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 exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And 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.

1. You’ll never see a bigger crowd than the first time you cry “Wolf!”
2. Anything that delivers big results quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.
3. You cannot build a strong and resilient company on gimmicks and empty promises.
4. Anything that works better and better the longer you keep doing it will deliver disappointing results at first.
5. It takes awhile to make people feel like they really know you.
6. This is why winning the hearts of customers requires months of meaningful courtship.
7. The average business owner does not have the faith and patience to build an attractive brand.
8. (This is particularly true of business owners who trust metrics more than they trust their own...

Leadership = Energy + Direction

Direction = Vision + Courage

Therefore, 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.65

Do 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 Beagle

I thought Bill Clinton was a good president for the same reason I thought Ronald Reagan was good; both were excellent Head Cheerleaders. Their politics, personalities and characters were different, but each had a similar ability to keep things from spinning out of control.

Every organization has a Head Cheerleader. Their business card usually says “manager”. The Head Cheerleader’s job is to keep talented hotheads, sycophantic suck-ups, whining excuse-makers, moon-eyed lunatics and plodding paranoids all headed in the same general direction. They have to make everyone feel like everything is going to be all right.

Are there really people who can do this job?

Thrown into the deep water at 26, I was possibly the worst manager ever to assume the position. But over the years, I’ve had a chance to observe the great ones, and I’ve noticed an unusual but recurrent characteristic:

Great managers are rarely excellent at any of the things they manage.

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

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 Robbins

The needle is now all the way in.

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

Pay it forward.

Roy H. Williams

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

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

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, Paypal

Great ad strategies are discovered when we return to first principles.

These are the first principles of effective ad creation.

1. Don’t try to convince the customer to think and feel like you do. Learn how to think and feel like the customer.
2. 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?

1. 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?
2. 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. Williams

Dr. 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...

I 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.

1. 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.
2. Fall in love with an actual person. Do not fall in love with falling in love.
3. Commitment does not flow from passion. Passion flows from commitment.
4. Patience will make you wealthy much more quickly than luck.
5. Business is nothing more than a search for purpose and adventure, and failures are footlights along the dark pathway to success.
6. Everyone has a superpower. When you have figured out their superpower, that’s when you know a person.
7. Never lose sight of your closest friends and always be there for them.
8. 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.)
9. 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.
10. What you are currently thinking and feeling is a product of where you have turned your attention. Be careful where you turn your attention.
11. Learn to speak in color and to write poetically.
12. 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. Williams

Becoming 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