Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

When a thought knocks politely on the door of my mind, I open the door and entertain the thought. But when an unseen thought shines into my mind through a skylight, I am always startled by the mystery of how words-not-my-own came to echo in my empty skull.“What, then, is Love?”Those four words, like the feet of a proud, white goat, prance in the snowy landscape of my mind.“What, then, is Love?”Unable to escape the music of those words, I will do my best to answer their question:“What, then, is Love?”Low-voltage love is a noun. It is something you feel. It surrounds you and you are “in” it.High-voltage love is a verb. It is something you do.E. W. Howe was 5 years old when Teddy Roosevelt was born, and he was 10 when the American Civil War began. E. W. Howe died 85 years ago. But while he lived, he said,“When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.”In those 25 words, we see love as a verb; love with its sleeves rolled up.Love as a noun comes and goes but love as a verb comes to stay. “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…”Alexander the Great died 323 years before Jesus was born. Alexander loved adventure and battle. He felt it, was surrounded by it, and was “in” it. Jesus loved people. He fed them, healed them, encouraged them, and died for them. Verb, verb, verb, verb.Alexander and Jesus both died at the age of 32.During the 12 years that Alexander was conquering and ruling the world, his soldiers taught every nation a simplified form of Greek so that everyone could understand what Alexander was saying. This “Koine” Greek became the world’s first international language.The entire New Testament – including all the stories of Jesus – were written in the “Koine” Greek of Alexander, a language with four different words for love, although only two of them were used in the New Testament. The two that do not appear are:Eros: sexual love.Storge: the love between members of a family.The two words for love that appear repeatedly in the New Testament are Philia and Agape.Philia: the love between close friends.Agape: sacrificial love; “I care about you more than I care about me.”The Harvard Grant Study is the world’s longest running and most comprehensive psychological study, and it talks about love. The study says the happiest people are those who have chosen to do 5 things.(5.) suppress unproductive and distressing thoughts,(4.) maintain a realistic view of the future and its difficulties,(3.) turn frustration and anger into productive energy,(2.) make light of stressful events,(1.) focus on the wellbeing of others.The world’s longest running and most comprehensive psychological study says the secret of happiness is to see love as a verb, something you do: focus on the wellbeing of others.Albert Schweitzer was a polymath. He was a physician, philosopher, musicologist, theologian, humanitarian, and a writer. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.On September 4, 1965 – the day Albert Schweitzer died – the song “Help!” by the Beatles, went to #1 on the charts. Do you remember the lyrics?When I was younger, so much younger than today,I never needed anybody’s help in any way.But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.And I do appreciate you being ’round.Help me get my feet back on the ground.Won’t you please, please help me?Albert Schweitzer spoke of love and happiness in much the same way the Harvard Grant Study spoke of love and happiness. Albert put it this way:“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”Not being able to answer the question myself, I put the question to you: What, then, is Love?Roy H. WilliamsDateline: Austin, TexasHeadline: Mickey Kennedy Has Spent 25 Years Helping Small Businesses Write and Distribute News ReleasesBody: Mickey Kennedy believes small businesses should not have to pay exorbitant prices to write or distribute news releases. In October 1998, he launched a news release service that has since provided hundreds of thousands of small businesses the media reach that the giant public relations newswires offer at a fraction of the cost. As Mickey tells roving reporter Rotbart, the key to news release success is knowing what will and what won’t capture the imagination of influential journalists.Contact: MondayMorningRadio.com, of course.

We have a need to belong. We want to be seen and heard. We want to be missed when we are not around. We want to have genuine connection. This is the basis of relational ad writing.Never heard of it? That is because most ads are transactional, not relational.In a transactional ad, an air conditioning company might claim to be, “The Honest Air Conditioning Company.” But in a relational ad, the owner does not claim to be honest. They just say something that only an honest person would say.The people in relational ads are marked by their vulnerability.KARLA: When something at home isn’t working right and you need a guy,  your friend says,JOHNNY MOLSON: “I’ve got a guy.”KARLA: Hi, I’m Mrs. Michael and I want to be your guy. You need a plumber. You need an electrician. You need an H-Vac technician; I want to be your guy. I’m a happily married woman with two grown children, but back when I was raising two babies, my husband and I started a plumbing company, an electrical company, and an air conditioning company. Make no mistake: Mr. Michael is a genius with tools, but he did NOT enjoy running 3 big companies, so he asked me to do it. Guess what? I LOVE IT! I know that if I make your problems vanish into thin air, then when your friends say,SARAH: “I’ve got a thing at home that isn’t working right, and I need a guy,”  KARLA:  you’ll say,JOHNNY MOLSON: “I’ve got a guy. Her name is Mrs. Michael.”KARLA: Plumber, Electrician, H-Vac technician. I’m Mrs. Michael, and I want to be your guy.DEVIN: Go to MrsMichael.comKARLA: OR… go to Iwanttobeyourguy.comDEVIN: MrsMichael.comRelational ads are not portable. They are true only of the company that airs them. Transactional ads are portable. They can be used by anyone who wants to make the same offer, use the same gimmick, tell the same lie.Mrs. Michael does not use transactional ads. She uses relational ads that let you know who she is, what she believes, and how she thinks. You are free to like her or not. Most people like her. A lot. No surprise, right? We tend to buy from people we like, people with whom we agree, people who remind us of ourselves.Did it ever occur to you that a transactional ad with an urgent, “limited-time offer” is erased from the mind as soon as the deadline is passed? We do not retain information that is no longer relevant or meaningful. The only thing we remember is to never pay that company their asking price because they will soon be having a sale.Goldcasters Fine Jewelry sells a startling amount of jewelry per capita in a town that is located less than an hour from the inspiring city of Indianapolis. Goldcasters’ sales volume would be impressive for a jewelry store in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago.Like Mrs. Michael, Goldcasters uses relational advertising.DEVIN: Brad Lawrence, owner of Goldcasters Fine Jewelry.BRAD: When I opened the store, I had no money. We didn’t have the money for inventory. I brought wax models from school to use to cast into projects for customers. And hence the name Goldcasters. Things were so tight at times I remember the backside of my wedding ring was gone because I didn’t have the money to buy gold to size rings. So I’d cut the pieces out of the back of my wedding band to use as gold stock to size rings for customers. And then when we could afford to, then I’d replace it back onto my band.JACOB: Did your wife ever find out about that?BRAD: (laughter) Well, when she saw the bottom of my ring, obviously she did. When you looked at it from the top, it looked perfect. (laughter subsides) It was a very, very humble beginning. I always believed that if you took care of the customers that the costomers would come back and that you could build a business that way.DEVIN: Goldcasters. At Second and Washington in Bloomington.Do you want to measure the results of your ads immediately? Write transactional ads that make an impressive offer that is available only if the customer acts quickly.Do you want to be the company people think of immediately and feel the best about? Write relational ads that allow them to get to know you.The longer you use transactional ads, the less well they work. The longer you use relational ads, the better they work.Is there ever a time in a relational ad campaign when the customer is given an opportunity to experience something special? Yes, but these ads are not transactional. They are simply an invitation to take the relationship to the next level.Relational ads are a courtship.Transactional ads are a one-night stand.Enough said.Roy H. WilliamsPS – If you were wondering why Mrs Michael said the two syllables “H-Vac” instead of the two syllables “A/C”, it’s because she lives and operates in a Northern city. Relational ads feel personal and sound local.President John F. Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”

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

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

There are places in geography.There are places in the heart.There are places in time.Where shall we start?– Indy BeaglePlaces in Geography:“We have thought how places are able to evoke moods, as color and line in a picture may capture and warp us to a pattern the painter intended.”– John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 256Places in the Heart:“God only knows what I’d be without you. If you should ever leave me, though life would still go on, believe me, the world could show nothing to me. So what good would living do me?”– Brian WilsonPlaces in Time:“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed; some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain. All these places had their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life, I’ve loved them all.”– John LennonMy favorite singer-songwriter, James Taylor, was interviewed recently. When James was asked about his life-controlling addiction to drugs as a young man, he answered with these words:“The key for an addict is how much of a relief the addict felt when they first discovered their drug of choice. When that really works for them, watch out for the backend, because you’ll hold on until the very end. You’ll be the last person to admit that it’s gotta go.”I was considering these places and spaces in the darkness of early morning when the tone of an arriving text turned my eyes toward the telephone. My friend had been reading the Monday Morning Memos in the archives from 15 years ago and had a couple of questions for me. One of those questions triggered the memory of someone whose life briefly intersected with Pennie’s and mine 38 years ago.And Now We Shall Start:Patrick is two years older than me. He is insightful and articulate, but his life has been shattered into sharp little shards. When a person has been irretrievably shattered, they have a hard time holding themselves together.When he was a boy, Patrick saw his mother kill his father in the street outside their home. He and his mother did not get along after that.And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Patrick together again.Watching your father fall is not at all like watching the rainfall, or the snowfall, or the light fall softly on the window pane. Watching your father fall is different. In Patrick’s case it led to him being held tightly in the sharp talons of the law like an eagle holds tightly to a mouse.Policemen are attracted to Patrick like iron to a magnet. And Patrick is pulled toward prison like a moth is pulled toward the flame.Patrick was headed back to prison when Pennie and I let him sleep in our spare bedroom 38 years ago. He was there for only a few weeks, but it was long enough to get to know him and all the monsters he was fighting in his mind.Patrick’s life has a rhythm. He serves his time, gets out of prison, and promptly goes back to prison again.Patrick isn’t crazy. He has a sharp, clear mind, an impressive vocabulary, and a deep understanding of the reality that surrounds him. His crime is that he uses illegal chemicals to escape that reality, and he is smart enough to manufacture those chemicals himself.“Uh-oh. That’s a no-no. We’re going to have to put you back in your cage, Patrick.”In the 67 years of Patrick’s lonely life, his only romantic interest has been his love for chemical escape. Chemicals are the music of his life. To him, they are like the Big Band music of Glenn Miller and Cole Porter. In my mind, I see Patrick dancing with a mirror-image of himself as he looks back at the day he first learned how to escape his pain.“That’s the way it began, we were hand-in-hand, Glenn Miller’s Band was better than before. We yelled and screamed for more. And the Porter tunes made us dance across the room. It ended all too soon. And on the way back home I promised you’d never be alone. Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait. I said to myself, ‘When we’re old, we’ll go dancing in the dark, walking through the park, and reminiscing.'”*Patrick is now old and dancing in the dark of an Oklahoma prison, reminiscing his lifelong love affair with perception-altering chemicals. But his sharp mind, his impressive vocabulary and his deep understanding of the reality around him rose to an unprecedented height in 2020 when he borrowed some legal books from the prison library, wrote his own legal petition, and filed a case with the United States Supreme Court.I think we can agree the odds are low that an incarcerated felon could write their own petition and have it not only reviewed but ruled upon by the United States Supreme Court.But that’s what happened. In July of 2020, Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh read Patrick’s petition and ruled in his favor. From what I can gather online, it didn’t get him released from prison, but it did overrule and reverse certain judgments of the lower court regarding Patrick’s case,

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

William Shakespeare, wearing the mask of an imaginary Prince of Denmark – Hamlet by name – suggested that human knowledge is limited.“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”Each of us lives alone in a private, perceptual reality. We can communicate with one another only to the degree that our perceptual realities overlap.There is an objective reality, but humans are ill-equipped to experience it.The degree to which you understand the limitations of your private reality is the degree to which you are self-aware.Dr. Jorge Martins de Oliveira is Director of Neurosciences at the University of Brazil, on the Editorial Board of Brain & Mind magazine, and is the author of “Principles of Neuroscience.”This is what he has to say about Perceptual Reality:“Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way that we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses. We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors. We experience vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experience chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences. They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colorless, odorless, insipid and silent.”“Although you and I share the same biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a distinct color and smell is not exactly equal to the color and smell you perceive. We may give the same name to similar perceptions, but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.”Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for discovering that we don’t have one brain divided into two hemispheres, as much as we have two separate, competing brains. Sperry was able to demonstrate that we have a logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning (SCIENTIFIC) Left Brain, and a romantic, artistic, connection-seeking, pattern-finding, (ARTS & HUMANITIES) Right Brain. He said,“Each hemisphere of the brain is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and… both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”Did you notice it? The Left and the Right hemispheres can have “simultaneous, mutually conflicting, mental experiences.” You can have a single experience and walk away with two opinions of what just happened!“In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other… The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.”– Tom RobbinsBut what happens if the Left Hemisphere completely ignores the voice of the Right Hemisphere? What happens if the Right ignores the the Left?C. P. Snow published “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” in 1959. He believed that Science and the Humanities were the driving forces of western society, but they were splitting us into a society of “two cultures.”Looking back over the culture war that has increasingly devoured us these past 20 years, it would appear that C.P. Snow was right.In May of 2023 the world renowned neuroscientist Dr. Iain McGilchrist was discussing the (SCIENTIFIC) Left Brain, and the (ARTS & HUMANITIES) Right Brain when he said,“Something I discovered in medical school, was that this corpus callosum, this connecting band, spent at least half its time, if not more, sending messages to the other hemisphere, ‘You keep out of this, I’m dealing with it.’ So it wasn’t so much facilitating as inhibiting. Primates have more inhibiting neurons than any other mammal and humans have more inhibiting neurons than any primate. In fact, about 19% of the human brain consists of inhibitory neurons telling us where we may not go, which is the important part that resistance, negation, plays in creation.”Continuing to speak of our split brains, McGilchrist said,“Attention is actually how our world comes into being. So if you attend to something in one way, you see one thing. If you attend in another, you see something quite different. It’s not that we’ve all got schizophrenia, of course we haven’t… we are all neglecting the Right (ARTISTIC) hemisphere. And if you like, schizophrenia is a case in which the Left (SCIENTIFIC) hemisphere has gone into overdrive and the Right Hemisphere has been wound down, or is not really being listened to. And this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world which is fully deluded.”Interviewer: Such as?McGilchrist: “There are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic: ‘This is right and anyone who says other is w

“No one listens to the radio anymore. Radio is dead.”When someone says that to me, I beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter.“Wait a minute. When you say, ‘beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter,’ what do you mean by that?”Okay let’s role play this. Say to me, “No one listens to the radio anymore.”“No one listens to the radio anymore.”How well do you understand the science of statistical measurement?“I understand the basics, I think.”You’ve heard of the Gallup Poll, right?“Sure.”The Gallup Poll measures the opinions of the 260 million adults in America with 95% confidence and only a 3 percent margin of error. Do you know the sample size required to do that?“Tell me.”One thousand and sixty-seven people.“That doesn’t sound right.”Statistical scientists know their measurements are reliable because of the Law of Large Numbers. Are you familiar with the Law of Large Numbers?“No.”The Law of Large Numbers guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of random events. While a casino might lose money on a single spin of the roulette wheel, its earnings will return to a predictable percentage over a large number of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. The margin of error depends inversely on the square root of the sample size. In other words, the smaller the universe, the larger the percentage that has to be queried to get an accurate result. But the larger the universe, the smaller the percentage.“What are you saying, exactly?”In a universe of just 100 people, you have to ask nearly all of them to get an accurate measurement. But in a universe of 1 million people, you need only 600 people in your survey. To measure the entire United States of America, you need just 1,067 randomly chosen adults.“So how many people participate in a radio survey in the average city?”Name a city.“San Francisco. It’s a tech city. Silicon Valley. There’s no way radio is reaching San Francisco.”The Nielsen sample size in San Francisco is three times the number of people required to measure the whole United States. And Nielsen doesn’t measure just once per quarter. Nielsen measures San Francisco 365 days a year.“How?”What do you mean?“How are they measuring it? What’s the mechanism?”It’s a digital device worn by thousands of randomly selected people. Nielsen’s Portable People Meter knows precisely which station you’re listening to, when you started listening, when you changed channels, and when you quit listening. It doesn’t rely on human recall, and you can’t lie to it. Nielsen’s Portable People Meter is as reliable as anything offered by Facebook or Google. Nielsen isn’t guessing when they tell you how many people are listening to the radio. They’re measuring it 24/7/365.“You still haven’t told me how many people listen to the radio in San Francisco.”41.6% of the people in San Francisco – 2,565,817 persons – spend enough time listening to the radio that we can efficiently reach each of them an average of 3 times a week, 52 weeks in a row. This means 41.6% of San Francisco will hear your new, surprising, and different radio ad 156 times this year.“Yeah. But is it working? Radio, I mean.”Radio is delivering better results for less money than it has ever delivered. I can say that because my 70 partners and I have been using radio to grow owner-operated businesses for more than 40 years.“Okay, but isn’t attribution a problem? Sure, maybe your clients are growing, but how do you know that radio is what’s driving that growth?”We don’t use a media mix when our client can’t afford to swing that hammer.“What do you mean?”We believe in doing one thing wholeheartedly instead of two things halfheartedly. A focused budget always outperforms a scattered one.“Are you doing any digital marketing?”Of course. Google is the new phone book, so you’ve got to be there when the customer goes looking for you by name.“So you’re buying only branded keywords?”Bingo. That’s how we track attribution. When we agree to work with a client, we look at how many people per week are typing their name into Google, and then we begin measuring (1.) the increase in branded keyword searches along with (2.) the top line growth of their company. Those are two of the three metrics we care about.“What’s the third one?”Cost Per Person/Per Year.“Never heard of it.”That’s because we invented it.“Are you allowed to do that?”Yeah. Welcome to America.“How is Cost Per Person/Per Year different from Cost Per Point or Cost Per Thousand?Food and Entertainment have a short purchase cycle. This means you will see results quickly when you make an enticing offer and create urgency. But most advertisers have a long purchase cycle. Consequently, they’ve got to become the company a customer thinks of first and feels the best about when that customer’s buying event occurs, and that takes massive repetition. Radio people call it frequency. But you also need 52-week consistency, which is essen

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

Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” He was speaking, of course, of DNA, the organizing pattern of every type of life on our planet.Your DNA contains the archetypal pattern of your physical body, but the world around you is bigger than your body.The world around you contains an infinite number of archetypes.An archetype is any recurrent pattern recognized by the pattern-seeking right hemisphere of the brain.Archetypes exist in our minds and in the physical reality that surrounds us. Archetypes are the interface that allows us to interpret, understand, and catalogue what we are experiencing.Archetypes are the basis for all similes and metaphors. Carl Jung understood this.If you Google “Jungian archetypes” you’ll find that most writers list the archetypes as twelve basic characters: Lover, Magician, Explorer, Creator, Sage, Outlaw, Hero, Jester, Everyman, Caretaker, Ruler, and the Innocent. These 12 characters populate the movies, television shows, novels, myths, and award-winning ad campaigns we experience on a daily basis.But what Jung actually taught is that archetypes are the psychological structures that allow us to recognize recurrent patterns in the world around us. They are the unconscious organizers of perceptions and ideas, since they spring from the systemic order that transcends both the external world and the human mind. Jung claimed there can be no master list of archetypes because there are an indefinite number of them, one for every recurrent pattern we observe.And not just patterns of personalities, but patterns of events, as well. Examples of events that follow an archetypal pattern include: Reproduction, Substitution, Reconfiguration, Following a Path, Collapse, Renewal, De-alignment, Re-alignment, and the Investment Bubble that always precedes delayed gratification.Every introduction of change requires a Pattern Shift, a transition from one pattern to another.Although most events could be categorized as “transitions,” an Archetypal Transition is a specific type of event, such as the ritual of Initiation (baptism,) or the ritual of Union (marriage,) or the ritual of Casting Out (divorce.) An Archetypal Transition is a portal to a new identity. Some examples of Archetypal Transition include being parented, courtship, loss of virginity, a sudden change in status, and preparation for death.Archetypes of Transition open the door for a new and different person to experience a new and different world.As a writer, you create new realities in the imaginations of your readers, so it is perfectly reasonable that you should observe and name new archetypes. You are not limited only to those named by Jung and popularized by tradition.In fact, I have invented names for several recurrent patterns that I have observed, and have mentioned several of them to you already.And now I officially give you permission to do the same:1. Go. Observe the world around you.2. Recognize and name the recurrent patterns that you find.3. Keep a list of them.Indy Beagle and I look forward to reading about your discoveries.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsPS – Today’s soirée was inspired by my partner, Vi Wickam, who sent me the Richard Feynman quote that opened today’s Monday Morning Memo.When Victoria Pelletier sets her mind to achieving a goal, she won’t let anything or anyone stop her. Nor will she blame anyone but herself when things don’t go the way she planned. Those two personality traits — being unstoppable and making no excuses — have been a recipe for success since she became the chief operating officer of a multinational corporation at age 24. Decades on, after holding senior roles at American Express, IBM, and Accenture, she now advises owners, CEOs, and board members on how to adopt her approach to business and life. Victoria tells roving reporter Rotbart that anyone, regardless of their socioeconomic background or the adversity they may have faced, can achieve professional growth and inspire others to do the same. MondayMorningRadio.com

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

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

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

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

I have been in a reflective mood of late. Unplugged from my beloved routine of writing an ocean of ads in the middle of the night, I have been examining the lives of people who sharpened their skills to such fine points that they pierced the skies and found themselves embodied in golden beams of light.A larger-than-life personality saturated in dazzling talent is combustible. Give that person the tiniest spark of opportunity and they will instantly be on fire.Ernest Hemingway embodied the sad machismo of the Lost Generation and became a cultural icon. Hunter S. Thompson embodied the psychedelic counterculture of the following generation and became a cultural icon. Arriving at the end of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, both of them shot themselves.But years before he pulled that trigger, Thompson wrote,“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”Robin Williams was 27 years old when he encountered the tiny spark of opportunity that embodied him in the golden beams of a career, and a life, on fire. He walked into the living rooms of America as Mork, a visitor to Earth from the planet Ork, in a show called Mork & Mindy that aired on ABC from from 1978 to 1982. Each episode ended with Mork closing his eyes and – through his thoughts – contacting an invisible being named Orson, with whom he would share his observations of the day.Right now you are expecting me to tell you that Robin Williams hung himself, but you already know that, so I don’t need to mention it.My interest is in the invisible god-like character named Orson. It is an interesting name for a god, don’t you think?My theory is that the writer of the show was thinking, consciously or unconsciously, about Orson Welles, the blazing talent that gave us The War of the Worlds, a 1938 radio event that has never been equalled, and Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that Orson wrote, directed, produced, and in which he played the leading role.Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.If Robin Williams, a hyper-creative being from another world, is talking to an epic giant from that other world, it doesn’t surprise me that the giant of that world would be named Orson.David Thomson, writing for The Guardian on October 22, 2009, said,“The Orson Welles of 1936-42 worked 20 hours a day, ate double meals to keep going, pursued pretty young women like a demon and lived as if he had no tomorrow. He worked, all at once, in radio, on the stage and in preparation for his great film. He was a looming figure in American life: an offence to Hollywood in the way he achieved a carte blanche contract, and a boy wonder of such arrogance that it was said of him, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.'”“If Orson Welles had never made Citizen Kane, he would be a phenomenon. But he did and that leaves us all his children. His real children might tell you that it was a difficult and sad life to be caught with. Alas.”“But remember this: Orson died alone in 1985 and you can read the reports as signs of sadness. On the contrary, I suspect he was exhilarated at the end. Real sadness is being worth $5bn and not knowing what to do with it.”Orson Welles and I never met, but I credit him with giving me some of the greatest advice about ad writing that I ever received.Orson wrote,“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”– Orson WellesEvery e-commerce website is looking for customer engagement. Every blogger is looking for reader engagement. Every podcaster hopes for listener engagement and every Youtuber is trying to achieve viewer engagement. And one of the principal ways they measure engagement is by the amount of time you spend with them.Orson Welles told us how to do it: Give your audience a hint of a scene. Make them participate by filling in what you leave out. Get them working with you to tell your story. Make them a co-creator. When it becomes a social act of the shopper, reader, listener, or viewer to take what you are giving them – and fill in what you left out – that’s when you have achieved engagement.Thank you for these few minutes you give me each week.I always look forward to spending time with you.Roy H. WilliamsPS – Indy Beagle found a Robin Williams video that he really wants you to see and it’s waiting for you on page 1 of the rabbit hole. Just click the image of Indy Beagle at the top of this page, and Shazbot! you’re in.Bradley Hamner brings freedom to executives who are slaves-to-their-companies and turns them into architects of growth and success. His motto i

It is naive to believe the world is a meritocracy, but it is defeatist to believe that you can’t win.Six years ago, notacoward wrote,“Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about ‘meritocracy’ and the salutary effects of hard work.Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.”We’ve all seen what notacoward was describing, haven’t we? Each of us knows people who were born on third base and think they hit a triple. They populate the royal families, the financial aristocracies, the college fraternities, and the luxury resorts of our planet. The business world is full of empty suits and corporate assholes who like to pretend they earned what they were given.When you grow up in the poor part of town, you see hardworking people shake their heads and say,“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”This is nothing new. It has always been true. But it doesn’t have to apply to YOU.I knew it didn’t apply to me because I once heard a 3,000-year-old story of a shepherd boy who became King because he was stunningly good at being a shepherd boy. When a lion attacked his sheep, he killed the lion. When a bear attacked his sheep, he killed the bear. And when a giant taunted his nation, he killed the giant.The son of that King later wrote,“Do you see a person skilled in his work?He will stand before kings;He will not stand before obscure people.” **Is it wise to protect the ones we love from the problems that taught us all we know?I know a lot of successful people who wish they knew how to give their children the hardships that made them rich.One successful young friend – just 42 years old – has created four separate fortunes during the past 20 years and is working on a fifth one. He started with nothing: no family money, no angel investor, no connections. His only assets were his courage and his relentless efforts. I asked him recently what advice he would offer the emerging generation. He said,“I think the question this younger generation needs to be asking themselves is, ‘Ok, now what?’ Yes, it sucks, but it also sucks that previous generations were drafted and shipped off to die in wars.So shit happens. And sometimes people slip through the cracks.I’m happy to not call them ‘lazy’ if they’re willing to acknowledge that they still bear the responsibility of doing something… anything… to improve their lot.Because lingering in whiney little bitch mode sure ain’t gonna get it done.”If you have fallen into the trap of believing that you don’t have the money or the connections to rise above your circumstances, lift your head and open your ears to what I am about to tell you: Become exceptional. Figure out how to kill the lion. And then kill the bear. Solve the problem. And you will soon become the person that everyone – even the King – wants at their side.Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.***Roy H. WilliamsPS – “‘Ole!’ to you, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.” - Elizabeth Gilbert*** "Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are," is generally attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, but he credits it to Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia in the 9th chapter of his Autobiography. I suspect that Bill Widener was noticed by Roosevelt because he was “skilled in his work.” As a consequence, Widener stood before Kings. He did not stand before obscure people.Jennifer Brown sizes up business on how well they address today’s ever-increasing demand for inclusive workplaces. Are you (1.) unaware, (2.) aware, (3.) active, or (4.) advocate? Do you want to create a productive work environment for every employee? Google, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Disney, and Coca-Cola have all asked for her help, but you don’t need to be a big company CEO to benefit from her insights. All you need to do is join Jennifer and roving reporter Rotbart for a brief soirée right now at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Jeffrey Eisenberg and Dewey Jenkins don’t know each other but each of them taught me the importance of removing the friction.Dewey sings it to every person in his company, “Make it easy for customers to do business with us.” And they do. Inventing new ways to “make it easier” is the job of every person in every department.Jeffrey Eisenberg calls this “removing the friction in the buying process”.Tesla is a good example.I am convinced that a number of other companies are building electric vehicles that are as good ­– or better – than Tesla, but Tesla remains the big name with the big stock price. At the time of this writing, Tesla is selling for $181 a share while Volkswagen is at $18, Subaru is at $8, Ford is at $13, Audi is at $19, Mercedes is at $20, BMW is at $35, and Rivian is at $15.Tesla has removed the friction from the buying process.Buying a car from Tesla is as easy as buying a book from Amazon. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. People who order a car from Tesla look up from their computer screen with a puzzled look on their face and ask, “Did I just buy a new car?” And then they look back at their computer screen and nod their head up-and-down slowly as they say, “Yes, I just bought a new car.”Go ahead and try it. It will only cost you $500.Princess Pennie ordered a Tesla a couple of months ago and was startled by how easy it was. Two weeks later, she decided she wanted to add the optional third row of seating. I watched her add that third row in less than 30 seconds with just two clicks. Tesla immediately displayed her new delivery date, and she closed her laptop. Done.Meanwhile, our younger son spent an entire day at the Volkswagen dealer trying to order an electric SUV. He persevered for 8 grueling hours, but he got it done and the car soon arrived. He loves that vehicle, and rightfully so, but he says he would rather endure a tax audit, a root canal, and a prostate exam than go through the process of buying a Volkswagen again.Volkswagen has not yet figured out how to remove the friction.1-800-GOT-JUNK is a company entirely committed to removing the friction. Led by its founder, Brian Scudamore, “Making it easier for the customer” is an ongoing source of enthusiastic discussion at every level in that company.Meanwhile, Google is introducing all kinds of new friction. Google “Best Electric Vehicles” and you will see pages of ads from manufacturers who want to sell you a car. Enter a different, more specific phrase and you’ll get that same list. In fact, any query that includes the word “electric” followed by any synonym for “car” will get you that list of ads.Google got big by putting the customer ahead of the advertiser. They’re clearly not doing that anymore, so I’ve decided to give Bing a chance. I suspect there might be millions of other people slowly coming to that same conclusion right now.But even though I am profoundly frustrated with Google, I remain encouraged that Dewey and Jeffrey and Brian Scudamore and the customer service team at Tesla remain committed to removing the friction at every point of contact, making it ever-increasingly easy for customers to do business with them.To remove the friction is to remove the customer’s frustration.I’m just an ad writer, so I’m not particularly good at refining the internal processes of running a business, but I highly admire those people who know how to do it.How about you? Can you think of 10 tiny-little-things that would each make it a-little-bit-easier for customers to do business with you? Think of those 10 things as Exponential Little Bits; they don’t just add up, they multiply and go exponential.And when you have implemented those 10 things, think of 10 more, and then implement those.Rinse and repeat.Keep it up and you’ll become the Tesla of your category.Roy H. WilliamsPS: After writing this memo, I went to Bing for the first time and entered “Best Electric Cars.” The top two listings were the answers to my question, both from reputable sources.https://www.forbes.com/wheels/best/electric-carshttps://www.edmunds.com/electric-carIt’s possible that Bing will get greedy and lazy at some point in the future and lose their customer focus, but for now, they are my huckleberry. (“A penny for whoever will unload my supplies,” said the man with the wagon. “I’m your huckleberry,” replied a young man on the street.)If you didn’t graduate from Harvard Business School, making sense of today’s bank failures, debt ceilings, inflation, currency fluctuations, and trade deficits – can be daunting. Eric Johnson is an instrument-rated pilot, surfer, black belt, astrophotographer, angel investor, and former CEO of a software engineering firm. He has spent 15 years decoding the mysteries of economics and can explain what an economy is and how it works. Eric shares these insightful answers with roving reporter Rotbart this week at MondayMorningRadio.com.

When your advertising leans on the weak wooden crutch of discounting, it is only a matter of time before that crutch splinters and slowly pierces your heart.Discounting is a seductive drug like heroin, meth, and fentanyl. It rarely kills you quickly.It prefers to kill you slowly.Yes, I know that is an uncomfortable image, but I need you to understand how dangerous it is to discount.Discounting erodes customers’ confidence in your pricing and trains them to delay purchasing from you until you offer them a juicy discount. Discounting also raises some questions about the quality of your product.But hooray, that’s not what we’re talking about today.Today I’m going to give you a method for acquiring customers that is far more powerful than discounting. This method allows you to pay for the results of your advertising according to how well your ads work.No, we’re not talking about pay-per-click. (Remember, you’ve got to pay for that click even if the customer gives you a glance, flips you the bird, and walks away.) I have a Love/Hate relationship with pay-per-click and I’ll bet you do, too.What I’m about to share with you is Love/Love/Love/Love.I love it.It loves me.You’re going to love it.You’re going to love me for telling you about it.I believe in only two prices: full price, and free.What can you give away for free?Thirty years ago, I was given an ad budget of $10,000 and asked to bring 500 new customers to a struggling frozen custard business that had two locations, but neither one of them had inside dining. These frozen custard stands were walk-up and drive-thru only. And this was during the middle of the winter in a state where ice and snow are a regular occurrence.I asked, “Do you care how I spend the money?”“No. We just need to see 500 new customers.”“Great. I’m going to spend $500 in a single day on radio ads on the smallest radio station in town and then I’m going to spend $1,700 on custard mix. You can keep the other 78-hundred. Get a good night’s sleep on Friday night because you’re going to be working 14 hours on Saturday.”My radio ad ran twice an hour from 6am until midnight on the day of the event.It said, “This frozen custard is so good it’s illegal in 7 states and under investigation in 12 more. And today, just to prove it, we’re giving away full-size cones for free.”I called them just after midnight.I asked, “Did anyone show up?”“We just finished counting the empty cone boxes. We served 11,000 free cones today and at least 10,000 of those were people we had never seen before.”Their business immediately jumped by 80% and their sales volume never quit climbing. Today they have 53 locations in 15 states.Another example is the air conditioning company that had a history of giving customers a 15-hundred-dollar cash rebate if they purchased a new air conditioning system in October.In 2014, I convinced them that customers would much rather have an iPad. Relatively few people had them back then.They said, “But an iPad is only $700. What do we do with the rest of the money?”I said, “Buy a few extra iPads for the people who call you and say, ‘Hey! I bought a new air conditioner from you two months ago. Where’s my iPad?’”They sold a huge number of new air conditioning systems in October, two months after air conditioning season was over.The first example was a full-size, free sample. Don’t be stingy. The second example was a highly desirable gift-with-purchase.The more irresistible your offer, the better it will work. If you try this and it doesn’t work, you made a weak offer that was easy to ignore. Your offer has to be remarkable.During the worst part of the Covid lockdown when doctors and nurses were working round-the-clock and everyone was losing hope, a jeweler crafted a beautiful lapel pin and paid a few dollars each to have 2,000 of them made.The ad said, “Do you know a medical professional? Let them know that we have a special lapel pin or pendant for them and it’s free. It features a gorgeous pair of angel’s wings sprouting from the sides of a caduceus, that universal symbol of the medical profession. It’s a gift to every doctor and nurse from all of us, everyone in the city. We just want to say thank you for taking care of us.”What we learned from that experience is that two thousand doctors and nurses coming into your store translates into millions of dollars in additional sales volume.Is this making sense to you?Custard mix and iPads and little silver lapel pins are much less expensive than advertising that doesn’t work. And if no one buys a new air conditioner, you don’t have to buy any iPads.Here’s a question. What percentage of your sales comes from repeat customers and referral customers? Take a moment. Choose a percentage. Remember that percentage.Second question. What percentage of your sales come from your highly visible signage, or branded vehicles on the road, or your marvelously visible location? Choose a percentage. Remember that percentage.Add tho

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

You believe in a lot of things. But what do you believe in the most?Go into the quiet security of your mind, and you will know that you value one of these more highly than the other four.GovernmentBusinessScienceFamilyDeity“American rates of religious affiliation have plummeted to their lowest point in the past 73 years. And nowhere are they lower than in knowledge-industry hubs like Silicon Valley, where high-skilled jobs are growing the fastest. If religion is in decline, I wondered, then what are Americans worshiping now? What has become our new religion? For many professionals, the answer is work. Work provides the identity, belonging, meaning and purpose that faith traditions once did.”– Carolyn Chen, NY Times, June 4, 2022“For thousands of years, our ancestors gazed at the world around us—the people and animals, the mountains and seas, the sun, moon and stars—and saw the divine. As the 19th Psalm puts it, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.’ Even Isaac Newton saw a universe filled with purpose. In his masterwork, the Principia, he wrote: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.’ Science advanced by leaps and bounds in the centuries following Newton, and scientists dialed back much of the God-talk. Many thinkers suggested that the universe runs like a mighty clockwork. Perhaps a creator was needed at the beginning, to set it going, but surely it now runs on its own. Einstein, who often spoke of God metaphorically, took a different tack. He rejected a personal deity, but saw a kind of pantheism—roughly, the identification of God with nature—as plausible.”– Dan Falk, Scientific American, July 27, 20211. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it government?At one end of this spectrum, Communism believes that citizens should collectively own the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society. Karl Marx proposed a classless society in which everything would be shared by everyone.At the other end of the spectrum, Libertarianism says, “We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.” [LP.org) Ayn Rand famously proposed, “If government would just get out of the way, individual self-interest would create a better society!”To have confidence in government – or in the absence of government – is to believe in people. To have faith in people is Humanism. Is that where you have put your faith?2. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it business, capitalism, free enterprise?“People create value and do good things when they have a profit motive.”“Capitalism creates jobs and provides a better lifestyle for everyone who participates. It is a virtuous cycle.”“Business people are problem solvers.”3. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it science, medicine, technology?J.G. Ballard was enthusiastic about living in a technological society. He said, “Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”Napoleon Hill echoed J.G. Ballard. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”But Thomas Schelling, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, disagreed with Napoleon Hill, saying, “The one thing a person cannot do, however brilliant they are, is write up a list of things that would never occur to them.”I like Thomas Schelling.Perhaps I am oversimplifying this, but my general feeling is that when we do a thing intuitively, we call it art. When we do it systematically, we call it science. And our love of science seems to be growing exponentially.“We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list. The results are in: The nerds have won. Time to replace those arrows in the talons of the American eagle with pencils and slide rules. We’ve become the United States of Metrics.”– Bruce Feiler, NY Times, May 16, 2014My own opinion echoes that of Tom Robbins, who said, “Romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.”We will now continue our examination of the major categories of Beliefs.4. Where do you place your highest confidence? Is it family, friends, relationships?Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”Edna Buchanan said, “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.”Anthony Bourdain advise

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

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

There are only three reasons to have a list of core values.   1: Inspire and reinforce “on-brand” behavior from employees.   2: Assist in the orientation and onboarding of new hires.   3: Inform investors, customers, and other interested parties of what they can expect from you.PROBLEM: When your core values include aspirational words that describe attributes rather than actions, your core values list will be interpreted differently by different readers, regardless of any clarifying language that might appear beneath the aspirational words.Use descriptions of actionsrather than create a list of attributes.These are a few core valuesthat describe aspirational attributesrather than observable actions:“Transparency”“Integrity”“Quality”“Accountability”“Respect”“Passion”How do you know if a person is transparent, accountable, or passionate?It is hard to know what a person is being, but it is easy to see what they are doing.Actions are easier to recognize than Attributes.This is why lists of attributes rarely ring true in the hearts of employees.When you list aspirational attributes instead of observable actions:Employees aren’t exactly sure what to do.New hires are intimidated and confused.Investors, customers, and other interested parties will not be able to clearly observe your core values manifested through the actions of your people.If your employees do not see your core values modeled by their fellow employees and reinforced by management each day, you don’t have a core values list; you have a wish list, a poster on the wall that will quickly become invisible.An actionable Core Values List will improve your company culture as well as the experience you deliver to your customers.Ray Seggern teaches:Your core values list is the STORY you are telling,the daily experience of your employees determines your CULTURE,and the reactions of your customers will be determined by the EXPERIENCE you give them.If you have a Wish List of aspirational attributes rather than a Core Values List of observable actions, here are a few examples of how attributes can be expressed and described as actions:Rather than say “Transparency,”we might say, “We make only honest and accurate statements about our products.”Rather than say “Integrity,”we might say, “We always follow through on our promises.”Rather than say “Quality,”we might say, “We will only sell products that are expertly manufactured from the finest materials.”Rather than say “Accountability,”we might say, “We never make excuses for our shortcomings or try to shift the blame to others.”Rather than say “Respect,”we might say, “We use courteous language at all times and maintain eye contact when others are speaking.”Rather than say “Passion,”we might say, “We smile and display energy, attention, and enthusiasm at all times.”In conclusion: A core values list, by definition, should contain only your core values. Don’t let it morph into a comprehensive list that feels like a sermon or a pep talk. Short, tight lists work better than long, rambling ones. Your core values list should not exceed 100 words. (The “actions” list in bold letters is 71 words.)Aroo,Roy H. WilliamsDale Carnegie, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Blaine Oelkers.“Blaine who?” Blaine is not yet as widely known as those other motivational luminaries, but he does have one huge advantage over them; he is alive and inspiring a new generation of businesspeople those other legends did not live to see. Stop, listen, and learn as Blaine Oelkers shares his best life hacks with roving reporter Rotbart, including his proven technique for creating a durable new habit in only 21 seconds. That’s less time than it took you to read this paragraph! The show will begin the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

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

Regardless of our chosen profession, most of us work with Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands.You’ve probably never thought about it. I certainly hadn’t, until I was talking with my 13-year-old grandson, Gideon, trying to convince him to elevate the quality of books he reads. Gideon is an exceptional storyteller and a surprisingly good actor for his age. Based on his natural proclivities, I am convinced Gideon will someday make his money with words. There are hundreds of ways to do it.I was about to list the careers that depend primarily on a practitioner’s capacity to choose and use precisely the right words when it hit me: every endeavor requires the use of numbers, facts, words, and hands.Career choices fall into one of those four camps.Numbers. Facts. Words. Hands.Arrange those four in the order you prefer to use them. Your order of preference may not correspond with the order of your competence, but it usually does. We get better at the things we prefer, especially when we focus on them.Let’s look at the careers where the language of Numbers stands on tiptoe and shouts “Look at me!”Data scientist, structural engineer, statistician, bookkeeper/accountant/CPA, insurance company actuarial, theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, (pretty much any kind of physicist,) and the list goes on.And in which politesse is the finesse of finicky Facts essential to success?Teacher, lawyer, doctor, policeman, consultant, inventor, and the list goes on.And what pursuits depend on your ability to muster and master Words that tickle the intellect and elevate the ears?Stand-up comedian, ad writer, politician, broadcaster, podcaster, online influencer, reporter, novelist, screenwriter, lyricist, and the list goes on.You didn’t know lyricist could be a career? Bernie Taupin has made more than seventy million dollars writing lyrics for Elton John. Bernie doesn’t write the music. Just the words.Now let’s look at the careers that harness the Hands.Carpenter, plumber, artist, musician, masseuse, electrician, manufacturing technician, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. And the list goes on.No career relies on the use of a single category exclusively, but when you look at a career from a distance, it is easy to see that one of those four is used more often than the other three.I have no idea how you might use this information, but I felt it was an observation worth sharing.One final thought: I have known a lot of people who followed the advice of their guidance counselor and chose a career based on how they scored on a standardized test. Tom was one of those people. Twenty-five years ago, he said,“I scored high on math skills so they convinced me to major in math in college. I graduated and got a job with a bank and was very successful but not happy. Then one day I realized that I hated math and had always hated math and was an idiot for listening to my guidance counselor.”Tom left banking to become an ad writer and became even more successful than he had been as a banker.And Tom was a lot happier, as well.If you took a moment to arrange Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands in the order of your preference, [email protected] would like you to share your list with him, along with anything else you would like to add.I told him you said aroo.He says aroo to you, too.Roy H. WilliamsCompanies are pouring big money into programs that teach “soft skills,” such as employee training, human resources, community outreach, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.) But do they get their money’s worth?Jack and Patti Phillips developed a method for determining the return on investment for programs like these and it has become the most-used evaluation system in the world, adopted by 27 governments and three-fourths of the FORTUNE 500! Listen as they explain to roving reporter Rotbart how much easier it is to assess these programs than most owners and executives realize. The time is now. The place is MondayMorningRadio.com

You are rolling down the road when you wonder, “If I turn off the engine and quit burning fuel, how far can I coast?”If your thought was to save fuel, you have made a costly mistake. The fuel you will burn to regain your speed is a lot more fuel than you would have burned to maintain your speed.This isn’t just a common mistake. It is an “extremely very” common mistake.But you were wondering how far you could coast, so I will answer your question, as asked.Your ability to coast will be determined bySpeedMassFrictionGravity (Are you coasting uphill, or down? Anyone can coast downhill in a booming economy.)Advertising is the fuel that energizes your business.Speed of growth is determined by how heavily you have been advertising.Mass is determined by how long you have been advertising that heavily.Friction is the inefficiency of your people to consistently delight your customers.Gravity is the resistance of your competitors. How strong or weak are they?It has been my observation that a roaringly successful business with a lot of momentum can coast for about 6 months before people begin to suspect that something has changed. During those 6 months, the business owner will say, “I cut my advertising and nothing changed! I should have done this a long time ago.”At the end of a year, they begin blaming the media. “The thing we were using no longer works. We’ve got to find the new thing.”At the end of two years, the wheels begin to come off. But it has been so long since they changed their advertising that no one suspects it to be the problem.At the end of four years, the company is in real trouble.I have seen this movie so many times that I can describe every scene and quote every line of dialogue.Whether it is after a one-month vacation, a three-month sabbatical, or a six-month abandonment, when that company starts advertising again, they invariably become frustrated that it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. (Remember what I said? “The fuel you will burn to regain your speed is a lot more fuel than you would have burned to maintain your speed.” Payback is hell. It’s going to cost that company at least six months of painful fuel inefficiency to regain the momentum they lost during those six months they were lazily picking their nose instead of advertising.“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”– Christopher McDougall, “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe”A second business owner believes they can build their business to a certain size and then, “just hold what they’ve got,” as though that volume of business is something they can count on from now on. But “holding what you’ve got” is never really an option because the physics of mass, friction, and gravity apply to maintaining your current speed just as surely as they apply to regaining lost momentum.“Hold-what-we’ve-got” business owners quietly believe, “We have all these customers now, so we don’t need to reach them with advertising anymore.”BREAKING NEWS: People stay reached like grass stays mowed. A good restaurant is an exception to this rule. In truth, I think you could open a marvelous restaurant on the steppes of Mongolia and people would find it and tell their friends about it.But you’re not in the restaurant business.Your business inhales and exhales, expands and contracts, just like every other living organism. This fantasy of, “holding what you’ve got” springs from the misbegotten belief that your business can hold its breath.Maybe you can do it. I don’t know. Give it a try and we’ll find out.Are you old enough to have seen a NASA rocket lift off the launchpad at Cape Canaveral? Remember the profound amount of fuel they had to burn to push that rocket slowly upward? Mass and Gravity are a bitch, whether you are trying to launch a rocket or a business. Fuel inefficiency during lift-off is just a fact of life.If you let that rocket begin to fall back to earth, you’ve got to start all over again.I’m sorry that I had to be the one to tell you.Roy H. WilliamsCan you teach yourself and your colleagues to generate great ideas — ideas actually worth pursuing? Robin Landa has been studying where breakthrough ideas come from — so-called ideation — and she can explain how anyone can conjure concepts that will be REVOLUTIONARY. Robin tells roving reporter Rotbart, “There are three ‘Gs’ that underlie every worthwhile creation.” Want to know what those Gs are? Join us at MondayMorningRadio.com and we’ll tell you everything you need to know. The party will start the moment you arrive.

I recently read a pair of books by Arkady Martine, a writer who is new to Science Fiction. A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021), each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.I like Arkady Martine and I like her books. She is an extraordinary storyteller.But she is not yet a great writer.That was not intended as an insult. Dan Brown sold a staggering number of The DaVinci Code, but he is not yet a great writer, either. We tend to read the book of a great storyteller only once. Knowing the story, the magic is gone. This is why every thrift shop in the world is stacked with countless copies of 50 Shades of Gray and The DaVinci Code.But we read the works of great writers again and again. A great writer could write an instruction manual and make it captivating.Literary evaluation is wildly subjective, of course, so I owe an explanation to Arkady Martine and to you.I never read borrowed books because I intend to circle passages and make notes in the margins along the way. To deface my own books with circles and notes is a sign of respect for the author, but for me to deface the book of a friend would not be a sign of respect.I will not finish a book if the author is not a great storyteller. I will not circle any passages if the author is a not a great writer.The hope of every great storyteller should be to also become a great writer. To win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize in literature, you have to be both.John Steinbeck was both.J.R.R. Tolkien was both.Tom Robbins is both.Bill Bryson is both.Barbara Kingsolver is both.I am currently on page 26 of Barbara Kingsolver’s 546-page novel, Demon Copperhead,* and I have already circled 10 passages. Indy will transcribe those passages into the rabbit hole when I have completed the book. (The Random Quotes database is now 6,108 quotes and climbing. – Indy)The stories that comprise One Thousand and One Nights were compiled a thousand years ago. In one of those stories, Prince Husain travels to Bisnagar and buys a magic carpet. Do not let Disney mislead you. Husain’s carpet is not a ‘flying’ carpet that rides the air like a raptor. His magic carpet is like a good book. All you have to do is decide where you want to be, sit down, and you are there.Good writing engages all your senses as it moves you to another place, another time, another life.You are at a spongey 100-year-old seaside resort favored by the idle rich in the tropical south.“The air was heavy with oleander and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5.”– Olivia NuzziYou are now in the brittle north.“It’s FREEZING cold; like the air is made of broken glass. Our English cold is all roly-poly snowmen and ‘woo-hoo! it’s a snow day!’ a hey-there friendly kind of cold. But this cold is mean…”“It’s getting so hard to breathe, my lungs are filling up with ants and there isn’t room for air any more. There’s a monster made of cold, hard as the edge of a pavement, coming towards us in the dark and it’s cutting through the windscreen and doors and windows and the only weapon against it is heat, but we don’t have any heat.”“…she felt it now as vastly, cruelly impersonal; a frozen darkness absorbing you into itself. She felt it filling her hollow spaces, embedding itself as icy marrow in her bones and then consciousness seeped away from her into the Arctic blackness.”– Rosamund LuptonYou stood in the rain sixty-five miles north of Seattle.“And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained pale eggs of the beast.Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller.Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure…”– Tom RobbinsYou are exploring Africa in the 1930’s.“The trail ran north to Molo; at night it ran straight to the stars. It ran up the side of the Mau Escarpment until at ten thousand feet it found the plateau and rested there, and some of the stars burned beneath its edge.”– Beryl MarkhamYou are learning from your friend Bill what to expect when visiting Rome.“I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve

I want you to:be more productive,reduce your mistakes,shorten your learning curve,and elevate your success.If I am going to help you do these things, we must first look at what’s hiding in your blind spot.Are you ready?Teamwork in Business is Highly Overrated.Teamwork is never the answer.Individual responsibility is the answer.A relay race is really just a series of individual runners, three of whom begin their efforts with an advantage, or a deficit, handed to them by the previous runner. If a runner increases that advantage or shortens that deficit, he or she was successful.When individuals are rewarded collectively, we create the illusion of a team.1: Individual responsibility brings out the best in us.2: You create a committee when you remove individual responsibility.3: Every bureaucracy begins as a well-intentioned committee.But we love to be members of a tribe. Being part of a team – a tribe – gives us a sense of identity, purpose, and adventure. These feelings help us to perform as individuals.Americans love football. But it isn’t the teamwork that attracts us. It is the tribalism and the tribal leaders.Quarterbacks, running backs and receivers – the tribal leaders who score the most points – are paid a lot more money than the rest of the team. So why do coaches tell players that every member of the team is “equally important”? I can’t help but hear the “Animal Farm’ voice of George Orwell, his tongue about to punch a hole in his cheek,“All animals are created equal. But some animals are more equal than others.”The role of a tribal leader is to instill the values, beliefs, and culture of the tribe into each of its members and each of its fans.Tribal leaders are different from tribal managers.A Manager – a Coach – holds each individual responsible for delivering the outcome that he or she has been assigned.Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer. Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer.Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were not a team. They were partners, each of whom had specific responsibilities.“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.” *That is Steve Wozniak’s advice to you.“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy… Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”– John Steinbeck, East of EdenWozniak was the first runner in a relay race. He handed the baton to Steve Jobs. When Jobs was forced to hand that baton to John Sculley in 1985, Scully stumbled and handed the baton to Michael Spindler who stumbled and handed it to Gil Amelio who fell on his face and left a 20-foot skid mark on the track.Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996 and brought it back to life. After he died in 2011, tribal manager Tim Cook lifted Apple to a $1 trillion stock valuation, the first ever in history.Professor Scott Galloway made a piercing comment about the power of tribal leaders when he was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour,“As societies become wealthier and more educated, the reliance on a super-being and church attendance goes down, but they still look for idols. Into that void steps technology leaders because technology… …is the closest thing we have to magic. Our new Jesus Christ was Steve Jobs, and now Elon Musk has taken on that mantle.”Although I admired the abilities of Steve Jobs, he was merely the popularizer, the face, the dynamic leader, the pitchman, the philosopher, the high priest of the Apple religion. Without Wozniak, Steve Jobs would likely have been just another California techie bouncing from company to company in blue jeans, a black turtleneck, and sneakers.I will leave Elon Musk up to you.Roy H. Williamswith special thanks to Tom Grimes of Amarillo for his 20 years of research into Social Tribes in America.* Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan CainThe Rice and Beans Millionaire: The Case of an Improbable Entrepreneur by Wizard Academy Instructors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. Short chapters. You’ll read several stories about Wizard Academy starting in Chapter 27: The Crazy Ones. Read and review this book. Do this and you will not leave a 20-foot skid mark on the track like Gil Amelio. In fact, 2023 will be your best year ever.– Indy Beagle Cathy Nesbitt is a passionate worm advocate, a sort of worm royalty. For the past 20 years Cathy has bred and sold red wigglers and European nightcrawlers to enthusiastic customers who use the squigglers to facilitate composting — converting household garbage

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the 2023 Zenith of the “WE,” so today I’ll give you a recap.The 3,000-year pendulum of Western Civilization* is energized by two good things that oppose each other: Every 40-year “ME” cycle is driven by the hunger for individuality and freedom of expression.Every 40-year “WE” cycle is driven by working together for the common good.We begin each of these cycles with the best of intentions; but then we take that good thing too far – all the way to the zenith at one end of the pendulum’s arc – and begin to mourn what we left behind. 20 years up to the zenith, 20 years back down; then we begin our 20-year journey up to the opposite zenith; then 20 years back down to complete the 80-year roundtrip.There are two reasons why so few people say, “Hey, I remember this!” 1. We don’t notice the truly important when we are distracted by the merely urgent.2. The pendulum is in the same position – headed in the same direction – just once every 80 years. How often do you listen to a 90-year-old when they say, “Back when I was 10 years old…” The 40-year “ME” cycle that began in 1963 was built on individuality and freedom of expression.  That “ME” zenithed in 1983, then it slowly deflated until 2003. That’s when we began our current “WE” cycle. And like every “WE,” it began with the beautiful dream of working together for the common good. As we reach the zenith of that “WE” – 2023 – we see the consequences of taking “working together for the common good” a little too far.Okay, a lot too far.Every zenith of a “WE” cycle is a time of intense opposition and strong beliefs. We feel that anyone who believes differently from us is stupid and evil and must be stopped at any cost. 1783 – The Revolutionary War ended on Sept. 3 with the Treaty of Paris. We spent the next 5 chaotic years writing and adopting – state by state – the Constitution.1863 – The middle year of the U.S. Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated 2 years later. Chaos.1943 – The middle year of America’s involvement in WW II. Two years later we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.2023 – (We shall see what we shall see.) Religiosity is often intense at the Zenith of a “WE” cycle. Disagreements often result from a lack of definitions of terms. For the purposes of this discussion, these will be the definitions of Faith, Religion, and Religiosity:Faith is that in which you place your greatest confidence.(Science? Politics? Deity?)Religion is the formalizing of a code of orthodoxy around your Faith.Religiosity is weaponized religion.Every reader takes from a text what he brings to it.“It is a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God. The minute I believe I know the mind of God is the minute someone needs to tell me to sit down and breathe into a paper bag. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”– Barbara Brown TaylorYou can get ancient scriptures to confess to whatever you want if you torture them long enough.“The history of the world shows that when you place an ego and a spiritual text (the Bible, Torah, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, etc.) in the same room, the text will always end up in a chokehold.”– Michele Miller-NelsonEvery person deserves to be remembered for their finest moment. From what I know of Ernest Hemingway, I believe his finest moment may have been when he said: “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”We want everyone to know what we think, but we don’t really care to know what they think.I believe our resistance to considering the perspectives of others is rooted in our need for identity reinforcement. I believe this is the driving force behind political parties, religious organizations, and affinity groups. Look back and you’ll see that things have been getting increasingly nutty since about 2013. For the past 3,000 years of Western Civilization,* the ugliest 20 years in the 80-year roundtrip are the 10 years before – and the 10 years after – the zenith of a “WE.” 2023 is that zenith, the moment when the Pendulum reaches its full ascent and begins to decline. The problem is that it will take us 10 years to get back to the low-level nuttiness we endured in 2013. The good news is that we are at the halfway point. Things will begin to slowly get better soon.Roy H. Williams * “How could Western Civilization be 3,000 years old,” you ask? Indy Beagle will answer your question, soothe your doubts, and make you laugh in the rabbit hole. He will also frighten you a tiny bit. Please accept my apologies in advance. That Beagle has a mind of his own.After ten years of running her own business with a hit-and-miss method of recruiting staff, Andrea Hoffer deci

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

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

The pain of loss is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain. When Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory in 1979, a generation of advertisers mistakenly began to speak to Pain, and to the fear of Loss.If you frame a choice as “Loss versus Gain,” most people will choose loss avoidance because “losses loom larger than gains.”But what if you want your audience to embrace the risk of loss? To what motivation, then, do you speak?Equally unwise is to frame a choice as “Pain versus Pleasure.” Pain and Pleasure are not as distinct as they may at first seem. You do not recall the event itself, but only your most recent memory of it.The experience of pain or pleasure during an event is replaced by the memory of that pain or pleasure; how it is perceived afterwards upon recall. Your memory is built upon what you were feeling at the peak point, and how the experience ended. These are the four peaks that matter:1. Elevation: a transcendent moment of happiness.2. Pride: a moment that captures you at your best.3. Insight: a eureka moment that gives you startling clarity4. Connection: a moment of knowing you belong.Don’t speak to the fear of loss – or to the avoidance of pain – unless you are counting on an immediate response from people who are easily alarmed.If you desire your audience to embrace the possibility of pain and loss, you must reframe the choice as “Fear versus Hope.”We have lionized feats of bravery and ridiculed acts of cowardice for millennia.“Are you a frightened, fearful little waste of skin, or will your actions be remembered for generations? Is there anything you care about more than yourself?”Loss vs. Gain, or Pain vs. Pleasure, can easily be reframed as Fear vs. Hope. To cause a person to prefer more pain instead of less pain, all you have to do is add a better ending.“With a beginning that invites each man to assume he’ll be the one who ‘outlives this day, and comes safe home,’ the speech skims over present difficulties to paint an evocative picture of future fellowship and hearty celebration. Instead of focusing on the suffering they’re about to face, the men project themselves years ahead, to the happy time when they will be old and honored, with even the meanest of their number elevated to gentry status as the king’s brothers-in-arms. With this vivid picture of their glorious future, the king moves the troops to conquer their fears and follow him to victory.”– Virginia Postrel, The Power of GlamourVirginia Postrell was referring to a famous speech Shakespeare wrote for a play in 1599. When they were impossibly outnumbered at Agincourt in 1415 and every man thought he was about to die; this is that famous speech given by King Henry V.HUMPHREY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTERWhere is the King? JOHN, DUKE OF BEDFORDThe King himself is rode to view their battle. EARL OF WESTMORLANDOf fighting men they have full threescore thousand. DUKE OF EXETERThere’s five to one; besides, they all are fresh.(The King, unseen, approaches from behind and hears… )EARL OF WESTMORLANDO that we now had hereBut one ten-thousand of those men in EnglandThat do no work today! KING HENRY VWhat’s he that wishes so?My cousin Westmorland? No, my fair cousin.If we are mark’d to die, we are enoughTo do our country loss; and if to live,The fewer men, the greater share of honor.God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more.Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my hostThat he which hath no stomach to this fight,Let him depart, his passport shall be made,And crowns for convoy put into his purse.We would not die in that man’s companyThat fears his fellowship to die with us.This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,Will stand a’ tiptoe when this day is named,And rouse him at the name of Crispian.He that shall see this day, and live old age,Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,But he’ll remember with advantagesWhat feats he did that day. Then shall our names,Familiar in his mouth as household words,“Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,”Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.This story shall the good man teach his son;And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remembered—We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he today that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition;And gentlemen in England, now a-bed,Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here;And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.– William Shakespeare,Henry V, Act IV, Scene IIIHe

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

There are four basic steps in every good story.Bad storytellers can do steps one and two, but recoil at step three.Good storytellers are willing to do step three.Brilliant Storytellers do steps three and four again and again.1. Create a character that people like, believe in, and can relate to.2. Launch that character on a hero's journey.3. Do terrible things to that character.4. Surprise your reader/listener/viewer by what happens next.And then what happens? Make it surprising.And then what happens? Make it surprising.And then what happens? Make it surprising.But it must also make sense.Predictability is the silent assassin of stories.Without trouble, there is no adventure.In 'That Hovering Question Mark,' I told you, "Every good story begins with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers." Ocean's 11 contains an excellent example of this."Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks. Not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever."– Rusty (Brad Pitt) to Danny (George Clooney), explaining how they will run the con in Ocean's 11And that is how they did it! Ocean's 11 contains surprise after surprise, even though the writer told us the plot when he gave us that Rusty-to-Danny statement just 12 and 1/2 minutes into a 2-hour movie. It was a statement that triggered more questions than it answered.A BOESKY: Ivan Boesky was a trader on Wall Street who got caught committing securities fraud. In Ocean's 11, Saul pretends to be a wealthy bankroller who has insider information.A JIM BROWN: Named for the famous American football player, this refers to Frank Catton, a large, intimidating black man who stages a confrontation with Linus Caldwell so that Linus can lift the security codes to the vault.A MISS DAISY: 'Driving Miss Daisy' was a movie about a woman who uses a chauffeur to drive her around. Using a SWAT truck and a disguised driver, the Ocean's 11 gang escapes with their own special chauffeur.TWO JETHROS: Remember Jethro of 'The Beverly Hillbillies'? In Ocean's 11, Turk and Virgil provide two-man 'goober' distractions, such as using helium balloons to obscure the security camera on the casino floor so that Livingston can get into the video surveillance room.A LEON SPINKS: When Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali in a Las Vegas prize fight, it was something that no one expected. In Ocean's 11, no one expects the power to go out in the middle of a prize fight in Las Vegas. A fabulous distraction.ELLA FITZGERALD: In a famous 1973 TV ad, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald shatters a wine glass, then the voiceover says, "Is it live or is it Memorex?" (audiotape). In Ocean's 11, the guys make a videotape of a pretend robbery and play it over the casino's surveillance system while the real robbery is happening.Most stories should be told as fiction, even when they are true. When confronted with facts we are always on our guard. But "Once Upon a Time" dispels doubt, opens the imagination, and creates a willing suspension of disbelief.In 1999 I was on the phone with an 87 year-old man I had been hunting for several weeks. His name was William Lederer. I needed his permission to publish a famous letter he had written to America’s Chief of Naval Operations back in 1963. He gave me permission, then asked, “Where you calling from young man?”“Austin, Texas.”“I was there recently. Nice town.”“What brought you to Austin?”“I was there to bury my best friend Jim.”“I’m sorry to hear that.”“You would have liked Jim. Son, have you got a minute to hear a story about Jim I've never told anyone? I want to tell someone.”"I'd be honored to hear it.""I was a journalist and none of my books had sold very well, so I showed Jim the manuscript for my newest book. He told me to go back and fictionalize the name of the country, the characters, everything. Jim said to me, ‘The public is more willing to believe fiction than non-fiction.’”“How did that turn out for you?”“‘The Ugly American stayed on the New York Times list for 78 weeks. And with a copy of that book in his back pocket, a young senator named John F. Kennedy arrived at the University of Michigan on October 14, 1960, at 2:00AM. The press had retired for the night, believing that nothing interesting would happen. But 10,000 students were waiting on the lawn to hear Kennedy speak, and it was there on the steps of the Michigan Union at 2AM that the Peace Corps was born, all because Kennedy had been reading my book. And then Kennedy bought a copy for every member of Congress! Historians speculate The Ugly American did more to change American Foreign Policy than any document since the Declaration of Independence. All these things happened because Jim told me to pretend my book was fiction. Marlon Brando starred in the movie! But of course none of that compares to what Jim accomplished.”“What do you mean?

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

Dr. Nick Grant, a psychologist, Dr. Mike Metzger of Clapham Institute, and Ray Bard my publisher, each taught me about water.Life is a journey on water. Your conscious mind is above the waterline. Your unconscious is beneath.That weightless, magical world below the waterline is fundamentally different from the world of facts, figures and logic that hovers above it.The arts are an invigorating plunge into the unconscious, that part of your mind that understands the languages of color, shape, proximity, radiance, shadow, silhouette, pitch, key, tempo, interval, contour, rhythm, and frame-line magnetism.Our relationship to the unconscious is like our relationship to water. We need it by the cupful to survive, but if you stay underwater too long, you will drown; a psychotic break.Life is a journey on water. To better understand this Jungian journey, watch Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the 1990 film, “Joe Versus the Volcano.”Nick Grant made me aware of the symbolic nature of water.Mike Metzger taught me how to look at water in a second way:You meet four people on the Ocean of Life, but you meet them again and again. The first person you meet is drifting, pushed each day by the winds and waves of circumstances. The drifter always goes with the flow. You know you’ve met a drifter when they say, “Whatever. It’s all good.”The second person you meet is surfing. They seem to be having a good time, but they never really get anywhere. They mostly paddle around in the ocean, looking for another wave to ride. The surfer is always looking for “the next big thing.”The third person you meet is drowning. Lots of people “go under” once or twice in life and need a helping hand. They may need rescue financially, or chemically, or relationally, but this is normal.There are also professional drowners: “It’s been the worst week of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” So you come to the rescue… but the next time you see them, “It’s been the worst week of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”The fourth person you meet is sailing. Confronted by the same winds and waves that controlled the drifter, surfer, and drowner, the sailor navigates. “If I turn the rudder and adjust the sails, this wind will take me wherever I want to go.”You cannot navigate by watching the wind and waves. You must have a fixed point, a non-negotiable guiding light that does not move. The North Star – Polaris – is perfectly aligned above the axis of the earth. It is that guiding light around which the whole world revolves. What is your non-negotiable, your star that does not move? When you have found it, you will always know where – and who – you are.Ray Bard taught me a third way to look at water. When you’re writing a book or considering a business venture, it is essential that you discover two things:1. How widespread is the public interest?2. How deep is that interest?If public interest is neither widespread nor deep, you’re looking at a puddle. Never invest time or money in a puddle.If interest is widespread but not deep, you’re looking at a bayou. Be careful. A bayou looks like an ocean at first because the interest is wide, wide, wide. But that interest is not deep enough to drive action. You can go broke when you see a bayou and think it is an ocean.If interest is narrow but deep, you’re looking into a well. You can draw a lot of water from a well. “The Care and Feeding of Quarter Horses” held no interest for most readers, but those who owned a quarter horse had deep interest. The book was successful.If public interest is wide and deep, you’re looking at an ocean. But you’re going to need a boat – a platform – on which to navigate your ocean. If you don’t have a platform, you’ll drown. And you’re going to need a plan, or you’ll drift.LIFE: You need a guiding light to let you know where – and who – you are.BUSINESS: Ignore puddles and bayous. Drill a well or find an ocean.BALANCE: Your conscious mind is always with you. It is a boat that floats on the water of your unconscious mind. You plunge happily into the unconscious when you are exposed to the arts, and you emerge feeling refreshed and renewed. We read about this feeling in the 42nd Psalm:“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterspouts; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”Phil Johnson taught me about balance. It was his favorite word. When Pennie and I were young and beginning our hero’s journey, Phil was our old man in the woods. He was our pastor, and old enough to be our grandfather. These were the last words Phil spoke to me a few days before he died:“You acquire an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you absorb culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”When Phil spoke about absorbing culture, he was talking about the arts. The arts include fiction and fantasy

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

I have seen friends walk away from relationships, jobs, and promising careers when all they really needed was some time and space to gather their thoughts, slow their heart rate, and rediscover their joy.I’m not saying you should always, “hang on one more day at a time and wait for things to get better.” I am saying you need to recognize the changing seasons in your life.Bobbie Gentry knew when it was time to stop, turn the page, and begin a new chapter.Bobbie knocked the Beatles off the #1 spot on the music charts with “Ode to Billy Joe,” a song that she wrote, performed, and produced. She won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards. Eleven more of her songs made the music charts. She was a major headline act in Las Vegas and she co-hosted a successful TV series with country music superstar Glen Campbell.America watched as Bobbie Gentry provided the music for a major motion picture about her imaginary Billie Joe McAllister, then performed “Mama, a Rainbow” for her mother who was seated in the studio during the filming of a television special.The next day, Bobby quietly retired from the spotlight without fanfare, returning no phone calls, answering no letters, and granting no interviews. She had been in the spotlight for 14 years when she whispered, “Enough,” and walked away 41 years ago.What triggered it? Nothing. She simply realized that a season in her life had ended.Solomon spoke famously about the seasons of life in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes:There is a time for everything,and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,a time to search and a time to give up,a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,a time for war and a time for peace.… He has made everything beautiful in its time.… I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.One can think of the seasons of life in a few different ways.Financially, we go from survival to acquisition to distribution.Relationally, we go from seeking, to finding, to celebrating.In business, we go from learner, to doer, to teacher. This is essentially the Hero’s Journey, a sequence of events that is nearly impossible to escape:1. We meet the Hero in modest circumstances.2. He encounters the Call to Adventure.3. He meets the Old Man in the Woods who prepares him for what lies ahead.4. He then rises to the challenge of adventure and discovers abilities within himself he didn’t know were there.In the Bible we see Moses, Joseph, Samson, David and many others, including women such as Hannah, Esther, Abigail, Ruth, and Deborah as they encounter the Hero’s Journey.In literature and in the movies, we see Bilbo in The Hobbit, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid, Simba in The Lion King, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Neo in The Matrix, and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.Luke was just a goober on the backwater planet of Tatooine when he was called to adventure. Obi-Wan Kenobi was the Old Man in the Woods who prepared him for his journey.Luke was again a goober with a wrecked spaceship in a swamp on Dagobah when he encountered Yoda, his second Old Man in the Woods who would prepare him for his second adventure.Which Luke Skywalker are you?Are you first-movie Luke in the middle of your first adventure?Are you in-between movies Luke waiting for your second adventure to begin?Are you second-movie Luke? And if so, have you learned anything from Yoda, that ridiculous little person you originally thought was a nuisance?Or is there a chance you have entered the celebration and distribution phase of your life? Are you now the Old Man (or Woman) in the Woods, ready to empower Bilbo, Frodo, Daniel, Simba, Katniss, Dorothy, Neo, and Luke to succeed in their own adventures?I would argue that the most fulfilling adventures of all are those of the Old Men and Women in the Woods, Gandalf, Mr. Miyagi, Mufasa and Rafiki, Haymitch, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, Morpheus, Obi-Wan and Yoda.If you’re ready to encourage and advise the next generation of Heroes, please remember that the Hero never goes looking for the person who will empower them. The Old Man (or Woman) in the Woods simply appears alongside the Hero in the Hero’s moment of need.Don’t wait to be asked.“When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by as

Ten different factors will determine how quickly your ads pay off.Do your ads capture attention or are they easy to ignore?Do your ads speak to a felt need, or are you answering a question no one was asking?Are you a known, trusted, and respected seller?Is the brand you sell known, trusted, and respected?What percentage of the public will ever – in their lifetime ­– purchase a product or service in your category?How often does the average person need to buy what you sell?Does your ad make the customer feel any urgency due to low price or limited availability?What percentage of the public knows your name and what you sell?In your category, what name will customers typically think of first and feel the best about?What percentage of the public considers you to be their preferred provider?Your answers to questions 5 & 6 indicate your product purchase cycle. Here are those questions again:“5. What percentage of the public will ever – in their lifetime ­– purchase a product or service in your category?”“6. How often does the average person buy what you sell?”Generally speaking, the longer your product purchase cycle, the longer it will take before your mass-media ads deliver a positive R.O.I.Online ads, however, work immediately. But will the customer type your name into the search block? If they do, you have already won the heart of that customer. They have chosen you as their preferred provider. This means you will enjoy an extremely low cost-per-click with a high conversion rate.But if they type the name of your competitor into the search block, then it will be your competitor that enjoys an extremely low cost-per-click and a high conversion rate.The starting pistol fires the moment a customer types your category into the search block instead of your name or the name of a competitor. Their computer screen overflows with the names of companies making them offers. If they see a name they recognize, the footrace is over in moments. But if no name is recognized, the names of several runners will be clicked.Every runner will pay a high cost-per-click due to gambling on an “unbranded” keyword.But only one runner will take home the prize money.Costs-per-click have never been higher.Mass media costs have never been lower.If you sell a product or a service with a long purchase cycle, the bad news about mass media is that it will take 3 to 6 months of weekly advertising before you begin to gain any real momentum.The good news is that the longer you use mass media, the better it works.1 This is how you make your name the one that customers type into the search block.I believe:Every advertiser should have a website.Every advertiser should be willing to pay for 100% of the clicks when a customer types their nameinto the search blockOrganic results are no longer enough.You’ve got to pay the price for your name to be seen.Your cost-per-click is extremely low when your name is typed into the search block.(I’ll tell you about #6 in a minute.)Ten years ago, Inc. magazine published an article by Jeff Haden titled, “How Google is Killing Organic Search.”“If your business depends on customers finding you in search results, you’re in trouble–and it’s likely to get worse. If case you haven’t noticed, pay-per-click ads are slowly taking over Google’s search engine results. That should come as no surprise since approximately 97% of Google’s revenues are generated by its core business, search engine advertising; Google is understandably protecting and extending its revenue turf… If you’re a business that depends on organic, unpaid search results to drive traffic, you’ve undoubtedly seen a steady decline in visitors and sales.”6. The cost-per-click is extremely high when you compete for unbranded “category” keywords such as “air conditioning repair.”A Tale of Two A/C Companies“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness… In one city, a $40,000,000 company is spending only $240,000 per year on Google ads because they became a household word by spending $461,000 per year on radio ads. Total ad spend: $681,000 per year. In another city, a $15,000,000 company is spending $700,000 per year on Google ads because they thought mass media was too expensive. Both cities are among the 25 largest in America, but neither city is in the top 10.”The story you have read is true. The $40,000,000 company began 10 years ago. The $15,000,000 company began 20 years ago. I’ve known the first company since it was born. I’ve known the second company for about 2 months.Things are about to change dramatically for the second company.Aroo. And again I say Aroo.Roy H. Williams1 When you use mass media 52 weeks a year, the growth of your business in year 2 will usually be twice the growth of year one. The growth in year 3 will be about triple the growth of year one. Keep in mind that we are measuring growth in dollars, not i

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

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

Eighty-eight percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1955 are gone. Poof.Half of them withered because they had a manager in the role of CEO when they desperately needed a leader. The other half were destroyed by a leader when a manager could have held the company together and grown it incrementally.The most important role of a board of directors is to know when their company needs a leader and when it needs a manager.Managers prefer incremental change, evolution.Leaders prefer exponential change, revolution.Managers guard the status quo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”Leaders invent new ways of thinking. “If it ain’t broke, break it, so we can create something new.”Managers prefer a map and a path.Leaders prefer unexplored territory.Managers say, “Ready, Aim, Fire.”Leaders say “Ready, Fire, Aim.” But this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. When shooting a cannon, this is called finding your range.Managers focus on planning and execution.Leaders focus on improvisation and innovation.Managers make organizational charts.Leaders make messes.Managers are given authority over others.Leaders are voluntarily followed by others.Kodak, Blockbuster, MySpace, General Motors, and General Electric were overwhelmingly dominant in their categories until their Manager-CEO’s fell asleep while guarding the status quo.Do not think the internet killed K-Mart, Montgomery Wards, Sears, J.C. Penney, or Bed Bath & Beyond. Walmart sells all those same products and they’re still doing fine because they saw the marketplace rapidly changing in August, 2016 and responded by putting visionary leader Marc Lore in charge of Walmart’s US e-commerce operations.Amazon did $398.8 billion in 2021.Walmart did $488 billion.Managers mistakenly think they can lead.Leaders mistakenly think they can manage.I know only two men who can perform both functions. Dewey Jenkins is one of them.If I written those words during the 10 years Dewey and I worked together, it would have sounded like flattery. But now that he is retired and I have stepped away, I am free to speak the truth.Good mothers can also perform both functions. Every good mother is a miraculous manager and a visionary leader.I was raised by an extremely good mother and my sons were raised by another.Good managers know what to “protect at all costs.” They know what not to change.Bad managers look only for compliance and conformity, blind to the special abilities that hide within their employees. But good managers see those special abilities and call them to the surface where they can sparkle. A good manager encourages your special ability and uses it to maximum effect, while partnering you with someone who sparkles in the area where you are weak.When you see a legendary duo, you can be sure that a brilliant manager put them together.The genius of visionary leaders is that they charge full speed ahead when they see opportunity on the horizon. When they see a storm coming, they steer around it.Visionary leaders recognize what is no longer working and do hesitate to change it. Bang. Gone.If you want to listen to the inner thoughts of visionary leaders and understand how their minds work, there are only two books you need to read.Sam Walton: Made in America (John Huey and Sam Walton)Iacocca: An Autobiography (Lee Iacocca and William Novak)As a special bonus to yourself, take a look at – Where Have All the Leaders Gone? – a slim volume written by Lee Iacocca when he was 82 years old.I love that book.And I love you, too.Thanks for reading my ramblings.Roy H. WilliamsSix times a year, Jonathan Dahl produces a magazine that reaches 1.8 million global executives and business owners. He also publishes a weekly online newsletter that has gets more than 3.5 million annual page views. Jonathan generates dazzling corporate content for a privately held consulting firm. “Whether your company has 5 employees or 5,000,” Jonathan says, “you need to be generating regular articles and blog posts that showcase your values, how you operate, and how today’s trends relate to you, your business, and your customers.” Roving reporter Rotbart is back on the job and he’s looking refreshed and happy and young! Woo-hoo! It’s time for MondayMorningRadio.com!

Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a marvelous book about writing. In it, she says,“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”I’m going to attempt to do that today. I am going to attempt to write “from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth.”I hope I succeed, but you will have to be the judge.Another of my favorite paragraphs from Bird by Bird is when Anne Lamott says,“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”I have often quoted Anne’s friend because I believe his remarkable statement bears repeating: “You can safely assume that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”I wrote to you recently about my first job in radio. It was at a Christian station in Tulsa owned by a wonderful man name Stuart who lived in North Carolina. He was impossibly tall and thin and looked exactly like a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln.I had only been there a couple of years when Stuart flew to Tulsa, summoned everyone to the radio station, packed us all into the conference room and said, “People who work in Christian media often see and hear things that discourage them.” His face fell and he looked sad as he said, “And then they become bitter.”I could tell he was struggling to find the right words as he looked down at the ground. After a long silence he looked up into my eyes and said, “Promise me that you’ll never become bitter.”I looked into his eyes and nodded my head. One by one, he looked at every other employee until they nodded their head or said aloud, “I promise I’ll never become bitter.”When he had extracted that solemn promise from each of us, he drove back to the airport and flew home.It was a very short meeting that happened 40 years ago but I have never forgotten it.And I never became bitter.In later years I began to identify myself as “a follower of Jesus” rather than call myself a Christian, because “Christian” was coming to mean something that I don’t believe Jesus ever intended.I get uncomfortable when people sign God’s name to things Jesus never said.Thomas Jefferson, too, was uncomfortable with Christians who use the logic of Plato to extrapolate truths from the Bible. Platonists1 will argue, “If this statement in the Bible is true, then by extension this second thing is true. And if this second thing is true, then by extension this third thing is true.”I have been reading the personal correspondence of Thomas Jefferson in the national archives at founders.archives.govTwo hundred and six years ago – on October 16th, 1816 – George Logan wrote a letter to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, congratulating him for publishing,“a system of ethics extracted from the Holy Scriptures, as tending to support the correct maxim—that religion should influence the political as well as the moral conduct of man… It is to be lamented that there exists even among professed Christians a disinclination to have their political maxims and transactions subjected to the rules of Christianity… Christianity hitherto (except in a few instances) has suffered by its connection with civil policy: and from the very nature of civil society, it must suffer in such connection; until both learning and power are transferred into the hands of virtuous men, and made subservient to piety.”In essence, George Logan was suggesting that Christians should seize the reins of power in government.Thomas Jefferson replied to George Logan on November 12, 1816, by saying,“I am quite astonished at the idea which seems to have got abroad; that I propose publishing something on the subject of religion. And this is said to have arisen from a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thomson, in which certainly there is no trace of such an idea.”Exactly 253 words later, Jefferson concludes his response to George Logan’s suggestion by reminding him of what happened in England.Thomas Jefferson said that people mistakenly believed that he – Jefferson – was planning to publish a book on Biblical Ethics in Government because of something he had writte

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

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

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

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

Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy.When Leo Tolstoy was 54, he wrote a book about the ethical teachings1 of Jesus as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. For the rest of his life, Tolstoy advocated the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change.Gandhi – the person we associate with peaceful, non-violent resistance – was 12 years old when Tolstoy’s book was published.Martin Luther King – the man who popularized peaceful, non-violent resistance in America – would not be born for another 45 years.In 1854, during the Crimean War, a British light brigade was ordered to charge the cannons of the Russian Empire.A “light brigade” carried only light weapons, such as sabers and pistols.Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about this famous headlong charge toward certain death:Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.“Forward, the Light Brigade!Charge for the guns!” he said.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.“Forward, the Light Brigade!”Was there a man dismayed?Not though the soldier knewSomeone had blundered.Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.Cannon to right of them,Cannon to left of them,Cannon in front of themVolleyed and thundered;Stormed at with shot and shell,Boldly they rode and well,Into the jaws of Death,Into the mouth of hellRode the six hundred…Leo Tolstoy was a Russian artillery officer in that war and was forever changed by it.That war – the first modern war – led Tolstoy to the Sermon on the Mount and convinced him of the truth of Jesus’ words.“Blessed are the peacemakers… blessed are the meek… blessed are the merciful…”Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 3 times, but each time he wrote to the committee and asked them to remove his name from consideration.When the public grew angry that Tolstoy never received the Nobel, he confessed that he had privately rejected it and wrote,“First, it has saved me the predicament of managing so much money, because such money, in my opinion, only brings evil. Secondly, I felt very honored to receive such sympathy from people I have not even met.”Tolstoy was loved by everyone except religious leaders.Remember that book he wrote in 1882 about the ethical teachings of Jesus? It did not appear in Russia for 24 years because it was blocked by the Orthodox Church, the leaders of the Christian faith in Russia. They were worried that Tolstoy might have been talking about them when he wrote,“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”The religious leaders became angry again when Tolstoy wrote,“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”Mark Twain, a contemporary of Tolstoy, may well have been making a joke about religious leaders in America when he wrote,“By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.”Tolstoy saw Jesus and his teachings as gold surrounded by the mud of religiosity. He said,“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”This reminds me of Michelangelo’s description of how he carved an angel from a block of marble:“I just removed everything that was not angel.”I will leave you now,to consider all that you have been told,and wash the mud from the gold,and remove everythingthat is not angel.Roy H. Williams1 Tolstoy’s A Confession, (1882) was originally titled, An Introduction to a Criticism of Dogmatic Theology.NOTE: Dogmatic Theology has nothing to do with dogs. – Indy Beagle

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

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