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 the Christmas 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 light flashing 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 said 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 special-event 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. Every day, people would tell me, “Your shoes are untied.”

Without looking down I would smile and say, “Yeah. I know.”

I was the diamond-ring Cadillac man. I was like Coca-Cola, baby, I was everywhere, the only dealer who had the good stuff. People would call and ask if I delivered. I would say, “You want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want?”

I spent the next 3 years as the King of Making Big Things Happen Fast. I was going in circles faster than a NASCAR driver on Saturday night and making more money than a heart surgeon. But I didn’t like the person I had become.

I was thinking about how much I hated working with anxious, impatient advertisers when it hit me: “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 The Seven Truths that correspond 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.

There have been a few occasions in the past 35 years when longtime clients have persuaded me to use the Seven Secrets of Sales Activation to give them a hard jolt of meth-laced, crack cocaine. In every instance, both the client and I have regretted it. 

Detox is a bitch.

Uh-oh. You want to know how it’s done. I can feel the strength of your curiosity vibrating through the keyboard beneath my fingertips. You want to know the seven secrets of meth-laced, crack cocaine!

(sigh)

Lest you believe I have written you a fiction, I will tell you how it is done, but I wash my hands of the disasters that await you.

FINAL WARNING: before you click this link, believe me when I say that meth-laced crack is addictive. People who use the Seven Secrets of Sales Activation usually overdose and kill their business. 

I have rarely seen an exception.

Roy H. Williams