Wizard of Ads

You want to succeed.But will you recognize success when it happens?What will be its indicators? How will you measure it?Most importantly, how long are you willing to pursue it?You probably overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what you can accomplish in ten years.How many years have you been pursuing your dream?Experience is the name you are allowed give to your mistakes, but only if you have learned from them.Some people have ten years of experience.Most people have one year of experience ten times.Ninety-nine percent of business owners* will continue to defend their marketing beliefs and management practices even when those beliefs and practices continue to underperform year after year.These business owners underperform because traditional wisdom often feels like common sense.The problem with traditional wisdom is that it is usually more tradition than wisdom.Here's how that happens:Your goal is lead generation.You create an ad that mixes urgency – a limited-time offer – with a strong value proposition. The features-and-benefits of your limited-time-offer dramatically outweigh the price.Your plan is to upsell the customer after they allow you into their home.This is called “transactional advertising” because you are advertising a transaction.Here's the problem: Transactional ads don't differentiate you. In fact, they blur you into your category, making you indistinguishable from your competitors.This is Today's Traditional Wisdom:STEP 1: Give Google most of your profits and keep your fingers crossed. Keep a sharp eye on your cost-per-lead, your conversion rate, and your gross profit per sale.STEP 2: Keep doing this, week after week, month after month.STEP 3: Once a year, calculate how much your cost-per-sale has increased.STEP 4: Contact the people in your peer group to see if their experience has been the same as yours.STEP 5: Yes. Their experience has been the same as yours.STEP 6: Tell yourself, “Everyone else in our category is experiencing exactly what we have been experiencing. This means that everything is under control.”STEP 7: Continue to do this. In 9 more years, you will have had one year's experience 10 times.Roy H. WilliamsPS – A smart person makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise person finds a smart person and learns how to avoid that mistake altogether.A wise person discovers relational marketing.*ADDENDUMWe gathered data from 64 reputable sources. It can reasonably be estimated that there are about 117,000 companies in the US that provide HVAC services, 132,000 provide plumbing services, and 252,000 provide electrical services. (117,000 + 132,000 + 252,000 = 501,000)Let's assume for the sake of this example that those numbers are elevated. A lot of home service companies offer two or more services.Let's further assume that a lot of them are going to be commercial, not residential. So we will reduce the aggregate estimate of 501,000 companies down to just 100,000 companies competing for the opportunity to serve homeowners across America.Here is the fascinating part: we know for a fact that only 638 of those companies have a top line of $20,000,000 or more each year, and...

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory.They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.Just now, my muse whispered to me,“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman's muse?'”“What shall I tell them?”“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:“Silvano Arieti's book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti's vast contributions to the field.”Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world's foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.The other book he wrote was about creativity.Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.But perhaps I am wrong.Roy H. WilliamsToday's rabbit hole is as wacky as today's memo. You should check it out. I'm Indy Beagle.Steven Gaffney's client list reads like a “Who's Who of America's Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week's amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory.They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.Just now, my muse whispered to me,“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman's muse?'”“What shall I tell them?”“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:“Silvano Arieti's book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti's vast contributions to the field.”Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world's foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.The other book he wrote was about creativity.Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.But perhaps I am wrong.Roy H. WilliamsToday's rabbit hole is as wacky as today's memo. You should check it out. I'm Indy Beagle.Steven Gaffney's client list reads like a “Who's Who of America's Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week's amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The greatest companies are the ones with the happiest customers.To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric.Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.Great companies ask, “How can we give our customers the buying experience that they would prefer?” They work at removing the friction from the customer experience.Average companies ask, “How can we get our customers to give us more money, more often?” Average companies tells their marketing teams, “Sales is just a numbers game. Bring us twice as many leads and we'll make twice as many sales. You bring'em in. We'll close'em.”But no matter what those marketing teams do, a decreasing number of people will respond to their ads. A negative customer experience drives customers away faster than marketing can bring them in.Do you want to see what real customer-centric thinking looks like?A client of mine recently wrote this email and sent it to all the people who work in his company. He forwarded it to me only as an afterthought.SUBJECT: Pricing Reflection — Serving the Everyday Working AmericanTeam,Today I had a realization around some of our pricing. I'm all for setting prices that protect our margins and keep the business strong – but I'm equally committed to making sure we have price point items that the everyday working American can actually afford.Let's take a simple example: a toilet. Right now, most of our toilet installs are priced over $1,000. If we assume the median household income is $85,000, divided over 26 pre-tax paychecks, that's $3,269 per check. A $1,000 toilet install is over 30% of that paycheck. That's significant.We need to remember who we're here to serve – the nurse, the police officer, the office worker, the firefighter. These are people raising families, keeping their homes together, and doing the best they can. We cannot price them out of basic service. If we do, we risk not only losing today's job – but any future relationship with that customer.Let me be clear: I'm not trying to run a low-margin business.But I do want to make sure we have real options for real people. Today's pricing structure on some of these essential services is a barrier – not just to customers, but to our own techs who are trying to present them.Because of this realization, I immediately asked Jacob to find a toilet that we could install at a price point of $699. Well, guess what – we found one today. And we're bringing it in and adding it to the price book at $649.This one change will give our team more confidence to present a basic toilet option. What I've heard from Will – and it's been consistent – is that this has been a never-ending battle. Technicians don't feel comfortable presenting a $1,000 toilet to customers, especially when many of them wouldn't pay that themselves. That lack of confidence translates to lower conversions and frustrated customers.This reminds me of what we went through in HVAC when we had no system options below $15,000. We lost installs constantly – not because we weren't good, but because we didn't have a simple, no-frills option for people who just needed heating and air. Once we corrected that, we started closing more jobs and rebuilding our pipeline.We need to apply that same logic here. During times like this, let's price effectively so we can keep building our customer base and generate revenue day by day. When the tide turns – and it will – we can always maximize margin percentage where appropriate.There's an opportunity here. We can maintain strong...

The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.Brands are like that.Two people are now going to tell us about books.Dear Person Reading This,A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.You can look out of another person's eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it's waiting.Go look for it.Neil GaimanA Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.Here is the second person.Dear Reader,When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl's school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book's heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!That's what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she'd looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn't just offer escape; it offered connection!All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.Emily LevineA Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?That's like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.For us to agree upon “Who was the...

“Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness.Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace.Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.”– Beagles of Destinae, chapter 4Ideas pour into the dark waters of the unconscious mind, sparkling like reflected stars. As above, so below. The natives always said it was so.But as Gemini sat on the throne of Aquarius, a dragonfish was born. And thus our story begins.The twins did not mean to unleash a dragonfish, but they had never promised not to, either. And besides, a dragonfish is an adventure.Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea,and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,And brought him strings, and sealing wax, and other fancy stuff.Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail,Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff's gigantic tail.Noble kings and princes would bow whenever they came,Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name.A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys.One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.“Puff the Magic Dragon” with lyrics by Leonard Lipton and music by Peter Yarrow appears on the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary album, “Moving.” An urban myth soon arose that the song was about drugs. It's really a backward look at childhood, and all that was left behind.“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry“He saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon's, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.'”– Luke, ch. 5The book “Peter Pan” was written only after the 1904 play became a huge success.On opening night, Mrs. Snow spoke to the playwright and author, J.M. Barrie about her late husband…“And he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it's all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn't that right?”“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”– Gabriel Garcia Marquez“The secret of The Muppets is they re not very good at what they do. Kermit's not a great host, Fozzie's not a good comedian, Miss Piggy's not a great singer… Like, none of them are actually good at it, but they love it. They're like a family, and they like putting on the show. And they have joy. And because of the joy, it doesn't matter that they're not good at it. That's what we should all be. Muppets.”– Brett Goldstein“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust…If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up.”– Peter

Pennie and I had a difficult week a long way from home.It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield.Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn't know that at the time.We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windshield people. They gave her a new appointment.When we picked it up for the second time, the whistle was a little less loud than it had been, but she decided to live with it. There are a lot of things in life more annoying than a whistling windshield.We didn't know it, but we were about to experience several of them.Driving for 4 hours in a rainstorm to see your mother in the hospital is not a bad experience unless your previously-whistling windshield is now pouring quarts of water into your car.Things went downhill from there for several days.I won't bore you with the details because the real purpose of this note is to tell you what happened that turned everything around for us.We discovered a wonderful French cafe just two blocks from Clearfork Hospital in Ft. Worth. Halfway through the meal, I went to their website to see if they had a location in Austin. They don't, but I'm sure they soon will.Meanwhile, Pennie went to romanticspotsfortworth.com to see if Clarissa had discovered and listed this amazing cafe.Of course, she had. Clarissa is really good at her job.Angela brought our next course to the table.I said, “We found out about you at romanticspotsfortworth.”To our delight, Angela said, “Yes! They sent us an award with the cutest logo on it! Everyone was excited.”Pennie and I chose not to mention that we own the romanticspots websites.When Angela departed, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the cafe's website where I encountered a carousel of remarkable quotes. “People who love to eat are always the best people.”– Julia Child“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”– J.R.R. Tolkien, from “The Hobbit”, spoken by Thorin Oakenshield“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”– Aesop, “The Lion and The Mouse”“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”– Andre GideHaving been distracted by every bad thing that had happened since our 4-hour trip in a flooded car, these next two quotes hit me pretty hard.“You'll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”– Dr. Seuss“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of all.”– Walt DisneyEach of the remaining quotes at the bottom of that menu lifted me a little bit higher.“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”– Frances Hodgson Burnett, “The Secret Garden”“True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.”– Fred Jacob“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”– Dr. Seuss“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”– Antoine de Saint-ExupéryAnd then this line lifted from “A Room of One's Own” by Virginia Wolf made me smile and remember where I was.“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”And then Andre Gide encouraged me to quit looking at what was behind me.“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the...

“If people were paid according to how hard they work, the richest people on earth would be the ones digging ditches with a shovel in the hot summertime.”That's what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued.“People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make.”Second only to grief, the weight of responsibility is the heaviest burden that a person can carry. Compared to those, a shovel full of dirt feels as light as feathers on a windy day.When forced to choose between two evils, it brings a good person no joy to choose the lesser evil. Fewer people will be hurt, but the pain those people feel will be real.A person who is not wounded by the pain they cause others is a sociopath.Authority is power, and power is attractive. Tear away the tinsel. Scrape away the glitter and you will see that authority is just a fancy costume. You wear it when you are about to cause someone pain.Every good person in authority has scars on their heart, memories of the pain they know they have caused others.Sociopaths don't care about the pain of others. They crave authority because they are weak, and the fancy costume lets them pretend they are strong.Things get ugly when a sociopath has power.“In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes – courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. – can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”– Eric Hoffer, “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973)A person in authority who lacks compassion is a very small person wearing a badge.As a young man, I admired cleverness. But I have lived enough years and cried enough tears that now I see the world differently. Today, I admire goodness. This shift in perspective helped me understand what Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, “Man's Search for Meaning.”“Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth… In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”Viktor Frankl was a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a survivor of the holocaust. He was imprisoned in four different concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz where his mother was murdered, Dachau,and then Türkheim.Viktor Frankl believed in freedom, but he refused to see it as a license to do whatever you want. To him, freedom without responsibility was an idiotic idea.Isabella Bird was a well-educated woman who left Victorian England to explore the world in 1854.When she arrived in the United States in 1873, she bought a horse and rode alone more than 800 miles to Colorado. In her book, “A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains,” (1879), Isabella wrote,“In America the almighty dollar is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. ‘Smartness' is the quality thought most of. The boy who ‘gets on' by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a ‘smart boy,' and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a ‘great man.'”“A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a ‘smart man,' and stories of this species of ‘smartness' are told admiringly...

His name was Rab. He died in Bengal, the land of tigers, in 1941. On his way out the door, he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.”Where do you hurry with your basketthis late evening when the marketing is over?They all have come home with their burdens;The moon peeps from above the village trees.The echoes of the voices calling for the ferryrun across the dark water to the distant swampwhere wild ducks sleep.Where do you hurry with your basketwhen the marketing is over?Sleep has laid her fingersupon the eyes of the earth.The nests of the crows have become silent,and the murmurs of the bamboo leaves are silent.The labourers home from their fieldsspread their mats in the courtyards.Where do you hurry with your basketwhen the marketing is over?Rab wrote this in 1913,Free me from the bonds of your sweetness, my love!No more of this wine of kisses.This mist of heavy incense stifles my heart.Open the doors, make room for the morning light.I am lost in you, wrapped in the folds of your caresses.Free me from your spells, and give me back the manhoodto offer you my freed heart.Famous for his role as President Jed Bartlet, Martin Sheen spoke several months ago at a White House event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the debut of “The West Wing” on television. He wrapped up his short speech by reciting a poem that Rab had written more than 100 years earlier.Where the mind is without fear and the head is held highWhere knowledge is freeWhere the world has not been broken up into fragmentsBy narrow domestic wallsWhere words come out from the depth of truthWhere tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfectionWhere the clear stream of reason has not lost its wayInto the dreary desert sand of dead habitWhere the mind is led forward by theeInto ever-widening thought and actionInto that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.Rab knew that you and I would be here today, and he left us a message.Who are you, reader,reading my poems a hundred years hence?I cannot send you one single flowerfrom this wealth of the spring,one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.Open your doors and look abroad.From your blossoming gardengather fragrant memories of the vanished flowersof a hundred years before.In the joy of your heart may you feelthe living joy that sang one spring morning,sending its glad voice across a hundred years.Rab – Rabindranath Tagore – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.He was the first non-European ever to win a Nobel Prize.Roy H. WilliamsNOTE FROM INDY: Speaking of Martin Sheen, his name has recently been mentioned in association with the book, “When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill.” Aroo.A timber-framed cottage was built in Frog Holt, England, in the year 1450. Today, 575 years later, that cottage provides an important case study for business owners who are scaling their...

Michael Dell and Shaquille O'Neal planned their work and worked their plans.Dell understood the formulas, and followed the rules, of efficiency.O'Neal understood the formulas and followed the rules of basketball.Each of them faithfully followed a Structural plan.Michael Dell invented nothing, improvised nothing, and innovated only once. But that single innovation made him a billionaire. Dell's innovation was to bring tested, reliable, proven methods of cost-cutting to the manufacturing and distribution of computers. When all his competitors were selling through retailers, Dell sold direct to consumer. This made his costs lower and his profits higher.Michael Dell's strengths are discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking.Likewise, Shaq says, “I didn't invent basketball, but I am really good at executing the plays.” Discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking made Shaq an extraordinary basketball player. These same characteristics also made him an amazing operator of fast-food franchises.“The most Shaq ever made playing in the NBA was $29.5 million per year. Now, it's estimated that the big man is bringing in roughly $60 million per year, much of which is coming from his portfolio of fast-food businesses around the U.S.”– 24/7wallst.comShaq didn't invent car washes or Five Guys Burgers and Fries, but he owns more than 150 of each.Michael Dell and Shaquille O'Neal are masters of Structural planning and thinking.Structural thinking relies on proven elements and best practices. “Gather the best pieces and processes and connect them together like LEGO blocks. What could possibly go wrong?”Structural planning and thinking:Invent, Improvise, Innovate?“NO, because those things are untested. We want to avoid mistakes.”Reliable, Tested, Proven?“YES!”Steve Jobs and Michael Jordon are masters of Gestalt planning and thinking.Gestalt planning and thinking:Invent, Improvise, Innovate?“YES!“Reliable, Tested, Proven?“NO, because those things are predictable. We want to be different.“The fundamental idea of Gestalt thinking is that the behavior of the whole is not determined by its individual elements; but rather that the behavior of the individual elements are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.It is the goal of Gestalt thinking to determine the nature of the whole, the finished product.Gestalt thinkers who can fund their experiments and survive their mistakes often become paradigm shifters and world-changers.Steve Jobs got off to a slow start because he refused to use MS-DOS, the operating system that everyone else was using. But he was sensitive to the needs and hungers of the marketplace. When Steve Jobs had a crystal-clear vision of the things that people would purchase if those things existed, he brought those things into existence.Structural thinkers rely on planning and execution. Gestalt thinkers rely on poise and flexibility, often deciding on small details at the last split-second. Ask a Gestalt thinker why they do this and most of them will tell you, “I decide at the last minute because that is when I have the most information.”The reason you never knew what Michael Jordan was going to do is because Michael Jordan had not yet decided. Michael's internal vision was simple and clear: “Put the basketball through the hoop.” With the clarity of that crystal vision shining brightly in his mind, Michael could figure out everything else along the way.Gestalt thinkers like Steve Jobs and Michael

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”“Life… Liberty… and the pursuit of Happiness.”We published those words 229 years ago when we declared our independence from Britain. That document was the earliest expression of what has come to be known as the American dream.Jefferson's Declaration did not free us from the tyranny of Britain. It merely communicated our collective desire to be unfettered and unrestrained.Do we now feel unfettered and unrestrained? I think not.It seems to me that our current view of the American dream sees raw ambition as “the pursuit of happiness.”Ambition is like sexual hunger. It is satisfied with accomplishment only for a moment, and then the hunger returns. Ambition will lead you to momentary satisfaction, but it will not lead you to happiness.John D. Rockefeller, the world's first billionaire, was worth 1% of the entire U.S. economy when he was asked,“How much money does it take to make a man happy?”Rockefeller answered, “Just a little bit more.”Ambition is never contented.Am I condemning ambition? I promise you that I am not. I am merely pointing out the deep chasm that separates the unending hunger of ambition from the high and lofty contentment of happiness.An old man named Paul wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy 2,000 years ago. Near the end of that letter, Paul wrote about old people and hypocrites and slavery and wealth.Paul then added two sentences that have echoed in my brain for the past 60 years.“To know God and to be deeply contented is the true definition of wealth. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”Happiness cannot spread its wings while wearing the handcuffs of our ambitions. The shining light of Hope is made of a stronger and happier substance than our dark dreams of future accomplishment.Ambition can bring you recognition, reputation, and riches. But those are no substitute for friendships, family, and contentment; for these are the three strong cords from which happiness is woven.Have you figured it out yet? Happiness is not material. It is relational.With whom do you have a meaningful relationship?Roy H. WilliamsWe have solved the mystery of the roving reporter!The wizard received this email from Italy a couple of days ago:Dear Roy and Pennie,Talya and I found this quaint restaurant with tables in its wine cellar and thought you'd love this place. (I don't drink, but thought it appropriate to pose with a glass of wine — which our son-in-law ordered.) If your future plans bring you to Vincenza, Italy, this is one stop you won't regret. Avital sends her warmest regards.– DEAN(You will find the photo that accompanied this email on the final page of today's rabbit hole. I'm Ian Rogers.)EMAIL NEWSLETTERSign up to receive the Monday Morning Memo in your inbox!Download the PDF "Dictionary of the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy"RANDOM QUOTE:“As we start looking for the good, our focus automatically is taken off the bad.”- Susan JeffersTHE WIZARD TRILOGY

“If we train our children only to harvest, who will plant the seed?”I wrote those words after contemplating the short-sightedness of so-called, “performance marketing,” on March 11, 2010.“Performance marketing” is the new name for direct response advertising. It works best when it extracts the value from a well-known brand. Its objective is to bring in a lot of money quickly.That is why business owners are attracted to it.But here's the caveat: value cannot be extracted from a brand unless it has first been created. You cannot squeeze a good reputation dry unless you first build a good reputation.Do you see the problem? When you have finally squeezed the last ounce of value from a good reputation, you don't have a good reputation anymore.As I was contemplating that last line I just wrote, the words “extraction of value” popped into my mind. I typed those words into the Google search bar. The AI Overview that appeared at the top of the page whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone: “‘The extraction of value' refers to the process of capturing or appropriating value from other stakeholders, often through exploiting a monopoly or manipulating competitive market processes, rather than creating new value.” – WIKIPEDIAThe eight words that leaped out of the paragraph were, “exploiting… or manipulating… rather than creating new value.”Do you remember that famous scene in the movie There Will Be Blood when Daniel says to Eli,“If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw… There it is. that's the straw, you see? Watch it. Now my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I… drink… your… milkshake! I drink it up!”That is the voice of performance marketing.The healthy alternative to performance marketing is sales activation within a relational ad campaign.Sales activation is like shearing the wool from a sheep. You can do it again and again and the creature is never diminished by it.Performance marketing is like slaughtering that poor sheep, piece by piece. It is painful, and there is nothing left when you are done.I apologize for putting that horrible image into your mind, but we are talking about your business.I'm sorry if I stepped over the line.Roy H. WilliamsYou will find 4 examples of what the wizard calls “sales activation within a relational ad campaign” on the first page of the rabbit hole. I can hear what you are thinking right now. And to that, I say, “You're welcome.” – Indy BeagleRoving reporter Rotbart will be away on a secret mission in Italy for the next two weeks. He didn't tell us exactly what it was, but here are our top 3 guesses. One: He is studying the original manuscripts of Leonardo Da Vinci for a special series of investigative reports to be aired on PBS this autumn. Two: The roving reporter was invited to the Vatican to meet with the Pope. Three: There is no secret mission. He is just eating gelato at a seaside cafe with his lovely wife, Talya, while gazing at the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. We will update you next week when we know more. – Ian Rogers

I was watching a few of Evan Puschak's “Nerdwriter” videos when I heard my own inner voice composing a thank you note to him. In the quiet of my mind, I told Evan that I have always found his analysis of literature, movies, music, photographs, and paintings to be incisive and insightful.IncisiveInsightfulThose two words, back-to-back, hit me so hard that I stumbled and fell backward into a bottomless chasm of grief over the loss of Andrew Cross.Evan Puschak is incisive.Andrew Cross was insightful.“Incisive” conjures the precision of a scalpel as it slices open a surface to reveal what is hidden inside.“Insightful” describes the inner workings of intuition as it quietly assembles a mosaic in the mind.I was going to say that I have a “parasocial relationship” with Evan Puschak and Andrew Cross, but then I decided that I should check to make sure that “parasocial relationship” means what I think it does. Here's what Captain Google told me.“A parasocial relationship is a one-sided, imagined connection or bond a person develops with someone they don't know personally, usually a media figure or celebrity, often feeling a sense of intimacy or familiarity despite the lack of reciprocity.”Yep. It means exactly what I thought it did.

Magical Thinking is often misunderstood.Jason Segel plays a psychologist in the Apple + TV show, “Shrinking.” He is talking to a patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.He looks at her. “This again?” She is holding her breath. He says, “You looked at the clock and now you have to hold your breath until the minute changes?” Holding her breath, she nods her head. He says, “Look, I know you feel like this compulsion is gonna help keep bad things from happening, but that's called magical thinking.”Medical News Today says, “Magical thinking means that a person believes their thoughts, feelings, or rituals can influence events in the material world, either intentionally or unintentionally.”But the summary of that article says, “This type of thinking does not always cause harm. In fact, it can have benefits.”The benefits of magical thinking are – according to me – exquisite.Magical thinking is the least destructive way to escape reality. When you compare it to alcohol, gambling, drugs, or adrenaline-producing dangerous behaviors, magical thinking is about as dangerous as eating raw cookie dough.Magical thinking is a requirement when you are:looking forward to a vacation, a wedding, or other happy event. Every time you imagine the future, you are visiting a world that does not exist.enjoying a television series, a movie, a novel, a poem, a song, a cartoon, or any other type of fiction. Half of your brain knows these things never happened, but the other half of your brain doesn't care.being persuaded by a well-written bit of advertising.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 1800GOTJUNK.comAnd prepare to be amazed.Words create realities in the mind.Magical realism is a type of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.If you exaggerate, people won't trust you. But if you say something so impossible that it cannot possibly be true, people will be delighted by the possibility you popped into their mind.SARAH: When your home feels clean and happy, the people inside feel clean and happy.BRIAN: I've got a partner who lives down the street from you and we're anxious to bring you a truckload of SPRINGTIME. [sfx magic sparkle]SARAH: You don't have to lift a finger!Predictability is the silent assassin of advertising.Magical realism focuses the imagination, disarms the assassin, and delights the mind.BRIAN: We make junk disappear. [sfx magic sparkle]SARAH: All you have to do is point.Magical thinking is good for your soul.Magical realism is good for your business.Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.Roy H. WilliamsThe reinvention of Gigi Meier is nothing short of remarkable. After three decades at the boardroom level of a multi-billion-dollar bank, Gigi reinvented herself as a romance writer. Gigi has published 16 books, some quite steamy, across three ongoing series. Did Gigi to draw on her extensive banking experience to fuel her publishing success? No! She tells roving reporter Rotbart that the opposite is true! Gigi has discovered valuable insights as a romance publisher that would have been useful during her banking career! No one has guests as interesting as roving reporter Rotbart. Am I right! This party will get started the moment you arrive...

Brian Brushwood knows how to gain and hold attention in social media.Reaching for that brass ring causes most people to lean too far off their plastic horse on the social media merry-go-round.SPLAT! They land flat on their faces with only a few hundred views.Brian has built a YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers, an entirely different channel to more than 2 million subscribers, and 12 days ago he produced a 1-minute “short” that had 3.6 million views on the first day, and at the time of this writing – on Day 12 – it has climbed to 17.1 million views.And you – yes, you – could have shot that exact same video with nothing more than a cell phone.I asked Brian if I could ask him a few questions on ZOOM for the Monday Morning Memo. Here are a some of the things he shared with me:“There's a temptation, especially with YouTube, to perpetually feel like you're too late. You're never too late. I thought I was too late to start YouTube in 2006 because it had been around since 2005. It was already seeing its early superstars. And I started in 2006. And then I thought by the time Scam School came to YouTube in 2009, I thought it was too late. It wasn't too late. I thought it was too late in 2016 when we launched the Modern Rogue. It wasn't too late.”“YouTube is the dominant market now.”“Facebook is now pay-to-play. And for some messaging, that works. It's worth paying the money to get the message out there. But if you're trying to build organic fans like I am, it's not a fit.”“TikTok: there's only one star of TikTok, and that's TikTok. You can get a million views one day and the next day you'll get 800. And it's agonizing because they literally just want to lure you into their dopamine trap. Whereas YouTube is a meritocracy.”“And here's the beauty. If you think about YouTube as your personal agent… What personal agent knows your material all the way back to the very first time you ever posted anything? And also it knows the customer, your client, your prospective new best friend, their entire history of everything they've ever watched.”What can you do for me in one hour, Brian?“We can crack who you are, what you do and do not do, and craft your storytelling engine.”“Have you noticed, Roy, that on YouTube, so much of the content boils down to, ‘Can you blank with a blank?' Or ‘How to blank with a blank.' And these are transactional things. Either they trade on curiosity, or they trade on things that people are searching for. But very quickly, all you have to do is get on paper what your flavor is – that's called in fancy Hollywood talk – ‘a style guide.'”“Now, I don't want to intimidate anybody… You know what, if I did want to intimidate people, I'll say, ‘In one hour, Roy, I can give you a story bible, a style guide, I can give you a structure, a framework, a narrative storytelling. I could break down the beats of your three-act structure. We could consider the Campbellian monomyth, all those things.'”“We could get that done in an hour and technically I'd be accurate. But the way I would explain it to anybody watching this is, ‘Give me an hour and I'll teach you not how to tell a story; I'll teach you to tell all the stories, because stories are happening to you all the time. Every client that has a setback is an amazing story.'”“It is so dead simple.”“Now that doesn't mean it's easy, but it is simple. The first hour is basically everything you're going to need to know. Everything past that is reinforcement, and everything after that is refinement.”

“Features and benefits” were once the most loudly shouted secrets of customer acquisition in Business to Consumer advertising (B2C). I even wrote a chapter in my first book – The Wizard of Ads – on the use of “which means” as a word-bridge between:1. naming a feature of your product and2. naming the benefit it delivers to your customer.But that was 27 years ago.When “features and benefits” became predictable in B2C advertising, they quickly tumbled into the gutters of “Ad-speak” and lost all of their effectiveness.Naming features and benefits is still the right thing to do in Business to Business advertising (B2B) and in Direct Response ads. In those environments, your customers already know they are in the cross hairs of a sales pitch. So name a feature, followed by “which means,” and then tell them about the benefit they will experience.Here's how that Direct Response ad might sound:“TwinkleWhite toothpaste contains Polychromaticite® which means your teeth will be whiter, your breath will be fresher, and everyone will be attracted to you. TwinkleWhite toothpaste is the choice of 93% of billionaires and 97% of supermodels worldwide, which means Polychromaticite® is an essential ingredient in the creation of personal wealth and beauty. This miracle toothpaste isn't sold in stores, which means you will save 65 percent when your order TwinkleWhite directly from the laboratory at TwinkleWhite.com”Direct Response advertising is a unique monster who lives and dies by its own special rules.1. It is judged by its ability to generate an immediate result.2. It offers no continuing benefit to the advertiser.Direct Response is the preferred method of advertising for people who are selling a stand-alone product, tickets to an event, or a quick solution for a short-term problem, such as roof repair after a hurricane. None of these people is building a brand.Although ads for B2C sales activation can sound similar to B2B ads and Direct Response ads like the one above, different rules apply.I will now whisper to you the quiet secrets of B2C sales activation in 2025.Every Powerful Message Comes at a Cost. Vulnerability is the currency that buys trust in today's over-communicated world. Financial vulnerability, emotional vulnerability, and relational vulnerability demonstrate your sincerity.When you don't have cash, spend time instead. Brad Casebier owned a tiny plumbing company in a town that doesn't have enough water. So he calculated how much water a running toilet wastes every day, then advertised that he would install a new toilet flapper for free in every home that had a running toilet. No strings attached. Brad became a superstar and his company became huge. Interestingly, the average person who needed a new toilet flapper spent about $800 on other things they needed done.These diamond earrings whisper, “I love you.” Customer interest skyrockets when inanimate objects have thoughts, feelings, or the ability to speak.Promote your slowest day of the week. I rarely visit my favorite restaurant on Mondays because it is always too crowded. Their offer of “Buy a Burger and Get One Free” packs the house with people who buy lots of appetizers, side dishes, desserts, and drinks from the bar because they saved a couple of bucks on a burger. The offer is for dine-in only.Don't think like a business owner. Think like the customer. Do not try to unload your buying mistakes through sales activation.

Philip Dusenberry once said, “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.”I can testify that Dusenberry is correct. The best ad writers make more money than the most highly paid lawyers and heart surgeons.Great advertising makes an enormous difference in the top line revenue of a company. A reputation for being able to write great ads makes an enormous difference in your bank account. But only if you get paid according to the growth of the businesses you write for.Did you notice that I ended that sentence with a preposition? A pedantic will tell you that I should have said, “But only if you get paid according to the growth of the businesses for whom you write ads.” But I chose not to do that. If you can tell me why, you might have the makings of an ad writer.Do you have a friend who reads the books of the world's most famous authors?If you say, “Call me Ishmael,” and your friend says, “Moby Dick,” your friend has the ingredients to bake a wordcake.Say to your friend, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”If your friend says, “Robert Frost,” he or she has the ability to lead people to places they have never been.Say, “The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”If your friend looks at you and says, “Tom Robbins died last month,” they definitely have the makings of ad writer.“As you read, so will you write.”If the cadence and rhythm and unpredictable phrases singular to poets, screenwriters and novelists are echoing in your brain, your mind will spew rainbows of words like ocean water from the blowhole of a whale.Luke records Jesus as having said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” If you want to know what is inside a person, listen to what they say and read what they write.The minds of great writers are filled with the music of other great writers. Music cannot flow from your fingertips if it does not live in your mind.I don't mean to be unkind, but most writers have no music in their mind.Tom Robbins told NPR in 2014, “I would tell stories aloud to himself, but always out in the yard with a stick in my hand. I would beat the ground as I told the story. And we moved fairly frequently. We would leave houses behind where one section of the yard was completely bare from where I had destroyed the grass. But I realized much later in life that what I was doing was drumming. I was building a rhythm. Even today as a writer I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm in my work.”When Tom Robbins died, hypnotic passages from his bestselling novels were quoted by NPR and The New York Times in their eulogies of his life.Character dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin is the standard by which all screenwriting is judged. Aaron says, “It's not just that dialogue sounds like music to me. It actually is music. Anytime someone is speaking for the purpose of performance, whether they're doing it from a pulpit in a church, whether it's a candidate on the stump or an actor on a stage, anytime they're speaking for the purposes of performance, all the rules of music apply.”The workload of my 81 Wizard of Ads partners will soon be at maximum capacity.I am looking for brilliant ad writers. Between now and the end of the year I will onboard a small group of writers who are worth a lot more money than they are currently being paid. They will attend the partner meeting this autumn.Selection, orientation, and enculturation requires diligence and patience on both sides.Our journey will begin when you send exactly 12

Twenty-four thousand men were crowded into Knockaloe Interment Camp in 1914 because they had been found guilty of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong last name.Tightly confined behind barbed wire, those men grew increasingly weak, feeble, stiff and awkward until a man named Joseph was shoved through their gate on September 12, 1915.He gave his fellow prisoners strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.They never forgot him.When the war was over and those men were released, Joseph boarded a ship for America. While onboard that ship, he fell in love with a woman named Clara who was also headed to America. When they arrived in New York, Joseph and Clara opened a studio on 8th street that would send ripples across the world.The rest of this story is about how those ripples became a wave.George Balanchine sent his ballet dancers to Joseph on 8th street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.Martha Graham sent her modern dancers to Joseph on 8th street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.The best dancers on Broadway went to Joseph on 8th Street to gain strength, stamina, flexibility and grace.George Balanchine became known as “The Father of Modern Ballet.”Martha Graham is shown in Apple's famous “Think Different” video as one of the 17 people that Steve Jobs felt had changed the world.Broadway, Ballet, and Modern Dance were lifted to new heights.When those ripples from 8th Street reached California, the “Golden Age of Hollywood” began.Gene Kelley danced with a light post and sang in the rain to the thundering applause of America.Slim, elegant, and incredibly strong, Fred Astaire did impossible things effortlessly.Ginger Rodgers did exactly what Fred did, but backwards and in high heels.A young man was known for his slogan, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He brought strength, stamina, flexibility and grace to the world of boxing.Like Martha Graham, this young boxer was chosen to appear in Apple's famous “Think Different” video as one of the 17 “crazy ones” who changed the world.He had been the heavyweight champion of the world for 5 years when a 10-year-old boy named Michael elevated dancing to an even higher place with the help of his 4 older brothers. Those 8th Street ripples of strength, stamina, flexibility and grace had splashed back from the California coast and were now rippling through Motown.Charles Atlas and Joseph Pilates were born one year apart and lived an almost identical lifespan.Charles Atlas gave men bulging biceps that other people could admire.Joseph Pilates told us how to gain the strength, stamina, flexibility, and grace to do whatever we want to do.What do you want to do?– Roy H. WilliamsPS – Joseph loved Clara until the day he died.Are your employees happy to follow you, or do they avoid you like a skunk at a garden party? Phillip Wilson says the more accessible you are as a leader, the more your business will thrive. But when leaders create a gap between themselves and their employees, they lose top talent and nudge workers toward unionization. Listen in as the famous Phillip Wilson explains to roving reporter Rotbart why “Approachable Leadership” is the only elevator that can lift employee morale, productivity, and retention. The button has been pressed and this elevator is about to up-up-up! But we're holding the door open for you, hoping that you'll join us at MondayMorningRadio.com

The biggest decisions I ever made didn't seem big at the time.I'll bet the same is true for you.Pivotal changes in direction seem obvious to us 10 years later, but during that tiny moment when we alter our course a little, it feels like a very small thing.Here are 4 small, pivotal moments that loom large in my mind today.Moment #1: I was a 22-year-old advertising salesman who was rapidly going bald. Every business owner I met was trying to decide, “Where should I invest my ad budget?”One morning I heard myself answer, “I don't care where you spend your money. The thing that matters most is what you say in your ads.”The man didn't believe me.But I believed me.The direction of my future was altered by a few degrees in that singular, magical moment.Moment #2, about 18 months later:I was writing exceptional ads and everyone was dancing except me. I knew something was missing, but I didn't know what. And it was bugging me.I looked into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror for about a minute one morning. And then I said out loud, “Why am I not seeing better results?”My reflection reached out from that mirror, slapped my face, grabbed my collar and pulled me in so closely that my nose was pressed into the glass. I could feel its breath on my ear as it whispered, “You are reaching too many people with too little repetition.”You never forget a thing like that.Moment #3: I was pondering the “Reach and Frequency Analysis” of my media schedule that had been calculated for me by the most famous data company in America and It said everything was fine. But I knew I was reaching too many people with too little repetition. That was the problem.I found the cause of that problem – and the solution to it – buried deep in the methodology of how advertising everywhere is measured, sold, purchased, and evaluated.Good science is distorted by our erroneous assumptions. We gather perfectly accurate data and then misinterpret it. We rarely question our assumptions, especially when they are part of the universally accepted way of “How Things are Done.”If you could see the mistakes that hide in your blind spot, it would not be called “a blind spot.”Misinterpretation of data is an irresistible tide that carries every boat in the wrong direction.The first fatal mistake occurs so early in the process of data processing that we never really question it.The second fatal mistake happens during the implementation stage. You assume that spreading your small ad budget across different media is the right thing to do because everyone does it. This idea of a “media mix” is practiced by all the largest advertisers and taught in every university. They say to their marketing students, “This is what the biggest companies do. You should imitate them.”But here's the dead fly in that bowl of soup: When a company has a much bigger ad budget than everyone else in their category, they can aim that firehouse across several media and soak everyone with relentless repetition.But you don't have a firehouse. You have a watering can.If you use your watering can properly, you'll be able to afford a garden hose. And if you use that garden hose properly, you will soon be able to afford a fire hose.The water in your watering can should be used to water all the people you can reach with sufficient repetition.“with sufficient repetition.”“with sufficient repetition.”Repetition is the non-negotiable you must protect at all cost.When you reach too many people with too little repetition, no one gets wet, and you stay small.NOTE: I am dangerously oversimplifying the solution when I say that you can achieve automatic, involuntary recall

If you believe that people today have a short attention span, you are mistaken.FACT: We live in an over-communicated society.This is why we have learned how to quickly filter out messages that do not interest us.FACT: We will happily spend several hours binge-watching shows that appeal to us.Where's your theory about a short attention span now?If you want to get people's attention and hold that attention, talk to them about things they already care about.If people aren't paying attention to your ads, it is because (A.) you chose the wrong thing to talk about, or (B.) you are talking about it in a predictable way.I wrote an ad this morning for a jewelry store. This is how the ad begins:RICK: Sicily is the island at the toe of the boot of Italy,SARAH: and the town of Catania is situated on the seashore, staring at the toe of that boot.MONICA: That's where Jay, one of our owners, traveled to meet Italy's most exciting new jewelry designer.RICK: Tell us about it, Jay.JAY: When I met Francesco and saw what he was working on, I almost hyperventilated.Those 5 lines do not sound like the typical jewelry store ad.But I'll bet you'd like to hear the rest of it.Let's talk for a moment about another obvious truth:FACT: Ads rarely work for products that people don't want. The ad writers and the media will always get the blame, but the real mistake is made when business owners convince themselves that advertising can sell things that no one wants.Advertising cannot, in fact, do that.I recently spoke to a friend who sent out 20,000 postcards that failed to get a response. This led him to conclude that “direct mail doesn't work.”When he told me what was featured on those 20,000 postcards, I told my friend the truth. “Your experiment proved only that a weak offer gets weak results. Direct mail didn't fail. Your offer did.”Your objective determines the rules you must play by.Direct Response – immediate result advertising – can be measured with ROAS (Return On Ad Spend.) Pay-per-click is perhaps the most common type of direct response advertising, but direct response offers are routinely made using every type of media. If you plan to introduce, explain, and sell a product or service to a customer with whom you have no previous relationship, you are rolling the dice of direct response. You can always measure the effectiveness of direct response ads with ROAS.Direct Response is a sport for surfers who like to ride the wave of a trend. It is a wild and crazy rollercoaster ride of feast-and-famine. If you like excitement, you should definitely do it. But be aware that the most successful direct response marketers are spending 25% to 35% percent of top line revenues on advertising. You need at least a 20x markup to play that game.I prefer sowing and reaping. Seedtime and harvest.Brand Building creates a long-term bond with the customer. The goal of brand building is to make your name the one that customers think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell. Your Return on Ad Spend –ROAS – will look terrible when you first begin, but it will get better and better as you build a relationship with the public. In the long run, nothing can touch brand building. It is always the most cost-effective way to invest your ad budget if you have patience, confidence, and a good ad writer.Roy H. WilliamsTwenty-eight million viewers tuned...

Buying advertising is a lot like buying diamonds.Allow me to explain.Anyone who talks to a jeweler will be told that diamonds are graded according to the 4 C's: Color, Clarity, Carat weight, and Cut.Customers ask the jeweler, “Which of the 4 Cs is most important?”This seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but the truth is that the 4 C's cannot be compared to one another. There is no rubric, no metric, no algorithm that can equate them. The 4 C's are distinctly separate from one another. They are not interchangeable.Advertising is like that. Each of the characteristics of highly effective advertising are distinctly separate from one another. They are not interchangeable.Natural diamonds can be an infinite number of shades of yellow, grey, brown, green, blue, red, or a mixture thereof. Diamonds can also be colorless.The only thing more valuable than a colorless diamond is an extremely colorful one.Color is a measurement of rarity, not beauty.Clarity is another measurement of rarity, not beauty.“Flawless” clarity refers to a diamond which is free of inclusions under 10x magnification. But under 40x magnification every flawless diamond is swimming with inclusions that cannot be seen under 10x. So get this idea of “flawless” out of your head, okay? It is a myth.Seven clarity grades below flawless is another clarity known as SI2, which looks flawless to the naked eye. Not even a jeweler can tell the difference without 10x magnification. But there is a huge difference in price between flawless and SI2 because Clarity is a measurement of rarity, not beauty, remember?Carat weight is how the size of a diamond is measured. We'll come back to this in a minute.Cut does not refer to the shape of the diamond, but to the ability of the diamond to gather light, bounce it between the facets, and then shine it upward toward the eyes. When diamonds are cut perfectly, they do not leak light out of the bottom of the diamond. A perfectly cut diamond returns 100% of internalized light upward and outward in a wild spectacle of sparkles.You want sparkles, but you also want carat weight.When you cut a diamond crystal perfectly, you lose more than half of that diamond's Carat weight. But if you cheat the cut a little, the diamond won't sparkle as much but it will weigh more and sell for more money.If you cut the diamond with a thick girdle and a deep pavilion, the diamond will be dull because its internal mirrors will be misaligned, but it will be much heavier than if it were cut properly.A Carat is a unit of weight. There are 141.748 Carats in an ounce. This means that a small pouch of 1-Carat diamonds worth just $4,000 each will cost you $567,000 an ounce.Pure gold is less than $3,000 an ounce.Are you beginning to understand why diamond cutters are loath to grind away precious carat weight in the quest for maximum sparkle?Your logical mind tells you that it should be possible to create a diamond algorithm that says, “one colorgrade = 0.05 carats = 0.78 of a clarity grade = 2.13% excess weight above the projected carat weight for a perfectly cut diamond of this diameter.”Your logical mind tells you this because you continue to believe that dissimilar properties such as color, clarity, carat weight, and cut can be quantified, codified, and reconciled.In truth, they cannot.Buying advertising is even more complicated than buying diamonds.The rubric used to calculate the Gross Rating Points achieved in media schedules makes perfect sense until you realize it equates dissimilar properties and treats them as though they are...

I recently sent you two memos about our need for positive hope.“Hollywood's Broken Angel” was the true story of a woman who desperately needed a friend to encourage her.“Hope and a Future” explained how easy it is to recharge the emotional batteries of a friend whose light has dimmed.Positive hope crackles with the vibrant energy of life itself. It radiates honesty, openness, forgiveness, acceptance, optimism, loyalty and love.Positive hope illuminates the heart and drives away the darkness.But there is also such a thing as negative hope. It promises salvation but delivers only hubris, which is desperation disguised as confidence.Negative hope is attractive, addictive, and cruel.Gamblers sitting around a poker table are the perfect portrait of negative hope. They ride a rollercoaster of elation and despair but tell themselves they have a system.A second portrait of negative hope is a lottery ticket, a receipt issued by the government to citizens who pay a voluntary tax because they believe in lucky numbers and are extremely bad at math.Bernie Madoff was a salesman of negative hope. He wore the mask of a self-made billionaire, but behind that mask was a desperate little con man who stole money from innocent people who believed they had been admitted into the inner circle of a genius who had a secret system.The world is full of elegant and attractive people who sell negative hope. One of them will sell you a worthless education by promising you a better-paying job. Another will sell you a garage full of crap by convincing you of the miracle of multilevel marketing. A third will sell you the promise of inner peace by convincing you they have it, and that it can be transferred to you for money.Negative hope is attractive, but you can easily recognize it now that you know what to look for.I'm really glad we got that out of the way because now I've got some great news for you: inner peace is real.And here's some even better news: you can have it for free, no strings attached.Inner peace is honesty, openness, forgiveness, acceptance, optimism, loyalty and love. All of these can be yours for free. But first you have to give them away.It is a simple but fascinating system. The more you give these 7 things to others, the more richly they accumulate in you.Five hundred and eleven Christmases have come and gone since Giovanni Giocondo sent his Christmas letter to a friend in 1513. It said, “No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!”Likewise, I say to you, inner peace is hidden in this present little instant.Reach out and take it. It's yours.Roy H. WilliamsWhen roving reporter Rotbart was a financial columnist with The Wall Street Journal, he met a young man named Steve Jobs who left a lasting impression on him. “When I spoke with Jason Schappert,” Rotbart says, “it felt like I was talking with Steve Jobs again.” Jason Schappert recently launched an AI-powered investment platform for middle-class consumers, providing the same insights and tools typically reserved for the ultra-rich. Today you have an opportunity to learn from Jason Schappert about how to identify opportunities, make bold decisions, and leverage your passion as roving reporter Rotbart meets with him at MondayMorningRadio.com

Fifty years ago, I was a teenager with an unreliable automobile. But that's never a problem for an Oklahoma boy who has knowledge, tools, and daylight.My knowledge and tools were always with me, but the daylight disappeared at the worst possible time, no matter how badly I needed it.Cell phones had not yet been invented.When the batteries in my flashlight died, nothing could be seen but the desperation, defeat, and despair of a boy at the side of the road trying to repair a car in the darkness.Any person who stopped to help me with a bright beam of light seemed like an angel sent from God.People who are lost, lonely and frightened are all around us but we seldom see them because fear, sadness, and despair look exactly like preoccupation, concentration, and distraction. This is how people in pain disappear into the scenery around us.But sometimes the beam of light within you will reveal a person directly in front of you who needs your help. Will you pass by on the other side of the road, or will you stop and share your light?I'm not just talking about random strangers. I'm talking about people whose names you know, people who are already in your life; coworkers, colleagues and employees who are walking with an invisible limp, people whose sunlight has receded below the horizon.You can shine some light into their darkness:Find a moment when it is just the two of you.Look at them and say their name.Say, “Do you know what I've always admired about you?”Describe specific moments that quietly impressed you.Tell them the truth about themselves. Remind them of who they are, and how much they matter, and why they belong.This is often all it takes to recharge a person's batteries and help them get their motor running again. When you shine your light into their heart, you elevate their hope and brighten their future.The mark of a strong leader who is deeply loved is that they lift up the people around them by speaking the encouraging truth into their lives, regardless of whether a person needs it or not.It is a gift that is always welcome.Roy H. Williams“Leadership is not a static trait but an evolving journey,” says Bob Kaplan, a high-level management expert with over three decades of experience. “Even ‘born leaders,' need training, desire, and experience to achieve real greatness,” he says, and then he adds, “The most challenging people to manage are always the leaders themselves.” Bob Kaplan believes CEOs and other C-suite executives should continually invite feedback — good and bad — and then concentrate on eliminating their shortcomings as they continually refine their skills. Hey! Do you want to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch? Roving reporter Rotbart says he will begin his interview of Bob Kaplan the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com. Aroo!

Her name was Lillian Millicent Entwistle, “Peg” to her friends. She was born in 1908.At the age of 19, Peg married Robert Keith, 10 years older than she. Then she discovered that he had been married before and had a 6 year-old son. The couple was soon divorced.“I'll move to a new place and get a new start,” she thought. “Goodbye, New York. Hello, L.A. I'm going to become an actress.”But hopes and dreams are fragile things and hearts are easily broken.At the age of 24 “She decided she'd failed,” says David Wallace, author of Hollywoodland. “She was very dejected and one day in 1932 she came up to the Hollywood sign, found a maintenance ladder by the ‘H,' climbed up to the top and presumably took one last look over the city she had failed to conquer, and jumped.”Her body was discovered two days later by a hiker.A handwritten note was found in her purse. “I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.”A letter arrived at her home on the same day her body was discovered. It was from The Beverly Hills Playhouse. They wanted her to star in their next production.Are you ready for this? It was to be a play about a young girl who loses all hope and commits suicide in the final act.Peg, if only you could've hung on. Things are never as bad as they seem. But now all we have left of you is a photograph and a note.Remember that 6-year-old son of Robert Keith you heard about in the second paragraph?That boy, Brian Keith, grew up to be a famous actor, best known for his role as “Uncle Bill” on the hit TV show, “Family Affair.” He also played the perfect Teddy Roosevelt opposite Sean Connery in “The Wind and the Lion,” (1975).I have seen that movie 14 times. Brian Keith made Teddy Roosevelt come alive for me.Brian Keith shot himself in 1997.Yes, hopes and dreams are fragile things and hearts are easily broken.Be gentle with the hearts that have been entrusted to you.Roy H. WilliamsMike Frick started a side hustle as a way to help his college-student son earn extra cash. Today that business sells its products nationwide to construction sites, quarries, farms, mines, and the US military. “Our products are simple, durable, and cost effective,” Mike tells roving reporter Rotbart. In spite of heavy competition from Chinese knock-offs, Mike and his company continue to thrive by manufacturing their products only in America. It's a story of focus, humility, and fantastic success. Because that's how we roll at MondayMorningRadio.com.

I asked Google, “What are thoughts made of?”Google said, “According to current scientific understanding, thoughts are essentially made up of electrical signals generated by the firing of neurons in the brain, which communicate with each other through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters; essentially, a thought is a complex pattern of neural activity within the brain, triggered by sensory input, memories, and other factors.”Google's answer to my question is true, but it isn't useful. My goal is to place a thought into the mind of another person. I want to change what they are thinking and feeling.In 2003 I proposed a theory that has come to be known as “The 12 Languages of the Mind.” It explains how thoughts are constructed from pre-thought particles.Stay with me. This is about to get interesting.A neuron is a nerve cell, the basic unit of the nervous system. It is responsible for sending and receiving electrical signals. A synapse is the tiny gap between two neurons. This is where information is transferred from one neuron to another through the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. Essentially, a neuron is the cell itself, and a synapse is the connection point between two neurons where communication occurs.Sounds a little bit like a computer, doesn't it?A computer is of little value without an operating system.The 12 Languages of the Mind are the operating system of the brain.Let's look at it another way.We know that all the matter in the universe is made from just 3 primaries: protons, neutrons, and electrons. These form atoms, the smallest units of matter.Atoms of elements combine to create molecules of compounds; two atoms of hydrogen plus one atom of oxygen create a single molecule of water, H2O.There are 118 different kinds of atoms organized in The Periodic Table of the Elements. We can create new substances because we now understand the constituent components that underlie all the matter in the universe.Just as protons, neutrons, and electrons can be arranged to form matter, The 12 Languages of the Mind can be arranged to communicate thoughts and trigger the emotions, opinions, and reactions that follow those thoughts.Symbols are one of The 12 languages of the Mind. Motion is another.Hydrogen + Oxygen = Water.Symbol + Motion = Ritual.Our material universe is created from just 3 primaries.Likewise, all the colors we see are created from just 3 primaries, red, yellow, and blue in subtractive color, red, yellow, and blue in subtractive color. But red, green, and blue in additive color. It depends on whether your eye is absorbing the light waves, which is additive, or whether you are seeing reflected light from a substance that has absorbed part of the light spectrum. That is called subtractive color.Created from 12 primaries, how much bigger is the universe of your mind?Your body contains about a 100 million sensory receptors that allow you to see, feel, taste, hear, and smell physical reality. But your brain contains about 10,000 billion synapses. This means you are approximately 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist, than a world that does. It is these

The Wizard Academy tower sits on a plateau 900 feet above the city of Austin. The view from the stardeck is stunning.When you attend our free public seminar on the afternoon of March 17, you will be in Tuscan Hall just 500 feet from the tower. If you have some extra time on campus, perhaps Dave Young will be willing to press the button that lifts you from the underground art gallery up to the stardeck so that you can look around.This is what I will teach you in Tuscan Hall:How to create a magnetic personality for your brand. It's easier than you think.How to use personification to breathe life into all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.How to use character banter and magical thinking to help customers understand that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.How to gather these techniques into an operating plan that will integrate this magnetic new personality into every touchpoint of your business.How to measure the trajectory and momentum of your rejuvenated brand.You're going to have a good time. I will include lots of examples of PowerSelling ads that have lifted people to new heights.Q: PowerSelling. What is it?A: PowerSelling is an advertising technique that makes your name the one people think of first – and feel the best about – when they need what you sell.Q: Does it work for B2B? (Business to Business)A: Not really. B2B requires tight targeting and significantly more logic than is required to win the hearts of the public. [NOTE: If today's memo feels different than the typical Monday Morning Memo, it is because this is probably the first example of B2B writing that you have ever seen me write. Are you noticing the additional logic? – RHW]Q: Does it work for Direct Response offers?A: No. Direct Response offers are built almost entirely on features and benefits, the so-called “value proposition,” enhanced by an urgent call-to-action, usually with a final bit of “added value” if you “act now.”Q: So what's it good for?A: PowerSelling is for products and services that have a long purchase cycle and a relatively high price tag; things like diamond engagement rings, legal services, medical services, and home services like plumbing, air conditioning, roofing, and electrical. PowerSelling is strictly B2C (Business to Consumer) and it almost always employs mass media; television or radio, sometimes with billboards added.Q: Will there be recordings made, or perhaps a livestream?A: Sorry, but no. The Wizards of Ads® have little desire to debate – or educate – a world full of traditional ad writers that have been trained on the tripe that is taught in college.*You are going to learn the explosive techniques that will make your advertising leap off the launchpad with fire and smoke as you begin your journey to the stars. You will feel your acceleration grow to the point where your cheeks are pulled back and your eyes become slits as the corners of your mouth touch your earlobes.Or maybe you are just smiling.If you are ready for the ride of your life, be in Austin on March 17th.Roy H. Williams|“Running a big company is like...

Your heart tells you who you are. Your heart contains all your beliefs.PowerSelling radiates outward from the pulsating fact that people don't bond with companies; people bond with people; personalities that share their beliefs.Your company needs a personality if you want your customers to feel a connection to it. Does your company have a personality?Are you communicating that personality in your advertising?Personification puts the power in PowerSelling.When you speak about something that cannot think as though it can think, you are using the art of personification.“The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming inand thought of doing something to the shorethat water never did to land before.”When you speak about something that cannot ask questions as though it can ask questions, you are using personification.“My little horse must think it queerto stop without a farmhouse nearbetween the woods and frozen lakethe darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shaketo ask if there is some mistake.”When you speak about something that cannot move as though it can move, you are using the art of personification.“It rained endlessly and the forests wept.The darkness fell and the trees moved closer.”When you can breathe life into something that is not alive, you are a god.Robert Frost and John Steinbeck were able to provide us with those examples of personification because they are Nobel Prize-winning writers. But we couldn't write like that, could we?“Your house will giggle with glee when it sees the smart thermostat you bought for it.”Your logical mind tells you that your customers wouldn't fall for that, but they've been falling for it all their lives. Superman is merely ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but your customers know that Superman can fly, squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond, and that he is in love with Lois Lane.The book of Genesis tells us that God spoke our universe into existence, then it tells us that we are made in the image of God.Did it ever occur to you that you speak new worlds into existence in the minds of others every time you describe a possible future?Personification is powerful because it uses magical thinking to open a portal into that world of imagination where hope is alive and well and singing in the shower, where the glass slipper fits the foot of Cinderella, and a wooden puppet named Pinocchio becomes a real live human boy.I am now going to shake you by the shoulders to wake you up. What I am about to say is hard to hear, but I am saying it because I love you: If you believe a brand is a logo, a color palette, a slogan, a visual style guide, and a company name that people have heard of, then your company is just another dreary, drab, and bland corporation in an ocean of bland corporations. Your company has no soul.Remember: People don't bond with companies; people bond with personalities that share their beliefs.PowerSelling happens when you win the customer's heart, knowing that their mind will follow. Their mind will always create logic to justify what their heart has already decided.This is what you must learn to do if you want to create a bond with your customers:Breathe life into your company through the skillful use of personification in all your corporate communications, beginning with your advertising.Employ magical thinking to deepen the public perception that your company has beliefs, values, motives, can make choices, and that it has life.Bond with customers who believe in the

Curiosity is a beagle running through the forest with its nose to the ground.Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity.Curious, I asked, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” I wish I hadn't.“Through different ventures, several members of the family have assets of over $1 billion. Kim Kardashian became a celebrity in 2007, after selling a pornographic film featuring ex-boyfriend, singer Ray J, which enabled the family to rise to stardom.” – GoogleThe reason I asked Google, “How did the Kardashians become famous?” is because I was talking with a client last week when I said, “Vulnerability – letting people see you ‘real' – is the only currency that can purchase real trust.” Then I spontaneously added, “You have to choose between being vulnerable or going full Kardashian.”I thought I had invented a new phrase, but as it turns out, “going full Kardashian” was already a thing.Google has its own definition of what it means to “go full Kardashian,” and Indy posted that list in the rabbit hole for you.But this is my list:If you believe, “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins,” you are in danger of going full Kardashian.People are more important than possessions.If you believe that looking good is more important than doing good, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.Beauty, fame, and wealth are outside your skin. Kindness, generosity, and joy are within.If you believe it's okay to do things that are unethical, immoral, and destructive as long as you are doing nothing illegal, you are in danger of going full Kardashian.A society grows great when old people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.I try to surround myself with tree planters. Jeremy Grigg is one of them.In our weekly Friday gathering of like-minded men, Jeremy said,“When a business is evaluating whether or not they can trust you, the attributes they are measuring are, 1. Ability, 2. Integrity, and 3. Benevolence. These are their unspoken questions: ‘Are you good at your job?' ‘Will you tell me the truth?' ‘Are you truly trying to help me?' Most of us focus on ability to the exclusion of integrity and benevolence. After all, when you are petitioning to win work, you want to make sure that the person who can do it for you is actually competent at their job. But in the longer term, honoring your promises, which is integrity and most importantly, giving a damn about the success of what they're trying to achieve is what really determines whether you are the sort of long-term partner that they're looking for.”Jeremy is an international consultant to multibillion-dollar IT services companies.Natalie Doyle Oldfield studies the drivers of customer loyalty and business growth. She says that half of all customers are willing to pay more for the same product or service if the seller has earned their trust. According to Natalie, “Trust is the critical value that top companies rely on to secure their market dominance and drive their growth.”I know for a fact that what Natalie is saying is true.I've been helping people do it for more than 40 years.Roy H....

Last week's Monday Morning Memo included a photograph of a diamond pendant and the promise of a $1,000 cash prize to whoever could use AI to write the 60-second radio ad that would sell the largest number of that pendant for Valentine's Day.I was given that photo by a jewelry client. In a moment we will look at the 60-second radio ad I wrote for the client before I issued the AI prompter challenge. But first, here are 10 things I have learned from the advertising results (and lack of results) I have seen during my 40 years as an ad writer.The most effective ads don't sound like ads.Most jewelry ads are filled with cliches and schmaltz.The Large Language Models used by AI are educated by the most often used phrases.This is why jewelry ads written by AI are filled with cliches and schmaltz.Most of the ads written by AI are better than what the average citizen would write.The average citizen has not received specific data about the results delivered by each of the thousands of ads they have written during the past 40 years.My challenge to AI prompters included a photograph of the pendant, but none of the ads written by AI were specific to that pendant.Specifics are more persuasive than generalities.The non-specific ads written by AI sold only the idea of a diamond pendant; an idea that can be fulfilled by any diamond pendant sold by any jewelry store, anywhere.Advertisers who use these “generalized” ads are not advertising for their store alone, but for all their competitors as well.Q: Would the AI radio ads “work”?A: If what you mean is, “Would they generate a result?” Then yes, but that result would not be the highest and best use of your ad dollars. Not by a long shot.AI is great at a lot of things, but effective ad writing is not among them.Radio cannot reveal visual images except in the imagination. That's what makes radio the perfect medium to deliver this ad. It is the radio ad I wrote to sell that specific pendant:JACOB: David, have you seen it?DAVID: Oh yes! I've seen it.JACOB: What did it say to you?DAVID: There is only one thing it CAN say.JACOB: Sometimes an artist will say something incredibly specific without using any words at all.DAVID: We've all heard music that can tell a story without words.JACOB: And we've all seen paintings that can tell a story without words.DAVID: But this time a jewelry designer did it.JACOB: The moment you see it, you know what it is saying.DAVID: I understood the message immediately.JACOB: [slowly] “The long and the short of it is we're in this together.”DAVID: “The long and the short of it is we're in this together.”JACOB: It has wit, and whimsy, and humor, and warmthDAVID: and commitment.JACOB: It made me smile when I saw it.DAVID: Me, too.MONICA: [SFX cell phone ring] Hello.SARAH: Did they see it?MONICA: Oh yes, they saw...

The General Social Survey has been conducted every second year since 1972 and the most recent one contained both good and bad news about us. GOOD NEWS: Our bonds with our families and friends are as strong as ever.BAD NEWS: The bridges we once extended to strangers have collapsed.Jesus talks about a socially unacceptable “Samaritan” man who sacrificed his time, energy, and money to help an unconscious stranger who had been robbed and left to die at the side of the road. According to Jesus, two different religious people had already seen the wounded man, but crossed over to the other side of the road so they could pretend they hadn't seen him.They saw a stranger in need and felt nothing.Empathy – feeling the pain of others – is the price we pay for being fully human.The internet promised to bring us closer together through instantaneous, worldwide, one-on-one communication.But then came the algorithms, those digital sheepdogs that segregate us into echo chambers where every voice we hear sounds exactly like our own.The easiest way to build an online audience – or a church – is to criticize and demonize “them,” the people who are “not like you… not like us.” Algorithms will help you do this. All you have to do is craft a message that says, “All the world's problems are caused by ‘them,' and it is up to ‘us' to save the future, and America, and the world, from ‘them.'”You don't build bridges to people that you believe are “getting what they deserve.”Generosity and Inclusion are the tools of peacemakers.“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” – JesusDavid Brooks recently posted a YouTube video that will make you feel wonderful and give you hope.I hope you will invest the time to watch it. In fact, I challenge you to watch the first 3 minutes. The odds are extremely high that you will happily choose to watch the remaining 18 minutes.That YouTube video is titled “David Brooks: Making People Feel Seen: How to Do It Right.”I'm betting it will be your favorite 21 minutes of the week.It will also be a signal to the algorithm that you are headed in a new direction.Merry Christmas.– Roy H. Williams“If people looked at the stars each night, they'd live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.” – Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

John Steinbeck wrote a letter to Carlton Sheffield about a conversation he'd had with his wife, Elaine.“Once I said to her, ‘I don't want the barbarity of funeral for myself.' And she said, ‘Don't be silly. A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival, maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.'”– Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p 829Henry Fonda – one of the most famous actors of his generation – stood up at John Steinbeck's funeral and recited a piece of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them,Fair the fall of songsWhen the singer sings them.Still they are carolled and said –On wings they are carried –After the singer is deadAnd the maker is buried.– Robert Louis StevensonWe know Henry Fonda spoke those words because Elaine Steinbeck, John's wife, describes the scene in a letter to her friend, Jean Vounder-Davis.What will people say when you are gone? Will memories of you ring like bells in the hearts you left behind?How will you be remembered?You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.The saddest eulogy ever carved on a tombstone said, “He Had Potential.”Will you be remembered for having a lot of money?“You can have money stacked to the ceiling, but the size of your funeral will still depend on the weather.” – Chuck TannerWill you be remembered as a selfish person, or a generous one?“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” – Winston ChurchillI have never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul trainer.“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” – Paul's letter to Timothy, ch. 6Will you be remembered as a critical person, or as an encourager?“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya AngelouThere is nothing standing in the way of you being a different person today than you were yesterday. Do you remember what I wrote to you in last week's Monday Morning Memo?“Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over.”If we make the right decision, we'll have more to be thankful for next Thanksgiving than we did this year.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsDouglas Katz is a West Point graduate, a disabled Army veteran, and a culinary enthusiast (also known as a foodie.) Douglas, like many other people who suffer from limited mobility, struggled to use kitchen utensils that require upper extremity strength. Aided by an army of friends and military veterans, Doug retreated to his workshop to invent a new type of kitchen knife, the first in a series of “adaptive” kitchen products he plans to introduce. Doug is building a cutting-edge company (pun intended) dedicated to radical innovation and inclusive kitchen design. It's happening and it's happening right now, with roving reporter Rotbart and you at MondayMorningRadio.com.

The future is unknowable. The past is unrecoverable.If you are anxious, you are living in the future.Don't live your life in an imaginary tomorrow. Find joy while it is still today.If you are depressed, you are living in the past.Escaping the past is easy. The hard part is choosing to start over.Let me give you The Seven Secrets to Crystal Days:Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.“Perfectionism may look good in his shiny shoes but he's a little bit of an asshole and no one invites him to their pool parties.” – Ze FrankGood enough, by definition, is good enough.Learn to celebrate the ordinary.“Celebrate! Celebrate! Celebrate!” – Dewey JenkinsSuccess and failure are temporary conditions.“Do not let either of them define you.”The most precious thing you can find is a friend.“A friend is always loyal, a sibling that helps in times of trouble.”Hatred is the only luxury more costly than an enemy.“Hatred is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”All the little things in life add up to your life.“If you don't get it right, nothing else matters.”Autumn is upon us. Cold air sweeps summertime over the hilltop fast and sharp like an old woman sweeping dust out a doorway. The dust washes the landscape with brown and orange, speckled with rusty red, the colors of old cars whose enamel has been erased by the rain in the junkyard of time.I suspect Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes in the autumn. You remember what he wrote, don't you?“Everything has its moment.There is a moment of ripening and a moment of falling away.A moment of being born and a moment of dying.A moment of planting and a moment of harvest.A moment of killing and a moment of healing.A moment of destroying and a moment of building.A moment of weeping and a moment of laughter.A moment of sorrow and a moment of dancing.A moment of scattering and a moment of gathering.A moment of togetherness and a moment of distance.A moment of finding and a moment of losing.A moments of grasping and a moment of release.A moment of ripping and a moment of sewing back together.A moment of silence and a moment of speech.A moment of love and a moment of hate.A moment of fighting and a moment of peace.”Autumn walks among us, quiet and invisible, like a Mexican ghost on the Day of the Dead.This is the time of year when I become reflective.Perhaps you do, too.Roy H. WilliamsAndrew Matthews has inspired more than 1,000 global corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Honda, and Citibank. In addition to that, Andrew and his wife produce uplifting books that have sold over 8 million copies in 70 countries and 48 languages by presenting timeless wisdom in fresh, engaging ways. This week, Andrew reveals his creative process to roving reporter Rotbart and explains how anyone – even you – can use that process to connect, inspire, and succeed in every nation of the world. Wouldn't this be a great day to stop and recharge your batteries at MondayMorningRadio.com?

My observation during the past 40+ years as an ad writer has been that television and radio professionals spend so much time trying to sell television and radio ads, they have no time to learn how to make those ads work.When you know how to make ads work, and can prove it, television and radio are incredibly easy to sell.Instead of asking a salesperson to help you with your ads, let me tell you everything you need to know.“Q” represents your unspoken questions.“A” represents my answers to those questions.Q: Who should I be targeting?A: I've never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong people. But I have seen lots of businesses fail because they were saying the wrong things in their ads.Q: Are you saying you don't believe in targeting?A: The most effective way to target is to write ad copy that speaks directly to the felt needs of your customer. Targeting isn't accomplished by reaching the right address, but by demonstrating to people that you feel the way they feel, and that you believe the things they believe.Q: Are you saying I can write ads that target specific types of people in mass media?A: Yes, but you get a lot more than that. Mass media reaches not only your target; it reaches all the influencers of your target. Is there anyone that you don't want to know you, like you, and say good things about you? Every person is an influencer, and decisions are never made in a vacuum.Q: If targeting the right person is no longer my primary objective, what is?A: You want to become the solution provider that people think of first and feel the best about. When you say the right things to the largest number of people you can afford to reach with sufficient repetition, you become a household word.Q: Which media will work best for my business?A: The media doesn't make your ad work. Your ad makes the media work. The media is just a vehicle that delivers your message, your ad. The wrong message will fail in every media, and the right message will work in every media. It is the message, not the media, that either works or does not.Q: Is there a proven way to create the right message?A: Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Q: Can you give me some specific tips?A: Sure. Here are 4 of them.Talk to the customer about what the customer already cares about. Most ads answer questions that no one was asking. This is why people hate most advertising.Always say something new, surprising, and different. Never say what people expect you to say. Predictability is what makes ads sound like ads.Don't just describe the process of what you do and how you do it. “We use only the freshest ingredients, and everything is made from scratch.” The process is informational. The outcome is motivational. Describe the outcome. “Food so good your head will explode.”Bad ads are about you and your company. Good ads are about your customer and their happiness. Ads filled with “me, my, we,” and “our,” are about you and your company. Ads filled with the words “you” and “your” are about the customer and the happiness you want to bring them.Q: Should every ad have a call to action?A: No, because if they did, your ads would be predictable.Q: Are you saying that NO ad should have a call to...

Billy Sunday was born in 1862, the second year of America's Civil War. He died in 1935, during the Great Depression. Billy was a wildly flamboyant and controversial preacher, but he made an interesting observation:“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.”We'll talk more about purpose in just a minute, but first we need to talk about possibilities.I will say it plainly:What you see in the mirror isn't you.Look inside yourself and take inventory of what you find there.Realize that this is all you have to work with.Make the best of it.I will say it as Confucius might have said it:Gilded paper and bright ribbons adorn an empty vessel while gold hides in a rough wooden box.You will not find what is not there. But what lies inside you is easy to see.Everything within you is all that you have.Therefore, it must be enough.I will say it like an old warrior:Fancy uniforms don't win battles.It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it's the size of fight in the dog.If you don't have it in you, it doesn't exist.Learn to use what you've got.This is how Yoda would have said it:Be invisible, you will.Inside yourself, you must look.Hmm. Flaws, you shall find.Magic, these are.I will say it as someone who loves you:You are the perfect you.No one else can be you as well as you can.You will be you for the rest of your life.It is time to discover what you can do.And now it is time to talk about purpose again.A sad voice inside you whispers: “Everyone talks about purpose, but no one can tell me what it is, or where to find it.”Quit listening to that whiner. Purpose is given to you by what you care about. Is there anything you care about?Of course there is.Are you ready for the real mind-blower?Purpose is given to you by everything you care about. You are overflowing with purpose. The problem is that you care about so many things that you are having a hard time choosing a purpose.Here is the good and happy news: You can have more than one purpose!In fact, you already do; and you have what it takes to make a difference.How many differences do you want to make?Pick two or three of them to get started. You can add other ones later, when you have taken these first ones as far as you choose to go. Sooner or later, you'll choose a few that will sink deep roots in you.Every oak tree begins as an acorn.Now go. Get started.Roy H. WilliamsPS – “It is better to burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle, too, than to put it away in the closet and let the mice eat it.” – Henry van DykeDavid Sauers used to be a commercial banker, but today he runs a service business with 50 branches nationwide. It's not the type of business that most people dream about owning. The nature of his business – and the powerful lessons you can learn from his success – will be revealed in this week's story. But here's an interesting twist: In a private note to Roy, roving reporter Rotbart wrote, “I love unusual guests and David Sauers definitely fits the bill.” The roving reporter is at it again! MondayMorningRadio.com

One hundred and two years ago, Benito organized a March on Rome with the intention of forcing the king of Italy to yield the government to him. It worked, and Benito was appointed prime minister.Thirty-two-year-old Antonio had a problem with that, and spoke out against Benito.Benito got tired of Antonio's criticism and had him thrown into prison, where he died 11 years later.But while he was still with us, he wrote 30 notebooks containing more than 3,000 pages of history and analysis. The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci are considered by historians to be highly original contributions to 20th-century political theory.Wizard Academy vice-chancellor Dave Young brought Antonio to my attention last week when he forwarded to me a glistening quote written by this shackled young writer:“The old world is dying. And the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”Those words of Antonio Gramsci dance and sting like honeybees, don't they?In return for his gift of Antonio Gramsci, I sent Dave a couple of the enthusiastic ramblings of American scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson:“I will defend AD and BC, year of the Lord, AD, ‘Ano Domini,' and BC, ‘Before Christ.' I'll defend the use of those because a lot of hard work went into creating that calendar – the Gregorian calendar – which is now used worldwide. It's based on a Christian construct, but it had a lot of very interesting science that went in behind it.I'm not just going to ‘swap out' the words to dereligify it. I don't mind leaving credit where it's due.I don't know any atheist that still uses AD and BC. They use ‘Common Era,' CE, and BCE, ‘Before Common Era.'But who are they fooling? It's the same numbers of years. They're just trying to ‘paint over' a religious reference.I don't have that much objection to the religious participation in civilization.”But this next comment of Neil deGrasse Tyson serves as a sort of counterbalance to that first one:“Ben Franklin was the world's most famous scientist in his day. But he's not remembered in America as that; he's remembered as a founding father.He invented the lightning rod.What's the tallest structure back then? The steeple makes the church the tallest structure in any city. What is the most susceptible to a lightning strike? The tallest structure. So lightning was taking out churches left and right, and if you were the other church that wasn't taken out, you had good argument for saying the people in the church that burned down were worshiping in the wrong way.Ben Franklin then invents the lightning rod, which does two things: It dissipates charges that build up under your structure that would otherwise be part of the lightning strike, and it sends them back into the air without the benefit of lightning. So that makes you less susceptible to begin with. And if the lightning strikes it, then it directs all of the charge through the metal and not through your house.So Ben Franklin does this, and churches are no longer destroyed by lightning, even if they're hit, and he's accused of heresy for thwarting the will of God.”Neil deGrasse Tyson is famous for his atheism but he vigorously defends the use of the Christian system of dating the history of the world in years that count backward and forward from the day that Jesus was born.Benjamin Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus, but he invented the lightning rod to make sure that churches did not burn down. And they accused him of heresy for it.*As I consider articulate Antonio and bumbling Benito of Italy, I recall the words of a delightful American writer who was born in the same year Antonio was born. When she was accused of being too critical, the delightful Dorothy Parker responded:“How could I possibly overthrow the government when I can't even keep my dog down?”Me...

As you round the corner and see your destination, the inconveniences of travel evaporate from your mind.Poof. You are here now, and everything is new again.Your children will carry the joy of this place wherever they go. The adventures we have for them are unimaginable.Leave them with us. We promise they won't miss you.Everything you see here is real. This is not a Hollywood facade.Now you understand why we don't have to advertise.You knew you were in love before you got here. Your partner knew it, too. But neither of you are prepared for the wonder of how deeply in love you really are.Remember. We promise the kids won't miss you.It takes only about 20 seconds to read those 118 words, but they leave a hovering question mark that vibrates with curiosity. Where is this place? What is “Everything I see here…”? What caused me to experience “the wonder of how deeply in love I really am”?I didn't have to provide those details, because I knew you would.“Begin with a happy outcome” is one of the secrets of the world's best ad writers. You must illuminate the imagination of the customer and cause them to supply the details that you have no way of knowing. The customer is the star of a movie you are directing in their mind. Cause them to see themselves smiling joyfully. The hovering question mark that vibrates in their mind is called customer engagement. Lights. Camera. Action.Great companies puts their energies into the creation of a process that will ensure the happiness of their customer.Then they insist that their ad writers describe every detail of that process until there is nothing left to surprise and delight you. Until the customer desires the outcome, they have no interest in the process. If you want them to watch your movie, make sure it begins with a happy ending.Several things were ungrammatical in my 118-word call-to-action,one of which was a shift from past-tense to present-tense within a sequence of connected sentences. “You knew you were in love before you got here. Your partner knew it, too.” The past-tense verbs within those two sentences take you into a possible future and cause you to look back at an experience you have not yet had. Then I shifted into present-tense verbs. “But neither of you are prepared for the wonder of how deeply in love you really are.” Your mind is now imagining the experiences you will share at this place you have never been, and don't know how to get to. I never said it was the most romantic spot on earth. You did.Roy H. WilliamsDuane Scott Cerny is an expert on dead people. (Or, more precisely, he is an expert at selling their possessions when they're gone.) A best-selling author, music producer, lyricist, and newspaper columnist, Duane runs Chicago's largest antiques mall and fully understands the formula for business success. Thanks to his ability to listen closely to his customers and adapt to ever-changing tastes, Duane is celebrating his mall's 34th anniversary this year. “Not only is Duane business savvy,” says roving reporter Rotbart, “he is a born entertainer and storyteller. I had a marvelous time doing this interview.” The time is now. The place is MondayMorningRadio.com.

Calvin is looking up into a star-filled sky when he says to his tiger friend Hobbes,“If people looked at the stars each night, I bet they'd live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.”My friends are Calvin. I am Hobbes.Last week Hobbes was complaining to Jeffrey Eisenberg about his frustration with a company that had “upgraded” its website, making it impossible for Hobbes to buy what they were trying to sell. Jeffrey responded like Calvin,“The only things that matter online are Motivation, Momentum, and Friction. It sounds like this company has introduced so much Friction into the buying process that your decision to purchase has lost its Momentum and your Motivation is about to disappear. Am I right?”Jeffrey's summary was so piercingly accurate that all I could do was vibrate my head up and down in a sort of big-eyed, high-frequency nod.Motivation, Momentum, and Friction are the only three dials that matter on the e-commerce machine.Turn the knobs of the first two dials all the way to the right.Turn the knob of the third dial all the way to the left.Stand under the spout where the money gushes out.Enjoy being rich.The next day I got a text from Tim Storm.” I think this needs to be understood: We are literally time travelers.”A few moments later, a second text appeared.“I don't use drugs, but that felt profound to realize.”Tim is right, of course. Physically, we are 3-dimensional creatures traveling through a 4th dimension called time.Friends say insightful things if you're listening.Perhaps the most impactful thing a friend ever shared with me happened 48 years ago. He said,“Depression is unfocused despair. You can rise above it by trying to help someone else. When you see a person who is sad or worried or afraid, take a few minutes to encourage them. Forget about your own problems and focus on theirs. Find a person who needs help and help them! If they're trying to carry something heavy, help them carry it. If they need someone to help them scrape bubblegum off the bottoms of school desks, help them do it. When you make a series of little differences, you win a series of little victories. Keep this up and the cloud over your head will fade away and the sun will shine again. This has always worked for me. Perhaps it will work for you, too.”He was right. It has always worked for me.Perhaps it will work for you, too.His name was David. You would have liked him.Roy H. Williams

Rock-hard sandstone used to be just plain old sand, the kind you see at the beach.If you lie down on beach sand, you will leave your imprint on it.But if you lie down on sandstone, it will leave its imprint on you.Every person who starts a business hopes to leave their mark in the sand. If that businessperson is disciplined, committed, and consistent, their mark will become sandstone and leave its mark on future employees.Did it ever occur to you that the processes and procedures, policies and warranties of a company are a direct reflection of the preferences and beliefs of the CEO?Company culture, commitment, and camaraderie – or any lack thereof – are merely a reflection of the shape of that CEO.Look closely at how a company's employees are recruited, evaluated, motivated and compensated, and you will see the precise size and shape of that company's CEO.Listen to how a company's employees talk about their job, their boss, their products, and their hopes for the future, and you will hear an audible echo of the soul of the CEO.Companies don't spring into existence on their own. They are born in the imagination of an entrepreneur when he or she lies down in the sand, then brought into reality through the magic of time, energy, and money. And if that company endures, every future customer will experience the values and beliefs and priorities of its long-ago CEO every time they interact with the company that CEO left behind.You realize that I'm talking about more than just business owners and their businesses, don't you?I'm talking about grandparents and parents and their children and their children's children and schools and religions and colleges and cultures and prisons and wars and the movies we make and the books we read and the hobbies to which we devote our time and money.I'm talking our collective journey across the sands of time.When you lie down on sand, you leave your imprint on it.When you lie down on sandstone, it leaves it imprint on you.Roy H. WilliamsPeter Spitz is an MIT-trained chemical engineer and a renowned expert in petrochemicals. He holds seven patents and started a company that grew to $20 million in annual sales before being acquired by IBM. Peter's most recent book is about the history of inventions.When we turn on a television, use a computer, heat dinner in a microwave, open a refrigerator, drive a car, or take an antibiotic, we are using technologies that took root in the Industrial Revolution of England 300 years ago. Peter wasn't around back then, but with a razor-sharp mind at 98 years of age, he has far-reaching insights on how to create successful inventions and how each of them will impact our modern world.Sit back, turn up the volume and listen as deputy rover Maxwell Rotbart pulls a mesmerizing tale from the magical mind of Peter Spitz. Where else but MondayMorningRadio.com?

I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself, and maybe it's a generational thing, but America, to my way of thinking, is less of a place and more of a belief system; a way of looking at the world and the people in it.Americans believe in opportunity and equality.Americans believe, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”Americans believe in defending the weak from the strong who would abuse them.Americans believe in lifting people up, dusting them off, giving them a big smile and telling them to try again.Americans don't scare easily, and we don't leave anyone behind.Shortly after the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, men and women from every corner of the world began meeting here, mingling here, and producing mixed-race children here.We've been doing it for 400 years.This place has gathered people from every nation that has ever flown a flag. Some of these people came voluntarily. Others were brought here against their will. But none of that matters because children do not get to choose their parents.Americans are not purebred showdogs. We are mixed-breed puppies born in a howling wilderness.Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, but he came to this country and became one of its Founding Fathers. We have printed that man's face on 27 billion ten-dollar bills and the Broadway play about his life was a stunning success.That play, by the way, was written by an American whose DNA is Puerto Rican, Mexican, English, and African. His parents named him “Lin-Manuel” after a poem about the Vietnam War.Is America portable? I believe it is. America is kindness and generosity.If you believe in opportunity and equality, defending the weak, lifting people up, dusting them off, smiling and telling them to try again, you are an American.If you don't scare easily and don't leave anyone behind, you are an American.If you believe in love with its sleeves rolled up, you are an American.Take America with you wherever you go.Be an American today, okay?Roy H. WilliamsPS – Do you live outside the U.S.? Not one of the virtues I mentioned today is exclusive to America. Most people-groups believe in exactly these same things. I wrote directly to the people of America today – calling them out by name – because we have been fighting about some really stupid things for a long time.The virtues I wrote about today live in the hearts of the people of your nation, too, and of every other nation on earth. Wouldn't it be great if we focused on our similarities instead of our differences?*At any given time, there are about 2.5 billion ten-dollar-bills in circulation, but the average ten-dollar-bill is replaced by the Treasury Department every 5.3 years. We have been using Hamilton's portrait on the ten since 1928 (96 years).96 years/5.3 years = 1818 x 2.5 billion = 27 billion portraits of good brother AlexanderHow would Walt Disney run your company? Even though he died in 1966, his company and his disciples continue to spread his beliefs. Among these disciples is Brian Collins, a former Disney Imagineer who helped create the magic for many of the world's most beloved theme parks and is today teaching brainstorming and innovation and the cross-pollinization of technology to large and small companies around the world. Roving reporter Rotbart tells us that Brian Collins is a living example Walt Disney's statement, “It's kind of fun to do the impossible.” Put on your Mouse Ears and get ready for a Disney

PART THREE of SEVEN SECRETS OF SALES ACTIVATIONThe objective of a Customer Bonding campaign is to make your name the one that people think of first and feel the best about.When you have not successfully bonded with your customer, any attempt at sales activation is simply an experiment in direct marketing. This can certainly work for awhile if you're good at it, but it will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.The world of marketing is full of people who will tell you exciting success stories about high-impact offers that made them a lot of money quickly. But have you ever noticed that all of those stories are told using past-tense verbs?They are telling you about something that happened, but is no longer happening now.Give that some thought.“Have you ever done anything that worked really well?” is a question I have asked a couple of thousand business owners over the past forty years.“Oh, yes!” they answer.“Tell me about it!” I say with bright eyes.After they explain to me what they did and how awesome it was, I say, “Wow, that sounds great! Are you still doing it?”When they say “No,” (which they always do,) I wear the expression of a puzzled puppy and ask, “Why not?”Yes, I am a tiny bit evil. But the simple truth is that I want them to realize their mistake, own it, regret it, and decide – on their own – never to do ask me to temporarily fluff up their sales numbers by resorting to the meth-laced crack cocaine of lies, gimmicks, artificial urgency, ambiguous offers, or misleading messages.It's just not the way to build a company.Few business owners have the patience to win the hearts of the public.But if you have what it takes to become the company that people think of first and feel the best about when they need what you sell, a new day will dawn for you and your business.In golden glow of that goodwill, up to 40 percent of the ads in your Customer Bonding campaign can include happy, healthy, sustainable Sales Activation.These are the ways to do it:Remarkable Item, Remarkable Story.A 30-year client, Kesslers Diamonds, recently conducted a contest among their designers with the winning designer honored by name in a radio ad.RICK: I'm really looking forward to this.SARAH: Me, too.RICK: She absolutely nailed it.MONICA: Are you talking about Jenni Sambolin?SARAH: Yeah, Jenni and her pendant, “The Music in a Mother's Heart.”JENNI: [SFX Door Opening] Hi Rick. Hi Sarah. Hi Monica.MONICA: Hi Jenni!SARAH: Hi Jenni!RICK: Jenni, we're going to produce your pendant design as a limited-edition collector's item and put a few of them in all 8 Kesslers stores.MONICA: Congratulations, Jenni!JENNI: Wow! This is HUGE!SARAH: Jenni, we expect “The Music in a Mother's Heart”to sell out very quickly.RICK: We'll also make a few available online.JENNI: I designed that pendant from the memory of how my Mother made me feel when we would sing together.MONICA: How often did that happen?JENNI: Constantly. We would sing along with whatever was playing on the radio, or sometimes we would watch a musical on TV and sing along with that.SARAH: At just 124 dollars, “The Music in a Mother's Heart” is going to sell out lightning fast.RICK: I'm buying...

Two thousand years ago, Confucius was as old to the people of China as Christopher Columbus is to us today. Five hundred and thirty-two years before the wise men followed their star to Bethlehem, Confucius wrote,“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by contemplation, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”I agree with Confucius, but I believe it is the wisdom gained by bitter experience that runs the deepest in us. The boy who travels from village to village shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” learns things about wolves and villagers that no one else can know.I was once a wandering wolf-shouter.There is a red flashing light in my soul that keeps me from writing hard-hitting “sales activation” ads, not because it is foreign to me, but because I am extremely good at it.When I was a 20-year-old ad salesman, business owners would say to me, “Show me what you can do with a small amount of money, and if it works, we'll talk about a long-term commitment.”Being young, confident, and stupid, I wrote sales activation ads that could only be measured with a seismograph, and my career took off like a race car in a gravel parking lot. I'm told the gravel is still flying somewhere between Jupiter and Mars.I wore my tie draped around my neck like a scarf and I never tied my shoes. People said, “Your shoes are untied.”I smiled and said, “Yeah. I know.”That young fool was the diamond-ring Cadillac man. He was like Coca-Cola, baby, he was everywhere. When people called and ask if he delivered, he would say, “You want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want?”For 3 years he was the King of Making Big Things Happen Fast. He was going in circles faster than a NASCAR driver on a Saturday night and making more money than a heart surgeon. But he didn't like the person he had become.He was thinking about how much he hated working with anxious, impatient advertisers when it hit him: “Every one of those twitchy little bastards is a short-term results addict and I am their dealer.”I was writing the advertising equivalent of meth-laced, crack cocaine.In 1942, Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote,“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”Realizing that I had been trying to spell success with the wrong blocks, I climbed out of the car I had been driving on the fast track to nowhere and saw what T.S. Eliot was trying to say when he wrote,“We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.”Finally standing with my feet on the ground, I looked with fresh eyes at what needed to be done, and knew the place for the first time.I saw Seven Truths that corresponded with The Seven Secrets of Sales Activation.These are the Seven Truths.You'll never see a bigger crowd than the first time you cry “Wolf!”Anything that delivers big results quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.You cannot build a strong and resilient company on gimmicks and empty promises.Anything that works better and better the longer you keep doing it will deliver disappointing results at first.It takes awhile to make people feel like they really know you.This is why winning the hearts of customers requires months of meaningful courtship.The average business owner does not have the faith and patience to build an attractive brand.(This is particularly true of business owners who trust metrics more than they trust their own...

Leadership = Energy + DirectionDirection = Vision + CourageTherefore, leaders are people of Energy, Vision, and Courage.If you are a person of energy, vision, and courage:(1.) I have noticed that people like you often become surrounded by wanderers who are looking for a leader. It is hard to make money when you are stumbling over puppies who gather at your feet. Resist the temptation to become a thought leader. Oh, I forgot. The new word is influencer. Don't become one.(2.) Do not become a zookeeper. When you find yourself among persons of energy, vision, and courage like yourself, do not try to “manage” these untamed creatures. Zookeepers diminish energy, dull vision, and punish courage. You will never meet a wealthy zookeeper.(3.) When you see pent-up energy, unexplored vision, and fearless courage, become the friend who delivers that person from their captivity. Hire them. Unlock their leg irons. Empower them, encourage them, unleash them.(4.) Be a leader who gives vision and direction to other leaders and encourage those leaders to do the same. Model correct behavior. Lead by example. Spread the joy.(5.) Your life is about to become very interesting.ADDENDUM: Lest you become too anxious as you search for world-changers like yourself, I have asked Albert Bandura to share this word of warning with you:“Let us not confuse ourselves by failing to recognize that there are two kinds of self-confidence—one a trait of personality and another that comes from knowledge of a subject. It is no particular credit to the educator to help build the first without building the second. The objective of education is not the production of self-confident fools.”– Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, p.65Do not be attracted by self-confident fools.Tinsel and glitter stand proudly in the spotlight, but true gold is found surrounded by mud.SURPRISE! Seventeen years ago the wizard recorded a memo that reminds me of the one he shared today, so I time-traveled back to November 5, 2007 and retrieved it for you. – Indy BeagleI thought Bill Clinton was a good president for the same reason I thought Ronald Reagan was good; both were excellent Head Cheerleaders. Their politics, personalities and characters were different, but each had a similar ability to keep things from spinning out of control.Every organization has a Head Cheerleader. Their business card usually says “manager”. The Head Cheerleader's job is to keep talented hotheads, sycophantic suck-ups, whining excuse-makers, moon-eyed lunatics and plodding paranoids all headed in the same general direction. They have to make everyone feel like everything is going to be all right.Are there really people who can do this job?Thrown into the deep water at 26, I was possibly the worst manager ever to assume the position. But over the years, I've had a chance to observe the great ones, and I've noticed an unusual but recurrent characteristic:Great managers are rarely excellent at any of the things they manage.Great coaches are great not because they were superstars, but because they know how to awaken the star that sleeps in each of the players around them.Excellent don't show you photos from their own vacation. They ask to see the photos from yours, and it makes them happy to see you had a wonderful time.Life-changing managers look for things to praise in their people, knowing that it takes seven positive strokes to recover from each negative reprimand.Think about it. If...

Riding this rocket toward my 67th birthday, memories of my life flicker in the twilight of my mind like shooting stars in the night.My gaze lingers on a long-ago day when I began writing ads for a jeweler.I saw the cover of a book that said, “Follow Your Passion. The Money Will Follow,” and remember thinking, “I would hate to become famous for writing ads for a product I couldn't care less about.”“Follow your passion” is an idea that makes sense until you think about it.I had no appreciation, no affection, no commitment to jewelry. But I did make a commitment to the jeweler. My job was to communicate his appreciation of jewelry, his affection for it, his commitment to it.For a quarter of a century I wrote ads for my friend that made both of us famous. He died unexpectedly in a frozen moment a dozen years ago.I continue to have his number programmed into my iPhone and there is part of me that believes if I touch his name with my finger he will answer and bellow “Good mornin', Sunshine!” before the second ring.There is another part of me that knows I will be shattered if he does not answer. His name will continue on my phone, and I will continue not to touch it.Our friendship of 25 years taught me an important life-lesson I will now share with you:Commitment does not flow from passion. Passion flows from commitment.I do not have to love the products I write about. I have to love the people who are going to sign their names to what I write. My words are spoken from their hearts, not my own.Lest you think I am wandering aimlessly down Melancholy Lane, I will push my point home like a syringe:Are you one of those sad-eyed souls who sigh and say, “I'm searching for my passion. I just don't seem to be able to find my passion. What's wrong with me? Why can't I find my passion?”Yes, the needle hurts, but there is medicine flowing through it.Every form of work is for the benefit of other people. You do not need to love the work to be happy. You need to love the difference you are making.Are you ready for me to push the needle a little deeper?You will never discover happiness when you work only for yourself. You will discover the joy of life when you work for the benefit of others. I believe the need to serve other people is hard-wired into the body, soul, and spirit of every person who walks upon this planet.Self-centered people can have pleasure, of course. But they can never have happiness.I'm sorry, but the needle still has to go deeper.These two quotes by Tom Robbins fit together perfectly although they were written 20 years apart.“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation (2005).* The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously (1985).*”– Tom RobbinsThe needle is now all the way in.This is the pure, uncut medicine: The next time you see a need, step up and fill it. Experience the joy of making a difference. Do this ten times and you will be addicted to happiness for the rest of your life.Pay it forward.Roy H. WilliamsDutch explorers in 1625 found a forested island between the East and Hudson rivers known to the Lenape Indians as “Manhattan.”Every square inch of that island was developed in the ensuing 400 years except for a 6.7-acre plot...

You are inside your business, looking out.The customer is outside your business, looking in.Your inside-out perspective makes you blind in one eye.Confirmation bias makes you blind in the other eye.You cannot see yourself the way your customer sees you. You imagine how they see you based on your mission statement, your policies and procedures, your employee training, and your good intentions.But you alone know those things, see those things, and care about those things. Your customer doesn't know, doesn't see, doesn't care.Bad ads talk about all the things the customer would care about if they knew everything that you know.Good ads talk about what the customer already cares about.When you have convinced an ad writer to see your business in the same way you do, that ad writer has nothing left to offer you but flattery.I'm not trying to offend you, friend. I am trying to open your eyes.Why do so many business owners think effective advertising can be discovered by studying the data?Bob Hoffman is an old ad guy like me. I've never met him, but I like him.Bob writes,“Our industry is drowning in math and starving for ideas. We need people who can dream shit up. We need impractical, illogical people. We have plenty of data. We need more of the opposite. We have forgotten that the only unique benefits we can provide to clients is imaginative thinking and creativity. Everything else, aside from ideas, they can get somewhere else. Good ideas are good ideas. Things that are entertaining, interesting and uplifting will always be attractive to everyone.”“On social media, for every success there are 10,000 failures. You have to be really good at it and there are very few people that can do it. Why are 97 per cent of all ads, books, movies and films crappy? Because it's really, really difficult to make good stuff. And it's the same with social media. Most of it is worthless and has no creativity or imagination to it.”Instead of look at the data, we should be looking at first principles.“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, ‘What are we sure is true?' … and then reason up from there.”– Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX“Good inventors and designers (and marketers) deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you'll find on surveys.”– Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them… Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”– Peter Thiel, PaypalGreat ad strategies are discovered when we return to first principles.These are the first principles of effective ad creation.Don't try to convince the customer to think and feel like you do. Learn how to think and feel like the customer.The customer isn't looking for a product or a service. They are looking for transformation.Those first principles will never change.Everything else is execution, which requires impractical, illogical people who can dream shit up.Roy H. Williams“Life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is...

Every company has an inside, an outside, and an engine.This is why successful companies have a Mother, a Trumpet, and a CEO.The CEO chooses a destination and builds a machine to take us there.The Mother looks inward to the people in the company.The Trumpet makes beautiful noises for the public to hear.The Mother in your company is the person everyone goes to when they are frightened, angry, or confused. The Mother keeps your family traditions alive and makes sure that everyone feels included. (“Mother” refers only to the role in the company. It can be a man or a woman.)If your company has a strong culture, your people will deliver exceptional customer service. They will do it because their Mother has convinced them of who they are. Your company culture and your customer service will be average at best if your people don't have a strong Mother to comfort, encourage, and motivate them.The Trumpet is the person who makes the public think highly of you. Your company will become the one people think of first – and feel the best about – when your Trumpet plays the kind of music that people love to hear.Let's review:The CEO is the visioncaster who is building a Rube Goldberg machine of systems and procedures and vendors and processes and levers and pulleys and profit margins represented by all those flow charts and diagrams and spreadsheets.The Mother makes the internal business strategy come alive through employee feelings and actions.The Trumpet makes the external business strategy come alive by using media to deliver stories that will bond future customers to your company.The Mother and the Trumpet must know, like, and respect each other, because they are the left and right hand of a person playing basketball.Back in the early 2000's, when McDonald's had lost their way and was circling the drain, they asked their original Mother to come out of retirement and help them get back on track.In a June 27, 2004, story called “McDonald's Finds Missing Ingredient,” Chicago Tribune staff reporter David Greising wrote:“Fred Turner did not need to look at financial statements to know McDonald's was in trouble. He could taste it. The man who worked alongside founder Ray Kroc to turn McDonald's into a global colossus, Turner noticed when penny-pinchers at corporate headquarters changed recipes to cut costs.”The article ends by saying,“The return of the special sauce is one of hundreds of changes, big and small, that McDonald's made after they made a return to ‘Inspect What They Expect,' and the result was one of the most stunning turnarounds in corporate history.”Fred Turner's ‘Inspect What They Expect' program taught and encouraged McDonald's employees to make sure that customers received the happy experience they were expecting.Fred Turner was the “inward-facing” Mother who made McDonald's operationally excellent.Keith Reinhard was the “outward-facing” Trumpet who made McDonald's famous.Keith Reinhard told us that a trip to McDonald's would be a transformative experience:“You deserve a break today, so get up and get away, to McDonald's” and that famous advertising jingle for the Big Mac, “Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun… You deserve a break today, at McDonald's.”When Keith Reinhard wasn't busy writing McDonald's ads, he wrote, “Just Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There.”Reader, do you trust me enough to let me to offer you some insanely good advice?Tear up your mission statement. It's just a collection of aspirational words on paper. The hearts and minds of your people are not guided by that paper, but by the mother whose face they see and whose voice they hear. Do you know who your Fred Turner is?Quit looking for an

The best screenwriters in Hollywood use the principles of David Freeman, as do Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelists and all the most effective ad writers, even if they have never heard of the man.I know David well, as he has taught a number of classes at Wizard Academy. His always-and-forever question is this: “What causes this character to think, act, speak, and see the world the way they do?”NOTE: As a writer, you don't necessarily need to tell your viewers, readers, or listeners why a character thinks, acts, speaks, and sees the world they way they do; it is only important that YOU know.When you know the backstory of a character, that character comes alive. It glistens with perspiration, and your audience feels it's heartbeat. Your heroes will never be perfectly pure and good, nor will your villains ever be entirely evil. Your audiences may even begin to wonder whether they ought to change sides and start cheering for the character they originally thought was a villain.The question you must ask each of your characters is this: “What happened to you that causes you to think, act, speak, and see the world the way you do?”You, as a writer, need to know why your characters are the way they are.Friend, with every sleeper you wake, every heart you break, every choice you make and action you take, you are writing the story of your life. Take a breath and say this next sentence out loud. “What happened to me that causes me to think, act, speak, and see the world the way I do?”Seriously, say it out loud. “What happened to me that causes me to think, act, speak, and see the world the way I do?”I believe my friend Tucker Max understands the magic of writing memoirs better than any writer who has ever lived. Tucker is the only writer I know who has had 3 books simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller list. And each of those 3 books was a memoir.Tucker Max is currently writing what will probably become the memoir equivalent of the Ring of Power that Frodo Baggins carried to Mordor. “One Memoir to rule them all, One Memoir to find them, One Memoir to bring them all and in the bright light bind them.”I won't tell you anything more about Tucker's soon-coming memoir because I don't want to ruin it for you, but I will tell you what Tucker said to me privately:“The reason to write a memoir is to tell yourself the truth about your life. Memoir is an inherently therapeutic process. Whether or not you ever let anyone read it is irrelevant. You are giving yourself a private space to uncover, and consider, and speak the whole truth about your life.”Today is the day that you will start writing your memoir. So say this out loud with me one more time. Are you ready?“What happened to me that causes me to think, act, speak, and see the world the way I do?”Ciao for Niao, and Indy Beagle told me to tell you “Aroo” and that he will see you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. WilliamsDr. Laura Gabayan is an emergency medicine doctor and associate professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, and for many years she has conducted a scientific study of wisdom, including how to define it and cultivate it. Dr. G., as she is known, recently published her findings and is sharing them today with roving reporter Rotbart in an effort to help him discover a more fulfilling, meaningful, and prosperous life. MondayMorningRadio.com

Every person on earth belongs to several cults.Calm down. I'm not talking about what you think I'm talking about.I'll start at the beginning.Cult: any group of people who share a devotion to an idea, activity, or identity.Cults become toxic and dangerous only when the devotion of the group is (1.) to a specific individual,(2.) focused on the destruction of an enemy.Culture: patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give those activities significance, importance, and meaning.Cultivation: to till or refine. Seeds are more likely to grow and produce a harvest when you till the soil to soften and refine it.Cult Brands: Apple, Lululemon, Tesla, Harley Davidson, Starbucks, Nike, and Star Trek are notable examples of brands that have become associated with an idea, activity, or identity.Cult brands make a lot of money.Do you want to create a cult brand? I've been telling you how to do it for 30 years, but I'll say it one more time for those of you who are new:“Win the heart, and the mind will follow. The mind will always find logic to justify what the heart has already decided.”To build a cult brand, all we need to do is abbreviate those earlier definitions and tilt them slightly toward advertising.Cultivation: to plant the seeds of an ideology by allowing potential customers to perceive and conclude that you believe and value exactly what they believe and value.Culture: the recurrent activities of a self-selected group.Cult: a group of people who are strongly attracted to a brand.The best storytelling ads gently cultivate the mind, loosening the soil of public consciousness so that you might sow the seed-thoughts that will grow into profitable persuasion, causing your brand to be the one people think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they need what you sell.These seed-thoughts are what my partners and I call brandable chunks, a collection of carefully crafted signature phrases that are unique to your brand. Like all seeds, these brandable chunks must be sown in abundance if you hope for a bountiful harvest.The seed-thoughts contained in these brandable chunks will germinate – and magnetic connection will occur – when a person perceives that you believe what they believe. When your brand stands for something that people believe in, you have the opportunity to become a cult brand.When this cultivation and germination of your seed-thoughts has occurred, the next step is for your customer to be introduced to your culture.Uh-oh. I just heard someone think, “I'm not affected by advertising, so I'm not in a cult of any kind.” Friend, I know you don't want to hear this, but you're a card-carrying member of the “Don't Label Me” cult. I could tell you several interesting things about your little group, but that would not be a friendly thing to do, so I won't.Instead, I will tell you about a cult I joined in 1972.“Roses for the Living” is the name of the cult my mother started completely by accident. I was there when it happened.It was 1972. We were struggling financially due to my father having fled the scene three years earlier. My mother had found a job, worked hard, kept a roof over our heads and food in our mouths for three long years before she finally had a few dollars she could spend on herself.She spent those dollars taking a friend with her on a 2-day trip to Taos, New Mexico.When I asked her why she did it, she said,“People will take time off work, buy a plane ticket and fly across the country to lay a dozen roses on the grave of a friend who has died.”“But their friend...

Brad Pitt, Ron Howard, and MeI never write click-bait headlines, but I wrote this one just to prove I can.Brad shines from Shawnee, Ron comes from Duncan, and I bailed from Broken Arrow.We're all Okla-Homeboys.Now that my click-bait headline has done its job and convinced you to keep reading all the way down to this third paragraph, I will transition to the real reason I wanted to speak with you today: Amway.Here's how it works. You buy stuff from me that I buy from someone above me, and they buy it from someone above them, and so on. But through the mystical magic of multi-level marketing, we all get rich by making a tiny commission on whatever you bought!What you need to do is find some friends who dream of financial freedom and convince them to buy this same stuff from YOU. And guess what! THEY WILL GET RICH, TOO! Don't you want all of your friends to be rich with you? Think of all the fun you rich, rich, rich people will have after you all become rich, rich, rich!Welcome to Oklahoma. Now you know why Brad, Ron and I decided to leave.Honestly, I have fond memories of Oklahoma and I cherish all the valuable lessons I learned there. For real.Never deal with an idiot. Escape while you can. Keep an eye on them until they become a tiny speck disappearing in your rear-view mirror.Fall in love with an actual person. Do not fall in love with falling in love.Commitment does not flow from passion. Passion flows from commitment.Patience will make you wealthy much more quickly than luck.Business is nothing more than a search for purpose and adventure, and failures are footlights along the dark pathway to success.Everyone has a superpower. When you have figured out their superpower, that's when you know a person.Never lose sight of your closest friends and always be there for them.Every conflict is an auction. The winner will be the one who is willing to pay a higher price than anyone else. (This is why you should try to avoid conflicts.)There is a time for incremental escalation and there is a time for overwhelming force. Take no action until you know what time it is.What you are currently thinking and feeling is a product of where you have turned your attention. Be careful where you turn your attention.Learn to speak in color and to write poetically.Poetry is any communication that changes what you think, and how you feel, in a brief, tight economy of words.Those are some of the things I learned as an Okie, and now I have shared them with you. That makes you a little bit Okie, too.Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsBecoming a children's book publisher is not “sugar and spice and everything nice.” It is one of the toughest journeys an entrepreneur can undertake. When Georgia Lininger launched her children's book imprint in January 2020, she quickly discovered that success was going to require more from her than sweet stories and colorful illustrations. Join roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy rover Maxwell as they uncover a classic American story of struggle and defiance along with the happy ending dreamt of by every entrepreneur offering a product or service that comes from the heart. MondayMorningRadio.com

These are stories of a bright day, a dark night, and a monster.The story of the bright day happened last year just before Christmas. You may recall that I told you about finding an undiscovered 400-year-old copy of the 1605 edition of Don Quixote at a used furniture auction in a village in New England.This is the rest of that story.After I bought that book (and 18 other books nearly as old,) I learned the nearest place that could ship those books to me was a 35-minute drive from the auction house. When I called them, they said,“Dude, we've got more than 200 orders stacked all around us that have got to be packed and shipped before Christmas and more people are coming in every day. We'll be buried here for at least the next two or three weeks. Your books will just have to wait.”Discouraged and worried that someone was going to realize that a 2-million-dollar book was sitting on a table in an empty auction building in a rural village, I was whining to Joe Davis while he was scrolling on his telephone. When I had finished telling him my story, Joe looked up and said,“I've booked myself on the 6:30AM flight to Baltimore. I'll be back tomorrow night with your books.”Joe Davis is one of those rare people who sees and solves problems immediately. Joe lives his life by three words made famous by Nike.“Just Do It.”Are you lucky enough to have a Joe Davis in your life? Have you told them lately how much they mean to you?And now the story of the dark night and the monster.Twenty years ago, Pennie and I wrote a check to purchase several acres on a high plateau and much of the land in the valley below. Our plan was to build Wizard Academy, then donate the land and all the buildings to a non-profit that would forever after run it as a 501c3 educational organization.A few months after we bought that land, we published Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg's book, Call to Action.The brothers funded the printing of the book, but we used my publishing company to give it an ISBN number and nationwide distribution.In the book business, bookstores pay the distributor, then the distributor pays the publisher, then the publisher pays the authors twice a year.The book made all four bestseller lists: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and USA Today. Jeffrey and Bryan's first check was going to be more than $100,000. They needed it to refresh their bank account since that was approximately what the printer had charged to print those tens of thousands of books.BANG. I got a phone call from Adrian Van Zelfden. His voice was quavering.“Roy, your name appeared in a public notice this morning. The IRS is in the process of taking your house, your cars, your furniture, your bank accounts, and everything else they can find that has your name on it.”“Adrian, that's crazy, there's been some sort of a mistake.”“Roy, this cannot be a mistake. This is happening.”The financial reports that I was seeing showed that we still had lots of money in several bank accounts, so when Adrian told me how much we owed the IRS, I said,“Okay, we'll just pay it.”Meet the Monster:We had copies of all our tax returns along with photocopies of the checks, but our bookkeeper had never sent any of those checks to the IRS. Over a period of 5 years, our bookkeeper had systematically drained every cent from our bank accounts, leaving only the cash from those unsent IRS checks to keep the boat afloat.The check we wrote to buy the plateau hit that boat like a torpedo.That's when I found out we were broke. The bookkeeper who had been with us for 5 years had been keeping 2 sets of books. One set showed the dollar amounts that should have been in our bank accounts, the other set revealed there was nothing there.The following week

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

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