past. We know&nbsp;you only by the future you’re trying&nbsp;to create. Keith’s&nbsp;enthusiastic&nbsp;involvement in the academy for the next 10 years made it clear he&nbsp;had found a home. He&nbsp;passed away in 2012 at the age of 84.God, I miss him.Each of us needs to know we belong.If you believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom…If you can happily embrace...

I have a theory about people who succeed:&nbsp;they cheat.&nbsp;And I’m in favor of it.I saw you recoil from that word a little, so I’ll say it more delicately:&nbsp;they’re quick to embrace an unfair advantage.Exceptional&nbsp;marketing gives a business an unfair advantage. Businesspeople who embrace this advantage&nbsp;are usually the ones who succeed.Here’s why I call it “an unfair advantage”: marketing doesn’t improve the product or the service you provide but it can&nbsp;make a customer choose you anyway, even when your competitor is offering a better value.Your competitor’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to win attention and create a memorable impression. He’s expecting his product to speak for itself.Products rarely do that.A strong location gives your business a&nbsp;second&nbsp;unfair advantage.Choosing a location is one of the most important marketing decisions you’ll ever make. A strong&nbsp;location wins attention and creates a memorable impression. A weak location doesn’t do that.Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg spent the past 12 months leading a team of programmers in the development of an online tool that helps you choose the ideal spot for your business. All you have to do is type in an address and the system will instantly evaluate more than 15,000 different metrics for that location, including demographics, psychographics, social signals, traffic patterns, search traffic, area competition and beneficial anchors.The blind tests they ran produced&nbsp;mind-boggling results.The first test involved a restaurant chain who provided the address and sales volume of their strongest location along with the address and sales volume of their weakest location. The IdealSpot software then accurately predicted&nbsp;precisely&nbsp;how all the other locations in the restaurant chain would rank. When Bryan pointed at the results page and said, “the location at this address should do 85% of the volume of the leading store,” the COO looked at his records and said, “that store does&nbsp;exactly&nbsp;85% of the volume of our leading store. How could you possibly know that?”The brothers did the same thing for several other chains of stores and in every instance, the IdealSpot software accurately predicted what the owners of those stores already knew and were able to confirm.Remember those 15,000 metrics the software is pulling down from Big Data? One of them is “pet ownership,” so it really shouldn’t surprise you that the IdealSpot system was able to accurately predict the performance of every location in a chain of pet supply stores.Technology provides an unfair advantage.&nbsp;Whether or not you choose to embrace that advantage when choosing a location is up to you.When I wrote&nbsp;The Wizard of Ads&nbsp;trilogy more than a decade ago, I included a chapter called, “How to Calculate an Ad Budget.” My formula is unique in that it considers your cost of occupancy (rent) as part of the cost of marketing.&nbsp;Entrepreneur&nbsp;magazine&nbsp;published our formula&nbsp;in February 2004 and it created quite a stir. In my 35 years of experience I’ve never had reason to back away from my statement, “Expensive rent is the cheapest advertising your money can buy.”Make sure you get the most for your money.The IdealSpot website went live just last&nbsp;week. The company is still in its infancy.&nbsp;You’re one of the very first people on earth to know about this new technology.My suggestion is that you&nbsp;take a look&nbsp;at IdealSpot.com&nbsp;and then bookmark the website in your browser. The odds are high that you’re going to bump into someone who really needs to...

Do you sometimes&nbsp;identify with Don Quixote,&nbsp;the self-appointed knight-errant who set out on his horse, Rocinante, along with his friend Sancho Panza on a donkey, to right the world’s wrongs and change the course of history?He was a delusional, but happy old fart.You and I are&nbsp;not the first to identify with him.John Steinbeck saw&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;as a symbol of himself. Thus, he traveled to Spain and La Mancha in 1954 out of a special affinity for the place, and began his journey to rediscover the soul of America in a camper he affectionately christened Rocinante. The fruits of his journey – Operation Windmill as he called it – eventually found expression in&nbsp;Travels with Charley.”– Stephen K. George,&nbsp;&nbsp;A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia,&nbsp;p. 55Travels with Charley,&nbsp;Steinbeck’s diary of his&nbsp;journey to see America with his dog, was published in 1962. He&nbsp;was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.Steinbeck’s 1960 GMC pickup with camper is on display at the Steinbeck center in Salinas, California.I decided that you and I&nbsp;should have our own Rocinante to park beneath the trees along the path to Engelbrecht House.We’ll run electricity to it so that it can be heated and cooled and offer it as a room on campus for any adventurous alumni who wants to travel with Steinbeck and Charley.”Vice-Chancellor Panza, I mean Whittington, agreed with me and we enthusiastically set out to find our truck.As it turns out, most of the 1960 GMC trucks we found online had already been sold, many of them more than a year ago. And the trucks that were available needed vast amounts of restoration.&nbsp;Uh-oh. This was going to be harder than we thought.&nbsp;But we couldn’t give up because a group of Wizard Academy alumni had already donated more than $6,000 toward the effort.Two weeks ago Pennie showed me 17 photographs of what can only be described as a 1-in-300,000,000 unicorn. Seriously, what are the odds that a professional mechanic would buy the same pickup and camper as John Steinbeck – brand new – and then keep it in his garage for more than 50 years?He ran the engine periodically, but drove the truck only once a year on a hunting trip with his son. That truck has only 20,000 original miles. Certified. It looks like it just drove off the showroom floor and it runs like the day it was born. What are the odds of this truck actually existing?I promise I’m not making this up. The old mechanic passed away and his son is&nbsp;selling the truck.Do you want to go along on&nbsp;this adventure?Photos of the proposed truck and camper can be found in the rabbit hole. Just follow Indiana&nbsp;Beagle at the top of this page. A click&nbsp;is all it takes.Three more bits of extremely, very excellent news:(1.)&nbsp;A romantic, Valentine’s Retreat,&nbsp;February 13-14 (Fri-Sat.) Stay on the&nbsp;Wizard Academy campus with your special someone for 2 days and 3 nights. Good food, new friends, and fabulous sessions with our beloved Dr. Richard D. Grant and Chairman of the Board, Jean Backus. This is going to be magical, especially the music, the insights, and the dress-up banquet. Laugh and snuggle and be happy. And with 2,000 bottles of wine in the cellar, I doubt that&nbsp;we’ll run out. Discount Code: Type “alumni” and save 50 percent.(2.)We’ve made&nbsp;big&nbsp;progress on&nbsp;Secrets of the Wizard Academy...

Although he lived more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci drew pictures of&nbsp;machines that would not be invented for more than 400 years. His paintings of the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man are perhaps the most widely recognized images in the world.WIKIPEDIA says Leonardo “was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest polymaths of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.”“Leonardo da Vinci” is an idea that is larger-than-life in our minds. But when I show you a photograph of the house in which he died, he becomes more of an actual human being.That photo of the house is what I call “a reality hook,” a&nbsp;point of contact&nbsp;that connects the world of abstract imagination to the world of concrete fact.You can buy a print of the Mona Lisa on Amazon.com for less than ten dollars and the image will be identical to the original. But the value of the original is beyond estimation because Leonardo da Vinci actually touched it.An original work of art gives you a point of contact with the artist.An historical artifact gives you a point of contact with a specific moment in time.Understand this, and you understand the heart of every collector.Just as Leonardo da Vinci became more “real”&nbsp;when you saw the house in which he died, he comes into chronological&nbsp;focus when I tell you that Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus and King Henry VIII shared his lifetime. Leonardo&nbsp;becomes gut-wrenchingly real when I tell you that his diaries speak of a “gang of four” that raped him repeatedly when he was a boy.BAM. Reality hook.Stories and descriptions become more believable when you give them context.There are four ways to create reality hooks:Connect to something&nbsp;the reader/listener has already experienced.“Have you ever bought a car and then began seeing cars like yours everywhere you went?”Use terms of description&nbsp;that are specific and highly visual; shapes, colors, and the names of familiar things.&nbsp;“A man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish.”Include details&nbsp;that can be independently confirmed. These bits that&nbsp;can&nbsp;be confirmed lend credibility to those parts of your story that&nbsp;cannot&nbsp;be confirmed.&nbsp;“There’s&nbsp;a&nbsp;restaurant in Austin at 4th and Colorado called Sullivan’s. It was there that I met Kevin Spacey and Robert Duvall.”Make logical sense.&nbsp;People are quick to believe things that seem correct, even when those things are not true.&nbsp;“If your advertising isn’t working, it’s because you’re reaching the wrong people.”Later this morning (Monday, January 12, 2015 at 11AM CST) I’ll spend the better part of an hour presenting examples of each of the 4 categories of reality hooks and talking about when and how to use them.Reality hooks are the hammer, screwdriver, pliers and duct tape of an&nbsp;ad writer. You can use them to fix practically anything.I really should have told you about&nbsp;today’s webcast&nbsp;a week ago, but it didn’t occur to me.Sorry about that.Here’s how I’ll make it up to you: the next time you come to a class at Wizard Academy, tell Vice-Chancellor Whittington that you’d like to see my examples of reality hooks and we’ll figure out a way to make that happen for you (and anyone else in your class that wants to join you.)2015 is going to be a year unlike any other.Hang on tight.Roy H. Williams

Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol. Other artists first make their art and then celebrity comes from it. Andy reversed this. For me the Factory was a place of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for some of the others it was: from ferment comes art.”– Nat Finkelstein,&nbsp;Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967The son of a Coney Island cab driver, Nat Finkelstein was a Brooklyn boy who entered Andy Warhol’s Art Factory as a photographer in 1964 and remained there as a photojournalist for 3 years. His photographs are famously iconic of the times.In 1966, Finkelstein was taking photos of Andy for a proposed book project when it became obvious that everyone in the room was jockeying to be included in the background of the photographs.Warhol said, “Everyone wants to be famous.”Finkelstein answered, “Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.”A year later, when Warhol was interviewed for a 1968 exhibition in Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art, he quipped,“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15&nbsp;minutes.”The reporter dutifully wrote it down and it was included in the program handed out to attendees of the exhibition.Although he was just repeating a funny line in the hopes of saying something quotable, it would become the most famous thing Andy Warhol ever said.But Andy, you said more than you know. Hundreds of millions of us walk the streets today with little calculators in our pockets the size of 8 cigarettes placed side by side.These pocket calculators also function as televisions that let us watch any TV show or movie anytime we want. They’ll even work in moving cars.Our little calculators also function as movie cameras. We use them to make movies we broadcast to the entire world for free.And it’s also a typewriter – we can use it to type a note.And it’s a telegraph – we can send that note to any group of people in the world and it will instantly appear on their little television screens.And it’s a telephone – we can use it to call anyone on earth, even when they’re not at home.Our little 8-cigarette televisions – movie cameras – typewriters – telephones – are also photography cameras that use no film. These photographs don’t need to be developed so we can send them to anyone, anywhere, instantly.The same device gives us instant access – 24 hours a day – to the collected knowledge of the world. And we can add&nbsp;our own thoughts and photographs and movies to this collected knowledge store anytime we want. Since they&nbsp;travel&nbsp;at the speed of light, it takes only one&nbsp;millionth of a minute to deliver&nbsp;our creations to every person in the world.Andy, the future you described in 1968 has finally arrived, but our 15 minutes of fame is given to us in microbursts of one millionth of a minute.Fifteen million flashes of worldwide fame take quite a while to create.As it turns out, a lifetime.So I’m not sure what, exactly, has changed.Roy H. Williams

You can hope the value of a stock will rise, but when you invest money in that stock, your hope becomes faith.&nbsp;Did you make a foolish commitment?Time will tell.We believe the sun will rise because we’ve seen it rise day after day.It is a repeatable observation.We believe what we have seen.We believe it will rise.Belief is not faith.Belief is rational.Faith is irrational.Belief is based on evidence.Faith is based on hope.This is where it gets tricky.When our hope compels us to action, our faith is made evident.Not just to others, but to ourselves.Without action, our hope is just wishful thinking.Faith is hope that has written its name in the wet cement of time.Faith is that realm where actions speak louder than words.Like I said, this is where it gets tricky.One thousand and twenty years ago – 1095 to be exact – Pope Urban II decided that christians should reclaim all the geography related to the life of Jesus. In 1291, these Crusades&nbsp;were abandoned with the fall of Acre, the last christian stronghold in Israel.You’ll notice that I’m spelling christian with a lower-case c. This is because I believe those actions taken in the name of Christ were not, in fact, sanctioned by him. In essence, the leaders of christianity were signing his name to checks he did not write.Sadly, leaders of movements tend to do this.It would be easy to declare – as many have done – that faith is foolish and evil and the world would be better off without it. Heck, John Lennon’s most popular song,&nbsp;“Imagine,”&nbsp;is that very idea set to music.Imagine there’s no heaven.It’s easy if you try.No hell below us,Above us, only sky.Imagine all the peopleLiving for today.Imagine there’s no countries.It isn’t hard to do.Nothing to kill or die for.And no religion, too.Imagine all the peopleLiving life in peace…”Juergen Todenhoefer is an international journalist&nbsp;who interviewed a leader within ISIS&nbsp;after 300 of their fighters took the Iraqi city of Mosul, even though more than 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers were stationed there when that attack was launched.So you also want to come to Europe?” Todenhoefer asked him.“It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe,” the man said, “just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain … For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines. Our expansion will be perpetual … And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”“What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?” Todenhoefer asked.“150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us,” the fighter answered. “We will kill them all.”Have you ever wondered how 2 Christians can read the same Bible and walk away with entirely different understandings of what they have read? Well, the same is true of Moslems and the Koran, I think.John Steinbeck may have been thinking the thoughts of God when he wrote,[The reader of my book] is just like me, no stranger at all. He’ll take from my book what he can bring to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there. And just as he is like me, I

You don’t need to go to college to become successful.What Americans call education is usually just the passing along of traditional wisdom, which, when you think about it, is essentially a deepening of the status quo: conformity, indoctrination, groupthink.When students can imitate their teachers perfectly, we claim they have achieved excellence. But aren’t they just imitating the norm, the average, the standard?If this is excellence, where will we find progress?I’m not the only one who feels this way.Laszlo Bock is the head of people operations at Google.In a conversation with Tom Friedman of&nbsp;The New York Times&nbsp;reported by Max Nisen at&nbsp;Quartz,&nbsp;Bock made a startling series of statements about what Google has learned from studying its own employees:Graduates of top schools often lack “intellectual humility”“They commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.”People that make it without college are often the most exceptional.“When you look at people who don’t go to school and yet make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people…. What we’ve seen [at Google] is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”Learning ability is more important than IQSucceeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock says that college can be an “artificial environment” that conditions students for one type of thinking.Want to hear something silly?Professors in American business schools usually have no experience in running a successful business. They’re just repeating what they were told by someone else who was taught it by someone else who learned it from an endless string of bloodless people holding chalk in front of blackboards in drab little rooms.Why do we revere&nbsp;the graduates of these places? It would seem to me that the very definition of mediocrity would be, “a highly developed ability to repeat what you&nbsp;were told.”But you don’t just repeat what you were told. You think for yourself.Mistakes don’t frighten you. You learn from them.The smell of mediocrity does not follow you.You are not average.You have imagination and courage and humility and a marvelous sense of humor.You, my special friend, are a wonderful and valuable brand of crazy.Merry Christmas.Roy H. Williams

The Grand Illusion of AdvertisingDecember 15, 2014ListenAYou own a business.You sell a product or a service.Your growth is limited by one of two things:The right people haven’t heard about you. Because if they had, they would surely be buying from you.The right people have heard about you. They just didn’t care.The grand illusion of advertising – perpetuated by every seller of ads – is that your problem is #1:&nbsp;the right people haven’t heard about you.But the painful truth is probably that the right people heard but didn’t care.Your mind recoils from that a little, doesn’t it?Don’t let it. Good news is on the way.Your problem is that you’ve been trying to find a date for your sister by telling your friends,She’s really pretty in the face.”That qualifier, “in the face,” is a deal-killer. The only way to make it worse would be to add,… and she’s got a really good personality.”Yes, men appreciate pretty faces and good personalities. That’s not the point. The point is that you qualified your recommendation in a way that made it seem like you were hiding something.Are you selling at “competitive” prices? Is your location “convenient” and do you have “an impressive selection?” Do you talk about how your “friendly” and “expert” sales associates really “care about finding the right solution?”Dude, your sister is never getting a date until you modify what you’re saying about her. There is no recommendation quite so damaging as faint praise.“Too good to be true” is another language of Ad-Speak&nbsp;that’s exactly the opposite of faint praise:My sister is drop-dead gorgeous and a lot of fun but no one wants to take her out.”Here’s how that sounds in business: “Highest quality at the lowest prices.”“We absolutely MUST sell 400 Toyotas this weekend!” “Prices too low to advertise.”Most ads are ignored because every customer has a mental filter that evaluates and dismisses both of these languages of Ad-Speak with a single question: “What are they not telling me?”Everyone hears what you’re&nbsp;not&nbsp;saying.My sister moved to town last week. She’s the new director of the animal shelter. Here’s a picture I took of her when we had dinner last night. It would be good if she had someone besides her brother to show her the city. Are you up for it?”Great ads close the loopholes.Loophole #1: Is she attractive? “Here’s a picture I took of her last night.”Loophole #2: Is she intelligent? “She’s the new director of the animal shelter.”Loophole #3: Why does she not have a boyfriend? “She moved to town last week.”Sure, I’d love to show your sister the city. See if you can get her on the phone right now and introduce her to me.”You’ve been reaching the right people all along&nbsp;and it was the same sister in all 3 ads.&nbsp;But you’ve been talking Ad-Speak.Come to Wizard Academy. We’ll make sure you never use Ad-Speak again.Your sister is going to be so happy.Roy H. Williams

Since the year 2000, the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop have happily endured the fanfare and pageantry of my 3-day explanation of Third Gravitating Bodies. It remains the most highly attended class at Wizard Academy.For the uninitiated, a Third Gravitating Body with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence is the single common characteristic shared by every mass-appeal success.Every one of them.&nbsp;No third gravitating body, no mass-appeal success.Third Gravitating Bodies make&nbsp;good things&nbsp;GREAT.And that’s the reason they’re so rarely discovered.1. You’ve created something that’s obviously good.2. Why would you risk adding something that doesn’t belong?A Third Gravitating Body is an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.When Francis Bacon said, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” the strangeness to which he referred was a Third Gravitating Body.Thou Shalt Not Argue with Francis Bacon.*The importance of Third Gravitating Bodies was demonstrated by Henri Poincare in 1887 when he used them to mathematically answer the nagging question of King Oscar II of Sweden, who for some&nbsp;weird reason felt he just had to know, “Is the solar system stable?”Here’s what I wrote&nbsp;about Third Gravitating Bodies in 2002.Here’s what&nbsp;a&nbsp;Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds&nbsp;wrote about them in 2006.Here’s what I wrote about them&nbsp;in 2012.But now, finally, after 15 years, I’ve figured out how to logically&nbsp;explain Third Gravitating Bodies in a single, highly condensed hour-long webinar.That magical hour will happen on Saturday Morning, April 4th, 2015. But due to the vagaries of Kickstarter, you’re going to have to pull the ripcord that opens your parachute before January 7th.If you want a detailed explanation of what will be happening and why,&nbsp;here’s some additional information.But if you’re a riverboat gambler with half a Franklin –&nbsp;or if you just inexplicably trust me&nbsp;– I believe you’ll be delightfully entertained, confused and titillated by&nbsp;this strange and unusual&nbsp;page on Kickstarter.And thus another adventure begins.Roy H. Williams

In 1879, Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in France who tripped on a strangely shaped stone and stumbled awkwardly forward. He was 43 years old.This would not normally be news but Cheval continued to stumble awkwardly forward each day for 33 more years. His was not the 10,000 hours to excellence championed by Malcolm Gladwell. Cheval stumbled forward for more than 10,000&nbsp;days.&nbsp;The miracle he left behind in his garden is protected by France as a cultural landmark and admired by more than 120,000 visitors each year.Ferdinand Cheval was our brand of crazy.Just like you and me, Cheval initially dismissed his strange idea for fear that people would think he was crazy. But when the idea came back to him like a boomerang thrown by an Australian shepherd boy, he said, “Screw it. Let’s do this thing.”The next day, Cheval gathered cement and wire and picked up rocks while walking his 18-mile postal route.In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well… I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn’t thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was… It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight… It’s a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate, it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature. I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture”AIn the 8th Psalm, David considers outer space and then asks a question of God:When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,The moon and the stars, which you have ordained,What is man that you are mindful of him,And the son of man that you visit him?For you have made him a little lower than the angels,And you have crowned him with glory and honor.You have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands;You have put all things under his feet…”The 8th Psalm doesn’t tell us whether God answered David’s question that day, but if he had, I think God’s answer might have gone something like this:David, David, David… Have you never considered the laughter of little girls or heard the songs of singers singing or read the words of men unafraid or seen the magic that leaps from the heart of every carrier of messages?”Ferdinand Cheval&nbsp;took his inspiration&nbsp;from where he found it, even though it was ridiculous.My Christmas hope for you is that you might have the courage to do the same. You, too, are a carrier of messages.Tell me, what is your ridiculous dream?Roy H. Williams

I made the decision 20 years ago that the Monday Morning Memo would rarely be about news or current events. I chose to leave the singing of fleeting facts to a chorus of professional reporters. It is a choir that does not need my voice.But today I’m making an exception.There are four things I’m betting you’ve noticed. Perhaps they’ve raised an eyebrow. I want you to know that you’re not alone.Social Media has become the new blackmail.*Customers are using threats of negative online reviews to extort cash and free products from sincere and honest businesspeople. My office is being bombarded with stories and questions from clients in every business category. I believe we’ll ultimately see an expansion of&nbsp;our libel laws&nbsp;to help curtail this racketeering, but that sort of change requires several years of debate. In the meantime, we’ll likely see the emergence of a new web device that allows businesspeople to respond with&nbsp;their&nbsp;side of the story.No, you’re not the only one being blackmailed by sociopaths.Businesses are struggling to find good employees.Employee recruitment ads are a significant percentage of what my partners and I are writing these days. The upside of this trend is that it’s an indicator of a surging economy. Businesses everywhere need more employees and few people need a job.No, you’re not the only one looking hard for good people to hire.The Witch Hunt has begun.**In the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “Me” generation (most recently 1973 to 1983,) we elevate heroes and create idols to worship, (Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan, among others.) But in the second half of the upswing to the zenith of a “We” generation (currently 2013 to 2023,) we subject our&nbsp;heroes to microscopic&nbsp;scrutiny and destroy every idol we can find. The zenith of a “We” is that time when the most innocent observation is likely to be misinterpreted as sexism, ageism, racism or religiosity. I am reminded of the tongue-in-cheek advice of Elbert Hubbard 120 years ago, “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” It was his way of saying, “Don’t let the fear of criticism rob you of the courage of your convictions.”Amen.(Uh-oh, was that sexism? Should I have said&nbsp;Amen&nbsp;and&nbsp;Awomen? What? You say it was religiosity? Can I just back up and start over?)Where did 2014 go?In late October I began receiving emails from a lot of people who don’t know each other, yet each of them&nbsp;chose the same 4 words: “Where did 2014 go?”&nbsp;These emails have continued for about 3 weeks and this does&nbsp;not&nbsp;happen every year. 2014 seems to have somehow vanished before our eyes. Wasn’t it just last month that we were trying to figure out how to navigate Obamacare?Nope. That was a year ago.The problem with living in the future is that it never arrives and suddenly your life is over.No, you’re not the only one looking for a quiet moment, a good friend and&nbsp;a desert island.Roy H. Williams

Phil was nearly 70 when I met him 30 years ago. He’ll be 100 soon. Phil doesn’t know it, but I think of him as one of the people who speaks wisdom into my life.Do you have a favorite word? Phil’s favorite word is balance.Most of us are out of balance and suffering for it.We think we’re in danger from bad things but those bad things rarely materialize. Our problem is that we’re pulled out of balance by our strong attraction to good things.You are resourceful. You get things done. You are a person of accomplishment. You will never be destroyed by those who stand in your way and&nbsp;try to push you back.The danger is from those who stand behind you and push you forward. “Go! Go! Go! You’re almost there! Just a little bit more! You can make it! Hooray! You da’Man! Keep it up! No pain, no gain! You can do this! Woo-hoo!”It’s our nature to take good things too far.A strong work ethic is a good thing. Every unbalanced workaholic has one.Compassion is a good thing. Every burned-out minister knows this.Recognition is a good thing. Just ask any celebrity who has forgotten who they are.We read in the Bible that Jesus would often leave the crowds he was teaching and disappear into the wilderness. My suspicion is that he hung out with Lazarus – the brother of Mary and Martha – during these times because Lazarus cared about Jesus the man more than he cared about Jesus the worker of miracles. I think maybe Lazarus was a “safe” person for Jesus, meaning that he made no demands on Jesus, and that’s why&nbsp;Jesus wept when Lazarus was gone&nbsp;and why he called him back from the grave.At least that’s how it happens in the screenplay I’m writing.Everyone needs a wilderness into which they can disappear. They need safe people to be around, friends&nbsp;who make no demands on them.Although we officially call Wizard Academy “a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious,” our students have laughingly called it “a summer camp for grown-ups” ever since we launched this place 14 years ago. Lately I’ve been thinking they might be right. In fact, we’re so often compared to Peter Pan’s island of Neverland that our next student mansion will officially be called, “The House of the Lost Boys.”Seriously, I’m not making that up.I like to believe that Wizard Academy is the desert island where Jesus would have hung out with Lazarus when he needed to get away from the pressing crowds. And I like to believe this is where you will come when you need to do the same.And one last thing: according to Robert Louis Stevenson, this is the island where the treasure is buried.Come, let’s see if we can find it.Roy H. Williams

I’m talking with a man about his happy future. There will be decisions to make and risks to take, but it’s a future that can definitely be his.And then he says, “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”The air leaves my body and I want to cry. And then I want to slap him, wake him up, shout the question that screams its own answer: “Do you know what happens when you don’t get your hopes up? Nothing! Not a bloody thing!”Lethargy. Apathy. Ennui. Depression.&nbsp;Hopelessness.&nbsp;This is the black water that rushes to fill the emptiness when you refuse to get your hopes up. So for the love of God I’m begging you, “Get your hopes up.”He says he doesn’t want to get his hopes up because he doesn’t want to be disappointed.Sigh.Perhaps the right answer is for him to buy a bigger TV, watch more sports and drink more beer. Yes, that’s the ticket. The clock will tick, the time will pass, and when they wheel his ancient body into a nursing facility, he’ll watch those same sports on a different TV and drink Ensure instead of beer.“Congratulations, friend. You never had to resort to Plan B. You never had to figure out what went wrong or find a way to fix it. You never had to deal with the joys and pains of Life, the only sport worthy of a human being.”Can you believe in things not immediately present? Of course you can. Tomorrow isn’t here, but you believe it will come.Can you have confidence in things you cannot see? Yes, you prove this every time you write a check. You have confidence – faith – that the bank won’t let you down.Is there anyone outside yourself that you care about enough to sacrifice time, energy and money to help them? If so, you have experienced love.I know of a sad woman who got her hopes up once, and things worked out pretty well for her. She became extremely famous and was widely quoted and lots of books have been written about her. She said,Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”Do you have a worthy purpose?That woman couldn’t see the future and she didn’t hear the voice of God saying, “Everything is going to be okay.” In fact, she couldn’t see or hear anything at all. Her name was Helen Keller and she lived with disadvantages so severe that the mind recoils from imagining them.When everything else is gone, faith, hope and love remain.Some people have faith in themselves. Others have faith in something or someone else. Where you put your faith is up to you. Likewise, each of us chooses what or whom to love. But once those choices have been made,&nbsp;faith&nbsp;gives us courage,&nbsp;love&nbsp;gives us energy, and&nbsp;hope&nbsp;is the light that shines in the darkness.Make a difference. Have an adventure. Get your hopes up.Turn on the light.Roy H. Williams

The silent workings of my mind are of little interest to anyone but me, yet occasionally I feel the need to chronicle some small discovery; to write it down so that it might continue to exist after I have been forgotten.Once a year I write a Monday Morning Memothat is more for methan it is for youand this is that one.If you quit reading now, I’ll understand.In Cervantes’ book of 1605, Don Quixote never meets&nbsp;Dulcinea. She exists only in his mind. Psychologist Carl Jung would call her Quixote’s “anima,” the imaginary woman that&nbsp;represents the innermost heart of a man.But in&nbsp;Man of La Mancha,&nbsp;the 1966 Broadway play by Dale Wasserman, Dulcinea is an actual woman, a reluctant prostitute in whom Don Quixote sees only purity, beauty and grace. That play won 5 Tony Awards and ran for 2,328 performances. In 1972, it was made into a major motion picture starring Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea.Dale Wasserman got the credit, but the character relationships and narrative arc of&nbsp;Man of La Mancha&nbsp;belong entirely to John Steinbeck.Follow my trail of breadcrumbs and I will tell you what I know.1952:&nbsp;The prologue to&nbsp;East of Eden&nbsp;tells us that Steinbeck was familiar with Cervantes and&nbsp;Don Quixote.&nbsp;In it, he speaks to his editor and close friend, Pat Covici:Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and with his&nbsp;Don Quixote&nbsp;set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel—the gladness and the terror.“Idling reader,” Cervantes wrote, “you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be the fairest, the sprightliest and the cleverest that could be imagined, but I have not been able to contravene the law of nature which would have it that like begets like—”And so it is with me, Pat……Cervantes ends his prologue with a lovely line. I want to use it, Pat, and then I will be done. He says to the reader: “May God give you health—and may He be not unmindful of me, as well.”John Steinbeck1953:&nbsp;Ernie Martin, the Broadway producer of&nbsp;Guys and Dolls,&nbsp;asks Steinbeck to write a sequel to&nbsp;Cannery Row&nbsp;so that it might be made into a play.I have in my possession the Christmas gift John Steinbeck sent Ernie Martin later that year, just as Steinbeck was beginning to write&nbsp;Sweet Thursday.&nbsp;It’s a copy of the 1949 edition of&nbsp;The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha.&nbsp;Inscribed on the front endpaper of that book is a note written and signed by John Steinbeck.Dear Ernie -:This is required preparation for Project X.John Steinbeck,Xmas 19531954:&nbsp;John Steinbeck publishes&nbsp;Sweet Thursday,&nbsp;a love story between “Doc” of&nbsp;Cannery Row&nbsp;and Suzy, a reluctant prostitute from the Bear Flag Hotel. Steinbeck’s&nbsp;note to Ernie Martin makes it clear that Suzy is&nbsp;Dulcinea.1955:&nbsp;Sweet Thursday&nbsp;becomes a Broadway play called&nbsp;Pipe Dream&nbsp;with a musical score by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The play receives the largest advance ticket sales in Broadway history to that point, $1.2 million, and is nominated for 9 Tony Awards.I think it would be safe to say that Dale Wasserman, a lifelong playwright, would have been very much aware of&nbsp;Pipe Dream&nbsp;in 1955.1957:&nbsp;John Steinbeck writes 114 pages of&nbsp;Don Kehan—The Marshall of Manchon,&nbsp;but he abandons...

The problem with most websites is that they’re built inside out.It’s an easy trap to fall into, almost inevitable, in fact.You’re on the&nbsp;inside&nbsp;of your company,&nbsp;looking out&nbsp;at your customer.She’s on the outside, looking in.Your website is built from your perspective, not hers. But let’s be fair: your website tells her everything she needs to know to make an informed decision, right? And who knows better than you? After all, you’re the expert.See how easy it is to build an “inside out” website?The effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization in 2014 depends on how well you anticipate and answer your customer’s questions; not the questions you feel she&nbsp;ought&nbsp;to be asking, but the ones she’s&nbsp;actually&nbsp;got in mind.Not only does SEO improve when your website is built “outside in,” but your Conversion Rate – the metric that measures the percentage of shoppers who become buyers – also takes a happy jump upward.The payoffs of an “outside in” website are big.And it’s much easier to accomplish than you think.Buyer Legends&nbsp;is everything you need to know, packed into 20 short pages.A handful of companies were given advance copies. Here’s a sample of what they’re saying:“Before reading this book I had already created some very successful online companies over the last 18 years. Most online business owners find that growth and forward progress become harder to achieve when you have become expert in every aspect of your company. Once you’ve reached that level, the definition of a ‘successful year’ typically means that you’ve maintained the profitability of the year before, or it could mean that you had an increase of 5%.Well, let me tell you that after only a few hours of going over the contents of this book, I was able to increase my sales volume by over 46%. This massive increase in sales and profits took only 3 weeks to implement. As a skeptic myself, I hesitated to provide the actual amount of my business increase for fear that it would look suspicious.As I stated, an increase of only 5% would have made my year a fantastic success, but the results I achieved from the information in this book are breathtaking.”By the way, I can vouch for the truth of that testimonial because it was written by someone who met Jeffrey and Bryan&nbsp;Eisenberg at Wizard Academy 5&nbsp;months ago and got an advance copy of&nbsp;Buyer Legends&nbsp;at that time. So when he says “already successful,” you need to understand that he was already doing a few million dollars per year in net profits. Now, after implementing Buyer Legends, “Up 46%.”My favorite testimonial, though, is from someone I’ve not yet met:“Having worked first hand with the Eisenbergs on mapping our customers’ critical paths and creating scenario narratives, I can confidently say the Buyer Legends process works.&nbsp;My team’s focus at Google&nbsp;is on acquiring SMB advertising clients. And if you’ve ever worked with these types of businesses, you know there is huge diversity through the spectrum of small and medium businesses. We’d miss opportunities and gaps by over-aggregating (i.e. taking too high level a view) though often the challenge was in effectively communicating our insights. The Buyer Legends framework allowed us to more effectively focus our efforts, improving the bottom line. And equally important, to make a more compelling case for change with our marketing, engineering and product colleagues.”Paul Jeszenszky,Head of Global B2B Digital Marketing Center of Excellence,&nbsp;Google<a...

When you write ads for a living, you learn that the truth is often the opposite of what people believe.Most people believe an ad will work if people like it, and an ad won’t work if people hate it. But that’s just not true. And we’re wrong about far more important things than that.Take marriage, for instance. You’ve heard it said countless times, “Marriage is just a piece of paper.”But the data clearly indicates otherwise. Not only are unmarried couples more likely to split up than married ones, couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married in front of 200 people.That shouldn’t come as a surprise.But this next bit of truth may indeed surprise you:The&nbsp;less&nbsp;you spend on the wedding, the more likely you are to stay married.According to&nbsp;The Knot,&nbsp;the average wedding in America costs about $30,000. But when you&nbsp;look at their methodology&nbsp;and realize&nbsp;The Knot&nbsp;surveyed only those brides who spent a lot of time on their fantasy wedding website and felt inspired to fill out a wedding-cost survey, this “average wedding” figure becomes somewhat suspect. Added to that,&nbsp;The Knot&nbsp;needs its advertisers to believe, “There’s gold in them thar hills.”I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not swallowing the hook.Better data would suggest the average American wedding costs between five and ten thousand dollars.According to Dr. Hugo Mialon and Dr. Andrew Francis of Emory University, if a couple spends 10 to 20 thousand dollars on their wedding, they increase their likelihood of divorce by 29%. Couples who spend more than $20 thousand are 46 percent more likely than average to divorce.When you spend&nbsp;less&nbsp;than average for your wedding, you increase your odds of staying together. Statistically, a couple is&nbsp;18% less likely than average&nbsp;to get divorced if they spend between 1 thousand and 5 thousand on the wedding. And a couple is&nbsp;53% less likely than average&nbsp;to get divorced if their wedding costs less than a thousand dollars.Interesting, huh?One last thing: that little factoid that “half of all weddings end in divorce” has never been true. The divorce rate in America has never exceeded 41% and that number is trending downward. In reality, the odds of staying married today are nearly 2 to 1 in your favor.Passion does not create commitment.Commitment creates passion.To whom, and to what, are you committed?Roy H. Williams

Jerry Seinfeld is the richest actor on earth. Google it. He’s worth eight hundred and twenty million dollars.You don’t make that kind of money working as a stand-up comedian in Atlantic City. You make it when companies pay to run ads during your hit TV show. Based on the advertising revenues it generated,&nbsp;Seinfeld&nbsp;(1989-1998) was the most successful TV show in the history of television.Fast-forward to October, 2014: Jerry Seinfeld wins a CLIO, an award that’s sort of like an OSCAR in advertising. (In Greek mythology, Clio was one of the nine Muses and a daughter of Zeus. She was the recorder of great deeds, the proclaimer and celebrator of accomplishments, and a source of inspiration and genius.)Jerry accepted his CLIO award from America’s advertising professionals by stepping up to the microphone and proving once again that you can say vicious things to people as long as you’re smiling when you do it. “I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.” “I love advertising because I love lying.”Like all great comedians, Seinfeld is funny because he has the audacity to say what everyone else is thinking. It’s been his trademark from the beginning. So no, I’m not bothered that he insulted the people who were honoring him. The average American is probably delighted that he did it. After all, those annoying advertising people had it coming, right?That’s one way to look at it.I prefer to look at it through the eyes of Don Quixote who, you will recall, did some amazing things while pretending he was a man who could do amazing things.Yes, I am a professional ad writer but I believe it to be a worthy profession.America did not become wealthy because of its natural resources. If natural resources determined the wealth of nations, Brazil would be the richest country on earth and Japan would be the poorest.Americans enjoy the most robust economy on earth because we’re incredibly good at selling things to each other. If we ever lose our ability to convince each other to buy things, the American economy will fall apart.So no, I’m not embarrassed to be the guy who convinces you to buy things you don’t need. If Americans bought only what we needed, we would never have progressed beyond kerosene lanterns and a hand-pump in the yard.I am embarrassed by companies who take away your right to choose.I am embarrassed by Marriott. (NYSE: MAR)While Jerry Seinfeld was insulting ad writers, the Federal Communications Commission was fining Marriott $600,000 for using high-tech equipment to jam personal Internet access during a convention at its Nashville hotel. If exhibitors or attendees wanted to go online, they had to pay $250 to $1,000 apiece to Marriott.Teddy Roosevelt spanked J. P. Morgan and the other robber barons of corporate America when they conspired to take away the American right to choose.Teddy wasn’t a Socialist, he was a Republican. He didn’t restrain free trade, open markets, capitalism or the American dream. He restrained powerful men who wanted to abandon seduction in favor of rape.God Bless the FCC.I believe Teddy would be proud.Roy H. Williams

When we think of Romeo and Juliet, we think of Shakespeare. But Shakey didn’t create those characters. The source of Shakespeare’s 1594 play was a 3000-line poem by Arthur Brooke,&nbsp;Romeus and Juliet,&nbsp;published 32 years earlier in 1562.Romeo and Juliet didn’t originate with Arthur Brooke, either. He compiled it from a number of Italian Renaissance sources, the earliest of them going back to 1474, ninety years before Shakespeare was born.Brooke’s tedious treatment of&nbsp;Romeus and Juliet&nbsp;was a moralizing, cautionary tale of a young couple engaged in “lust and whoredom,” whereas Shakespeare’s&nbsp;Romeo and Juliet&nbsp;is a sad misadventure in which heartbroken young lovers die needlessly.Beginning in the 1660s, British productions of Shakespeare’s play allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death with Romeo. Some theatre troupes went so far as to offer the ‘tragic death’ and ‘happily-ever-after’ versions on alternating nights.I’ll bet you didn’t know any of that. I certainly didn’t. I learned it from my friend, Steve King.I spend a few minutes each day with Steve.But I’ve never met him.Steve publishes a daily newsletter called&nbsp;Today in Literature,&nbsp;“the naïve idea of an English teacher on leave from the classroom.”The contact page of his website says, “It is pleasing to think that&nbsp;Today in Literature&nbsp;helps to keep the world of books alive for so many — especially those two subscribers on Bouvet Island in the Antarctic, whoever you may be. I also live on an island— Newfoundland, Canada— where I help raise two children, amuse my wife, and run this cottage industry. It is a one-man operation and it needs your support.”This is me supporting my friend, Steve King. He has no idea I’m doing it.Interestingly, Steve’s little history lesson about Romeo and Juliet contains a valuable business tip that can save you a lot of time and make you a lot of money. This is the tip: whenever possible,&nbsp;repurpose the proven.&nbsp;Streamline and accelerate something that has worked in the past.EXAMPLE: Approach 10 people with&nbsp;fearless faces and ask each of them, “Can you name a movie directed by Oliver Stone in which Charlie Sheen plays a young man who follows a bad father figure, then turns to begin following a good father figure?” Half of them will say&nbsp;Platoon&nbsp;and the other half will say&nbsp;Wall Street.Oliver Stone discovered a winning pattern and he stuck to it, moving the story of&nbsp;Platoon&nbsp;from the green jungle of Viet Nam to the concrete jungle of Wall Street. Each of the films was a towering success.Repurpose the proven.&nbsp;Find a successful pattern and use it as a blueprint.Henry Ford became the world’s first billionaire by turning&nbsp;the overhead&nbsp;disassembly&nbsp;line of Chicago meat packers upside down to create the Detroit assembly line of the Model T. He needed a quick assembly method because he had discovered&nbsp;the miracle question.Sam Walton echoed the miracle question of Henry Ford, “At what price could I sell a huge number of these?” Like Henry before him, Sam became one of the richest men in the world.Steve Jobs followed the lead of Nike Shoes. Instead of focusing his ads on his product, he turned his camera toward the kinds of people who would buy such a product. This little “mirroring” act made him 11 billion dollars.Nike didn’t follow anybody’s lead. They just did it.No, that’s not exactly true. Nike set out to create a fashion statement that indicated an athletic lifestyle, even if the purchaser had no intention of wearing the shoes for the...

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that businesspeople think of advertising and sales training and customer service as three separate departments within a&nbsp;company.Have you ever developed an impression of a company through&nbsp;their advertising and then gotten a totally different impression of that company when you&nbsp;met them?The external&nbsp;personality of your company is created through your ads. This is&nbsp;what’s&nbsp;perceived by the general public.The internal personality of your company is created by&nbsp;management. This is what your customers encounter when they contact you.If you delegate the creation of your advertising to an outside group but give them no input into your sales training and customer service programs, you’ll create a company with a split personality every time.Are people in your company using&nbsp;those words and phrases created and popularized by your ad writers?&nbsp;Or do they start an altogether new and different conversation with your customer full of new and different words and phrases?That’s a really bad idea.Continue the conversation that was begun in your ads and you’ll see your close rate rise significantly.Each of us has a natural connection with 3 of every 10 people we meet.Another 3 aren’t going to like you regardless of what you do or say. This disconnection isn’t your fault, so don’t let it bother you. The remaining 4 people can possibly be sold, but only if you do and say the right things.Does it surprise you that when all categories of selling are combined, the national average&nbsp;close rate&nbsp;is about 20 percent?Let’s say your staff is well above average with a close rate of 30 percent. This means they’re selling 3 out of 10 opportunities. That’s 50% more than the 2 out of 10 everyone else is selling.Even so, what if we could sell just 1 of the 4 remaining “sellable” customers?Your sales would immediately increase by 33%.What if we could sell 2 of those 4?Your sales would increase by 67 percent.What if, through clear focus and genuine inspiration, we could sell 3 of those 4?Congratulations. We just doubled your sales volume with no change in pricing, no change in inventory, no change in overhead and – most importantly – no additional sales opportunities.The corporate wall between ad writing and sales training has troubled me for 30 years, but I’ve not spoken publicly about the problem until now.Shall I confess?I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to be asked to fix it.Fixing it, you see, would involve talking to&nbsp;the employees of all the companies for whom I write ads. And frankly, nothing on earth could be as excruciating for me as having to smile and listen to well-meaning people tell me what they think I should do differently.Truth be told, I’m not really a people person. Few writers are.But a few months ago it occurred to me:&nbsp;I don’t have to have those conversations myself.&nbsp;I have dozens of partners and thousands of students who are much better with people than I am.One of my partners, Tim Miles, has written extensively in recent months about how to keep your company from becoming schizophrenic. And Tim is a real people person. Bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg have addressed the problem in a new “executive storyteller’s guide” that’s scheduled to be released next month. The Fortune 500 companies that were given advance copies and implemented the advice have responded with enthusiastic reviews. Another partner, Ray Seggern, has put together a marvelous workshop to help you repair the split in your corporate personality.According to Seggern,1. Story&nbsp;is What You Say (external...

Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this 1994 Compuserve ad that talks about delivering “up to 60 messages per month” as though 60 would be the largest number of emails that any of us would ever need to send.Isn’t it interesting how our use of technology always seems to evolve differently than any of us expected to see happen? Yet we continue to be attracted to pitchmen with booming voices and bad toupees who claim to be able to tell us how we’ll use technology in the future.In 1978, Fed-X was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1983, they became the first U.S. company to reach revenues of $1 billion without merger or acquisition. Then when FAX machines became popular, everyone predicted the immediate decline of Fed-X. After all, why would anyone spend ten dollars to send documents overnight when you could send those same documents in a matter of seconds for the price of a long-distance phone call?Fed-X revenues will be about $46 billion in 2014.Not many years prior to 1978, the introduction of electric toasters, gas-powered lawnmowers, self-correcting typewriters, microwave ovens and other “labor saving devices” had the experts&nbsp;convinced that boredom would&nbsp;soon be the biggest problem facing modern Americans. How were we going to spend all that leisure time?No one – absolutely no one – predicted that we would simply accelerate the pace of living, cramming more productivity into each waking hour until we were frazzled and breathless and had to look at our driver’s licenses to remember who we were.We used to tell ourselves that we could become anything we wanted to be. But today we tell ourselves&nbsp;we can become&nbsp;everything&nbsp;we want to be.We’re living multiple lives simultaneously.As a consultant, people ask me to predict the future of advertising. They look at the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of digital technology and ask, “What’s the next big thing?”The only thing I know for sure about the future is that it will happen. But rather than dodge the “What’s next?” question, I’ll give you my best guesses. (You should set an alarm on your phone to remind you 6 years from today to compare my predictions to the realities of September, 2020. We’ll probably both get a big laugh out of it.)1.&nbsp;Audiences will continue to get smaller, but ad rates will increase.2. Micro-targeting will become increasingly popular as predictive modeling through Big Data promises advertisers that they can reach “exactly the right customer at exactly the right moment.”3.&nbsp;Excited by the promise of predictive modeling, most advertisers will continue to focus their efforts on finding the right customer to sell instead of finding the right message to deliver.4.&nbsp;The big rewards will go to advertisers who find the right message to deliver.5.&nbsp;Savvy advertisers will use the Post Office to deliver warm messages to prospective customers for the price of a first-class postage stamp. The most successful of these will be hand-addressed, original greeting cards in numbered editions.6.&nbsp;No, I wasn’t joking about #5 above. I actually believe direct-mail is going to make a come-back, but this time around it will wear better clothes and have a lot more class.7.&nbsp;Broadcast radio (AM/FM) will continue to offer great value to advertisers for at least a while longer. Internet radio continues to erode Broadcast radio, though more slowly than most people assume. The most reliable projections indicate it will be about 8 more years (2022) before Internet radio is as large as Broadcast radio.Indiana Beagle has more details about all of this in the rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole, just click the fish in the Compuserve ad at the top of the page. Each click of an image in the...

Before becoming a poet, a Wizard of AdsTM&nbsp;and a writing instructor, Peter Nevland was an engineer at Motorola.Andrew Backus is a geologist and the living embodiment of Doctor Doolittle. The number of injured animals Andrew has rescued from the roadside would overflow the San Diego Zoo.&nbsp;Andrew&nbsp;and&nbsp;Peter&nbsp;are both&nbsp;cognoscenti graduates of The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.When I saw Peter talking to Andrew I walked over to where they were standing.&nbsp;This was going to be interesting.Peter looked at me and said, “What makes one storyteller more interesting than another?”Not sure where this was headed, I asked, “Are you asking, or are you about&nbsp;to tell me?Peter said, “I’ve developed algorithms* to help me grade the writing assignments of my students, but I haven’t been able to reverse engineer what makes the basic structure of a story interesting.”I said, “Ahhh. Architecture. So you’re asking, then?”Peter nodded, so I continued. “Stories become&nbsp;interesting when highly divergent components converge.&nbsp;Predictable&nbsp;stories are built from elements with too few degrees of separation between them. That’s what makes the narrative arc (the plot) of those stories feel linear; the&nbsp;listener can&nbsp;easily guess what’s going to happen next. Good storytellers begin with a high&nbsp;degree of separation between the elements in their stories, thereby increasing the listener’s surprise and delight when those elements converge.”Andrew said, “Can you give me an example?”I decided to use&nbsp;a technique called Random Entry that I learned from Mark Fox, one of the instructors at Wizard Academy.**I said, “I want each of you to think back over the past 24 hours and focus on something that has occupied your attention for a period of time, something you felt to be interesting and worthwhile.” A minute later Andrew said, “I’ve got something,” and Peter said, “Me, too.”I looked toward Andrew and he told&nbsp;me about Zoysia grass. “Not only will it grow in dry climates, but it will also grow in the shade.”Peter spoke of a pattern in Psalm 15 that is broken – intentionally, Peter believes – to dramatically emphasize the unique nature of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.I said, “You will agree that those two ideas are highly divergent from one another?”Both of them smiled and nodded.I then told them the story of how God is like Zoysia grass.One of my literary heroes, Tom Robbins, says,&nbsp;“Everything in the universe is connected, of course: it’s a matter of using imagination and research to discover the links and using language to expand and enliven them.”I did the&nbsp;“research” Tom Robbins speaks about as&nbsp;I listened to Andrew and Peter. The key to this research is to probe for the defining characteristics of each story&nbsp;until you’ve clearly&nbsp;identified components within the two stories that can&nbsp;be linked. These are your&nbsp;points of connection.&nbsp;All that remained for me, then, was to build a&nbsp;bridge between Andrew’s&nbsp;tale of Zoysia grass and&nbsp;Peter’s tale of Psalm 15. The points of connection&nbsp;make&nbsp;it&nbsp;possible.Building the bridge is easier than you would&nbsp;think. The points of connection are always there. I know it sounds crazy but, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course.”I continued my explanation to Andrew and Peter. “The bridge that connects highly divergent ideas is like the flow of electric current. It’s powerful and illuminating and it always feels like magic.” * * *Andrew said, “So the bridge is like a third gravitating body?”“Not quite,” I answered. We won’t have a true, third gravitating body until we find a third idea that’s as&nbsp;divergent from Zoysia Grass and the God of Israel as those two ideas are from...

Some of you are going to feel like I’ve spit on your shoe or mocked your religion or told you that your baby is ugly, so I’d like to apologize in advance for what I’m about to say.Teamwork in business is highly overrated.There, I’ve said it.I realize those 6 words are going to disturb some of you, but if my goals were merely to buy an arched eyebrow and a scornful frown and trigger an email of rebuttal, I would be just another sensationalist trying to yank a reaction from his audience.But those are not my goals.My goals are to make you more productive, help you reduce your mistakes, shorten your learning curve and raise the height of your success.To do these things, we must look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.I appreciate that you’re still reading.I was at lunch recently with 3 incredibly bright businesspeoplewhen I smiled cheerfully at them and said,&nbsp;“I think teamwork in business is highly overrated.”All three of them stiffened as though I had said something truly shameful. After a moment, the business owner sitting directly across from me looked down at his plate and said quietly,&nbsp;“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”We had not been talking about teamwork. There was no reason for any of these people to feel personally challenged or attacked, yet that’s exactly how they reacted. The cultural myth of Teamwork is anchored deep within the American soul, beginning, I believe, with Thomas Jefferson and “We the People” and the launch of this grand experiment called Democracy.I spent the next hour swatting down every example of successful “teamwork” they could throw at me. At the end of that hour they universally agreed that “teamwork” is an illusion created when the individual components within a human system accomplish a goal that is credited to the collective, rather than to the individual efforts of the components.What might appear to be teamwork in a relay race is, in truth, just a series of individual runners, each of whom begins their effort with an advantage or a deficit that was handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful. It is only when they are rewarded collectively that we create the illusion of a team.Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.If you remove individual responsibility, you create a committee.Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.Leaders and managers have different functions.A leader encourages the members of a tribe to deliver their best individual efforts.&nbsp;A manager holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Although I admire the abilities of Steve Jobs, he was merely the popularizer, the face, the dynamic leader, the pitchman, the philosopher, the high priest of the Apple religion. Without Wozniak, Steve Jobs would likely have been just another California techie bouncing from company to company in sneakers and ripped blue jeans.Wozniak said,&nbsp;“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”John Steinbeck said something similar in 1952, when Wozniak was just 2 years old.&nbsp;“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”The great David Ogilvy made

Targeting is impotent.That wasn’t a misspelling.If you want to waste a lot of money on advertising, just target exactly the right audience and then make an offer that fails to move them.Targeting isn’t the answer.Having the right message is the answer.Most ads underperform because they say, “Here’s what we do and here’s how we do it. You should buy it.” Tedious and predictable ads always talk about what and how. But if you want to engage the imagination, you’ve got to start talking about why.Ads that change hearts and minds say, “This is the belief that wakes us up in the morning. It’s why we come together. Here’s how we live our belief. Do you believe what we believe?”The selling of products and services is the selling of ideas.And now you know how Apple became the 5th largest company in America.According to Simon Sinek, most computer companies say, “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?” That’s how most of us communicate in our ads. We say what we do and how we’re different and better than our competitors. What and how are always boring. But Apple begins by telling us why they do what they do.Apple says, “We believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” In other words, Apple sells you their belief system before they try to sell you their computer.Apple generated $43.7 billion in sales during the first three months of 2014. That’s more than Google, Amazon, and Facebook COMBINED. Apple’s iPhone revenue alone is bigger than Microsoft and their iPad revenue alone is bigger than Facebook. And those are just two of their products. We haven’t even touched laptops or iTunes or Beats by Dre.In his TED talk,&nbsp;How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Simon Sinek says,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you don’t know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do? Again, the goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”“Dr. King wasn’t the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn’t the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,’ he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.”“How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. And it wasn’t about black versus white: 25 percent of the audience was white. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. And, by the way, he gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.”Simon Sinek speaks of leadershipbut his principles apply equally well to advertising.Great ads – like great leaders – tell you why, not just what and how.Indy will post a couple of examples&nbsp;from Apple in today’s rabbit hole and I’ll explore an hour’s worth of examples during next week’s session of Wizard of Ads LIVE....

If you were to ask 1000 people&nbsp;to name the behavior that marks93 percent of all successful companies,&nbsp;what do you suppose they would tell you?I didn’t ask 1000 people&nbsp;but I did ask Google, which is sort of like asking the whole world. Here’s what the whole world told me:“Successful companies focus on what they do best.”“They invest in their people.”“They’re passionate.”“They anticipate the future and stay ahead of the curve.”“They never quit learning.”“They have discipline and a financial roadmap.”“Blah, blah, blah.”I was staring at a list of 86 different characteristics&nbsp;when the truth finally hit me: “Half of these people are guessing and the other half are just preaching a sermon about their personal values and core beliefs. Not a single one of these writers has actually gathered the facts.”Then I stumbled&nbsp;onto a book review written by Eric Barker of&nbsp;Time&nbsp;magazine.Amar Bhidé went to Harvard,&nbsp;became a proprietary trader for E.F. Hutton, a consultant for McKinsey and Company, and then a college professor and a world authority on capitalism. In his third book,&nbsp;The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses&nbsp;(Oxford University Press,) Bhidé brought all the rigor of academia to his investigation of the characteristics of successful companies.God bless Amar Bhidé.What he found&nbsp;was that 93 percent of all successful companies had to abandon their original business plan — because the original plan proved not to be viable.&nbsp;“In other words,”&nbsp;wrote Eric Barker of&nbsp;Time,&nbsp;“successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach.”Mary Whaley&nbsp;summarizes Bhidé’s book by saying the winners in business&nbsp;“survive and prosper because of an ongoing ability to adapt to opportunities and problems, are subjected to many detours, and stumble often along the way.”Successful&nbsp;companies&nbsp;have an ability to improvise.Unsuccessful&nbsp;companies&nbsp;blindly “stick to the plan.”The principal difference between hope and a planis presumption about the future.The intended&nbsp;plan is deliberate.The improvised&nbsp;plan is emergent.According to Eric Barker,&nbsp;“Deliberate is what’s in the business plan, the PowerPoint deck, the list of goals. And that’s what ends up changing 93% of the time. Emergent is what you find along the way. It’s when your baby nephew ignores the gift you bought him… but LOVES the shiny wrapping paper. The heart medication research… that ends up becoming Viagra.”“Intel’s decision to accept an order from Busicom,&nbsp;a second-tier Japanese calculator company, started the company on its path to microprocessors. Sam Walton’s decision to build his second store in another small town near his first one in Bentonville, Arkansas rather than in a large city, led to Wal-Mart’s discovery of the attractive economics of building pre-emptively large stores in small towns.”–&nbsp;The Processes of Strategy Development and Implementation,Clayton Christensen and Tara DonovanNovelist E.L. Doctorow&nbsp;once said,&nbsp;“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”&nbsp;The same thing is true of running a business.There’s a line in Psalm 119&nbsp;in which the writer says to God, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path.” When I was a very young boy, one of my teachers pointed out that a footlamp provides only enough light to see the next step. You can’t see further until you’ve moved forward in the light that you have.I’m betting E.L. Doctorow has read...

Thirty-one years ago,&nbsp;David Ogilvy wrote,&nbsp;“In some developing countries radio still reaches more people than television. Yet even there nobody really knows what kind of commercials make the cash register ring. Isn’t it time somebody tried to find out?”– David Ogilvy,&nbsp;Ogilvy on Advertising,&nbsp;1983, p. 116Sleep well, David.&nbsp;We found out. And by “we,” I mean the Wizard of Ads partners.As Indy points out&nbsp;in the illustration above the title of today’s memo, opening with a pop culture reference from 50 years ago followed by a quote from a man that’s been dead for 15 years could easily lead you to believe I’m a dinosaur left over from that bygone era when cars still ran on gasoline.Would I point out&nbsp;how old and potentially out-of-touch I am if I didn’t have complete confidence in what I’m about to say?A lot of business people&nbsp;are listening to their kids right now and getting all lathered up in the belief that the Internet has made TV and radio ads obsolete. In fact, I just received an email from a client in Syracuse who is positively fretting about the future of radio. What makes his email especially funny is that we’ve been using radio exclusively for the last 3 years and it’s made him so wildly successful that he’s currently expanding into cities nationwide.I believe in the web.&nbsp;In fact, I’m using it to deliver this message to you.The Internet killed the yellow pages,&nbsp;the newspaper and encyclopedias and now it’s revolutionizing the distribution of books and music. Born in 2005, YouTube has become a magnificent lottery that doesn’t pay its winners in cash, but with worldwide recognition and a few weeks of fame.I may be YouTube’s biggest fan. I am enthralled by it.Have you ever bought any pay-per-click ads?&nbsp;Shortly after Google announced their AdWords program I spent more than $100,000 of my own money just to learn what does and doesn’t work. My only goal was to get a hands-on education. I didn’t want to risk my clients’ dollars until I knew exactly what I was doing.In the end,&nbsp;I figured out how to drive qualified traffic to a target website for just a nickel a click. But that seemed expensive to me, so I abandoned it.The average 30 or 60-second radio ad&nbsp;needs to be heard by the same person 3 times within 7 nights sleep. This currently costs my clients less than 2 cents per week. In some cities, that 3-frequency costs us only about a penny a week. We can do the same for you if you want.When I talk about mass media,&nbsp;young advertising people often look at me with pity and scorn. I can almost feel them patting me on my head.That’s why I got such a kick&nbsp;out of watching a YouTube video of Bob Hoffman speaking at an advertising conference in Europe:“One of the problems with our advertising experts is that they have a free pass. They go around to conferences. They talk to the press. They write stupid blogs. And they make profound statements, and confident statements about our industry. And no one ever goes back and checks up on them… We begin our little journey in 2004, about 10 years ago… Seth Godin, the bestselling guru of marketing said, ‘We have reached the end of traditional advertising.’ He apparently forgot to tell Toyota and Coke and McDonald’s. Then&nbsp;Advertising Age,&nbsp;the top advertising trade publication in The States, said, ‘The post-advertising age is underway.’ Bob Garfield, a columnist at&nbsp;Advertising Age,&nbsp;said in 2009, ‘The present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition, or any transition at all, from mass media and marketing to micro-media and marketing are absurd. The sky is falling. We are exquisitely, irretrievably, fucked.’ Bob is a nice guy but I really think he needs a hug. And according to the nonprofit think-tank, FutureLab, they just came out and said it, ‘Advertising is...

Todays memo is a long one, but I promise you it's worth it.Advertisers are attracted to online media&nbsp;when they’re not entirely happy with their investments in traditional broadcast media. To understand the reasons behind their disappointments, we need only to revisit the subject of&nbsp;last week’s Monday Morning Memo:“Linear, no-threshold thinking”&nbsp;assumes that every statistic is scalable. It’s what causes advertisers to assume they can “test the waters” with small investments, then increase their financial commitments if the test results are positive.If an ad needs to be encountered only once&nbsp;to trigger a sale, it’s a direct-response ad. Congratulations! You’ve successfully crafted a high-impact offer for a product with a short purchase cycle. Direct-response ads are scalable, meaning sales increase proportionately to the number of people reached. But not everything can be sold with a direct response ad. The simple truth is that most products and services require that their ads be encountered again and again.Pepsi has been a household word&nbsp;since before we were born, so why do they keep advertising? Couldn’t they reduce their mass media spending and still maintain their sales volume?In a word, no.We know this because Pepsi tried it.Bob Hoffman&nbsp;was the keynote speaker at the 2014 European conference of AdvertisingWeek:“In 2010, Pepsi cancelled all its TV advertising and its Superbowl advertising to great fanfare and bet BIG on the largest experiment in social media marketing ever attempted, ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project.”&nbsp;TIME&nbsp;magazine quoted the CEO of a New York brand consultancy, ‘This is exactly where Pepsi needs to be. These days brands need to become a movement.’ Well, they became a movement all right. I estimate The Refresh Project cost them between 50 and 100 million dollars. It got them 3.5 million Facebook likes and&nbsp;a 5% loss in market share,&nbsp;which they seem to have never recovered. That year, they dropped from the second best-selling soft drink in the US to third. Pepsi’s marketing director said, ‘The success has been overwhelming. We have more than doubled our Facebook fans. We have more than 24,000 Twitter fans.’ The L.A.Times didn’t see to agree. They called it ‘a stunning fall from grace.'”Hoffman went on to say&nbsp;that TV and Radio are best at&nbsp;creating&nbsp;demand, while the web is terrific at&nbsp;fulfilling&nbsp;demand. The interviewer then challenged Hoffman by saying,&nbsp;“But it is changing. And it’s changing fast. Ten years ago 93 percent of the public got their news from television and only 7 percent got their news online. Today it’s 26 percent online.”Hoffman’s response&nbsp;reflected his 40 years of experience directing ad campaigns for McDonald’s, Toyota, Shell, Nestle, Blue Cross, Chevrolet and Bank of America:“What we often confuse is the&nbsp;use&nbsp;of digital media with its power as a marketing or advertising entity. The fact that more people are&nbsp;using&nbsp;online for news is not a de facto proof that it’s a good advertising medium. Let me give you an example of that: the old-fashioned telephone. Everyone in the world had a telephone. It was a hugely popular means of communication. That didn’t make it a good advertising medium. It was a lousy advertising medium. The fact that people us it for communication or to get information or to have conversations doesn’t necessarily make something a good advertising medium.”Now let’s get back to the subject&nbsp;of why so many advertisers are frustrated with their TV and Radio campaigns.In last week’s memo we described motorcycles&nbsp;going out of control when...

Reliable data&nbsp;tells us exactly how many motorcycle riders have died trying to navigate an S-curve at 100 miles per hour. The straightforward logic of traditional accounting, with its linear, no-threshold thinking, predicts one-tenth as many deaths at 10 miles per hour.But we know this is ridiculous.&nbsp;The number of riders that die at 10 or 20 miles per hour is likely to be zero. There is a&nbsp;threshold&nbsp;speed at which the curve becomes dangerous. Any extrapolation that crosses that threshold is certain to be inaccurate.If you understand&nbsp;the concept of “extrapolations that cross the threshold,” you have the key you need to understand why financially focused businesspeople often make breathtakingly bad decisions in business.The rules of accounting&nbsp;make it counterintuitive for a financially trained person to perceive a numerical threshold at which the laws of math are suddenly altered. But keep in mind the threshold speed of the motorcycle in the S-curve: deaths at speeds&nbsp;above that numerical threshold&nbsp;will have no correlation to deaths at speeds below it. In effect, the laws of math are suddenly altered.You and I know&nbsp;that an invisible force, momentum, is affecting the motorcycle and causing it to careen out of control. Although momentum can be measured, there’s no column for it on a financial spreadsheet.Momentum in business&nbsp;can be positive or negative, pushing your company forward or back. Advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media provide momentum to a business. But a threshold called “the experience of the customer” will dramatically alter these efforts, accelerating them forward or holding them back.If your typical customer’s experience&nbsp;is delightful, your communication efforts will be highly effective. But if that experience falls short of delightful, advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth and social media will no longer have the desired effect.Financial types like to&nbsp;“hold advertising accountable,” because it’s easy to blame poor advertising for every decrease in sales opportunities. But no calculation is ever made for the cumulative impact of un-wowed customers. Financial types never consider&nbsp;the threshold of disappointment&nbsp;at which once-loyal customers abandon ship.When Michael Eisner came to Disney in 1984,&nbsp;he was initially perceived as a golden boy of finance, making Disney wildly profitable during a time when its rivals were faltering. He worked his miracle by putting Disney’s greatest cinematic treasures on DVD, milking every last dollar from the rich heritage that had taken the Disney brothers half a century to build. Within a few years, video sales were providing almost all the profits for Disney’s movie division and, by 2004, Disney had raked in $6 billion from video and DVD sales. But then the Disney cow was dry.Michael Eisner looked&nbsp;at assets and opportunities through a financial lens. He had none of the whimsy of adventure, none of the imagination or commitment to excellence that had guided the Disney brothers. While busily milking the cow and making himself more than a billion dollars in the process, Eisner quietly abandoned the values and traditions of Disney.“A company without values and traditionsis a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.”– The Monday Morning Memo for July 14, 2014“In 2003, Roy E. Disney resigned&nbsp;from his positions as Disney vice chairman and chairman of Walt Disney Feature Animation, accusing Eisner of turning the Walt Disney Company into a ‘rapacious, soulless’ company (against everything Walt Disney believed in and stood for.) ‘You can’t fool all of the people all the time. Nor can you succeed by getting by on the cheap,’ said Disney, referring to his accusations that Eisner slashed spending on the Disney theme parks, leading to closed rides,...

for Recommending You to Their FriendsAmerican retailers learned&nbsp;some interesting things last year. Although consumer confidence was higher during Christmas 2013 than it was during Christmas 2010, ShopperTrak tells us that in-store, holiday foot traffic declined by almost half during those three years. But don’t assume sales volume declined by half for those retailers or that half their customers bought online. A 50% decline in foot traffic simply means that we’re making half as many trips to the store.We no longer feel&nbsp;that we have to visit the store to learn what we need to know.A 2013 Harris Poll reports that 46%&nbsp;of us have shopped a brick-and-mortar store for information, then gone online to find a better price. But that same Harris Poll says that a far higher number of us – 69% – have done exactly the opposite; researched online, then bought from a local brick-and-mortar.If the result of our online research&nbsp;is that we visit just one store instead of two, a 50% decline in foot traffic will be the direct result.“In many instances, customers have access to more information online than when talking to an in-store sales associate. Online reviews and price comparisons enable them to feel more confident in their buying decisions…”– Jeremy Bogaisky,&nbsp;Forbes,&nbsp;Feb. 12, 2014A 2013&nbsp;McKinsey &amp; Company report echoes those findings.&nbsp;“Our research shows that for the average consumer, peer recommendations carry ten times more weight than recommendations from salespeople.”Of course you want&nbsp;your customers to recommend you to their friends;&nbsp;a friend has 10 times the influence of a salesperson.&nbsp;But before you get all excited about creating a rewards program for customers who send you their friends, please know that such schemes are almost always counterproductive.Here’s an example of why:A client told me that a buddy of his invested in a particular company and then said to him,&nbsp;“It’s going to skyrocket. I invested $250,000. You really ought to get in on this.”&nbsp;My client took his buddy’s advice and likewise invested $250,000. My client would probably have recommended that investment to everyone in his inner circle, but a disturbing betrayal made any such recommendation impossible. As he handed over the check for his investment to the financial officer of the company, the man said,&nbsp;“If you know anyone else who might want to invest, just keep in mind that we’re paying 10 percent to whoever sends them in.”When my client realized&nbsp;that his buddy had made $25,000 by “recommending” the investment to him, he felt a lot less good about the investment.And a lot less good about the buddy.My client immediately&nbsp;knew that if he recommended the investment to any of his friends,&nbsp;they would be made the same offer that he had just been made.&nbsp;There’s just no way that he was going to risk that.Let me say&nbsp;this plainly: If you try to bribe your customers, they’ll think less of you.Friendship&nbsp;is built on trust. A friend makes a recommendation because they believe it will be good for their friend. They don’t do it to benefit themselves or the company they’re recommending.That wouldn’t be a friend at all.That would be a salesman.To win&nbsp;the recommendations of customers, you must impress those customers with your performance. Focus your efforts on being consistently and truly remarkable. It’s the most effective thing you can do.Word of mouth isn’t new;&nbsp;it’s as old as the human race. Friendship isn’t new. Integrity isn’t new.What’s new is digital technology&nbsp;and the way it amplifies and accelerates everything you say. But if you look closely, you’ll see this digital knife cuts both ways. People are losing their jobs, their friends and their freedom because of...

Michael&nbsp;participates&nbsp;in our monthly Wizard of Ads LIVE webinar. Last week, Michael asked for a method that would let him create&nbsp;fewer&nbsp;leads, but&nbsp;better&nbsp;leads.I responded&nbsp;by telling Michael that broad targeting can be donegeographically&nbsp;by zip code,financially&nbsp;by income,demographically&nbsp;by age and gender, orpsychographically&nbsp;by targeting specific “personas” derived from affinity groups and previous purchase histories.Anyone who knows&nbsp;anything about targeting already knows those things. But then I told Michael what few people know:“The key is to make sure that your leads are coming to you for the right reason. You want them to be coming to you for that thing you KNOW you can deliver better than anyone else. If they’re coming for any other reason, it’s a lower quality lead. The key is to target through ad copy. The key is to use brandable chunks.”We’ve spoken&nbsp;about brandable chunks before but I didn’t give you a clear explanation.Ray Smith asked,&nbsp;“How is a brandable chunk different from a slogan, a tagline, or a positioning statement?”I said, “Slogans and taglines are usually white noise, adspeak, something you wish people that would believe even though they probably won’t. But a good positioning statement differentiates you from your competitors in a meaningful way. The problem is that positioning statements are usually about the BIG picture. They tend to be all-encompassing, relating the totality of your company to the totality of your competition. A brandable chunk is a memorable, micro-positioning statement about JUST ONE ASPECT of your business. Consequently, you can easily have a dozen or more meaningful, brandable ‘chunks’ of highly memorable message.”Brandable chunks&nbsp;are memorable, micro-differentiators. They are refined from average advertising in the same way that hi-octane gas is refined from crude oil.Brandable Chunks:1.&nbsp;create vivid mental images.2.&nbsp;employ unusual word combinations.3.&nbsp;communicate features and benefits succinctly4.&nbsp;have meter (rhythm) so they tumble off the tongue.If you have the discipline&nbsp;to repurpose your brandable chunks in your web copy and through your face-to-face and voice-to-voice communications, your brandable chunks will bring your&nbsp;advertising,&nbsp;your&nbsp;web presence&nbsp;and your&nbsp;customer experience&nbsp;into perfect alignment. Your brand identity will be strengthened and your close rate will rise. Your customer will finally see you in 3D.We’re now going to lift some brandable chunks&nbsp;from a couple of better-than-average radio ads that I’m told are working quite well for a business in Michigan:TIME… IT’S THE MOST PRECIOUS THING YOU CAN GIVE SOMEONE. SPENDING TIME WITHOUT CELL PHONES, VIDEO GAMES OR ELECTRONIC DEVICES IS EVEN MORE PRICELESS. GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU’VE BEEN FISHING YET…AND… WHO TAUGHT YOU HOW TO FISH? IT’S AN EXCELLENT WAY TO SPEND TIME WITH SOMEONE. STOP IN TO GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE AND BE READY TO FISH. THEN, GO OUT TO THE WATER AND LEAVE DISTRACTIONS BEHIND. YOUR MEMORIES START AT GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE IN OLD TOWN… LIKE ‘EM ON FACEBOOK. GRAND RIVER BAIT AND TACKLE… REEL EM IN!Here’s the shorter, tighter ad we refined from it:Time…it’s the most precious thing you can give someone.Especially if you make sure it’s uninterrupted.No cell phones. No video games. No electronic devices.Just a tackle box and a couple of fishing poles. And&nbsp;time.Grand River Bait and Tackle believes there’s no time like the present, and no...

Her plan was obviously brilliant,&nbsp;so why wasn’t it working? Susan was as confused as a termite in a yo-yo. I was about to suggest an answer when she said it herself; “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”Every experienced consultant knows&nbsp;that a third-best plan that&nbsp;will&nbsp;be executed is better than the first or second-best plans that won’t.The first time I heard the phrase,&nbsp;“Culture eats strategy for lunch,” was 14 years ago when another student at Wizard Academy was explaining why he resigned his position as Chief Visionary Officer in a Fortune 500 company in which he had labored for 30 years:“Time after time I’d have all the C-level executives* in agreement with me, only to find that the rank and file would choose not to implement what the executive team had decided. In a small company you can simply replace those workers who won’t comply, but when you have more than 200,000 employees, culture eats strategy for lunch.”Another name for culture&nbsp;is corporate memory. And the anthem of corporate memory is, “That’s not how we do it here.”But this isn’t really about&nbsp;Susan or my friend from corporate America. It’s about you and what you’re trying to do.Values and traditions&nbsp;are the left and right rails of the railroad track that will determine the direction of your company. Moving those rails is extremely difficult and it’s impossible to do so quickly.Your company is the train&nbsp;that rides on those rails. A company without values and traditions is a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.Strategy&nbsp;is a motorcycle exploring the territory ahead.The train can easily push the motorcycle.The motorcycle can’t push the train.It’s not the job&nbsp;of the strategist on the motorcycle to move the railroad tracks. And only a foolish strategist would pretend those tracks don’t exist.The job of the strategist&nbsp;on the motorcycle is to prepare the passengers on the train for all the hills and valleys and tunnels that lie ahead, suggesting which window might offer the better view, and when they might need to turn on the lights.The job of the copywriter&nbsp;is to ride behind the strategist and cry out to the citizens of the countryside about the glories and wonder of the train that is about to pass their way.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

1.&nbsp;Bring&nbsp;positive and negative into close proximity.2.&nbsp;Resist&nbsp;the temptation to clad them in insulation.3.&nbsp;Witness&nbsp;the flow of electricity as it leaps between the two.Speaking in 1980&nbsp;of his songwriting experience with Paul McCartney, John Lennon said, “He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.”– David Sheff,&nbsp;All We Are Saying“The work John initiated&nbsp;tended to be sour and weary, whereas Paul’s tended to be bright and naive. The magic came from interaction. Consider the home demo for “Help!” – an emotionally raw, aggressively confessional song John wrote while in the throes of the sort of depression that he said made him want ‘to jump out the window, you know.’ The original had a slow, plain piano tune, and feels like the moan of the blues. When Paul heard it, he suggested&nbsp;a counter-melody, a lighthearted harmony&nbsp;to be sung behind the principal lyric – and this fundamentally changed it’s nature.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk,&nbsp;The Atlantic,&nbsp;July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80We’re talking&nbsp;about the magic of duality.We’re describing&nbsp;the foundations of transformative thought.“When he began to write songs,&nbsp;Paul [McCartney] wasn’t thinking about rock and roll.&nbsp;He wanted to write for Sinatra.”– Joshua Wolf Shenk,&nbsp;The Atlantic, July-August 2014, ‘The Power of Two,’ p. 80Lennon’s McCartney was Sinatra’s Riddle.I bought&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters&nbsp;mostly because I was curious why a bestselling novelist would write a biography. Sure, Sinatra was a great singer, but since when does a great singer really&nbsp;matter?&nbsp;And why Sinatra instead of some other singer, actor, writer or photographer?What I found&nbsp;was that Hamill’s book isn’t so much about a person, but about a time.“Frank Sinatra&nbsp;was the voice of the 20th-century American city.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p.94In the beginning,&nbsp;Sinatra was merely a teen idol, the heartthrob of teenage girls. Twice he tried to enlist as a soldier in WWII, but was rejected each time because of a punctured eardrum. As the other young men went off to boot camp or basic training there were a lot of lonely women left in the land. Sinatra was every girl’s boyfriend singing of his loneliness.“…in the music&nbsp;he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal… His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p.130When the soldiers&nbsp;came home from WWII, Sinatra’s career fell flat.“One thing is certain:&nbsp;for many of those who came back from WWII, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth. More important to the Sinatra career… the girls started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the passion.”– Pete Hamill,&nbsp;Why Sinatra Matters,&nbsp;p. 133-134Sinatra became&nbsp;Sinatra&nbsp;when his Riddle arrived.“Sinatra started out&nbsp;with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.”– Pete...

Institutions of higher education&nbsp;offer a degree path, a specific series of classes that will prepare you for the journey you’re about to take. Wizard Academy’s board of directors is preparing a similar map for those happy adventurers who come here for refreshment, instruction and advice.Dr. Oz Jaxxon&nbsp;and space shuttle scientist Mark Fox prepared an initial list of core curricula to present to the rest of the board of directors at last Tuesday’s board meeting. It triggered an interesting conversation.I looked at the list&nbsp;and said, “I like it. Some of these classes are informative – giving students a new set of skills that will take them to the next level. Others are&nbsp;transformative – opening their eyes to new perceptions – giving them a new set of stars to shine brightly among the shadows of the mind, allowing them to navigate with greater confidence.”Dennis Collins said, “Navigate?”Knowing that Dennis&nbsp;had spent 40 years in advertising, Princess Pennie answered, “In advertising, navigation is strategy; finding the message that will have the greatest impact.” Dr. Nick Grant added, “The informative classes help you externalize your strategy.”I was so jarred&nbsp;by the next statement that I can’t remember whether it came from Corrine Taylor, Dr. Lori Barr, or chairman of the board Jean Backus. All I can remember is that a woman’s voice said, “But isn’t that communication?”“Yes!” I thought,&nbsp;“Public Speaking 101, Advanced Wordsmithing, Writing for Radio and the Internet and the other&nbsp;informative&nbsp;classes help students implement what they learned in&nbsp;transformative&nbsp;classes like Magical Worlds, Escape the Box and Da Vinci and the 40 Answers.”Speaking and writing,&nbsp;singing and acting and all the other arts flash into existence when you&nbsp;externalize&nbsp;an internal realization.Transformative&nbsp;classes load you up with internal realizations.Informative&nbsp;classes equip you to externalize those realizations.And externalized realizations&nbsp;are called “communication.”Dr. Grant spoke up again.&nbsp;“Transformative classes give you a new operating system. Informative classes give you cool applications that run on that operating system.”Small realizations&nbsp;make incremental differences:&nbsp;Evolution.Big realizations&nbsp;make exponential differences:&nbsp;Revolution.Which&nbsp;do you need right now?Have you decided?Good.&nbsp;We have a class for that.Roy&nbsp;H. WilliamsA

Cedric Yau&nbsp;is one of a handful of geniuses I know.In our most recent&nbsp;conversation, Cedric opened my eyes to a truth I had not previously encountered, but it reinforced everything I know about ad campaigns and it’s about to make Cedric a billion dollars.I’m not exaggerating.You’ve seen long&nbsp;lines of ants carrying food back to their hives, right? So where is the centralized intelligence that brings such sophisticated synchronization to their actions? If you dig even a little bit, the mystery of ant behavior moves very quickly from interesting to miraculous to intoxicatingly impossible.Consider:&nbsp;You and I are more than 1,800 times as tall as the ants that live in our yards. The mowed grass through which they walk would be for us a jungle 600 feet high. A single ant colony forages for food each day across an area that would be 1,156 square miles for you and me.Here’s the zinger:&nbsp;If you and I and all our friends are scattered across 1,156 square miles and one of us finds some food, how does that one notify the rest of us who are scattered across 1,156 square miles? Ants have no telepathy, telephones or radios and there are no bosses to give them instructions.But they do have&nbsp;3 unifying principles that synchronize the entire colony.Does your business have unifying principles?Viewed in high speed at the macro level,&nbsp;ant behavior seems to be guided by chaos theory as their movements create a pattern too vast for the unaided mind to comprehend. But when mapped on a computer, what at first appeared to be randomness becomes a beautiful fractal image built upon the unifying principles of self-similarity.Fractal images&nbsp;are maps of highly organized chaotic systems and their patterns seem to mirror the behavior of the stock exchange and population fluctuations and chemical reactions. Using chaotic math, computers today are producing images that look exactly like the beauty found in nature… ferns and clouds and snowflakes and bacteria. These maps can also resemble mountains and the human brain and the frost that forms on a windowpane.Ant behavior goes&nbsp;from intoxicatingly impossible to seductively predictable when the principles that bring an ant colony into unity are reverse-engineered. Here are the ingredients of ant-magic:1.&nbsp;If you find food, take some home and leave a scented trail.2.&nbsp;If you find a trail, follow it and add to the scent. If that trail leads you back to the hive, turn around and follow it the other direction.3.&nbsp;If you don’t know where food is and you don’t where a trail is, wander.That’s&nbsp;what the miracle of the ant-line looks like when you reduce it down to its unifying principles.But Cedric wasn’t&nbsp;studying ants so that he could better understand advertising or team motivation. Cedric has an altogether different use for these insights. My closing words to Brother Yau were these: “Based on what you’ve told me, it should take about 2 years for you to quietly put one billion dollars into your bank account.”“That’s right.”“My suggestion&nbsp;is to then publish exactly what you did and how you did it. Spend a few months being interviewed on talk shows and then come and teach a class at Wizard Academy.”“That’s exactly what I had in mind.”We’ll keep you posted.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Have you&nbsp;ever gone shopping only to come home with something entirely different than what you had planned to buy?Of course&nbsp;you have. We all have.“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say,‘these are the conditions, now what happens next?'”– Richard Feynman,&nbsp;(winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize)Advertising people&nbsp;can be like that, too. We like to believe that we can ask, “What does the customer want?” and an answer will be forthcoming. But in truth, what the customer wants is in a constant state of flux.Decision&nbsp;is a destination, a tangible place of certainty, but the multiple paths that will take us there can be faint and foggy and damp. We are confronted by choices unanticipated. We find new information, unexpected options, possibilities we did not foresee.Simply stated,&nbsp;our buying motives can evolve from a tiger to a mouse to a llama to a rhino to a little pink pony in the space of a single hour.Darwin would be made dizzy.Professor Sexton&nbsp;reminded me of all this recently when he discovered that our ongoing “evolution of motive” has a scientific name. And like all scientific names, this one is both confusing and dull: Heterogeny of Ends.Read&nbsp;the WIKIPEDIA entry for Heterogeny of Ends and you’ll learn that“an ongoing behavioral sequence must often be understood in terms of ever-shifting patterns of primary and secondary goals. For example, one may accept the invitation of a friend to attend an art show. Initially, the motive is simply the anticipation of a pleasant evening in good friendship, but in the course of that evening, one encounters a highly desirable work of art and wishes to purchase it. A whole new set of motives now enter the picture and exist alongside – and in addition to – the original motive.”I present this&nbsp;information for your consideration today because I’m concerned about the public’s growing reverence for numbers and measurements and statistics. We seem to have arrived at the silly conclusion that every decision-making process is the same.We human males&nbsp;are small and simple enough to think we can ask, “What does a woman want?” in the belief that someone, somewhere, someday will finally be able to answer us.But a woman&nbsp;will answer that question with one of her own; “Who is the woman and what time is it?”What does the customer want?Your customers want confidence that they’ve made the right decision. The big umbrella answer is confidence. But I cannot tell you what combination of information and events will give a particular customer confidence.I cannot list&nbsp;the little raindrop answers. And when the sad day arrives that someone finally can, human beings will no longer be&nbsp;magical.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

When Jacqueline Bouvier&nbsp;married JFK she became “Mrs. Kennedy.”She&nbsp;was the Princess Di of her generation.Following&nbsp;her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline’s voice was almost never again heard in public. She quickly became the most mysterious and glamorous woman on earth. When she married Aristotle Onassis, the world’s richest man, she became forever thereafter, “Jackie ‘O’.”“Like so much in her life, the aim of her signature style was concealment. A chemical straightener disguised the naturally kinky hair she hated. The teased bouffant masked a low hairline. Kid gloves covered large, strong, mannish hands… the cut of her suit jacket artfully concealed the breadth of her shoulders and her muscular back and arms. The skirt disguised hips she thought much too broad. The shoes were specially cut to make large feet look smaller and more feminine. Sunglasses hid brown eyes set so far apart that her optician had to special-order a suitably wide bridge. Dark lenses had the additional advantage of guarding emotions that since childhood she had taken tremendous pains to hide.”– Barbara Leaming,&nbsp;Mrs. Kennedy,&nbsp;(2011)But, oh, she was glamorous.A“One way or the another,&nbsp;all glamour follows the formula laid out by Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, ‘Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.’&nbsp;Mystery is an essential element of glamour as it provides a blank space for the imagination, a spot where the audience can project its own desires.”– Virginia Postrel,&nbsp;The Power of Glamour&nbsp;Silence, too,&nbsp;provides a blank space and a mystery. It is a type of glamour. Few people use it to full advantage.“Nothing&nbsp;strengthens authority so much as silence.”– Leonardo da VinciNassim Nicholas Taleb, too,&nbsp;understands this power of silence.&nbsp;“Never say no twice if you mean it.”Taleb also observes,&nbsp;“What we call a ‘good listener’ is usually someone with skillfully polished indifference.”&nbsp;And when that same cold indifference turns its face toward you, the silence can hurt like frostbite.&nbsp;“You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer.”Roger Lincoln says,“There are two rules for success.(1) Never tell everything you know.Ha! Silence – the voice of Mystery – strikes again.Perhaps we should study it.I think maybe I’ll startnow.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Dean Rotbart&nbsp;says you are three different people.The first of the three is the person you see when you look in the mirror;&nbsp;&nbsp;the person you believe yourself to be.The second is the person other people see when they look at you;&nbsp;&nbsp;the person they believe you to be.The third is the real you.“Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.” – Allan GurganusGurganus is right.&nbsp;The truth happens to everyone, but stories only happen to people who can tell them.Professor Sexton&nbsp;recently told me about a new definition of reality known as the antenarrative: Ante:&nbsp;prior to,&nbsp;Narrative:&nbsp;the story.It reminds me of&nbsp;that third person spoken of by Rotbart.The antenarrative is the story that no one can tell.&nbsp;Not even the people who were there. It is chaotic, without logic and disconnected. It is the way things actually happen.&nbsp;Narrative, on the other hand,&nbsp;is crafted in retrospect as a storyteller assembles selected puzzle pieces in 20/20 hindsight; the beginning, middle and end of the tale are now a foregone conclusion. If the storyteller chooses skillfully and arranges the antenarrative pieces artfully, his story will sparkle with fairy dust. If the storyteller chooses predictably and organizes the pieces chronologically, the story will smell like cat food.Antenarrative happens to everyone.&nbsp;But stories only happen to people who can tell them. Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for making the narrative of his finely-crafted fiction feel as unvarnished and rough-hewn as antenarrative. In speaking of&nbsp;The Old Man and the Sea,&nbsp;he said,“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.”&nbsp;–&nbsp;Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,&nbsp;p. 198Another Pulitzer-winning book,&nbsp;Founding Brothers,&nbsp;is an attempt to look at selected moments of American history through that same spider-web lens. The American antenarrative of 1776 is that those colonists loyal to Britain reviled the conspirators who bound themselves together in a Declaration of Independence. Those conspirators were plagued by doubts, short of cash and argued continually as the success of their rebellion was in constant jeopardy. They never thought of themselves as “The Founding Fathers,” nor did they consider the survival of the American nation to be inevitable.But you and I&nbsp;live&nbsp;under the curse of post facto knowledge,“But of course the American Revolution had to succeed because, well, it just had to.”We never consider&nbsp;how this landmass called 21st century America might easily have remained an extension of England.Post facto knowledge&nbsp;is always troublesome, but especially so in ad writing.Facts are not necessarily&nbsp;believable&nbsp;just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily&nbsp;interesting&nbsp;just because they are true.Facts are not necessarily&nbsp;relevant&nbsp;just because they are true.This is why ad writers&nbsp;never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.Harley Davidson – American by Birth. Rebel by Choice.Volkswagen – Think Small.Walmart – Save Money. Live Better.Adidas – Impossible is Nothing.Levis – Quality never goes out of style.IBM – Solutions for a smart planet.Research the antenarrative&nbsp;of any of these brands and you’ll see exactly what I mean.Now let’s get back&nbsp;to Rotbart’s assertion. Is there a chance that1.&nbsp;what you see when you look at your...

The next time&nbsp;someone tells you an advertising success story, especially if that success was online, ask to see the ad – the content – that triggered it.Here’s a Really Big Tip for you.&nbsp;You might want to write this down:“The media doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work.”I’m spending&nbsp;a lot of time these days fielding questions about online marketing. The most fervent of these petitioners are the ones who talk about the amazing response they’ve seen on FaceBook.“Does everything you post trigger a big response?”“No, but when it does work, Wow! It’s awesome.”“Show me something you posted that triggered a lot of interest.”Guess what I’ve&nbsp;learned from these encounters? FaceBook friends pass along only those things they find to be remarkable. And it’s always the message – the content – that is remarked upon. Jeff Greenspan of&nbsp;Buzzfeed&nbsp;says it clearly:&nbsp;“Nobody wants to be a shill for your brand, but they are happy to share information and content that helps them promote their own identity.”Do you sometimes visit a website&nbsp;and then see banner ads for that same company everywhere you go for the next several days? Congratulations, you’ve been “retargeted.”Retargeting&nbsp;is the shiny new object in advertising. (Google’s version of it is called Remarketing but it’s essentially the same thing.) Retargeting reminds me of a boy who stalks a girl after a bad first date, saying,&nbsp;“Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance. Give me another chance…”A better solution,&nbsp;in my opinion, is to not blow the first date.Spend your time&nbsp;creating a remarkable offer. When your message is right, whatever media you choose to deliver that message is going to perform like nothing you’ve ever seen.BOOM.&nbsp;Success story.You can sell&nbsp;tickets to watch the fireworks.Bruce Feiler&nbsp;in the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;reported a few days ago that a recent study of two billion web visits found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.Evidently,&nbsp;David Ogilvy’s decades-old observation remains correct:“Five times as many people&nbsp;read the headline as read the first line of body copy. So when you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent 83 percent of your ad budget.”Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Move on.Scan.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Disconnect. Move on.Scan.Scan. Note. Probe. Double-check. Bingo. One-click. Here in 2 days.Ten websites&nbsp;attracted this shopper but only one of them made the sale.Q:&nbsp;What did the others do wrong?A:&nbsp;They focused too much on technology to reach the shopper and too little on what to say after they met.Advertising Doesn’t Fail.&nbsp;Ads Fail.Small business owners are drowning&nbsp;in sales pitches telling them they can “reach the perfect target” digitally. I don’t dispute that claim in the slightest. But each of the nine websites that didn’t make the sale “reached the perfect target,” didn’t they? What did it get them?That&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;story&nbsp;about 2 billion page visits goes on to say,“In the last few years,&nbsp;there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication,&nbsp;the story,&nbsp;is being pushed aside by&nbsp;the list.”Let me say this plainly: Wizard Academy will forever...

Do you have code words&nbsp;and phrases whose meanings are known only to the people closest to you?I laughed a little&nbsp;when I realized the absurdity of some of the communication abbreviations that Pennie and I have developed over the years.Every couple&nbsp;has code phrases, I suppose, and there is doubtless a story behind every one. Are you willing to send us some of your code phrases and their definitions? I think it could be fun to compile a dictionary of them.Here are some of the phrases Pennie and I use most often:“Get official”To change from your work clothes into something ugly but comfortable, signifying that you are now officially home and in for the evening.“Foie gras” \?fwä-?grä\“I would spit this into a napkin if these other people weren’t with us. For the love of god don’t eat any of it.”“Go for the poise.”“Pull through this parking space into the one opposite, thereby leaving the car poised to be driven out forward when we leave.”“One more thing”“Objection. This is not what we originally agreed. You’re changing the deal we made.”“Preliminary weed-eat”An abandoned task you have no intention of completing.“Fox”Obviously artificial. (A mispronunciation of faux, recalling a moment 25 years ago when we overheard a condescending snob say that a piece of furniture had a “fox finish.” We’ve been chuckling about it ever since.)“Paper cigar”A brilliant improvisation crafted quickly to avoid disaster.“Rye grass”A widespread belief that isn’t true.“Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis”“Of course I can get all this in one load. I am a magna cum laude graduate of the Loren L. Lewis School of Hauling.”Will you send us&nbsp;your code phrases and their definitions? Indiana Beagle will likely publish them in the rabbit hole and if we get enough, Wizard Academy Press will publish a little dictionary and we’ll have an extensive, secret language of our own.Are you in on this deal?&nbsp;Send your phrases with their definitions to [email protected].(I learned that one from Indy.&nbsp;It means “gotta run”)Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

You can do it.I don’t know how long it will take&nbsp;or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do it.1.&nbsp;See your objective&nbsp;clearly in your mind. You must see it before you can seize it.&nbsp;It takes courage&nbsp;to focus on your objective.Reach for the courage&nbsp;that dangles in front of you. Don’t fear that it will prove to be a carrot on a stick and you the unwitting mule.Courage&nbsp;is necessary to the seizing of your objective.Reach&nbsp;for your courage. It waits for you.Grasp&nbsp;your courage.&nbsp;See your objective. Identify your adventure.2.&nbsp;Name your objective.&nbsp;Saying it out loud moves it from private to public, from thought to action, from fantasy to reality.When you’ve said it aloud&nbsp;in front of people you care about, you are no longer a spectator. You are a player.3.&nbsp;Know that you will fail&nbsp;and rejoice when you do.Education&nbsp;is theoretical. Experience is practical. Battle scars are the marks of a warrior. Happiest&nbsp;are those moments when you rise from the ashes of bitter defeat to try again, smarter, wiser, unstoppable. Everyone is watching you. Smile at them. Show your teeth.A con man lies&nbsp;to someone who trusts him and walks away with money. A criminal threatens violence and walks away with money. These quick and hollow victories leave both men sadly unsatisfied. Lottery winners are famously miserable. Rich kids are depressingly bored.Yes, rejoice&nbsp;when you fail because nothing is more tragic than winning quickly.4.&nbsp;Cherish the caterpillar.&nbsp;Trust in the butterfly you cannot see. An angel is dressed as a beggar. Wisdom wears the hat of a fool. Power hides behind the eyelids of a quiet old woman.Every&nbsp;miracle wears a disguise.5.&nbsp;Expect evolution.&nbsp;Your objective will be altered by the passage of time. An infant bears little resemblance to the woman she will become, but she is the same girl, surely.Fantasy is frozen&nbsp;and changeless in the mind but a worthy objective is durable and alive. Your objective will grow and mature as you do. Don’t be surprised when it changes, because you are changing, too.You can do this.I don’t know&nbsp;how long it will take or what you will have to go through, but you can most definitely do this.Lift your eyes&nbsp;and see the courage that floats in the air before you.Reach for it.Hold tight.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Of all the things&nbsp;that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.I borrowed that sentence&nbsp;from Charles Johnson, a storyteller who begins his tale,&nbsp;Middle Passage,&nbsp;with that line. I chose not to enclose it in quotation marks because I didn’t want to alert you to the fact that misdirection was about to slap your cheek.Quotation marks&nbsp;do that, you know. They are animated bookends that wave like semiphore flags, shouting, “These words are special.”Misdirection is half the storyteller’s art.“Justice?—&nbsp;You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”1The other half is resolution:&nbsp;We are surprised to learn that women are a disaster. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not. We are surprised to learn the law is not just. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.“Once&nbsp;upon a time,&nbsp;there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”2We are surprised to learn&nbsp;that a woman can turn into the wrong person. But after a moment’s reflection, we are not.Every magician&nbsp;depends on misdirection and resolution.The comedian&nbsp;is a magician of laughter. The greater his misdirection, the greater the orgasm of laughter at the punch line, that moment of resolution when it all comes together.The storyteller&nbsp;is a magician whose stage is the page. Words are the top hat from which he extracts his rabbits and the endless handkerchief he pulls from his sleeve. They are the handsaw he uses to cut the pretty girl in half and the wheels he uses to roll those halves together again.A great communicator&nbsp;says things plainly and brings clarity to the mind. This is difficult. But it is not magic.A storyteller&nbsp;turns the heart this way and that, showing it things it has never seen, things that have not yet happened, things that never will, using misdirection and resolution over and over, touching you in places you didn’t even know were there.Every business, every person,&nbsp;has a story to tell. You know this, of course.But now you face&nbsp;a difficult choice: Will you speak clearly and win the mind? Or will you speak magically and win the heart?Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Retailers are asking,&nbsp;“Why do people buy from my competitors without even giving us a chance?” And I reply, “They gave you a chance. They just didn’t physically come to your store.”Customers carry instant access&nbsp;to all the knowledge of the world in their pockets. They no longer have to visit your store to compare prices and research their options.Why would they drive to a store&nbsp;to get expert guidance when better, faster, more objective guidance is instantly available online?You can argue, if you like,&nbsp;that the information you provide is far superior to the information available online. And you might even be right. But your customers are looking for information immediately. They’re looking for information&nbsp;right this second.&nbsp;They gave you a chance when they went online. Your website just didn’t volunteer what they wanted.If your answer&nbsp;to their query had been available online, Google or some other friend would likely have directed them to it.“Advertising is a tax you pay for not being remarkable.”There are three keys to being remarkable:1:&nbsp;Correctly anticipate the customer’s desire.2:&nbsp;Satisfy it clearly, with nothing held back.3:&nbsp;Package your offer magnetically.These are simple things,&nbsp;but as my friend Jeffrey Eisenberg says, “Simple isn’t always easy.”Particularly “not easy”&nbsp;is this challenge of magnetic packaging: to create an offer that draws attention, an offer that bears repeating, an offer that no one else has the courage to make.Magnetic Packaging&nbsp;begins with strategy. “What would the customer be delighted to hear?” Answer this question resoundingly and you have the beginnings of a successful direct response campaign.Want to know a secret?&nbsp;Next week’s class at Wizard Academy, “How to Write Direct Response Ads,” will be attended by three of the most successful direct response packagers in the world today: (1.) Brian’s website has more than unique visitors per day than most websites will see in 3 years. (2.) Ryan has hundreds of professional marketers paying him significant amounts of money each year just so they can hear what Ryan is currently thinking. (3.) Dan employs 180 people in a full-time direct response effort that brought in 85 million dollars last year. That business will easily exceed 100 million in 2014.Weirdly,&nbsp;all three of these giants want to hear what Jeff Sexton and I have learned about Magnetic Packaging.Dan has agreed to share&nbsp;the technique that allowed him to go from $70,000 in credit card debt to $85,000,000 in sales. Some of you have stayed in the room Dan built at Engelbrecht House. Yes, Dan has been part of the family for a long time, so he’s willing to share things with us that he shares with no one else. Brian and Ryan are also deeply involved with the Academy and even though they’re both attending as students, I’m betting their questions, comments, suggestions and observations will be insightful. Frankly, I’m very much looking forward to this class.All the rooms&nbsp;in Engelbrecht House and Spence Manor are full, of course, but we can definitely find a seat for you if you’re willing to rent a hotel room.This class is May 6-8.&nbsp;I’m definitely going to be there.Are you?Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

“Cream rises to the top”&nbsp;is what we tell talented people who are frightened. It’s a lie, of course, but it makes them feel like they have a chance.Confidence and courage are not the same thing.Confidence&nbsp;is trust in your ability.Courage&nbsp;is to have such security in your identity that you’re willing to risk open failure. “I’m okay with who I am and I know my intentions are honorable. Que sera, sera.”Confidence&nbsp;springs from ability.Courage&nbsp;springs from identity.And the&nbsp;energizing fluid of courage is audacity.Public&nbsp;speaking requires it.Singing&nbsp;demands it.And&nbsp;successful advertising depends on it.The technical term&nbsp;for the fear of speaking – and of being judged by what you say – is glossophobia, from the Greek gl?ssa, meaning tongue, and phobos, fear or dread.We must elevate you&nbsp;above this fear or you will never successfully advertise a business, promote an event, or advance your career.Stage fright&nbsp;isn’t just the fear of performing in front of large groups. It’s also the reluctance to make a presentation to a group of co-workers.Dr. David Carbonell says,“Stage fright is like being heckled mercilessly during your performance, and getting into an argument with the heckler, except that it’s your own mind doing the heckling. You get so involved in your internal struggle that you don’t get involved with the actual performance. Most people with performance anxiety get tricked into focusing on themselves, struggling against anxiety in a vain effort to get rid of it… One of the keys to mastering stage fright is to become truly involved in, and focused on, your material. Not on yourself.”Unless you’re a major celebrity,&nbsp;the audience didn’t really come to see you; they came to hear the material you brought them.It’s not about you at all.&nbsp;It’s about the material. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it. Think about the material. Think about how the audience needs it.Don’t let anything&nbsp;get in the way of the gift you brought for your audience. It’s not about you at all.You’re only the mailman.I said earlier&nbsp;that courage is, “to have such security in your identity that you’re willing to risk open failure.”But sometimes&nbsp;you need Plan B, so here it is: Commit to delivering the mail. Commitment looks exactly like courage when you’re committed to something more important than your fear. Say to yourself, “It’s okay if the audience isn’t impressed with me, as long as they’re impressed with what I brought them.”Only a fool&nbsp;stands between a mother tiger and her cubs.Be the mother tiger.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

I should begin&nbsp;with an apology, I suppose, because the secret of great advertising, the secret to great wealth, the secret of status and stature and your name on the lips of all the beautiful people is actually a wee bit disappointing.Yes,&nbsp;it’s a sadly disappointing big secret.The reason&nbsp;the big secret is such a letdown is that you already know it.Are you ready?The secret of great advertising&nbsp;is that you must find something to say that your customer would be happy to hear.You knew this,&nbsp;of course, but most advertisers don’t. If they did, our eyes and ears would not be so continually assaulted with such excruciating drivel.And this goes double for newscasters.Plato&nbsp;was obviously thinking about advertisers and newscasters in 372 BC when he said,“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”Ad strategy&nbsp;is more difficult to teach than ad copy.Strategy&nbsp;is determining what a customer would like to hear.Copy&nbsp;is deciding how best to say it.Impact&nbsp;in advertising is 80 percent strategy, 20 percent copy. This makes it nearly impossible for good copy to compensate for weak strategy.We create&nbsp;advertising failure when we pretend that creativity can overcome the fact that we really have nothing to say.Morris Hite said it sharply enough to pop a balloon:“If an ad campaign is built around a weak idea – or as is so often the case, no idea at all – I don’t give a damn how good the execution is, it’s going to fail. If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you.”Even more annoying&nbsp;than advertisers and newscasters who have nothing to say are those smug and confident little weasels who preach with passion that the secret of successful advertising is to find the media that reaches the RIGHT CUSTOMER. In effect, the weasels are selling you a treasure map. “The reason you haven’t found the treasure,” they say, “is because you’ve been digging in all the wrong places.”But the treasure isn’t buried at all.&nbsp;It’s in the pockets and purses of everyone you see. And if you offer these people something they’d rather have than their treasure, they’ll hand you their treasure with a smile and say “Thank you.” And then they’ll tell all their friends that they should give you some treasure, too.The media&nbsp;that delivers your message is the least important part of the communication equation. When your message is right, any media will work. When your message is wrong, no media will.During the decade&nbsp;when I lived in hotel rooms and spoke about advertising in 50 cities a year, my least favorite moment was when the airplane landed back home in Austin and the ground crew didn’t immediately throw open the door. Those minutes waiting for them to open the hatch and revive me to life were a dark and hateful hell for me.You did not need to know that.&nbsp;I included it only because I thought it would be weird to talk about “my second-least favorite moment” and leave you wondering about my first-least favorite.But now the mystery is solved, so we can continue.My&nbsp;second-least favorite moment&nbsp;was when an advertiser would follow me into the bathroom and then casually lean over to say,&nbsp;“Mr. Williams, I’m in the furniture business. How do you suggest I advertise? Is it TV? Is it Radio? Is it the Internet?”This happened&nbsp;to me&nbsp;a lot more often than you might think.&nbsp;How would you have answered?Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

When Ann Richards&nbsp;was Governor of Texas, she said,&nbsp;“Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”&nbsp;Governor Richards was slightly militant in her feminism, as was common 20 years ago when she made her piercingly witty statement.But the once-edgy voice of feminism&nbsp;has softened in recent years as Americans have increasingly recognized the abilities of women. America’s 110-year movement toward female empowerment is headed into its final phase:When you want to popularize an idea, romanticize it.The&nbsp;Twilight&nbsp;series of films&nbsp;was launched 5 and 1/2 years ago.&nbsp;Twilight&nbsp;revolves around Bella, a high-school girl who is average in every way, yet she’s accepted, respected and highly valued by immortals of astounding power and wealth. The&nbsp;Twilight&nbsp;films have grossed more than 3.3 billion dollars and it’s&nbsp;not&nbsp;because we believe in vampires.It’s because we believe in girls.In 2012&nbsp;we were introduced to 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen in&nbsp;The Hunger Games,&nbsp;another successful franchise about an average girl who is called upon to save humanity. Her inner strength, tenacity and fundamental goodness allow Katniss to survive everything that is thrown at her as she quietly wins the day. No fists flung skyward in triumph. No chin jutting forward in defiance. No happy end zone dance.Divergent&nbsp;is the newest&nbsp;of these Joan of Arc films in which an average young woman goes toe-to-toe against strong opponents and wins. The special ability of the&nbsp;Divergent&nbsp;protagonist, Tris Prior, is that she isn’t limited to seeing the world in just one way but is able to respond appropriately in ever-changing circumstances. In other words,&nbsp;Divergent&nbsp;celebrates an ability shared by every woman, everywhere.I don’t believe&nbsp;that&nbsp;Twilight, The Hunger Games&nbsp;and&nbsp;Divergent&nbsp;are changing our perception of women. Movies like these are just mirrors that show us how much our perceptions have&nbsp;already&nbsp;changed.The quietly heroic woman&nbsp;is especially evident in jewelry stores.As recently as ten years ago,&nbsp;approximately half of all men would choose the engagement ring alone. The other half would choose with their partner at their side. It was barely thinkable that a woman would shop for an engagement ring by herself and then bring her partner in to see it later. But this is a common practice today.Do you have any idea&nbsp;how this trend affects the language of engagement ring ads? Most women are gracious enough not to be angered by outdated AdSpeak such as,&nbsp;“Buy her the diamond she deserves,”&nbsp;but is such a statement going to attract a woman to your store?A more elegant observation&nbsp;would be to say,&nbsp;“When you love someone and they love you back, it just doesn’t get any better than that. And a diamond is the symbol of that love.”&nbsp;This statement treats both parties as equals and makes no assumptions regarding gender.But gender-neutral statements&nbsp;are difficult to craft in the English language since we have no gender-neutral pronouns to speak of someone that isn’t me or you. We are forced to say, “He walked across the road,” or “She walked across the road.” We cannot say, “It walked across the road.”&nbsp;Such are the miseries of an ad writer.The first artificial sweetener&nbsp;was dressed in pink and called&nbsp;Sweet&nbsp;and&nbsp;Low;&nbsp;adjectives that perfectly described the American woman of that day. In 1981,&nbsp;Sweet’n’Low&nbsp;was challenged by a new competitor.&nbsp;Equal&nbsp;quickly became the overwhelming choice of women. Men, not surprisingly, continued to...

Nine Voices, Nine MoviesEach of us&nbsp;speaks and writes without thinking. This is why so much of what we say is predictable. Do you want to be more interesting? Choose an unusual perspective and verb tense. A movie begins in the mind of the listener every time you speak or write. At whom is your camera aimed?First Person&nbsp;perspective: “I, me, my, we, us, our.”The person speaking is the star of the movie.Second Person&nbsp;perspective: “you, your”The person listening is the star of the movie.Third Person&nbsp;perspective: “He, she, him, her, it, they, them”A person other than the speaker or the listener is the star of the movie.After you’ve chosen your star,&nbsp;you must decide upon the action. The verbs you use will be past tense, present tense or future tense. You should choose these verbs consciously, rather than unconsciously.Past tense&nbsp;verbs speak of history.Present tense&nbsp;verbs speak of action as it’s happening, play-by-play.Future tense&nbsp;verbs are predictive.Any story&nbsp;can be told with past tense, present tense or future tense verbs.It&nbsp;was&nbsp;the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.It&nbsp;is&nbsp;the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.It&nbsp;will be&nbsp;the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature will stir, not even a mouse.Now let’s look&nbsp;at 9 different movies produced from a single script by using 3 different actors in each of 3 separate timelines.1.&nbsp;I placed my paws in warm water and shivered.(First person, past tense.&nbsp;Personal historical narrative.)2.&nbsp;You placed my paws in warm water and I shivered.(Second Person, past tense.&nbsp;An historical story&nbsp;about the listener.)3.&nbsp;She placed my paws in warm water and I shivered.(Third person, past tense. An historical story that&nbsp;describes the actions of a person that is neither the speaker nor the listener)4.&nbsp;I place my paws in warm water and shiver.(First person, present tense.&nbsp;I’m doing it right now.)5.&nbsp;You place my paws in warm water and I shiver.(Second person, present tense.&nbsp;The speaker describes what the listener is doing as it is happening.)6.&nbsp;She places my paws in warm water and I shiver.(Third person, present tense. The speaker is&nbsp;describing what someone else is doing as it is happening.)7.&nbsp;I will place my paws in warm water and shiver.(First person, future tense.&nbsp;Predictive of the speaker’s future action.)8.&nbsp;You will place my paws in warm water and I will shiver.(Second person, future tense. A story about what the listener will do in the future.&nbsp;This voice is predictive or prophetic.)9.&nbsp;She will place my paws in warm water and I will shiver.(Third person, future tense. A story about&nbsp;the actions of others that have not yet occurred.&nbsp;Again, predictive or prophetic.)The voice&nbsp;of any story is transformed when you change the actor and timeline.You have seen the 9 movies and heard the 9 voices.You have been forever changed. You are different now. You carry magic.You will speak with authority and people will listen.That is my benediction,&nbsp;crafted in the second person, traveling through your past (2 sentences) and your present&nbsp;(2...

Today we call it Data&nbsp;but we used to call it Statistics.Statistics are boring.&nbsp;That’s why a clever boy in Silicon Valley gave them a new and better name.A scientist&nbsp;is willing to change a belief when presented with data, facts and logic.But very few customers are scientists.&nbsp;This is why you must accommodate their perspectives, reinforce their biases, anticipate their preferences and leverage their stereotypes.In his book,&nbsp;How to Win Friends and Influence People,&nbsp;Dale Carnegie said,&nbsp;“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”Carnegie&nbsp;was quoting Benjamin Franklin who said it 100 years earlier.Franklin&nbsp;discovered the idea in a satirical poem,&nbsp;Hudibras,&nbsp;written by Samuel Butler 100 years before that, in 1664.That statement,&nbsp;“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still,”&nbsp;resonated with Carnegie, Franklin and Butler, just as it does with every person who has vainly attempted to use facts and logic to overcome a belief.In the words of Andrew Lang,&nbsp;we generally use statistics&nbsp;“as a drunken man uses a lamppost, for support rather than for illumination.”This is because&nbsp;data, facts and logic are not the keys to the mind.The keys to the mind&nbsp;are metaphors, connecting the unfamiliar to the familiar, the unknown to the known. Metaphors employ&nbsp;Symbolic&nbsp;thought, the only type of thought that bridges the unconscious to the conscious, the right brain to the left, the category to the specific, the pattern to the purpose.Verbal&nbsp;thought is the sound of words in your mind.Analytical&nbsp;thought embraces data, facts and logic.Abstract&nbsp;thought embraces patterns of events and patterns of answers. It’s a nonverbal, subjective reality built on preferences, prejudices and stereotypes.Symbolic&nbsp;thought is a bridge that begins in the land of&nbsp;Abstract&nbsp;thought and ends in the land of&nbsp;Analytical&nbsp;thought. Parables, music and metaphors are powerful expressions of Symbolic thought. Each is more persuasive than Data.You’ve heard it&nbsp;said that,&nbsp;“Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”&nbsp;Yet we routinely craft our own facts from the fabric of personal experiences, preferences and prejudices.A stereotype is nothing more&nbsp;than a pattern we’ve observed. This pattern isn’t always predictive, but it is a pattern nonetheless and we trust it. We do this in the misbegotten belief that we have correctly interpreted our past experiences and that our preferences and prejudices are, in fact, correct and reliable interpretations of objective reality.We’re a funny, funny species, aren’t we?We’re coaching a basketball game.Cedric makes 4 baskets in less than 2 minutes so we conclude that Cedric has “a hot hand,” he’s “in the zone and has a feel for the basket,” so we instruct the other players to feed Cedric the ball.Does it surprise you to learn&nbsp;that all the data clearly indicates that a player who makes 4 consecutive baskets in less than 2 minutes of game time is&nbsp;no more likely&nbsp;to make his next shot than usual? But every coach, every player and every fan of the sport will continue to feed Cedric the ball.We don’t trust data&nbsp;nearly so much as we trust our heart.Digital marketing&nbsp;is here to stay and it provides us with data beyond imagination. But data doesn’t change the mind. At best, it reinforces a decision that was already made in the heart.&nbsp;Win the heart&nbsp;and the mind will follow. Don’t fill your messages with data. Instead, use metaphors that connect your idea to your customer’s world.&nbsp;Because a man...

People will direct their attention&nbsp;to whatever gives them a sense of identity, purpose and adventure.You must always&nbsp;remember this when crafting advertising.The fans of a sports team&nbsp;are the members of a club. Their team gives them identity, purpose and adventure. Political parties, too, give their members identity, purpose and adventure. Religious organizations, book clubs and Twitter feeds give their followers identity, purpose and adventure.A grandmother&nbsp;adores her grandchildren because they give her identity… purpose… and adventure.Do you know&nbsp;what a rock collector gets from his rock collection?&nbsp;Identity, purpose and adventure.Each of us&nbsp;– every one of us – is on a treasure hunt. The differences between us are found primarily in the things we value. When a person doesn’t value what we value, we think a little less of them. They are obviously shallow, stupid, deceptive or evil.Abraham Maslow believed&nbsp;a third of our society lives below the search for identity or above it. Those who live below the search are focused primarily on securing food, shelter and safety. This is their economic reality. Those who live above the search have a clear sense of identity and they know their purposes precisely. This is their emotional reality. Their adventures depend on nothing outside themselves.Those who live below or above&nbsp;the search for identity are effectively immune to advertising. The first group can’t afford what you’re selling and the second group doesn’t care.&nbsp;These people are rarely prospective customers.Fortunately for businesses everywhere,&nbsp;two thirds of us buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. These two thirds of society are the backbone of the economy. We have needs that have not been met, hungers that have not been satisfied, dreams that have not been fulfilled.Businesses exist&nbsp;to meet those needs, satisfy those hungers and fulfill those dreams.We&nbsp;make and spend money primarily to discover who we are.This would be&nbsp;sadif it wasn’t so much fun.Vie à l’économie.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

It’s Friday morning, September 7, 1951.&nbsp;John Steinbeck emerges from deep in his writing of&nbsp;East of Eden&nbsp;to scribble a note to his friend, Pat Covici:“This week has been a hard one. I have put the forces of evil against a potential good. Yesterday I wrote the outward thing of what happened. Today I have to show what came of it. This is quite different from the modern hard-boiled school. I think I must set it down. And I will. The spots of gold on this page are the splatterings from beautiful thoughts.”Those five words,&nbsp;“the splatterings from beautiful thoughts,” let me know that I’m not alone.Another five words,&nbsp;“haggard, inconstant splashes of beauty,” appear near the end of an Italian movie about a guy who, on his 65th birthday, begins to reevaluate his shallow life.&nbsp;The movie&nbsp;is visually rich&nbsp;but a bit of a downer.Life&nbsp;can be a bit of a downer, too, even when it’s not a shallow one.Visually rich sights are all around us&nbsp;but we’re too pressed for time to notice. We’re in a mood, in a hurry, in trouble, in a crisis or incapacitated. We’re anxious or angry, distracted or distraught, bedazzled, bedeviled or bedraggled.But still&nbsp;those splashes of beauty creep in – barely noticeable at first – but there they are, haggard and inconstant, limping and laughing splashes of miracles that would show up more often if only we would notice.“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it….”– Alan Paton, opening line of&nbsp;Cry, The Beloved CountryA profound beauty&nbsp;can often be found in the ordinary. Will you look for it with me today? The cost is nothing and the value is high.If beauty&nbsp;is in the eye of the beholder, then let us become beholders.Yes, people will laugh at us&nbsp;if we see beauty where they do not. Let us think of this laughter as our gift to them. We should laugh a little, too.And now I will tell you a dark secret&nbsp;that is also a paradox: the richest of all beauties – the one that takes your breath away – is deeply terrifying. It grants me new life when it appears, but I do not seek it. For this richest beauty happens only when my world collapses and my only hope is in God.Perhaps you, too, have been there.There is a quickening,&nbsp;a wiggle of life when we’re&nbsp;in extremis,&nbsp;a rearrangement of priorities, deep and clear. The problem that’s about to swallow you whole becomes a pool of water that serves as a magnifying glass and for a moment you see everything clearly.As I said,&nbsp;I do not seek this richest of beauties, for it is terrifying.Coward that I am,&nbsp;I shall continue to live without an all-consuming crisis for as long as I’m able and do my best to be satisfied with the haggard, inconstant splashes of beauty that are the splatterings from beautiful thoughts.Dorothy Parker&nbsp;was right,&nbsp;“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”Even so,&nbsp;let us look for beauty – in the calm – of the ordinary.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

I look in the mirror&nbsp;and see the person I believe myself to be. You look at me and see the person you believe me to be. We don’t see the same person.Businesses, too,&nbsp;see&nbsp;themselves differently than their customers do.A flatterer disguised as a branding consultant&nbsp;will help you create an idealized self-portrait and tell you it’s your brand. I say “idealized” because we businesspeople judge ourselves by our intentions. Customers judge us by our actions.Peace of mind&nbsp;comes from liking the person you see in the mirror.But brand attraction&nbsp;happens&nbsp;when the customer looks at your company and sees a reflection of themselves.We are attracted&nbsp;to brands that stand for something we believe in. Likewise, we are attracted to television shows, movies, books, websites, podcasts, newscasts and songs that confirm what we believe. This is known in psychology as “confirmation bias.”Let me say this plainly:&nbsp;If you challenge a person’s core beliefs, they will avoid you. Agree with those beliefs and they will like you. This is the essence of brand building.But not everyone&nbsp;believes&nbsp;the same things. This is why a brand-builder must choose who to lose. There is no message, no belief system, that appeals to everyone.The Democratic party and the Republican party&nbsp;dominate American politics even though just fifty-eight percent of Americans align themselves with either of these two brands.In a survey of self-identified&nbsp;“Liberal Democrats” and self-identified “Conservative Republicans,” Experian Simmons identified the Top 15 favorite television shows of each group.Not a single show was on both lists.Not one.Liberals prefer&nbsp;shows of moral ambiguity like&nbsp;Mad Men, Dexter, 90210&nbsp;and&nbsp;Breaking Bad,&nbsp;where the good people aren’t entirely good and the bad people aren’t entirely bad.&nbsp;“I don’t mean to make light of it,&nbsp;but Democrats seem to like shows about damaged people,” said John Fetto, senior marketing manager at Experian Simmons. “Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”Conservatives prefer&nbsp;shows where hard work and talent are clearly rewarded. Reality shows and contests like&nbsp;American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Survivor&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Bachelor&nbsp;scored high with this group.Interesting information, right?&nbsp;But not really surprising when you think about it. Narcissus saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with the person he saw.Confirmation bias strikes again.How can you&nbsp;use this information to make money?1. Quit trying to change your customer’s mind.2. Tell them they’re right.3. Confirm their suspicions.4. Demonize their enemies.5. Let them see themselves when they look at you.&nbsp;Do these things&nbsp;and you’ll make more money. Usually, a lot more money.But a strange thing&nbsp;happens when you“go along to get along,” when youagree with people you don’t respect, when youfail to speak out against injustice, when youallow etiquette and expediency to quietly replacecompassion and courage:You look in the mirror&nbsp;and no longer like who you see.How do we remain open&nbsp;to seeing things from a new perspective without losing clarity of self in the process?If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

A cafe owner,&nbsp;famous for his soup, was told by his accountant that he could boost his profit significantly if he would add just 5 percent more water to the recipe. The accountant was right. The water was added and no one noticed. Months later, the cafe added 5 percent more water and still no one noticed. Later, more water was added. And then a little more, but never more than 5 percent because they had now “proven” that customers cannot detect just 5 percent more added water.As you suspected,&nbsp;the cafe owner didn’t lose his customers incrementally, but all at once.&nbsp;“The soup here just isn’t as good as it used to be.”I was told that story&nbsp;by a multimillionaire Wall Street speculator. He says American businesspeople have a peculiar blind spot to the all-at-once backlash that comes from watering the soup. He said American businesses expect to see incremental declines when they are incrementally abusive, but that’s never how it works. When the wife packs up to leave, she takes the kids and leaves all at once.The central belief&nbsp;of a cost-cutter is that profits rise when costs are lowered. And on paper, this argument is insurmountable because the cost-cutter’s forecast doesn’t project a decline in business.In the short term, the cost-cutter looks like a genius.Later, when customers&nbsp;quit buying soup and the business begins to circle the drain, the silly little cost-cutter becomes an even taller hero:“See how smart I am? If I hadn’t reduced expenses, we’d really be in trouble right now. But with our new, lower overhead, we’re still profitable. I’ve saved the company.”Don’t laugh.&nbsp;I’m watching it happen to a friend’s business right now and it makes me want to cry.Shortly after we bought the plateau&nbsp;on which Wizard Academy proudly sits, the&nbsp;Chicago Tribune&nbsp;ran&nbsp;a fascinating story. These are the opening lines:Fred Turner did not need to look at financial statements to know McDonald’s was in trouble. He could taste it.The man who worked alongside founder Ray Kroc to turn McDonald’s Corp. into a global colossus, Turner noticed when penny pinchers at corporate headquarters changed recipes to cut costs. So when McDonald’s cheapened the famed “special sauce” on its flagship Big Mac sandwich, Turner knew.But it wasn’t until a new CEO brought him back from retirement 18 months ago to help lead a turnaround at McDonald’s that the now 71-year-old Turner learned just how deep the trouble ran…McDonald’s&nbsp;was a magical corporation when it was in the hands of entrepreneurs. But then the conniving little accountants took over.I did not say&nbsp;that all accountants are idiots. My own accountant, Adrian Van Zelfden famously says,&nbsp;“It’s usually easier to increase revenues than to cut costs. Don’t try to shrink your way to profits.”Jean Backus,&nbsp;another CPA, was recently elected to serve as Chairman of the Board at Wizard Academy. Jean doesn’t believe in shrinking things either. Jean believes in growing them.Your accountant&nbsp;may be one of the good ones, too. What are they telling you to do? Are they suggesting that you grow your company? Or are they suggesting that you shrivel into something else?A cost-cutter&nbsp;buys grapes and makes raisins.An entrepreneur&nbsp;buys grapes and makes wine.You’ll never see&nbsp;a person arrive to a celebrationcarrying a box of raisins.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Contrary&nbsp;to what my headline might suggest, this is actually an upbeat message.Guilt&nbsp;is about what you have done.Shame&nbsp;is about who you are.Failure in business&nbsp;has no connection to either of these.Failures are footlights along the dark pathway to success.One of the defining characteristics&nbsp;of Wizard Academy alumni is that we are people of action. Failure does not frighten us.The author of&nbsp;Peter Pan,&nbsp;J. M Barrie, would have been one of us if Wizard Academy had existed back then. He said,&nbsp;“We are all failures – at least the best of us are.”Thomas John Watson,&nbsp;the early President of IBM who turned that company into a household word, said,&nbsp;“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”Roger Van Oech,&nbsp;a consultant to Apple, Disney, Sony and IBM echoes,&nbsp;“Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.”Warren G. Bennis&nbsp;had a failure epiphany that changed his life. He says,&nbsp;“The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to some failure: something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom — as something they thought was almost a necessity. It’s as if, at that moment, the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.”Failure, it seems,&nbsp;is valuable and important and necessary to your success.Here’s how to do it right:Fail cheaply.&nbsp;Always ask, “What is the minimum viable experiment?”Fail forward.&nbsp;Be sure to learn something you didn’t know before you failed.Fail quickly.&nbsp;The primary goal is to prove or disprove your concept.This education by experience can be expensive.&nbsp;But ignorance is even more expensive.I’m in the middle&nbsp;of what appears – right now – to be a failure of epic proportions.But I’m not frightened by it, ashamed of it, or even confused.“Amazed” is the word I would use.Back on November 4th&nbsp;I announced a $10,000 Quixote’s Windmill Prize. Only 4 people, so far, have entered that contest.Think of it this way:&nbsp;would you accept a free lottery ticket to win a $10,000 cash prize if your chances of winning were 1 in 4? That’s right. There is nothing to buy, no entry fee, and&nbsp;anyone can enter.&nbsp;The prize is cash.The deeply insightful Jean Vanier says,&nbsp;“I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.” The name of Vanier’s book is Community and Growth.Community:&nbsp;you’re part of the community of Wizard Academy and the Monday Morning Memo.Growth:&nbsp;It’s the goal of our coming together.I’m going to say something hard now.&nbsp;I hope you will forgive me: If you want to stand before others as a sparkling example of what is possible if a person works hard enough, is disciplined and determined enough, and makes all the right decisions, well, you seem to have a need to be worshipped.If you actually want to benefit the people around you…&nbsp;if you want to help them avoid the mistakes you made and the difficulties you endured as a result… you must share those mistakes and describe those difficulties. This is how we grow. This is how we have community.I want you to enter&nbsp;Quixote’s Windmill contest because it’s important for you to laugh about your failures. If you try to keep them secret, you give them power over you.Don’t wear the handcuffs...

“Once, there were 3 kittens named Murry, Furry and Wurry…”I’ll admit&nbsp;to fabricating Murry and Furry, but you and I both know that Wurry is often pampered and protected like a cherished pet. We talk about our Wurry and cuddle it. We share our Wurry with others, hoping they will choose to love our Wurry as we do.If you try&nbsp;to help a person eliminate their Wurry, they will rise ferociously to its defense.People who&nbsp;have all chosen to love the same Wurry form organizations and political parties, bound together by a shared anxiety.Would you like to have anxiety?&nbsp;It can be yours if you want it. All you have to do is craft a pessimistic interpretation of ambiguous events and&nbsp;voilà,&nbsp;anxiety is yours.Jesus makes a strong argument&nbsp;against worry in the 6th chapter of Matthew, then finishes his thoughts with these words: “Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”That’s a well-known Bible verse,&nbsp;but if you actually choose not to worry, most people will consider you to be foolish and naive.We are programmed from birth&nbsp;to give our attention to the snarling tiger on our left instead of the beautiful butterfly on our right.&nbsp;When face-to-face with imminent danger, fear&nbsp;gives us focus and clarity.&nbsp;It is a biological imperative that keeps us alive.&nbsp;This is why we give&nbsp;bad news the highest priority.&nbsp;But that doesn’t mean fear is always good.When was the last time you encountered a tiger?In the absence of snarling tigers,&nbsp;modern man has chosen to focus his need to fear beyond this moment, beyond his circumstances, beyond objective reality.Our fear about the future is called Worry.I do not love it.What would it feel like if&nbsp;we quit borrowing trouble from tomorrow?It sounds reckless, doesn’t it,&nbsp;not to worry about possibilities that might never happen? Would that mean the end of planning? Perhaps it would. But it would also trigger an explosion of improvisation.I seem to recall a writer&nbsp;who said that most plans are just inaccurate predictions anyway. I think he makes a good point.Am I seriously suggesting&nbsp;that we eliminate worry from our lives? No, it was Jesus who suggested that. I’m merely contemplating the implications of such a decision and walking you down a path of possibilities.Interesting scenery, don’t you think?Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

We could call&nbsp;this memo,&nbsp;“The Poodle and The Vamp, Part Two,”&nbsp;but we won’t. No one likes the sequel quite so much as they liked&nbsp;the original.Talent isn’t rare.&nbsp;Our world overflows with worthy talent that continues day-to-day unrecognized. I’ll wager that you possess such talent.There is something&nbsp;you’re capable of doing, I’ll bet, that could make you famous around the world. Your fame might even happen in a&nbsp;whoosh,&nbsp;the way it did for Billy, Tom, and Ted.Billy Graham&nbsp;started preaching in 1947. In 1949, Billy set up a circus tent in Los Angeles, certainly not the first to do so. So there he was, night after night, just another preacher with a tent, when two words forever altered the trajectory of his life: “Puff Graham.”William Randolph Hearst,&nbsp;the newspaper mogul who inspired the movie,&nbsp;Citizen Kane,&nbsp;sent that unexplained, 2-word telegram to every editor at every newspaper he owned in America. The next day, papers from coast to coast were glowing with stories about this Christian minister. Hearst never told the papers to quit puffing Graham.And they never did.In his book,&nbsp;Just as I Am,&nbsp;Billy Graham says he never learned why Hearst took an interest in him. “Hearst and I did not meet, talk by phone, or correspond as long as he lived.”Billy Graham was,&nbsp;and is, remarkably talented. But so are 10,000 other ministers.Every poodle needs a vamp.“Tom Clancy&nbsp;was an insurance salesman in Maryland when, in the early nineteen-eighties, he wrote a book, ‘The Hunt for Red October,’ that Ronald Reagan, with a handsome public mention, turned into a best-seller. Clancy’s career took off like, well, like one of his rockets. Too nearsighted to serve in the armed forces, Clancy, who kept a tank on his front lawn, was a military fantasist whose end-is-nigh concoctions spawned a franchise…”– David Denby,&nbsp;The New Yorker,&nbsp;Jan. 20, 2014, p. 78Reagan played vamp&nbsp;for Tom Clancy just as Hearst did for Billy Graham.But what about&nbsp;Teddy Roosevelt? Wasn’t he one of the most popular and beloved presidents in the history of the United States?Nope. Not really.&nbsp;His policies and decisions were as hotly debated as those of Barack Obama today. We think of Roosevelt as “one of the great ones” primarily because his monumental face watches over America from Mount Rushmore along with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, the undisputed big boys of American history.Roosevelt’s vamp was Gutzon Borglum.Borglum was not commissioned&nbsp;by the government to create Mount Rushmore. It was a private work begun by a private individual.And that individual&nbsp;was a buddy of Ted Roosevelt back when Teddy was still alive. Roosevelt had been gone for only 8 years when Borglum began his carving.If Gutzon Borglum&nbsp;was only just now beginning to carve that granite in South Dakota, he might chose Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Carter because Gutzon answered to no one but himself.That is the power of a vamp.Do you believe in someone? Vamp for them.The Wizard of Ads partners&nbsp;are known throughout the Engish-speaking world because we have agreed upon a covenant:&nbsp;Never boast of your own accomplishments but only those of your partners.“You vamp for me. I’ll vamp for you.”It’s called “third party credibility,”&nbsp;or at least it used to be. Today they call it “feedback,” “comments” and “customer reviews.”Billy, Tom and Ted went viral&nbsp;before it had a name. But one thing remains the same:&nbsp;A poodle needs a vamp.Every business&nbsp;is a poodle.Every ad writer&nbsp;is a vamp.How good&nbsp;is...

Type “business plan” into Google&nbsp;and you’ll see an impressive array of articles from&nbsp;BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Forbes, Entrepreneur&nbsp;and SBA.gov.Everyone&nbsp;has a business plan.Almost no one&nbsp;has an advertising plan.And we are coming&nbsp;to a critical fork in the road.I want you&nbsp;to choose your fork consciously rather than unconsciously. And choose you most definitely will.I’m talking about&nbsp;your choice between brand-building and direct response advertising.When you sell&nbsp;a product or service with a long purchase cycle – something purchased only once every several years – your business will be best served by brand building. Do everything in your power to become the company that people will think of first and feel the best about when they finally need what you sell. Good brand-building also stimulates word-of-mouth, the original “viral.” But brand building requires patience, confidence and courage.If you sell&nbsp;a product or service with a short purchase cycle – something that most people will purchase every few days, weeks or months – your business will be best served by direct-response ads. Create an extremely attractive, limited-time offer, then add an additional incentive for those who act now. Then add a third incentive. This is called “benefit stacking” and it makes a massive difference. Direct-response ads are exciting but to be really successful you need a big-gap offer.The goal is to create a big gap&nbsp;between the perceived value and the asking price. The more impressive that gap, the more attractive your direct-response offer. Big-gap offers are most easily made when the public has no ability to shop and compare.Companies that make money&nbsp;with big-gap offers are the ones that can sell products with a perceived value that is at least 10 times their actual cost. I’m betting you don’t have that kind of profit margin. Am I right?Write a direct-response ad&nbsp;for a product with a widely known price and the public won’t be impressed unless you’re selling that product below your cost. This is known as a “loss leader.” The idea behind a loss leader is that it can drive customers into your store who might make additional purchases while they’re there. Grocery stores have used this technique since the dawn of time.Direct response&nbsp;is not a style of ad writing. It is a style of offer packaging.Businesses with short purchase cycles&nbsp;can jump from offer to offer, item to item, incentive to incentive indefinitely. But may God have mercy on the ad writer who is expected to generate immediate response for a product or service with a long purchase cycle.There are times when it’s possible&nbsp;to run a direct-response offer within a brand-building ad campaign for a product or service that has a long purchase cycle. An example of this would be for a jewelry store to make an enticing offer to finance engagement rings right before Valentines Day. Add the additional incentives of a romantic dinner and a limousine filled with 12 dozen roses and you might see a bump in engagement ring sales.Google’s ability to identify customers&nbsp;who are immediately in the market for products and services with long purchase cycles has all but eliminated the Yellow Pages and it is rapidly eroding the public’s need for in-store “experts” as well. Google’s unique ability to do this has caused many business owners to believe they have a right to expect immediate results from traditional mass media.Business owner,&nbsp;the fork in the road is before you: brand building or direct response.If you sell a product or service&nbsp;that at least 50 percent of the public will purchase within the next 12 months, you might do well to consider running direct response ads in mass media. But please be careful to make a highly impressive offer or you’ll be horribly...

“Normalization”&nbsp;begins with an idealized norm of conduct – for example, the way a soldier should ideally stand, march, and present arms, with each of these actions defined in minute detail. Individuals are then rewarded for conforming to this ideal or punished for deviating from it.Normalization allows a leader&nbsp;to exert maximum social control with the minimum expenditure of force. This idea of “disciplinary power” emerged over the course of the 19th century, came to be used extensively in military barracks, schools, factories and offices in the 20th century, and has since became a crucial aspect of modern societies.&nbsp;I blame the British.Curious to know more?&nbsp;Read&nbsp;Discipline and Punish&nbsp;by Michel Foucault“We all know bad things are happening&nbsp;to our political and social universe; we know that business is colonizing ever larger chunks of American culture; and we know that advertising tells lies. We are all sick to death of the consumer culture. We all want to resist conformity. We all want to be our own dog.”– Thomas Frank,&nbsp;Conglomerates and the Media,&nbsp;1997“The reward for conformity&nbsp;is that everyone likes you but yourself.”– Rita Mae Brown,&nbsp;Venus Envy,&nbsp;1994“Education either functions&nbsp;(1.) as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or (2.) it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”– Paulo Freire,&nbsp;Pedagogy of the Oppressed,&nbsp;1968Paolo Freire was a miraculous educator&nbsp;who used unapproved methods to teach thousands of illiterate Brazilian farmworkers to read and write in just 45 days. He was later put in jail.I believe Paolo would have&nbsp;loved Wizard Academy, a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious. We resist rigid rules and rely instead on universal principles.Laid side-by-side, a stick and a rope&nbsp;have a similar profile. Likewise, rules and principles look alike even though they have little in common.Rules are like sticks.&nbsp;You can prod people with them. You can threaten people with them. You can beat people with them. But you cannot lead people with them. When a rule doesn’t fit the circumstance, your only choice is to break it.Principles are like rope,&nbsp;able to be wrapped around even the most weirdly shaped problems. They are less brittle than rules, and stronger. Principles whisper priceless advice and people are happily led by them.A rule requires obedience.A principle requires contemplation.Simple people&nbsp;living in a push-button society demand simple rules.Wise men and women&nbsp;understand and apply universal laws.There. I have said it.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

A brief summary of this episode

The Eye of the Storm&nbsp;is what we call the classroom in the tower at Wizard Academy. This name is doubly appropriate; not only is The Eye of the Storm a momentary escape from the buffeting winds of business, it was funded by Tim Storm, a wildly successful entrepreneur.It was the third day&nbsp;of a 3-day class. A hand went up in the second row.“Yes?”“What’s the next big thing?”The answer&nbsp;leapt from my mouth before he had even finished the question.“YouTube.”Everyone laughed.&nbsp;This confused me until I realized the class thought I was trying to be funny. Yes, of course, YouTube was already big.But not in the way I meant.Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim&nbsp;founded YouTube in February 2005. Google purchased it the following year (2006) for $1.65 billion.YouTube&nbsp;was an idea whose time had come.During the 365 calendar days of 2011,&nbsp;YouTube delivered more than 1 trillion views. Viewership in 2012 was up by more than 40 percent: 1.46 trillion views. I mentioned that to you exactly 52 weeks ago. You might remember how I pointed out that one million seconds is about 12 days.One billion seconds is nearly 32 years.One trillion seconds is 31,688 years.A trillion is a lot.The statistics page at YouTube&nbsp;currently says the number of views delivered in 2013 was “50 percent more than last year.” This means they’ve jumped from 1 trillion views to 2 trillion views is just 24 months. It seems that you and I and the rest of the world are watching a lot of online video.Advertising begins a conversation&nbsp;with prospective customers&nbsp;that will be continued when they make contact with your company. This is why it’s important to educate your sales team about your advertising.Sometimes a customer calls&nbsp;to ask you a question. You answer. Sometimes they walk through your door. You greet them. But as Steve Wozniak wryly observed in 2010, “We used to ask a smart person a question. Now who do we ask? It starts with G-O, and it’s not God.”Your customers are gathering information&nbsp;through Google and YouTube. This means your website and your online videos are vital new half steps that fall between your advertising and your customer’s direct first contact with you. (You know I’m right because you’re doing this, too.&nbsp;You walk to your keyboard every time you have interest in a product or a service.)Are your customers finding the information they need?I’m not talking about Search Engine Optimization.&nbsp;I’m not talking about responding to customer queries made by email. I’m talking about crafting an informative answer to the question you believe your customer will ask and then posting that answer in a video on YouTube. You can also embed that video on your website. How many questions can you answer intelligently? That’s exactly how many YouTube videos you should create.Yes, I’m being serious.YouTube is often called “social media.”&nbsp;This is unfortunate because businesspeople tend to see “social media” as cotton candy that offers little real nutrition.&nbsp;Entertainment value&nbsp;is measured by the number of views a video receives. I am not suggesting that you should entertain the public, but rather that you should inform them.&nbsp;Information value&nbsp;is measured by how well you anticipate and answer your customer’s not-yet-asked question.YouTube delivers entertainment&nbsp;when we want to be distracted but it also delivers information when we are seeking answers. Google and YouTube give us unprecedented access to information, 24/7. This is changing the nature of sales training. As Steve Wozniak pointed out, we’re no longer seeking the opinions of experts face-to-face, we’re seeking them face-to-computer-screen. This is not how the world functioned a short decade ago.Welcome to 2014.Wizard...

The official wedding count&nbsp;for Chapel Dulcinea in 2013 was 824 weddings. When I talk about the number of weddings performed each year at Chapel Dulcinea I usually say, “more than a thousand,” but it’s not because I’m lying.I’m just telling the truth prematurely.&nbsp;We’ll soon be at 1,000+ per year. I’m certain of it.If you make a declaration&nbsp;but you don’t believe it to be true, then you’re lying. But if you say a thing is true and you believe it to be true even though it hasn’t happened yet,&nbsp;“I’m there for you. I have your back, no matter what,”&nbsp;are you lying? Are you exaggerating? Or are you just telling the truth prematurely?Faith is the substance&nbsp;of things hoped for. Happy endings are made of it.Faith is the evidence&nbsp;of things not seen. It is proof of the invisible.Hope is optimistic expectation.Faith&nbsp;is hope with its sleeves rolled up.Faith&nbsp;is hope wearing working gloves.Faith&nbsp;is hope yanking the ripcord of a chainsaw.Faith&nbsp;is hope with a hammer in its hand.Faith&nbsp;speaks&nbsp;of that which is not yet as though it already were.Faith requires commitment.I have faith in the success&nbsp;of the companies for whom I write ads. I have faith in the abilities of my Wizard of Ads partners. I have faith that you will blossom like a rose when you visit Wizard Academy. I have faith that you will find what you need while you’re with us.Faith requires commitment&nbsp;and commitment is a choice. It’s not something that arises within you like courage. It’s not something that comes upon you like fear. Commitment is simply a choice.Are you willing&nbsp;to pay the price of commitment?The things&nbsp;to which you must say “no” are the price of your commitment.The things&nbsp;you must walk away from are the price of your commitment.The things&nbsp;you will deny yourself are the price of your commitment.Commitment comes at a price.Do&nbsp;you have hope for the future?Do you&nbsp;have faith in your plans?Does your faith&nbsp;have a hammer in its hand?Are you willing&nbsp;to pay the price of your commitment?If you can give me four yesses&nbsp;I’ll tell you your future:You’re going to have a fabulous 2014.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

I admire John the Beloved and Abraham Lincoln.&nbsp;These were quietly determined and reliable men, full of love and compassion, unwilling to leave anyone behind. But if I am honest, I must admit that I’m actually more similar to Simon Peter and Teddy Roosevelt; blustering and thundering, quick toward combat, often causing more pain than I realize.There are few Lincolns&nbsp;in America but the spirit of Teddy is everywhere you look.Teddy Roosevelt would have liked Hockey and Football.“It is always dangerous to generalize,&nbsp;but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.”– Margot AsquithMargot Asquith&nbsp;was an English socialite, author and wit.Dorothy Parker&nbsp;was an American socialite, author and wit.In 1927,&nbsp;Dorothy reviewed&nbsp;The Autobiography of Margot Asquith&nbsp;for the Oct. 22 edition of&nbsp;The New Yorker:“The affair&nbsp;between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories of all literature.”And that, Ladies and Gentlemen,&nbsp;is what is known in wrestling as a take-down. In soccer and hockey, a body check. In football,&nbsp;spearing.&nbsp;In the hood, a bitch slap.Americans&nbsp;are generally better at it than Europeans.&nbsp;This is an observation that’s been made many times.“I am an American,&nbsp;Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make a record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted: sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”– Saul Bellow, opening line,&nbsp;The Adventures of Augie MarchI was born&nbsp;in Texas and raised with rough boys in Oklahoma, so I understand what Saul Bellow meant when he said, “I am an American…”&nbsp;Humorist Will Rogers also knew what Bellow meant. He wrote a letter from Europe to President Calvin Coolidge in 1926:“We,&nbsp;unfortunately, don’t make a good impression collectively… There ought to be a law prohibiting over three Americans going anywhere abroad together.”Comedian Fred Allen&nbsp;likewise looked into our cultural mirror with amusement and chagrin.“The American arrives in Paris&nbsp;with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.”Another comedian, Paul Rodriguez,&nbsp;said in 1987,“War&nbsp;is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”Ouch.But the most devastating criticism&nbsp;came from the pen of John Steinbeck:“Americans are remarkably kind and hospitable and open&nbsp;with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle around the man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence….”– John Steinbeck,&nbsp;Paradox and Dream,&nbsp;(1966)That these criticisms&nbsp;come from within our own circle gives me hope and a sense of pride. I am not advocating negativity. Continual self-criticism is a slow, unwinding spiral into darkness as our self-confidence unravels to nothing. This is dangerously self-destructive.But even more dangerous&nbsp;is to deny that we make mistakes.The vital passage&nbsp;in my book,&nbsp;Pendulum,&nbsp;is a quote from David Farland:“Men who believe themselves to be good,&nbsp;who do not search their own souls, often commit the worst atrocities. A man who sees himself as evil will restrain himself. It is only when we do evil in the belief that we do good that we pursue it wholeheartedly.”I believe it is wise&nbsp;to...

Why the World Needs Don Quixote&nbsp;Sarah says&nbsp;if you rely solely upon reason, your actions will be based upon what you believe to be possible. You’ll not likely attempt the impossible. She goes on to say,&nbsp;“Quixotism is the passionate pursuit of an ideal which may not be attainable. It is the belief that an individual can alter reality and redefine what is possible.”George&nbsp;brings Sarah’s observation to a pragmatic conclusion:“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”Progress begins&nbsp;with a rejection of the status quo.Progress begins&nbsp;when a Quixote sees a giant that needs to be defeated.Are you a conformist&nbsp;who believes we must accept the dominance of giants?Of course you’re not.&nbsp;If you were, you would not be reading this. You are the “unreasonable” person of whom George spoke.The opening lines&nbsp;of&nbsp;George’s biography at NobelPrize.org&nbsp;tell us,&nbsp;“George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training.”George disliked organization?&nbsp;He would have adored Wizard Academy.&nbsp;Sadly, George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, exactly half a century before Wizard Academy was born. So alas, we cannot meet him.But Sarah is still with us.&nbsp;And she is looking for work as a babysitter. I know this because I found her 2011 college thesis during a Google search and was deeply impressed by it. Curiosity required me to learn more about her.Here are a few quotes&nbsp;from the introduction to her thesis:“Quixotists are the willful creators of their own destinies.Their childlike ability to marvel at the world, desperation to experience a full life, and willingness to pursue goodness and beauty through an adventurous process of trial and error set them apart from all who depend upon common sense. Thus, quixotism has the potential to serve as a mechanism of social change, stretching the limits of the possible.”“Given that quixotism stands in stark contrast to the more cautious, conventional notion of reason, it initially appears to be nothing more than madness and is often summarily dismissed as such. However, one of quixotism’s most important principles is its recognition of ambiguity and uncertainty. This philosophy thrives in the space between the known and the unknown.”“Quixotism represents the most profound expression of genius: joyful curiosity about the world and a willingness to explore. As thought and action are inseparable, it is both a belief system and a way of life. While the practice of quixotism leads to a greater number of mistakes than more restrained forms of intellectualism, it also yields more successes as a result of its extreme nature.”Young Sarah is obviously one of us.She doesn’t know&nbsp;I’m quoting her. She doesn’t even know we exist.Shall we contact her?&nbsp;Shall I offer her a scholarship to a class atWizard Academy? Would you like to help cover her travel costs?Babysitters don’t often have money for plane tickets.It is Christmastime.&nbsp;You are busy. I am busy. So perhaps we should forget the whole thing.I leave it up to you.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

You have within you an idea,&nbsp;a possibility, a thought that has never quite gone away. You tell yourself it’s a childish fantasy.Perhaps it is.&nbsp;And that’s precisely why you should rescue it from the shivering shadows.Let your child live in the light.&nbsp;You’re strong enough now to watch over it and protect it from the beasts that would devour it.Let your child live in the light.This “thought that has never quite gone away”&nbsp;provides you with a perspective not fully understood by those around you. You see a special connection between certain things that others don’t quite see. This is probably one of your “life messages,” a note you carry from God to the rest of us.We are terrified&nbsp;to deliver life messages. I’m not entirely sure why. But I do know that every two-dimensional life gains depth when its message is brought into the light.Have you been living&nbsp;a 2-dimensional life? If you will share your secret belief, your special perception, you can step into an exciting, 3-dimensional world.Yes, some people will think you’re bat-crap crazy.That’s the price you pay.I’ll admit this probably sounds highly abstract&nbsp;and even a bit airy-fairy, so I’ll make it concrete by giving you some examples:1. I believe there are specific, spatial relationships&nbsp;within a 3-dimensional color model – my favorite is Munsell’s – that can accurately predict the emotional effect of juxtaposing selected colors. We explore this idea briefly during the “Color” module of the class,&nbsp;Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind.&nbsp;(The 2014 session will be March 4-5. You should register.)2. I have been haunted by the number 3 since I was small.&nbsp;During the past 17 years I’ve investigated the relationship between the numbers 2, 3 and 4, and have been encouraged by the fact that Lao Tzu was haunted by the same idea during the lifetime of Alexander the Great (about 325 BC) and he wrote about it in chapter 42 of the&nbsp;Tao Te Ching.&nbsp;Augustine of Hippo was likewise haunted by threes in 410 AD and shared his conclusions in chapter 2 of book 15 in his series,&nbsp;On the Trinity.&nbsp;Alchemists struggled with this 2-3-4 relationship during medieval times, calling it “The Axiom of Maria.” Mathematician and theoretical physicist Henri Poincare’ was haunted by threes in 1887 when he investigated the wild-card power of every&nbsp;third&nbsp;gravitating body in complex systems and invented algebraic topology as a direct result. Carl Jung built his Theory of Individuation around the idea. So maybe I am a nut, but I’m a nut in pretty good company. If this idea holds interest for you, any of the cognoscenti of the&nbsp;Magical Worlds Communications Workshop&nbsp;can explain the benefits and uses of this&nbsp;perception of threes&nbsp;in detail.3. I want to create songs in which the musical instruments, themselves,&nbsp;sing the words to the song. You know what a trumpet sounds like. You can identify it by its sound. Now imagine the voice of a trumpet speaking intelligibly. I believe this will soon be done, not just with trumpets, but with every musical instrument. The vowels of any language can easily be converted into notes via their frequency signature, so the problem of making instruments “talk” doesn’t lie within the vowels, but in the formants of the consonants.Are you beginning to understand&nbsp;what I mean when I say, “a perspective not fully understood by those around you… a connection between certain things that others don’t quite see?”You have ideas like these within you, too.&nbsp;Why not let them

This ocean adventure called life&nbsp;is most easily navigated when we have a guiding light.The winds and waves of circumstance push at all of us.1.&nbsp;We can passively go with the flow.2.&nbsp;We can choose the badge of the victim.3.&nbsp;We can loose ourselves in pleasure.4.&nbsp;We can harness the wind and waves.The Drifter,?Spun by wind and wave,Helpless, says, ‘Whatever…’The Drowner?Plays for sympathy.‘It’s been the worst week of my life.’The SurferScans the horizon,Wanting ever ‘The next big thing.’The Wise Men?Follow the star.?Adjust the sails.Twist the rudder.The Wise-ards know.– Roy H. WilliamsStart begins with star.Rick Warren&nbsp;popularized the concept of a guiding light in his book,&nbsp;The Purpose-Driven Life,&nbsp;but he certainly didn’t invent it. That book was published in 2002. By 2007, it had sold 30 million copies.It would appear&nbsp;that people hunger to have a purpose.Miguel de Cervantes&nbsp;wrote about a man consumed with purpose.His Don Quixote has been heroic and laughable, wise and foolish, admired and scorned for more than 400 years. Steinbeck speaks of Cervantes and Quixote in his preface to&nbsp;East of Eden,&nbsp;then says,&nbsp;“The reader will take from my book what he brings to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there.”Steinbeck looked at Don Quixote&nbsp;and realized that we tend to see what is already within us.In&nbsp;The New York Observer&nbsp;of March 31, 1910,&nbsp;John Bancroft Devins set 14 words apart in quotation marks but failed to attribute them. These 14 words have since been repeated many times:“Two men looked out through prison bars.&nbsp;One man saw mud, the other stars.”The first man&nbsp;saw mud because mud was within him.The other&nbsp;saw stars because he was full of light.We do not&nbsp;see things&nbsp;as they are, but as we are.We especially do that with the Bible, I think.Jesus speaks of vision&nbsp;in the 6th chapter of Matthew and the 11th chapter of Luke. I suppose the passage has as many interpretations as it has readers:“Where your treasure is,&nbsp;there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye: if your vision is singular, your whole body will be full of light. But if your vision is unfocused, your body will be full of darkness. If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”I read those lines&nbsp;and hear Jesus speaking of the passion and energy and creativity and stamina – the&nbsp;light&nbsp;– that comes from having a vision, a dream, a purpose, a goal. And I hear him speak of the echoing emptiness of life without these things. Perhaps I find in that passage only what I bring to it, but that’s what I find, nonetheless.I find myself contemplating this for three reasons:1.&nbsp;It is November.2.&nbsp;We have only to build Bilbo Baggins’ house and the Lenhard-Murray amphitheater and the Wizard Academy campus will be complete. What will we do then?3.&nbsp;Pennie and I remember in vivid detail the day we purchased the land on which Wizard Academy is built. The ensuing 9 years and 8 months passed us by with such speed that we are left gasping in a vacuum.I walk across the campus&nbsp;and am startled by what I see. When did all this happen?Each autumn&nbsp;I think seriously about what to do with the rest of my life. I reflect on the irreversible past and project a possible future. It is my favorite time of year.Start begins with star.“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right

For Friends OnlyFifty-one times a year&nbsp;I write things I believe you’ll find to be useful. Once a year I turn the mirror toward myself. This is that time.I hope you don’t mind.I’ve enjoyed 8 distinct advantages in life&nbsp;for which I can take no credit. I am thankful for 6 of these advantages, but weirdly embarrassed by two of them.I was born in America as a white boy&nbsp;during a time when to be anything other than that was a distinct disadvantage. I didn’t choose to be (1.) white and (2.) male, so I’ve always carried uneasy feelings of guilt. There you have it.I’m often reprimanded&nbsp;by those who feel it’s in poor taste to acknowledge differences in race and gender. This confuses me. I believe it’s in poor taste to pretend that minorities and women are always as quickly hired as white boys. Things are certainly better today than when I was young, but we’ve got a long way to go before we’re the nation we pretend to be.I was born in the late 1950s. I remember the murder&nbsp;of Martin Luther King. I remember Rosa Parks. I remember being raised by a single Mom who worked harder than her male counterparts, was more effective than her male counterparts and was paid 32 percent less than her male counterparts. So please, for the sake of our friendship, keep your reprimands to yourself.These are the 6 things for which I have always been thankful.1.&nbsp;I was born poor.This gave me a certain fearless resourcefulness that isn’t so easily learned in the better parts of town.2.&nbsp;I was born introverted.This makes it pleasant for me to focus and concentrate deeply when I’m alone. I’ve used this preference to great advantage throughout my life. My clients even pay me for it. I call these deep thoughts “plotting and scheming against the rest of the world.”3.&nbsp;I began losing my hair in my late teens.This gave me credibility as a young ad man. Thinning hair makes a boy look older, so I looked 30 by the time I was 20. You have no idea how much more seriously people listen to your advice when you don’t look like a kid.4.&nbsp;I was raised by a mother who gave me copious freedom and good advice.Mom knows that traditional wisdom is usually more tradition than wisdom, so she taught me to think for myself. And her belief that I could accomplish whatever I chose was so vast and complete that I could not help but believe it myself. Add to this the simple fact that poor people are resourceful by necessity and fearless because they have nothing to lose and you’ve got the ingredients of an unbreakable entrepreneur.5.&nbsp;I fell in love with a girl who believed in me.Miraculously, she agreed to drop out of college and marry me when we were both eighteen. This is huge. It cannot be overestimated. My belief in the extreme importance of one’s life partner is so overwhelming that I taught my sons throughout their formative years that their choice of a life-partner would be far more important to their future happiness than their educational path or choice of career. I know such statements are considered to be heresy in career-worshipping America but they never arrested me for it.There is one more thing for which I am thankful.6.&nbsp;I’ve had deeply personal&nbsp;encounters with God&nbsp;that make it impossible for me to be agnostic even though I find it easy to follow the logic of close friends who believe him to be a delusion. And my God likes me! I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable or angry, but we’re talking about me today, not you, remember?I’ve shared with you from my heart today – at great risk –&nbsp;in the hope of inspiring you to look inwardly this week and celebrate the ordinary in your life with great joy. We’re about to go into 2014 together and we’ve...

Evocative Words Work WondersGive a mundane product&nbsp;an evocative name and you will dramatically increase its appeal.Humans&nbsp;are uniquely gifted to attach complex meanings to sounds. Some of these sounds are musical; pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, interval and contour. But much more specific in their meanings are phonemes, the building blocks of words.Cat and Kite begin with the same sound.&nbsp;Ignore, for a moment, that C and K are different letters. The phoneme is the sound, not the letter. The sound represented by the letters “ch” in chirp, cherry and cheerful is another phoneme.There are only 40 phonemes&nbsp;in the English language. If you want to get fussy, you can count the unvoiced “th” sound in&nbsp;with&nbsp;as a different phoneme than the voiced “th” in&nbsp;the.&nbsp;If you continue down that road, you can find as many as 44 different phonemes. But that’s all.Forty-four sounds&nbsp;allow you and I to know each other’s thoughts.The Bible opens and closes with stories&nbsp;about the importance of names. Genesis tells us that Adam’s first task was to name all the animals. In the Revelation of John we read, “I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.”Names are important.&nbsp;This is a fact known to every cognitive neuroscientist.Nouns originate and are interpreted&nbsp;in a region of the brain just behind your left ear known as Wernicke’s area, connected by the arcuate fasciculus – a high-bandwidth bundle of nerves – to another region slightly forward of your left ear known as Broca’s area, where we attach the sounds we call “verbs” to the actions we need to name. Broca’s area then coordinates the diaphragm, larynx, lips and tongue so that we can form the rapid succession of phonemes in that positively human display called speech.Information gathered&nbsp;by the eyes, muscles and skin is routed through Broca’s area on its way to the dorsolateral prefrontal association area, the home of the visuospatial sketchpad*, the mind’s eye, where we “see” things in our imaginations. All of this is connected to the ear.Yes, humans are uniquely gifted&nbsp;to attach complex meanings to sounds. And we are uniquely gifted to make those sounds, as well.All of this is well documented.Shape and Color are visual languages.Phonemes and Music are auditory languages.Painters use paint and brush.&nbsp;Fashion designers use cloth and scissors. Jewelers use metals and gemstones. Visual artists, gifted in the languages of Shape and Color, often expect their work to “speak for itself.”But it can’t.If you will add to these visual languages&nbsp;an evocative name, the listener – your customer – will craft their own unconscious bond to the thing you have named. A well-chosen name focuses and accelerates the talent of the visual artist and gives that talent greater impact.A designer and a poet holding hands can reshape the world.Here’s a 60-second radio ad&nbsp;built upon the evocative naming of visual products.SARAH: Christmas is coming!SEAN: And what could be betterSARAH: than designer diamond earrings!SEAN: You’ve never seen ANYTHING like these.SARAH: From diamond Hugs and KissesSEAN: two-hundred-ninety-nine dollarsSARAH: to the fabulous hoops of the Renaissance Queen.SEAN: Twenty-five-hundred-thirty-nine dollars.SARAH: See them on our website.SEAN: The Diamond-Studded SUPERSTAR.SARAH: The Summer of Love.SEAN: Cinnamon Roll earrings!SARAH: Fairy Tale hoops.SEAN: Forever THIN.SARAH: Sparkling Springtime!SEAN: Pink CHAMPAGNE hoopsSARAH: and Captured HeartsSEAN: Buried TREASURE hoopsSARAH: [sexy]&nbsp;and the Diamond Negligee.SEAN: The Ocean...

for What Ails Your Customer?A spoonful of Entertainment&nbsp;helps the medicine go down,medicine go&nbsp;dowwwwn,medicine go down.The public&nbsp;will give you their time if you offer them entertainment.They will give you their money if you offer them hope.But don’t ever call it hope.Don’t accuse your customer&nbsp;of being hopeless. Just let them know exactly how you can make tomorrow different than today and let them know it in an entertaining way.Go do that.Go. Get started.“Be entertaining”&nbsp;and “make tomorrow different” is easier said than done, right?We want&nbsp;your customer to have a new perspective, a new attitude about you and what you sell. But if your customer doesn’t give your message a moment of their time, your message might as well have never existed.You paid the postage but they didn’t read the letter.Entertainment is the currency&nbsp;that will buy you their time. How might your message entertain them? I’m not just talking about being funny.Humor is nitroglycerine.Handled correctly, it moves mountains.Mishandled, it moves things you didn’t want moved.We often remember the humor&nbsp;but don’t remember the product, right? This is what happens when the humor is gratuitous, disconnected from the essence of the ad.“Entertaining”&nbsp;is simply what we call the most interesting thing that’s in front of us at any given moment. Sometimes the bar is lower than at other times.My friend Brian Alter&nbsp;is a jeweler who’s about to send a catalog to his customers. His excellent cover letter below will accompany each catalog. Take a look and see what you can learn.ANext week we’ll talk about PowerNaming.Now get some rest.&nbsp;Christmas is coming.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams&nbsp;

You must attempt the ridiculous to accomplish the miraculous.David sees a giantand says, “I will defeat him.”Everyone else sees a giant, as well.David walks toward the giant with his slingand BANG, David is king.That’s a favorite story everywhere. Here’s another.Don Quixote sees a giantand says, “I will defeat him.”His companion sees only a windmill.Quixote charges the giant with his lance,is lifted high into the air on its revolving arms,and slammed into the ground.“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”Wizard Academy&nbsp;alumni&nbsp;refer to David and Don as “our brand of crazy.” Unafraid. Purpose-driven. Willing to try.So why does only David get a trophy?What about Quixote, who fought his giant hand-to-hand and ended up in a heap on the ground?Wizard Academy announces&nbsp;a $10,000 cash prize&nbsp;for him.Is he/she you?The purpose of the Quixote’s Windmill Prizeis to encourage the takers of chances, the facers of giants, the riders on the arms of windmills. We are a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.Are you our brand of crazy?Tell us about it in a YouTube videobefore March 23, 2014 and you could win $10,000 in cash, plus a free ride at Wizard Academy for one full year; a revolving scholarship for as many classes as you choose to attend.These are the rules of engagement:1.&nbsp;Anyone can enter. You do not have to be an alumnus of Wizard Academy.2.&nbsp;Your story must be true and verifiable.3.&nbsp;You can’t enter an idea you did not pursue. You must have taken dramatic action, spent money, time and energy in the pursuit of your idea.4.&nbsp;You must have learned a lesson that has value.5.&nbsp;Your video cannot exceed 2 minutes and 30 seconds. If the YouTube time bar on your video says 2:31 or more, your entry will not be considered.6.&nbsp;The winner will be named on April 23, 2014.7.&nbsp;A contestant can enter no more than 2 videos each year.You will lose if you make us pity you.In fact, you have already lost. Quixote makes us cheer for his courage and he leads us in laughter at his defeats because Quixote knows that failure, like success, is a very temporary condition.There will be 5 areas of scoring.&nbsp;Each of the 7 directors of Wizard Academy can award up to 100 points in each of the following 5 categories.A perfect score would be 3,500 points.1.&nbsp;How good was the idea?Tell us why it made sense at the time.&nbsp;7 x 100 points2.&nbsp;How aggressively did you pursue it?Make us feel your courage, your creativity, your determination.&nbsp;7 x 100 points3.&nbsp;How bad was the outcome?Did you merely shrug your shoulders and walk away, or did paramedics drag your unconscious body from a smoking crater?&nbsp;7 x 100 points4.&nbsp;What did you learn?How valuable will your advice be to the rest of us?&nbsp;7 x 100 points5.&nbsp;How well do you tell your story?This is where you get style points for lighting, color, sound quality, graphics, special effects, humor…&nbsp;7 x 100 pointsHave you tried and failed?&nbsp;Have you battled and lost?Watch the videos of the other Quixotes who enter and you won’t feel stupid anymore. You’ll say, “Wow. I’m part of a family, a tribe, a fraternity that doesn’t sit and watch from the sidelines.” And no matter how much your misadventure may have cost you, no matter how badly it...

The following press release will soon be received by the media in Midland, Texas.Diamonds to be Cut in Midland(MIDLAND, TEXAS – October 29, 2013)[Name of Diamond Cutter] is coming to Midland to cut diamonds on Saturday, November 16th and the public is invited. “It’s one of the Christmas gifts we’re giving the city,” says Cathy Fleck of Occasions Fine Jewelry.“Diamond crystals aren’t very impressive when they come out of the ground. But then, when they’re cut, they explode with light. It’s like watching the sun come up over the horizon.”“We’re going to let our guests see and touch and hold a $1,500 natural diamond crystal before it is cut. Then, we’re going to have a drawing to see who gets that diamond for free. That person will then tell the diamond cutter the shape they want him to cut their diamond. And then everyone who’s there will see the birth of a new diamond. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”The event will be displayed on an LCD screen for those who can’t get close enough to the diamond cutter.“I asked myself, ‘How can a jeweler honor the birth of Christ?’ And then it hit me; the manger, the star, and Jesus coming into the world. The only thing a jeweler could do is let people watch the birth of a sparkling new diamond. And then that diamond must be given for free. Maybe you think the whole thing is silly, but I’m really looking forward to it.”Witness the birth of a diamond from XX – XX on Saturday, November 16.Occasions Fine Jewelry was born in the back of a local drug store in Midland 20 years ago. Today, they stand on the corner of Loop 250 and Garfield with more than 4,000 square feet and are known throughout the world.# # # #&nbsp;That press release&nbsp;was written by one of the Wizards of Ads. It features frame shifting, dimensional shifting, and a trio of reality hooks.&nbsp;Here’s the original press release&nbsp;that was&nbsp;given to us by our friend, Cathy Fleck, who asked, “Is there a better way to tell this story?” The writing is slightly better than average. But is better-than-average really good enough in today’s overcommunicated society?# # # #&nbsp;OCCASIONS FINE JEWELRY EXPLAINSDIAMOND CUTTING PROCESS TO THE COMMUNITY(MIDLAND, TEXAS – October 29, 2013)Occasions Fine Jewelry is bringing a Diamond Cutting Show to Midland on Saturday, November 16th. As a part of the show, Occasions is flying in equipment and cutters to do a demonstration for the public. They will show all stages of the process on site. “We are very excited about this new event,” said owner Cathy Fleck. “Very rarely do you get to experience something like this in Midland. We will also be drawing for a diamond that the customer can pick their own shape and cut to create their own diamond.”The event will discuss the different shapes and yields in person as well as display on an LCD screen. Customers will be able to walk through each step of the process.The event will be held at Occasions in Midland (2308 W. Loop 250) from XX – XX on Saturday, November 16.Occasions Fine Jewelry opened for business in the back of a local drug store in Midland over 20 years ago. Today, their Midland location on the corner of Loop 250 and Garfield is over 4,000 square feet.Occasions offers a number of lines exclusively in the West Texas area including Lorenzo, Orbis, Soho, Diamond Cushette, Cyma, Natalie Kay and Paul Winston.####The cost of hosting the diamond-cutting event&nbsp;remains the same for Mike and Cathy Fleck regardless of which press release they send.That, right there, that, is why you should learn to write.The Wizards of Ads are writers of persuasion.&nbsp;“Find a better story and deliver it with greater impact.” Two of the wizards&nbsp;who

One of the books I’ll write someday&nbsp;is a collection of true stories gathered from extremely successful people.My business&nbsp;as an advertising consultant and seminar speaker has put me face-to-face with many of the brightest stars in the entrepreneurial sky. And rarely do I miss the opportunity to ask them,“Can you recall that fateful moment&nbsp;when you chose the fork in the road that led you to where you are today? How did you first get into this business?”Never – not once –&nbsp;has a successful person said to me, “I followed my passion.”But this is the answer&nbsp;you will hear again and again from people who are serving time in prison.The world is full of rich people who are not,&nbsp;and never were, successful. People who stole the money, inherited the money, married the money, won the money in the stock market or in the lottery, cheated others out of the money or were awarded the money in court, do not qualify as “successful” in my admittedly subjective opinion.The “Follow-Your-Passion” myth&nbsp;is pervasive because successful people are usually passionate. But those people would have been passionate about&nbsp;whatever&nbsp;they chose to do.Their jobs don’t give them passion.They give passion to their jobs.The same is true in successful marriages.Moon-eyed dreamers who say,&nbsp;“I just can’t find my passion” always act like I kicked their puppy when I tell them that passion is not a magical ether that can be located and tapped into. Passion is the shrapnel that flies from a three-way collision of determination, commitment and action.While we’re at it,&nbsp;let’s pull the mask off a couple of other myths:(1.) Passion doesn’t always manifest itself as happiness. Passion is also behind deep grief. (2.) Passion isn’t always confident. Worry is misguided passion, fearful passion, but it is passion nonetheless.Don’t do what you’re passionate about.Be passionate about what you do.Don’t follow your passion.Let your passion follow you.&nbsp;Passion is created&nbsp;when determination and commitment are joined by the nitroglycerin of action. Leonardo da Vinci said it 480 years ago and he said it in Italian. Here is the clearest translation:“People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”Listen to Leonardo.Go out and happen to something.When we hear the laughter&nbsp;and the dancing,the crying and the grief, we will know the shrapnel is flying.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

The Silent Rifle as a 3rd Gravitating Body“Dangling like this&nbsp;from his leg, his upside-down perspective made him giddy. If this were to be his last moment he would die happy, but it would not. Instead, he’d soon be singing karaoke with a group of Korean tourists. But first, the roller coaster.”?– Christina Gressianu,&nbsp;opening lines of an unwritten novelAnton Chekhov wrote a letter&nbsp;to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev dated November 1, 1889, in which he said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”Tragically, this casual advice&nbsp;became the sacred and unbreakable rule of scriptwriting known as “Chekhov’s Gun” in which every element in a story must be necessary and irreplaceable.Obey the rule of Chekhov’s Gun&nbsp;and your stories will be predictable to all but the youngest of children.Movies are predictable,&nbsp;TV shows are predictable and Advertising is predictable because some fool decided Chekhov was a messenger sent from God.No, let us be fair to Chekhov:&nbsp;his advice was given in 1889 when less than 1 percent of the public had ever read a novel or seen a play. Motion pictures were an inventor’s experiment in a laboratory. Television wasn’t even a fantasy. His audience was, in effect, young children.Would Chekhov offer&nbsp;the same advice today? Let me assure you he would not.Surprise and delight&nbsp;are strangled by the cruel hands of Predictability.If you will write an interesting story,&nbsp;wallpaper the room with guns that are never used and never explained. An unfired gun is a curious distraction, a potential disaster or delight that hovers beautiful like a hummingbird just out of view.I use “gun”&nbsp;only as the metaphor for a literary device, just as Chekhov did. Can an oversized bottle of champagne be a silent rifle, a hovering gun hanging beautifully on the wall?Of course it can.One of my favorite passages in literature&nbsp;flagrantly violates the rule of Chekhov’s Gun. It is an inexplicable paragraph inserted into the middle of&nbsp;Cryptonomicon,&nbsp;an extraordinary adventure/mystery novel written by Neal Stephenson. The gun on the wall is a bowl of breakfast cereal.The cereal, the milk,&nbsp;the eating of the cereal, indeed breakfast itself is utterly unnecessary in the story of&nbsp;Cryptonomicon.&nbsp;But there it is:“World-class cereal-eating&nbsp;is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. The best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds… He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap’n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other’s essential natures.”Chekhov, I believe, would approve.Welcome, Anton, to 2013.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

My friend Jeffrey&nbsp;and I were talking one day about this and that when he said, as much to himself as to me, I think, “What is it that separates confidence from hubris?”I replied, “The outcome.”“That’s it!”&nbsp;Jeff gasped through his laughter, his head thrown back as tears began to inch toward his ears. “If you succeed, it was confidence. Fail, and it was hubris.”I’ve never been sure&nbsp;why my answer gave Jeff such pleasure, but isn’t it great to see a friend laugh uncontrollably?For the past 30 years&nbsp;I’ve livedwith my finger on the pulse of business owners.I know the rhythm of their heartbeats.I know what raises their blood pressure.I know what puts them to sleep.I feel the&nbsp;thump, thump, thump&nbsp;of their hunger for success.I know the storms that rise above them.I know the rains that fall.And I know what keeps them moving.Time and Chance&nbsp;are variables beyond our control.Money and Love&nbsp;are fuel.Time and Chance&nbsp;affect the flow of Money and Love.But Money and Love&nbsp;have no effect on Time and Chance.I’ve always been simpatico&nbsp;with the writer of Ecclesiastes.I think I understand him.&nbsp;He said,I have seen something else under the sun:The race is not to the swift?or the battle to the strong,?nor does food come to the wise?or wealth to the brilliant?or favor to the learned;?but time and chance happen to them all.Moreover,&nbsp;no one knows when their hour will come:As fish are caught in a cruel net,or birds are taken in a snare,so people are trapped by evil timesthat fall unexpectedly upon them.It is not my goal to bring you down&nbsp;or give you melancholy. I hope only to broaden your perspective.&nbsp;I want you to enjoy this adventure called Life,&nbsp;regardless of the scenery that surrounds you. You made it here. You exist. You’re alive. How cool is THAT!We choose&nbsp;our destiny with every choice we make.We create&nbsp;our reality with every action we take.And Time and Chance&nbsp;happen to us all.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Do not confuse&nbsp;pleasure with happiness.Unhappy people can have pleasure.And uninterrupted pleasures are not happiness.Happiness is the result of knowing who you are, why you are here, and what you should do.We need identity, purpose, and adventure.Identity – Who am I?Purpose – Why am I here?Adventure – What will I do now?Selling is theater&nbsp;and each customer is an actor in that play.The marketing person – an ad writer – creates the storyline.The salesperson is the director, the narrator, the master-of-ceremonies and the usher.The customers&nbsp;sit quietly in the audience until they realize the play is about&nbsp;them.Are your customers sitting quietly in the audience?&nbsp;Your job&nbsp;is to entice them out of their seats. You want them to stand up and take action. You need them to storm the stage, perform their parts, walk on clouds of laughter, dance in the rain of the spotlight, revel in the thunder of applause.This play called Life&nbsp;should always be about identity, purpose and adventure. Make it about something else and your play is certain to be a parody, a tragedy, a satire or a farce.These are the motivations of the characters:Identity:&nbsp;Who am I?&nbsp;We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. We even choose our service providers based on how closely they mirror the way&nbsp;we&nbsp;would run their company.&nbsp;We’re attracted to reflections of ourselves.&nbsp;A salesperson points out this reflection, “That’s you, isn’t it?” and then gives the intellect the facts it needs to justify the purchase. Win the heart and the mind will follow.Purpose: Why Am I Here?If you’re sitting alone in the darkness, it’s because you’re afraid. Stand up fearfully, but&nbsp;stand up anyway. Flip the switch of the spotlight with a trembling finger and walk wobbly-kneed to center stage.&nbsp;We measure ourselves by our intentions but others measure us by our actions. Let your intentions&nbsp;become&nbsp;your actions and you will have stumbled onto your purpose. Quit thinking. Start doing.&nbsp;And whatever you do, do it with set-jaw determination. Your purpose will reveal itself soon enough.Adventure: What Will I Do Now?It is not the victory, but the audacity of the attempt that makes us feel alive. Small plans do not enflame the hearts of men. If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough. Waiting is a kind of dying. Indecision is a decision. When you let enough time go by as you wring your hands and say, “Well, I just don’t know,” the opportunity will pass and your decision will have been made. Procrastination is the passive assassin of happiness.Opportunity has been knocking&nbsp;for a long time now. In fact,&nbsp;it’s pounding on your door&nbsp;as you read this.&nbsp;Get up and answer it.Do something that scares you.What’s the worst than can happen?Answer the door.It’s showtime.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

I’m 21 years old&nbsp;but my thinning hair makes me look about 30. I consider this to be my greatest asset.I walk the retail sidewalks,&nbsp;looking in windows, deciding if I will go in. A peddler goes door to door unthinkingly, playing the odds, tossing his pitch to anyone who will catch it like the common cold. But I choose my doors carefully, walking past most, looking always for those little indicators that whisper, “The owner of this business has a brain.”I climb wooden stairs&nbsp;to the trailer house office of a mobile home dealer on Admiral Boulevard. Standing on the cedar deck outside the glass door I see myself looking back at me, the sport coat I bought for 3 dollars at the Goodwill store, the briefcase I carry to look educated. Behind me is the neighborhood of Ponyboy Curtis, an unfiltered assortment of bent automobiles, broken houses and discarded people.My footsteps drum the wooden deck.&nbsp;Behind the glass, two men drink scotch at a coffee table in a cloud of Winston and Lucky Strike. The heavier one looks up at me, then back to his scotch as I swing open the door and step inside.“Whatever you’re sellin’, we’re not buyin’.”&nbsp;His eyes never leave the scotch.“Probably advertising,”&nbsp;said the other, careful not to look my way.“I came in here&nbsp;because you guys appear from the road to be smarter than most. Don’t tell me I made a mistake.”Both men turn to look at me.&nbsp;They stare. I stare. The second one speaks again. “What makes you think we’re so smart?”“The sign, the flags, and the angle of presentation.”His eyes grow cold and hard. “Explain.”Holding a solitary finger&nbsp;in front of me, I give them the facts. “Five sheets of inch-and-an-eighth tongue-in-groove plywood gave you an 8 by 20 sign on which you painted ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ in exactly the same style and colors a government agency would use. You’re looking for that Veterans Administration ‘one-dollar-move-in’ money that you know every Viet Nam vet has available to them. You’re smart enough to paint the sign. I’m smart enough to know it’s working.”A second finger joins the first.&nbsp;“Every other dealer on mobile home row uses exactly the same strings of cheap vinyl flags to get attention. Red, yellow, blue, green and white. But you paid extra for unicolor strings of metallic silver and metallic gold. It makes your mobile homes look upscale.”Three fingers.&nbsp;“You have the least inventory of any dealer but your customers never realize it because while every other dealer places their homes parallel to the road, you’ve angled yours so that no home is ever blocked from view. This is visually more interesting, gets more attention, makes the homes seem distinctive AND you’re creating leading lines in a V-shape that guide the eyes of passers-by to your seemingly official ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ sign.”The second one stood up&nbsp;and shifted his scotch to his left hand. “I’m Jim McDuffie.” Pointing to his partner he said, “That’s Mac McKean.” Reaching toward me for a handshake, he said, “And you’re our new advertising guy. Tell me what I need to buy.”I like to tell that story&nbsp;because it makes me look smart. There are other stories I don’t like to tell.Jim McDuffie’s business is big enough&nbsp;to advertise in multiple ways. This means I have a safety net. If the ads on my tiny little radio station don’t produce results, the traffic generated by the other stations will cover me. I rarely have this luxury.The upside of working for the smallest radio station in the city&nbsp;is that I can make presentations to businesses with budgets too small for any station but mine. In other words, the salespeople who work for the larger stations are limited to just 1 of every 100 businesses. The other 99 can’t afford their rates, but every business in town can afford me.That’s the problem.&nbsp;People buy my...

A brief summary of this episode

Reverse Your Thoughts, Increase Your IncomeUnifying Principles&nbsp;are those guiding thoughts around which all your actions revolve. When you hold them in plain sight, you always know what to do next.Brilliant people stumble&nbsp;when they focus on the parts and neglect to see the webs of connections between those parts. This is what causes medical doctors to treat each symptom separately while failing to recognize the underlying disease.Such compartmentalization&nbsp;is an even bigger problem in business, causing owners and managers to wrestle with symptoms instead of solving the problem. Not enough customers, low profit margins, high employee turnover and negative online reviews are merely compartmentalized symptoms of a systemic malfunction.Unifying principles eliminate compartmentalization.Let’s develop some unifying principles for your business&nbsp;that will help you create your happiest possible future:1.&nbsp;Think of your perfect ending;&nbsp;leap forward in time and see the outcome you most desire. How does that future company behave? Who are its customers? What marvelous things does it do that cause its customers to recruit their friends? What do these happy customers say about you? Describe, right now, the perfect day in this business you’ll own in the future. See, feel, taste and smell all the details of that soon-coming day.2.&nbsp;Hold those thoughts clearly in your mind.3.&nbsp;You are now equipped&nbsp;to identify the constituent components of this happy future. You’re ready to create the steps that will take you there. You’re ready to draw the map you will follow.ONE: Where would such a company be located?TWO: How would such a workplace be decorated?THREE: How would such a company recruit its employees?FOUR: In what ways might such a company train its employees?FIVE: How would such a company compensate those employees?SIX: What hours would such a company be open?SEVEN: How would their ads make you feel?EIGHT: What would their written warranties and guarantees include?NINE: What would such a company NEVER do?TEN: What might such a company do for its customers that its competitors would be unwilling to do?Are you beginning to get the picture?A clear and stable vision of the End Goal&nbsp;is required to inform the small choices that will bring that goal into existence.You’ve previously heard of Gestalt Theory&nbsp;but now you’ve actually used it.AThis particular application&nbsp;of Gestalt Theory springs from TRIZ Principle 13: turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards. If you want to learn the other 39 Principles of TRIZ, check out Mark Fox’s book,&nbsp;Da Vinci and the 40 Answers&nbsp;or&nbsp;attend that class&nbsp;when Br’er Fox teaches it on Oct. 30-31. Wizard Academy cognoscenti Dr. Kary Mullis&nbsp;never heard of TRIZ Principle 13 but he instinctively used it to create Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR,) the invention that opened the door for DNA research and won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kary said,&nbsp;“Everyone was looking for a needle in a haystack, so I said, ‘Why not turn the haystack into needles?'”&nbsp;Turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards.&nbsp;That’s how PCR was born.More recently, Kary used Principle 13&nbsp;to create Altermune, the invention that will probably win him a second Nobel Prize. Speaking of that portion of our immune system that attacks foreign tissue and of how it has been studied for decades so that it can be suppressed during organ transplants, Kary said,&nbsp;“Suppress it, hell, why not aim it?”&nbsp;And from that bit of...

Agrees With Wizard AcademyHeadlines often tell the truth&nbsp;more powerfully than is completely accurate, a disturbing trend in this day of sound-bite news.The mental image conjured in the mind&nbsp;by the headline, “Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Agrees With Wizard Academy,” is one in which the Nobel Laureate (1.) is aware of Wizard Academy and (2.) makes a statement of affirmation regarding it.Neither of these things has happened.&nbsp;So how could the writer of that headline say such a thing? The Monday Morning Memo you received on July 29 was titled,&nbsp;Fortune’s 500 or America’s 5.91 Million?&nbsp;Perhaps you remember reading it.In that memo I stated,The Fortune 500 are the newsmakers but they are not the backbone of the American economy. According to the U.S. Census, America is home to nearly 17 million sole proprietorships, plus an additional 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These 5.91 million are the backbone of the economy since they create more new jobs than all the other companies combined. The press will cheer for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.If the Fortune 500 suddenly vanished from the earth, a new group of giants would arise. But if America’s 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees suddenly vanished from the earth, the fabric of our society would be shredded and democracy would be gone.Free enterprise doesn’t depend on democracy.Democracy depends on free enterprise.On August 17, 2013,&nbsp;more than 2 weeks after that MondayMorningMemo appeared, Jeffrey Eisenberg sent a story from the August 17th&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;in which the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, Robert J. Shiller, contemplated the newly-published worries of Edmund Phelps, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.According to Shiller,“Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend… He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.”I’m not suggesting&nbsp;that Phelps or Shiller was influenced by what I wrote. In fact, I’m reasonably certain they’ve never heard of me. But I do feel I’m well within the mark to say both men agree with me.Phelps is worried about corporatism.&nbsp;Me? I’m worried about a disturbing trend toward overstated sound bites. I gave today’s memo a reckless headline to underscore my point, but better examples are all around us.A recent story&nbsp;boasted the headline,&nbsp;“Right Brain, Left Brain? Scientists Debunk Popular Theory.”&nbsp;Google it and you’ll find dozens of variations of that story reposted by online parrots who never pause to contemplate what they hear before squawking it to all the world.Invest 3 minutes to actually&nbsp;read&nbsp;that story&nbsp;and you’ll find the headline to be false and misleading to the point of absurdity. The discovery for which Dr. Roger Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology stands as tall and proud as ever. Here’s a direct quote from the story that supposedly ‘debunks’ Dr. Sperry’s findings:“‘It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain,’ explained Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study. ‘Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a...

The Essence of Content MarketingThe perfect customer&nbsp;is like a beautiful woman, distant and desirable and pursued by countless competitors. An appropriate metaphor, don’t you think?Most advertisers&nbsp;want ads that equate to a magical pickup line. “Tell me what to say to this beautiful woman so that she’ll rip off her clothes and jump into bed with me.”Some advertisers&nbsp;get downright self-righteous as they demand these magical lines. They lift their chins and sniff, “I want to hold my ads accountable.” In other words, “I want it to work immediately. Tell me how to make this beautiful woman give me what I want. Tell me what to say. I’ll say anything.”Advertising people&nbsp;know how to craft these “direct response” messages. And the lines we tell you to say to the woman very often work! Not surprisingly, the “beautiful women” who can be won in a single conversation are mostly interested in money. It’s usually about the price.And they tend not to be loyal.Courtship&nbsp;takes a longer path.According to&nbsp;behavioral psychologist Desmond Morris, the strength of a relationship is usually determined by the process that formed it. Relationships that are quickly formed are quickly broken. True courtship is an adventure and adventures take time. You’ve got to let the woman of your affections get to know you.You do remember&nbsp;that we’re talking about business, don’t you? All this stuff about beautiful women was just a metaphor for building long-term relationships with customers.If your website or blog&nbsp;provides valuable, insightful content, you’re likely to become a sustaining resource that your prospective customer will grow to depend upon. This form of customer courtship is called “content marketing.” Think of it as the advertising equivalent of love letters.Ray Seggern,&nbsp;one of my Wizard of Ads partners, explains customer courtship as the convergence of&nbsp;Story, Culture and Experience.&nbsp;According to Ray:Story&nbsp;isWhat You Say.&nbsp;(Marketing)It is the personality and promises you put in your messages.Culture&nbsp;isWho You Are.It is the experience your employees have within your company.Experience&nbsp;isWhat You Do.It is what your customers perceive when they interact with your company.Authenticity&nbsp;occurswhen your story and your customer’s experience align.When these don’t align, you get bad reviews.High Employee Morale&nbsp;is what happenswhen your story and your culture align.When these don’t align, you have cancer in the building.Brand Ambassadors&nbsp;are bornwhen story and culture and experience align.This is when your happy customer chooses to become a member of your family, part of your brand.In other words,&nbsp;the beautiful woman agrees to marry you.And because&nbsp;who you are and what you say and what you do are in perfect alignment, I honestly&nbsp;believe you’ll live happily ever after together.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Commentators say&nbsp;that people today&nbsp;have a shorter attention span than in the past, but Jerry Seinfeld and I don’t believe this is true.“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only&nbsp;the quality&nbsp;of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.” – Jerry Seinfeld“If you are entertaining them.”I believe it’s presumptive&nbsp;to say that today’s generation is more easily distracted than previous generations. It is accurate, perhaps, to say they are&nbsp;more often&nbsp;distracted, but might not their forefathers have been just as often distracted had they carried electronic worlds in their pockets?The truth is that people today&nbsp;have a low tolerance for boredom. Combine this with the constant availability of entertaining attractions and it’s easy to see why this question of attention span keeps popping up like a prairie dog.Of course&nbsp;people today can pay attention. But why should they?“We frequently forgive those who bore us, but cannot forgive those who we bore.” – Francois, Duc de La RochefoucauldWe are insulted&nbsp;when people turn their attention away from us, especially when we believe what we’re saying is important.You can blame&nbsp;today’s generation&nbsp;for bad manners and a short attention span. You can blame video games and smart phones. You can blame poor parenting and too much television. You can blame Alfred E. Neuman. You can blame God.Or you can realize&nbsp;that attention will always turn toward whatever stimulus is most interesting. You can see the competition for attention is fiercer today than it has ever been. You can see that we need to up our game.Our ability&nbsp;to gain and hold attention depends entirely upon our ability to stimulate the curiosity of others.Can you stimulate curiosity?&nbsp;If you can’t, you will not hold attention. Not in your ads, not on the telephone, not face-to-face.I tell my business partners,&nbsp;the Wizards of Ads, not to be offended when someone in the audience begins texting or playing a video game, but to take it as a signal to add some sparkle to their talk; do something more interesting than the distraction; win back the wandering mind. They are now among the most riveting speakers in America.So what will it be?&nbsp;Will you blame the audience or blame yourself?If you blame the audience,&nbsp;you eliminate all hope of improvement because there is nothing you can do to fix the audience. You must then conclude that society is circling the drain.&nbsp;“America is in decline,&nbsp;blah, blah, blah”.But if you blame only yourself&nbsp;for not rising to the challenge of increased competition, that problem is easily solved:All you have to do is become more interesting.Begin by entering&nbsp;your subject from an unusual angle.“Jerry Seinfeld and I don’t believe this to be true.”Use&nbsp;examples that are relevant to the audience.“…electronic worlds in their pockets.”Specificity&nbsp;is more interesting than generalities.“…this question of attention span keeps popping up like a prairie dog.”Don’t&nbsp;over-explain. Let your listeners figure it out for themselves.“You can blame Alfred E. Neuman.”Unusual&nbsp;intonations and inflections captivate the ear and make it difficult to quit listening.Talk faster than usual.&nbsp;Our speed of hearing greatly exceeds the speed of speech. Nothing bores people faster than taking too long to say too little.Deliver&nbsp;big ideas quickly like boulders in an avalanche. Rapid distraction is a machine gun that requires you to collect bullets in advance.You can no longer&nbsp;just make it up as you go along.The future&nbsp;is a magical world that will belong to those who...

We tend to think of imitation&nbsp;as the opposite of innovation but I don’t believe this is true. “Opposite” indicates opposed positions, left and right. But my observation is that innovation and imitation are usually the second and third positions in a continuing circle that has improvisation as its starting point.Here’s how that circle is usually drawn:You are faced with a problem for which you have no solution, so you improvise. Or a known and trusted solution fails to perform as it has in the past, so you improvise. It is through such improvisation that innovation is most often discovered. Then, when the innovation has proven to be more efficient, it is imitated again and again to become our new state-of-the-art. It will be touted as a “best practice” for a while, then lose its luster to become merely the status quo, “the way things are done.” Yesterday’s brilliant innovation then becomes traditional wisdom, and as new circumstances arise, we begin to suspect it to be more tradition than wisdom until finally it becomes “the box” in which we feel trapped.You’ll say,&nbsp;“I need to think outside the box,” and improvisation will begin again.1. Improvisation*2. Innovation and3. Imitation&nbsp;are&nbsp;three positions on a continuing circle, or more accurately, a spiral.Practical Applications of Chaos Theory&nbsp;is the final session on the last day of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy, America’s school for the imaginative, the courageous, and the ambitious. In that climactic session, the cognoscenti learn that a fractal image is merely the map of a chaotic system and that chaos, in science, is not randomness but rather precisely the opposite: a level of organization more complex than the human mind can follow. The cognoscenti then learn that fractal images are three-dimensional due to the repetitive nature of fractal self-similarity: a repetitive series of complex patterns that interlock to become a larger iteration of precisely that same pattern. In the simplest possible manifestation of this idea, a spiral is a series of spinning circles interlocked to become an increasingly larger series of spinning circles.That’s when we begin to hear the voice of Solomon&nbsp;echoing through time and space as it has echoed for 3,000 years:“What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one can say,‘Look! This is something new’?It was here already, long ago;it was here before our time.No one remembers the former generations,and even those yet to comewill not be rememberedby those who follow them.”–&nbsp;Ecclesiastes,&nbsp;ch. 1Another good Jewish boy, Brian Greene,&nbsp;is the theoretical physicist widely known for his ability to explain String Theory, reconciling quantum mechanics to general relativity and explaining the fundamental nature of time and space along the way.“Among the many features of String Theory, the following three are perhaps the most important ones to keep firmly in mind.First, gravity [general relativity theory – RHW] and quantum mechanics are part and parcel of how the universe works and therefore any purported unified theory must incorporate both. String theory accomplishes this.Second, studies by physicists over the past century have revealed that there are other key ideas – many of which have been experimentally confirmed – that appear central to our understanding of the universe. These include the concepts of spin…”– Brian Greene,&nbsp;The Elegant Universe,&nbsp;p.383Wow. The spinning spiral&nbsp;must really be an essential law of nature&nbsp;if Brian Greene gives it first place on his short list of the laws of the universe.Improvisation, innovation and imitation&nbsp;are just repetitive phases...

When you find&nbsp;your mind wandering, ask yourself these two questions:What am I thinking?Why am I thinking this?And when&nbsp;you’re busy, ask these three:What am I doing?What do I hope to gain by it?Why does this matter to me?Ask these questions&nbsp;and you’ll sidestep the bullet Socrates fired into the future when he said,“The unexamined life is not worth living.”Reality Television.&nbsp;Why are we so quick to examine the lives of others and so reluctant to examine our own?Carl Jung&nbsp;gave us another lens for self-examination when he said,“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”Make a list&nbsp;of your pet peeves and you’ll learn something about yourself.But then we must contend&nbsp;with Dr. Richard Cytowic, that famous neurologist who tells us,“Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to, or expressible in, language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts! Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds than we can ever consciously know.”Wow.&nbsp;According to Cytowic, there’s stuff happening in our heads that can’t be spoken; stuff we don’t even know that we know.And then, just to make&nbsp;absolutely certain that we don’t get too cocky about this whole self-examination thing, MIT’s Dr. Jerre Levy throws her own special molotov cocktail into the mix:“The left brain maps spatial information into a temporal order, while the right brain maps temporal information onto a spatial order. In a sense understanding largely consists in the translation of information to and fro between a temporal ordering and a spatial one – resulting in a sort of stereoscopic depth-cognition.”Huh?Strangely, the solution&nbsp;to unraveling this hopelessly tangled knot we call self-identity can be found in the advice of an imaginary person in a science fiction book about archaeology on other planets:“Show me what a person admires, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu,&nbsp;The Engines of God,&nbsp;p. 398Do you want to know yourself better?Quickly make a list of:2 favorite visual artists3 favorite poems4 favorite stories5 favorite movies6 favorite songsWhen you’ve made these lists,&nbsp;take them with you into the rabbit hole and Indiana Beagle will tell you what to do next.I’ll see you there.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Wal-Mart&nbsp;is the biggest company in America, followed by 3 oil companies and then Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway, Apple Computers, General Motors, and General Electric.Yep. Apple today&nbsp;is bigger than both General Motors and G.E.“Yippee, Skippy, call the press.Oh, you did already? And the press said Nash-Finch is number 500?Who the hell is Nash-Finch?”The Fortune 500 are the newsmakers,&nbsp;but they are not the backbone of the American economy. In fact, if every company in America with more than 500 employees was added to Fortune’s famous list of America’s 500 largest corporations, all those companies combined would account for just three tenths of 1 percent of the businesses in America and less than one half of all the jobs.According to the U.S. Census,&nbsp;America is home to nearly 17 million sole proprietorships, plus an additional 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These 5.91 million are the backbone of the economy since they create more new jobs than all the other companies combined.These 5.91 million buy&nbsp;the majority of the radio ads, half the TV ads and most of the Google Adwords. And they also buy more real estate and rent more office space than the Fortune 500.The press will cheer&nbsp;for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.If the Fortune 500 suddenly vanished&nbsp;from the earth, a new group of giants would arise. But if America’s 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees suddenly vanished from the earth, the fabric of our society would be shredded and democracy would be gone.Free enterprise&nbsp;doesn’t depend on democracy.Democracy&nbsp;depends on free enterprise.My partner, Jeff Sexton,&nbsp;said something the other day that impressed me enough to write it down:“A nation of farmers, fishermen, lumberjacks, cowboys, ranchers, etc. is not the same as a nation of cubicle dwellers. We’ve focused on self-esteem when we should have focused on building self-efficacy.”Don’t feel weird&nbsp;if you’re not sure about the definition of ‘self-efficacy.’ I wasn’t sure either, so I looked it up: “Self-efficacy is the measure of one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals.”Self-efficacy says, “I can do this.”&nbsp;Self-efficacy is where freedom begins.It is through choices and consequences&nbsp;that we learn the hard lessons that make peace and prosperity possible.Susan Ryan&nbsp;is using the power of choices and consequences to bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan. Susan has been teaching Afghan women to become employers of labor. She says,A“Men look at you differently when you have the power to give them a job.&nbsp;A dozen Afghan women,&nbsp;each running a company that generates at least a million dollars a year in sales, would significantly alter the future of Afghanistan.”Wizard Academy’s Chapel Dulcinea&nbsp;sits across from the last remaining corner of an old stone home. And on the wall of that old home is a bronze plaque that says,&nbsp;“If mothers ruled nations there would be no war. Arm in arm they would stand and say, ‘Stop that. Stop that right now.'”Susan Ryan&nbsp;has an MBA and is an extraordinary teacher. Her company, Silk Road Solutions, trains courageous and ambitious people to make different choices and experience different consequences.Susan teaches them&nbsp;how to make money.Her&nbsp;50 employees in Afghanistan&nbsp;have been teaching locals how to create a happier financial future for themselves. Susan says,&nbsp;“Think new, act different, create change.”&nbsp;The Afghan people love Susan’s company and the Afghan government approves of what she is doing. Not surprisingly, Susan has been invited to bring Silk Road...

Every employee&nbsp;has opinions about the advertising that represents their company. This is natural I suppose because those ads, by extension, represent the employee as well. And so they tell the boss what they think, “and all of our customers think that, too.”But if the development&nbsp;of successful advertising were as instinctive as most people believe, a higher percentage of ads would be successful.Most business owners trust their instincts&nbsp;and personal preferences in the creation of their advertising. Others empower a “creative” family member, an “artistic” employee, or worse, a group of employees who “studied advertising in college” to craft their messages and select the media that will move their businesses to the next level.And the results&nbsp;of these ad campaigns&nbsp;are nearly always disappointing.Philip Stanhope&nbsp;addressed this situation when he said, “Every young man thinks himself wise enough, just as every drunk man thinks himself sober enough.”Joss Whedon, too,&nbsp;might easily have been talking about writing ad copy when he said, “Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.”But no one ever thinks they suck.&nbsp;No one considers their own company to be boring or their own product to be average. Each of us is from Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”We look in the mirror&nbsp;and assume that everyone sees what we see. And then we “hold these truths to be self-evident” in our advertising.But does anyone&nbsp;ever see us the way we see ourselves?Most people have an opinion&nbsp;when it comes to advertising. And they feel certain they know what would work. But it’s only when you’re allowed to play with live ammunition – real dollars – that you begin to feel the slip of the ice beneath you and draw the sharp air of reality into your lungs.The amateur believes an ad will be successful&nbsp;if it captures an aspect of the business that is unique and beautiful.But every business&nbsp;is unique and beautiful, just like every snowflake in a snowbank.When you have walked on that snow&nbsp;and slipped and fallen again and again and left the stain of your blood on the whiteness, you learn some hard truths that are&nbsp;not&nbsp;self-evident:1.&nbsp;The world of advertising is noisier and more crowded than you ever dreamed possible.2.&nbsp;Even though you are paying money to reach them, prospective customers are not required to give you their attention.3.&nbsp;Until you win the customer’s attention, your message does not exist.4.&nbsp;People turn their attention – moment by moment – to whatever is most interesting.5.&nbsp;It is hard to make ads interesting.6.&nbsp;The message contained in your ad must be relevant.7.&nbsp;The message contained in your ad must be credible.8.&nbsp;True isn’t always credible. And credible isn’t always true. Competitors know this.9.&nbsp;Ads soft enough not to repel anyone are also too weak to attract anyone.10.&nbsp;If you evaluate each ad by asking, “Who might this offend?” you will never craft an ad sharp enough to pierce the clutter.11.&nbsp;Every brand attracts a different set of core values in the hearts of its customers. The strategy that grew Apple computers into a worldwide brand won’t work for J.C. Penney. Just ask Ron Johnson.12.&nbsp;The best ads contain entertainment, information, and hope.The hardest part&nbsp;of my job as an ad man&nbsp;is telling my clients how to respond to people they care about when those people begin telling them how they should advertise.When you’re held...

A brief summary of this episode

You and I are aware&nbsp;of the superficial motives we have for the things we do, but only rarely do we consider the deeper motives that hide behind the superficial ones.Pennie and I&nbsp;have been discussing the future and how it revolves around you.Yes, you.Today, July 8, 2013,&nbsp;is the vortex of a 15-year convergence of events that began in 1998. We sit for an instant in the eye of the storm, a wonderful moment of stillness surrounded by a whirlwind of activity before and after.Everyone&nbsp;who works on the Wizard Academy campus – about a dozen of us – spent the last 2 weeks frantically unstacking and moving, sifting and sorting thousands of items from warehouses scattered across the campus. We’ve hungered for this grand purge for several years. Books and artwork, furniture and accessories, music and films were pulled out of boxes and given new homes. It was a Herculean task carved into our calendar several months ago. Fifteen years of acquisitions were organized and distributed in just 14 days.Twelve people&nbsp;working for 80 hours is 960 man-hours. We woke up yesterday morning and breathed a deep sigh of relief.By strange coincidence,&nbsp;during those same 2 weeks Daniel Denny rented the equipment to cut the 14-inch hump out of the solid limestone approach to the tower. The concrete was then poured – thanks to the generosity of Cognoscenti Rich Carr – so the golden flagstone can be laid on top of it and the Jane DeDecker monuments can be installed for our October 4th Open House.And the business office in the tower&nbsp;was finally completed as well! Whoosh. All at once, 4 momentous things came together that have been driving me crazy for years.&nbsp;Whirlwind.An even weirder coincidence&nbsp;is that Wizard Academy’s new Vice Chancellor – Daniel Whittington – starts work today. Believe it or not, we didn’t time the completion of the business office – the place where he will work – to coordinate with the day of his arrival. It was completely accidental. I started to write to you about Daniel Whittington. But then I said, “No, I’ll give him a week or two to get settled.”And then I started to write to you&nbsp;about digital outdoor advertising, online radio and the secrets of successful videoblogs. But then I said, “No, I’ll save those things for the monthly webcast at 11AM.”And then I started to write to you about portals,&nbsp;those literary, musical and visual devices useful in moving a reader, a listener or a viewer to a new perspective. But then I said, “No, portals need to be taught with the 12 languages of the mind and that’s way too much to put into a Monday Morning Memo.”And then I thought about printing the details&nbsp;of How to Negotiate and Schedule Successful Radio Advertising. But then I said, “That would be – for a significant percentage of Monday Morning Memo readers – the most boring thing I ever wrote.”And then a bright light overcame the darkness in my mind.&nbsp;“Tell them why you do it. Tell them why you write these memos, why Pennie and you built this campus, why you and she gathered all these thousands of things together.”Here’s the reason,&nbsp;the deeper motive that hides behind our superficial ones, the truly important motive that is often obscured by the merely urgent: Pennie and I want you to have a happy and satisfying life.We began writing the Monday Morning Memo in 1994&nbsp;in the hope that you might begin to think differently, make better decisions and enjoy greater success. We didn’t see you with our eyes but we saw you in our mind.We purchased&nbsp;and donated the land for the Wizard Academy campus and applied for government recognition of the school as a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization so that you would always have a physical place to which you could escape, regroup, and open your mind to new possibilities. We don’t own it. You do.We built Chapel...

I’ve had a handful of memorable moments.AAmong them is a meeting with Zig Ziglar in 1986. Zig stood at a whiteboard and smiled at the 20 of us staring back at him with big eyes. Zig had written several bestselling books and created America’s most popular sales training program. The 20 of us were neophyte managers, trembling with excitement at having been chosen to be in that room.Marker in hand,&nbsp;Zig said, “Name for me every attribute of the perfect employee.”As we called out attributes&nbsp;Zig wrote them down. We had nearly 90 on the board before we began to slow.“Can you think of any others?”&nbsp;We painfully named two dozen more.“Think hard.&nbsp;I want you to describe the perfect employee. I need every attribute.” We studied that whiteboard until we began to sweat. We got to 114.Pointing now&nbsp;at the first word on our list, Zig asked, “Is this a skill or an attitude?” We said it was an attitude. Zig wrote a big “A” next to it. Pointing at the second word, he asked, “Skill or attitude?” Another big “A.”Twenty minutes later,&nbsp;Zig tallied the final score: of the 114 attributes on our list, only 7 could be classified as “Skills.” Five were “Skills/Attitudes,” and a whopping 102 of them were purely “Attitude.”Zig could have&nbsp;saved himself 30 minutes by just blurting out the punch line: “Employees don’t lose their jobs because they lack skill. They lose their jobs because they don’t have a good attitude.” But Zig didn’t want to say these things and then try to convince us of their truth. Zig wanted us to say them, and thus convince ourselves to “always hire people who have the right attitude.”I sat there drenched in realization&nbsp;and&nbsp;recalled a few lines from Elbert Hubbard’s famous rant of 1899,&nbsp;A Message to Garcia.“I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to anyone else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress him… Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular fire-brand of discontent.”Twenty-five years after&nbsp;that meeting with Zig Ziglar, I had a similar moment with the great David McInnis. “I finally figured out how to improve employee morale,” David said, “Productivity skyrockets and everyone loves coming to work. It’s a program that never fails. Works every time.”I stood there looking at David.He stood there looking at me.Finally, I raised my shoulders and turned my palms upward.&nbsp;Looking steadily into my eyes, David said, “Fire all the unhappy people.” Those words struck me with such comical force that I began to laugh. But David wasn’t laughing.None of us&nbsp;wants to run a sweatshop. None of us wants to be that hard-hearted boss who fails to appreciate the humanity of employees. None of us wants to abuse our people with the cold pragmatism displayed by Wal-Mart.And this is why&nbsp;so many businesses become country clubs for employees.Here’s how it happens:&nbsp;a whiner makes a reasonable request and you grant it. That request is expanded upon and accelerated until it ceases to be a privilege granted to employees and becomes an inalienable right. And that was only the first request in an unending stream of others brought to you by an increasingly dissatisfied staff. And you, sadly, are now seen as the oppressive King George.But this revolt&nbsp;is unlike that famous one of 1776. This time it will be King George that delivers the declaration of independence to the whiner.David’s advice, and mine,&nbsp;is that you identify the “firebrand of discontent” within your company – if you have one – and give that person a smiling declaration of independence as you...

And the People Behind It&nbsp;In the world of bricks-and-mortar,1. a spectacular building,2. good signage and3. an excellent locationare the best advertising money can buy.In the binary world&nbsp;where Ones are bricks and Zeroes are mortar,1. your website is your building,2. your masthead is your signage and3. your domain name is your location.But that’s where the metaphor falls apart.In the world of air and sunshine,&nbsp;an interesting building with a memorable sign on a high-traffic road will be noticed and remembered. But in the airless void of ones and zeroes,&nbsp;your building doesn’t exist&nbsp;until a visitor arrives at your specific street address, then WHOOSH, it is conjured from code in an instant.Welcome to virtual reality,&nbsp;where no one sees you until they get there.But in this vacuum&nbsp;of cyberspace, the laws of physics still apply. So the Great and Glowing Truth you can count upon above all other truths is this:&nbsp;Advertising will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway.A purely online business&nbsp;lives or dies through its website and other digital interactions. But a brick-and-mortar business lives or dies through&nbsp;real-world&nbsp;interactions with its customers. Successful online businesses provide an exceptional online experience. Successful face-to-face businesses provide an exceptional face-to-face experience.Wizard Academy is a face-to-face experience.&nbsp;Wizard Academy was founded by an ad man,&nbsp;but the school has never spent a penny on advertising and the WizardAcademy.org website is unattractive, outdated and clunky. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the ugliest website in Virtual Reality.Search engine optimization? Nope.Pay-per-click? Not yet.But we were doing&nbsp;Content Marketing&nbsp;before it had a name.In 1994, when the internet was still a secret&nbsp;and the Monday Morning Memo was sent by fax, we called each tidbit flung into the world a Free Product Sample, FPS for short. And when we flung those tidbits from a microphone we called it a Free Public Seminar. Again, FPS for short. And then came email.Regardless&nbsp;of the vehicle used for distribution, the idea remained unchanged: people will give you their time if you give them something valuable in exchange for it.People value information, entertainment, and hope.&nbsp;If you give them these from an open hand and an open heart, they will probably forgive your unattractive, outdated and clunky method of delivery.Our Number One Priority&nbsp;is to send you something each week worth reading.Number Two&nbsp;is to build you a country home to which you can escape any time you feel the need to be free. That country home, the Wizard Academy campus, is nearly complete.A new website should appear by the end of the year.But there won’t be&nbsp;any time or money for that until first we’ve finished Bilbo Baggins House, the Lenhard-Murray Amphitheater, and the Jeff Morris Worldwide Invitational Bocce Ball Court.Priorities.Bittersweet:&nbsp;Late this autumn, when the miraculous Daniel Denny hangs up his tool belt and moves back to Oklahoma to build, at long last, a home for himself and his wife, Pattie, their adobe mansion at Wizard Academy will become additional student housing.Your country home is nearly complete.And thanks to you, it’s debt-free.Imagine&nbsp;what we could have done if only we’d had a better website.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

A person&nbsp;capable of creating is happiest when they are creating.Artists create&nbsp;visual and auditory artifacts that affect our thoughts, moods and attitudes. Riddle-solvers perform feats of engineering and invention. Teachers create new understanding in the minds of their students. Entrepreneurs create businesses that offer us new and different experiences. Communicators create stories and speeches and ads.Made in the image of God,&nbsp;humans are creators by nature. All humans.Yes, that includes you.What do you create?&nbsp;What do you change? What effect do you have on the world around you?The Success Myth&nbsp;of our culture is an evil one. We are told that “the freedom to do nothing” is the reward provided by great wealth. Have you spent much time among the idle rich? Sadly, I have, and on many occasions.Leisure feels good&nbsp;when you are weary from intense creating. Leisure is restorative, allowing you to return to your creation with renewed intensity. But when you are satiated with food, it is no longer pleasant to eat. When you are satiated with rest, it is no longer pleasant to rest.The idle rich&nbsp;aren’t bored because they are rich. They are bored because they are idle. The idle poor have exactly the same feelings as the idle rich, but the idle poor call it “hopelessness.”Political radio shows exist&nbsp;because people would rather be angry than bored. Horror movies exist because people would rather be frightened than bored. Sensational films and photos exist because people would rather be shocked and offended than bored.Boredom is a kind of death.&nbsp;Being angry, frightened or offended reminds you that you are alive. But these emotions are sad and fruitless substitutes for the joy that comes from creating.Happy people value something&nbsp;much more than they value themselves. If there is nothing in your life that means more to you than you do, I fear you will be unhappy. No, that’s not right. I fear you are already unhappy.Are you feeling lethargic?&nbsp;Apathetic? Bored? Aimless? Hopeless? Get off your ass and do something. It won’t be the&nbsp;outcome&nbsp;that brings you joy; it will be the&nbsp;effort.&nbsp;You’ve probably excused yourself from taking action in the past by saying, “but I’m not very good at it.” Friend, no one is ever “good at it” in the beginning. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly until you get better at it.Find something that needs to change.&nbsp;It can be anything bigger than you. Fight for it, work for it, throw all your creative energies into it. You will soon be frustrated, angry, disappointed and tired.But happy.I’m sorry&nbsp;if this offends you. I thought it might. But I care enough about you to say it anyway.Doing the best I can.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Your Spotlight of Words?A radio commercial begins,&nbsp;“I’m Ronald Watersdown, and I’m here to tell you about a very important opportunity that I’m sure you won’t want to miss. It’s an incredible chance for you to…”What did those&nbsp;twenty-nine words make you see in your mind?Not much, right?&nbsp;But what about these?“Owl&nbsp;was neither wise nor old. She was a teenage assassin whose large, dark eyes said she was sleepy or depressed or bored. I was never really sure which.”You saw&nbsp;(1.) a momentary owl, then (2.) a young female assassin with half-shut eyes, then (3.) you considered the emotions she might be feeling and (4.) you wondered about the relationship between her and the narrator. All in just twenty-nine words.Perhaps you’re thinking,&nbsp;“Well, radio ads just can’t be as interesting as the opening lines of novels.”But why is that, do you suppose?&nbsp;Why couldn’t a radio ad begin with twenty-nine words about a teenage assassin?“Owl was neither wise nor old. She was a teenage assassin whose large, dark eyes said she was sleepy or depressed or bored. I was never really sure which. But her sister Procrastination was even harder to read. Procrastination… the passive assassin of Opportunity.&nbsp;Silently killing one day at a time…&nbsp;Don’t let Procrastination take what you love. Give yourself a new [name of item] today and feel on top of the world. Feel like you can fly. Feel like liquid Springtime. Procrastination says ‘wait.’ But what do&nbsp;you&nbsp;say?”The absence of a real product&nbsp;disallowed the inclusion of specifics in that ad, so we can’t be sure it would bring in customers, but it would definitely hold the attention of listeners with a much tighter grip than the limp, wet hand of Ronald Watersdown.“A great big, bright red…”English is a language built backwards. We speakers-of-English string together a list of modifiers before naming the thing we modify. In so doing, we require our listeners to commit to memory those modifiers so they can later be applied to the thing we name. I’m told the Romantic languages have solved this problem with a more efficient sentence structure: “A rose, bright red and big.”A good ad&nbsp;is a series of vivid mental images projected onto the movie screen of imagination. Here are a few tips for writing opening lines that will flash and crackle in the mind with the smell of burnt electricity:1. Name&nbsp;something easily seen.2. Modify&nbsp;it only after you have a named it.3. Choose&nbsp;verbs that carry context. I said “flash… crackle… burnt electricity,” and you saw lightning even though I never used the word. You were engaged by the language, a willing participant in our co-creation of a vivid mental image.4. Clarity first,&nbsp;creativity last. A few paragraphs ago I wrote, “English is a language built backwards. We speakers of English…” My original line was, “We speakers of this inverted tongue…” but I decided that was a little too clever. “Inverted tongue” is visual, yes, but it’s also potentially confusing.Creativity that blurs clarity is pretentious.Creativity that sharpens clarity is genius.Words&nbsp;carry energy. What will you light with them?Isaac Newton&nbsp;discovered that impact is mass times acceleration. How big is the idea in your mind? How quickly can you transfer it?5. Shorter is quicker, and quicker hits harder.Always&nbsp;hit hard.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Laid side-by-side,&nbsp;a stick and a rope of the same length share a similar appearance. Likewise, rules and principles look alike even though they have virtually nothing in common.Rules are like sticks.You can prod people with them.You can threaten people with them.You can beat people with them.But you cannot lead people with them.When a rule doesn’t fit the circumstance, your only choice is to break it.Principles are like ropes,&nbsp;able to conform to the shape of any problem. They are less brittle than rules, and stronger. Principles whisper valuable advice and people are happily led by them.A rule requires obedience.A principle requires contemplation.Rules&nbsp;are demanded by peoplewho have not the wit to understand and applythe appropriate, all-encompassing principle.Segmentation is a principle.&nbsp;Elimination is another. These are, in fact, the first two principles of TRIZ, an uncanny toolbox of 40 Answers that shine their own, unique light on your problem from 40 different directions, revealing a wide range of creative solutions.The principle of segmentation&nbsp;urges you to consider the perspective of connected pieces. Trains, chains and sliding windowpanes are expressions of segmentation.The principle of elimination&nbsp;urges you to consider that less is more. Pruning a plant, cropping a photograph and editing an ad are expressions of elimination.If the other 38 principles of TRIZ&nbsp;were as self-explanatory as these, I’d simply encourage you to tap T-R-I-Z into your favorite search engine and study it on your own. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.Go ahead. Do it.&nbsp;Throw some Google on that acronym and see what you find: T-R-I-Z. I believe you’ll see that a journey into the jungle of TRIZ would make a lot more sense with an experienced guide at your side.Anti-Weight&nbsp;(Principle 8,)Preliminary Anti-Action&nbsp;(Principle 9,)Equipotentiality&nbsp;(Principle 12,)Another Dimension&nbsp;(Principle 17,)Homogeneity&nbsp;(Principle 33,)&nbsp;andPhase Transitions&nbsp;(Principle 36)are easy to understand when SuperFox reveals them. Not so easy when you attempt to follow someone else.Mark Fox is the Chairman of the Board at Wizard Academy.&nbsp;Before rising to that illustrious position, he was the youngest Chief Engineer in the history of the space shuttle project. Yes, Mark is a rocket scientist. He’s also been Chief Marketing Officer of some famous hi-tech companies. My favorite thing about Mark, though, is that he’s a fascinating instructor and a lot of fun. You’ll want a room in Engelbrecht House when Mark unleashes the 40 principles of TRIZ in his world-changing workshop,&nbsp;Da Vinci and the 40 Answers.&nbsp;(If you’re smart, you’ll&nbsp;register for the October session&nbsp;today while free rooms are still available.)If October isn’t an option,&nbsp;you’ll at least want to read the book. A working knowledge of the 40 Answers is like having Batman’s utility belt.Wizard Academy&nbsp;is a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious. Dull people, cowardly people, and people without purpose find nothing here they can use.But you,&nbsp;you’ll find exactly what you need.&nbsp;We built&nbsp;this whole place for you and frankly, it’s pretty amazing.Come.&nbsp;Even if it’s just for the principle of the thing.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

The principal benefit of creative thought is hope.New possibilities&nbsp;are electric, and hope is the light that shines from them.Creativity is the source of hope&nbsp;even when your hope is in God: “I don’t see a way out of this, but I’m betting that He does.” We depend upon God’s creative thoughts to do what we cannot.I’m sorry&nbsp;if my mention of God annoys you. (Just for the record, He is never annoyed when I mention you.)Creative thought&nbsp;is much on my mind these days.President John F. Kennedy&nbsp;told a story in 1962 about a mother who wrote to the principal of her son’s school, “Don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to run for Congress.” Kennedy commented,&nbsp;“I’ve never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart. I think politicians and poets share at least one thing, and that is their greatness depends upon the courage with which they face the challenges of life.”Hope is the glow that surrounds creativity,&nbsp;and courage is the confidence we gain in that light. Kennedy seemed to know this.We want to think&nbsp;‘outside the box’ because we can’t breathe in there. The box is made of rules and the lid of the box is the heaviest rule of all.Rules are created with the gentlest of intentions.We know a thing best&nbsp;when we’ve learned it the hard way. Wisdom springs from experience. The best of the past is brought forward when we give others the benefits of what we’ve learned. Such advice is valuable and often deeply appreciated until some fool carves it in stone and it becomes an unbreakable rule. Did you notice how quickly the darkness fell? What happened to the breeze? Why can’t I breathe?Help me push open this heavy lid.Rules kill hope by suffocation.Creativity brings hope to life again.I see a person&nbsp;in your life with whom you have some difficulty. I see a health issue about which you’re worried. I see financial fears.&nbsp;Possibilities, possibilities, possibilities.I came to encourage you.Eighteen hundred years ago,&nbsp;Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome’s Five Good Emperors, said,&nbsp;“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”The day after this day is called Tomorrow&nbsp;and it’s never been here before. I hope you’ll show it a good time.A touch&nbsp;of creativity is all it takes.&nbsp;And you’ve&nbsp;got the touch.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

The smartest thing I ever did&nbsp;was drop out of college on the second day. What I wanted to learn, they couldn’t teach me, so I left to figure it out on my own. That was 37 years ago.A number of years later&nbsp;I wrote a series of&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;and&nbsp;Wall Street Journal&nbsp;bestselling business books and launched a school for grown-ups who are imaginative, courageous and ambitious. Wizard Academy teaches big things fast. Our students are leaving their fingerprints on the world and I am proud of them beyond belief.College isn’t for everyone. It was definitely not for me.If you have among your circle of friends&nbsp;a public school teacher who trusts you enough to speak to you “off the record” about what has happened to our school system, you owe it to America to have that conversation.I predict you won’t be able to sleep that night.None of the teachers to whom I’ve spoken&nbsp;wants to see their own children or grandchildren in public schools. These teachers aren’t afraid of drugs or violence. They’re afraid of an educational system that requires its teachers to wear the handcuffs of strict conformity and “teach to the test” in lockstep fashion so that the school district won’t be penalized. “Cram for the exam, learning be damned.”Every lesson, every day,&nbsp;is simply test-prep for the all-important standardized test.Standardized.&nbsp;As if every child is an identical blank slate, devoid of individual aptitudes or interests.Have you ever heard of the Creativity Quotient (CQ)?&nbsp;It’s like the IQ except that it measures creativity rather than intelligence. All across America, our 2nd graders score higher on CQ tests than our high-schoolers.Evidently, compliance and conformity come at a price.Children starting school this year will retire in 2072.&nbsp;None of us has a clue what the world will look like just 5 years from now, yet we are tasked with educating children for the world they will face 20, 30, and 40 years in the future.Paul Torrance&nbsp;administered the first CQ test in 1958 to a large number of elementary-age schoolchildren in Minnesota. Twenty-two years later, these schoolchildren were located to see if their CQ scores had been in any way predictive of career success. A second follow-up was administered in 1998, 40 years after the original test, and a 50 year follow-up was conducted in 2008 as the schoolchildren were approaching the age of 60.The result? CQ is 3 times more reliable as an indicator of career success than IQ.That Torrance CQ test measured divergent thinking on 4 scales:1. Fluency.&nbsp;The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.2. Flexibility.&nbsp;The number of different categories of relevant responses.3. Originality.&nbsp;The statistical rarity of the responses.4. Elaboration.&nbsp;The amount of detail in the responses.Professor Ken Robinson defines creativity as&nbsp;“the process of having original ideas that have value.”&nbsp;Creativity is messy and not easy to manage, so public schools don’t like to measure the CQ of their students or encourage creativity in any way.I believe this needs to change. I believe it must.“But what can we do,” you ask?Allow me to answer&nbsp;with the words of Margaret Mead:“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.?”Are you in?Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Radio Ink&nbsp;magazine, published by Eric Rhoads, is the principal trade publication of the radio industry. Today we examine a feature article I wrote for that magazine recently. In it, I speak directly to the frustrations of the account executives – the salespeople – employed by America’s 10,000+ commercial radio stations and the many hundreds of stations across Canada and Australia. I’ve decided to let you see what I told them; a peek behind the curtain, if you will. – RHW&nbsp;Ad strategy&nbsp;is more difficult to teach than ad writing.Ad writing,&nbsp;essentially, is to choose:1.&nbsp;an intriguing angle of approach into the subject matter and2.&nbsp;the sharpest words and phrases to make your point.Ad strategy,&nbsp;essentially, is to choose:1.&nbsp;the point you need to make.Bad strategy happens when you:1.&nbsp;listen to an advertiser’s wishful thinking and then2.&nbsp;assume that a radio schedule that3.&nbsp;delivers great frequency and4.&nbsp;reaches the perfect audience5.&nbsp;with really good copy will6.&nbsp;make that advertiser’s dream come true.If you’ve been selling radio long enough,&nbsp;you already know that a client’s wishful thinking is a lever that will help you sell that client a radio schedule, but it takes a lot more than wishful thinking to motivate the client’s customer.CLIENT:&nbsp;“I wish I could sell these items.”ACCOUNT EXEC:&nbsp;“Let me help you.”CLIENT:&nbsp;“How can you help me?”ACCOUNT EXEC:&nbsp;“We have a loyal audience.” (Insert success story here.) “Advertising is an investment in your future.” (Insert schedule and contract here.) “Now tell me exactly what makes these items different and special and better than the ones your competitor sells.” (You start taking notes like crazy. The client is animated. Sincere. Hopeful. Excited.)You return to the station&nbsp;with a contract and a run order. Now all you need is great copy, right?Let me pause here to say&nbsp;that it’s not my goal to discourage you. My goal is only to open your eyes. I want you to see the problem clearly so that you no longer walk into a trap from which there is no escape. We will now continue.You work really hard&nbsp;and write a great piece of copy. Excellent copy. Miraculous copy. World-class copy. The greatest copy that has ever been written. Your co-workers love the ad. The client loves the ad. High-fives all around and champagne for everyone.The schedule runs. The ad airs.&nbsp;Everyone is commenting on it. Very little of the product is sold. Beyond generating those comments, the ad has minimal impact on the business.What the hell?Your copy, indeed, was fabulous.&nbsp;You employed an excellent angle of approach, held the listeners’ attention and made your point in a clever way. Well done! But your fundamental strategy was flawed; your ad answered a question that no one was asking.You walked into the trap&nbsp;when you failed to question why the client was overstocked on the item he wanted you to advertise. The real problem is that no one wants the item.&nbsp;It’s a loser, a dog, a mistake.&nbsp;Your client assumed – and you assumed with him – that if people “only knew and understood,” then they’d rush in to buy the product. So you told the people, you made them understand. And they still didn’t want the product.Advertising will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway.Convince your client&nbsp;to let you offer the public what the public already wants. This is what drives traffic into a store. And many of those people will...

For I Am Exchanging a Day of My Life For It.Quixote sees&nbsp;the turning of the windmill as the flailing arms of a giant that must be defeated.Peter Pan will remain young&nbsp;only if he can escape a tick-tocking crocodile that has swallowed a clock.In 1904, old Mrs. Snow&nbsp;spoke of her late husband to author J.M. Barrie on the opening night of his play,&nbsp;Peter Pan,&nbsp;“…and he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it’s all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn’t that right?”Don Quixote doesn’t defeat his giant&nbsp;but is lifted on its revolving arms and slammed into the ground. Yes, each of us is chased by the same crocodile that tormented Captain Hook and Peter Pan;&nbsp;tick-tick-tick-tick…&nbsp;Time is the windmill of Quixote.Can I ask you a personal question?&nbsp;I mean a really personal question? What are you buying with the hours of your life?Rita Mae Brown said,&nbsp;“I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.”Again I ask,&nbsp;what are you buying with the hours of your life?Anne Tyler&nbsp;opens her book,&nbsp;Back When We Were Grownups,&nbsp;with the words,&nbsp;“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”That line scares me a little.&nbsp;Sometimes I worry that I’m turning into the wrong person, too. Don’t you?You and I gasp for breath&nbsp;and wipe tears from our eyes, feet flying barefoot in our daily race against time.“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special.&nbsp;They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: ‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”– Isabel Allende,&nbsp;My Invented CountryOur race against time&nbsp;is a race we will lose. But running out of time is not what frightens me. This car will run out of gas. What frightens me is the idea of spending irreplaceable time in a headlong rush to an unworthy destination.John Steinbeck speaks of the unworthy destination&nbsp;in&nbsp;Sea of Cortez,“Most busy-ness is merely a nervous tic.&nbsp;We know a lady who is obsessed with the idea of ashes in an ashtray. She is not lazy. She spends a good half of her waking time making sure that no ashes remain in any ashtray, and to make sure of keeping busy she has many ashtrays.” p. 182, (1941)We spend our time&nbsp;searching for security and hate it when we get it.In chapter 5&nbsp;of Ursula K. Le Guin’s&nbsp;The Left Hand of Darkness,&nbsp;a fortuneteller, Faxe, answers Genry’s question about time with a question of her own:“What is sure,&nbsp;predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”“That we shall die.”“Yes, there’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”Make no mistake; the future has yet to be written.&nbsp;For we are a species gifted with&nbsp;choice.The Greeks believed,&nbsp;“A civilization flourishes when people plant...

Finally, an authentic, encoded message.And you'll never guess where.The Da Vinci Code&nbsp;was published in 2003, exactly 10 years ago. The book has been denounced as an attack on the Catholic church and sharply criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies, but that hasn’t keep it from selling more than 80 million copies in 44 languages. The story is fiction, marketed as fiction, and contains only a bare sprinkling of tautly-stretched connections to reality, but millions of wide-eyed gullibles accepted&nbsp;The Da Vinci Code&nbsp;as fact anyway.In 2006, Virginia Fellows published&nbsp;The Shakespeare Code,&nbsp;purportedly proving that William Shakespeare was actually Sir Francis Bacon. This wasn’t the first book written, however, in an attempt to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. More than 4,500 such books had been published prior to 1949 and&nbsp;“Nobody tried to keep a running tally after that.”&nbsp;[Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?&nbsp;by James Shapiro, p. 4 of the Prologue]Just 8 days before Barack Obama&nbsp;was reelected President of the United States, reporter Joe Kovacs wrote,&nbsp;“A well-known Bible-code researcher has bad news for Barack Obama, as he claims hidden texts in the Holy Bible indicate Mitt Romney will be America’s next president. (Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew and author of&nbsp;Bible Codes Breakthrough)&nbsp;… For those not familiar with Bible codes, they are said to be secret messages embedded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Those who claim the codes’ validity say they disclose information about both the past and the future.”Heh, heh, heh.&nbsp;We are a funny species, are we not?&nbsp;Methinks Terry Rossio was speaking about all of us when he said,&nbsp;“The magic of a secret decoder ring lies not its ability to code and decode messages, but in allowing children the belief that they possess knowledge worth keeping secret.”When it comes to treasure maps and coded messages,&nbsp;is there anyone among us who is not a child? You keep your secrets and I keep mine. They are among our most prized possessions. But how often do you hold a secret that means the difference between life and death?When Miguel de Cervantes&nbsp;wrote&nbsp;Don Quixote de La Mancha&nbsp;in 1605, he was keeping a life-and-death secret and he hid it openly within his book.The Spanish Inquisition was in full swing.&nbsp;Anyone holding a copy of the contraband New Testament translated into Spanish by Juan Pérez de Pineda would immediately be put to death. Indeed, Julián Hernández had already been tortured for 3 years and burned at the stake for it along with more than 100 other people during the 17 years prior to 1605.AWhat do you suppose&nbsp;motivated Miguel de Cervantes to quietly shout,&nbsp;“I have a copy of this forbidden New Testament and I’m looking at it right now!”&nbsp;from the pages of&nbsp;Don Quixote? Yet this is precisely what he does in part one, chapter nine, and again in part two, chapter thirty-four, when he describes in detail the complex image on the cover of the forbidden&nbsp;Pineda&nbsp;New Testament.“Two things can easily be a coincidence,&nbsp;and at a stretch, three,”&nbsp;says my friend Massimiliano Giorgini,&nbsp;“but when you have the convergence of four or five indicators, you’re probably no longer looking at a coincidence… In&nbsp;Don Quixote,&nbsp;Cervantes describes the cover of the&nbsp;Pineda&nbsp;New Testament in seven highly specific ways.” Even more compelling&nbsp;is Giorgini’s exposition on the following visual similarity: When the name “QIXOTE” is spelled in Gothic letters, it appears strikingly similar to the classic Greek ICTHYS fish-symbol followed by the Greek spelling for “FISH,” an acronym you’ve seen...

Fear&nbsp;is the bullet that eliminates happiness.Fear&nbsp;is the bullet that kills the dream.Fear&nbsp;is the assassin of success.Why not&nbsp;become bulletproof in 2 easy steps?1. Make peace&nbsp;with the possibility of failure.2. Amputate&nbsp;your sense of shame.“Failure is not an option”&nbsp;is the platitude of people who have attended one-too-many motivational seminars. Failure is always a possibility, whether you admit it or not. Sometimes your very best just isn’t good enough.Do you&nbsp;want to succeed?Learn&nbsp;from each failure.Identify&nbsp;what went wrong.Start&nbsp;all over.Failure&nbsp;is a temporary condition.You&nbsp;cannot have humility until you first have confidence.You&nbsp;cannot fail until you first have courage.Confidence&nbsp;and courage are not shameful.Humility&nbsp;is not shameful.Failure&nbsp;is not shameful.Fear&nbsp;is shameful.A perpetual doubter&nbsp;pops the balloons of high-flying dreams. Armed with the needles of sharply-focused questions, the doubter injects fear into every decision… “But what if…”I say&nbsp;to these doubters, “But what if you live your whole life without ever becoming alive?”Anaïs Nin&nbsp;wrote about these people and your relationship to them:“You are in charge&nbsp;of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”The perpetual doubter is a nitpicking needle-snout&nbsp;who can always find a problem and happily poke holes in the solutions proposed by others. Like a mosquito, he sucks the life out of those around him. Slap the bastard and move on.I do not suggest&nbsp;that you become reckless or mindless or silly. I advocate only that you refuse to let Fear cast the deciding vote.If anyone had the right&nbsp;to be afraid, it was deaf and blind Helen Keller. But it was she who told us,&nbsp;“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”Devin Wright,&nbsp;one of my co-workers, puts it this way:&nbsp;“It’s like a can at the grocery store without a label. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.”Each of us&nbsp;lives the life we choose. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.The following 9-word summary&nbsp;is on loan to me from that celebrated author of&nbsp;Gulliver’s Travels,&nbsp;the immortal Jonathan Swift:May you live&nbsp;all the days of your life.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

If you’re not being criticized today,&nbsp;then no one was listening when you spoke.Welcome to the time of the witch-hunt.This is that time&nbsp;when angry cyber-terrorists post incendiary online reviews and pretend their only motive is to protect the public. This is that time when corporate assassins take pleasure in shooting elephants from a distance; their greatest joy is to ruin the reputation of a prominent man or woman or company. The more the elephant is beloved by the public, the greater the delight of the assassin in bringing them down with a well-aimed bullet to the gut.Let me explain my motives&nbsp;in writing to you about this trend:1. I hope to bring you&nbsp;some small measure of comfort in advance. A clear understanding of the social climate can provide a sort of emotional padding and soften the force of the blows when your company is attacked.2. If you deal with&nbsp;a lot of people, your company will become a target. Think of today’s memo as a general heads-up from the air traffic control tower that some dark storm clouds are gathering on the horizon.3. Please don’t assume&nbsp;I’m simply venting my own frustrations. I have not been attacked. This memo isn’t about me. The rise of the corporate assassin is just a symptom of the times.Eighty years ago,&nbsp;when the pendulum of society was last in this position, headed in this direction, Robert Lynd wrote,&nbsp;“There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.”&nbsp;Our current witch-hunt mentality even extends to the courtroom. If you serve as a juror today, you can reasonably expect at least one of the other jurors to say,&nbsp;“If this person wasn’t guilty, they wouldn’t have been arrested.”We are indeed living&nbsp;in dangerous times when an accused person is presumed guilty until proven innocent.How did we get here?“Working together for the common good”&nbsp;is the dream that launches every We generation. Our original goal was simply to “clean this place up and straighten out this mess,” but we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a happy effort for the common good slowly hardens to become the handcuffs of duty, obligation and sacrifice.1933 was the last time&nbsp;the pendulum was in this position, headed in this direction. George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938, so he was familiar with the witch-hunt window of a WE cycle. These are the words he sends to us from the past:&nbsp;“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”Consider with me for a moment:&nbsp;A true, civic hero looks for solutions that are within his or her own power to implement. An assassin looks not for solutions, but for problems, and for someone to blame.The corporate assassin is an accuser,&nbsp;a fault-finder, a nitpicking inquisitor. And when they wear the disguise of a news reporter, they wield the power of public opinion.Although the corporate assassin&nbsp;has long been recognized as one of the 7 types of journalists, their numbers are on the rise and their attacks are becoming increasingly reckless and unjustified. I hope you’ll remember this when listening to the media. I believe it’s extremely important that we continue to give accused companies and individuals the benefit of the doubt.Because next time it might be you.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

’ve never seen a business fail&nbsp;due to “reaching the wrong people.” So why does every business owner instinctively believe that “reaching the right people” is the key to successful advertising?Who, exactly,&nbsp;do you&nbsp;not&nbsp;want to know about you? Who isn’t qualified to repeat the good things they’ve heard about you? And when is the best time to advertise?Solomon wrote&nbsp;about these things in the 11th chapter of Ecclesiastes:“If you wait&nbsp;for perfect weather, you will never plant your seeds. If you are afraid that every cloud will bring rain, you will never harvest your crops… So begin planting early in the morning, and don’t stop working until evening. You don’t know what might make you rich. Maybe everything you do will be successful.”Advertising is a seed&nbsp;that grows in the soil of the customer’s heart. If you will allow this metaphor, it would appear that Solomon advises, “Don’t overthink it. Just tell your story every day in every circumstance. You never know who might be listening.”Matthew, Mark and Luke&nbsp;felt the following moment to be important enough to include in the books they wrote about Jesus. Here’s how Luke tells it:“A large crowd came together.&nbsp;People came to Jesus from every town, and he told them this story: ‘A farmer went out to sow seed. While he was scattering the seed, some of it fell beside the road. People walked on the seed, and the birds ate it all. Other seed fell on rock. It began to grow but then died because it had no water. Some other seed fell among thorny weeds. This seed grew, but later the weeds stopped the plants from growing. The rest of the seed fell on good ground. This seed grew and made 100 times more grain.'” Jesus finished the story. Then he called out, ‘You people who hear me, listen!'”Neither Solomon nor Jesus advised,&nbsp;“Target the good soil.” What do you think would have happened if Jesus had attended business school? Would they have convinced him to judge the value of each potential customer from statistical data, or would he have convinced his professors of the efficiency of untargeted message distribution?Maybe Jesus just didn’t understand.&nbsp;Maybe Jesus misspoke. And maybe Solomon wasn’t very bright.Uh-oh. Here I am&nbsp;talking about planning&nbsp;again. When will I ever learn?I know it’s counterintuitive,&nbsp;but if you look at all the offers from all the sellers of mass media and then accept the offer that allows you to reach the largest number of people each week, 52 weeks a year, for the fewest dollars per week, it’s hard to make a mistake.An impressive, memorable message&nbsp;is what matters most. How you deliver that message – and who hears it – is far less important than you have been led to believe.It is&nbsp;your choice of message that targets the customer, not your choice of media.There are&nbsp;rare exceptions, of course. But not many.I’m going to deliver&nbsp;a short-but-counterintuitive media buying tutorial during next week’s Wizard Academy workshop,&nbsp;Writing for Radio and the Internet&nbsp;(April 10-11.) The early bird registrants were given all the rooms in Engelbrecht House, but it’s worth sleeping in a hotel to be part of this class. Your lunches and dinners will be on campus with the rest of the group. The only time you’ll be alone is when you’re sleeping. And that’s not so bad, is it? Register now. Jump-up the size of your harvest in 2013.&nbsp;Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsA

The Private Advice of Harry Connick, Jr.Chandler Canterbury&nbsp;is a child actor with a dazzling future.Immediately&nbsp;following the world premiere of&nbsp;When Angels Sing,&nbsp;a not-yet-released movie young Canterbury made with Willie Nelson, Connie Britton, Lyle Lovett, Fionnula Flanagan, Kris Kristofferson and Harry Connick, Jr., Harry grabbed a microphone and told a funny story about his first encounter with Chandler. (I’ve posted my iPhone video of that moment in&nbsp;the rabbit hole&nbsp;for you.)But Harry C. Jr. told&nbsp;an even better story privately.“Chandler and I&nbsp;were hanging out between scenes,” Harry said, “when he looked at me and said, ‘What’s the secret of being popular? How do you get people to like you?'”An interesting question, don’t you think?&nbsp;Most of us would have responded by saying “Just be yourself,” or “Popularity is overrated,” or some other such claptrap. But Harry believes in answering questions&nbsp;as asked.&nbsp;So the astoundingly popular actor and musician looked young Chandler in the eyes and said,“The secret of being liked&nbsp;is to always ask 5 questions before you say anything about yourself. People won’t remember what you said about yourself, but they’ll always remember what you asked about them.”Harry then let Chandler&nbsp;practice asking him different kinds of ice-breaking questions until the young man finally mastered the art.It kind of makes you wish&nbsp;Harry Connick, Jr. had taken you under his wing when you were a kid, doesn’t it?The bigger story, though,&nbsp;is the movie itself. Turk Pipkin wrote&nbsp;When Angels Sing&nbsp;as a story to be read to his friends and family each Christmas. Year after year, Turk would pull those sheaves of dog-eared paper out of a shoebox and read the story to a roomful of friends who would faithfully gather to hear it.And each Christmas, the crowd got bigger.One year, Fred Miller was in the room.&nbsp;Among his other accomplishments, Fred was executive producer of&nbsp;For All Mankind,&nbsp;that miraculous film documenting the Apollo space missions from 1968 to 1972. When released in 1989,&nbsp;For All Mankind&nbsp;was selected as the Audience Favorite and the Grand Jury Winner at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.That same Fred Miller jumped up and said,&nbsp;“This story needs to be made into a movie.” Then Elizabeth Avellan – producer of 30 movies including the&nbsp;Spy Kids&nbsp;franchise – got on board. Following Elizabeth was Shannon McIntosh, executive in charge of post-production for Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning&nbsp;Inglourious Basterds&nbsp;(2009) and executive producer of this year’s Oscar-winning&nbsp;Django Unchained&nbsp;(2012.)And now you&nbsp;want to invite Fred Miller to your Christmas party, right?When Willie and Harry&nbsp;and Connie and Lyle and Fionnula and Kris heard about the project and read the screenplay, each of them volunteered to make the film for a teeny-tiny fraction of the prices they typically command. Each of them knew in their heart this film was a magical Christmas card that would cause tens of millions of people to have happier holidays for decades to come. And each of them wanted to be part of a movie that said,&nbsp;“Merry Christmas. You are loved.”Hollywood desperately wants to gain control of this film&nbsp;but the actors and producers aren’t sure they want Hollywood to have it. During a laughter-filled afternoon on the campus of Wizard Academy a few days ago, the general feeling of the producers was to possibly try and repay the...

f I had any sense,&nbsp;if I had half the brains God gave an aardvark, I’d talk about politics or religion and fewer people would be annoyed.But aardvarks&nbsp;look at me with pity because I’m foolish. My social filter is so misaligned that I’m going to share with you my thoughts about planning.“Plan your work and work your plan.”&nbsp;These are the holy words of a belief system built on intuitive faith in an orderly universe.I do not share that faith.I do not believe that everything happens for a reason.YOWZAH!&nbsp;Are you beginning to see how this simple thing called “planning” can trigger strongly-felt emotions?Your thoughts about planning&nbsp;reflect your innermost beliefs about the workings of the universe. When you speak of planning, you unknowingly speak of religion and politics; you speak of how you believe the world works, and of the best way to fix it.But that’s enough about you.&nbsp;Let’s talk about me some more. (Because if we talk about you and accidentally reveal that you’re horribly flawed and broken, you’re going to be REALLY angry. So we’ll talk about me instead and reveal that I’m horribly flawed and broken and then you won’t be angry. You’ll be able to say, “I knew that.” – RHW)I believe&nbsp;there are only two kinds of planning:(1.) Process planning.(2.) Result planning.A process plan is commonly known as “Plan A.”&nbsp;We give it that name when we’ve decided to abandon it because it isn’t working. Results are most often achieved through Plan B or C or D or K or Q or V.Don’t let yourself be seduced&nbsp;by the promise of a miraculous process that leads to golden results. Yesterday’s perfect process becomes “the box” people are struggling to escape today.Focus on the result, not the process.The Wizard Academy campus is nearly complete&nbsp;and there was never a process plan. The only thing we ever planned was the result. Astoundingly, a multimillion-dollar campus was constructed through nonstop improvisation.I don’t actually know how much money we’ve spent.&nbsp;I could easily look it up, of course, but I’ve never been sufficiently interested. There was never a schedule or a budget. “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.”There was usually&nbsp;just enough money in the bank to pay for the work we were doing that week. “We’ll find next week’s money next week.”I apologize if you are horrified by these confessions.&nbsp;Your reaction is perfectly normal if you were raised in a nation that was once a colony of Britain. The machine mindset of the industrial revolution taught our society to overvalue conformity, repetition and process. Improvisation and innovation, those wild, flowering weeds, have been uprooted and cursed for 200 years.Although Wizard Academy didn’t have a process plan,&nbsp;we did have three unifying principles:1. Build with cash. Never borrow money.“When money slows down, slow construction down to the pace of the money coming in.”2. Use whoever shows up.One by one, hundreds of you came to me with ideas and suggestions during the past 12 years. My response never changed, “Great idea! You’re in charge of that.”3. The students are the soul of the school.“Designs, furnishings and decor will be chosen to elevate the thoughts and attitudes of students and guests while they are here. The campus will whisper at every turn and touchpoint, ‘Anything is possible.'”I didn’t come up with this idea of Result Planning on my own.Life comes down to a few moments.&nbsp;One of those moments happened for me when I was 8 years old.AOn October 27, 1966,&nbsp;Walt Disney described his vision for a 27,400 acre “Disney World” in Florida. Walt had purchased 43 square miles of land surrounded by a swamp. His dream was literally twice the size...

Been Read, Being Read, Will be ReadJeff says&nbsp;I have a confirmation bias, a strong attraction to information that reinforces my convictions and helps me prove my point.That makes sense.&nbsp;I’m an ad writer.Does anyone&nbsp;really want their ad writer to be unbiased? The job of the ad writer is to:1. discover&nbsp;a persuasive perspective, and2. develop&nbsp;a distinctly memorable voice for the ad campaign, and3. find&nbsp;supporting evidence that clearly demonstrates your company and your products to be the only intelligent choices in your category.Yes,&nbsp;I have a confirmation bias. It makes me a living.ARay Bard&nbsp;is a good friend and the publisher of most of my books, including the&nbsp;Wizard of Ads&nbsp;trilogy. So if Ray published a book and I thought it was crap, I’d love that book anyway. But that’s not what’s happening today.&nbsp;The ONE Thing&nbsp;says what I’ve tried to say for years, but haven’t been able to say nearly so clearly. This book will sharpen your focus, cut away your distractions, and zoom your ability to achieve the ONE thing at which you aim your heart.&nbsp;The ONE Thing&nbsp;is written from a powerfully persuasive perspective and includes a lot of interesting, supporting evidence. Do you have a dream? The first step toward making that dream come true is to read&nbsp;The ONE Thing.Mark my words:&nbsp;The ONE Thing&nbsp;will leap onto the business bestseller list. Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. Bard Press. A friend sent me&nbsp;a copy of&nbsp;Steal Like an Artist&nbsp;after reading my advice to “repurpose the proven.” (Better Than Creativity,&nbsp;the Monday Morning Memo for January 28, 2013) You’ll read&nbsp;Steal Like an Artist&nbsp;in about 30 minutes but it will forever change how you look at creativity. I hope to get the author, Austin Kleon, to Wizard Academy later this year. If you can afford both books, buy them both. I feel stronger and better for having read them.&nbsp;And I usually hate nonfiction.&nbsp;Maybe it’s just more proof of my confirmation bias, but even though I felt like I already knew what these books were telling me, they made me feel brightened and tightened. Confident. Hopeful. Bouncy. I believe they’ll make you feel the same way.Now let’s talk about fiction.bIn Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s&nbsp;international bestseller,&nbsp;The Shadow of the Wind,&nbsp;Daniel Sempere is a boy whose father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old and obscure titles. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it, which he must then protect for life.“This is a place of mystery,&nbsp;Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago.”I titled this memo “Voices of Books”&nbsp;because I am attracted to writers who craft a vivid voice. When I was 13, I was magnetically attracted to the poetic voice of Robert Frost. Spellbound, I marvelled at how he could&nbsp;say two things at once. On the surface of each of his poems, Frost would describe a moment that is common to us all. But below the surface, he was saying something profound and deep and eternal. This appreciation of Frost has never left me and I’m not alone.

Is it wiseto protect the ones we lovefrom the hardshipsthat taught us all we know?Hardship&nbsp;is the undisputed School of the Masters, but very few students seek admission.Education begins&nbsp;with memorization. Having learned all the theories, steps and rules, we parry and thrust against the light in a kind of frantic swordplay with the shadows of possibilities. This is when we learn that steps and rules are only a weak and sad beginning. We still have a lot to learn.Memorization&nbsp;was our first lesson.Improvisation&nbsp;is the second.Choices and Consequences&nbsp;are the lessons that never quit teaching.Every industry, craft, trade and profession&nbsp;has its own traditional wisdom that will hide you safe, out of trouble, by keeping you inside the box.If you’re going to start&nbsp;thinking “outside the box,” you’re going to have to ignore the unwritten rules of traditional wisdom. Do this and you’ll immediately be told that you’re “not doing it right.” And sadly, the new thing you’re attempting to do probably won’t work the way you had hoped.You won’t&nbsp;have a victory but you will have an education.So you’ll try&nbsp;something else that doesn’t work out.Now you’re a screw-up.Most people&nbsp;would crawl back inside the box and quit trying.But not you.You try again. Fail again.Now you’re a loser, a nonconformist, a problem child, and possibly unemployed.This, mi amigo, is what they call hardship.Try again.&nbsp;Limited success.Now you’re a tinkerer who won’t leave well-enough alone.Try again.&nbsp;Limited improvement.No one calls you anything now because no one is paying attention.Try again.&nbsp;Major breakthrough.Now you’re an innovator and everyone wants to swim in your pool.AGeorge Washington&nbsp;was a loyal British subject who decided the king was wrong.Thomas Jefferson&nbsp;envisioned a form of government that Winston Churchill – on the floor of the House of Commons* – would later call “the worst form of government ever created, except for all the others.”Abraham Lincoln violated&nbsp;millennia of traditional wisdom when he won the war but refused the victor’s spoils, saying instead, “With malice toward none, with charity for all… let us bind up the nation’s wounds…” (2nd inaugural address.)But perhaps Teddy Roosevelt&nbsp;said it best. Speaking of the choices and consequences we face daily as we improvise our way through life, he said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”Wizard Academy&nbsp;is a nonprofit educational organization, a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.Finally!&nbsp;After 12 years of false starts, mistakes and “almost rights,”we have a way to explain this place.&nbsp;THANK YOU to Jeffrey Eisenberg and Jeff Sexton, who accepted this challenge 8 months ago and never turned loose of the tail of that dragon.“Wizard Academy: a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.”&nbsp;This tells the world who we are and who we are not.“If you have no imagination, please stay at home. If you lack courage, this is not the place for you. If you have no dream that keeps you awake, go back to bed with our blessings. We have work to do.”It took us 12 years&nbsp;to figure out how to explain who we areand we’re the ones that are supposed to know what we’re doing.You’re not a screw-up.&nbsp;You’re an innovator on the edge of a breakthrough. Trust us. We know. We’re very familiar with the edge.And the view from here is magnificent.Join us.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams* Nov. 11, 1947&nbsp;

I think there should be&nbsp;something in science called the ‘reindeer effect.’ I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, ‘Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.’– Jack HandeyThe Reindeer Effect isn’t real.AThe Ikea Effect, however,&nbsp;is real enough to be the subject of a story in Harvard Business Review. The essence of it is this: We don’t put effort into things because we love them.&nbsp;We love them because we put effort into them.1. We find purpose&nbsp;and see value in the work of our hands.2.&nbsp;We see a reflection of ourselves&nbsp;in the things we create.&nbsp;&nbsp;The Ikea Effect&nbsp;was named for that highly successful, international retailer known for selling flat-pack furniture that must be tediously assembled by the purchaser. Persons who assemble this furniture tend to place a much higher value on the finished product than persons who had no involvement in its construction.The authorship&nbsp;of virtually every book in the Bible is debated by scholars. I don’t want to put my dog in that fight, so let me say for the record that I&nbsp;choose&nbsp;to believe Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes toward the end of his life approximately 3,000 years ago. Solomon enjoyed the freedom to follow his passions and pursue his dreams. Ecclesiastes is his diary of that journey. In it, Solomon shares what he learned on that fateful day he found the final answer. Here’s an often-quoted passage from chapter 3:There is a time for everything,and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,a time to search and a time to give up,a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,a time for war and a time for peace.What do workers gain from their toil?&nbsp;I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink,&nbsp;and find satisfaction in all their toil — this is the gift of God.That last bit&nbsp;is usually left out when people put this quote on posters and calendars and greeting cards. Solomon’s assertion that the true secret of happiness is to find satisfaction in our toil – our efforts – the work of our hands – is just too plebeian an answer for ambitious people who are driven to succeed.&nbsp;But the Ikea Effect&nbsp;– and the Harvard Business Review – seem to confirm Solomon’s assertion. Even so, most of us will continue to&nbsp;overvalue that glimmering destination on the horizon – “Success” – never quite realizing that any value it has in the end will be produced by memories of the journey that took us there.&nbsp;Now let’s think for a moment&nbsp;about this idea that we love things&nbsp;because&nbsp;we put energy into them. When a thing becomes the object of concentrated hope and focused effort, when we inject it with our own life-force and energy, it becomes very precious to us. Actions trigger feelings.&nbsp;We usually wait&nbsp;to fall in love with something before throwing ourselves into it. A subject in school, a nonprofit organization, a hobby, a sport, a business. But the Ikea Effect tells us that...

A brief summary of this episodeTo See a Better OutcomeThings depend on how you look at them.Through what lenses do you examine possibilities?The first 2 lenses&nbsp;are intellect and emotion.Sometimes you use one, sometimes the other. This is normal.Intellect&nbsp;employs hard facts and cold logic.Emotion&nbsp;relies on soft intuition and warm connections.Will the first impression&nbsp;be made in the head or in the heart?&nbsp;&nbsp;In all your communications&nbsp;and attempts at persuasion – especially in your advertising – be careful to make a deep, dual impression; one track in the head and another in the heart.But what happens&nbsp;after&nbsp;that first impression has been made? Are there other, smaller lenses that read the second, third, and fourth impressions?Ray Bard is a quiet genius&nbsp;who speaks into my life. I walk away from each encounter a richer soul.Ray recently told me&nbsp;that a careful examination of all the biggest nonfiction books of the past 50 years revealed 4 common characteristics. Ray is like that. He sees patterns that others miss and solves riddles that few have ever considered.Unless you’re a nonfiction author,&nbsp;you don’t really care&nbsp;what makes a nonfiction book successful, do you? But what if I told you&nbsp;these same 4 characteristics are the keys to successful advertising?&nbsp;I saw that.&nbsp;Your ears perked up like a German Shepherd.Communication, to be highly successful, must have:1. A Big IdeaConceptInsightInformation2. Nuts &amp; BoltsHow ToStep-by-StepInstructionsExamples3. EntertainmentWriting styleAnecdotesAdventureSurprise4. HopeVisualized HappinessPromiseInspiration(1.) The Big Idea and (2.) Nuts and Bolts,are more about the writer than the reader. Yet these are the only things every writer of nonfiction feels a need to share.&nbsp;And now you know why we churn out more than one million dull new books each year and why most of our advertising is gruel.Dull communications&nbsp;are about the speaker, the author, the product, the advertiser. Lots of examples supporting a big idea are merely white noise when there’s no entertainment and no hope;&nbsp;the sound of traffic in a too-busy world.Successful nonfiction&nbsp;– including highly effective advertising – is about the reader, the listener, the viewer, the customer. These beloved messages deliver(3.) Entertainment&nbsp;and&nbsp;(4.) Hope.Ray Bard shared with you and me his Big Idea.&nbsp;We can use it to lift the effectiveness of our advertising to new heights. This should give you Hope. But if you want 2 days of Nuts and Bolts examples and Entertainment beyond compare, arrange your schedule to be at Wizard Academy April 10-11 to learn&nbsp;How to Write for Radio and the Internet,&nbsp;the highly heralded class of Christopher J. Maddock and Jeff Sexton.I plan to add a few modest examples&nbsp;and I’m working to get the elusive Ray Bard to make an appearance and share additional wise-ard insights with you, though I can’t yet promise he’ll be there.But I do have Hope.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams&nbsp;

Nothing sounds appealing.Have you ever had that feeling?&nbsp;You’re sort of hungry, but nothing sounds good. You want to have fun, but nothing sounds fun. So you drive to the bookstore but none of the books – not a single one of them – whispers for you to carry it to the cashier.You go home and sit.&nbsp;The clock ticks.You keep sitting.&nbsp;The clock keeps ticking.You realize&nbsp;the clock is going to win.I hate that feeling.&nbsp;You hate that feeling. Neither of us wants it. So why do we have it?Consider with me&nbsp;the word&nbsp;aimless.&nbsp;It refers to a thing that has not been aimed. This would seem to indicate that it might be aimed, can be aimed, should be aimed.Is an aimless person&nbsp;one who is not being aimed?Now consider the word&nbsp;pointless.It refers to a thing that has no point.Physically, such a thing would be dull.Sort of how I’m feeling right now.The opposite of pointless and aimless&nbsp;would be “sharply pointed and directly aimed.” Do you see in those words an arrow aimed at a target by an archer? There is no dullness in that picture. Notice the fingers on the string, the hand pulled to the cheek, the sweating bicep, the zeroed eye. It requires energy to aim an arrow.But at what shall we aim?Good news:&nbsp;It really doesn’t matter since any nearby target can be hit.The sure-fire cure for the blues&nbsp;is to&nbsp;aim pointed energy&nbsp;at something. The object of your aim is of no importance. All that matters is that you can physically see that your target was hit.I will now stand up and clean my office.&nbsp;I don’t relish the idea. I’m really not in the mood. So who is going to make me do this?I am.I’m putting away my laptop now. It’s 7:09AM.You won’t hear from me again until I’m done.Okay, it’s 8:31AM.&nbsp;I’m not done but I made a lot of progess. I found my favorite, dark red baseball cap under a pile of stuff. Martin Rapaport gave this cap to me. I quit wearing it last summer when it got sweat-stained and salty dust collected where the crown meets the brim. Not a good look. I spent 25 minutes hand-scrubbing the cap. When it dries I’ll see if it’s wearable again.Unimportant? Yes.Satisfying anyway? Absolutely.Okay, back to work.It’s 8:42AM and the clock can no longer be heard.&nbsp;Back again.&nbsp;But now it’s the next morning: 3:27AM. Pennie came into my office while I was cleaning yesterday and suggested that we take my pickup truck to our son and daughter-in-law’s house and load up a bunch of stuff from their garage and haul it to a rented storage facility. They’re trying to get their house ready to sell. The Princess and I spent the day making 3 trips to the storage facility, loading and unloading, loading and unloading, loading and unloading. We made a huge difference in that garage.My office remains a mess but I feel great.Surefire Cure for the Blues:&nbsp;Aim pointed energy at a nearby target. Fix something broken. Create a visible change. Make a difference.Want to kick it to an even higher gear?&nbsp;Aim your attention away from yourself. Do a good thing for someone else. Good feelings follow good actions.Someone a long time ago&nbsp;said that it makes us happier to give than to receive. Give it a shot. See if it’s true.It worked for me.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Rambling Thoughts, Spoken Plainly,Certain to Irritate Someone, SomewhereA mirage is not a hallucination, but a misinterpretation.We see the sky reflected from the ground and we assume it to be water. But it isn’t. That reflection is caused by light passing through cold air that sits on a thin layer of hot air, heated by sun-soaked sand.1. FaceBook, for business, is a mirage.Can it successfully gather a crowd to hear a band perform at a bar? Absolutely. Social media, social event. Can it successfully be used by a&nbsp;physically-existing&nbsp;retail or service business as a substitute for mass media? No. It cannot.&nbsp;A&nbsp;physically-existing&nbsp;business&nbsp;is one that lives in the land of sunlight. A purely online business, by contrast, lives in the light of the plasma screen. Check into those FaceBook success stories and you’ll find them all to be businesses that sprang into existence after 2003. I defy you to find a physically-existing business who enjoyed success prior to 2003 that is now reducing its mass media budget because it has found FaceBook to be a more effective use of ad dollars. You will find no such example. I’ve been looking for 3 long years.When you see the power of FaceBook&nbsp;to connect people together, you are facing an indisputable fact. When you assume it’s “the next big thing” for business, you are seeing a mirage, an illusion, a reflection caused by hot air.Google is our phone book,&nbsp;our encyclopedia, our source of ongoing news. Amazon is our bookstore and our mail-order catalog. FaceBook is a party line, a telephone line shared by a large group of people allowing each to listen-in on the conversations of the others.2. Google’s own data makes it clear:&nbsp;pay-per-click works extremely well for physically-existing businesses that have already built themselves a name. Pay-per-click performs poorly for businesses that aren’t already well known. If the name of your business is a household word in your town, consider investing in local pay-per-click. But if you’re still trying to build your name, put all your eggs into a single mass-media basket and then lift that basket to the sky. The biggest mistake you can make is to spread your ad dollars around, thinking you should “cover all your bases.” You don’t have the money for that. Have courage. Get focused. Talk loud and draw a crowd.A human being drinks about 180 gallons&nbsp;of liquid per year. This number is essentially carved in stone. When we drink more coffee or wine or expensive beer, we are drinking less of something else. This is a problem for Coke and Pepsi and Budweiser.A human being consumes precisely 24 hours per day.&nbsp;This number, too, is carved in stone. When we spend time online or playing video games, we are spending less time doing something else. This is a problem for television and radio and the reading of books.3. There is no “next big thing” on the media horizon.&nbsp;I see only a teeming host of small and medium things. Here’s one of the best of the medium things.Get an iPhone 5.&nbsp;Use it to collect video of customers giving you real-world, real-time testimonials “in the moment.” Post these testimonials on YouTube and embed them on your website. It’s free.&nbsp;You don’t even need to know what you’re doing. Professional video editors are plentiful and affordable in the cloud.&nbsp;One million seconds is 12 days.&nbsp;One billion seconds is 32 years. One trillion seconds is 31,688 years. The world watched 1.46 trillion complete YouTube views in 2012 and that number is climbing.Forget Facebook. The opportunity is on YouTube.4. Two of my favorite people won the Superbowl.&nbsp;Paul Harvey spoke to the Future Farmers of America in 1978 and a two-minute clip from that speech rocked the nation during the 2013 Superbowl. When&nbsp;Secret

Wizard Academy exists&nbsp;to educate, equip and encourage small business owners, little people with dreams who face giant corporations with big bank accounts. Like the windmills of Quixote, these giants are often unaware and unfeeling of their challengers.Don Quixote was an average man,&nbsp;distinguished only by his beautiful dream. He called this creation of his mind, “My lady, Dulcinea.” She was his Helen of Troy, the Galatea of his Pygmalion, the perfect girl-next-door. All that Quixote accomplished, everything he endured was in Dulcinea’s name and for her honor. (She was his Jungian anima; that perfect woman who exists in the mind of every man. Likewise, the animus is Jung’s name for the “real man” that exists in the mind of every woman.)Quixote’s Dulcinea was, in reality,&nbsp;a common village girl named Aldonza Lorenzo and she was completely unaware that Quixote existed. But no matter. A dream is a dream.Small business people are driven&nbsp;by beautiful dreams of common things: a better school for the kids, a house in a nicer neighborhood, a car, a boat, travel to exotic places filled with natives who, strangely, are also dreaming of escape. But no matter. A dream is a dream.Quixote lived&nbsp;in a world populated by characters and monsters of his own making.&nbsp;So do we all.An immortal comic strip&nbsp;featuring an adventurous 6-year old boy with a toy tiger and a boundless imagination: Calvin is Quixote and Hobbes, the tiger, is Sancho Panza. In one of my favorite episodes, Calvin says,“C’mon,&nbsp;let’s go try to find a big poisonous snake!”?Hobbes asks, “What will we do if we see one?”?Calvin replies, “Are you kidding? We’ll scare ourselves silly and run around in circles, screaming like a bunch of loons!”Hobbes sighs, “I look forward to when we’re old enough to get our morning jolt from coffee.”Peering through the grass, Calvin replies, “Ahh, I’ll bet that wears off quicker.”Are any of us older than 6?I am, by career choice,&nbsp;an ad man, and storytelling is at the heart of good advertising. Did you know that every literary device, every storytelling tool ever crafted, made its debut in 1605 in Miguel de Cervantes’&nbsp;Don Quixote de La Mancha,&nbsp;the first novel ever written?It is impossible for a storyteller&nbsp;to detach himself completely from Quixote. But this mythical man who jousted with windmills is not the only icon of our little school.Wizard Academy takes its name&nbsp;from a group of guys we meet in the second chapter of Matthew, the first book in the Christian new testament. These “wise-ards” see a star in the sky, attach special significance to it, and set off in the darkness to discover where it might lead them. Remember that star in the darkness as you consider these lyrics written by Joe Darion for the wildly successful Broadway musical,&nbsp;Man of La Mancha:To dream the impossible dream,to fight the unbeatable foe,to bear with unbearable sorrow,to run where the brave dare not go.To right the unrightable wrong,to love pure and chaste from afar,to try when your arms are too weary,to reach the unreachable star.This is my quest,to follow that star –no matter how hopeless,no matter how far.To fight for the rightwithout question or pause,to be willing to march into hellfor a heavenly cause.And I know if I’ll only be trueto this glorious questthat my heart will be peaceful and calmwhen I’m laid to my rest.And the world will be better for this:that one man scorned and covered with scarsstill strove with his last ounce of courageto reach the unreachable stars!“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime,you’re not thinking big enough.” – Wes JacksonThe rotation

A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity.Let me qualify that.&nbsp;A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity&nbsp;if your goal is to make money.The most profitable&nbsp;form of creativity is to repurpose the proven.Do you want&nbsp;to put together a group of colors that create a powerful effect? Maybe for a website or a sign or a brochure or a living room?Common sense&nbsp;will tell you to hire an expert. That expert will ask you to describe the feelings you want the color scheme to conjure and then he or she will aim all their education, talent and experience toward doing what has already been done by minds far greater than their own.Yes, common sense would tell you&nbsp;to hire a talented expert. But common sense is merely the name we give the collection of prejudices we acquire before the age of eighteen. (If you feel you’ve heard that statement before, it’s because Albert Einstein famously said it in the 1952 book,&nbsp;Mathematics, Queen and Servant of the Sciences.)Common sense is overrated.An enlightened soul&nbsp;who has escaped the boundaries of common sense will quietly inquire of the giants whose footprints went deep into the earth, those giants whose fingerprints can be found on the hearts of billions of people they have touched.Why pay a lightweight for advice&nbsp;when you can consult Gustav Klimt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh for free?(1.) Go online&nbsp;and select a series of world-famous paintings whose color palettes have the mojo you seek. (Mojo, by the way, is just the name we give to high-voltage emotional juju. Einstein didn’t say this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true, anyway.)(2.) Download&nbsp;only the paintings of artists who rocked the world.(3.) Import&nbsp;those paintings into Photoshop and sample each of the four or five principal colors. Click a couple of buttons to reveal the precise CMYK formulation of each. BAM!&nbsp;Trust me,&nbsp;those colors will work fabulously well together.No, don’t trust me.&nbsp;Trust the giants.Lee Iacocca was chosen&nbsp;as one of Ford Motor Company’s ten “Whiz Kids” in 1946. But every time young Lee would go to his boss with a suggestion, his boss would say, “Show me where it has worked.”Your first impression of this man&nbsp;is that he was a follower, a lemming, a conformist with no courage or imagination, right? But Iacocca credits that boss as being the man responsible for all his later successes. Iacocca learned from him a pivotal lesson: if an idea is truly brilliant, you’ll find examples of its successful implementation scattered throughout history.The road&nbsp;to bankruptcy court is flanked on both sides by bright-eyed “creative people” dripping with enthusiasm. Ask any one of them for directions. They’ll make sure you get there.The secret of guaranteed success&nbsp;is to import a tested and reliable methodology into a business category where it has never been used.Repurpose the proven.They’ll call you&nbsp;a brilliant creative innovator. You might even be able to patent your breakthrough.But you and I&nbsp;know the truth. You’re merely an insightful historian.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

We have, for the most part, the feelings we choose to have.Please don’t be angry with me&nbsp;if you prefer to be tragic. I do not deny you this choice. I deny only that you have no escape.Our feelings&nbsp;in the first moment are triggered by our circumstances. Happy news. Sad news. News that makes us angry. But in the second moment, and the third, our feelings are the produce of our chosen perspective.What angle of view&nbsp;do you choose when you examine the day that lies ahead of you and all the days that lie behind? What is your perspective? Where do you aim your eyes? What produce do you grow in the soil of your imagination and the sunshine of your life?Jeanne Hébuterne&nbsp;was a 19 year-old art student in 1917 who fell deeply in love with a dashing Italian artist named Amedeo Modigliani. A year later, their daughter was born out of wedlock and the Hébuterne family was horrified. When that little girl was 2, Modigliani died. The next day Jeanne Hébuterne threw herself out a fifth-story window. She was only 22 years old.Modigliani’s sister&nbsp;adopted the little girl and raised her as her own.The girl inherited no art. She died in 1984.What do you suppose&nbsp;the little girl felt as she was growing up? Did she say,“My father&nbsp;was an alcoholic, drug-addicted loon who refused to marry my mother when she became pregnant and my mother did not love me enough to raise me. She killed herself the day after my father died.”Persons who would choose this perspective,&nbsp;and the feelings that accompany it, always say they are being “honest and realistic.”But is that really true?Would this perspective be any less honest or realistic?“My father&nbsp;was an artist whose paintings of my mother sell for many tens of millions of dollars. My mother was so deeply in love that she literally could not live without him. I am the product of that love.”I do not know&nbsp;what the little girl chose to think, and feel, and believe.I know only&nbsp;that she had a choice.As do you.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Use half as many words and they’ll hit twice as hard.Every writer knows it.Salespeople need to learn it.A few weeks ago&nbsp;I invested a day of training in the telephone staff of a client of mine and doubled their close rate as a result.“You’re working way too hard at it,”&nbsp;I said. “These people are calling you, remember? They’re calling you because they believe your company can solve their problem. In your mind, you’re being enthusiastic. But you’re coming across as anxious and nervous and defensive and combative. You’re not talking these callers&nbsp;into&nbsp;buying from you, you’re talking them&nbsp;out&nbsp;of it.”Selling is a transfer of confidence.&nbsp;The seller must transfer his or her confidence in the product to the buyer. When you babble, you don’t sound confident.When you&nbsp;act like the customer has asked the wrong question, you’re basically telling them that they’ve hit you where you’re weak.Always answer questions AS ASKED.&nbsp;This means that you should focus your energies on providing the simplest answer in the fewest words. If your customer wants to know more, they’ll ask you a follow-up question.Pennie and I know a woman&nbsp;with a 13 year-old son who recently said to her, “Mom, what is cunnilingus?”With no hesitation whatsoever,&nbsp;she answered, “That’s when a woman gives sexual pleasure to another woman.”He shrugged&nbsp;and said, “Oh,” and the conversation was over.Had our friend raised an eyebrow,&nbsp;acted surprised, gotten flustered, or asked, “Where did you hear that word?” the whole thing could have escalated into something it didn’t need to become.Our friend is a brilliant woman&nbsp;who gave a simple answer to an innocent question. She didn’t read anything into it. She is, in my opinion, an example of the perfect salesperson for 2013.When you provide&nbsp;simple and straightforward answers to your customer’s questions, they feel that you’re there for them. But when they provide ears for your rambling monologues, they begin to feel they’re there for you.Be there for your customer.&nbsp;Don’t make them be there for you.I was going to write&nbsp;a book about this, but then I found it has already been written. Dan Pink is a brilliant researcher as well as an insightful and entertaining writer. I haven’t yet read his newest book,&nbsp;To Sell is Human,&nbsp;but I did read the transcript of an interview he gave NPR.“We have this idea&nbsp;that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance — that is, how many times the cash register actually rings — the correlation’s almost zero. It’s really quite remarkable.“Let’s think about a spectrum&nbsp;on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely introverted, 7 is extremely extroverted: The 6s and 7s — the people who get hired, the gregarious, backslapping types of the stereotype — they’re not very good. OK, now, why? … They’re just spending too much time talking. … They don’t know when to shut up. They don’t listen very well; they’re not attuned to the other person; they sometimes can overwhelm people.”The art of selling&nbsp;has changed more in the past ten years than in the previous hundred.Ten years ago,&nbsp;we had to rely on the seller to provide expert information. Today we’re just a few clicks away from anything we want to know.Salespeople&nbsp;are certainly necessary, but the roles they play have changed dramatically.Next week&nbsp;I’ll be teaching a 2-day workshop at Wizard Academy,&nbsp;“How to Advertise in a Noisy World.”&nbsp;I could just as easily have called it, “How to Sell in 2013.”If you can’t come to Austin&nbsp;for the workshop,...

But at Least You're in the Parade"When your friend&nbsp;says something interesting, write it down. Better yet, post it online and give your friend eternal life.I was whining to Rich Mann&nbsp;over a plate of sushi one day when he reminded me to shut up and be happy. Rich didn’t even look up when he said it. He just mumbled, ‘You may be shoveling horse manure but at least you’re in the parade,’ while trying to decide whether to chopstick a slice of tuna or a piece of spider roll. But his words fell on me like Robert Frost’s *Dust of Snow.&nbsp;I smiled, pulled a receipt from my wallet, scribbled Rich’s statement on it, then posted it in the random quotes database at MondayMorningMemo.com.Rich’s words&nbsp;reminded me of something Tom Grimes taught me about tribes. “Every tribe has a hierarchy,” he said.“Give me an example.”“A football team&nbsp;has a trainer who bandages the players. And if you’re the third-string quarterback who never gets put into the game, you can still look at the trainer and say to yourself, ‘Well at least I’m not THAT guy.’ But even THAT guy – the lowest ranked member of the tribe – gets to watch the games for free from the best seat in stadium and chat with the players in the locker room. Never forget, THAT guy is still part of the team.”“You may be&nbsp;shoveling horse manure, but at least you’re in the parade.”What horse manure&nbsp;have you been shoveling&nbsp;in this most wonderful of all parades?“When I hear&nbsp;somebody sigh that life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?'” – Sydney J. HarrisElmer Zubiate&nbsp;(Zoo-be-AH-tay) grew up embarrassed that his name was Elmer. After losing everything he owned in 2005, Elmer fought like a tiger to start a little HVAC business in San Antonio. Last year he decided to make the most of the whole Elmer thing. This is what he put on the radio:There’s Elmer Fudd, Elmer’s Glue, and ME, Elmer Zubiate of Elmer’s One-Hour Air Conditioning and Heating. We’ll be there within one hour of the time we promised you or whatever you need is free.&nbsp;No charge.&nbsp;There’s NO WAY you’re going to wait for US all day. Great prices. Fabulous service. Elmer’s One-Hour.Dial two one oh, thirty-three Elmer.[JINGLE]Two one oh, thirty-three ElmerLast year, One-Hour Elmer&nbsp;did $3.8 million and is trending toward $6 million in 2013. We have every expectation that Elmer will bag $12 million in 2015.I have another friend –&nbsp;and I promise I’m not making this up – who feels the great tragedy of his life was that he inherited 31 million dollars. The way he tells it, he’s never really recovered from that horrible day. He used to moan about it until I finally said, “Shut up, you crybaby. Maybe we should take part of that cash and buy you a spine. And then maybe we can hire an old woman to knit you a pair of balls.”Strangely, I think he still likes me.You want to hear something&nbsp;even stranger than that? I actually kind of agree with him: it would be truly horrible to wake up one day and learn that nothing in life required your effort anymore; all you had to do is point and it would be handed to you.It is good to be Elmer.&nbsp;It is good to be in the parade.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

Today I’m going to tell you&nbsp;3 new things you need to know about.My enthusiasm&nbsp;will probably make it sound like I’m giving you a sales pitch. Sorry about that. If you’re not in the mood, the tiniest motion of a finger will take you to a new and different place…You decided to stay?&nbsp;I think you’ll be glad you did.YouTube. Not FaceBook.Throughout the year I’ve been saying to students of Wizard Academy, “YouTube will deliver one trillion views during the 365 short days of 2012. It’s a message delivery vehicle that has yet to be maximized. YouTube’s potential to grow a business is vastly greater than FaceBook. The number of search strings typed into YouTube each day is second only to Google.”The actual number of views in 2012&nbsp;turned out to be 1.46 trillion. Let’s put that in perspective:One million seconds is about 12 days.&nbsp;tick-tick-tick-tickOne billion seconds is nearly 32 years.&nbsp;tick-tick-tickOne trillion seconds is 31,688 years.This means 46,264 people&nbsp;per second&nbsp;click to watch a YouTube video 24/7/365. Nearly 3 million per minute, 4 billion per day. That’s 13 times the population of the United States&nbsp;every day.*You have things to say.&nbsp;Why not say them to the world?#1 VidBetter is a video production systemthat lets goobers like you and me crank out YouTube videos that look like big money. And there’s no learning curve with VidBetter. All the tricky stuff has been fully automated. The hardware comes in a box. Your professional editors are in the cloud and available to you 24/7.&nbsp;Take a look.#2 Do you talk better than you write?Dave Young and Paul Boomer have created a content-extraction service that pulls your very best out of you and puts it on paper. It’s a fabulous way to create witty and intelligent blog posts, craft award-winning web copy, record relaxed and informative podcasts, write training manuals, create policy and procedure documents, whatever it is you need to get out of your head and onto the web or onto paper. All you have to do is talk on the phone to a professional interviewer. BAM. The whole thing is recorded, transcribed, edited, and given back to you in whatever format you desire. These guys will make you sound like a genius.&nbsp;Check it out.#3 Become a happier you.Kyle Cease was voted the #1 comedian on Comedy Central in 2009 but his real passion is for transformative change. I’ve watched him lead his classmates through exercises that made a profound difference in their thought processes, their attitudes, and their expectations. When his 2-day class was announced a couple of weeks ago, the classmates who had already met him snapped up all the rooms in Engelbrecht House immediately. If you want 2013 to be VERY DIFFERENT than 2012,&nbsp;be at this class.&nbsp;Sleep in a hotel. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll catch Kyle’s class next time. Kyle did more than 200 shows last year and right now he’s hotter than ever. It took weeks to find dates for this class that would work in his schedule for 2013. It will be awhile before we can get Kyle back to Austin. This will be a highly interactive, fast paced, experiential workshop. You will definitely leave better than you came.I shared this stuff with you today&nbsp;because I want you to have the happiest possible 2013. I want you to be energized and productive. I apologize if I sounded like I was making a sales pitch. I’m an ad writer, remember? I sound like I’m making a sales pitch when I pray.But God’s okay with that.&nbsp;He understands.Hopefully&nbsp;you...

I recently spent a day&nbsp;with two lawyers who practice the same legal specialty. We’ll call them Nick and Ralph. They live on opposite sides of the country. They met at a conference and became friends.Nick read my books,&nbsp;attended Wizard Academy, and decided to go fishing for customers with a net. He put his money in radio.Ralph thought it made more sense&nbsp;to target only those people in immediate need of a lawyer within his specialty. Ralph went fishing with a hook called Pay-Per-Click.Ralph said,&nbsp;“Nick, you’re hunting with a shotgun. I’m hunting with a rifle.” Ralph believes in targeting, you see. That’s why he fishes with a hook and catches just one fish at a time. But you don’t build a widespread reputation by waiting until your customer needs you and then targeting them through Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click.Nick the Net&nbsp;chose to win the public before they needed his services. Nick the Net wanted everyone in the city to know about him, even if many of them would never need his services. Nick the Net chose to win the hearts of the people 52 weeks a year.Ralph the Hook,&nbsp;by the way, practices law in a trade area that offers 22 times the potential of the area served by Nick the Net.Both men&nbsp;are smart and aggressive. They plunged. Hard.Ralph the Hook spends $180,000&nbsp;per month on Search Engine Optimization, online marketing consultants, and&nbsp;locally targeted Pay-Per-Click. His annual ad budget of $2,160,000 brings in slightly less than $6 million per year in legal fees, leaving Ralph with a little less than $4 million for gas money. Not bad.One year ago, Nick the Net&nbsp;was spending $30,000 per month on radio. His $360,000 ad budget brought in $1.4 million the previous year in legal fees, leaving Nick with a little more than $1 million to spend on lunch.NOTE:&nbsp;Nick brought in 1/4 as much money but spent only 1/6 as much on ads.And then&nbsp;Nick asked me to begin writing his ads. This year he and I brought in $4.2 million with that same $30,000/mo. ad budget.About 6 weeks ago,&nbsp;Nick said he wanted me to add another $20,000/mo. to his radio budget. I said, “Not yet. First we need to improve your close rate.”“But we’re closing 30 percent&nbsp;of the people who call us,” answered Nick, “Ralph the Hook is closing barely 10 percent of his online leads.”When you advertise 52 weeks a year&nbsp;on the radio, you become a household word. Yours is the name the customer thinks of first and feels the best about. The leads brought in through radio are much warmer than the leads generated through pay-per-click.“Nick,” I said,&nbsp;“our close rate should be up around 60 percent. Bring all the people who answer your phone to Austin for a day of training.”Nick brought them to Austin for a day.&nbsp;They listened. They learned.At the end of the day,&nbsp;Nick drove his people to the airport and sent them home to answer the phones. Nick then returned to my office with his buddy, Ralph the Hook. As a favor to Nick, I spent a couple of hours with Ralph. Ralph, of course, only wanted to know “how to choose the right radio station.”Ralph the Hook still believes&nbsp;that “targeting the right customer” is the secret to growing a business.But Nick and I believe&nbsp;in building a widespread reputation with a warm predisposition in the hearts of the general, untargeted public.What do you believe?Common sense&nbsp;says targeting would be more efficient, right?My thirty years&nbsp;of experience say otherwise.&nbsp;One last thing:&nbsp;Nick’s telephone team is now closing more than 60 percent of all incoming leads. This means Nick the Net will likely do $8.4 million in 2013 with no increase in ad budget and no increase in sales opportunities.<a href="http://mondaymemo.wpengine.com/kraken" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

The Miraculous Disappearance of Black-and-WhiteMost of the choices&nbsp;we make have effects we did not anticipate. This is due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.“Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and&nbsp;popular opinion&nbsp;have largely ignored it.”– Rob Norton, author of&nbsp;The Concise Encyclopedia of EconomicsHere’s an example&nbsp;of politicians ignoring it: The Chinese government introduced the one-child policy in 1978 as a measure to curb China’s population growth. Thirty-four years later,“The policy has been implicated in an increase in forced abortions, female infanticide, and underreporting of female births, and has been suggested as a possible cause behind China’s gender imbalance.”-&nbsp;WikipediaLimited to just one child,&nbsp;many families opted for a boy because men have always had more power in Chinese society.The unintended consequence&nbsp;of the one-child policy is that marriageable young Chinese women are in extremely short supply. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, unmarried men between 20 and 44 already outnumber their female counterparts 2 to 1.* This gives young Chinese women amazing power.Score one for poetic justice.All this seems&nbsp;perfectly reasonable in hindsight, but did anyone see it coming 34 years ago?Before you wag your finger&nbsp;at those Chinese parents, consider what American parents were saying to their daughters during those same years,“Why dream of being a nurse when you can become a doctor? Don’t be a secretary, become a CEO. Make something of your life! You can always get married AFTER you’ve established your career.”Thus warned&nbsp;against becoming that ultimate of losers –&nbsp;a stay at home Mom&nbsp;– American girls grew up and became “successful” by foregoing the creation of a family.And what&nbsp;did we tell our boys?“If you don’t go to college, you doom yourself to be a loser, son; a common, blue-collar laborer who gets no respect, no admiration, no love. Please, son, go to college. Don’t be a loser.”Thirty-four years later&nbsp;we have millions of college-educated, unmarried men and women returning to live in their childhood bedrooms at Mom’s and Dad’s house because they can’t support themselves, much less pay off the tens of thousands of dollars they owe in student loans. There are plenty of good-paying jobs out there, but most of them require a technical skill; something not taught in college.The Unintended Consequences&nbsp;of the advice America gave its children is that the American subgroup Bill O’Reilly likes to call “Traditional America” (code for “white,”) no longer controls the outcome of elections. Ironically, it is the subgroups who continue to value motherhood and skilled labor that have become the deciders of America’s future.And I,&nbsp;for one, have no problem with that.America has a surplus&nbsp;of young adults empowered with pointless educations and staggering student loans. For now, at least, it would appear the spotlight belongs to men and women who are skilled in a trade, who take pride in the work of their hands; chefs and carpenters, plumbers and electricians, mechanics and technicians and jewelers who can set a diamond in gold.The American Success Myth&nbsp;of the 20th Century taught us to buy things we didn’t need with money we didn’t have to impress people we didn’t like. We were taught,&nbsp;“Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”So we chased&nbsp;happiness with dollars in our hands and it fled from us faster than we could run. Exhausted, we sat down and learned the truth:“The key to happiness is an ability to celebrate the ordinary.”Family.&nbsp;Friends. Food. Fun.Having been born&nbsp;into a 1958 America that was strictly...

Voltaire&nbsp;is often quoted as having said it, but he never did.It was actually&nbsp;Pierre de Beaumarchais in 1775, just a few months before Thomas and George and Ben and the boys wrote their scathing letter to England’s king.Beaumarchais&nbsp;was working on the second scene in the first act of&nbsp;The Barber of Seville,&nbsp;when it hit him, “Aujourd’hui ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.”“Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.”Now before you&nbsp;get all hinky-dink and say, “But George Washington didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence,” allow me to assure you that my statement is six times correct: Clymer, Read, Ross, Taylor, Walton and Wythe.&nbsp;Georges all.&nbsp;Declaration signers.Isn’t it funny&nbsp;how the mind makes assumptions based on fragments of information? I gave you 1775, Thomas, George, Ben and the boys, and a letter to England’s king. You thought, “Revolution, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and the founding fathers, and The Declaration of Independence they sent to King George.”Your mind filled in the empty spaces.But&nbsp;what if there were no empty spaces?What&nbsp;if&nbsp;the mental bandwidth of your attention was filled with other information?Fill some of that vacancy&nbsp;with music and you’ve got a song.Crowd the remaining emptiness&nbsp;with images and actions and you’ve got a movie. Make it participatory and you’ve got a video game, but now we’re introducing an entirely different lesson…Allow me to get back on track:&nbsp;song lyrics don’t have to make sense because words that are wrapped in music aren’t held to the same level of scrutiny as words that must stand on their own.Every language&nbsp;is made of obstruent and sonorant phonemes with the vowels of the language supplying the musical tones. The letters of the alphabet are not phonemes. The&nbsp;sounds&nbsp;represented by those letters – and certain combinations of letters such as sh, th, ch, ng, – the&nbsp;sounds&nbsp;are the phonemes. (I’m not making this stuff up. It is a studied and known science. We can look further into it in the rabbit hole, if you like.)Humans are uniquely gifted&nbsp;to attach complex meanings to sound. Some of these sound-messages are the combinations of phonemes we call words, but a complex sound-message&nbsp;without&nbsp;phonemes is called music. Mix phonemes with music and you’ve got a song.Words wrapped in music&nbsp;are no longer strictly words, but components of a complexly woven auditory tapestry with additional messages embedded in the pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, interval and contour of the tune. Song lyrics cannot be easily evaluated until they’ve been separated from the music that has swallowed them.When the music feels happy,&nbsp;we usually think of the song as being happy, even when the lyrics are tragic. When the music is sad, we feel the song is sad even when the lyrics are joyful. When the music is triumphant, we feel the song is triumphant even though its lyrics may describe rejection and defeat.On September 12, 2001,&nbsp;the day after 9-11, the most-played song in America was Bruce Springsteen’s&nbsp;Born in the USA.&nbsp;This is a fact. Radio stations across America wanted to lift the mood, remind us of our heritage and defy Osama Bin Laden, so they filled the sky with our favorite anthem to American exceptionalism:“Born down in a dead man’s town,The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.You end up like a dog that’s been beat too muchTill you spend half your life just covering up.Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A….Those lyrics&nbsp;get increasingly sad, describing rejection and defeat without redemption, as a returning Viet Nam vet can’t find a job even though he turns to the Veteran’s Administration for assistance. In the end, he winds up...

An auction house&nbsp;is an island of cast-offs and misfits where the rejected and broken feel finally at home.I am&nbsp;speaking&nbsp;of the merchandise, of course, not of the people.Perhaps&nbsp;I am speaking of the people, as well.From the age of 18,&nbsp;Pennie and I have searched for buried treasure in auction houses. When you collect the misfit and the broken, you quickly learn how to accentuate natural beauty and disguise the inevitable flaws. These are valuable skills for a marketing consultant.There is magic&nbsp;in that moment between Before and After.AThe most miraculous makeovers&nbsp;happen when the misfit is made of wood. Formby’s Conditioning Furniture Refinisher is an amazing solvent that dissolves old varnish, lacquer and shellac, gently melting the crackled, grimy layers of age into a homogenous, flowing liquid.It’s not a stripper, exactly.&nbsp;Formby’s refinishing solvent merely allows you to redistribute the accumulated weirdness that was already there, giving the piece a rich, original,&nbsp;old&nbsp;finish.Time&nbsp;is like Formby’s Refinisher; a solvent dissolving memories and events into one another, creating altogether new realities based only loosely upon the ones that were before.The past&nbsp;was&nbsp;reality.&nbsp;But it does not remain reality.What&nbsp;is today’s reality?&nbsp;Yours, I mean.My mind&nbsp;has been topsy-turvy for a year. Last month marked the first anniversary of the death of a lifelong friend. I am only just now beginning to regain my balance.A couple of weeks&nbsp;before the anniversary of his death, I contacted his right-hand man of many years and asked him to organize a “memory party” with good food and fine wine to be held on the anniversary of our pal’s departure. I sent a significant budget and asked that he invite everyone who might have a story to tell about our friend.I believe good stories&nbsp;need to be spoken into the living memories of others, a sort of cross-pollination of realities.The party was a big success.&nbsp;Lots of people came and I’m told the stories were wonderful. I’ve decided to make it an annual event.I suspect&nbsp;that in the not-too-distant future, citizens who never met my friend will be able to share sparkling memories of moments with him that never really happened.And it is possible&nbsp;that these true stories will be the most magic of all.Myths&nbsp;and legends&nbsp;are true, you see, even when they are not.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

A wise man&nbsp;sees both sides of a matter. The fool sees only one.The origin&nbsp;of the word “wizard” is wise-ard. It means wise man. Nothing more.The wise-ards of the Christmas Story&nbsp;followed a star, had an adventure, made a discovery and leaped onto the pages of history. What did they talk about along the way? Who did the cooking? What pressing issues did they leave unattended back home? What did they do with the rest of their lives? Where, when, and how did each of them die?We know only&nbsp;that they followed a star everyone else was content to ignore; that they were nonconformists with strange beliefs who had the courage of their convictions.They took action.&nbsp;They left home and found the thing they sought.How about you?&nbsp;Will you run with the big dogs or sit on the porch and bark at the postman? Talk is cheap, the buzzing of flies.&nbsp;I didn’t say that&nbsp;to hurt your feelings. I said it because I love you.What&nbsp;are you trying to accomplish?How&nbsp;will you measure progress-to-goal?Do&nbsp;you know what needs to happen next?Which&nbsp;star do you follow?An encounter&nbsp;with the wise man in the woods is part of every hero’s journey. Athena was the wise man in the woods for Odysseus. When Obi-Wan was gone, Luke went to Dagobah and Yoda became his wise man. Mr. Miyagi was wise-ard for the Karate Kid. Morpheus for Neo. Galadriel for Frodo.When you’re in the darkness of the forest&nbsp;– the belly of the whale – look around for the wise-ard who will help you complete your journey. The wise man in the woods exists only to assist the hero on his or her adventure.21st century&nbsp;wise-men-in-the-woods become faculty at Wizard Academy. Putting you together with them is why we built this place.Mark Huffman from Procter &amp; Gamble.Dave McInnis from PR Web.Tim Storm from FatWallet.comDean Rotbart from the&nbsp;Wall Street Journal.Greg Farrell from&nbsp;Bloomberg News.Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, Dr. Lori Barr, David Freeman, Michele Miller, Kyle Cease, Ze Frank, Jean Backus, Jeff Sexton, Rich Christiansen, Mark Fox, Dr. Richard D. Grant, Ken Brand, Dennis Collins and the unforgettable Beate Chelette.Wizard Academy is America’s small business institute,&nbsp;a training facility and think-tank for open-minded and courageous business people from around the world. The star you follow is entirely up to you. We simply prepare you for your journey, tell you what to expect on the road ahead, and celebrate your success when you find what you seek.Two or three days&nbsp;at the academy is an informative experience for some, transformative for others.I’ve rambled&nbsp;enough for one day. I thank you for your kind attention.As I bow at the waist&nbsp;and back slowly off&nbsp;the page, I pass along&nbsp;these carefully crafted words from heroes who carved their names deeply in the tree of life.“Life&nbsp;should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!'”– Hunter S. Thompson“If your life’s work&nbsp;can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”– Wes JacksonNever forget&nbsp;that failure is temporary, a moment quickly forgotten.&nbsp;2013 awaits you.&nbsp;Damn the torpedoes.Full speed ahead.Roy&nbsp;H. Williams

We can listen&nbsp;much faster than we speak. Consequently, a listener’s mind will wander when we take too long to make a point. This isn’t new. What is new, however, is the current trend toward voluntary, rapid distraction. Defenders of this practice call it ‘multi-tasking.’ But brain-imaging studies reveal that ‘multi-tasking’ is merely the switching of attention back and forth between two tasks.The danger of multi-tasking&nbsp;is that it trains the brain to be more easily distracted. Combine this with the exponential growth of information that assaults our brains each day and you’ll see why – and how – radio ads must change.Information saturation&nbsp;has risen to the point that an auditory neuroscientist at Brown University, Seth Horowitz, published a stern warning about it in the Nov. 9, 2012 issue of the&nbsp;New York Times:&nbsp;“Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.”In other words,&nbsp;few people these days can listen to a single voice drone on and on about a product or service for sixty, or even thirty, seconds. The only way for an ad to elbow its way into the customer’s fragmented attention is to become the most interesting and surprising thing that’s happening at that particular moment.Horowitz goes on&nbsp;to explain that focused attention is what separates mere hearing from active listening.&nbsp;“Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain.”1. The sudden loud noise&nbsp;that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.2. More complex attention&nbsp;kicks in when you hear your name called from across a room or a birdcall in an underground subway station. This stimulus-directed attention is controlled by pathways through the temporoparietal and inferior frontal cortex regions, mostly in the right hemisphere — areas that process raw, sensory input, but don’t concern themselves with what you should make of that sound.3. When you actually pay attention&nbsp;to something you’re listening to, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, a part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you’re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren’t as immediately important.A high percentage of radio ads are being tuned out&nbsp;because they are judged by the brain to be “not immediately important.” Radio has not yet embraced the giddy pace of 2012.To embrace the new pace:1.&nbsp;Talk faster, say more.2.&nbsp;Use big ideas, presented tightly.3.&nbsp;Introduce a new mental image every 3 to 5 seconds.4.&nbsp;Use fewer adjectives.5.&nbsp;Embrace unpredictable timing and intonation.6.&nbsp;Say things plainly. Bluntly, even.7.&nbsp;Emotion is good. Even negative emotion.8.&nbsp;Allow distinctly different voices to finish each other’s sentences.9.&nbsp;Prepare for lots of complaints.&nbsp;Listeners want to be able to ignore radio ads.&nbsp;When they can’t ignore your ads, they complain. A lot.10.&nbsp;Prepare to make more money.We have proven this technique works,&nbsp;but you can definitely take it too far: the confusion that results from going too far is a condition I call&nbsp;Cloud Atlas.&nbsp;(Those of you who are laughing right now have seen the movie.)Would you like to listen&nbsp;to a performance of...

Everyone wants to make&nbsp;the same three things,” the Princess said, “money, a name, and a difference. But our actions are dictated by the one we want most.”You can make a name for yourself&nbsp;– become famous – or you can make a lot of money in complete obscurity. Either way, people will consider you a success. But famous people with piles of money seem always to be haunted by the need to make a difference, don’t they?You’ve seen it. So have I.Getting&nbsp;is more fun than having.Building&nbsp;is more fun than maintaining.Giving&nbsp;is more fun than receiving. Just ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.Bob Buford says,&nbsp;“The first half of life is a quest for success, the second is a quest for significance.”Success&nbsp;is measured by the money and the name you’ve made.Significance&nbsp;is measured by the difference you’ve made.GOOD NEWS:&nbsp;Making a difference doesn’t always require money and it certainly doesn’t require a name.Significance is achieved by caring and doing.Caring without doing&nbsp;is the mark of frightened, tentative, whiners. That’s right; small people complain. But big people don’t whine. They swing the hammer, bang the problem, sing a song and alter the world.In other words, shut up and do something.Our world is full of people&nbsp;who have achieved success without significance. Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote about these people 115 years ago:Whenever Richard Cory went down town,?We people on the pavement looked at him:?He was a gentleman from sole to crown,?Clean favored,* and imperially slim.??And he was always quietly arrayed,?And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,?‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.??And he was rich – yes, richer than a king -?And admirably schooled in every grace:?In short, he was everything?To make us wish we were in his place.??So on we worked, and waited for the light,?And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;? And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,?Went home and put a bullet through his head.The day is young.&nbsp;There’s still plenty of time to make a difference.Someone&nbsp;should have told Richard.&nbsp;Roy&nbsp;H. Williams&nbsp;* good-looking