Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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

A verb avalanche is a highly engaging description that causes you to see, hear, and feel action all around you. You dodge each tumbling word-boulder only to leap, jump, roll and scramble to dodge the mountainside of word-boulders that follow close behind it.causes, see, hear, feel, dodge, tumbling, leap, jump, roll, scramble, dodge, followThat example included 12 verbs among 43 total words. Roughly 1 in every 3 1/2 words was a verb.Verb Avalanches are built from verbs: action words.“Thorin stepped up and drew the key on its chain from round his neck. He put it to the hole. It fitted and it turned! Snap! The gleam went out, the sun sank, the moon was gone, and evening sprang into the sky.”– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chapter 11stepped up, drew, put, fitted, turned, Snap! went out, sank, was gone, sprang10 verbs among 43 total words. Roughly 1 in 4 words was a verb.(Snap! is onomatopoeia, a word that imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. When constructing a word avalanche, onomatopoeia counts as a verb.)Here are some other examples of onomatopoeia:Machine noises — honk, beep, vroom, clang, zap, boing.Impact sounds — boom, crash, whack, thump, bang.Sounds of the voice — shush, giggle, growl, whine, murmur, blurt, whisper, hiss.“Jacob slipped into the shadows, ducked down a hallway, climbed a wall, and hid in the shadows above the throne room.”slipped, ducked, climbed, hid.4 verbs among 21 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“Jacob was afraid for his friends. He slipped into the shadows, crept over a rooftop, slid down a tree, hurried away from the palace, and ran all the way to Bethlehem.”– Chris Auer, The Littlest Magi   was afraid, slipped, crept, slid, hurried, ran6 verbs among 31 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”– Jack Kerouaclive, talk, be saved, desirous of everything, yawn, say, burn, burn, burn, exploding, see, pop, goes, ‘Awww!’14 verbs among 69 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of wordsas they tangle with human emotions.”– James Michener love, writing, love, swirl, swing, tangle In this sequence, 2 verbs – writing and swirl – were used as nouns, but we are counting them anyway. Even when used as nouns, verbs have impact.6 verbs among 17 total words. Roughly 1 in 3 words was a verb.“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock – shock is a worn-out word – but astonish.”– Terry Southernwriting, astonish, shock, shock, astonish.5 verbs among 19 total words. Roughly 1 in 4 words was a verb.“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.”– Shauna Niequistsizzles, pops, makes, laugh, want, get, realize, is, meetings (verb/noun), eat, sing, open, wear, stay up, laughing, paint, sleep hard, throw, eat, read, jump, want, make, belly laugh, gave, loves.26 verbs among 135 total words. Roughly 1 in 5 words was a verb.Did you notice the pattern? When at least 1 in 5 words is a verb, you have created a description that is sure to gain and hold the attention of the reader, the listener, the customer. You have created a verb avalanche.Don’t expect to Google this and learn more about it, because I just made it up.But that doesn’t make it untrue, does it?Roy H. Williams

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

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

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

Bad marketing is about you, your company, your product, your service. “I, me, my, we, our…”Good marketing is about the customer, and how your product or service can elevate their happiness. “You, you, you, you, your…”With every purchase we make, we shout to the world who we are.We are attracted to products and services and brands and celebrities and organizations and friends because we see a reflection of ourselves in them.Our purchases and alliances are identity reinforcement.I’ve built a career on this belief.Simon Sinek says the same thing, but differently. Four minutes into his famous TED-X talk in Puget Sound, Simon says,“Here’s how Apple actually communicates. ‘Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.’At 5 1/2 minutes,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”At 7 1/2 minutes,“The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”As Simon approaches the 11-minute mark, he says,“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.At 13 minutes:“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe.And at 15 1/2 minutes, he starts talking about Martin Luther King:“He didn’t go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,‘ he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It’s what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August.”Most people call this the “Start with Why” talk, but Simon never did. Although he did use the word “why” 28 times, he used the word “believe” 32 times, and 28 of those were in his most high-impact statements.You gain the power of persuasion when you learn to see through the eyes of others. This allows you to talk to them about what they already care about instead of lecturing them on what they ought to care about.It sounds easy, but it’s not. To see through the eyes of others, you have to open your heart and mind to values and beliefs that are not your own.The only hard choices in life are the choices between 2 good things.You will agree, I’m sure, that Justice and Mercy are both good things. But when they come into conflict, which way do you lean? Your customer might lean the other way.How about Freedom and Responsibility? As one increases, the other decreases. Which one do you value a little more than the other?Honesty and Loyalty? Those come into conflict almost daily.You believe what you believe. And you agree with people who believe as you do.When you write unthinkingly, you speak and write from within the constraints of your own belief system. And in so doing, you speak persuasively only to the members of your own tribe.But persuasive ad copy is about the customer. Can you open your heart and mind wide enough to speak to values and beliefs that are not your own?There will always be people who like to buy in the way you like to sell. These people are the low-hanging fruit on which you build the foundation of your business. These people are your tribe. But there will come a day when you have plucked all the low-hanging fruit – perhaps you already have – and you will find yourself trapped beneath a glass ceiling. You can see a lot more business out there, but it’s just not coming to you.You will pass through that glass ceiling when you learn how to sell people who like to buy in a way other than how you like to sell.You have to sell each customer their way.Persuasive ad writers use a technique called “inclusive communication by design.” There are 2 good ways to do it:1. Include something for everyone. Figure out how to include lang

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

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

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

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

Your ability to speak and understand words is a function of the logical, rational, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere of your brain. Your left-brain hungers for accuracy and seeks to forecast a result.1But the other half of your brain – the wordless right hemisphere – is wired for pattern recognition.2The right hemisphere has no morals, no discretion, and doesn’t care whether a thing is true or false; that’s the left brain’s job. But visual patterns, musical patterns, mathematical patterns, and patterns of behavior trigger what you and I call intuition; gut feelings and hunches. Your can be sure that your wordless right hemisphere is at work when you suddenly know something, but you’re not entirely sure how you know it.It is during the solving of mysteries that the equal-but-opposite left and right hemispheres are fully engaged.Talent is unconscious competence.If the right hemisphere of your brain recognizes the patterns within great writing, you will likely be a talented writer, but you will not likely be a great writing teacher. It is difficult to transfer talent.Skill is conscious competence,usually obtained by observing a talented person and then figuring out exactly what it is they are doing unconsciously. Skilled people make great teachers.This tug-of-war between talent and skill is found in every field of endeavor.But today my fascination is fixed upon speculation, another type of mystery-solving that involves our pattern-seeking right hemispheres.Speculation is responsible for every form of gambling, including speculation in the stock market. Speculation is why we love great stories told in books, TV shows and movies. Speculation is why we marvel at magic tricks and laugh at good jokes and groan at the ones that are obvious.If you want to bore people, just say what they expected you to say; do what they expected you to do. But if you want to captivate those people, delight them with a series of small surprises.Are you beginning to understand the purpose of those unexpected words in great literature, symbolic song lyrics and amazing ad copy? Talented people write those words unconsciously. But you and I can learn to write them consciously.In last week’s rabbit hole, Indy Beagle, Laura Nyro, and The Fifth Dimension gave us the inexplicable word “surry” in Stoned Soul Picnic, along with a debate about what “surry” might mean. But “surry” was only the first surprise we encountered.“Surry down to the stoned soul picnic. There’ll be lots of time and wine, red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine. Rain and sun come in akin, and from the sky come the Lord and the lightning. There’ll be trains of blossoms. There’ll be trains of music. There’ll be trains of trust, trains of golden dust. Come along and surry on sweet trains of thought.”Fifty-three years after this song hit the charts, our left-brains continue to demand an explanation of what Laura Nyro was trying to say.Meanwhile, our right-brains are enjoying the picnic.Roy H. Williams1 Broca’s area (slightly forward of your left ear canal) and Wernicke’s area (just behind your left ear,) along with a high-bandwidth bundle of nerves connecting these two called the arcuate fasciculus is what gives us our superpower: the ability to attach complex meanings to sounds, and then to make those sounds through the effortless coordination of diaphragm, larynx, lips and tongue. This ability to communicate highly detailed information is what puts you and I, along with all the other humans, in charge of this spaceship we call Earth.2 Dr. Roger Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine, “for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.” Speaking of the brain and the mind, Sigmund Freud said, “Poets [thinkers who prefer the right brain] are masters of us ordinary men in knowledge of the mind because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science [thinkers who prefer the left brain.] Aroo, Indy Beagle

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

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

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

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

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

Information can be objectively true but have no relevance to you personally.This is the difference between objective reality and perceptual reality.The opposite is true, as well.You can perceive a person to be beautiful when that person is objectively average. You can also perceive information to be important when in truth, it is not.But in perceptual reality, that person is beautiful.In perceptual reality, the information is important.Objective facts do not win the heart and mind. The magic that creates perceptual reality – personal truth – is relevance.Relevance is a happy shout of Yes to the question, “Do I care?”Just because a thing is true doesn’t mean we have to care.The first time I taught publicly about perceptual reality was in 1994 when I was invited to speak to 1,500 jewelers in London at the 400th Anniversary Celebration of the Goldsmiths of the United Kingdom. Afterwards, Pennie and I were whisked away to the world headquarters of DeBeers to meet with Roger Van Egan, their director of marketing.DeBeers wanted to know why my small handful of jewelry clients were selling 20 times more diamonds than the average American jeweler.My answer, in a word, was “relevance.”On date nights, my jewelers were on the radio speaking to couples in cars.“The Christmas season is a GREAT time to get engaged. She’s going to want to show her new engagement ring to everyone she cares about, and most of those people are going to be conveniently gathered together at Christmastime. If you show up at the Christmas party of your girlfriend’s parents and she is NOT wearing an engagement ring, you get to listen to Great Aunt Gertrude talk all night long about her recent gallstone operation. But if your girlfriend IS wearing an engagement ring, the only thing Aunt Gertrude will want to know is whether you’d like another piece of pie before, or after you ride Cousin Larry’s new motorcycle. One more thing: the day she starts wearing your engagement ring is the day her Mom quits calling you “What’s-his-name.”“But your ad didn’t say anything about why he should buy an engagement ring from your client! You said only that he should buy an engagement ring!”Au contraire, mon frère. That ad made my jeweler fun, approachable, and most importantly, NOT SCARY.But when courtship mode has run its course and the honeymoon is over, men who believe “actions speak louder than words,” tend to be poor communicators.Seeds of doubt, disillusionment and divorce are planted when a woman thinks, “This is not the man I married. He doesn’t love me anymore.”“Ladies, many of you will be fortunate enough this Christmas to find a small, but beautifully wrapped package under your tree bearing a simple gold seal that says Schiffman’s. Now you and I both know there’s jewelry in the box. But the man who put it there for you is trying desperately to tell you that you are more precious than diamonds, more valuable than gold, and very, very special. You see, he could have gone to a department store and bought department store jewelry or picked up something at the mall like all the other husbands. But the men who come to Schiffman’s aren’t trying to get off cheap or easy. Men who come to Schiffman’s believe their wives deserve the best. And whether they spend 99 dollars or 99 thousand, the message is the same: men who come to Schiffman’s are still very much in love… We just thought you should know.” [Hard stop. No location tag.]That ad on the radio said to men, “Buy a diamond from Schiffman’s and she’ll know that – unlike “other guys” – you are still very much in love. Now won’t THAT be grand!”Jewelers today are intently focused on reaching engagement ring customers because there are slightly more than 2 million weddings in the US each year.But there are currently 62.34 million married couples. Do the math. I did. And I quickly came to the conclusion that the jewelry business needed an objective way to categorize a diamond as an “Anniversary Diamond.”So I made one up.“You gave her an engagement ring at the beginning of your journey. You’ve come a long way together. Now it’s time to give her a big Anniversary Diamond.”“What’s an Anniversary Diamond?”“It’s a diamond that’s at least twice as big as the one in her engagement ring.”“Why twice as big?”“Because that’s how you say, ‘I love you twice as much today as the day I married you.'”Do you remember what I said about relevance? If Mister “actions speak louder than words,” still loves her but can’t find the words to tell her, I’m confident he can still find his way to the jewelry store.She wins, He wins, the jeweler wins, and I win.The first rule of persuasion is this: you cannot take a person where you want them to go until you first meet them where they are.When you enter the perceptual reality of the customer, you meet them where they are.Now all

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

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

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

Bad ads waddle like a porcupine and make lots of little points.Good ads charge like a rhinoceros and make a single point powerfully.This is true regardless of your choice of media.Ad budgets are like that, too.When universities ask me to address their Advertising & Marketing majors just prior to graduation, I always warn those young “advertising experts” never to give advice to friends or family members who are involved in a local business. “This is because everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company, or for an advertising agency that places the media for large, national brands. You have not been taught how to grow a local business.” And then I ask their professors – in front of the students – whether they agree or disagree with what I just said.One hundred percent of the time, without exception, every professor has agreed with me. Most of the time, they start nodding their heads in affirmation when I say, “…everything you have been taught assumes you will go to work in marketing for a Fortune 500 company…”The most dangerous of these Fortune 500 concepts is the idea of a “media mix.”The widespread belief about the value of a “media mix” has caused small business owners to sprinkle their ad budgets across several different media because they are worried they are going to “miss” someone. After all, “Not everyone listens to the radio.” “Not everyone watches the news.” “Not everyone looks at billboards.” “Not everyone blah, blah, blah.”Advertiser, you can’t afford to reach everyone. You’ve got to choose who to lose.Would you rather reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way, or reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? Repetition is effective. Repetition is effective.Don’t be a porcupine. Be a rhino.If you sell a product or a service that most people will need sooner-or-later and you suspect you’ve been sprinkling your ad budget, “a little bit here and a little bit there,” try spending 80% of your ad budget on a single mass media and the remaining 20% online. The choice of mass media is up to you, but it’s hard to go wrong with local broadcast radio or television newscasts. People rarely record the TV news on their DVRs. They watch it live. The same is true of live sporting events.By the way, in case I forget to tell you this later, repetition is effective.“Wait a minute,” you say, “you told me to be a rhino and not to sprinkle my budget, but now you’re telling me that 20% of my budget should be spent online! What’s up?”Google is the new phone book, so you must have an online presence. Properly used, mass media will make you the provider that people think of immediately and feel the best about, but the first thing those people are going to do when they need what you sell is go online to look for your phone number, or your store hours, or your street address, or at your online reviews.You’ve got to show up when your customer is looking for you.There are instances – particularly in the home service categories – when it makes sense to use geotargeting. If time and energy are an underutilized resource, the placement of door hangers and lawn signs and the slipping of flyers under windshield wipers are old-school techniques that still pay big dividends. This is what I call, “shoe leather on the sidewalk.”The geotargeting of neighborhoods can also be done online, and geofencing will even allow you to target the people who enter and exit a specific building. Cool, huh?“But what if I sell a product or a service that only a tiny percent of the population will ever want or need?”Friend, that’s when you bet your entire ad budget online. But make sure that your gross profit margin will allow you to spend 25% to 33% of total top-line sales on advertising, because when all the shouting is over, that is what you’re likely to spend.(Meanwhile, those local advertisers who are betting on the effectiveness of mass media are spending only 6% to 12% of total top-line sales on advertising.)Mild surprise is the foundation of delight.In your ads,A. if you say what your customers expected you to say, they will be bored.B. if you make unsubstantiated claims, they will not believe you.C. if you speak to anything other than a felt need, they will ignore you.D. if you say something new, surprising and different, you will gain their attention.E. if you give them reasons to like and trust and believe you, they will.9. If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The intellectual mind will always create logic to justify what the emotional heart has already decided.10. Repetition is effective,repetition is effective,repetition is effective.Roy H. Williams

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

1492: An Italian, funded by the Queen of Spain, sailed west to find the east, discovered a small island in the Caribbean, decided it was India, and sailed home to share the happy news. Ponce de León, Balboa, Cordoba, Cortés, Coronado and 24 other conquistadors were sent from Spain to bring home whatever they could find.1562: France sent Laudonnière on 3 expeditions to South Carolina and Florida, but Spanish Admiral Menéndez slaughtered the French in 1565 and built the fortress city of St. Augustine, Florida. 1620: Religious misfits from Holland and England boarded a ship called the Mayflower, crossed the Atlantic in 66 days, landed at a place called Plymouth Rock, met some friendly natives and celebrated Thanksgiving with them, presumably on the last Thursday in November.1662: A Dutchman named Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from a group of local Indians for merchandise worth 60 Dutch guilders and built a thriving community there. It is considered to be the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world. Two years later, the English showed up with cannons and announced that they would now be in charge. The Dutch asked, “Can we keep our houses and our businesses and all of our stuff?” The English said, “Sure, no problem. You just have to let us be in charge.”The Dutch smiled and said, “Welcome to America.”In the decades that followed, the sons and daughters of Spanish conquistadors and French explorers and religious misfits and Dutch traders and English soldiers were joined by tens of thousands of optimistic adventurers and entrepreneurs and families who dreamed of a better life. They came from everywhere.And then slave traders arrived with shiploads of captives for sale. But no one smiled at the captives and said, “Welcome to America.” In fact, these dark-skinned newcomers were not allowed to keep houses or businesses or anything else, not even their own children.July 4th, 1776: A new nation was born when everyone got tired of the English being in charge. And as this baby nation grew, her people began to sing.1886: The song of Ellis Island, the song of the Statue of Liberty.“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”– Emma Lazarus1904: The song of a Century of Progress.I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die.A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart, she’s my Yankee Doodle joy.Yankee Doodle came to London just to ride the ponies, I am the Yankee Doodle boy.– George M. Cohan1968: The song of our Wandering Years.“Kathy, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping,“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,They’ve all come to look for America…”– Paul Simon1980: The Song of CelebrationEverywhere around the world, they’re coming to America.Every time that flag’s unfurled, they’re coming to America.Got a dream to take them there. They’re coming to America.Got a dream they’ve got to share. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.They’re coming to America. They’re coming to America.Today… today… today… today… today!– Neil Diamond 2010: Lady Liberty no longer lifts a torch, but a toast to the newcomers.“So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, all my underdogs! We will never be, never be anything but loud and nitty gritty, dirty little freaks. Won’t you come-on and come-on and raise your glass? Just come-on and come-on and raise your glass!”– Pink Sitting in the back corner of the classroom, a silver-haired gentleman was the last to stand and introduce himself. He cast his gaze about the room for a long moment before he spoke. “As I sat and listened to you people introduce yourselves, I thought, ‘Never in my life have I been surrounded by so many weirdos, wackos, mavericks and misfits. It’s as if this wizard fellow sent out the mating call of the albino monkey, and you are the strange people who answered.” Then he sat down and smiled as he concluded, “And I just can’t tell you what an honor it is to be counted here among you!”   That man was Keith Miller, the bestselling author of The Taste of New Wine, a book that sold several million copies as it rocked the foundations of Religious America back in 1965. (Christian booksellers kept Keith’s book under the counter because it had the word “wine” in the title.) Keith’s assessment of Wizard Academy was correct. For 21 years, it has been the home of proud misfits who are not afraid to fly their own flag and chart their own course as they journey toward the star that beckons them in the night. Wizard Academy is a waystat

Hollywood has been feeding us romanticized history ever since Birth of a Nation splattered across the silver screen in 1915.Romanticized history is a lie.People will always believe lies that reinforce their worldview.Hollywood feeds us romanticized history because we love it, and the fictions we love best are those heroic stories of pioneers and settlers and cowboys during the years of America’s westward expansion.John Wayne was a powerful icon of rugged individualism for two generations of American men. He was self-reliant and manly and brave, the living embodiment of maximum masculinity. There was no woman in distress he could not save, no wilderness he could not tame, no fight he could not win.His real name was Marion Morrison and he grew up in Southern California. According to WIKIPEDIA, “He lost a football scholarship to the University of Southern California as a result of a bodysurfing accident and began working for the Fox Film Corporation…. It was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) that made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, ‘John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage.’”The real-world Americans who traveled westward in the hope of finding a better life were, for the most part, poor people with nothing to lose. With few tools and no resources, they improvised as best they could. They endured painful hunger, parching thirst, desperate cold, raging disease and the untimely death of people they loved.We romanticize these struggling families of an earlier century and call them “self-reliant, rugged individuals.” We imagine them as strong, beautiful characters in a John Wayne movie.Here is my question: When you scrape the Hollywood glitter off these people and see them real, was their resourcefulness an expression of exuberant confidence, or was it a product of their abject desperation?Many of you sympathized with the millions of us Texans who shivered in our homes for several days at below-freezing temperatures with no heat, no light, no water and no toilets.I drilled numerous yellow holes in the snow.No electricity means no hot meals, and in southern states like Texas, icy streets mean no deliveries, no fire trucks, no ambulances, and no police. Even the grocery stores were closed.The hospital nearest our home was evacuated.When Pennie and I had been without water for 3 days, the ex-governor who presided over the deregulation of energy in Texas (and dismantled the regulations that would have insured the consistent delivery of water and electricity in our state,) called a press conference to proudly announce that Texans would gladly, “be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”Now there is a man who has watched one-too-many John Wayne movies.And then there is the senator from Texas who decided that, “to be a good Dad,” he was going to hop on a jet and find some comfort at The Four Seasons in sunny Cancun, Mexico. But I can make room for that. I don’t really blame him for it. If I wasn’t concerned about Covid, I might have done it myself.The “John Wayne” part of that story is that he flew to Cancun with a mask on his face displaying the image of an old Texas flag from our pre-statehood years. That flag shows the star of Texas with a big cannon and the words, “Come and Take It.”In 1835, when European settlers revolted against the government of Mexico, they got control of a cannon in a border town, then flew a flag with a drawing of that cannon and added the words, “Come and Take it.”Basically, they were just flipping the bird to the Mexicans.But why – 186 years later – would a person flaunt a symbol that insults Mexicans while escaping TO MEXICO to get away from 3rd world conditions back home?One-too-many John Wayne movies, that’s why.Born in Texas and raised in the dangerous part of an Oklahoma town, I am no stranger to violence. My willingness to embrace it when it presents itself is alarming to most of my friends. So please don’t think you can write me off as an effete little man who needs to be sheltered from the harsh realities of life.I have all this on my mind today because of a quote in the February 15th Monday Morning Memo from John McCain, a man who was everything Marion Morrison pretended to be.“War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.” – John McCainMcCain’s statement has been rattling around in my head for the past two weeks. I agree with him completely; there is nothing glorious, nothing honorable, nothing virtuous about hardship, pain, and suffering. “Only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.”Men who have been engaged

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

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

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

If one were to assume that a blank sheet of paper – complete freedom – is the best way to coax maximum creativity from the human mind, one would be wrong.The highest levels of creativity are launched from the tightest constraints.Consider this request made a couple of weeks ago by a student in our monthly webcast.Hi Roy, I work with a micro-distillery in our province who recently developed a lower-priced brand of affordable liquor. It is called: lōk(ə)l and they spell it phonetically, with a k and a schwa. (ə)They make vodka, gin and schnapps packaged in plastic bottles. How can we advertise this on the radio to get people to look for the right product?  Not to mention there is some muddiness marketing “local” when everyone is jumping on the “shop local” train… there is even another alcohol beverage called Local with a similar style.Thanks for all your help.Let’s examine our creative restraints and limitations:Plastic bottles shout “cheap.”“Locally-produced vodka” is not a strong selling proposition.“Local” is an overused generic descriptive, but we’re stuck with it as a name.A competing product has the same name, but with the correct spelling.If we cannot differentiate our brand, our radio ads are likely to sell the products of companies other than our own.Bottom line: lōk(ə)l vodka is memorable only because it is spelled with a k.These are the creative handcuffs we wear as we write a series of 30-second radio ads in an effort to give this brand a personality that says something other than “cheap generic vodka.”Are you ready to ride?Lokal vodka is NOT low-cal, low calorie, lightweight vodka. You’re thinking of a different brand. Lokal-with-a-K is full-bodied, genuine, authentic vodka made right here in Saskatchewan. Vodka is spelled with a K, not a C. Lokal-with-a-K is old-school vodka, the kind that will kick your ass if you drink too much of it. We also make gin and schnapps. This stuff is fabulous, but to make it affordable we put it in plastic bottles, ’kay? Lokal-with-a-K is available in every store that has good taste.AD 2:Lokal-with-a-K vodka is made right here in Saskatchewan, which also has a K. And Vodka is spelled with a K, so we spell Lokal with a K. You say, “Hey, you also make gin and schnapps and they don’t have a K.” But in THIS deck of cards, Vodka is KING, Schnapps is QUEEN, Gin is the JOKER and the joker is wild. Drink has a K.  Kick has TWO K’s, but Compromise is spelled with a “C.” Lokal-with-a-K is fabulous, but to make it affordable we put it in plastic bottles, ’kay? Lokal-with-a-K is available in every store that has good taste.AD 3:Lokal-with-a-K vodka is made right here in Saskatchewan, and because you love it, we’re now making it with extra K. We also put extra K in our gin and schnapps. Vodka is KING, Schnapps is QUEEN, Gin is the JOKER and the joker is wild. With these three in your hand, you’re on your way to a Full House. Drink has a K.  Kick has TWO K’s, but Compromise is spelled with a “C.” We don’t compromise. Neither should you. Lokal-with-a-K is available in every store that has good taste.By the time we get to the third ad, this campaign is promising wild parties in a full house of people where everyone gets their kicks. Did you notice?Incongruities, anomalies, gaps and disturbances naturally attract attention. Learn to leverage them as memory hooks.What if we were asked to differentiate that other brand of vodka, LoCal?Let’s ride again, shall we?Vodka is clean, pure, and colorless… Like diamonds… And sunlight… And the music of angels. But it will also make you FAT and we don’t want THAT. My vodka is Local vodka. At least that’s how most people pronounce it. Look closely and you’ll see that it actually says Low-CAL… Low-CAL. Lo-Cal vodka won’t give you a fat ass. Lo-Cal vodka is diamonds, and sunlight, and the music of angels. [pause] It comes in a small, tight can. Because isn’t that really what we’re after?AD 2:I don’t want to drink wide-bottom vodka. You don’t want to drink wide-bottom vodka. We want the low-CAL vodka that tastes like diamonds… and sunlight… and the music of angels… all of which, by the way, are also low in calories! This heavenly designer vodka is cleverly disguised as, quote, “local” vodka. But look closely and you’ll see it says, Lo-CAL. You’ll spot it immediately. [pause] It comes in a small, tight can. Because isn’t that really what we’re after?AD 3:Pour it into a glass and you’ll see diamonds, and sunlight, and the music of angels. Lift that glass to your lips and you’ll taste diamonds and sunlight and the music of angels. Share it with your boyfriend and he’ll

I have long been fascinated by twilight. In fact, I often use that word to describe flavors that are complex and muted.But what is twilight, really?“Twilight is the illumination of the lower atmosphere when the Sun is not directly visible because it is below the horizon. Twilight is produced by sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere, illuminating the lower atmosphere so that Earth’s surface is neither completely lit nor completely dark.” – WIKIPEDIATwilight lasts only about 20 minutes.“There is a brief time, between waking and sleep, when reality begins to warp. Rigid conscious thought starts to dissolve into the gently lapping waves of early stage dreaming and the world becomes a little more hallucinatory, your thoughts a little more untethered. Known as the hypnagogic state…”– Vaughan Bell, Science Writer, The Atlantic, April 20, 2016I think of this time “when reality begins to warp” as the twilight of consciousness, that time when the subconscious mind takes the intellect for a ride.Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jerome L. Singer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University, are studying a different twilight of consciousness. “Daydreaming is a normal, widespread, human phenomenon that people are aware of consciously and can report reliably on questionnaires. Large numbers of people from different walks of society, gender, and ethnicity report considerable daydreaming in their daily lives.”Kaufman and Singer have determined there are three types of daydreaming.1. Positive-Constructive Daydreaming (playful, wishful, constructive imagery)2. Guilty-Dysphoric Daydreaming (obsessive, anguished fantasies)3. Poor Attentional Control (the inability to concentrate on ongoing thought or external tasks)Further study indicated that1. Positive-Constructive daydreaming is related to Openness to Experience, reflecting curiosity, sensitivity, and the exploration of ideas, feelings, and sensations.2. Guilty-Dysphoric daydreaming is related to Neuroticism.3. Poor Attentional Control is related to low levels of Conscientiousness Current neuroimaging research supports Singer’s idea that daydreaming is the default state of the human mind.Your daydreams are the voice of your powerful subconscious as it tries to assist your conscious mind. When your subconscious mind and your conscious mind are working together to achieve a common goal, you can believe that it will happen.So, if our daydreams are the voice of the subconscious mind and we want our daydreams to be Positive-Constructive, how can we fill our subconscious with productive, helpful, happy images?Two thousand years ago, we were given this advice:“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” *If I were to translate this to the language of the 21st century, I would say,“If you turn your attention to good things, your mind will shine. But if you turn your attention to dark thoughts, your mind will be full of darkness. So pay attention, then, or you will find yourself full of darkness.”You have the power to turn your attention wherever you will. Aim it at productive, helpful, happy things. Don’t obsess over problems. Focus your attention on solutions. Not just solutions for the problems you’re currently facing, but solutions in general.Stories of problems solved are, by definition, stories with happy endings.Don’t worry. Be happy.Roy H. Williams*The Good News of Luke, chap 11:34-35

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

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

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

Reading the title of this essay, “What Would You Have Me Do?” might cause you to imagine me defending myself, saying in effect, “I had no choice.”But I want you to hear those words in an entirely different tone of voice.“What would you have me do?” is a quiet question that I often ask God when I am feeling conflicted or uncertain. I cannot not say I always feel him guiding my heart in answer to my question, but I can say that I always feel better for having asked.I have never “not believed” in God. In my private, inner world, faith is not a matter of logic or evidence. I never try to “prove” the existence of God, but if you will indulge me, I will share a pivotal, personal story of when I felt he answered my question, “What will you have me do?”My only intention is to encourage you. Like faith, encouragement is not logical. It is simply a warm light that can brighten a private, inner world.It was 1977. Pennie and I had been married less than a year and we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives. I was working for $3.35 an hour in a steel fabrication shop, cutting, welding, grinding, and pressure-testing gigantic heat exchangers to be fitted on oil wells. With hammers pounding on metal, grinders showering you with sparks, and the acrid smell of welding fumes burning your nose, a steel shop is the perfect place to develop your private, inner world.One morning I slipped into a bathroom stall at work, but not because I needed to go to the bathroom. I lowered the deck on the toilet, locked the door and sat down to talk to God. “What would you have me do? If you tell me, I’ll do it. And I know you can get a message through to me because you’re God, right? And one more thing. I know you hear me, and I know you’re not going to forget that I asked, so I don’t plan on bugging you about this. I trust you’ll tell me when you’re ready. Amen.”I stood up and unlocked the door just as the buzzer announced it was break time. Walking out into the 45,000 square foot work floor, I was scanning the tops of all the tool cabinets for my coffee cup. Having said everything that I needed to say to God, my only thought was to grab a cup of coffee.The thing that happened next is difficult to describe, but I’ll do my best.All at once, and very unexpectedly, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and it startled me. I didn’t see anything or hear anything, but my surprise was exactly as though I had looked across the floor and seen myself pull a message from a letter pouch and hold it out for someone to take.This knowledge, or awareness, or whatever you want to call it, was altogether different than anything I had ever experienced. Without seeing a sight or hearing a sound, I felt just as certain – and was every bit as surprised – as if I had seen a person and heard a voice.I walked over to the time clock, grabbed my timecard, clocked out, got in my car and drove to the Federal Building in downtown Tulsa where I presented myself to a weary woman sitting at a desk. “I’m here to become a postman,” I said, and then I told her the story I just told you.When I left, the woman was no longer looking weary. She was surprised, befuddled, and contemplative. I think she was struggling to decide whether I was delusional, or if it was remotely possible that what I was telling her might be true.I lived in a continual state of excitement for the next two days, but when I quieted my heart to continue my conversation with God in that private, inner world, I realized that I wasn’t supposed to work for the United States Postal Service, but that I was to deliver messages of a different sort.On my lunch break that day, I drove back to the Federal Building, found that same woman, and gave her the rest of the story. When I left, she looked even more surprised, befuddled, and contemplative than before.Next, I rented an announce-only answering machine from the telephone company, had an extra telephone line installed in our apartment, and began writing and recording a new message of encouragement each day, 7 days a week. I placed little classified ads in all the free newspapers that were distributed in little wire stands outside the convenience stores and laundromats.“Take a break in your day. DAYBREAK. 258-7700”No one knew who was recording these messages or why, but within a few months the little counter in the machine indicated I was getting more than 200 calls a day. And every time I heard that tape rewind, it would usually be less than a minute before the little red light indicated that another call was coming through. When I did the math and saw that a 3-minute message playing 200 times tied up the phone line for 10 hours each day, I realized a lot of people must be getting a busy signal. So I rented a second announce-only machine and installed a second phone line.At the end of two years, having written and recorded more than 700 different messages, I needed a part-time job to help pay for it all. So I took a job at a radio station

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

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

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

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

This is what good marketers see when they close their eyes:Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind of the customer will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and announce to the world around us – who we are.A tribe is a group of self-selected insiders.Identify a tribe, (an affinity group.)Develop that tribe.Market to the tribe you have developed.Gathering your tribe is easy. (A.) In your first encounter, make sure they win big. Give them far more than they gave you. (B.) Speak to your tribe about what they ALREADY care about.All of the above can be summarized in two words: Identity Reinforcement.Entertainment is the currency with which you can purchase the time and attention of a too-busy public.Television and radio, YouTube videos, blog posts and social media deliver results because they deliver entertainment.Information is medicine. Entertainment is a spoonful of sugar.Reaching the customer is mechanical, a question of media selection.Convincing the customer is artistic, a question of message creation.Reaching the right people is easy. Saying the right thing is hard.Online, when you target the right customer at the zero moment of truth you are fishing with a hook for today’s customer.At the zero moment of truth online, the best hooks are information, availability, and free shipping.Customers seeking information have not yet chosen a preferred provider.Customers seeking availability want the product immediately.Customers seeking free shipping want to save money.When using mass media – TV and radio – at the zero moment of truth, your message must be urgent.Urgency is achieved when the desire is widespread, but the availability is limited.Customers in transactional mode are worried about spending money. They are willing to spend time to save money.Customers in relational mode are worried about spending time. They are willing to spend money to save time. This is why they will choose someone they feel they can trust. In the absence of a previously chosen preferred provider, they will choose to trust Google reviews and Amazon reviews.Television and radio are called mass media for a reason: they reach the unfiltered masses. When you use mass media, you are fishing with a net for future customers and their influencers.The goal of advertising in mass media is to become the preferred provider, the one the customer thinks of first and feels the best about.Mass media – TV and radio – can deliver big results quickly, but only for products that have broad appeal and a short purchase cycle.Food and entertainment have broad appeal and a short purchase cycle.Engagement rings and air conditioners have broad appeal and a long purchase cycle.The longer you use mass media, the better it works. The effects of mass media are cumulative. But it only works for products and services that have broad appeal.When using mass media long-term for products with a long purchase cycle, your message must be memorable.Mass media fails miserably for products with narrow appeal.When your product has narrow appeal, online media is your answer.Make your store and your website interesting. The seller who gets more of the customer’s time is the one most likely to get their money.Online, when you want to target the customer at the zero moment of truth, you have to bid on the right keywords or buy the right list.Unbranded keywords are the ones that everyone in your category is bidding on.Unbranded keywords are expensive.Branded keywords are those signature phrases – brandable chunks – for which your company is known.Branded keywords deliver 7x to 10x higher return-on-investment than unbranded keywords.Branded keywords are most easily created through mass media – TV and radio – but they can also become known through blog posts, YouTube videos, and other social media.Don’t set out to make money. Set out to be the kind of company that people want to do business with.If people like you, they will create their own logic for buying from you.Do you remember our opening statement? “Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind of the customer will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.”These are some of the things you will study in-depth when you become a member of the Ad Masters Guild at the American Small Business Institute.Coming soon. Just email [email protected] to get your name on the early notification list.Roy H. Williams

Every beginning starts with an ending.This is one of the principles of Pendulum theory.And the middle is always in the middle.When our fight with King George ended in 1783, thirteen powerless colonies became “The United States.” This was the beginning of the first America; 3 million citizens clinging to the eastern edge of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Truly, “a land of opportunity.”Eighty years later – 1863 – we were in the middle of a war between ourselves. (1861-1865)And July 2nd of that year – the middle day in the 3-day Battle of Gettysburg – was also the middle day of the middle year in our 5-year Civil War.Fourteen years after the Civil War ended, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington headed west to capture the ending of the Wild West. Their paintings and sculptures of those ending days now sell for millions of dollars.Nineteen years after Charlie and Fred headed West, Teddy Roosevelt led his “rough riders” up a hill during the Spanish-American War. His arrival on that hilltop signaled the end of the Wild West, the end of the Spanish Empire, and the end of the first America.1As I said earlier, every beginning starts with an ending.The second America began when Teddy became President in 1901. This second America was a land of progress and achievement, a World Power, a country of cars and department stores and Coca-Cola, electric lights, running water, and houses everywhere.Do you remember when Whitney Houston sang, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”? America’s memory of the Civil War was more recent than that when they elected Teddy Roosevelt.One of Teddy’s first official actions was to invite Booker T. Washington, a black educator, to dinner at the White House. White-hot rage was ignited across the South. According to historian Deborah Davis, “There was hell to pay… This story did not go away. An assassin was hired to go to Tuskegee to kill Booker T. Washington. He was pursued wherever he went… There were vulgar cartoons of Mrs. Roosevelt that had never been done before.”The Revolutionary War ended and the first America began: Opportunity America.One hundred and twelve years later – 1901 – the second America began: Achievement America.One hundred and twelve years later – 2013 – the third America began: Virtual America,a “sharing economy” featuringvirtual ownership, (Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit)virtual currency, (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin)virtual reality. (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok)2013 was also the halfway point in the upswing of society’s pendulum toward the zenith of our current “We” cycle. The halfway point is where we begin to take a good thing too far. In 2013 we shifted from “fighting together for the common good” to simply “fighting together.”Western Civilization2 has done this every 80 years for the past 3 millennia.I wrote at length about it in Pendulum several years ago:1783 marked the ending of our Revolutionary War.1783 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…1863 marked the middle of our Civil War.1863 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…1943 marked the middle of WWII.1943 was the zenith of a “We.”80 years later…2023 will mark the zenith of our current “We.”I wonder what we’ll be in the middle of then?Roy H. Williams1 the America of George W. and Thomas J. and Benjamin F. and Samuel Adams, the patron saint of beer. 2 Western Civilization began 3,000 years ago in Israel and Persia, then expanded to ancient Greece, then to Rome, then to Britain who took it to North America and Australia.

Dr. Seuss had1. the courage to make up new words,2. the confidence that his readers would understand what these new words meant, and3. he was a master of meter, the rhythm that is created when you arrange your words so that the stressed and unstressed syllables fall into patterns.There are a couple dozen types of meter, but Dr. Seuss used only one of them, anapestic meter, sometimes called galloping meter because it tumbles off the tongue.People often conflate meter with rhyming. But meter does NOT have to rhyme to work its magic.“What magic?”The magic of being musical.“Meter makes words musical?”Yes.“Even when read silently?”Yes, even when read silently.“So, what’s the benefit of it?”When words become musical, they enter into the non-judgmental, pattern-recognition portion of your mind.“Non-judgmental?”The right hemisphere of the brain doesn’t know fact from fiction; that’s the left brain’s job. Pierre de Beaumarchais understood this way back in 1775.“How do you know?”It was in 1775 that Beaumarchais wrote in The Barber of Seville, “Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.”“I think you’re making all this up.”Dr. Roger Sperry documented it in 1981 and they awarded him the Nobel Prize for it.“Oh… so maybe I should just shut up and listen?”Might be a good idea.“Please continue.”Bounty, the quicker-picker-upper.BMW. The ultimate driving machine.My client would not, could not, did not commit these crimes. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.“Are those examples of anapestic meter?”No, anapestic meter is two light stresses followed by a heavy third stress, like this:Oh, the sea is so full of a number of fish,if a fellow is patient, he might get his wish…and that’s why I think that I’m not such a foolwhen I sit here and fish in McElligot’s Pool.And who could forget,The children were nestled all snug in their beds,While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap,When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.Away to the window I flew like a flash,Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snowGave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,When what to my wondering eyes should appear,But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer…“Okay, but can you give me an example of anapestic meter that doesn’t rhyme?”And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,So I walk by the edge of a lake in my dream.“But you said Dr. Seuss made up new words and trusted that people would know what they mean.”You want to hear some made-up words?“Yeah, but not from Dr. Seuss.”Why not?“Because I won’t be speaking or writing to little kids. My people are old enough to drive cars, drink beer, and vote.”Fair enough. Here are some grown-up, made-up words.The reason you haven’t seen me out is because I’ve been Hiberdating.I type slowly because I’m Unkeyboardinated.Give me a bus ticket to anywhere. I’m going Columbusing.I can’t remember where I went last night. I think I’ve got Destinesia.The doctor and I had a Nonversation. It was very Unlightening.I don’t hang out with Todd anymore. He was always staring at his phone in a high state of Textpectation, so I Dudevorced him.You can’t say Idiot anymore. You’ve got to say Errorist.I was so exhausted I fell into bed and had a Bedgasm.“Okay, I get it.”But can you do it?“What do you mean?”Sixty-nine years ago, John Steinbeck wrote a note to his best friend, Pascal Covici:“I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing. … And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute.”– John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters“Okay, so you’re saying what?”I want you to honor Dr. Seuss and John Steinbeck by finding the courage to make new words and new combinations.“Why should I go to the trouble?”1. It will make you interesting.2. It will make you memorable.3. It will make you money.“Are you saying that if I don’t do this I’m an Errorist?”That’s exactly what I’m saying.“Whe

Jacques Cousteau, the man who made the world care about the ocean,said, “A lot of people attack the sea. I make love to it.”But he was French.Not being French, I don’t see each day’s work as a choice between attacking or love-making. I see the future unfurl each morning as a fork in the road. Will I choose the battleground or the playground?Do you see business as a necessity of life, a battleground swarming with vendors, employees, customers and competitors that have to be kept at bay? Or do you see each day as a playground where the principal game is called, “How can we make others happy?”I have lived a strange life these past 40 years, spending all day, every day talking with business owners about their best and worst experiences in business.What I have noticed is that there are patterns, one of which is that the “business is a playground” people are happier and more successful.They didn’t become happy because they were successful. They became successful because they were happy and wanted to make other people happy, too.1. Are you making people happy?2. How are you doing it?3. Where do you find your inspiration?Inspiration is an interesting subject. Decades of searching for it have taught me, “Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.”My hero Robert Frost found inspiration in ridiculous places as well.The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock treeHas given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.Here are three ridiculous places where I have found inspiration:J. Peterman catalogueChuck Lorre Vanity CardsChipotle Story CupsJ. Peterman catalogueIt’s Friday night at a 200-year-old pub off O’Connell Street in Dublin. World headquarters for conversation. Dark mahogany walls. Lean-faced men. Ruddy-faced women. The bursts of laughter aren’t polite, but real, approaching the edge of uncontrol. The stories being told are new, freshly minted, just for you. There is no higher honor. The room roar is high (but still, not as bad as in New York restaurants where you can’t make out what it is you, yourself just said). These Irishmen, in collarless Irish shirts and tweed caps, have managed to keep their mouths shut all week, saving up the good stuff for now, for Friday night, this very place, this very moment… How could one single city possibly give birth to Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, Wilde, Beckett… and all those here tonight as well? Working-Class Irish Pub Shirt, well-suited for both the intoxication of talk and the difficult art of listening. Not bad for just hanging out, either. Or, when absolutely necessary, for looking interesting. Simple collar band. Seven-button placket. Stud at neck. No-nonsense, rounded shirttails. Two-button cuff. No pocket. You’ve got to carry everything you’ve got… in your head.Chuck Lorre Vanity Cards# 397 CENSORED BY ME (by myself) I’ve decided to save everybody a lot of unhappiness and not submit this week’s vanity card to the CBS censors (I know when I’ve crossed the line with these things and I don’t need a bunch of corporate lawyers getting their cotton blend panties in a bunch). Accordingly, I’ve banished the offending card to that dark place where all my offending cards go – the internet. View the censored 397.#634  Russia, if you’re reading this, hack into the Nielsen computers and make our ratings higher.Chipotle Story CupsIn 2014, Chipotle asked a number of America’s best writers to craft stories to print on the sides of their cups. This is the story written by bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver:“Two-Minute Cheer for the Home Team”The ancient human social construct that once was common in this land was called community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Mumbai. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.But here’s my favorite part of the Chipotle story:“The Yale Collection of American Literature collects American Literature in all its formats and in all media, documenting the ways great American writers reach diverse and unusual audiences beyond standard book publishing,”&n

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

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

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

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

I was 24 and Phil was 60 and he was a most unusual man. Articulate but quiet, passionate but calm, and possibly the world’s greatest listener.By the age of 60, Phil had traveled to more than 40 countries, published stories, articles, and poems in more than 50 magazines, and assembled a personal library of books that overflowed the small rooms of his modest home.It occurs to me as I write this that books are what all my friends seem to have in common.Phil and I traded stories for only 3 years before Pennie and I moved away, but we corresponded once a month until that fateful day in 2019 when he left this world to move in with a friend.He was 97 years old.Phil always wore a tie. He didn’t have many, but each of them was special to him. He gave his wife, Barbara, careful instructions before he died regarding which tie he wanted each of his friends to have. The tie I received is covered with books on bookshelves. It hangs over the draperies in my study at home.When Barbara passed away in 2020, I received a phone call from their grandson, Cooper, informing me that Phil had left me his library.Phil’s library was as eclectic as he was:The Autobiography of A.A. Milne, (author of Winnie the Pooh)The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by TarbellLiterature and Western Man, by J.B. PriestlyUnderstanding Types, Shadows, and Names. A 2-volume set.The Gospel of Moses, by Samuel J. SchultzHawksbill Station, by Robert SilverbergThe Little Minister, by J.M. Barrie (the author of Peter Pan)The Shepherd of the Hills and When a Man’s a Man, by Harold Bell WrightAnd Behold The Camels Were Coming, by Edward Cuyler KurtzAnd then we have Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Roosevelt, and the complete works of James Whitcomb Riley and William Makepeace Thackeray.And because Phil was a pastor and a Bible scholar, we haveA fat 4-volume set of Word Studies in the Greek New Testament,A Lawyer Examines the Bible,The Treasury of David,The Old Testament and the Fine Arts, by Cynthia MausChrist and the Fine Arts, by Cynthia Mausand a few dozen books about the Tabernacle in the Wilderness,along with a couple of hundred Biblical commentaries and Expositions of Holy Scripture.And then there is the gorgeous 27-volume set featuring the paintings of all the greatest artists of the last 600 years.Pennie and I bought a new trailer to send with Joe Davis when he went to pick up the books 500 miles away. That trailer is 17 feet long, 8 1/2 feet wide, has a 9-foot ceiling, and is rated to carry 3 1/2 tons. Joe drove home slowly because the trailer was overloaded.You will notice a couple of new things in the Welcome Center upon your next arrival at Wizard Academy. The first of these will be the smell of delicious food. Pennie is pursuing a coffee cafe license so that people can have something to eat while they sit with a book or a computer or a friend and a glass of wine and forget about their cares for awhile.The second thing you’ll notice will be the thousands of books adorning the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with rolling ladders in the James Phillip Johnson reading room. And on the wooden header where those rolling ladders roll, you’ll read the last words Phil ever spoke to me:“You acquire an education by study, hard work and persistence. But you absorb culture by viewing great art, listening to great music and reading great books.”I scribbled those words on a scrap of paper so that I could add them to the Random Quotes database when I got home.I had no idea that I would never hear Phil’s voice again.Roy H. Williams

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

These are the basic principles of Chaotic Ad Writing as taught by Wizard Academy:1. Approach your subject from an unexpected angle.2. Tell two stories at once, using the relationship between two things as a pattern to reveal the relationship between two other things.3. Allow the listener to arrive at their own conclusion.In the New Testament, stories like these are known as parables.This is the challenge we outlined in last week’s Monday Morning Memo:STEP ONE: I have chosen the word “Molokai” to be our unexpected beginning.STEP TWO: Send [email protected] a link to the website of a product or service for which an ad could not possibly begin with the word “Molokai.”STEP THREE: I will randomly select five of these products or services and write a fascinating ad for each of them beginning with the word, “Molokai.”STEP FOUR: These five ads will be published in next week’s Monday Morning Memo.DISCLOSURE: When I promised I would “randomly select” 5 products or services for which I would write an ad beginning with Molokai, I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to do that. In the end, I just told Indy to give me the first 5 emails he received. These were fromJay Leigeber at 1:25AM,Malton Schexneider at 3:24AM,Pauline Tom at 3:51AM,Damien Deighan at 4:08AM, andTSO at 4:39AM, but this was an email to Indy for a “Molokai Beach Face Mask,” from John at TSO, so it was sort of like, “Interesting coincidence, huh?” So I figured I would take the next one,Bryan Eisenberg at 5:18AM, but Bryan is a close friend and that would look suspicious, so I disqualified him and went with Wendy Gardner at 5:53AM.A few more emails trickled in during the next 30 minutes, then at 6:25AM Jason Fox opened the floodgates and Indy Beagle feared he would be swept away.Are you ready to read some ads?Jay Leigeber was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai. The most Hawaiian of the Hawaiian islands. Warm, wonderful, Molokai.For a one-time payment of just a hundred and twenty-nine dollars…Tushy will take you to Molokai every day…and bring you home, relaxed… refreshed… and feeling oh, so fine.The Tushy Spa warm water bidet attachment will fit any toilet…in any home… and take you to warm, wonderful Molokai whenever…you want…. to go.HelloTushy dot com.Malton Schexneider was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai is the wonderful island where the Hawaiians sent their people when they had a painful, debilitating condition. If you experience back pain, you know debilitating pain. Will you let us help you? Our free report on Eliminating and Preventing Back Pain will be your own private, Molokai, where you can find relief, and health, and experience happiness once again. Molokai awaits you at Back Pain Relief Secrets dot com.[That ad was completely true, by the way. Molokai housed Hawaii’s leper colony for more than 100 years. – Indy Beagle]Pauline Tom was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai. That untouched Hawaiian island, is HOME to the world’s most beautiful birds. But there is one bird in your own backyard that is smart… and wise… and beautiful enough to be the pride of Molokai, and it needs a home, too. Will you give your Bluebird a fabulous, custom home where it can be safe and happy? Just 25 dollars at Texas Bluebird Society dot org.Damien Deighan was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai is the island where everything is simple… straightforward… uncomplicated. If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward, uncomplicated way to find the data scientists your company needs, visit data science talent dot co dot uk, the Molokai of data science. Last year we filled 91.6 percent of all requests with the picture-perfect candidate. Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated… data science talent dot co dot uk. Aloha.Wendy Gardner was convinced “Molokai” could not be used as the opening word for this product:Molokai. Five hundred visitors travel to Hawaii, but the one who goes home with a life-changing smile is that one visitor who finds marvelous, magnificent, Molokai. BaxterBoo dog goggles are like that. Five hundred dogs wag their tails but the dog that makes you smile is that one dog who is wearing marvelous… magnificent… BaxterBoo dog goggles. BaxterBoo dot com. Visit us.[Wait a minute! A few hours after the wizard wrote those five ads, an email from Bob Jones suddenly appeared and it was time-stamped at 2:39AM! I guess it got hung up somewhere along the way, so I asked the wizard to write one last ad. – Indy Beagle]Molokai. The unspoiled island. Pure water. Fresh Air. Nature at its most natural. Aquaza brings the health and freshness of Molokai to crowded

Robert Frost died when I was four, so we never met face to face, but throughout my formative years I spent an hour with him every night before I fell asleep.Robert Frost taught me how to write.If you will write like Robert Frost, you must approach your subject from an unexpected angle. Few things capture the attention like the unexpected. When your reader or listener has chosen to follow you on a journey, it is because they expect to be fascinated, intrigued, and delighted.Don’t let them down.Robert Frost knew that things can be used as metaphors for other things, which is why his poems often finish by making a powerful point we didn’t see coming. The dual nature of metaphors makes it easy to tell two stories at once.In addition, Frost uses metaphors to lead us toward a destination. Then he allows us to joyfully discover it on our own. He doesn’t tell us what to believe; he just causes us to believe it.And like every great ad, his poems get better with every repetition.Robert Frost noticed the binary relationship between the hot and cold theories of earth’s destruction and wrote “Fire and Ice” exactly 100 years ago.Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I’ve tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.– Robert Frost  (1920)1. With his opening surprise of just 12 words he shows us the two possibilities known to every astrophysicist: (A.) our world could be burned up by the explosion of our sun, or (B.) we could perish in a coming ice age.2. But then he makes a hard left turn to reveal that desire is just another type of fire, and hate is another kind of ice that for destruction “is also great and would suffice.”Robert Frost opens our eyes to the destructive powers of greed and hate in 15 seconds, with just 51 words.When you allow a person to arrive at their own conclusion, the truth you have communicated is no longer your truth, but their truth, and no one will ever be able to take it away from them. They will forever defend it as a product of their own observation.1. Approach your subject from an unexpected angle.2. Tell two stories at once, using the relationship between two things as a pattern to reveal the relationship between two other things.3. Allow the listener to arrive at their own conclusion.These are the principles of Chaotic Ad Writing as taught by Wizard Academy.Chaos in science is not randomness but its opposite, a higher level of order beyond the scope of our immediate awareness. In the words of chaotic novelist Tom Robbins,*“Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It’s just a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.”But Robert Frost knew this before Tom Robbins was born. And Robert Frost taught it to me.Shall we put it to the test?STEP ONE: I have chosen the word “Molokai” to be our unexpected beginning.STEP TWO: Send [email protected] a link to the website of a product or service for which an ad could not possibly begin with the word “Molokai.”STEP THREE: I will randomly select five of these products or services and write a fascinating ad for each of them beginning with the word, “Molokai.”STEP FOUR: These five ads will be published in next week’s Monday Morning Memo.The objective of this demonstration will be to show you how “everything in the universe is connected, of course,” and how you can leverage these connections to accomplish things you have never been able to accomplish before.I would happily tell you “what kinds of things” but when you have seen this technique demonstrated five times, you will come to your own conclusions. The connectedness of everything around you will no longer be Robert Frost’s truth, or Tom Robbins’ truth, or my truth, but your truth, and no one will ever be able to take it away from you.Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize 4 times and was nominated for the Nobel Prize a record 31 times. Had he chosen to become an ad writer, he could have helped thousands of business owners achieve their dreams and become wonderfully wealthy in the process.Roy H. Williams

Above ground, in the sunlight, grain silos provide much of our daily sustenance.Below ground, in the darkness, hides another kind of silo.But it is not the missile silo that is killing us. People are disappearing into the bone-dry quicksand of grain silos in less than 5 seconds.“Once entrapment begins, it happens very quickly due to the suction-like action of the grain; Researchers in Germany found that an average person who has sunk into grain once it has stopped flowing can get out only as long as it has not reached knee level; at waist level assistance is required. Once the grain has reached the chest a formal rescue effort must be undertaken.” – WIKIPEDIAI have my beliefs and you have your beliefs.Belief is not a group project. But a sense of belonging, the creation of a community, and the establishment of a society have always been group projects.Covid-19 took the face-to-faceness of community and society away from us, leaving us no alternative but to gather online in echo-chamber silos where we can hear our own opinions voiced oh-so-eloquently by others.If we sink into the life-giving grain of these online silos, we will suffocate.When you know a person’s silos, you know everything about them that matters.Cambridge Analytica gained access to information on 50 million Facebook users as a way to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. Cambridge Analytica was merely an expression of Online Marketing 101.I’m not saying it was right. What I’m saying is that when you are in a silo, you are easy to manipulate.We segregate ourselves into silos based on (1.) our beliefs, and (2.) our activities.The most successful online marketers are those who know their ABC’s.*A: Identify a tribe.B: Develop the tribe.C: Market to the tribe.Each of us participates in a handful of tribes. It is impossible to avoid.Just try to remember that each of your tribes exists in a silo – an echo chamber – where it is easy to become convinced that “everyone” thinks and feels like you do.But your silos aren’t the world. And my silos aren’t, either.This is why I’ve been reaching out to well-spoken friends and acquaintances who spend time in other silos and have different beliefs. I asked these people – one by one – to share their thoughts on subjects I knew they saw differently than me.I’ve enjoyed it immensely, and I suggest you do it, too.But this is the important part: Ask and listen only. Do not – under any circumstances – offer your perspective. If you do, the whole conversation will feel to your friend like an ambush. Just ask questions and keep your mouth shut. Focus your mind on trying to see what your friend sees.And do it by Zoom or telephone. It is much easier to focus a call – and end it – than a face-to-face meeting.Do you have the courage to do this? Are you willing to look at the future – if only for a few minutes – through the eyes of someone who believes differently than you?If you answer yes, you have the mind of a mass marketer with arms long enough to embrace the world.If you answer no, my suggestion is that you focus your marketing firepower on the silos you know best. This will allow you to talk to your tribe, in the language of that tribe, according to the values and beliefs they hold dear.Indy says to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’ll see you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams* as taught by chairman Ryan Deiss in his class at Wizard Academy.“A relationship seldom achieves its full potential without confrontation; but confrontation is almost always doomed to failure unless it grows out of a deep trust built on honest communication. Even then, it must be handled with sensitivity. If your friend is not convinced of your genuine concern, if he is not certain that you have his best interests at heart, he will likely become defensive, rejecting your correction.” – Richard Exley“Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Be swift to love, make haste to be kind.” – Henri Frederic AmielA