Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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

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, “Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Professor Steven Pinker whose research on vision, language, and social relations was awarded prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association? Would you believe Pinker? He’s also received eight honorary doctorates, won several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard as well as numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. Prospect magazine listed Pinker among ‘The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,’ Foreign Policy named him in their ‘100 Global Thinkers,’ and Time magazine put him on their list of ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.’ Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Steven Pinker?”They say, “I don’t care what he says and I don’t care what you say, either. I’ve seen the pie charts. I know what I believe. “I say, “Yeah, I love you, too.”Roy H. Williams

I had an interesting moment a couple of weeks ago.A client came to Austin for his annual marketing retreat and brought his top lieutenants with him. His company has a couple of hundred franchisees that do about a quarter-billion dollars a year.Everyone was anxious to hear my marketing strategy for 2016.“I need you to watch carefully and say nothing for the next 10 minutes,” I told them. “When I’m done presenting my little show you can ask questions, though I suspect I will have answered them all.”“We’re scheduled to be here for 2 days,” my client said, “and you really think you can answer all our questions in just 10 minutes?”I put a finger across my lips and turned off the lights. My presentation appeared on the big TV on the wall. Ten minutes later, my client said with big eyes, “How did you know my three favorite movies? Those characters were my idols when I was a kid.”“You’ve been emulating them your whole life,” I answered. “It’s what attracts people to you and your companies. My plan for next year is simply to accelerate what I’ve been doing in your ads since the day I met you, but kick it up to a higher level.” After I gave them a few examples of what this would look and sound like and told them what I expected the impact to be, they had no other questions.His lifelong guiding characters were Dr. Dolittle, Willie Wonka and Peter Pan. The female version of this character would be Mary Poppins, of course. They don’t live in a magical world, but magic follows them wherever they go. They bring the magic with them.I decided to do it again last Friday. A woman you’ve seen many times on television arranged for Princess Pennie and me to give her a private tour of the campus before she and her associates walked into the Toad and Ostrich pub to hang out with Daniel Whittington and whoever else showed up that day.You never know who’s going to be at the Toad on a Friday afternoon at four. Sometimes it’s 3 people. Sometimes it’s 20. But the only person who showed up that day was our friend, Gene Naftulyev. At the end of the evening our celebrity guest asked one of her associates to snap a photo of her with Gene. She put her chin on his shoulder so they would be cheek to cheek as she wrapped her arms around his chest. Startled, Gene beamed like a five year-old on Christmas morning. Click.I’m fairly certain he’ll have that photo printed in poster size and mail a copy to all his friends.During our walk around campus she spoke of the challenges she faces in forming a clearly differentiated identity for a new brand she has launched.I pointed out that her public persona was merely the never-ending echo of a certain iconic character the public has always loved. My suggestion was that she allow her brand identity to be guided by the values and quirks of that character.Weirdly, she had never consciously realized the story she’s been echoing for years. You could see the gears beginning to spin behind her eyes. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed, “This solves everything.” A highly memorable and sharply differentiated brand flashed into existence in a twinkling.“Oh my God, this solves everything.”She has always been the science nerd that everyone sees as “just one of the guys” until she takes off her ugly glasses, shakes her head, a button pops open at the top of her blouse and BOOM, she’s a bombshell.Dual identity: science nerd and sex goddess. We’ve seen this character a thousand times and we always love her because she’s the worthy but unnoticed underdog who finally gets what she wants and deserves.Can you see how the guiding hand of this identity – along with a couple of other characteristics I opted not to tell you about – could help to refine the style and voice of a brand?Everyone has a story.I don’t mean a story about them, but a story that shapes them. A story that sits in a canvas sling chair, offstage, invisible, affecting all their choices and actions each day like the director of a movie.Who sits in your canvas sling chair? What story do you echo without knowing it?I talk a lot about my own stories: Don Quixote, the Wise Men who followed a star, A Message to Garcia, The Old Man and the Sea, Henry V at Agincourt. What few people realize is that each of these stories revolves around a single theme: unconditional commitment to an objective no one else can see.Dulcinea was important to no one but Quixote.The star of Bethlehem was meaningless to everyone except the wise men.Garcia set out to find a General whose location no one knew.The old man kept fishing although he had caught nothing for 84 days.Henry V believed in his ragtag band of men when everyone else thought they were bums.Examine your own favorite characters.See what they have in common.Prepare to be impressed with what you learn about yourself.And if you are wise,you will allow that characterto bring all the facets

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

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

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

Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water.Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this 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 7Splashing 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 things made plain.You should come.Roy H. Williams

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

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

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

“Bonding” is falling in love with a company, a product, a spokesperson, an outlook, a belief system. This bond of love inevitably manifests itself in a tangible way. And then again. And again.A bonding ad is about the customer.A direct response ad is about the offer.Direct response ads trigger immediate action.Bonding ads do not.The results of a direct response ad can be measured immediately. The public either buys what you’re selling or they don’t. This is how you know whether or not the ad is working. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to build your company on direct response.Bonding ads build customer loyalty.Direct response ads do not.Hi Roy,I have a client who started his radio campaign a few months ago running a low frequency schedule. He is already starting to see the success of his campaign both through website visits and actual inquiries from potential clients. In the beginning his creative was written by us and read by him. He sells life insurance. My client is now concerned with measuring the effectiveness of each ad. He is trying to determine which ads are generating the most website hits and inquiries. He has stated:“With any direct response ad the trick is to determine wording based on the effectiveness of the ad. If the testimonials are driving the most hits, we should be pushing those. I want every campaign I do to be measurable. Without being able to measure each ad’s effectiveness we are just shooting in the dark. If I look at my website hits for instance, I can see that yesterday I only had 7 hits but on July 8th I had 39. What ad played on July 8th to garner such a response?”Any advice on how to explain why his radio campaign is effective without needing to measure each individual ad for its effectiveness?”JonJon, the success of a direct response ad is determined by the attractiveness of the offer made to the customer. What offer can this life insurance salesman make? Keep in mind that the offer must be compelling enough to get a person to take immediate action.This insurance agent’s best hope would be to use radio as a promotional vehicle for content marketing. What insights, solutions or valuable information might he publish on his website and talk about in his radio ads that would cause listeners to immediately visit his website to read it? Without this kind of “content” as bait, his direct response campaign on radio is likely doomed.Business people are attracted to direct response ads because they want their advertising to function like a gumball machine. “You put in your money and you crank the handle and out come the results.”In theory, direct response marketing is tidy and scalable and predictable. “Put in a penny and you get one gumball. A nickel gets you five gumballs. Give it a dime and ten gumballs emerge. A quarter? You guessed it: twenty-five gumballs.”The problem is that this gumball machine called “advertising” never functions quite like it should. Sometimes you crank the handle and get a huge gumball. Sometimes you get a tiny one. Sometimes you get nothing at all.Even when you’ve found an offer that generates predictable, scalable results – such as the response to that “content marketing” offer we described earlier – you’ll find these results will erode over time. The longer you keep pumping coins into that gumball machine, the less well the machine will work. The gumballs will keep getting smaller and smaller until you finally go broke.No direct-response ad campaign has ever worked long-term.Each offer has to be new, surprising and different. And then you must say, “But wait. There’s more! Order now and we’ll include at no extra charge…” This is called benefit stacking.Remember Columbia House? They did $1.4 billion in 1996 as a result of direct response marketing. Nineteen years later, Columbia House filed bankruptcy. Their 1.4 billion fell to just 17 million in total sales. In other words, the size of the gumball coming out of their “predictable, scalable direct response machine” used to be 8,200 percent bigger.You could argue that what killed them was the emergence of the internet, but your argument won’t hold water. If Columbia House had built their business around the customer instead of around the offer, they would have become iTunes.Google just told me iTunes is trending to do $5.03 billion this quarter; more than $20 billion this year.Apple built iTunes through bonding, not direct response.The reason gumball people don’t like to invest in bonding ads is because it’s like flying on a commercial jet. You hear a roaring noise as the plane begins to rattle and shake and unsustainable amounts of fuel are consumed and OH-MY-GOD we’re approaching the end of the runway! The client shouts, “This sucks. I don’t like it. Shut this thing down and get me out of here.”I weep at the number of advertising flights I see aborted. All that money inves

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

I got some great news last week. A friend who read my Musings of an Old Ad Writer said to me, “You’re not old, you’re middle aged.”Woo-hoo! If he’s right, I’m going to live to be 114.During the years that I was, in fact, middle aged, I was too busy to have a midlife crisis.So I decided to have one now.A midlife crisis, as I understand it, is a ridiculous and ill-advised grab at the fleeting shadow of one’s former years. So I chose to reclaim my lost youth by wearing a distinctive brand of canvas shoes that defined me when I was a kid. Zappos was happy to send 5 pairs of this wildly inappropriate footwear and I began wearing them everywhere I went.No one seemed to notice. Then I learned that my “new look” is the standard uniform of silicon valley CEOs.Crap. I can’t even conjure up a credible mid-life crisis. (I’m continuing to wear the shoes though, because they’re even more comfortable than I remembered.)The good thing about forgetting to have a midlife crisis is that you avoid a lot of pain.When I was one year old, John Steinbeck wrote a letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, in which he expressed regret over what his midlife crisis had cost him.I’m going to do what people call rest for a while. I don’t quite know what that means – probably reorganize. I don’t know what work is entailed, writing work, I mean, but I do know I have to slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier. True things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place.”– John Steinbeck, Dec. 30, (the day before New Year’s Eve,) 1959From Steinbeck: A Life in LettersJohn Steinbeck was neither the first nor the last to feel those feelings and think those thoughts.Humanity has long been distracted by “shiny easy things” but rarely does anyone publicly admit they made a dumb move “at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier.” Keep in mind that Steinbeck never meant for his letter to be published. He was writing only to his agent, Elizabeth Otis.Oscar Wilde wrote a similar, private letter 118 years ago. Oscar was an Irishman living in London during the years leading up to the Spanish-American War. He died 2 years before John Steinbeck was born.In his youth, Oscar was a sparkling novelist and playwright, a bon vivant and a wastrel with a dazzling wit. At the height of his fame, Oscar was imprisoned for being gay. After serving 2 years, he was released in May, 1897.Three weeks later, he wrote a letter to his friend, William Rothenstein.…I know, dear Will, you will be pleased to know that I have not come out of prison an embittered or disappointed man. On the contrary. In many ways I have gained much. I am not really ashamed of having been in prison: I often was in more shameful places: but I am really ashamed of having led a life unworthy of an artist. I don’t say that Messalina is a better companion than Sporus,* or that the one is all right and the other all wrong: I know simply that a life of definite and studied materialism, and philosophy of appetite and cynicism, and a cult of sensual and senseless ease, are bad things for an artist: they narrow the imagination, and dull the more delicate sensibilities. I was all wrong, my dear boy, in my life. I was not getting the best out of me. Now, I think with good health, and the friendship of a few good, simple nice fellows like yourself, and a quiet mode of living, with isolation for thought, and freedom from the endless hunger for pleasures that wreck the body and imprison the soul, – well, I think I may do things yet, that you all may like. Of course I have lost much, but still, my dear Will, when I reckon up all that is left to me, the sun and the sea of this beautiful world; its dawns dim with gold and its nights hung with silver; many books, and all flowers, and a few good friends; and a brain and a body to which health and power are not denied – really I am rich when I count up what I still have: and as for money, my money did me horrible harm. It wrecked me. I hope just to have enough to enable me to live simply and write well.”Oscar Wilde died in Paris in November, 1900, at the age of 45.John Steinbeck recovered from his midlife crisis and so did sparkling Oscar. Both of them returned to their work as writers with a heightened appreciation for the simple pleasure they took in the daily labor of it.To what wheel do you put your shoulder each day? On what do you labor?John Steinbeck and Oscar Wilde could have saved themselves a lot of pain if they had read the open confessions of Solomon who describes in his Ecclesiastes what may have been history’s most opulent and elaborate midlife crisis.In chapter one, Solomon says,I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens.”But he finds this grand qu

There are words used by young advertising professionals that I try desperately to avoid. Two of the most painful phrases for me are “unique selling proposition” and “branding.”When I was young, those phrases meant the same to me as they did to everyone else. But I take comfort in the words of Muhammad Ali, “The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”Here’s what thirty years have taught me:Very few “selling propositions” are unique.If the public cares enough about a particular “selling proposition” to respond to it, your competitors will quickly adopt it. So tell me, which was the first online company to offer free shipping and how long did it remain “unique” to them?Those things that make you truly unique are rarely “selling propositions.”You can take two things from this observation. The first is that when you become overly committed to differentiating your “selling proposition” from your competitors’ “selling propositions” you’re about to make a mountain out of a molehill. You’re going to build a sales campaign around something “unique” that no one really cares about.The second thing you can take from this observation – and this is important – is that unique things about you don’t have to be “selling propositions” to be valuable.Keep that thought in mind while I tell you my problem with the word “branding.” We’ll come back to “unique things about you” in a minute.Most people think “branding” is the consistent use of a logo, a slogan, a color palette and a font to create recognizable layouts.But this isn’t really branding. It’s a style guide for labeling.Yes, your company should have a visual style guide as well as an auditory style guide that includes music and other sounds, and a linguistic style guide that includes 9 to 14 brandable chunks, distinctively memorable sentences and phrases that people associate with your company.Brandable chunks are not slogans. Slogans, for the most part, are AdSpeak.AdSpeak is anything your customer interprets as “blah, blah, blah.”One form of AdSpeak has relevance to the customer, but no credibility. In other words, your customer believes it to be hype. The second form of AdSpeak is credible, but has no relevance. Your customer believes you. They just don’t care.Have you created crackling and sizzling brandable chunks? Do they dance from your lips and make people smile? Does everyone in your company use these brandable chunks in daily conversation with current and prospective customers? Do you sprinkle these chunks randomly throughout your ads?But let me be clear: even if you have a visual style guide, an auditory style guide, and a linguistic style guide that includes brandable chunks, all of these put together still fall short of true branding.True branding is bonding.This is why those things that make you unique don’t have to be “selling propositions” to be valuable in an ad campaign. If your quirks and foibles and preferences and flaws cause people to bond with you, isn’t that enough?If I’ve had a secret as an ad writer, that’s been it.Johann Hari summarizes this essence of true branding six minutes into his amazing TED talk, Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong.Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other, but if you can’t do that, because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature. That’s what we want as human beings.”You might wonder why an ad man would be listening to TED talks about addiction. I hope you will excuse me for sounding Machiavellian, but isn’t the goal of “people becoming addicted to your brand” exactly what we’re hoping to accomplish?True branding – bonding – happens when the identity hooks of people become intertwined. We bond through shared experiences and beliefs, hopes and fears, fascinations and flaws.People will be attracted to you when you quit being scared to be seen as you really are.I’ve been telling my clients this for years.Maybe someday I’ll get there myself.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 AcademyWizard 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:a worldwide group of alumni and adjunct faculty that are positively electric.a spectacular campus with zero debt.a network of thousands of business owners who claim 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 “science.”Until we have done this, our school will remain incomplete.What do you have – in your head – that you could give to The American Small Business Institute at Wizard Academy?The ASBI will collect and offer all the left-brain, sequential, step-by-step, mathematical and procedural genius of its faculty and alumni to create a streamlined, highly accelerated “executive summary” business education spanning everything from management to bookkeeping to banking to taxes to human resources and contract law and all the dozens of other things that haven’t yet crossed my mind.But I don’t need them to cross my mind. I need them to cross yours. Daniel Whittington needs your help to outline and frame and collect and organize all those “JP Engelbrecht,” “Eric Rhoads” and “Tom Grimes” bits of insight in a structured, step-by-step way.Virtually every college class spanning a semester can easily be summarized in less than 30 minutes. Am I right? You know I am.I’m asking every successful CEO, every entrepreneur and MBA and business executive – including you – “What are the three most valuable things you’ve learned? Can you articulate them clearly, tell us when and how to use these tips and techniques and best practices, and then finish your tale with a real-life case history including specific before-and-after details? Can you do all of this in less than 7 minutes?”Some of you will have more th

You cannot instruct a person to have enthusiasm any more than you can instruct them to give birth to a redheaded child.The person must first be inspired.Inspiration is what you give them.Enthusiasm is what they give you.People inhale inspiration and exhale enthusiasm.They cannot give you enthusiasm until you give them inspiration.Neither is a product of instruction.There is a time to instruct and a time to inspire.We often think we’re doing one when we’re actually doing the other.Is your enthusiasm contagious or is it contained?Are you inspiring those around you?Never is this more important than when you’re working with artists.I spent a lot of money recently* in a series of experiments with 99 Designs, the logo development firm that allows graphic designers around the world to submit logo designs in the hope of winning your prize money. (I know several designers who are deeply insulted by this crowd-sourcing of their sacred art and I understand their feelings completely, but technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is standing on its tracks.)The new logo for Wizard of Ads came from a designer in Italy.The Wizard Academy logo came from a designer in Minnesota.Indy’s Rabbit Hole logo came from Croatia.Angel Skating: IndonesiaWhisk(e)y Marketing School: GermanyDUI Rescue Guys: the PhilppinesLast week my sons decided to invest in a logo for VidBetter, the hardware and training division of their online video business. They gave the logo designers instructions that sounded very similar to the descriptions business owners give you when you ask them about their businesses:We invent equipment and produce training to help non-professionals make better videos for their businesses. Friendly. Helpful. Step-by-step. Simple. Quirky. We want our customers to feel empowered to make great videos that share who they are, and what they have to offer. The resulting videos are always unscripted. The personality of our brand is witty, natural, authentic, real, light-hearted and smart. Our customers aren’t children, but they aren’t boring/stuffy businesses either.”All the logos my sons received during the first two days of the contest looked surprisingly similar, just like those predictable ads that are created when you focus on your “unique selling proposition.”So they sent the designers some new instructions:I get it. The words ‘Vid’ and ‘Better’ are abstract and don’t lend themselves to cool visuals. Triangular play-button icons come with the territory, and we’ve seen a lot of them. (Actually, some of them are pretty awesome.) That being said, I’m also very open to ridiculous, attention grabbing visuals, as long as they’re done well. I have a deep appreciation for off-beat, over the top, and silly things – again, as long as they’re done well. If you have an absurd idea – even if it doesn’t match the words “VidBetter,” bring the madness. A giant fire breathing grizzly bear with a propeller beanie and a jet pack, clutching a video camera? Cool. A 19th century nature sketch of a proud fox with a vintage camera strapped on its head? Awesome. A squirrel with a camera, riding a dog as it chases a cat? Nice. I’m totally serious. The money is guaranteed in this contest. If we end up with a strategically safe logo for VidBetter, that’s fine. But I’m hoping for one that people see and think, ‘That’s crazy, what the heck is VidBetter?!’ This is your chance to run with that crazy idea that always made you laugh – but was too risky to ever use. Take that idea, stuff it with dynamite, wrap it in bacon, hurl it into the sun, then wrap the sun with more bacon. The parent company is sunpop.com.”The bloody-nose impact of the second series of logos they received is amazing.But the talent of the designers hadn’t changed.It was the inspiration that had changed.See the logos on the first two pages of Indiana Beagle’s rabbit hole. Just click the rhinocerous at the top of the page and you’re there.Roy H. Williams* These experiments were funded entirely by me. I never experiment with client dollars. I learned how to extract the best designs from the 78,000 graphic designers registered at 99 Designs so the Wizard of Ads Partners could confidently guide their clients through the process when those clients need designs. (Believe it or not, I spent so much money in such a short period of time that 99 Designs contacted us and offered to pay $500 for a few minutes over the telephone. Woo-hoo!) A

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

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

Showmanship 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 artistic roller skating, but that the sport wasn’t very well packaged or promoted.Packaging and promoting are just different names for showmanship and storytelling.A Tour of Scotland and a comical comment from Indiana Beagle was all it took. Angel SkatingTM was born before the sun went down. An official logo, a cartoon character mascot, a series of domain names and the rules of advancement through a series of “elegance levels” were all agreed upon within 36 hours.Showmanship and storytelling – packaging and promotion – are what whiskey tasting and roller skating have in common with what you do.And now you know what we do.Roy H. Williamsand the Wizard of Ads Partners

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

The genius of the human race lies in our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.But not all of these sounds are words. There is a second, wordless language of pitch, key, tempo, contour, interval and rhythm: music is an auditory fractal, a 3-dimensional map of a chaotic system. (Chaos, in science, is not randomness but precisely the opposite. It’s a level of order and organization that’s beyond our ability to grasp and comprehend.)Whoever controls the music controls the mood of the room.When the message of that first language of sound – words – contradicts the message of the embedded second language of sound – music – our interpretation of the song will be guided by the music more often than by the words because words encoded in music are not interpreted in the same way as when they arise from silence or come piercing through an ocean of background noise.Words are interpreted in the rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning hemisphere of your brain – the left hemisphere* – while complex patterns of pitch, key, tempo, contour, interval and rhythm are interpreted in the pattern-recognition hemisphere of your brain, the non-judgmental right.**The right hemisphere makes no judgments, has no morals and doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction. This is perhaps why, in the words of Voltaire, “Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.” The right hemisphere gives us the ability to enjoy fiction books and movies we know to be untrue. The right hemisphere is why we’re happy to bellow song lyrics at the tops of our lungs without needing to understand what we’re singing.These are some of the things you’ll learn in the opening session of the communications workshop we call Magical Worlds.Daniel Whittington was a touring musician for 18 years prior to becoming vice-chancellor at Wizard Academy. After participating in the Magical Worlds workshop a couple of times he said, “Every musician on earth should take this class.” The next day he employed TRIZ principle 13 (Turn it upside-down, do it backwards,) and TRIZ principle 32 (Change the color) as he played a melancholy version of a perky, pop mega-hit from 1980, Celebration by Kool & The Gang. Then he applied a similar set of inversion principles to I Just Want to Celebrate, another big, happy-energy song from Rare Earth, circa 1971.I said, “Let’s do a whole album of those.”Daniel spent the next several months writing music, recruiting talent, and recording that album. And then he shifted into planning, coordinating and delivering the April concert we held in Tuscan Hall on the campus of Wizard Academy.The album is called Bring the Dark. You’re going to be impressed.You can download the studio version of the album and then watch the live concert video at DanielWhittington.com. Indiana Beagle is going to show a few highlights from that video in today’s rabbit hole.One of our objectives in this project was to demonstrate the attractive power of highly divergent elements brought into reconciliation through the use of third gravitating bodies. The secret, as every cognoscenti knows, is to add something that absolutely doesn’t belong, and then make it fit perfectly. WHAM! Surprise becomes delight. This is incredibly attractive to the unconscious mind but it often goes undetected by the conscious mind because when a highly divergent element fits, it feels as though it belongs.Here’s an example from the concert: You’re listening to a countrypolitan version of Staying Alive by the BeeGees when you hear the signature harmonica passage from Neil Young’s Heart of Gold and then a rap artist pops in and raps awhile and the whole thing is integrated so seamlessly that it never occurs to you that any of this is unusual in any way.How about Abba’s perky Take a Chance on Me played with drunken Bourbon Street trumpet accents and an agonized Bonnie Raitt-style guitar solo? It doesn’t sound wrong at all.How about Girl From Ipanema, the definitive Bossa Nova song, sung as a male/female call-and-response duet without a Bossa Nova rhythm? You’ll hear it and think it’s always been that way.Highly divergent elements reconciled through the use of a third gravitating body are the unwavering signature of high-interest communication. Ask any Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds.Now enjoy the album and concert video at DanielWhittington.com while we plan another fun album and an even bigger concert for next year.You’re coming, right?Roy H. Williams

A Partial Dictionary of the CognoscentiJune 8, 2015ListenAAngle – the direction from which a writer, speaker, photographer or illustrator approaches their chosen subject. Some angles are more interesting than others.Brandable Chunks – memorable phrases that become associated with a brand.Innovation Model – a proven template that allows you to generate a superior result.Business Topology – a technique used for the discovery of innovation models that have been proven, tested and refined in a business category other than your own.Defining Characteristics – distinctive triggers of identification.Chaos – a level of order and organization that exceeds the capacity of the human mind.Third Gravitating Body – a reliable disruptor of predictability that allows you to gain and hold human attention.Daguerre – an academic style of communication that is accurate, but tedious.Dick and Jane – an unintelligent style of communication that employs predictable clichés.FMI – First Mental Image; the first vivid idea presented in an ad, a speech or a presentation, or the first thing noticed in a work of art.LMI – Last Mental Image; the closing thought in an ad, a speech or a presentation; the final feeling or impression communicated by a work of art.Full Circle – when the Last Mental Image in an ad, a speech or a presentation revisits the First Mental Image. “Going Full Circle” creates an elegant sense of closure.Fractal – a kaleidoscope-like image created as the result of mapping a chaotic system.Frameline Magnetism – an effect that is created when an image is extended – in the imagination – beyond what is revealed.Frank – a style of communication noted for (1) approaching its subject from an interesting angle, (2) brevity and clarity (3) frameline magnetism, (4) a highly restrained use of adjectives. (Named after the photographer Robert Frank.)Frosting – to replace common words and phrases with less common, more colorful ones. (Named after the poet Robert Frost.)Frosted Frank – A style of writing marked by the characteristics of Frank, but with the added color and surprise of Frosting.Free the Beagle! – unleash your intuition! take a chance!Meter – a rhythm constructed from the stressed and unstressed syllables of words. Meter makes language more easily remembered by making it musical.EXAMPLE:And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,So I walk by the edge of a lake in my dream.”   – George Gordon, Lord Byronfrom The Destruction of SennacheribMonet – an impressionistic style of communication marked by subjective feelings and opinions rather than objective, clear facts.Neapolitan – a transitionary device that creates a longing for closure.Portal – an auditory or visual trigger that helps a reader, listener or viewer move from one feeling or state of consciousness to another feeling or state of consciousness.Put It Under Water – delete information that is already known to – or can easily be figured out by – the reader, listener or viewer. (Essentially, “putting it under water” is frameline magnetism applied to words, calling upon the imagination to fill in what was left out by the writer, speaker or actor.)Random Entry – a technique used in Chaotic Ad Writing in which a randomly chosen, high impact sentence is used as the opening sentence of an ad.Purple Coffee – red wine that is consumed before noon.Seussing – to create your own words in the manner of Dr. Seuss.Schema – a pre-existing belief system that helps humans organize and interpret their experiences. Your schema allows you to take shortcuts in interpreting information, but it can also cause you to exclude pertinent information when it doesn’t conform to your previously held beliefs.Surprising Broca – to gain attention by introducing something that is new, surprising or different.TLB – Twitchy Little Bastard; a person who is counterproductively anxious for results.Turtles All The Way Down – Extremely very incredibly excellent.Verb Avalanche – a style of writing that slaps the cheek of the imagination and jerks open the eyes of the mind by firing rocket-like verbs to explode in the darkness and brighten the horizon. You leap out of the way of a mental image plummeting toward you only to find that another is hurtling at your face. Adrenaline surging, heart pounding, knees flying, lungs gasping, you’r

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 ManchaThe three images of Indiana Beagle aren’t part of the Wizard Academy logo. Indy is the mascot of the Monday Morning Memo and is not an official icon of the 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 nerd science and humor that is part of every class.*I’m sorry if I have explained the obvious. It wasn’t my intention to be tedious. My goal was merely to encourage you not to be afraid of imperfections.Flaws – presented with confidence and restraint – are the essence of style.Be flawed.Have style.Roy H. WilliamsPS – But don’t take a good thing too far. In the words of our audio producer, Dave Nevland, “There’s a fine line between ‘lack of skill’ and ‘personal style.’” Competence is important. Restraint is the key.

I’ve met people who say absolute truth does not exist, that all truth is subjective and exists like beauty in the eye of the beholder.I believe those people are sadly misguided.Absolute truth absolutely exists. If you don’t believe me, just ask me again because I am absolutely certain.But we’re not talking about absolute truth today.We’re talking about his very beautiful sister, personal truth.Can you share your perceptions with someone else?Can you cause them to feel a little of what you feel?Can you make them see in their mind what you see in yours?Do you have a contagious sort of confidence?Congratulations. You are an artist, a persuader.Every artist is a salesman and every salesman is an artist.*The left hemispheres of our brains are wired for empirical, scientific, objective reality: absolute truth.The right hemispheres of our brains are sponges thirsty for impressions, symbols, metaphors, connections and patterns. These patterns can be auditory, visual or behavioral.Auditory patterns are called music.Visual patterns are called art.Behavioral patterns are called personality.The more complex the pattern, the deeper the beauty.The goal of every artist – no matter their field of art – is to give us a glimpse of personal truth, the beautiful sister of absolute truth.Personal Truth is also known as Perceptual Reality and like Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, she lives in your heart and mind. Jory MacKay calls her “referential meaning.”Embodied meaning is intrinsic—it’s inherently inside something and doesn’t rely on our emotions or experiences to have meaning. Referential meaning is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words, we create meaning through what we think of when we see it.”A persuasive message – an advertisement – can be crafted from the absolute truth of facts or the personal truth of values and the self-image we see reflected in them.I once knew an attorney who put it this way:When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the truth is on your side, argue the truth. When the law is on your side, argue the law. When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”In other words, when the facts are not on your side, appeal to self image, personal truth, subjective reality: values.Last week, Indiana Beagle asked for your opinion of six different images of himself. You could give each logo from one to five stars and add comments, if you wished. What strong opinions you have about him! Reading those comments, Indy was delighted. I’ve known Indiana Beagle for many years but I had never before seen him prance.Each of the six logos had its advocates who proclaimed it to be the obvious only choice, and each of the six had its detractors who said it was a criminal mischaracterization.Each of you sees Indy differently because each of you brings a different set of values to the party. Indy is merely a trigger. “Referential meaning is dependent on the network of associations activated when we are exposed to the stimulus. In other words, we create meaning through what we think of when we see it.”John Steinbeck said the same thing was true in storytelling.A story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure.”Speaking to values instead of facts is one of the more complex methods of indirect targeting in ad writing. We’ll reveal all the simpler methods in August when the Wizard of Ads Partners unveils their new 1-day seminar on Indirect Targeting.It may even become a class at Wizard Academy.Interested? Shoot [email protected] an email and he’ll keep you updated.One last thing: our plan all along was to purchase all the logos from all the artists and rotate them with every visit to MondayMorningMemo.com.Indy is exactly like you: he is much too big to be contained in a single image.Roy H. Williams

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

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

Throughout the presidency of her husband, Martha Washington hosted a weekly reception each Friday evening for anyone who would like to attend. At these gatherings, men and women from the local community would mingle with Members of Congress and visiting dignitaries at the presidential mansion where they would enjoy refreshments and talk.Martha didn’t do this because she loved to entertain. She did it to encourage people, brighten people, connect people.One hundred years later, Stéphane Mallarmé would open his modest home each Tuesday night to the literary and artistic misfits of Paris. Among the writers who gathered there each week were Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and Rainer Maria Rilke.What conversations they had! Arthur Schopenhauer was likely talking about these Tuesday nights when he wrote, “The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.”Debussy named Stéphane Mallarmé as his inspiration for 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:If you talk about business or politics, we throw you out.Although the topic of conversation may wander like a butterfly in springtime, we have a single conversation with everyone participating. No side conversations, please.Daniel Whittington is our 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

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 spinaround a ball of light?Evidently, these are the things I think about when I’m on vacation.When I’m not on vacation I think about how to attract customers to your business.I’ll bet you’ll be glad when I get back from vacation, right? I look at what I’ve written so far and think, “It’s good that I don’t keep track of how many people subscribe and unsubscribe, because a Monday Morning Memo like this one is likely to set a new record for losing the largest number of readers in a single day.”That’s 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 ArtsGrammar  – the art of lettersLogic – use and study of valid reasoningRhetoric – the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situationsThe Quadrivium – is the upper division of the Seven Thinking ArtsArithmetic (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: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 time for more than two thousand years.)It reminded me that Wizard Academy is being built by many hands and minds. Now in its fifteenth year, the Academy is growing increasingly independent of Pennie and me with every passing month. This is a very, very good thing.Mia is the very successful Chief Marketing Officer of a large national company. Her 9 to 5 job is similar to my own and her idle thoughts are just as crazy as my own, so maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all.Perhaps Pennie and I need to take more vacations.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 never let anyone or anything be more important to you than her. If you’ve always got your best friend with you, life is pretty amazing.Hang in there, kid.And remember what I told you.Roy H. WilliamsPS – As Pennie and Indy and I are out outside the U.S. for 2 weeks, the fact that you’re getting this MMMemo at all is a miracle. Our internet here is dial-up slow when it’s working at all. Anyway, there’s a chance you won’t have an audio memo next week, but we’ll move heaven and earth to make sure you get the text version. We haven’t missed one of those since the Monday Morning Memo began in 1994. – RHW

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ground moved beneath our feet.There. It did it again.That first tremor was the growing reality of gender equality.The second was the shrinking of mass media.These trends aren’t connected, but they’re both significant.Gender equality is changing the nature of romance. Don’t believe me? Watch any romantic movie from 20 years ago and count the anachronisms, those interactions that belong to the past and do not seem to fit the present.Gender equality also affects advertising and marketing in ways you might not expect.Not many years ago, it was assumed that lovers would marry and buy a home and establish a life together. But then an entire generation of women was taught not to depend on a man, but to establish a career and a life on their own.I’m not being critical. If Pennie and I had daughters instead of sons, this is probably what we would have urged them to do.That advice to young women changed the landscape in marketing. A study published by Pew Research Center indicates that in 1970, 84% of U.S.-born 30-to 44-year-olds were married. By 2007 that number had declined to just 60% and if we extrapolate the trend into 2015, the percentage of married 30-to-44-year-olds is currently at 54.8% and falling. We went from 16% single to 46% single in just one generation.A once-proud nation of families is evolving into a proud nation of individuals.The motivations that drive husbands and fathers and wives and mothers are different from the motivations that drive individuals who have no one depending on them but themselves. Consequently, the language and logic of ad copy must be altered to connect with this altered audience.The trend toward singleness is sociological.The erosion of mass media is technological.Each trend accelerates the other.If the majority of a nation is watching the same TV shows at the same time, listening to the same hit songs at the same time, and receiving similar news from similar sources simultaneously, we can expect that nation to think and feel in similar ways.Mass media ruled America in 1970. Radio was a rock station, a country station, a talk station, an easy listening station and an instrumental format called “beautiful music.” Then you had ABC, CBS and NBC TV. Ted Turner wouldn’t create the first cable network until 1976 and FOX didn’t appear until 1986. When a movie left the theaters, it would go to the drive-in theaters where it would be shown for a reduced price, then appear on network television for free about a year later. DVRs, DVDs and videotapes did not exist. You either had to be where a movie was showing at exactly the right time or you missed it. This forced us to gather together at specific times for entertainment where we all heard the same commercials.Mass media brought us together physically and it united us psychologically. It also gave advertisers a platform for telling their stories.Advertising was easy in those days.Today’s technology allows us to opt-out of mass media. This is good for the individual but it presents a significant challenge to the advertiser. The advertising opportunities created by new technology are highly targetable but they’re also shockingly expensive. The most efficient thing we’ve found so far costs 4 times as much per person as broadcast radio. And although the digital product gives us the ability to pinpoint target a specific audience, that advantage doesn’t deliver anywhere near enough benefit to justify the inflated cost. This is not theoretical. We’ve learned these things through testing.I’ll bring this to a conclusion:We’re approaching the end of a golden time when courageous advertisers can invest money in mass media and see their businesses grow as a result. My suspicion is that we’ve got perhaps 5 to 7 more years before retail businesses and service businesses will be forced to begin playing by a whole new set of rules. No one yet knows what those new rules might be, but this we do know: the sharply rising costs of digital advertising are not being offset by a rise in efficiency.Buy mass media while the masses can still be reached.Reaching people one at a time doesn’t offer nearly the return on investment.Roy H. Williams

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

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

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

Roughly 10 percent of the American population is worried about having enough money to pay the rent and enough food in the pantry to make it until payday. A good day is when their biggest fear is whether or not the car will start and get them to work. This is called living “hand-to-mouth.”I did it for years. Perhaps you’ve done it, too.Another 10 percent of America has these basic needs met but a dysfunctional household – or perhaps a troubled neighborhood – keeps them from feeling safe. These unhappy souls wear the dark handcuffs of fear and dread as they walk silently through what David called, “the valley of the shadow of death.”I don’t pretend to have a solution.At the other end of the spectrum are the 15 percent whose biggest concern is whether or not they’re getting sufficient recognition from the people whose opinions matter to them.And then there are the rest of us, the 65 percent in the middle who are “figuring-it-out-as-we-go.” Usually, our greatest need is that we’re searching for where we belong. Each of us is looking for the mirror tribe who will finally see us and know us and value us and miss us when we are absent.Pennie and I spent the last 15 years building a place for that tribe to meet. These Monday Morning Memos are a sort of homing beacon…Okay, I’m back now. I had to wipe a tear from my cheek as the gushing memory of a friend flooded my mind. I wasn’t thinking of him when I began this piece, but the words “homing beacon” burst the dam of a memory I’ve decided to let flow.More than a dozen years ago I decided to teach a class about unleashing your Intuition. We called it “Free the Beagle.” As is my custom, I opened that class by having each of the 30 students stand up and tell us their names and a little bit about themselves. The last person to stand was a white-haired man sitting in the far corner of the back row.My name’s Keith Miller.” He stopped and his stern gaze swept the room. “As I sat here and listened to you introduce yourselves, I realized that never in my life have I been surrounded by so many weirdos… misfits… mavericks… renegades… rebels and rule breakers.” The room went silent as a tomb. “It’s almost as if the wizard sent out the mating call of the albino monkey and this is the strange group that answered that call.” Then he shouted with happy joy, “And I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be counted here among you!” The room exploded with laughter and applause.When I saw how masterfully he had handled the room without telling us anything about himself, I wondered, “Could this be that Keith Miller?”During the first break, I slipped into my library and pulled out a hardback, The Taste of New Wine, a monumental book that sold more than 4 million copies when it was released in 1965. I handed it to Keith privately and said, “Could I convince you to sign that?”His eyes fell and he frowned a little. He had hoped he would not be discovered.I chose not to inquire about the sequence of events that led Keith to seek the shadows of oblivion. That’s one of the markers of our tribe; we don’t hold you accountable for your past. We know you only by the future you’re trying to create. Keith’s enthusiastic involvement in the academy for the next 10 years made it clear he had found a home. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 84.God, I miss him.Each of us needs to know we belong.If you believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than wisdom…If you can happily embrace a friend whose religious and political views differ wildly from your own…If you want to make a difference…If you want your future to be brighter than your past…If you have the courage to let your choices dictate your actions…There’s a strong possibility that you might be part of The Albino Monkey Tribe of the late Keith Miller.I never again taught that class. Free the Beagle was a one-time thing, although a number of people who were there that day have since told me it was their favorite class of all time.Should we do it again? You can vote Yes by sending an email to [email protected]. To vote No, do nothing. If enough of you want to do it, perhaps he’ll add it to the Wizard Academy schedule for 2015.This isn’t what I planned to write about today, but the memory of Keith swept me away.I know you will forgive me.Because that’s what albino monkeys do.Roy H. Williams

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

Do you sometimes identify with Don Quixote, the self-appointed knight-errant who set out on his horse, Rocinante, along with his friend Sancho Panza on a donkey, to right the world’s wrongs and change the course of history?He was a delusional, but happy old fart.You and I are not the first to identify with him.John Steinbeck saw Don Quixote as a symbol of himself. Thus, he traveled to Spain and La Mancha in 1954 out of a special affinity for the place, and began his journey to rediscover the soul of America in a camper he affectionately christened Rocinante. The fruits of his journey – Operation Windmill as he called it – eventually found expression in Travels with Charley.”– Stephen K. George,  A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, p. 55Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s diary of his journey to see America with his dog, was published in 1962. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year.Steinbeck’s 1960 GMC pickup with camper is on display at the Steinbeck center in Salinas, California.I decided that you and I should have our own Rocinante to park beneath the trees along the path to Engelbrecht House.We’ll run electricity to it so that it can be heated and cooled and offer it as a room on campus for any adventurous alumni who wants to travel with Steinbeck and Charley.”Vice-Chancellor Panza, I mean Whittington, agreed with me and we enthusiastically set out to find our truck.As it turns out, most of the 1960 GMC trucks we found online had already been sold, many of them more than a year ago. And the trucks that were available needed vast amounts of restoration. Uh-oh. This was going to be harder than we thought. But we couldn’t give up because a group of Wizard Academy alumni had already donated more than $6,000 toward the effort.Two weeks ago Pennie showed me 17 photographs of what can only be described as a 1-in-300,000,000 unicorn. Seriously, what are the odds that a professional mechanic would buy the same pickup and camper as John Steinbeck – brand new – and then keep it in his garage for more than 50 years?He ran the engine periodically, but drove the truck only once a year on a hunting trip with his son. That truck has only 20,000 original miles. Certified. It looks like it just drove off the showroom floor and it runs like the day it was born. What are the odds of this truck actually existing?I promise I’m not making this up. The old mechanic passed away and his son is selling the truck.Do you want to go along on this adventure?Photos of the proposed truck and camper can be found in the rabbit hole. Just follow Indiana Beagle at the top of this page. A click is all it takes.Three more bits of extremely, very excellent news:(1.) A romantic, Valentine’s Retreat, February 13-14 (Fri-Sat.) Stay on the Wizard Academy campus with your special someone for 2 days and 3 nights. Good food, new friends, and fabulous sessions with our beloved Dr. Richard D. Grant and Chairman of the Board, Jean Backus. This is going to be magical, especially the music, the insights, and the dress-up banquet. Laugh and snuggle and be happy. And with 2,000 bottles of wine in the cellar, I doubt that we’ll run out. Discount Code: Type “alumni” and save 50 percent.(2.)We’ve made big progress on Secrets of the Wizard Academy Campus, the comprehensive, pictorial guidebook we’ve been promising for the past 6 years. It contains backstories and explanations and interpretations of the artistic and architectural symbols of our campus and it’ll be available before the Academy’s 15th anniversary in May. In a couple of weeks we’ll give you a link to the online version-in-progress so you can make sure your name is spelled correctly in all the right places. The story of Rocinante II and the names of Steinbeck’s 100 will also be in that book.(3.) To help complete this pictorial guidebook, Wizard Academy is hosting a 2-day/3 night Photographer’s Round Table, April 8-9.  The price of tuition is that you must donate the photos you take while you’re here. Other than that, it’s free. If you’re a professional photographer or an accomplished amateur and would like to be part of this year’s Round Table, just send an email to [email protected]. Tell us a little about your experience and show us a bit of your work. We can only accept 18 photographers and 6 of those have already been invited, so we can’t make any promises, but it’s definitely worth sending in your application. We’re going to teach you some amazing things and you’re going to demonstrate that you understood by taking photos using those techniques during lab time. Those photos, of course, will be used in our guidebook.Gosh this is a fun place.Here are some other fun classes on the near horizon, including a marvelous half-day course this Friday with Chris Maddock and a 2-day

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

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

You can hope the value of a stock will rise, but when you invest money in that stock, your hope becomes faith. Did you make a foolish commitment?Time will tell.We believe the sun will rise because we’ve seen it rise day after day.It is a repeatable observation.We believe what we have seen.We believe it will rise.Belief is not faith.Belief is rational.Faith is irrational.Belief is based on evidence.Faith is based on hope.This is where it gets tricky.When our hope compels us to action, our faith is made evident.Not just to others, but to ourselves.Without action, our hope is just wishful thinking.Faith is hope that has written its name in the wet cement of time.Faith is that realm where actions speak louder than words.Like I said, this is where it gets tricky.One thousand and twenty years ago – 1095 to be exact – Pope Urban II decided that christians should reclaim all the geography related to the life of Jesus. In 1291, these Crusades were abandoned with the fall of Acre, the last christian stronghold in Israel.You’ll notice that I’m spelling christian with a lower-case c. This is because I believe those actions taken in the name of Christ were not, in fact, sanctioned by him. In essence, the leaders of christianity were signing his name to checks he did not write.Sadly, leaders of movements tend to do this.It would be easy to declare – as many have done – that faith is foolish and evil and the world would be better off without it. Heck, John Lennon’s most popular song, “Imagine,” is that very idea set to music.Imagine there’s no heaven.It’s easy if you try.No hell below us,Above us, only sky.Imagine all the peopleLiving for today.Imagine there’s no countries.It isn’t hard to do.Nothing to kill or die for.And no religion, too.Imagine all the peopleLiving life in peace…”Juergen Todenhoefer is an international journalist who interviewed a leader within ISIS after 300 of their fighters took the Iraqi city of Mosul, even though more than 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers were stationed there when that attack was launched.So you also want to come to Europe?” Todenhoefer asked him.“It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe,” the man said, “just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain … For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines. Our expansion will be perpetual … And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”“What about the 150 million Shia, what if they refuse to convert?” Todenhoefer asked.“150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter to us,” the fighter answered. “We will kill them all.”Have you ever wondered how 2 Christians can read the same Bible and walk away with entirely different understandings of what they have read? Well, the same is true of Moslems and the Koran, I think.John Steinbeck may have been thinking the thoughts of God when he wrote,[The reader of my book] is just like me, no stranger at all. He’ll take from my book what he can bring to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there. And just as he is like me, I hope my book is enough like him so that he may find in it interest and recognition and some beauty as one finds in a friend.”Each of us takes from ancient scripture what we bring to it.Angry persons find an angry god.Demanding persons find a demanding god.Forgiving persons find a forgiving god.Happy persons find a happy god.Peaceful persons find a peaceful god.You will notice that I haven’t suggested an answer to the problem of ISIS aggression. This is because I don’t have one. I’m just saying that faith is not the problem.2015 will be a year of surprises.Remember to celebrate the happy ones.Roy H. Williams

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

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

Since the year 2000, the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop have happily endured the fanfare and pageantry of my 3-day explanation of Third Gravitating Bodies. It remains the most highly attended class at Wizard Academy.For the uninitiated, a Third Gravitating Body with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence is the single common characteristic shared by every mass-appeal success.Every one of them. 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

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

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