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The Monday Morning Memo

What, then, is Love?

July 10, 2023

When a thought knocks politely on the door of my mind, I open the door and entertain the thought. But when an unseen thought shines into my mind through a skylight, I am always startled by the mystery of how words-not-my-own came to echo in my empty skull. “What, then, is Love?” Those four words, […]

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Our Hunger for Relationship

July 3, 2023

We have a need to belong. We want to be seen and heard. We want to be missed when we are not around. We want to have genuine connection. This is the basis of relational ad writing. Never heard of it? That is because most ads are transactional, not relational. In a transactional ad, an […]

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Reap the Whirlwind

June 26, 2023

It would appear that journalists can no longer see clearly or talk plainly. They hand you something twisted and bent and assure you that it is straight. Propaganda hangs thick in the air around us and we are weary of it. It has gotten so bad that each of the people I could count on […]

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Mosquitoes Trapped in Amber

June 19, 2023

Do you remember that scene in Jurassic Park when the park’s founder revealed that he had extracted the blood of a dinosaur from a mosquito trapped in fossilized tree sap? Forget the blood. Forget the dinosaur. Our interest is in that mosquito trapped in amber. I sometimes think time is the amber in which we […]

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Patrick and the Supreme Court

June 12, 2023

There are places in geography. There are places in the heart. There are places in time. Where shall we start? – Indy Beagle Places in Geography: “We have thought how places are able to evoke moods, as color and line in a picture may capture and warp us to a pattern the painter intended.” – […]

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Criticism and Encouragement

June 5, 2023

She is dead now and so is he. He was a friend of mine; lean, rangy, and muscular. She was his mother. “You’re getting fat,” is what she told him, right up until the day he died. Criticism will often cause you to see yourself worse than you are. Did it ever occur to you […]

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The Source of Our Culture War

May 29, 2023

William Shakespeare, wearing the mask of an imaginary Prince of Denmark – Hamlet by name – suggested that human knowledge is limited. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Each of us lives alone in a private, perceptual reality. We can communicate with one another only […]

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“No One Listens to the Radio Anymore”

May 22, 2023

“No one listens to the radio anymore. Radio is dead.” When someone says that to me, I beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter. “Wait a minute. When you say, ‘beat them unconscious with a Portable People Meter,’ what do you mean by that?” Okay let’s role play this. Say to me, “No one […]

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What Do You See?

May 15, 2023

You have tiny openings in your mind. When you look through one of those keyholes, you see a world that could easily become real, but only if you keep looking through that keyhole. Look through that keyhole long enough and it will expand into a window, then grow to become a door of opportunity through […]

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Archetypes are Bigger Than You Think

May 8, 2023

Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” He was speaking, of course, of DNA, those impossibly long threads that organize every type of life on our planet. Your DNA […]

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Content Without Context is Boring

May 1, 2023

You see a photo of a man in a blue jacket standing in front of McDonalds. That photo contains at least 3 pieces of information. Information is content. 1. Man 2. Blue Jacket 3. McDonalds Content without context is boring. That photograph was taken to encourage you and elevate your hope. Does that surprise you? […]

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An Honest Attempt to Understand

April 24, 2023

In 1947 a Norwegian became curious if it was possible for the natives of South America to have drifted on a raft 4,300 miles across the Pacific ocean to populate the islands of Polynesia. The question of who populated Polynesia wasn’t really important to anyone but Thor Heyerdahl. He opened his bestselling book in 1950 […]

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Your Personality Drives Your Business

April 17, 2023

My friend David Freeman gave me a tool about 20 years ago that I have used to great effect. David teaches screenwriters and novelists how to create fictional characters that draw you toward them like magnets. It is not my objective to teach you David’s technique today, nor will I teach you my simplified version […]

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Celebrate Your Partner

April 10, 2023

Do people under 50 know what a yoke is? I honestly don’t know. When I consider that millions of Americans don’t know how to use a rotary telephone, I can easily believe they might be unfamiliar with that wooden implement used to unite a pair of horses or mules or oxen so that they might […]

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“Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson.”

April 3, 2023

I have been in a reflective mood of late. Unplugged from my beloved routine of writing an ocean of ads in the middle of the night, I have been examining the lives of people who sharpened their skills to such fine points that they pierced the skies and found themselves embodied in golden beams of […]

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Start Your Own Business

March 27, 2023

It is naive to believe the world is a meritocracy, but it is defeatist to believe that you can’t win. Six years ago, notacoward wrote, “Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small […]

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Remove the Friction and Grow

March 20, 2023

Jeffrey Eisenberg and Dewey Jenkins don’t know each other but each of them taught me the importance of removing the friction. Dewey sings it to every person in his company, “Make it easy for customers to do business with us.” And they do. Inventing new ways to “make it easier” is the job of every […]

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Calculating the Cost of Customer Acquisition

March 13, 2023

When your advertising leans on the weak wooden crutch of discounting, it is only a matter of time before that crutch splinters and slowly pierces your heart. Discounting is a seductive drug like heroin, meth, and fentanyl. It rarely kills you quickly. It prefers to kill you slowly. Yes, I know that is an uncomfortable […]

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“You’re just the one she hasn’t left yet.”

March 6, 2023

Our song began in 1971 when Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the end of the 60s. He may as well have been writing about the end of a love affair. “We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can […]

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Let’s Talk About Faith

February 27, 2023

You believe in a lot of things. But what do you believe in the most? Go into the quiet security of your mind, and you will know that you value one of these more highly than the other four. Government Business Science Family Deity “American rates of religious affiliation have plummeted to their lowest point […]

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What Do You Feel is Real?

February 20, 2023

Ten years ago, scientists discovered “a geometric, jewel-like object at the heart of quantum physics.” This jewel-like object is called the amplituhedron (cool name, right?) and it, “dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.” * A theoretical physicist at Harvard, Jacob Bourjaily said that when using the amplituhedron, “The degree […]

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The Goal is Differentiation

February 13, 2023

CHAPTER ONE: We  assume that every plumber can plumb, right? We assume that any A/C company can make the house warm in winter, cool in summer. We assume that every jeweler can sell us a diamond, and a lawyer must know the law, or he wouldn’t have a license to practice. So how do we […]

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Does Your Company Have Core Values?

February 6, 2023

There are only three reasons to have a list of core values.      1: Inspire and reinforce “on-brand” behavior from employees.      2: Assist in the orientation and onboarding of new hires.      3: Inform investors, customers, and other interested parties of what they can expect from you. PROBLEM: When your core […]

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Just Three Words

January 30, 2023

Lately I’ve been trying to explain to uncomprehending faces how the most powerful opening lines are never questions, but statements that trigger more questions than they answer. I am certain those uncomprehending faces are my fault. I fear the idea that I am trying to teach may be bigger than the teacher. I am going […]

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Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands

January 23, 2023

Regardless of our chosen profession, most of us work with Numbers, Facts, Words, and Hands. You’ve probably never thought about it: Numbers, Facts, Words, Hands. I certainly hadn’t, until I was talking with my 13-year-old grandson, Gideon, trying to convince him to elevate the quality of books he reads.  Gideon is an exceptional storyteller and a […]

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An Extremely Very Common Mistake

January 16, 2023

You are rolling down the road when you wonder, “If I turn off the engine and quit burning fuel, how far can I coast?” If your thought was to save fuel, you have made a costly mistake. The fuel you will burn to regain your speed is a lot more fuel than you would have […]

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Storytellers, Writers, and the Original Magic Carpet

January 9, 2023

I recently read a pair of books by Arkady Martine, a writer who is new to Science Fiction. A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021), each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I like Arkady Martine and I like her books. She is an extraordinary storyteller. But she is not yet a great […]

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Teamwork: Another Look

January 2, 2023

I want you to: be more productive, reduce your mistakes, shorten your learning curve, and elevate your success. If I am going to help you do these things, we must first look at what’s hiding in your blind spot. Are you ready? Teamwork in Business is Highly Overrated. Teamwork is never the answer. Individual responsibility […]

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WE 2023: “Working Together for the Common Good.”

December 26, 2022

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the 2023 Zenith of the “WE,” so today I’ll give you a recap. The 3,000-year pendulum of Western Civilization* is energized by two good things that oppose each other:  Every 40-year “ME” cycle is driven by the hunger for individuality and freedom of expression. Every 40-year […]

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You Don’t Need Authority to be a Leader

December 19, 2022

Authority can be given to a person. Leadership cannot. People with authority often have no followers. People with followers often have no authority. Leaders require no authority. They say, ‘This is what I’ve decided to do.’ And then they do it. Others see them doing it and decide to follow. On Tuesday I was on […]

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Heart Surgery en masse

December 12, 2022

We shall operate on the heart, but we shall not use a scalpel and it will not pump blood better when we are done. We have no interest in that muscle in the center of the chest. We will use magic words to operate on the center of emotions. We will change how people act, […]

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Frame. Reframe. Counterpunching Part 2

December 5, 2022

The pain of loss is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain.  When Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory in 1979, a generation of advertisers mistakenly began to speak to Pain, and to the fear of Loss. If you frame a choice as “Loss versus Gain,” most people will choose loss avoidance […]

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Verbal Counterpunching

November 28, 2022

A person unconsciously frames a statement when they choose a perspective, a point of view, or an angle of approach. Verbal counterpunching is nothing more than the reframing of a statement made by someone else. Citizens of Britain said for centuries, “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” to which a citizen of India […]

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Storytellers: the Bad, the Good, and the Brilliant

November 21, 2022

There are four basic steps in every good story. Bad storytellers can do steps one and two, but recoil at step three. Good storytellers are willing to do step three. Brilliant Storytellers do steps three and four again and again. 1.  Create a character that people like, believe in, and can relate to. 2.  Launch […]

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If Life is a Journey on Water…

November 14, 2022

If life is a journey on water, with our conscious mind above the waterline and our deep unconscious beneath, and if all the people in the world are drifting, surfing, drowning and sailing on that surface, shouldn’t there be a person on a wooden chair in the sky above the beach watching over it all? […]

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Three Ways to Look at Water

November 7, 2022

Dr. Nick Grant, a psychologist, Dr. Mike Metzger of Clapham Institute, and Ray Bard my publisher, each taught me about water. Life is a journey on water. Your conscious mind is above the waterline. Your unconscious is beneath. That weightless, magical world below the waterline is fundamentally different from the world of facts, figures and […]

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A Day at the Zoo

October 31, 2022

People in museums stop to look at paintings that have people in them, but walk past paintings that have no people. Ninety percent of the books sold each year are fiction. Ninety percent of the books written each year are non-fiction. The same is true in movies and television: fiction beats non-fiction 10 to 1. […]

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Bobbie Understood the Seasons

October 24, 2022

I have seen friends walk away from relationships, jobs, and promising careers when all they really needed was some time and space to gather their thoughts, slow their heart rate, and rediscover their joy. I’m not saying you should always, “hang on one more day at a time and wait for things to get better.” […]

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How Quickly Will My Ads Start Working?

October 17, 2022

Ten different factors will determine how quickly your ads pay off. Do your ads capture attention or are they easy to ignore? Do your ads speak to a felt need, or are you answering a question no one was asking? Are you a known, trusted, and respected seller? Is the brand you sell known, trusted, […]

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That Hovering Question Mark

October 10, 2022

Every good story – and every good ad – begins with a statement that triggers more questions than it answers. “I do not like to turn left when leaving my neighborhood…” “I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my father…” “You are sitting in a candlelit restaurant when you hear a strange noise…” […]

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The Immortals

October 3, 2022

I hope you are not prone to regrets.  The next time you make the wrong decision, I want you to look back and remember that it seemed like a good idea at the time. You were given incomplete information. The future was unknowable. What is there to regret? Nevertheless, the dull ache of regret came […]

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Are You a Manager or a Leader?

September 26, 2022

Eighty-eight percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1955 are gone. Poof. Half of them withered because they had a manager in the role of CEO when they desperately needed a leader. The other half were destroyed by a leader when a manager could have held the company together and grown it incrementally. […]

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The Problem with Plato

September 19, 2022

Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a marvelous book about writing. In it, she says, “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will […]

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Freedom and Responsibility

September 12, 2022

My friend is forever shouting about his Freedom. It is the only song he sings. Freedom is a good thing, but our love of freedom is why family sizes are shrinking. Children are a responsibility. Freedom and Responsibility are paired opposites, a duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. […]

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How I Met Indy Beagle

September 5, 2022

I was the new kid in a new town, ­getting ready to start the third grade. We had moved into a rented house beyond the outer perimeter of Skiatook, Oklahoma. There were no other houses within sight, so there were no neighbors to visit, no new friends to meet, nothing to do except walk in […]

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If I Had It All To Do Over Again…

August 29, 2022

You’ve heard it said, and might even have said it yourself, “Knowing what I know now, if I had it all to do over again, I would…” Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that you, “have it all to do over again.” You can return to any day in your past to begin reliving your […]

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It Freaked Me Out a Little

August 22, 2022

I was writing about third gravitating bodies and I needed to know the year that Henri Poincaré wrote The Third Body Problem and won that huge cash prize from King Oscar II of Sweden. I typed “third gravitating bodies” into the Google search block. At the top of the results page was a featured snippet and […]

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War and Peace

August 15, 2022

Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy. When Leo Tolstoy was 54, he wrote a book about the ethical teachings1 of Jesus as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. For the rest of his life, Tolstoy advocated the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change. Gandhi – the person we associate […]

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Man Bites Dog

August 8, 2022

Predictability is the silent assassin of persuasion. When static electricity saturates the sky, lift the lightning rod of the new, the surprising, and the different and let the concert begin. The booming of the big bass drum will make the draperies tremble as the lasers light up the night. Give that anxious electricity something to […]

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How to Recruit and Retain Good Employees

August 1, 2022

Rugged individualism is the essence of America. It is also the reason that we, as a people, feel isolated and lonely. Our focus on personal, individual success is the reason we feel disconnected from one another. This is happening even in our marriages according to Ian Kerner, author of the book, So Tell Me About […]

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My Favorite Francis

July 25, 2022

I’m telling you up front that I’m not sharing anything valuable or useful today, but don’t let that keep you from continuing. Today we’re going to talk about 7 guys named Francis. Alan Lightman is not one of those 7 guys. Lightman is a past professor at Harvard and a current professor at MIT and […]

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Gerald

July 18, 2022

Gerald was an unwanted third son to his father, so his mother took Gerald on long walks each Saturday night so they would not be available when his father came home drunk. To avoid a beating, Gerald and his mother would wait outside in all weathers until his father fell asleep. Gerald was 16 when […]

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Inflection Point

July 11, 2022

The long-ago Greeks had two words for time: Kronos (χρόνος) and Kairos (καιρός). Kronos is chronological time, sequential time, the metered time of the regimented left hemisphere of the brain. Kairos is an inflection point, a time-window of indeterminate length during which something consequential happens. On the other side of the Kairos, things are forever […]

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Magical Thinking

July 4, 2022

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. In 1981, Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his documentation of brain lateralization, which basically says that we don’t have 1 brain divided into 2 hemispheres as much as we have […]

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Just Keep Showing Up

June 27, 2022

It’s impossible not to like someone who likes you. This is why the secret of success is to just keep showing up. My friend Brett was studying theater in college until the day a professor told him to lie on his back, close his eyes, and “breathe blue.” Brett did his best, gave up, got […]

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Inside the Box, or Out?

June 20, 2022

My partner Kyle started a non-profit called “Neighbor in Need” after a developer made a comment that caused Kyle to become concerned about all the elderly people in his neighborhood who didn’t have the money to repair their homes, buy hot water heaters, replace air conditioners, or fix roof leaks. So Kyle decided to do […]

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A Colorful Cast of Characters

June 13, 2022

The ancient Greeks understood psychology a lot better than they understood science. Hippocrates, the father of the Hippocratic Oath, believed that our information-gathering and decision-making processes are determined by an imbalance of 4 bodily fluids – red blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – two of which have never existed in the form that […]

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The Promise I Made You

June 6, 2022

I made you a promise on November 22 in a Monday Morning Memo called “Time Travel”. This was how that memo began: “My friend Don has a time machine. He takes me with him sometimes. You should come, too! Every person who rides in Don’s time machine is changed by it.” “The United States Department of […]

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Wide & Shallow vs. Narrow & Deep

May 30, 2022

A successful cluster manager was one of 36 people in a class I taught 2 months ago. When we went into Q & A, he asked for suggestions about what to do with a poorly performing radio station in his cluster. He expected me to suggest a format change, or a clever promotional campaign using […]

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What You Do Today is Important

May 23, 2022

What you do today is important, because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. What will you do today? “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” – Wes Jackson I knew a man who used to say, “I don’t ever get my hopes up. […]

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Do You See?
Do You Stand in Wonder?
Do You Take Off Your Shoes?

May 16, 2022

I write advertising because I’m good at math. According to my calculations at age 18, the odds of making a living as an ad writer were 117,682% higher than the likelihood that I could make a living as a poet. But really, poems and ads are the same thing. Good poems promote a new perspective […]

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What They Didn’t Teach Me at Oxford, I Learned in Jail

May 9, 2022

In his 3,000-year-old book, Ecclesiastes, King Solomon tells us of the stages and phases of his life, his fads and fancies, his regrets and realizations. Then he gives us his final conclusions and advice. Next to the Good News of John, Ecclesiastes is probably my favorite book in the Bible. Oscar Wilde wrote a similar […]

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When to Write It, and When Not.

May 2, 2022

If relationships matter to you at all, don’t put your negative emotions in writing. Spoken words land softly on their feet like a cat that has fallen from a tree. But written words often land with a thud, and the crack of a fractured relationship. My son Jacob taught me an African proverb last week, “The […]

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Affinity Groups

April 25, 2022

An affinity group is composed of people who share an identity marker. Backpackers are an affinity group. Corvette drivers are an affinity group. If you like to sew, you are part of an affinity group. Every sports team has “fans,” an affinity group. If you like wine, you are in that affinity group. People who […]

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Caribbean Santa

April 18, 2022

Thirty-five years ago, he patrolled a stretch of beach as long as two football fields on a Caribbean Island whose name I cannot remember. He pushed a wheelbarrow full of ice as he pranced from one end of his empire to the other, the music of his voice rising and falling over the sound of […]

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Not Happy With Your Profits?

April 11, 2022

It is easier to increase sales than it is to cut expenses. In the words of Adrian Van Zelfden, “You cannot shrink your way to profit.” Cost-cutting CEO’s are hailed as geniuses by Wall Street and lauded as saviors by private equity firms because cost-cutting always works in the short-term. But that’s not how you […]

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Elegant Absurdity

April 4, 2022

The choice between a good thing and a bad thing is never a hard choice. The only hard choice is between two good things. Science is a good thing. And so are the Arts. Why choose? Rube Goldberg became wildly famous 100 years ago because his elegantly absurd inventions combined Science with Art. Elegant absurdity surprises […]

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How to Win in Business

March 28, 2022

The great game of BUSINESS does not come with an instruction manual. The assumption of most players is that Customer Acquisition – lead generation – sales opportunities – is how you win the game. But the understanding of a Highly Skilled Player goes 2 levels deeper: Customer Acquisition (lead gen) Conversion (closing the sale) Remove […]

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Let’s Go Time-Traveling

March 21, 2022

Gordon Atkinson’s Land of La Mancha is the finest literary work of loneliness that has been chronicled since Henry David Thoreau spent 2 years on Walden Pond. Here is how Thoreau opens that most iconic of early American books: “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a […]

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Was I Wrong in 2011?

March 14, 2022

In 2011, the attention of our nation was consumed by the economic problems caused by the sub-prime mortgage debacle of 2008. That’s why everyone thought I was crazy when I wrote these words… “Western Society is in danger of becoming self-righteous, sanctimonious and insufferably judgmental. If history is to be our guide, the next 20 years […]

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The Purpose of Heroes

March 7, 2022

Johnny Molson sent me a video of an elderly Ukrainian woman walking up to a heavily armed Russian soldier, the point man of a force that was occupying her town. Looking him in the face, she said, “Put sunflower seeds in your pocket so flowers will grow when you die.” * The note that came […]

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Look, See, and Feel.

February 28, 2022

Motivational speakers often tell their followers to visualize accomplishing their desired outcomes; to mentally go into the future and feel the joy of that not-yet-happened moment. Visualization is the mental rehearsal of possible future events. When the word “rehearse” was invented more than 700 years ago, it meant to hear again; to re-hear. I am […]

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Branding is Not Informational.
It is Relational.

February 21, 2022

The goal of branding is to build a relationship with future customers. When a relationship has finally been established, you become who these people think of immediately – and feel the best about – when they, or any of their friends, need what you sell. Direct marketers often disdain mass media because it doesn’t allow […]

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When Words are Images
and Images are Words

February 14, 2022

There are four kinds of thought. Verbal Thought is hearing a voice in your mind. Analytical Thought is deductive reasoning that seeks to forecast a result. Abstract Thought embraces fantasy and all things intangible. Symbolic Thought relates the unknown to the known. The pattern-recognition power of the right brain connects new ideas [abstract thought] with known information [analytical thought] in […]

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Storm’s Passion

February 7, 2022

Storm is a character in my mind. No, not so much a character as a caricature, an icon, an archetype. I occasionally meet Storm in the real world. Storm is sometimes male, sometimes female. You’ve met Storm, too. Storm is easily infatuated.  Storm is in love with Love.  Storm talks a lot about passion. But […]

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Carl Jung, Peter Pan, and Egypt

January 31, 2022

You and I spoke last week about shadows being “holes in the light” that speak of past actions and their consequences. We are not the first to make that observation. The ancient Egyptians believed your shadow was the spent energy coming off you and dying in this world. Your shadow was separate from you but […]

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Shadows and Silhouettes

January 24, 2022

Your actions cast a shadow across space and time, affecting people directly – or indirectly – for generations. You already know this. The rest of what I’m about to tell you is speculative, but I believe I am right: Visually, a shadow is a hole in the light. A shadow carries the distorted shape of […]

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Correct and Expected, Right and Proper

January 17, 2022

I learned about advertising from listening to my eighth-grade football coaches. “Every play is a touchdown play if everyone on the team does their assignment properly.” That was one of the two things they bellowed at us every day. The other one was this: “If you succeed in football, you will succeed in life.” I […]

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A Second Reality

January 10, 2022

Twenty-three years ago, roving reporter Rotbart said to me, “You are three different people. 1. There is the person you see when you look in the mirror. 2. There is the person other people see when they look at you. 3. There is the real you, the person no one can see but God.” Objective […]

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At the Fingertips of an Ad Writer

January 3, 2022

“Hoare writes with the license of the nonexpert; you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms.” John Williams was describing Philip Hoare when he wrote that line, but he could easily have been describing me. As a nonexpert, I am free to speculate and arrive at my own […]

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These Will Be Your Challenges in 2022

December 27, 2021

The limiting factors that will challenge business owners in 2022 are inflation, Covid, and the recruitment of good employees. The bad news is that I can give you the solution to only 1 of these 3 problems. The good news is that it’s the big one: the recruitment of good employees. Ivan Pavlov won the […]

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Old Cars in Barns

December 20, 2021

Matthew McConaughey writes in his book, Green Lights, “Cool is a natural law. If it was cool for THAT time, then it is cool for ALL time. A fad is just a branch on Cool’s trunk; a fashionable fling whose 15 minutes can never abide, no matter how long she trends to try. Cool stands […]

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Your Inquisitive Mind

December 13, 2021

When your intuitive mind senses a pattern and begins to search for the completion of that pattern, we call this, “curiosity”. But sometimes our searching for the completion of a pattern goes sideways, takes a shortcut, gets it wrong. The false logic that springs to mind as a result of this wrong turn is so […]

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Me and New Orleans

December 6, 2021

I’ve been saying for 20 years that I’m going to write a buddy movie about Jesus and the 12. I’ve got the whole thing in my head. But who am I to put words in the mouth of Jesus? The idea of creating a fictional Jesus who does and says things that are not in […]

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You and Your Lottery Ticket

November 29, 2021

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with.” – Rebecca Solnit In just 25 words, Rebecca gave “hope” a new identity, introduced a new purpose for it, and caused us to imagine the beginning of a new adventure. She […]

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Time Travel

November 22, 2021

My friend Don has a time machine. He takes me with him sometimes. You should come, too! Every person who rides in Don’s time machine is changed by it. The United States Department of Justice has booked passage on Don’s time machine for countless prison inmates. State and local governments and hundreds of rehab centers […]

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Creative Handcuffs and Isaac Asimov

November 15, 2021

Creativity is counterintuitive. You hate it when you are handcuffed and expected to do your best work, but the secret of doing your best work is to be handcuffed. Creative restraints bring out the best in you. When Sean Jones sold controlling interest in Spence Diamonds a number of years ago, I left that company […]

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Your Time in the Elevator

November 8, 2021

When Pennie and I were preparing to move away from the town of our childhood, I told my friend Phil that I felt I was holding onto the end of a rope in the half-light of limbo, and I had no idea where the other end of the rope was tied. I have never forgotten […]

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Looking in the Rear-View Mirror

November 1, 2021

“Unless your goal is to go backwards, you cannot make progress while staring into the rear-view mirror.” An opening statement like that would usually indicate a motivational message, but I’m doing something different today. I’m not backing up and I’m not moving forward. I’m pausing to look at the long road behind me and the […]

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The Favorite Con of the Plantagenet Kings

October 25, 2021

King Edward of England inherited control of Gascony in France from his mother, Eleanor of Provence, a French noble. But when the 27-year-old King of France decided in 1295 not to let the King of England control part of his country, Edward asked his English nobles to raise an army so that he could regain […]

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On a Rainy Autumn Day…

October 18, 2021

His father called him Bunny because he was born on Easter Sunday. Bunny’s younger brother got a scholarship to Harvard. I’ve had both of Bunny’s phone numbers memorized for the past 48 years and I mention his name at least once a week. “Don’t make me say Loren L. Lewis” has been a private joke […]

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Which Type of Generous are You?

October 11, 2021

In America, “generosity” implies an openhanded sharing of material resources. A restaurant can serve generous portions. A donor can be generous with their money. A friend can be generous with their pickup truck, their lawnmower, or their cabin at the lake. While some people are generous with their money; others are generous with their time. […]

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Meet Your Customers Where They Are

October 4, 2021

Did you know that mood and mode share the same root word?1 I point this out because you cannot take your customer where you want them to go until you first meet them where they are. And where they are is in one of two different moods, or modes of shopping: transactional mode and relational […]

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Lonely and Ignored, Outcast and Rejected

September 27, 2021

“I did all the right things. I touched all the bases in exactly the right order and I was highly rewarded for it. If you had done what I did, you would have been rewarded, too.” Abel didn’t say it, but Cain heard it. And in his rage, Cain sent his brother to the other […]

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The Path that Brought You Here

September 20, 2021

When you list “features and benefits” in your ads, you are speaking to the customer who is currently, consciously in the market for your product. What percentage of the public do you suppose that might be? One percent? I doubt it. In most categories, it is only a tiny fraction of one percent. But what […]

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Do You Deliver What You Promise?

September 13, 2021

Jeffrey Eisenberg and I had lunch in a Japanese restaurant on April 28, 2007. I know this because he said something I quickly wrote down and later added to my Random Quotes database: “Marketers are paid to make promises that businesses have no intention of keeping.” Jeffrey wasn’t talking about marketing; he was talking about […]

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Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right*

September 6, 2021

The illustration at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo features Indy Beagle wearing a yarmulke as he says, “The FBI just released its hate crime statistics for 2020. Are you ready? 36% of victims were attacked for being black, 10% were attacked for being white, and 9% were attacked for being Jewish. Of all […]

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No One in the Bible Spoke English

August 30, 2021

Did anyone besides me grow up reading the King James Bible? Shakespeare was 40 years old when King James commissioned a new translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible into English, and he was 47 when it was published in 1611. During those 7 years, Shakespeare wrote a dozen plays including Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, […]

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Floating on the Ocean of Time

August 23, 2021

A snapshot is a message in a bottle floating on the ocean of time. We had “picture day” at school when I was growing up. Is that still a thing? Our 8th grade yearbooks were delivered to Sequoyah Junior High the following summer, just before we started the 9th grade. There was no internet, no […]

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Unbranded Search and The Yellow Pages

August 16, 2021

You are too young to remember when there were no search engines. Sit. Relax. I’ll tell you about it. In the days before the dawning of the internet and the Age of Aquarius, every household was given a fat telephone book, and in the White Pages of that book, the names of companies and individuals […]

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Random Quote:

“A Speaker of the House of Representatives who believed in slash-and-burn politics erased whatever civility once existed in our capital. He preached that harsh language could win elections; in 1990, when he ran a political action committee, he taught candidates to use a list of words to describe members of the opposite party. These words included “decay,” “traitors,” “radical,” “sick,” “destroy,” “pathetic,” “corrupt” and “shame.”

So as we look back to the second half of the 1990’s, here is the question: When he taught that, did he teach a good thing?”

- Roy H. Williams

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