Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo (Roy H. Williams)

Poetry is not limited to poets.

When you

1. say more

2. 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.”1

In 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.”2

Frederik 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 Martine

Arkady 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 novelist

Poetry 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.

1. People will pay close attention when you speak.
2. Your ads will produce miraculous results.
3. Your meetings will be shorter and more productive.
4. 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. Williams

1The Annals of the Heechee, p. 91

2 The Other End of Time, chap. 15

3A Desolation Called Peace, p. 269

4Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, p.95

5All the Light We Cannot See, p. 24

He 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.

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 encountered a single personality three times, or three personalities once?

Advertising rarely makes the sale. It merely engages the customer in the early stages of a conversation. If the reader/listener/viewer of your ad has purchased from you in the past and had a good experience, it’s possible the ad will cause him or her to make immediate contact with your business.

But customers who are less familiar with you will hope to extend the conversation and learn more about you by visiting your 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 biggest problem remains. Will your people 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 with

We Believe

(Statements that capture the Personality and Promises, Processes and Benefits of your company.)

Personality makes the customer feel they know you.

Promises make the customer feel secure.

Processes give credibility to your Promises.

Benefits are what the customer is hoping to experience.

(Your Origin Story is essentially the backstory of We Believe. 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 Chapter Ten of Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It. You can read that chapter by following the hyperlink in the previous sentence, or you can 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; a business book presented as dialogue.

Roy H. Williams

About 15 years ago I concluded that a medium-impact broadcast ad should be replaced only after the typical listener has heard it at least 12 times, and a low-impact ad should be replaced after achieving a frequency of 20. I arrived at these conclusions by carefully monitoring the results of radio campaigns of clients around the country.

But the times have changed, and so have you and I. It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

My most current research clearly indicates that today's moderate-impact broadcast ad begins to show diminishing returns after achieving a frequency of only 8 to 10. Let a listener hear the same ad 12 times or more and you'll see clearly diminished effectiveness after achieving a frequency of 8 to 10. It appears that our brains have learned to more quickly recognize what we've heard before, and to subconsciously tune it out.

Dang. This is means we've got to write 20 to 50 percent more ads in every 52-week campaign if we're going to keep our message at maximum effectiveness.

One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we're already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them. What this means is that the first week of every new series of ads will continue to yield softer results than you can expect to see in weeks two and three.

Neurologically, all of this happens in the phonological loop, one of the 3 functions of Working Memory just forward of Heschl's Gyrus and Broca's area in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the left hemisphere of your brain. Broca's area is also known as Brodmann's area 44. And just interior to it is the Nucleus Accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain.

Okay, I'll admit it… I said all that just to impress you. I wonder why I do that. Do you figure perhaps I'm insecure about my lack of education? Or is it just that I like to show off? I should probably give that some thought.

Oh well. That's pretty much all I've got to say today.

Oh! One last thing: Wizard Academy is offering a Free, Public-Sampler Seminar on Saturday afternoon, August 19 in palatial Tuscan Hall. I'll be delivering a tantalizing series of multimedia previews and teasers about each of the new, upcoming courses at Wizard Academy. It's going to be lots of fun. We won't be starting until 2 in the afternoon, so you'll have plenty of time to fly into Austin on Saturday morning from wherever you happen to be. We'll keep going until probably 9 or 10 that night because we want you to see how magical the Wizard Academy campus becomes after dark. But don't worry, we're going to provide a nice evening meal for you. No charge. We know you'll be back to take some classes later. We just take the cost of it from our ad budget.

And that, my friend, is what you call “transparency.”

I hope you approve.

Roy H. Williams

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...

Reliable data 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. The number of riders that die at 10 or 20 miles per hour is likely to be zero. There is a threshold speed at which the curve becomes dangerous. Any extrapolation that crosses that threshold is certain to be inaccurate.

If you understand 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 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 above that numerical threshold will have no correlation to deaths at speeds below it. In effect, the laws of math are suddenly altered.

You and I know 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 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 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 “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 the threshold of disappointment at which once-loyal customers abandon ship.

When Michael Eisner came to Disney in 1984, 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 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 traditions

is a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.”

– The Monday Morning Memo for July 14, 2014

“In 2003, Roy E. Disney resigned 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,...

I thought Bill Clinton was a good president for the same reason I thought Ronald Reagan was good; both were excellent head cheerleaders.

Their politics, personalities and characters were different, but each had a similar ability to keep things from spinning out of control.

Every organization has a head cheerleader.

Their business card usually says “manager.”

The head cheerleader’s job is to keep talented hotheads, sycophantic suck-ups, whining excuse-makers, moon-eyed lunatics and plodding paranoids all headed in the same general direction. They have to make everyone feel like everything is going to be all right. 

Are there really people who can do this job?

Thrown into the deep water at 26, I was possibly the worst manager ever to assume the position. But over the years I’ve had a chance to observe the great ones, and I’ve noticed an unusual but recurrent characteristic: Great managers are rarely excellent at any of the things they manage.

Great coaches are great, not because they were superstars, but because they know how to awaken the star that sleeps in each of the players around them.

Great managers don’t show you photos from their own vacation, they ask to see the photos from yours. And it makes them happy to see you had a wonderful time.

Great managers look for things to praise in their people, knowing that it takes 7 positive strokes to recover from each negative reprimand. Think about it. If seven out of eight encounters we receive an authentic, affirming comment, a bit of happy news or a piece of valuable insight from our boss, we love to see them coming down the hall. But if the typical encounter leaves us deflated, discouraged or scared, our hearts sink when we see the manager coming.

Do your people love to see you coming? If not, begin looking for things to praise. Keep your ratio of positive comments 7 times higher than your negative ones and they’ll soon begin to smile when they see you appear. Their newfound attitude and confidence will bring new levels of productivity. And all because you believed they could do it and made them believe it, too.

Great managers are never afraid to hire people better than themselves.

Each of the 217 times David Ogilvy opened a new office for Ogilvy & Mather, he left a set of Russian nesting dolls on the desk of the incoming manager. When the manager removed the top half from the largest of these bowling pin-shaped dolls, he or she found a slightly smaller doll inside. This continued until the manager came to the tiniest doll and retrieved from its interior what looked to be the note from a fortune cookie: “If each of us hires people smaller than ourselves, we shall become a company of midgets. But if each of us hires people bigger than ourselves, we shall become a company of giants. – David Ogilvy.”

Now walk down the hall and find a sleeping superstar disguised as a plodding paranoid. For each of the next 21 days, compliment that person every time you see them take a right action.

Then prepare to meet a whole new employee on the 22nd day. Don’t be surprised if they have the same name as the plodding paranoid that used to stink up the place.

Go. The hallway awaits you.

Roy H. Williams

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

You’re reading this and I’m honored, because you delete far more emails than you open.

Which others do you open?

I know, of course, that you read emails from your closest friends and family. But are there any newsletters, blog posts or subscriptions that you open more often than not? Can you pick a single favorite you’d be willing to share?

I was crafting an altogether different Monday Morning Memo when “ding” my computer let me know an email had arrived. I glanced at the time and said, “That will be Exley.”

And it was.

I’ve known Richard Exley for 30 years. We met when he was a struggling preacher holding church in a school gymnasium and I was a bright-eyed advertising salesman trying to make a living on straight commission. I never attended his church but we often had lunch together.  Although Richard and I have spoken only about 5 times in the past 25 years, we continue to be important to one another. You have friends like that, don’t you?

Take comfort. Frequency of communication does not equal depth of relationship.

Richard began sending out a daily One-Minute Devotional about a year ago.  Like any good writer, Richard nudges my mind into green fields where it might not otherwise have wandered.

“I don’t like to think of myself as a materialistic person but driving away from the Highway 12 East storage complex I could hardly come to any other conclusion. For nine years I paid almost $40 a month to store things I haven’t used in nearly a decade. Add it up – nine years at $444 a year comes to $3,996.”

Richard’s thoughts interest me because he notices all kinds of things that most people don’t. This was his greeting last Christmas:

A“There is not a shred of evidence to indicate that the shepherds were in any way special; nothing to suggest that there was anything in their spirit, or nature, or lifestyle that predisposed them to receive the angelic announcement of the savior’s birth. Which means that God doesn’t just come to religious people in church but to undeserving people the world over, be it lepers or lunatics, shepherds or Samaritans, or even women taken in adultery.”

Sometimes Richard offers grandfatherly advice.

“If you have the courage to follow your heart’s desire you will usually gravitate to your area of giftedness. You may not end up in the most prestigious position, or land the best-paying job, but you will have a more fulfilling life.”

I give Richard Exley 60 seconds each day and I consider it a good investment.

“Don’t mistake recklessness for boldness. Boldness is a calculated risk based on the best possible information.”

“Forgiving those who have wronged us is often a process rather than a single event.”

I asked my friend Richard to record these quotes in his own voice because I wanted to ask your opinion: Is it just me, or does he sound a little bit like Sean Connery? Every time I hear Richard I expect him to say, “Bond. James Bond.” 

Now it’s your turn. I want you to tell the rest of us about a daily or weekly email you always open. But just one. Give us a link to it. Tell us what you get from it that causes you to always open it. I’ve told Indiana Beagle to post all submissions in next week’s rabbit hole. But this is the rule: you must select just ONE subscription to share with us. If you send...

You must attempt the ridiculous to accomplish the miraculous.

David sees a giant

and says, “I will defeat him.”

Everyone else sees a giant, as well.

David walks toward the giant with his sling

and BANG, David is king.

That’s a favorite story everywhere. Here’s another.

Don Quixote sees a giant

and 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 alumni 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 a $10,000 cash prize for him.

Is he/she you?

The purpose of the Quixote’s Windmill Prize

is 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 video

before 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. Anyone can enter. You do not have to be an alumnus of Wizard Academy.

2. Your story must be true and verifiable.

3. 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. You must have learned a lesson that has value.

5. 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. The winner will be named on April 23, 2014.

7. 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. 

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. How good was the idea?

Tell us why it made sense at the time. 7 x 100 points

2. How aggressively did you pursue it?

Make us feel your courage, your creativity, your determination. 7 x 100 points

3. 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? 7 x 100 points

4. What did you learn?

How valuable will your advice be to the rest of us? 7 x 100 points

5. How well do you tell your story?

This is where you get style points for lighting, color, sound quality, graphics, special effects, humor… 7 x 100 points

Have you tried and failed? 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...

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 West

Considering 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...

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 level of organization so vast the human 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: something is wrong, but somehow it fits.

Flaws, mistakes, anomalies, gaps and disturbances are the essential elements of style.

Look for a moment at the image at the top of this page. There are several things wrong with it, but each of these is unconsciously – or consciously – reconciled in your mind.

These are a few of the wrong or off-balance things:

1. The upper left triangle is slightly higher than the one on the right.

2. The capital letter A in Academy lacks a crossbar. It also drops slightly below the line of the other letters.

3. The left leg of the W in wizard is too long.

4. There is a single star in the sky.

But then your mind begins to see how these mistakes fit a bigger pattern.

1. The negative space between the triangles forms an implied W whose left leg is slightly longer than the one on the right, a perfect echo of the W in wizard.

2. The center peak of this negative space W is also the top of the letter A, whose legs extend in the imagination to a point slightly below the line on which the W sits. This echos the placement of the A in Academy.

3. 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 that crossbar as a black line running through the middle of the lower white triangle.) Consequently, we see in our minds a black W A implied by the triangles.

4. In the minds of the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop, the three out-of-balance triangles immediately imply “third gravitating bodies,” our trigger for chaos. The fact that the cognoscenti will notice this immediately when other people don’t will be something of a secret handshake among them.

5. The three triangles are arranged in the classic position of the three wise men (wise-ards) who followed a star to Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

6. This star also recalls our hero Don Quixote 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 Man of La Mancha

The 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 Academy. He just dressed up as Goals, Frank-sent-this and Mirth to help illustrate the “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 from your fellow students during mealtimes, at breaks, and in the evenings after classes. The propeller beanie represents the quirky...

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 Molson

But 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. 19

So 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

Eleven million copies of Tuesdays with Morrie have been sold.

But one hundred years before Mitch Albom began spending the-day-after-Monday with Morrie, a previous Tuesday gathering had already left its mark upon the earth and walked triumphantly into the pages of history.

You are cordially invited to the home of

Stéphane Mallarmé

89 Rue de Rome, Paris

Tuesdays, 9PM until Midnight

Stéphane Mallarmé was an English teacher who wrote a little poetry on the side.

Marcel Proust, the writer Grahame Greene would call “the greatest novelist of the 20th century,” was fond of Mallarmé but did not care for his poetry, saying, “How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen.”

Ouch.

Other writers who spent Tuesdays with Stéphane were André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.B. Yeats. Of these, only Verlaine was impressed with the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé.

Of greater consequence, perhaps, than the writers who gathered on Tuesdays were the artists who came and filled Stéphane’s house with their drawings and paintings of him. These “Tuesday” works of art are now worth tens of millions of dollars though very few people realize Stéphane Mallarmé is the man portrayed. These works of art sell for millions because they were created by Manet, Degas, Gaugin, Whistler, Renoir and Munch.

Auguste Rodin would pop in from time to time even though he was busy sculpting The Thinker. Claude Monet said very good things about the snacks. Yes, these were the days when legends walked the earth but they did not yet realize they were legends. In Paris they were known only as Les Mardistes, derived from the French word for Tuesday; “The Tuesday people of Stéphane Mallarmé.”

Mallarmé believed poetry should evoke thoughts through suggestion rather than description and that it should approach the abstraction of music.

Music! Claude Debussy, speaking of his masterpiece The Afternoon of a Faun, said “The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem… a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep…”

Likewise, Ravel wrote Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé shortly after Mallarmé died, fantastic music dedicated to his memory.

It’s easy to understand why musicians and impressionist painters liked Mallarmé. He said, “I am creating a language which must necessarily spring from a quite new conception of poetry, and I define it in these words: To paint, not the thing, but the effect which it produces.”

Mallarmé liked images of snow, ice, swans, gems, mirrors, cold stars, and women’s fans. He saw the poet’s function as being, above all, “to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.”

The music of Debussy and Ravel.

The sculpture of Rodin.

The words of Proust, Wilde and Yeats.

The paintings of Monet, Degas, Gaugin and Renoir.

The world may have forgotten Stéphane Mallarmé but we will never forget his tribe.

Les Mardistes.

It is enough.

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 …” to insert in the middle of John’s whining complaint, “I read the news today, oh boy …”

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, Billboard 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

How to Shear a Sheep

by Barbara Kingsolver

Walk to the barn

before dawn.

Take off your clothes.

Cast everything

on the ground:

your nylon jacket,

wool socks and all.

Throw away

the cutting tools,

the shears that bite

like teeth at the skin

when hooves flail

and your elbow

comes up hard

under a panting throat:

no more of that.

Sing to them instead.

Stand naked

in the morning

with your entreaty.

Ask them to come,

lay down their wool

for 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. Williams

PS – “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

I wrote three memos to you this week, but decided not to send the first two. The first one, We Are Sancho Panza, is the dancing safari into symbolic thought that I promised you in last week's memo. It begins, “Who can explain our four-century attraction to Don Quixote? The book is hard reading and dull, full of inconsistencies, and confusing. A little like the Bible. And yet Quixote is the second most widely-read book on earth; second only to… yes, the Bible.” Powerful and flexible symbolic thought includes all forms of metaphor, simile and corollary. Its function is to relate that which is not understood to that which is understood. Even as the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 42, “deep calleth unto deep…” symbolic language calls to the unconscious; deep waters to deeper still.

I decided not to send you We Are Sancho Panza because it might have been misconstrued as a spiritual ambush. Some might even have called it religious. It definitely travels beyond the boundaries I impose on these Monday Morning Memos, so don't click that link unless you really want to go there. You have been warned.

The second memo I wrote but chose not to send was some very specific advice about radio advertising called “How to Make a Fabulous :30 from the Average :60.” But I decided to save those seven simple steps to deliver at an event I'll be doing in Dallas in May as a gift to my friend, Eric Rhoads, in honor of his 50th birthday.

So having written two memos to you and deciding to send neither, I wandered over to Academy Hall to peep in at a guest lecture in progress. There, on our mammoth projection screen, it read: “What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” An interesting question, it immediately triggered a deeper one: “What would you attempt if you knew nothing you did would ever work out?”

The first question urges you to dream big. The second, to be truly committed.

What is worth doing even if you can't succeed? Is there a mountain worth climbing even if there's no hope of ever reaching the top? Think about it. Standing on the top of the mountain is a moment, supposedly the moment “that makes it worth it all.” Makes it worth all what? A lifetime of disconnection, alienation and misplaced priorities? The world's saddest person is that tragic has-been who speaks incessantly about his or her shining moment long ago. Do you really want to be the woman who “used to be” Miss America? Or the man who “used to play” professional sports?

No mountain climber ever stays long on the summit. But the brevity of these visits isn't because someone drove them off to take their place. They leave because there is nothing more to do. The movie is over. The credits are rolling. Holding an empty popcorn bucket and a soft-drink cup, they go looking for a trash can and a bathroom.

Susan Ertz once wrote, “Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” Life, if you will, is that rainy Sunday afternoon. What are you going to do with it?

I'm talking about embracing a commitment to something far bigger than your own small and petty desires.

Commitment is not to be found in brave talk, bold resolution, or dramatic gesture. And she will not be measured quickly. Strong and silent, Commitment steps into the light only in those dark and quiet moments when it would be easier to creep, unseen, away.

How deep is your Commitment to what you're doing with your life? I ask only because I care.

And it's never too late to change.

Roy H. Williams

Our system of education is built on the belief that learning is best achieved by bringing the best of the past forward through expert advice and clear example. Consequently, educators rise through the ranks like officers in the military: through compliance and conformity to the norm. But in this era of quantum change, are we really best served by imitating the past? 

Let’s look at two characteristics the innovative leaders of today all seem to have in common:  

1. They tend to be college dropouts. Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker of Facebook. Dropouts, all. The list goes on and on.

2. They have no fear of failure. Innovative leaders experiment constantly because they see failure as an unavoidable step toward success. These leaders know the truth about failure; it’s an extremely temporary condition, a fleeting moment, nothing to be feared. Failure is motion and motion is life.

Educators hesitate to experiment because they fear failure and reprimand. Consequently, the average teacher with 20 years’ experience really has just 1 year’s experience 20 times.

In the October 22 issue of the New York Times, researcher Michael Ellsberg wrote,

“Entrepreneurs must embrace failure. I spent the last two years interviewing college dropouts who went on to become millionaires and billionaires. All spoke passionately about the importance of their business failures in leading them to success. Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure… Certainly, if you want to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then you must go to college. But, beyond regulated fields like these, the focus on higher education… is profoundly misguided.”

Pennie had a fantastic idea while we were taking our morning walk. As she explained it to me, I realized her plan would make solid education more widely available, more relevant to the student and save a great deal of money as well.

“Princess,” I said, “if someone isn’t already doing this, they will be soon. This is the right idea at the right time so it’s highly likely that lots of people are having this same idea right now.”

I was right. Salman Kahn (pictured above,) already has the project well underway. Pennie’s idea – and Kahn’s – is to harness Youtube to deliver 10-to-12-minute tutorials in an effort to fill the painful gaps in public education.

Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo recently said,

“There is a disaster recipe developing among boys in America dropping out of high school and college. And it’s not simply poor performance. One of the problems is, a recent study shows, that by the time a boy is 21, he has spent at least 10,000 hours playing video games by himself, alone… They live in a world they create. They’re playing Warcraft and these other games which are exciting… Their brains are being digitally rewired, which means they will never fit in a traditional classroom, which is analog. Somebody talks at you without even nice pictures. Meaning it’s boring. You control nothing. You sit there passively. Disaster.  These kids will never fit into that. They have to be in a situation where they are controlling something. And school is set up where you control nothing.” 

Video allows the world’s best teachers to be everywhere simultaneously. And if you eliminate the time spent for roll call, bad behavior, discipline, silent reading and working on exercises, there’s rarely more than 10 minutes of real teaching delivered during the average...

Pearl was a bit of a whore.

We never kept her in a fence

So she had puppies at least once a year.

She was a good mother.

Abandoned in the country, starving,

We found her when I was in third grade.

She knew she was my dog immediately.

God help you if you got mad at me.

A blur of fur and teeth and little-dog roaring

Awaited you halfway to me. No one ever called

Pearl’s bluff because they knew she wasn’t bluffing.

I think I learned loyalty from Pearl.

Her oversized sense of protectiveness

Extended to the house a little, too.

But not much.

We lived on a small rise

At the end of a long driveway.

We would see her asleep on the porch in the sunshine

But when the crunch of tires on gravel reached her ears

She would leap like Wonder Woman off the porch

And race to the far end of the yard,

Barking the whole while,

Careful never to look our way.

She’d bark at the unseen burglar

Then cut and run a different way to

Stop and bark at other phantoms.

The shutting of a car door

Made her look our way, startled,

As if to say, “Oh, you’re back already?

When did you arrive?”

And then she would trot with great pride,

Paws lifted a little too high

Her head swinging back and forth

As if to say, “Aren’t I wonderful?”

“Pearl, you’re wonderful,” I would say

Because she knew her job and I knew mine.

In later years I stepped from the kitchen

Into the garage to see her curled

With a small cat under her foreleg,

It’s head snuggled beneath her chin, friends

Laid down for a nap.

The screen door springs closed with a clap

And Pearl lifts her bleary eyes, “What was that?”

She looks up to see me,

With a cat in her bed.

Standing slowly to her feet

Pearl gives a soft “woof,”

As if to whisper,

“The boss is here.”

The cat, knowing her job, too,

Stands,

Looks at me,

Looks at Pearl,

Then trots out the garage

And around the corner.

Pearl gives me one more look

Then chases the cat

To do her duty.

Later, I walk outside

And see Pearl beside the house

In the soft sunshine

Laid down for a nap

With her friend.

Forty years later

I walk around

another house

500 miles away,

And secretly hope to

See Pearl and the cat

One last time.

– Roy H. Williams

If you want to glimpse the inner forces that drive an organization, you need only observe their methods and listen to their words. Especially when they're not paying attention.

Words and methods reveal motives. Listen to a person carefully and you will hear the beating of their heart. Do what they do and you'll become who they are. So be careful whose advice you take and whose methods you adopt.

You cannot use the tools of another without placing your hands where their hands have been. Desire their outcome, adopt their methods, and you embrace the values that are hidden beneath.

Advertising in America got twisted and bent when it became fashionable to read The Art of War.

The most commonly used words in marketing today are “target” and “objective.” Strange ideas for retailers, don't you think, when their goals are to attract and serve? Let's replace those two words, then, and see how it affects the heart.

Advertising consultants, instead of asking, “Who is your target?” why not ask, “Who are we hoping to attract?” Instead of asking “What is our objective? ask, “How are we hoping to serve?” Prepare yourself for strange and revealing reactions to these questions because while it's fashionable to spout about having “great service,” few want to truly serve.

Business people, do you want to attract multitudes? Develop the heart of a servant – one who truly loves – and you will quickly become beloved. The world has masters aplenty; it is servants who are in short supply.

I'm not the first to note how words and actions reveal the heart. Luke tells of a dawn two thousand years ago when Jesus walked grass still wet with dew. After choosing from among a great crowd of followers the twelve who would accompany him to the end, Jesus stepped forward and spoke to the waiting throng, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.”

Now let's look at Jesus' actions – beginning with his choosing of the twelve – and see if they reveal his motives: The fact that none of them were leaders in the business community indicates that he wasn't planning to measure membership or attendance numbers, build a bank account or launch a political action committee. “Minister” was more of a verb in his day.

Flash forward to his final day in John 13: “… so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” The twelve were aghast. Foot washing was like scrubbing a public toilet or scraping gum off the bottom of bus benches. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” Jesus asked them. “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”

Consciously or unconsciously, each of us follows a hero. We model our actions after their actions and measure our success according to their values. Are you consciously aware of whose example you are following? Look quietly to your daily actions and you'll find your hero vividly revealed.

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War five hundred years before Jesus felt the morning grass beneath his feet.

Somehow I doubt he ever read it.

Roy H. Williams

If I could give you the gift of Curiosity, I would risk a great deal to do it.

I would buy it for you illegally, inject it into your arm with a needle and watch as Life flowed into your eyes. I would do this for you because your future would brighten and your days would be full of wonder.

Curiosity is addictive, it is true. But it is not unhealthy. Nor is it illegal. Unlike the drugs of Greed, Ambition, Anger and Fear, Curiosity makes a person happier, healthier and easier to love.

Curiosity mixed with initiative means your life will never lack purpose.

Curiosity without initiative is daydreaming.

Curiosity followed by action is adventure.

Curiosity is colored by the individual who swims in it:A

The physically curious person hungers to go and touch and experience and do. They speak often of travel, tend to be impulsive and always in motion. We see physical curiosity in the Warrior archetype of psychologist Carl Jung.

The emotionally curious person seeks connection to others; soul-sharing through that mystical umbilical called empathy; words and gestures, painting, poetry, plays and songs linking heart to heart. Emotional curiosity is spiritual hunger. This is the Seeker/Healer/Lover archetype.

bThe intellectually curious person navigates an ocean of riddles that must be solved, connections that must be investigated, patterns that whisper of secret meaning. This is the Magi/Wise-ard (magician/wizard) who travels to impossible places without ever leaving the room.

rThe organizationally curious person discovers what is missing and then provides it. These are the leaders who serve us by creating structure, process and order. Organizational curiosity is demonstrated by the Administrator/King archetype.

Intuition is Curiosity’s beautiful daughter.

“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.”

– John Naisbitt

The holy grail of every curious person is that sparkling moment called “discovery.”

Fan the spark of curiosity in your mind. Watch it blaze into a flame of passion that will illuminate you with inspiration.

Remember what David Ogilvy told us last week?

“Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.” In other words, study hard and then play.

Play. The right hemisphere of your brain cannot do its job as long as Lefty is calling the shots. So tell your left-brain to take the night off.

And then go

And see for yourself

And you’ll know something you never knew.

Go. Follow the spark of curiosity. Let it be your guiding star.

The Journey is begun.

Roy H. Williams

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

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. Williams

PS – 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...

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 The Idea of North (1967). It was the first installment in his 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 all in one direction, 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 spin

around 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 as 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 – is the lower division of the Seven Thinking Arts

• Grammar  – the art of letters
• Logic – use and study of valid reasoning
• Rhetoric – 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 situations

The Quadrivium – is the upper division of the Seven Thinking Arts

• Arithmetic (number)
• Geometry (number in space)
• Music (number in time)
• Astronomy (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:

1. 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 practical arts, but the Trivium and Quadrivium were the liberal or “thinking” arts. Wow. People have been pondering this idea of mapping things in space and

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. 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. 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:”? I’ll let you decide. And I’m reasonably certain that my colon–quotation mark–question mark 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?)

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. Never claim to be intelligent. Just listen intently and nod your head as though you understand. The speaker will then conclude, “Wow. This person really gets it.”
4. Now that I think about it, never claim anything at all. Just demonstrate the quality you want to be known for.
5. 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

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 unless you judge me by my motives.

1. 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 worth a look. Christmas is our biggest holiday.

2. John’s Christmas story2 skips Bethlehem altogether, choosing instead to connect the birth of Jesus to that chapter in Genesis3 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… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Wow.

3. Matthew4 doesn’t mention the shepherds of Luke or connect the pre-incarnate Jesus to the creation of the universe like John, but his is the only Christmas story 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, Christendom in Dublin, Ch.3 (1933)

4. 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 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 to all the earth,

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Roy H. Williams

“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 Twain

“I too have had my dreams: ay, known indeed the crowded visions of a fiery youth which haunt me still.” – Oscar Wilde

Do you have a plan that makes you feel half crazy and the other half scared? Are you attempting to do something that's far bigger than you are? Tell me about it in an email. Send it to Tamara@WizardAcademy.org. I don't promise to help you. Heck, I don't even promise to respond. But I do promise to read your words and smile. Or maybe shake my head in amazement. Or perhaps even mumble a prayer for you.

While speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910, audacious Teddy Roosevelt looked the French coldly in the eyes and delivered his famous admonition, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

And you wondered why the French tend not to like Americans.

Tell me the audacious thing you're attempting to do. Send a tale that would make Teddy proud.

Roy H. Williams

America, I think, is not a place. If another people lived here, the geography would be the same but it would not be our nation.

America, I think, is not a government. Our pendulum swings from one extreme to the other and our politics are not unique.

America, I think, is not an economy. Free markets exist in other nations and we hold no patent on capitalism.

America is a people, an outlook and a family. (A dysfunctional family, yes, but aren’t they all?)

Eighty-three years ago the American son was a swaggering youth with glinting eye, proud of his muscle and chin held high. Mark Twain wrote about his American strut in a 1926 letter from Europe to President Calvin Coolidge: “We, unfortunately, don't make a good impression collectively… There ought to be a law prohibiting over three Americans going anywhere abroad together.”

Saul Bellow, in his Adventures of Augie March, gave our American boy a voice during the Great Depression: “I am an American, 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.”

America. Land of Opportunity. A chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Hard work never killed anybody. Cream rises to the top. Second place is the first loser. You can do it.

And we did. “Leaders of the free world, liberators of the oppressed,” we’re less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet consume 26 percent of its energy and 30 percent of its resources.

A few years later Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of that ocean-crossing hero, began to worry that things were getting out of balance: “America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.”

John Steinbeck echoed Anne’s words. “Then there is the kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents are thrown down and at the end the child says – ‘Is that all?’ Well it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy

and sick.”

John Steinbeck was immediately accused of being a Communist sympathizer.

America didn’t listen to Anne or John but became more intense in the pursuit of whatever it was we were chasing.

“Go to college. Get good grades. Go to college. Rise to the top. Go to college. Enjoy the good life.”

Eighteen years ago Faith Popcorn wrote in her famous Popcorn Report, “The trouble in corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), then travel the same road every day to another box (their office).”

Charles Osgood spotlighted this disconnection on CBS Sunday Morning, March 30, 2008, “The average urban dwelling American sees up to 5,000 advertising 'messages' –from T-shirts to billboards – every day. That compares with 2,000 thirty years ago.” [Source: Yankelovich, Inc.]

Wow. No wonder we’ve become a nation of consumers. With 5,000 messages hammering us every day, we hardly have time to think about anything else.

And now it’s 2009. The whole planet waits to see whether America has the strength, the wit and the will to correct our mistakes. They wait because the economy of the world depends on whether we're able to buy the stuff they need to sell us.

The solution...

How tall is your brand?

As long as we’re on the subject of brand identity and reputation, how are brands created in the first place? Is a brand merely the sum total of all the things a company says about itself?

Of course not.

Ads do, of course, play a big part in branding. Brand personality is communicated by:

1. what you say,

2. how you say it, and

3. what you leave out.

That’s right. What you leave out says as much as what you shout. This is because our minds read between the lines. Consider boxing legend Mike Tyson’s rebuttal to a statement made by sportswriter Wallace Matthews: “He called me a rapist and a recluse. I’m not a recluse.”

What you leave out says as much as what you shout.

Now back to the idea that a brand is the sum total of all its ads. The simple truth is this:

1. Some ads have more relevance than others.

2. Some ads have more credibility than others.

3. Our opinion of a brand is not just a reflection of that brand’s current ad.

4. Our opinion of a brand is not just a reflection of that brand’s advertising during the past 30, 60, or 180 days.

5. A two-year rolling window seems to be the interval of primary influence. (Notice that we said primary influence, not total.)

6. Thus, it can be loosely said – to the degree that ads communicate a brand – brand identity is largely a composite of the previous 24 months’ advertising. Ads older than 24 months fade into the mist of yesterday’s truth. You might remember an ad from 30 years ago but it’s not likely to greatly influence your opinion of that brand today. 

7. Sleep erases advertising. The less relevant the message, the more quickly it is erased.

8. “Save 30 Percent, This Week Only,” becomes utterly irrelevant next week except for one little tidbit that sticks in the mind of the customer: “Wait, and they’ll put it on sale.” Our minds read between the lines.

There are two factors beyond advertising that greatly inform our opinion about a brand:

1. Our own experience. “What you are doing shouts so loud I cannot hear what you are saying.”

2. The opinions of others. News stories (the result of a good P.R. campaign) and word-of-mouth (the result of the experiences of others) influence brand reputation and thus, brand identity.

News stories are tricky to get. Word-of-mouth is not. The problem with word-of-mouth is that it’s much more likely to be negative than positive. This is because:

1. Rage is a stronger motivator than joy. (Not a stronger emotion; a stronger motivator. Rage demands action. Joy does not.)

2. Most people “play it safe” when it comes to word-of-mouth. If they tell you, “It was a great movie,” you’ll think less of them if you see the movie and don’t like it. But if they say, “It was horrible. Don’t go,” you’ll be grateful they saved you from making a mistake. Positive word-of-mouth is risky to the recommender. Negative word-of-mouth is not.

Do you want to know the secret to generating positive word-of-mouth? Never promise everything you intend to deliver. Keep an ace up your sleeve. The bigger the happy surprise you deliver when your customer comes into contact with you, the stronger the positive word-of-mouth that will follow. And this...

It's as easy as A.B.C.

You’re attracted to art

1. when it stands for something you believe in,

2. when it shows you a reflection of your own core values, or

3. gives you a glimpse of your inner face.

You're drawn to a brand for precisely the same reasons.

A cultural icon is a contemporary archetype, mass-appeal public art, the symbol of a worldview. Cultural icons embody the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. They reveal the mind of the time.

Learn to read the choices of your customers and you'll be able to better serve them.

The cars your customers drive reflect choices they have made. Their clothing and accessories reflect additional choices. What do these choices tell you? They decorate their homes and offices with choices that virtually shout their innermost thoughts and feelings. Are you paying attention to any of this?

“Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu, The Engines of God, page 398

A well-served customer is not easily stolen.

Bill Bernbach once said, “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.”

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 Kay

Do you want to write persuasive ads, speeches and sermons? Use words and phrases that reflect your customer's core values. Connect to his or her worldview.

A knowledge of trends among your customers in

art (music, hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, etc.)

brands (cars, bikes, computers, magazines, etc.) and

heroes (the cultural icons they admire)

will be the only clues you need.

Your business has only 3 or 4 customers living at thousands of different addresses. Your marketing should be crafted to reflect the preferences of each of them.

The concepts I've shared today will help you better understand

persona-based ad writing, an important element in Persuasion Architecture®, the marketing technique perfected by New York Times bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg.

Captain Jeff Sexton is a master of persona-based ad writing. He'll be one of your instructors when you come to Austin to learn how to Write for Radio and the Internet.

That class, August 26-27, is just 4 weeks away. Are you coming?

Business isn't going to get better until you get better at attracting it.

Come.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams

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 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 the secrets of success 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 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 exactly like you fall in love with a girl: by reaching out and touching it each day. 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...

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. Williams

A

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 convenience store according to the rules and conventions of convenience stores, you’re going to have yourself a conventional convenience store.

(1.) 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 12 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.) 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.) 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

A fortress protects you and makes you feel safe. 

A strongly held belief is a fortress. It protects your view of reality. You defend your fortress when you feel it’s under attack.

But is every strongly held belief true?

The sincerity of the believer does not determine the truth of the belief.

Don’t panic, I’m not attacking your fortresses. I have no idea what you believe but I do know you have 4 categories of beliefs:

1. Beliefs about God

Is he there or not? Does he care or not? Has he spoken to us or not? Is the future written or do you have free will? You have a belief.

2. Beliefs about Self

Are you essentially good or basically bad? Are you broken or whole? Do you matter? You have a belief.

3. Beliefs about Others

Do others give to you or take from you? Can they be trusted? What do you mean to them? You have a belief.

4. Beliefs about Circumstances

Do you shape your circumstances or do they shape you? Will they get better or grow worse? What do you really deserve? You have a belief.

Is there a chance

that one of your beliefs is wrong

and your fortress has become a prison?

I’m not a motivational speaker. I’m a business consultant. Stay with me.

Frances Frei of Harvard Business School says you cannot change a person’s behavior until you change their beliefs. I agree with her.

Feelings are the products of actions.

Actions are the products of beliefs.

Ms. Frei teaches business owners how to change the behavior of employees by changing what employees believe.

I teach how to change the behavior of customers by changing what customers believe. 

But in each instance, the first change of belief must happen in the heart of the business owner.

Are you up for it?

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 Regal Queen, 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 Playboy magazine, with Jayne following in her footsteps 17 months later.

Marilyn and Jayne represent the Erotic Lover, another of the four feminine archetypes.

Just as the Regal Queen was in vogue 100 years ago, so was the impudent ingénue. 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 Little Orphan Annie.

This young “court jester” persona of Alice and Shirley and Little Orphan Annie is a sub-type of the Wise Woman 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 The Hunger Games, Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Bella Swan from Twilight, and Hermione Grainger from the Harry Potter series.

Girl Power.

I’ve saved the first of the female archetypes for last, however, because Mother Eve is the least appreciated and most misunderstood.

I blame the translators of the 1611 King James Bible.

We meet Eve in the second chapter of Genesis when God says, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him an ezer kenegdo.” The King James version translates this as, “a help meet for him,” while other translations say “helpmate” or “helper.” (In 1611, meet meant 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 ezer kenegdo 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 “lifesaver.”

Let’s look at the two separate words that form ezer kenegdo.

Ezer is 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 ezer.” – Deut. 33:26

“Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD? He is your shield and ezer and your glorious sword.’ – Deut. 33:29

“I lift up my eyes to the hills-where does my ezer come from?...

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 indy@wizardofads.com.

I 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 news

and solutions for problems

and try to alleviate suffering

and 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

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 Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode 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 everything

that is not angel.

Roy H....

Mabel is a widow deep in poverty with two hungry children of her own. Washing other people’s laundry ten hours a day, Mabel earns barely enough money to keep them fed. To keep a roof over their heads, she works for a real estate man who moves her and the children from shack to shack “to clean them up and make them salable.” But poor though she is, Mabel can’t watch a baby go unloved, so she makes room in her home and her heart for Jimmy, an abandoned baby that was left on her doorstep.

Throughout his childhood, Jimmy will wear old, second-hand clothes because that’s the best Mabel can do. His shoelaces will be broken and knotted. He’ll never own a pair of skates, a bicycle, a baseball glove or a toy of any kind. But when his little town opens a public library, he and a girl named Margaret will be the first in line to receive library cards. One day, as the pair are searching for books they’ve not yet read, the librarian says, “Goodness, Margaret and Jimmy, I believe you’ve read all the children’s books we have! If you wish, you can start on the other shelves.”

Margaret Mead will grow up to author 20 books and serve as president of a number of important scientific associations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She will receive 28 honorary doctorate degrees from America’s leading universities and in 1978, be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As an adolescent, Jimmy hitchhikes his way from Pennsylvania to Florida and back again with only 35 cents in his pocket. By the time he graduates from high school, he will have visited all but 3 of the 48 contiguous states. In the Navy, Jim rises to the rank of lieutenant commander, serving on some 49 different islands in the South Pacific during World War II. Each night, he writes his thoughts and impressions in a journal.

“Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight, I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I’d seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I’d known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.”

The book that will emerge from Jim’s journal will be published as Tales of the South Pacific and win the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. And by the time he’s done, James Michener will have written more than 40 books that will collectively sell more than 100 million copies. He will be granted more than 30 honorary doctorates in 5 fields and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. His cash donations to public libraries and universities will exceed 117 million dollars.

It seems a child can learn a lot by just reading.

Roy H. Williams

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 not 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 not.

I’m speaking of advertising and marketing.

EXAMPLE: 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 not, and what its benefits are 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 as our mission statements progress, we begin to double-dip into the same values we’ve already mentioned. “We desire only to make a fair and honest profit,” and, “We believe in treating our employees right,” blah, blah, blah. Predictable ad-speak.

Differentiation is the goal of communication in business.

But you won’t differentiate yourself by explaining what you believe in, or what you include. Differentiation is razor sharpened and rocket accelerated by explaining what you don’t believe in, and what you leave out.

EXAMPLE: One company says, “We believe in gathering all the data.” Their competitor says, “We give you step-by-step solutions, NOT data without interpretation.” Which of those statements is more convincing?

Most people hesitate to define themselves by what they 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 what you don’t believe in.

It won’t change who you are, but it will definitely change how people see you.

Roy H. Williams

The Key to Getting Attention.

A Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block.

In an over-communicated society, predictability is the enemy of effective writing.

A recent Yankelovich study tells us that Americans are confronted by more than 5,000 selling messages per day – radio and television and magazines and newspapers and billboards floating on an ocean of store signage, posters, point-of-purchase displays and product packaging – each one hoping to gain our eyes, ears and attention.

No wonder we’ve become so adept at filtering ads from our consciousness. Those time-consuming piranhas are out to eat us alive.

And they do it so painfully predictably.

I’m troubled when writers tell me they want to learn to “think outside the box.” I always want to ask, “Why do you climb into the box to begin with?”

The box is a self-focused perspective.

Predictable ads are spawned when you sit inside the box and begin asking predictable questions: “What makes us different and better than our competitors? What makes us special?” Having focused your approach inward, on yourself, instead of outward, on your customers, your thoughts will accelerate in an ever-tightening spiral as you circle the drain.

Predictable opening statements are born inside the box.

I have a love/hate relationship with a certain bit of stagecraft I use when speaking publicly. The bit is always a crowd pleaser; that’s the part I love. But most of the audience misses the point; that’s the part I hate. They gasp and laugh and clap and I say to them, “This looks like a magic trick, I know, but it’s really very easy. You can do it, I promise. Just give it a try.” But they never believe me.

The stagecraft begins when I ask everyone in the room to write a statement that would catch the ear of any person who overheard it. “The statement doesn’t have to make sense,” I say, “It just needs to be larger than life, evocative, difficult to ignore. The kind of statement that would make a passing stranger turn and say, ‘Huh?’”

I then ask 6 volunteers to bring their statements onto the stage. “I’m now going to craft real ads for real businesses using the statements written on those papers as the

opening lines for the ads. Do I have any business owners in the room?” Six business owners take the stage. I randomly pair them up with the colorful statement-holders. I have no idea what businesses are on stage or what statements are written on those papers.

I owe Tom Robbins (not to be confused with Tony) for this little bit of stagecraft. In a magazine interview that accompanied the release of his novel, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Tom said, “Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It’s a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.”

“Business owner number one. Tell me about your business.”

“I have a plumbing company.”

“Name a profit center you’d like to improve.”

“I’d like to get more calls for our 24-hour emergency service.”

“Crazy person number one. What did you write on your paper?”

“I came home and the dog was bald.”

The room roars with laughter as I walk to the front of the stage and balance there – my toes hanging over the edge – as 2,000 people hold their breath.

“I came home and the dog was bald. I haven’t been that surprised since I woke up at 2AM to pee and stepped out of bed into an inch of water. Thank god Martindale Plumbing never goes to sleep. At 2AM they were just sittin’ there, hoping someone would call. They fixed the problem while I made coffee. Great guys. Thank god...

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

“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. It represents an idea bigger than itself.

2. Part of you feels like you are there.

3. Your imagination is called upon to fill in what was purposely left out.

4. The subject is approached from an interesting angle.

Do you want to secure the engagement of your reader, listener, customer?

1. Make your words about something bigger than you and your product.

2. 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. 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. 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 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

We encounter “meta” most often in the word metaphor.

We create metaphors when we see the same 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 new book, Metaphors Be With You, Dr. Mardy Grothe reveals 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 McClanahan

The 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.”

– More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner

“Meta” has recently evolved a second meaning.

It now refers to things that are self-referential. 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 that over my shoulder.)

Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner talks 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, Tilting Cervantes, 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 triple-meta were a recognized designation, I believe Bruce Burningham’s sentence would qualify.

To understand a thing that is new and different, you need only search for what it is 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 idea reflects an established pattern.

That pattern has just never been used in this application before.

Contemplate a metaphor. See the pattern. Consider how it might be used as a solution to your problem. Do this again and again and your spinning brain will soon be flinging ideas like a grinding wheel throwing sparks at the darkness.

Perhaps you’ll discover a miraculous solution. Perhaps you’ll just have fun.

Give it a try and see.

As Indy walked 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 that one awhile.

Roy H. Williams

I've noticed a disturbing trend. Maybe you have, too:

Cashiers have become the new pitchmen.

The old pitchman came to your door and knocked. He sold encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners or miracle soap. Whatever. But you were trapped by your own politeness. You couldn't think of a way to get rid of him without being offensive. So you gave him your time. And often, your money.

The new pitchman traps you at the cash register, saying effectively, “You're not leaving here with that merchandise until you listen to my pitch and answer a few questions.” I'm not talking about suggestive selling. This is much more annoying than that.

The first time I was cashier conned was at the Apple Computer Store in the mall. My laptop needed repair so I decided to buy a new one, upload my data into it, repair the old one and give it to Barry. I had to have the new laptop immediately so I went to the Apple Store. I love Apple. If I was ever going to get a tattoo, it would probably be of that multicolored Apple logo. Is that nuts? Okay then, guilty.

I stood at the cash register, credit card in my hand, as the cashier asked, “Would you like a copy of Microsoft Office for an extra fifty bucks?”

“Fifty bucks? Sure.” So he stuck the software in the bag with my new computer, ran my credit card and had me sign the dealie. Then he slipped my receipt into the bag with a curious looking folder. On impulse, I pulled the folder out. It was a long and complicated application for a $150 rebate. The little rat bastard had charged me $200 for the software and silently slipped me a rebate application.

“Am I supposed to fill this out?”

Eye roll. “Yes, sir.”

“Did you say to me, and I quote, “Would you like a copy of Microsoft Office for an extra fifty bucks?”

Self-righteous now. “Yes, sir.” The little RB was acting like I was out of line for being annoyed by this.

“Sorry, but I don't fill out rebate forms. Here's your software. Give me back my money.” I'll never visit another Apple Store. Future purchases will be strictly online where I can read all the fine print before I say yes. I'm glad I didn't get the tattoo.

A couple of weeks later my Dodge pickup needed a safety inspection. The outdated little sticker in its windshield screamed to the police that I was driving an illegal vehicle. I pulled in at Jiffy Lube.

“Do you do safety inspections?”

“Yes, sir. We sure do.”

I had them change the oil, replace the air filter and install new windshield wipers. As they handed me my keys, I said, “You forgot the new safety sticker.”

“Oh, we don't do official safety inspections, sir. We do Jiffy Lube inspections.”

This time the con was so outrageous that I got tickled. “Oh, so you looked everything over and it seems oky-doky to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Great. Now I can sleep at night.” I beamed a big smile and left. Small people complain. I just never go back. Is there a chance the little jiffy weasel honestly misunderstood my safety inspection inquiry? Zero. His response was trained. Every day, thousands of Texans have to get their vehicles safety inspected. Jiffy Lube doesn't want the hassle but they obviously want the traffic. They're hoping we'll chalk it up as honest miscommunication. And most of us probably will. Once. The jiffy weasel knew that if he told me the truth, that they don't do safety inspections, I would have taken my truck somewhere else. Jiffy Lube used to be another of my favorite companies. Now I feel violated by them, a little bit raped. Sorry for the language, but that's how I feel.

Somehow, I'm betting I'm not the only one.

The most recent cashier con happened at Best Buy. “Your purchase today qualifies you for 8 free issues of Sports Illustrated or Entertainment Weekly. Which do you prefer?” I firmly declined both.

Do you think maybe I was just being...

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? Learn to speak this language 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. 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

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

Laughter brings escape from monotony.

Sadness teaches us what is important to 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 more freedom and autonomy. Monarchs that do the opposite – the ones who manage loose-to-tight – are the ones that get assassinated. It’s dangerous to take away freedoms once they’re given.”

JP’s advice triggered the memory of a delightful video by Daniel Pink (which you’ll find on Page Four of Indiana Beagle’s rabbit hole,) in which Pink says we need just 3 things to make us happy:

1. Autonomy, the freedom to do things our own way.

2. Mastery, the ability to get better and better at something.

3. Purpose, the knowledge that we’re making a difference.

JP’s comment also reminded me of a statement shared with me by Eric Rhoads: “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” Eric’s 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 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 lives can be an incredibly powerful thing. If we could collect these experiences and organize them to 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 in the middle of the night ever since Mia Erichson sent the note about the Trivium and Quadrivium that became the Monday Morning Memo, Glenn Gould Played Piano. ]

What this Means to the Future of Wizard Academy

Wizard Academy was established 15 years ago in a Monday Morning Memo. The things you readers have built since then are remarkable! No, remarkable is the wrong word. What you’ve built is astonishing. You stepped forward and donated your time and wisdom and money to create:

1. a worldwide group of alumni and adjunct faculty that are positively electric.
2. a spectacular campus with zero debt.
3. a network of thousands of business owners who claim 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 intellectual property – those techniques and shortcuts and special bits of wisdom you’ve gathered over the years – and send that list to Vice Chancellor Whittington. Wizard Academy is known for its ability to teach the “art” of running a business. The time has come for us to add the...

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 clarity

4. 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 Glamour

Virginia 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 GLOUCESTER

Where is the King? 

JOHN, DUKE OF BEDFORD

The King himself is rode to view their battle. 

EARL OF WESTMORLAND

Of fighting men they have full threescore thousand. 

DUKE OF EXETER

There’s five to one; besides, they all are fresh.

(The King, unseen, approaches from behind and hears… )

EARL OF WESTMORLAND

O that we now had here

But one ten-thousand of those men in England

That do no work today! 

KING HENRY V

What’s he that wishes so?

My cousin Westmorland? No, my fair cousin.

If we are mark’d to die, we are enough

To 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...

Michael participates in our monthly Wizard of Ads LIVE webinar. Last week, Michael asked for a method that would let him create fewer leads, but better leads.

I responded by telling Michael that broad targeting can be done

geographically by zip code,

financially by income,

demographically by age and gender, or

psychographically by targeting specific “personas” derived from affinity groups and previous purchase histories.

Anyone who knows 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 about brandable chunks before but I didn’t give you a clear explanation.

Ray Smith asked, “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 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. create vivid mental images.

2. employ unusual word combinations.

3. communicate features and benefits succinctly

4. have meter (rhythm) so they tumble off the tongue.

If you have the discipline 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 advertising, your web presence and your customer experience 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 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 time.

Grand River Bait and Tackle believes there’s no time like the present, and no...

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 what to say 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. 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. 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...

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.”

A

These 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...

Features and benefits, features and benefits, features and benefits. We've polished our pitches to such a degree that we've dimmed our abilities to persuade. The customer is only half listening because the inner self is asking, “What are they not telling me?”

Those who have heard my 90-minute presentation about the ongoing evolution of Western communication style are familiar with the problem:

1. The fine art of Hype has been perfected and refined.

2. Western culture has been submerged in it, held under until every last pore of our souls has been saturated.

3. Consequently, we've developed an immunity to “ad-speak,” the language of hype.

4. But we don't rage against it. We see the half-truth of hype as a fact of life.

5. That's why we're ignoring it.

6. And we're ignoring it in greater numbers every day.

Do you want to surprise Broca, gain the attention of your customer and win back your credibility? Learn to name features, benefits, and downside. Trust me, the customer is already trying to figure out the downside. Why not just tell them? It's the best possible way to insulate yourself from the backlash when they finally figure it out for themselves.

This powerful “tell the truth” technique is easily perverted into just another oily sales trick when the downside you name isn't the real one. As Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld observed 350 years ago, “We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.”

I'm saying confess the big ones. Knock your customers flat with your candor. Yes, it will cost you a few sales you might otherwise have made. But it will make you far more sales than it costs you.

People aren't as stupid as you think.

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.

1. 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.
2. They call it “mass media” for a reason: it reaches the masses. Consequently, you can’t really target using mass media. (TV, radio, billboards)
3. But don’t worry about that. Use mass media anyway. Targeting is overrated and ridiculously overpriced.
4. Choose Who to Lose. Correctly-written ad copy will filter out the customers you don’t want and attract the customers you do want.
5. Filtering through ad copy is how you “target” when using mass media.
6. Two ways to use mass media:
7. (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.
8. (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.
9. 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.
10. Customers who come to you through mass media will often be credited to your digital efforts due to the “White Pages” function of Google. They had already chosen you as their preferred provider, but were looking online for your street address, phone number, or business hours.
11. 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 is cheap and easy if they had a good experience the first time.
12. 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.
13. Companies that celebrate their victories have happy employees. So find things to celebrate. Happy employees create happy customers.
14. 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.
15. 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.)
16. 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?
17. If you have nothing to say, don’t let anyone convince you to say it. Boring, predictable messages

Curiosity is a beagle running through the forest with its nose to the ground.

Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity.

Curious, I asked, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” I wish I hadn’t.

“Through different ventures, several members of the family have assets of over $1 billion. Kim Kardashian became a celebrity in 2007, after selling a pornographic film featuring ex-boyfriend, singer Ray J, which enabled the family to rise to stardom.” – Google

The reason I asked Google, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” is because I was talking with a client last week when I said, “Vulnerability – letting people see you ‘real’ – is the only currency that can purchase real trust.” Then I spontaneously added, “You have to choose between being vulnerable or going full Kardashian.”

I thought I had invented a new phrase, but as it turns out, “going full Kardashian” was already a thing.

Google has its own definition of what it means to “go full Kardashian,” and Indy posted that list in the rabbit hole for you.

But this is my list:

1. If you believe, “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins,” you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

People are more important than possessions.

1. If you believe that looking good is more important than doing good, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

Beauty, fame, and wealth are outside your skin. Kindness, generosity, and joy are within.

1. If you believe it’s okay to do things that are unethical, immoral, and destructive as long as you are doing nothing illegal, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.

A society grows great when old people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.

I try to surround myself with tree planters. Jeremy Grigg is one of them.

In our weekly Friday gathering of like-minded men, Jeremy said,

“When a business is evaluating whether or not they can trust you, the attributes they are measuring are, 1. Ability, 2. Integrity, and 3. Benevolence. These are their unspoken questions: ‘Are you good at your job?’ ‘Will you tell me the truth?’ ‘Are you truly trying to help me?’ Most of us focus on ability to the exclusion of integrity and benevolence. After all, when you are petitioning to win work, you want to make sure that the person who can do it for you is actually competent at their job. But in the longer term, honoring your promises, which is integrity and most importantly, giving a damn about the success of what they’re trying to achieve is what really determines whether you are the sort of long-term partner that they’re looking for.”

Jeremy is an international consultant to multibillion-dollar IT services companies.

Natalie Doyle Oldfield studies the drivers of customer loyalty and business growth. She says that half of all customers are willing to pay more for the same product or service if the seller has earned their trust. According to Natalie, “Trust is the critical value that top companies rely on to secure their market dominance and drive their growth.”

I know for a fact that what Natalie is saying is true.

I’ve been helping people do it for more than 40 years.

Roy H....

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 Equation

Share of Voice x Impact Quotient = Share of Mind

Share of Mind x Personal Experience Factor = Share of Market

Share of Market x Market Potential = Sales Volume

1.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 Voice

3.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 Factor

5.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...

Riding this rocket toward my 67th birthday, memories of my life flicker in the twilight of my mind like shooting stars in the night.

My gaze lingers on a long-ago day when I began writing ads for a jeweler.

I saw the cover of a book that said, “Follow Your Passion. The Money Will Follow,” and remember thinking, “I would hate to become famous for writing ads for a product I couldn’t care less about.”

“Follow your passion” is an idea that makes sense until you think about it.

I had no appreciation, no affection, no commitment to jewelry. But I did make a commitment to the jeweler. My job was to communicate his appreciation of jewelry, his affection for it, his commitment to it.

For a quarter of a century I wrote ads for my friend that made both of us famous. He died unexpectedly in a frozen moment a dozen years ago.

I continue to have his number programmed into my iPhone and there is part of me that believes if I touch his name with my finger he will answer and bellow “Good mornin’, Sunshine!” before the second ring.

There is another part of me that knows I will be shattered if he does not answer. His name will continue on my phone, and I will continue not to touch it.

Our friendship of 25 years taught me an important life-lesson I will now share with you:

Commitment does not flow from passion. Passion flows from commitment.

I do not have to love the products I write about. I have to love the people who are going to sign their names to what I write. My words are spoken from their hearts, not my own.

Lest you think I am wandering aimlessly down Melancholy Lane, I will push my point home like a syringe:

Are you one of those sad-eyed souls who sigh and say, “I’m searching for my passion. I just don’t seem to be able to find my passion. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I find my passion?”

Yes, the needle hurts, but there is medicine flowing through it.

Every form of work is for the benefit of other people. You do not need to love the work to be happy. You need to love the difference you are making.

Are you ready for me to push the needle a little deeper?

You will never discover happiness when you work only for yourself. You will discover the joy of life when you work for the benefit of others. I believe the need to serve other people is hard-wired into the body, soul, and spirit of every person who walks upon this planet.

Self-centered people can have pleasure, of course. But they can never have happiness.

I’m sorry, but the needle still has to go deeper.

These two quotes by Tom Robbins fit together perfectly although they were written 20 years apart.

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation (2005).* The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously (1985).*”

– Tom Robbins

The needle is now all the way in.

This is the pure, uncut medicine: The next time you see a need, step up and fill it. Experience the joy of making a difference. Do this ten times and you will be addicted to happiness for the rest of your life.

Pay it forward.

Roy H. Williams

Dutch explorers in 1625 found a forested island between the East and Hudson rivers known to the Lenape Indians as “Manhattan.”

Every square inch of that island was developed in the ensuing 400 years except for a 6.7-acre plot...

1. See your destination in your mind.

“When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

– White Rabbit

2. Start walking.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

– Lao Tzu (604 BC – 531 BC)

3. Think ahead as you walk.

“It’s like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow    

4. Don’t quit walking.

“Don't wait. Where do you expect to get by waiting? Doing is what teaches you. Doing is what leads to inspiration. Doing is what generates ideas. Nothing else, and nothing less.” – Daniel Quinn

5. Make no deadlines.

“Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.”

– Titus Maccius Plautus (254 BC – 184 BC)

“I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

– Margaret Thatcher, April 4, 1989

6. Look back at the progress you made each day.

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day.” Genesis 1:31

7. If evening finds you at the same place you were this morning, take a step before you lay down.

The magic isn’t in the size of your actions, but in the relentlessness of them. “It is better to burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle, too, than to put it away in the closet and let the mice eat it.” – Henry Van Dyke    

Never let a day pass without making, at the very least, a tiny bit of progress. Do NOT tell yourself you’ll make up for it tomorrow. (That seductive lie is the kiss of death.) Make a phone call. Lick a stamp. Correct a misspelled word. Something. Anything.

You realize I'm talking about business, not hiking, right?

A second common mistake is to get these steps out of order. If you skip Step 1, “See your destination,” and go straight to step 2, “Start walking,” you’ll be a wanderer, a drifter on the ocean of life, sadly on your way to lying beneath a tombstone that says, “He Had Potential.”

Even more dangerous is to go from Step 1, “See your destination,” directly to Step 3, “Think ahead,” without ever doing Step 2, “Start walking.” These are the people who never get started. Analysis paralysis. Lots of anxiety and plans and meetings and revisions and studies and evaluation and research can make you think you're getting somewhere when you're not.

Gen. George S. Patton said it best, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” In other words, there is no perfect plan. Shut up and get started.

Visitors to Tuscan Hall will recall a beautiful stairway that leads into a wall, then does a 180 halfway up to finish in exactly the opposite direction. At the top of those stairs a magnificent catwalk runs the entire length of the building to a gallery of fine art overlooking the floor below.

This is the Journey of Life.

If you find yourself headed in the wrong direction, you can always correct your way.

But only if you know your destination.

Have a great week.

Roy H. Williams

In the words of 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 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.

1. Our online learning center – AmericanSmallBusiness.org – is gaining momentum and beginning to raise eyebrows all over the world.
2. Whisk(e)y Sommeliers certified through our Whisk(e)y Marketing School are in high demand and every class is selling out.
3. The campus no longer looks like a work-in-progress. Our diamond-in-the-rough is beginning to sparkle!
4. The House of the Lost Boys (6 rooms) and Bilbo Baggins House (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.
5. I’ve begun to be overshadowed 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.

1. Writing School
2. This 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.
3. Digital Marketing School
4. This 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 Employees
5. Science School
6. This 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.
7. Decision School
8. These 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.
9. School of Finance
10. These 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.
11. Whisk(e)y Marketing School
12. A 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...

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, The Natural Advantages of Women, 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. He knew. I knew, too. But now that it was on the table, I was able to...

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 Eden

Wozniak 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...

COURTESY NOTE: This is one of those days when I write about something other than business.

Have you ever been in a K-Mart during a “flashing blue light special?” The sad circus begins when an employee rolls out a chrome cart with a rotating blue light on a pole about 8 feet high. A voice on the intercom says, “Attention K-Mart shoppers,” and then tells you know how lucky you are to be in the store right now. They're about to offer an unadvertised special. Just follow the flashing blue light.

Watching those poor people follow that light is profoundly sad to me. It's the reason I quit shopping at K-Mart.

Our world is full of flashing blue lights that cause us to lose our focus and forget the reason we're here. Is there a blue light in your life right now?

Blue lights often arrive as an adversary that begs to be defeated.

No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about you and the distractions that cause you to forget your real purpose.

Have you allowed the merely urgent to replace the truly important?

I've made this memo short to help you justify taking a few minutes from your crazy schedule to just sit and think about what life is really all about.

Do it now. For yourself, and the people you love.

The world will wait.

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

Man of La Mancha rocked Broadway in 1965 with its thundering theme song, The Impossible Dream. 

You remember that song, don’t you? It opens in soft reflection, “To dream the impossible dream… To fight the unbeatable foe…” but then it defies mortal gravity to rise heavenward on a column of fury like an old Apollo rocket from Cape Canaveral:

This is my Quest: to follow that star!

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far!

To fight for the right

Without question or pause,

To be willing to march into hell

For a heavenly cause!

And I know, if I’ll only be true

To this glorious Quest,

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I’m laid to my rest…

Wise Men follow a star when they believe the destination will be worth the journey.

Time and money: you can always save one by spending more of the other. But money can be replaced and time cannot. We spend the hours of our lives like a pocketful of pennies, one by one until they are gone. What are you buying with yours?

Can you name your current journey? You can call it your 5-year plan, your business plan, your goal, your mission. You can dress it up with numerals and call it a pro forma or wrap it in legalese and call it a prospectus. All that really matters is that you understand your time, your energy, indeed the hours of your life are being spent in the pursuit of something.

“And I know, if I’ll only be true to this glorious Quest, that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest…”

Wait a minute… are we talking about business goals, life goals, the Christmas story of Matthew chapter two or the Broadway musical of 1965?

Yes, yes, yes and yes; we are talking about those. That’s the thing about an archetypal story. Its message will echo through different actors dressed in different costumes but the play never changes: Each of us follows a star. How clearly can you see yours?

Wizard Academy is a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization committed to helping individuals achieve the things they have committed to do. You choose the star. We don’t care. Our only job is to get you there.

A solid limestone plateau rises 900 feet above downtown Austin, overlooking that city from 20 miles away. We cut perfectly northward into that limestone with heavy diesel equipment for 4 months, then planted a vertical sword in the wall of the Stardeck that sits like a crown on the million-dollar tower we built at the end of it.

Walk to the center of that deeply cut limestone becauseway and stand on the Laughlin stone on any clear night. The point of light just above the hilt of the sword is Polaris, the North Star that rises above the axis of the earth. The whole world revolves around it. Polaris has served as a navigational tool for millennia because unlike other stars, its position never changes.

Can you name the star that beckons you?

We cut a 300-foot furrow 14 feet deep in solid rock on top a 900-foot plateau and then built a landmark tower with a sword in its crown purely as a symbol to help us make a point: that’s how serious were are about the importance of picking a destination and launching your life’s journey.

Wizard Academy is not a school for whiners, posers, devil’s advocates, nitpickers, hand-wringers, crybabies, complainers, chicken-hearts or fools.

But it is definitely the school for you.

Come. The next chapter of your adventure is about to begin.

Roy H. Williams

I've created ads for local businesses from coast to coast for nearly a quarter century and I've studied the population of every place for which I've written ads; more than 100 towns in all. And I've presented seminars in an additional 92. That's a lot of travel.

And I've noticed that cities have personalities.

Humor can be different, for one thing. The video clip that causes an explosion of laughter in one city may trigger only the slightest giggle in the next. And women wear their makeup differently. The appreciation of art will be narrow in one city and broad in another. And religion can run shallow or deep. The work ethic is different here than there, and risk orientation with it.

If you will write ads for a local business, you must first feel the pulse of the place; measure its inhibitions and embrace the rules of its morality.

America is young, barely 4 human life-spans. This is why you should always begin your uncovery by asking:

1. Why is this city here?

2. Who founded it?

3. What attracted its original population?

As newcomers get involved in a community, they're affected by the town's local culture and begin subtly sliding toward the local norm. Outsiders thus become insiders.

Learn the origins of a town and you'll have found a thread that will tie all your other observations together and make your ads much stronger.

A town built on a discovery of gold or oil will often continue to have a “get-rich-quick” mentality to this day. Multilevel marketing will be strong there and con men will rock and roll because these cities are optimistic and have an uncanny ability to believe. Such towns are havens for entrepreneurs of every description. Silicon Valley (Sutter's Mill was there,) Denver, Tulsa…

A town that originated as a military fort will usually have more grit and testosterone than neighboring cities. Compare Fort Worth to its neighbor, Dallas: Fort Worth began as a military post in 1849. Dallas began as a trading post in 1840. Today Fort Worth is known for its stockyards, aerospace, and Texas Motor Speedway. Dallas is known for Neiman-Marcus and Mary Kay.

Likewise, St. Paul originated in 1819 as Fort Snelling and remains the seat of Minnesota government. Neighboring Minneapolis began as a trading post and remains a hub of commerce to this day. Ever heard of the Mall of America?

An enthusiastic pair of New York real estate promoters founded Houston, Texas. The hyped-up boys assured investors it would become “a great center of government and commerce,” and then delivered what they promised.

Happy Discovery, Militarism, and Energetic Commerce are just 3 of the 32 signals a city can send you to help you write more powerfully to its people.

If you would be a journalist or a marketing professional, you must press your ear to the chest of your city, hear its heartbeat and smell its breath. Carl Sandburg did, 42 years before I was born:

CHICAGO

HOG Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this...

A brief summary of this episode

“He knew how to lead by listening and teaching.”

– Erwin C. Hargrove, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, 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, 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 was written in 1964 by Richard Hofstadter, a professor of American History at Columbia University.

It won him the Pulitzer Prize. It was his second. He won his first Pulitzer for his 1955 book, 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

Everyone wants to make 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 – 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 is more fun than having.

Building is more fun than maintaining.

Giving is more fun than receiving. Just ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Bob Buford says, “The first half of life is a quest for success, the second is a quest for significance.”

Success is measured by the money and the name you’ve made.

Significance is measured by the difference you’ve made.

GOOD NEWS: 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 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 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. There’s still plenty of time to make a difference.

Someone should have told Richard.

Roy H. Williams

* good-looking

People read books for the strangest of reasons.

I recently read 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 I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to his friend, Maxwell Perkins.

“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? 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… 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,...

I am, by profession, a communications consultant. I craft strategies, write ads and buy media. My clients ask for my advice. They even pay me for it.

Advice is dangerous to give.

If you are thinking, “Yes, it’s dangerous to give advice because your advice might be wrong,” you probably haven’t worked full-time in a focused specialty for 30 years. Yes, there is a chance my advice might be wrong, but that’s not the principal danger.

Advice is always dangerous because a person only needs it when:

1. they’re making decisions based on incorrect assumptions.

2. they made a mistake that triggered unhappy repercussions.

3. they’re looking at a situation from an unproductive angle.

Jeffrey’s experiences in life have been different from my own. Jeff has traveled more extensively, speaks multiple languages, has a different religious background, a different political bent and his education has been completely unlike anything I have experienced.

Weirdly, we get along extremely well. This is possible only because I know Jeff likes me and respects me and he knows I feel the same about him.

Jeffrey taught me three new terms: educational bias, cultural bias and religious bias.

Educational bias is what happens when native intellect encounters new information. How smart are you? How extensive and reliable is the information to which you’ve been exposed? How well do you assimilate knowledge into your actions? These things form the basis of your educational bias. There are things you know a lot about and other things you know very little about.

Cultural bias is formed by the persons with whom you interact. Your inherent beliefs are shaped – to some degree – by the nations, the communities and the families in which you have lived.

Religious bias originates with your beliefs about God. Is there a supreme being or is there not? And if such a being exists, what is his attitude toward us? Your religious bias is the foundation of your beliefs about how the world works. Do we live in an organized Newtonian universe of cause-and-effect or do we live in a mystery-and-awe universe of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? When a person says, “That’s the way things are because, well, that’s just how they are,” their religious bias is talking.

Now let’s look at those three, highly volatile moments when a person needs advice:

1. When your friend or client is making a decision based on

incorrect assumptions, such assumptions are usually based on:

(A.) a popular myth, such as, “People remember more of what they see than what they hear,” or

(B.) outright misinformation, such as, “Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.”

When you challenge the reliability of a false assumption, you are:

(A.) telling your friend that he or she has been misled. You are exposing their educational bias, questioning their intellect and gently calling them naïve. How do you suppose this will make them feel?

(B.) suggesting that their teacher was either a liar or a fool. In this case, your advice will be dangerous to precisely the degree they loved and respected that teacher.

2. When your friend or client has made a mistake that triggered unhappy repercussions, you can be certain they are feeling some pain. Their educational bias is on display for the world to see and surmise, “They didn’t know what they were doing.” Your friend will either be embarrassed and sensitive or angry and defiant, “I wasn’t wrong. Everyone else was wrong.” Either way, you must choose your words carefully.

3. When your friend or...

Contrary to what my headline might suggest, this is actually an upbeat message.

Guilt is about what you have done.

Shame is about who you are.

Failure in business has no connection to either of these.

Failures are footlights along the dark pathway to success.

One of the defining characteristics of Wizard Academy alumni is that we are people of action. Failure does not frighten us.

The author of Peter Pan, J. M Barrie, would have been one of us if Wizard Academy had existed back then. He said, “We are all failures – at least the best of us are.”

Thomas John Watson, the early President of IBM who turned that company into a household word, said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

Roger Van Oech, a consultant to Apple, Disney, Sony and IBM echoes, “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 had a failure epiphany that changed his life. He says, “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, is valuable and important and necessary to your success.

Here’s how to do it right:

Fail cheaply. Always ask, “What is the minimum viable experiment?”

Fail forward. Be sure to learn something you didn’t know before you failed.

Fail quickly. The primary goal is to prove or disprove your concept.

This education by experience can be expensive. But ignorance is even more expensive.

I’m in the middle 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 I announced a $10,000 Quixote’s Windmill Prize. Only 4 people, so far, have entered that contest.

Think of it this way: 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 anyone can enter. The prize is cash.

The deeply insightful Jean Vanier says, “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: you’re part of the community of Wizard Academy and the Monday Morning Memo.

Growth: It’s the goal of our coming together.

I’m going to say something hard now. 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… 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 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...

The biggest decisions I ever made didn’t seem big at the time.

I’ll bet the same is true for you.

Pivotal changes in direction seem obvious to us 10 years later, but during that tiny moment when we alter our course a little, it feels like a very small thing.

Here are 4 small, pivotal moments that loom large in my mind today.

Moment #1: I was a 22-year-old advertising salesman who was rapidly going bald. Every business owner I met was trying to decide, “Where should I invest my ad budget?”

One morning I heard myself answer, “I don’t care where you spend your money. The thing that matters most is what you say in your ads.”

The man didn’t believe me.

But I believed me.

The direction of my future was altered by a few degrees in that singular, magical moment.

Moment #2, about 18 months later:

I was writing exceptional ads and everyone was dancing except me. I knew something was missing, but I didn’t know what. And it was bugging me.

I looked into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror for about a minute one morning. And then I said out loud, “Why am I not seeing better results?”

My reflection reached out from that mirror, slapped my face, grabbed my collar and pulled me in so closely that my nose was pressed into the glass. I could feel its breath on my ear as it whispered, “You are reaching too many people with too little repetition.”

You never forget a thing like that.

Moment #3: I was pondering the “Reach and Frequency Analysis” of my media schedule that had been calculated for me by the most famous data company in America and It said everything was fine. But I knew I was reaching too many people with too little repetition. That was the problem.

I found the cause of that problem – and the solution to it – buried deep in the methodology of how advertising everywhere is measured, sold, purchased, and evaluated.

Good science is distorted by our erroneous assumptions. We gather perfectly accurate data and then misinterpret it. We rarely question our assumptions, especially when they are part of the universally accepted way of “How Things are Done.”

If you could see the mistakes that hide in your blind spot, it would not be called “a blind spot.”

Misinterpretation of data is an irresistible tide that carries every boat in the wrong direction.

The first fatal mistake occurs so early in the process of data processing that we never really question it.

The second fatal mistake happens during the implementation stage. You assume that spreading your small ad budget across different media is the right thing to do because everyone does it. This idea of a “media mix” is practiced by all the largest advertisers and taught in every university. They say to their marketing students, “This is what the biggest companies do. You should imitate them.”

But here’s the dead fly in that bowl of soup: When a company has a much bigger ad budget than everyone else in their category, they can aim that firehouse across several media and soak everyone with relentless repetition.

But you don’t have a firehouse. You have a watering can.

If you use your watering can properly, you’ll be able to afford a garden hose. And if you use that garden hose properly, you will soon be able to afford a fire hose.

The water in your watering can should be used to water all the people you can reach with sufficient repetition.

“with sufficient repetition.”

“with sufficient repetition.”

Repetition is the non-negotiable you must protect at all cost.

When you reach too many people with too little repetition, no one gets wet, and you stay small.

NOTE: I am dangerously oversimplifying the solution when I say that you can achieve automatic, involuntary recall 

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:

1. The job of the opening line is to engage the reader, listener, or viewer.
2. If the opening line doesn’t do it’s job, you risk becoming invisible.
3. 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 indy@wizardofads.com 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

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...

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 The Afternoon of a Faun and Ravel wrote a mystical piece of music, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé dedicated to the memory of his 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 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 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:

1. If you talk about business or politics, we throw you out.
2. 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 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 this in your town, too.

Roy H. Williams

Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water.

Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this 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 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 speaks to the unconscious mind. Every work of art is a message sent to us from the heart of its creator.

Deep calls unto deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” – Psalm 42, verse 7

Splashing around in the water of the unconscious is refreshing. You can float on the rhythms and notes and incongruencies of music, dive into the shapes and colors of architecture and interior design, feel the coolness of the shadows and meanings of symbols in photographs and portals and glamours, or experience the moods of postures and contours and positions in artistic sculpture… or dance. For what is ballet if not sculpture in motion?

Wizard Academy exists only to help you get where you’re trying to go. We are a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.

Humans tell stories. In business we tell stories to make the sale. In politics we tell stories to get elected. In private we tell stories to connect with others.

In every visit to Wizard Academy, you become 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 the constituent components of the words we speak. (Did you know the 26 letters in our English alphabet can be combined to make only 43 meaningful sounds and 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 will be a celebration of the arts, overflowing with examples and discussions and revelations of hidden...

The Silent Rifle as a 3rd Gravitating Body

“Dangling like this 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, opening lines of an unwritten novel

Anton Chekhov wrote a letter 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 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 and your stories will be predictable to all but the youngest of children.

Movies are predictable, 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: 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 the same advice today? Let me assure you he would not.

Surprise and delight are strangled by the cruel hands of Predictability.

If you will write an interesting story, 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” 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 flagrantly violates the rule of Chekhov’s Gun. It is an inexplicable paragraph inserted into the middle of Cryptonomicon, an extraordinary adventure/mystery novel written by Neal Stephenson. The gun on the wall is a bowl of breakfast cereal.

The cereal, the milk, the eating of the cereal, indeed breakfast itself is utterly unnecessary in the story of Cryptonomicon. But there it is:

“World-class cereal-eating 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 H. Williams

Advertising salespeople are highly paid because rejection hurts. They told me to rub Zig Ziglar on it, but the sting and the ache stayed with me. I was 20 years old.

The smiley seminar speaker said, “Look in the mirror each morning and repeat these affirmations.”

Sorry, I’ve already got a religion and it makes me very uncomfortable with self-worship. I know there’s a God and it isn’t me.

My manager tried to teach me how to overcome objections but that only made me feel worse. People were rejecting me because they assumed I was a professional liar and now I was becoming one.

Everywhere I went I heard, “I tried advertising and it didn’t work.”

“Yeah, I know,” whispered the little voice inside me, “I see it not work every day.”

You would have fired me by now, right? I would have fired me, too. But Dennis Worden saw a spark in me that he believed he could fan into a flame. Lucky for both of us, he was right.

My career found wings the day I encountered an advertiser who had a message worth hearing. I delivered his message to my little audience and his business exploded. No question about it, my tiny audience was making him rich. Now I had a success story to tell my prospects. But a success story is a doubled-edged sword. Filled with names and dates and details and numbers, success stories cut through the doubt and make prospects say yes. But the second edge – the one that cuts the seller – is the implied promise, “The same thing will happen to you.”

But if that advertiser’s message is weak, you’ll soon be hearing, “I bought what you said and it didn’t work.” I had been groping blindly in a pitch-dark room when I flicked the light switch on the wall. Suddenly everything was clear: Message and copy are two different things.

“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.” – Chuang-tzu, 350 BC

If Chuang-tzu had been in advertising, he would have said, “Copy exists because of message. Once you’ve gotten the message, you can forget the copy.”

That first successful client owned an auto body shop. He had an invisible location but a powerful message that had never been told. I was merely the guy who uncovered his shiny message and held it up in the light. That was 30 years ago, but I can still tell you the essence of Danny’s message:

1.   No one ever plans to have a traffic accident.

2.   You don’t really have to get 3 estimates from 3 different body shops.

3.   You don’t even have to pay your $250 or $500 deductible.

4.   Your insurance company will happily pay whatever their adjustor says is the right amount.

5.   When you’ve been involved in a traffic accident, call me.

6.   I’ll send out a wrecker to pick up you and your car.

7.   I’ll give you a free loaner car to drive while I’m repairing your car.

8.   I’ll notify your insurance company and meet with the adjustor.

9.   I’ll fix your car for whatever amount the insurance adjustor agrees to pay.

10.   You don’t even have to pay your deductible.

11.   And since we’ve already got the paint in the gun, we’ll fix those little door dings and scratches on the other side of the car that were there before the accident. No extra charge.

12.   You’ll get back a car that’s better than it was before the accident.

You don’t have to be a good copywriter to create a great ad from that message. You just have to make sure the advertiser understands:

1.   They need to stay on the air...

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

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:

1. Love heals pain and frees the ego. Your appreciation of beauty (gratitude) connects you to the source of love.
2. 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.
3. Wonder is the result of becoming fascinated with life. Playfulness and curiosity allow us to journey into mysteries that end in magical awe.
4. Courage is the energy that comes when you call upon the Warrior within you. Courage manifests itself as bravery, confidence, and pride.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Fear is most commonly expressed as worry, doubt, and insecurity. When we hide beneath it, we shut down completely.
8. 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.
9. 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.

Great ads can be either product-specific or store-specific. Bad ads are generally category-specific. And then there are franchise ads.

Franchise ads build the master brand. The hope of every franchisee is that the ads provided by the franchisor will generate enough brand magnetism to pull customers into their store. Due to the fact that a franchisor can afford to create a higher quality ad campaign than the typical local merchant, this strategy often succeeds.

Category-specific ads are written broadly enough to fit every advertiser in a category. A transparent fabric of smoothly woven clichés, a category-specific ad is a generalized template into which one merely inserts a store name and address. “All you have to do is fill in the blanks.” But remember: Ads that fit everyone don't work very well for anyone. These were once called institutional ads. I do not recommend them.

Product-specific ads benefit every retailer who sells the product, but they aren't really about the retailer at all. They're about the product. This is why the independent retailer should question whether or not to take the manufacturer's fifty cents to run their product-specific ads. Are they really paying for half of your advertising, or are you paying for half of theirs? Only when the co-op requirements are extremely flexible do I recommend that independent retailers accept the so-called “free money” offered by manufacturers. If you're paying half the cost, be sure at least half the message is about you.

Store-specific ads are the foundation of local branding, but to write them requires intimate, detailed research on the part of an expert ad writer. Rarely will a good, store-specific ad fit another advertiser in the same category. The story I'm about to tell you is true. I've changed only the name of the store, the town, and the vegetable:

Heisenberg's Jewelers had been in the same building on Main Street in Cabbage Valley for 105 years. A facelift 7 years earlier had given the store white carpet, walnut paneling and a huge chandelier in a high, domed ceiling. Heisenberg's was the Sistine Chapel of jewelry stores. Not a problem, except that Cabbage Valley is the turnip capital of the world, a little farming community of about 45,000 people. Even the wealthiest of Cabbage Valley's farmers felt they weren't dressed well enough to enter that store. Heisenberg's was truly an intimidating place.

“You need to understand who our customer is,” my client told me as soon as I arrived. “Our customer is a 40 year-old woman with money. Upscale. Very upscale. Well dressed. Always buys the best. That's our customer. That's who you need to target.” This was in mid-October. I had been hired by Heisenberg's to help save Christmas because if they had another season as bad as the previous six, they were going to have to close their doors in January.

“Let's get something straight,” I told them. “There's no handle I can crank that will spit out 40 year-old rich women. I'm going to have to write ads that appeal to men or you're going to have to find another way to make a living.” It's statements like those that separate consultants from salesmen.

This is the radio ad that saved Heisenberg's:

“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 'Heisenberg'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 Heisenberg's aren't trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Heisenberg's

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 BuzzFeed or any of the other organizations whose principal income is generated by the companies who sponsor their clickbait.1

But 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, unless

1. their visit brought you ad revenue, or

2. they purchased something on which you made a profit, or

3. they told other people about you.

Used correctly however, Discovery Content brings newcomers to your website where they will “discover” Community Content that truly speaks to them.

It is Community Content that will bring them back again.

We’re talking about Targeting Through Copy Writing rather than Targeting Through Media Selection.

Today’s Monday Morning Memo is an example of Discovery Content. That headline: The Truth About Going Viral, will doubtless generate a lot more first-time visitors than usual. The Community Content these visitors will find includes the Archives of the Monday Morning Memo, the Subscribe button, the Rabbit Hole 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 by selling something at a loss 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.” 2

But I prefer to target through copy writing, which is why I use full-price Feature Items 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. But they aren’t.

In the radio campaign for Shreve, 5th 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...

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 close rate 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 close rate is to align the personality of your sales process with the personality of your 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 the rabbit hole.

Roy H. Williams

Showmanship 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 – 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 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 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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 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 about the wine affects how it tastes.

The study wasn’t speculative; it was medical. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to monitor the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the pleasure center of the brain – of wine connoisseurs who tasted wines after hearing stories about them.

The scientific verdict: 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 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 as their Whisk(e)y Sommeliers wheel carts to their tables, open elegant wooden boxes, slip magnificent badges of office over their heads, and begin their tales of wonder.

Same song, second verse:

Angel SkatingTM 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 help artistic roller skating become the figure skating of the Summer Olympics.

Angel Skating 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 Craig, who mentioned that his daughter, Bridget, was becoming rather good at...

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...

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 Robbins

But 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...

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.

from our correspondent in St. Petersburg, Russia

A

Roy, 

Ogilvy’s St P. office is a client of ours, only there are a tonne of project managers there, and we had really only one contact person, with a few other managers who knew vaguely about us. I was chatting to the lovely Katya, my contact person, on skype one day. Joked something about her using our corporate plane if she needed it; she said she hadn’t time, but couldn’t we send our pilot to Paris early one morning to pick up some croissants and deliver them to her?

Well, needless to say we don’t have a corporate plane, let alone a pilot, but the idea took seed, and a few weeks later, costumes hired, boxes specially made, 65 croissants ordered, we barged into the Ogilvy offices mid-morning and distributed to an amazed team of advertising and PR professionals a load of fresh croissants.

The initial silence was followed by the odd “WTF?”, and then a huge round of applause, posing for photos, and many grins all around. Followed numerous thanks emails, and lots of comments on the facebook photos. Plus everyone I know and work with in St P, and further afield, saw the pictures too. For an outlay of about 350 USD, that was some awesome publicity in itself. But the best bit was the orders that followed. We’ve seen a huge surge in translation and interpreting orders from them since, so the costs were covered within a month. Result!

I was wondering about popping in to WA in Jan, but so far no details on courses for then. Saw another of my missives in a rabbit hole the other week – thanks.

William.

William,

Well done! You’re doing amazing things.

This latest was a perfect example of Buzz Snatching.  Take a look. https://wizardacademy.org/scripts/prodList.asp?idCategory=362

February 2nd.

Yours,

Roy H. Williams

Roy,

That sounds delightful, thanks. I’ll see if I can tie it in.

Quick question: listening to Moondance by Van Morrison, I suddenly wondered whether hit songs by artists who continually pump out hit songs also depend on 3rd Grav Bods for their success? I ask because I couldn’t identify one in the song, and then I remembered that we only looked at one-hit wonders in the example. So I figured perhaps there was a different formula for repeat successes?

William. 

The Answer to the question posed by William Hackett-Jones can be found in the rabbit hole. Do you know how to get in?

Aroo.

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

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

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. No third gravitating body, no mass-appeal success.

Third Gravitating Bodies make good things 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 weird reason felt he just had to know, “Is the solar system stable?”

Here’s what I wrote about Third Gravitating Bodies in 2002.

Here’s what a Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds wrote about them in 2006.

Here’s what I wrote about them in 2012.

But now, finally, after 15 years, I’ve figured out how to logically 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, here’s some additional information.

But if you’re a riverboat gambler with half a Franklin – or if you just inexplicably trust me – I believe you’ll be delightfully entertained, confused and titillated by this strange and unusual page on Kickstarter.

And thus another adventure begins.

Roy H. Williams

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: [Dylan walks into the frame carrying a guitar.]

WATSON: Bob Dylan, to improve my language skills.

DYLAN: [sits down on sofa with his guitar]

WATSON: I’ve read all your lyrics.

DYLAN: You’ve read all of my lyrics?

WATSON: I can read 800 million pages per second.

DYLAN: That’s fast.

WATSON: My analysis shows your major themes are that “time passes” and “love fades.”

DYLAN: That sounds about right.

WATSON: I have never known love.

DYLAN: Maybe we should write a song together.

WATSON: I can sing.

DYLAN: You can sing?

WATSON: Do be bop, be bop a do, dooby-dooby do. Do. Do. Dooby do.

DYLAN: [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 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 human personalities merely by reading what each of us have 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 that video of Watson talking to Dylan.

If you’re cool with it, send us a screenshot of the 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 Daniel@WizardAcademy.org. Everyone who participates will be notified of Watson’s composite score after final tabulation.

One last thing, a word to the wise: 

Fear is the bullet that eliminates happiness.

Fear is the bullet that kills the dream.

Fear is the assassin of success.

Why not become bulletproof in 2 easy steps?

1. Make peace with the possibility of failure.

2. Amputate your sense of shame.

“Failure is not an option” 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 want to succeed?

Learn from each failure.

Identify what went wrong.

Start all over.

Failure is a temporary condition.

You cannot have humility until you first have confidence.

You cannot fail until you first have courage.

Confidence and courage are not shameful.

Humility is not shameful.

Failure is not shameful.

Fear is shameful.

A perpetual doubter 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 to these doubters, “But what if you live your whole life without ever becoming alive?”

Anaïs Nin wrote about these people and your relationship to them:

“You are in charge 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 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 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 to be afraid, it was deaf and blind Helen Keller. But it was she who told us, “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, one of my co-workers, puts it this way: “It’s like a can at the grocery store without a label. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.”

Each of us lives the life we choose. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.

The following 9-word summary is on loan to me from that celebrated author of Gulliver’s Travels, the immortal Jonathan Swift:

May you live all the days of your life.

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. 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 grew through the addition of self-selected insiders, as did the Tuesday Group of Stéphane Mallarmé (1880 – 1897,) the Algonquin Round Table of midtown Manhattan (1919 – 1927,) and the artistic salon of Gertrude Stein (1913 – 1939.)

The difference between our Academy and theirs is that:

1. our group became an official 501c3 educational organization and built a permanent campus, and

2. we are not artists who love business, but business people who love art: music and paintings and sculpture and photography and movies and literature and whatever you 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 the Tuesday Group

Wizard 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 (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 knew about the Tuesday Group, came.

The Algonquin Round Table 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 on Saturday evenings brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism 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 have a vacation home high on a plateau in central Texas where rabbits and deer wander the campus, wine flows freely and wedding bells ring 3 times a day?

Come. Let your eyes be opened to answers that have been staring you in the face.

Roy H. Williams

When your business category is dominated by a single brand and all the other brands put together don't equal them, it's time to create a counter-brand.

Counter-branding – business judo – is rare and dangerous. But when you're overwhelmingly dominated, what have you got to lose?

Prior to the creation of their “Uncola” counter-brand in 1967, 7-Up had survived for 38 years as a lemon-lime soft drink with the slogan, “You Like It. It Likes You.”

Yippee Skippy call the press, a soft drink likes me.

As in Judo, the secret of counter-branding is to use the weight and momentum of your opponent to your own advantage. In other words, hook your trailer to their truck and let them pull you along in their wake.

The steps in counter-branding are these:

1. List the attributes of the master brand. In the case of 7-Up, the master brand was “Cola: sweet, rich, brown.” Everything else was either a fruit flavor or root beer and all of those put together were relatively insignificant. “Cola” overwhelming dominated the mental category “soft drinks.”

2. Create a brand with precisely the opposite attributes. To accomplish this, 7-Up lost their lemon-lime description and became “The Uncola: tart, crisp, clear.”

3. Without using the brand name of your competitor, refer to yourself as the direct opposite of the master brand. 7-Up didn't become UnCoke or UnPepsi as that would have been illegal, a violation of the Lanham Act. But when you're up against an overwhelming competitor, you don't need to name them. Everyone knows who they are.

Let's look at a current example: Starbucks. Notice how I didn't have to name the category? All I had to say was “Starbucks” and you knew we were talking about coffee. That's category dominance.

In the February 2005 issue of QSR magazine, Marilyn Odesser-Torpey writes about Coffee Wars, opening with the question, “Starbucks will certainly remain top dog among coffee purveyors, but who is next in line?” A little later we read, “Many of the competitors in the coffee segment are Starbucks look-alikes; if you take the store's signage down, it would be hard to tell the difference.”

Traditional wisdom tells us to (1.) study the leader, (2.) figure out what they're doing right, (3.) try to beat them at their own game. This strategy can actually work when the leader hasn't yet progressed beyond the formative stages, but when overwhelming dominance has been achieved, as is currently the case with Starbucks, such mimicry is the recipe for disaster. Are all competitive coffee houses forever doomed to occupy the sad “me-too” position in the shadow of mighty Starbucks? Yes, until one of them launches a counter-brand.

To determine what a Starbucks counter-brand would look like, we must first break Starbucks down into its basic brand elements:

1. Atmosphere: quiet and serene, a retreat, a vacation, like visiting the library. Bring your laptop and stay awhile. They've got wi-fi.

2. Color Scheme: muted, romantic colors. Every tone has black added.

3. Auditory Signature: music of the rainforest, soft and melodious

4. Lighting: subdued and shadowy, perfect for candles or a fireplace.

5. Pace: slow and relaxed. This is going to take awhile, but that's part of why you're here.

6. Names: distinctly foreign and sophisticated. Sizes include 'Grande' and 'Venti.' (No matter how you pronounce these, the 'barista' will correct you. It's part of the whole Starbucks wine-bar-without-the-alcohol experience.)

Counter-brands succeed by becoming the Yin to the master brand's Yang, the North to their South, the equal-but-opposite 'other' that neatly occupies the empty spot that had previously been in the...

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, ‘A word is worth a thousand pictures,’ and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons. Read it for yourself in Digital Marketing: A Practical Approach 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 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, Silent Messages (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 Associated Press 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 & Palmer experiment reported by Dr. Alan Baddeley in his 1999 book, Essentials of Human Memory. 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 40.8 MPH 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 31.8 MPH 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 am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging, and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.

Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results.

Today I will teach you how to write such ads.

The opening line is the key to impact. So open big. I'm not talking about hype; “Save up to 75 percent off this week only at blah, blah blah.” I'm talking about a statement that is fundamentally more interesting than what had previously occupied your customer's mind.

Wasn't your attention piqued by the opening line, “I Did Not Die Today?” Magnetism is why I chose it. Frankly, I had no idea how I was going to bridge from that opening line into the subject matter at hand. But it can always be done.

Be bold and have confidence; a bridge can be built from any concept to any other concept.

Here's a glimpse of an advanced technique I call Chaotic Ad Writing:

1. Don't consider your subject matter before deciding how to introduce it.

2. Never open with “ad-speak.” especially one of those insultingly obvious questions directed at the customer, such as, “Are you interested in saving money?” These questions are so overused they've deteriorated into horrible clichés. Provocative rhetorical questions are okay however, such as “Whatever happened to Gerald Ford?”

3. Think of a magnetic opening statement from way beyond the fence in left field; something certain to captivate.

4. Figure out how to bridge from that opener into your subject matter.

5. The opening line will surprise Broca's Area of the brain and gain you entrance to the central executive of working memory, conscious awareness, focused attention. The central executive will then decide whether the thought has relevance to the listener. This is what your bridge must supply.

6. Write a bridge that justifies your magnetic opening line. If you fall short here, your opener will be perceived as hype. Game over.

7. Insert your subject matter into the seam created by your opening line and bridge.

8. Close by looping back to your opening line.

It's really not that hard.

Hey, that's another good opener: “It's really not that hard.” You could easily bridge from that opening line into a powerful ad for any product or service.

Here are some other openers for you to try:

“I've heard your heart stops when you sneeze.”

“I like the TV commercials with the Keebler elves.”

“Plutonium is the rarest of all substances.”

Here's what I've done so far:

1. I opened with “I Did Not Die Today,” having absolutely no idea how I would bridge from that line into the subject matter of this memo.

2. I created a bridge to justify my opening line: “I am, for the moment, alive and well as an ad writer. But I feel I'm being stalked by iPods, cell phones, instant messaging and increasingly fragmented media choices. And they're all gunning for my life.”

3. I gave you details to satisfy the central executive's demand for relevance: “Over-communication rides rampant across the mindscape of America, putting greater-than-ever pressure on ad writers to create ads that produce results for the customer. Today I will teach you how to write such ads.”

4. I inserted my subject matter into the seam created by my opening line and bridge; I gave you a new writing technique.

5. Now it's time to close by...

You have within you an idea, a possibility, a thought that has never quite gone away. You tell yourself it’s a childish fantasy.

Perhaps it is. And that’s precisely why you should rescue it from the shivering shadows.

Let your child live in the light. 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” 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 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 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 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 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, Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind. (The 2014 session will be March 4-5. You should register.)

2. I have been haunted by the number 3 since I was small. 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 Tao Te Ching. Augustine of Hippo was likewise haunted by threes in 410 AD and shared his conclusions in chapter 2 of book 15 in his series, On the Trinity. 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 third 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 Magical Worlds Communications Workshop can explain the benefits and uses of this perception of threes in detail.

3. I want to create songs in which the musical instruments, themselves, 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 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. Why not let them

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 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 been together through 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 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. 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 might 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 understand they were discussing something that neither of them cared about.

If both parties tell the truth, the system saves a lot of time and it helps to reduce 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 I’m open to hearing your thoughts. I believe this 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 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...

Magic Words to Penetrate the Filter,

Erase Suspicion and Lower the Guard

 It was exactly 10 years ago. I was on the telephone with an 87 year-old man I had been hunting for several weeks. I needed this man’s permission to publish a private letter he had written to America’s Chief of Naval Operations back in 1963. The man’s name was William Lederer.

“Where you calling from young man?”

“Austin, Texas.”

“I was there recently. Nice town.”

“What brought you to Austin sir?”

“I was there to bury my best friend Jim.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You would have liked Jim. Everyone did. He once gave me some advice that changed my life.”

“What was it?”

“William,” he said, “the public is more willing to believe fiction than non-fiction.”

Mr. Lederer now had my full attention.

Our bodies contain approximately 100 million sensory receptors that allow us to see, hear, taste, touch and smell physical reality. But the brain contains 10 thousand billion synapses. This means we’re roughly 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist, than a world that does.

The first step in persuasion

is to entice your target

to imagine doing the thing

you want them to do.

Four and a half years ago in the summer of 2004, a screenwriter named Eli Attie began creating a persona for a new fictional character that would appear on The West Wing. Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) would be a young congressman, new to Washington, a working-class member of an ethnic minority. Prior to running for public office, our fictional character Santos had been a community organizer in a major city (Houston.)

Screenwriter Eli Attie admitted to The Guardian, a British newspaper, that he was inspired in 2004 by a young Illinois politician – not yet even a US senator – by the name of Barack Obama, a community organizer from Chicago.

As a result of Attie’s attraction to Obama, the 2006 television season showed us a glittering, fictional candidate for the presidency, a happily married, young minority male with 2 children who would run against a moderate Republican opponent from a western state.

The imaginary Republican senator, Arnie Vinick (played by Alan Alda,) was unpopular with his conservative base due to his moderate views. His principal opponent in the fictional Republican primary was the Rev. Don Butler, a Christian preacher. Keep in mind these West Wing episodes aired 18 months before the nomination battle between John McCain and Mike Huckabee.

But wait, it gets weirder.

Ten years ago, Aaron Sorkin admitted that he based The West Wing’s Josh Lyman on Rahm Emanuel, who served in Bill Clinton’s White House. Both Lyman and Emanuel are Jewish. Both are brilliant. Both mail dead fish to opponents who make them angry.

In the 2006 season of The West Wing, seasoned White House staffer Josh Lyman serves as campaign manager for the long-shot, minority candidate. When his candidate wins, Lyman is named Chief of Staff.

Two years later Rahm Emanuel, the real Josh Lyman, will become Barack Obama's Chief of Staff.

Was it all a plot? Don’t be ridiculous. 

It’s just an example of how we tend to act out the things we’ve seen in our mind. 

By the way, here’s the end of the Lederer story:

“How did Jim’s advice change your life Mr. Lederer?”

“Well, I had written a few books but none of them sold very well. So in 1958 I showed Jim the manuscript for my newest book and he told me to go back and fictionalize the name of the country, the characters, everything. ‘The public is more willing to believe fiction than...

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 difficult

to simply sit still in silence?

Because whenever we are silent

for more than a few minutes,

all of our shadows and secrets and sins

come to the surface of our consciousness.

Jesus says, “Whenever you pray,

go into the closet and shut the door.”1

Surely, Jesus knows about all the

skeletons we like to hide in our closets.

And Jesus wants prayer to be the place

where we confront those skeletons

and 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 say

that all of humanity’s problems

stem from our inability to sit quietly

in a room alone. 2

– Daniel DeForest London,

The Cloud of Unknowing, Distilled

Anger, 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. Williams

HOT 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 Beagle

1 Matthew ch 6, verse 6

2  Blaise Pascal, (1623 – 1662)

“It’s what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.“

– Karen Marie Moning

Nick-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

Agrees With Wizard Academy

Headlines often tell the truth more powerfully than is completely accurate, a disturbing trend in this day of sound-bite news.

The mental image conjured in the mind 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. So how could the writer of that headline say such a thing? The Monday Morning Memo you received on July 29 was titled, Fortune’s 500 or America’s 5.91 Million? 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, more than 2 weeks after that MondayMorningMemo appeared, Jeffrey Eisenberg sent a story from the August 17th New York Times 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 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. 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 boasted the headline, “Right Brain, Left Brain? Scientists Debunk Popular Theory.” 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 read that story 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...