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The Monday Morning Memo

Laugh, Cry or Get Angry

January 2, 2017

| Download
https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/3f89a85d-f3f5-4cc1-a59b-81d98baca0d0/MMM170102-LaughCryGetAngry.mp3

People would rather be angry than bored.
Anger is a form of excitement.

That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it?

But if you can choose, choose laughter.
“Man is the laughing animal…” 1
Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun.

I’m talking about storytelling and communication.
I’m talking about books and movies.
I’m talking about television and music.
I’m talking about romantic attraction.
I’m talking about successful ads.

If you hope to move people, you must make them laugh, cry or get angry.

You ask, “What about fear?”

Fear is never the end-game.
Fear is merely a fuel that will move you to submission (crying) or defiance (anger.)

There is a fourth state of elevated awareness, however, more seductive even than laughter: wonder, mystery, that magical glimpse of a thing too big for us.

Wonder is the fabric of religious devotion and romantic attraction.
It is the highest goal of any communicator.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”
– Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies (1931)

You stood in wonder at the cliff’s edge of 2016, looking forward into a vast unknown.

“The gift of flight is reserved only for those who leap.”

So you did.

Happy New Year.

May you walk in fields of gold.

Roy H. Williams

The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.”

“It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.”

Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.”

The younger man turned off the radio.

“Why do you call me Sunshine?”


The wizard spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s working on a new book with his friends Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg.
What you just read were the opening lines. You can read all of Chapter One in today’s rabbit hole. Chapter Two will be there next week. Aroo! – Indy

Laughter, Wonder, Sorrow and Anger are the tools of master communicators. Would you like to know how to use them?

1 from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, written around 340 BC and named after his father or son, both of whom were called Nicomachus.

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Random Quote:

“

  1. I am not allowed to carry a whip
  2. Imitating Indiana Jones in any way is forbidden
  3. “For fun-sies” is not an acceptable synonym for “ritual purposes”
  4. I am not allowed to use my trowel as a knife
  5. I am not allowed to use a skull to recite Hamlet (It’s insulting to the skull)
  6. I am not a general in the skeleton war
  7. I am not allowed to claim that I can raise the dead
  8. I am not allowed to sing “Hi-ho” while using a mattock
  9. If I am bit by an insect I must report for treatment, not insist that I will become Spiderman
  10. I am not “king of the spoil heap” nor do I “rule over the mighty clods”
  11. Our university funding is for equipment, not alcohol
  12. I am not allowed to kick someone into the trench and yell, “This. Is. Sparta.”
  13. I am not allowed to play “the floor is lava” in the trenches
  14. If jewelry is found, I am not to call it “my precious” nor horde it like Smeagol
  15. No artifact we find appoints me as the chosen one
  16. I am not allowed to start a gang
  17. I am not allowed to play baseball with shovels
  18. I will not switch the decaf with regular nor the regular with expresso, no matter how efficient it would be
  19. I am not allowed to call the crew “gold diggers”
  20. Or “grave diggers” however accurate that may be
  21.  I am not allowed to have flashbacks to wars I was never in
  22. I am not allowed to act like I am possessed by the spirits of those we exhume
  23. I am not allowed to taunt the paleontologists
  24. Machetes are tools, not toys
  25. When someone asks, “can I have a hand?” I am not to give them a bag of hand bones
  26. I am not allowed to talk to the public about good places to bury a body
  27. We do not perform virgin sacrifices
  28. We do not perform blood sacrifices either
  29. I am not allowed to act like a flamboyant fashion photographer while taking in-situ photographs
  30. The drone is a tool, not a toy
  31. There are several tests to determine if it is a bone aside from licking it
  32. I am not allowed to be drinking when I should be working
  33. I am not allowed to refer to spilled drinks as “libations to the gods”
  34. The GIS is not my “wizard staff”
  35. I am not allowed to insist that any inscription is a curse. It’s probably graffiti
  36. Especially if I cannot actually read said language
  37. Take that hat off
  38. I am not to address supervisors as “master” or insinuate I am their minion
  39. I am not allowed to prescribe any medication to the undergrads.
  40. I have a doctorate, but I am not a medical doctor
  41. Doing any form of illicit substance is not considered experimental archaeology, even if I write the results down
  42. A rain-filled trench is not a pool
  43. I am not allowed to talk like a pirate
  44. I am not allowed to join the local gang either.

“

- Andrei Friedman

The Wizard Trilogy

The Wizard Trilogy

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