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

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. Williams

Bernie 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

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,...