It is at this farmhouse that our journey begins.

Robert is a stockman on a farm. Daphne is his wife. Their little boy, Bernie, is born in that little farmhouse by lantern light because the house is much older than electricity.

When Bernie is five years old, his father is promoted to farm manager, and they are moved into a house with electric lights.

Bernie thinks, “Now we are living the good life.”

He leaves school at 15, but his mother has given him a love for literature and her father “Poppy” has injected him with a love for nature and narrative poetry.

Bernie sends a few of his poems to a music publisher in London who is looking for song lyrics.

That same publisher is talking to a young man named Reggie who is looking for a way to leave “Bluesology,” a mediocre local band that plays songs while the patrons of local restaurants eat fish and chips. Reggie says to the publisher, “I’m very good with music, but I can’t write lyrics. I’m hopeless.”

The publisher responds by handing Reggie an unopened envelope that he snatches from the top of the pile on his desk. He says to Reggie, “See what you can do with that and get back to me.”

Neither Bernie nor Reggie are accepted by the music publisher, but they are accepted by each other. Bernie mails poems to Reggie in London, and Reggie writes the music that turns Bernie’s poems into songs.

You have heard many of these songs, I’m sure.

According to Jordan Runtagh,

“‘Rocket Man,’ ‘Honky Cat,’ ‘Crocodile Rock’ and ‘Daniel’ all immediately shot into the Top 10 in rapid succession. By 1975, they were responsible for 2 percent of all records sold on the entire planet. That same year they released Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which became the first LP in history to debut at the top of the Billboard chart.”

Reggie is Captain Fantastic and his farmboy friend Bernie is the Brown Dirt Cowboy.

Reggie knows, of course, that he is unlikely to become famous as Reggie Dwight, so he creates a new name from the names of his former bandmates, Elton Dean and John Baldry.

As “Elton John,” Reggie writes the tunes that make Bernie’s poems famous around the world. Some of those tunes are “Your Song,” “Levon,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “The Bitch is Back,” “I’m Still Standing,” and “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues.”

In 1973, Bernie was traveling to concerts with always high, out-of-control Elton, doing the job each day of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men by “putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

When the Brown Dirt Cowboy decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore, he wrote his brother a letter of departure:

“When are you gonna come down? When are you going to land? I should have stayed on the farm. I should have listened to my old man. You know you can’t hold me forever. I didn’t sign up with you. I’m not a present for your friends to open. This boy’s too young to be singing the blues. So goodbye yellow brick road where the dogs of society howl. You can’t plant me in your penthouse. I’m going back to my plow. Back to the howling old owl in the woods hunting the horny back toad. I’ve finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road.”

“What do you think you’ll do then? I bet they’ll shoot down the plane. It’ll take you a couple of vodka and tonics to set you on your feet again. Maybe you’ll get a replacement. There’s plenty like me to be found, mongrels who ain’t got a penny sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground.”

Reggie Dwight did what he always did. He wrote a tune and sang what Bernie had written.

In the days when an album that sold a million copies was a “Gold Record,” Reggie and Bernie’s album, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” sold 30 million copies.

A few years ago, Bernie Taupin spoke of the “inseverable bond” of brotherhood that he and Elton have shared for 60 years.

“In the insanity of our lives, there’s nothing better than the times when we get to sit down, just together. Like those moments in the dressing room, about a half an hour before he goes on, when I’ll go in and see him and there’s nobody else in there, and it’s just he and I. The calm before the storm. It all comes back. When we’re just alone with each other, it seems like a frozen capsule of time that everything we’ve ever done together inhabits. That’s magical to me.”

Bernie, I think I speak for a lot of other people when I say that your partnership is magical for us, as well.

Roy H. Williams

1. How can I achieve my goals with less effort?
2. How can I achieve my goals in less time?
3. How and where can I find pleasure?

These are the “How to…” questions.

(I call them the Quivering Questions because they contain an anxious energy similar to that of an addict looking for his or her next “fix.”)

Shortcuts, pro tips, life hacks, and insider secrets are snippets that exist to tell you “How to…”

Schools, seminars, master mind groups, and countless consultants exist to tell you “How to…”

Millions of books and Youtube videos have been written and produced to tell you “How to…”

The answers to the “How to” questions are always Informational.

The Three Ancient Questions That Echo Within Us:

1. Who Am I? (Identity)
2. Why Am I Here? (Purpose)
3. What Must I Overcome? (Adventure)

Those are the “Fascination” questions.

Fascination is the drive behind our search for God and our hunger for entertainment.

Faith and entertainment seem incongruent until you realize that both of them fascinate us because they change our mood and lift us higher.

The answers to the “Fascination” questions are always Relational.

When you understand these 6 questions, you understand the essence, attraction, and purpose of social media.

Youtube offers only “How to” videos and “Fascination” videos.

Likewise, every book is either a “How to” book or a “Fascination” book.

Television shows are either “How to” or “Fascination.” Movies and music lend themselves mostly to fascination.

I told you, “Fascination is the drive behind our search for God and our hunger for entertainment.”

When we contemplate our existence and the possibility of God, we ask,

1. Who Am I?
2. Why Am I Here?
3. What Must I Overcome?

Your answers to those questions will determine your faith, whether it be Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostic, or one of the many other belief systems with millions of followers.

When entertainment elevates our mood, our fascination comes from identity reinforcement.

The books, movies, and television shows that we love are the ones that show us a reflection of ourselves.

When we identify with a character, we vicariously experience the challenges they face. These challenges are known as the plot or the “narractive arc.”

We likewise experience the evolution of that character when they are changed by those challenges. This is known as the “character arc.”

The characters with whom we identify remind us of who we are.

Identity reinforcement is the essence of affinity groups.

An affinity group is any group of people who are attracted to the same thing.

Every religion is an affinity group.

The fans of a sports team are an affinity group.

People who follow fashion are an affinity group.

If you like jazz music, or hip-hop, or Jeeps or NASCAR or backpacking or sewing or science fiction or romance or current events or capitalism or gossip, you are in an affinity group.

Mass media and social media exist to attract and serve affinity groups.

The size of a business opportunity is largely determined by size of the affinity group it serves.

If you are an electrician, a plumber, or an HVAC technician, your affinity groups will be people who like and need electricity, running water, and comfortable temperatures. Your limiting factors will be

1. the population of your trade area
2. the strength of your competitors.
3. how often the average person needs your services
4. Whether or not your name is the one people think of first and feel the best about.

If you are a dentist, a jeweler, a lawyer, or a tree trimmer, your limiting factors will be

1. the population of your trade area
2. the strength of your competitors
3. how often the average person needs your services
4. Whether or not your name is the one people think of first and feel the best about.

If you own a restaurant, a grocery store, or sell some other product that people need weekly, your limiting factors will be

1. the population of the neighborhood in which you are located
2. the quality of the customer’s experience
3. the visibility of your location

Believe it or not, everything I have told you in these 727 words is extremely important when you are creating the messages that you will spend your advertising budget to deliver.

I understand if you are surprised by this, but it is true, nonetheless.

Roy H. Williams

Facebook has 3.07 billion monthly active users

YouTube has 2.5 billion monthly active users

Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users

TikTok has 1.58 billion monthly active users

LinkedIn has 930 million monthly active users

NOTE: Monthly Active Users tells you only the Reach of these platforms. But to compare Effectiveness, you would need to know how much time each week a user spends on each platform. You would also need to know how many times each week the same user could be reached on that platform. I’m Indy Beagle

THIS WEEK on Monday Morning Radio: Steven Mercer speaks from personal experience when he tells entrepreneurs how to build a service practice without sacrificing their values, their time, or their financial stability.

Deputy rover Maxwell Rotbart asks brilliant questions and scribbles notes while Steven Mercer explains how to transition gradually from current employment to independent practice. He then explains how to attract clients through referrals and valuable content. He also explains how to decide when advertising makes sense.

Do you want to know the best ways to set fees, establish boundaries, and handle difficult clients?

Class will begin the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Choices and consequences.

I believe that with all my heart.

But I do not believe that wise choices will always yield the outcome you desired.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is filled with the wisdom and insights of Solomon, who had this to say in chapter nine;

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but Time and Chance happens to them all.”

I agree with what Solomon wrote, so I dare not say that a wise choice will always produce the desired outcome. But I will say that in the absence of unlucky timing and plain old bad luck, good Choices usually lead to good Consequences.

Vi Wickam, one of my Wizard of Ads partners, wrote 140 words last week that knocked my socks off.

I am typing these words to you on a computer that sits on top of my desk. Below that desk are my bare feet.

My socks are nowhere to be found.

These are the 140 words that Vi Wickam wrote for American Business Secrets.

Make a Decision.

Many people talk about decisions, but few people understand what it really is

to make a decision.

Not every choice is a decision.

Decide comes from the Latin words “de” – meaning OFF – and “caedere”, meaning to CUT.

To decide is to Cut Off the other possibilities.

Few things are as powerful as a true decision.

To decide is to move in a direction and to cut off the others.

To decide is to keep your focus, and to not look back.

To decide is to face your fear of loss.

Every decision comes with loss, and you must face it.

When you face that fear, you will feel relief.

You will breathe easier.

To decide is to stop second guessing yourself.

To decide is to move forward with clear vision, and clear purpose.

Make a decision today.

With American Business Secrets, I’m Vi Wickam.

Do you often have to explain, justify, and defend your decisions?

Me, too.

These are the 3 key sentences in Vi’s 140-word essay that jerked my eyes open and blew my socks away:

1. Not every choice is a decision.
2. To Decide is to Cut Off the other possibilities.
3. Every decision comes with loss, and you must face it.

Some people believe that if you delay long enough, a solution will arise that causes no discomfort, no inconvenience, and no awkward moments.

You will find these people waiting for their luck to turn, waiting for their ship to come in, waiting for their big break, waiting to begin this long, awkward, funny, delightful and difficult Walk of Life.

Roy H. Williams

Saturday, August 1st, will mark the 150th Anniversary of Colorado’s admission to the Union as the 38th state.

That milestone might not seem to relevant at first glance, but your opinion will quickly change.

Maxwell Rotbart reveals in his new book, “Becoming Colorado,” the Rocky Mountain territory’s long struggle for statehood offers valuable lessons for today’s business executives in leadership, negotiation, coalition building, crisis management, branding, and strategy.

Chief rover Dean joins deputy rover Maxwell to explore the business counsel hidden within Colorado’s remarkable journey to statehood. Together, they will validate Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

Are you ready to be fascinated? The place to be is MondayMorningRadio.com

Tony and Indy ride in the front seats. Pennie and I ride in the back.

We stop only for gas.

Arriving in pre-dawn Atlanta, we get a few hours sleep, then go down to the track where 67 racecars are parked in the dim sunlight of a misty morning.

We are invited to examine all 67 of the racecars. At the end of 40 minutes, Tony points to car number 52, a 1978 Buick Skyhawk. He says,

“Unless the driver sticks it into the wall or the engine explodes, that’s the car that will win.”

I looked at number 52, then glanced around at all the other cars and said, “Why?”

Tony said,

“That’s a ten-thousand-dollar paint job, and paint jobs don’t win races.”

“You’re telling me that the owner is an idiot. So why do you think his car will win?”

Tony slowly shook his head, then said,

“The fact that he spent $10,000 on a paint job lets me know that he spared no expense doing everything that matters. This guy did hundreds of important things to this car before he gave a single thought to the paint job. This paint job was the very last thing he did.”

When I understood what Tony was saying, I repeated it back to him. “The fact that he has spent a ton of money to repaint a brand-new car that was already beautiful means that he has already done everything else that could help him win this race.”

Tony said,

“Ten-thousand-dollar paint jobs don’t win races.”

I nodded my head, then we silently climbed the hill where we would sit to watch the race.

The track at Road Atlanta is two-and-a-half miles of hills, valleys, winding curves, and long straightaways that eat most of the cars and drivers who dare to place tires on its asphalt.

A grass-and-tree-covered park sits in the center of that fierce track like a glittering jewel. This is where we will sit on blankets and watch cars fly past at startling speeds as 67 drivers try to outdistance each other for 6 screaming hours.

At the end of the appointed time, only 24 cars remained on the track.

Number 52 won by an impressive margin.

A client said something to me three weeks ago that triggered my memory of standing on that racetrack with Tony 48 years ago.

When a young client said that he was thinking about spending a huge amount of money for new truck wraps, I was instantly transported back to that track, listening to Tony explain why the car with the $10,000 paint job would win the race.

My client owns a fast-growing home services company that sends technicians to houses to fix things that are broken. He has only been in business a few years.

I accepted him as a client because I saw that he had already begun doing the things that will take his company higher than the tops of the mountains that surround him.

When he told me that he was thinking of investing a shocking amount of money to have his service trucks re-wrapped, I asked, “Why?”

He said he had read a list of extremely successful companies who had all used the same graphics house to design their new truck wraps.

I asked,

“Was it the owner of the graphics house that compiled and published the list?”

My client said “Yes.”

I said, “I once went to an Italian Restaurant in Weehawken, New Jersey that had a prominent sign in the foyer that said, “This Dining Establishment is Highly Recommended by its Owner.”

We both laughed. Then I said to my client,

“Paint jobs don’t win races and truck wraps don’t grow companies. The owners of every company on that list had already done everything they could do that would make a difference. When they had run out of ways to spend money on things that actually matter, they decided to get an expensive paint job.”

Then I concluded my counsel by saying,

“You own this company. I do not. My job is to help you do whatever you choose to do. If you feel like you have already done everything that you know for sure will make a difference, then spend the money for the truck wraps. But don’t think that those companies became successful because of their truck wraps. Those companies became successful because they had already done everything else that matters.”

I do not yet know what my young client will choose to do.

But I do know two things:

1. He is smart, hard working, and is outdistancing all of his competitors.
2. Paint jobs don’t win races.

Roy H. Williams

Ron Robinson says that successful organizations continuously evaluate their vulnerabilities, engage employees in solving problems, and remain flexible as conditions change.

Listen as Ron describes to roving reporter Rotbart his four-step framework for anticipating disruption and responding before challenges become existential threats.

Ron’s goal is straightforward: Help leaders weather the storms of uncertainty and emerge stronger in their aftermath. A storm is definitely coming. Escape that storm and emerge stronger at MondayMorningRadio dot com

That story is often called “The Parable of the Sower and the Seed.”

The story goes like this:

1. A farmer is slinging seed.
2. Some of the seed falls on the compacted soil of the pathway where the birds came and ate it.
3. Seeds fall on rocky soil where it spouts, then dies because the soil is thin.
4. Some of the seed falls among thorns where it sprouts, then gets choked out by the aggressive weeds.
5. Seeds fall on good soil where it returns a massive harvest.

Doug referred to that story to make an altogether different point than the one that I am about to make, but I think that there is a solid chance that Doug would agree with me.

Look at the sower of the seed as an advertiser, and the seed itself as the message that his advertising contains.

You will notice that Jesus did not say, “Target the good soil.”

(He does not say it in Matthew 13, He does not say it in Mark 4, and He does not say it in Luke 8.)

Think about that for a moment; a pathway is easy to see. Rocky ground and thorny patches are likewise obvious.

Why did Jesus NOT tell us to avoid spreading seed in places where it is unlikely to grow?

Why did Jesus NOT tell us to target the good soil?

(Yes, I am talking to you about the wisdom of using un-targeted mass media to spread your message. The consistent, long-term use of broadcast television and broadcast radio continues to be wildly effective even though they reach the untargeted, unfiltered, unwashed masses.)

I am convinced that Jesus was familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes, which was written hundreds of years before He was born. These are the high points of what you will find in the first 6 verses of Ecclesiastes chapter 11.

“Ship your grain across the sea; after many days you may receive a return.” [Translation: Don’t fall into the trap of short-term thinking – RHW] …”Whoever watches the wind will not sow seed. Whoever looks at the clouds will not reap a harvest. But you do not know the path of the wind… Sow your seed in the morning, and in the evening do not let your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.”

In other words, “Quit trying to know the end from the beginning. Energetic activities are more far productive than data collection and analysis.”

Do not fall into the trap of short-term thinking.

Sow the seed, sow the seed, sow the seed.

Do not try to target the good soil.

Sow the seed, sow the seed, sow the seed.

Do not worry about whether or not “this” is the right time.

Sow the seed, sow the seed, sow the seed.

Quit thinking that you have the ability to predict the future.

Sow the seed, sow the seed, sow the seed.

Perhaps my beliefs are completely wrong, but if they are, then it would appear that Jesus and Solomon were wrong, too.

Roy H. Williams

Colin Hodge knows that rapid business growth begins with understanding why customers think, choose, and behave as they do. Colin applies practical insights from psychology to strengthen customer loyalty and make better decisions through continual experimentation.

As he tells roving reporter Rotbart, this mindset proved essential after his first successful app was abruptly pulled from Apple’s app store, forcing him to start over.

Today, Colin’s company is back on Apple and has more than 17 million users. His story demonstrates how every setback can become the springboard to even greater success.

Are you ready to run down that springboard, bounce high into the air, and reach for the stars? If your answer is “Yes,” the place for you to be is MondayMorningRadio.com.

Congratulations on your initial public offering of SPCX.

Google’s AI says, “The blockbuster debut briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire on paper.”

The words “briefly” and “on paper” dim the dazzling brightness of the word “trillionaire” a little, but still, it’s a pretty big deal.

I’m sure that Errol and Maye are super-proud.

You’ve come a long way since you started Zip2 with your brother, Kimball, in 1995.

Who would have ever thought that a company that created online city guides for newspapers would sell for $307 million after just 3 and 1/2 years in business?

Your 7% was only worth $22 million, but still, that’s a lot of pocket money for a 27-year-old boy.

Your decision to partner up with Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, and Christopher Payne to create “X,” and then merge with your biggest competitor so that all of you could survive the bursting of the dotcom bubble, well, that was another brilliant move.

It worked out well for Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, too. You and Thiel and Ho, Fricker, Payne and Max created Paypal at exactly the right time.

Well done, all of you!

But of all your accomplishments, the one that impresses me the most is the frictionless website that you built to sell cars.

Every Tesla owner that I have ever met has admitted to being marveled by how easy it was to buy a new Tesla. Five minutes online and $500 on a credit card leaves the customer sitting there, mildly stunned, asking themselves. “Did I really just buy a car? Can it really be that easy?”

Elon, when people marvel at something, the thing that marvels them can rightfully be called marvelous.

Elon, your Tesla website is marvelous.

And the car is marvelous.

Except for one thing. Can we talk about that one thing for a moment?

Shortly after my wife Pennie bought her Tesla, I saw that we had a sheet rock screw embedded in the center of the tread in the right rear tire.

Pennie said, “No problem, Tire Service is one of the things that my Tesla app says they can do right in our driveway.”

So she pulled out her phone and quickly ordered and paid for Tire Service.

When the tire guy showed up he said, “Yep. That’s definitely a sheet rock screw and it’s definitely an easy fix, but I can only do tire rotations. Take this to the Tesla service center and I’m sure they will do it for free.”

When Pennie got back from the service center, she said that your service manager told her that the tire could not be fixed because it had a scuff on the sidewall, so he sold her a $400 new tire.

Obviously, I should have gone with her.

Was she cheated out of $400? Yes. In my opinion, she was cheated out of four hundred dollars.

Have we been cheated by other people for more money than that? Yes.

Life goes on.

Elon, you and I both know that no car on earth – not even your Tesla – is equipped with onboard sensors that can monitor the depth of the tire tread on a tire. So I can only assume that this annoying “tire tread” warning light that has been front-and-center on our dash ever since she visited your service center was most likely put there by the same aggressive salesman who already sold my wife a tire that she did not need.

I’m sure you can understand why I will never visit another Tesla service center.

Can we resolve this like honorable men?

Elon, I will Venmo you another $400 if you will tell your service manager to press the button that will make the annoying “tire tread warning” light disappear from the dash of my wife’s car.

You can keep the tire. I don’t need it, just like I didn’t need the first one. But I really do need that annoying dash light to go away.

I will even Paypal you the $400 if you prefer.

Again, congratulations on briefly becoming the world’s first “on paper” trillionaire.

– Roy H. Williams

A boundary is a friendly agreement that keeps people from going too far.

But a wall separates people.

A wall isolates people.

A wall keeps people away.

In business, there are few things more important than the management of expectations through the use of clearly-worded boundaries.

In business, these boundaries are called “up-front agreements.”

An “up-front agreement” clarifies – at the very beginning of the relationship – what is INCLUDED, and what is EXCLUDED.

It lets everyone know what they CAN expect, and what they CANNOT expect.

“Up-front agreements” are how you establish boundaries with your customers.

Boundaries are friendly.

Walls are unfriendly.

When you tell a customer “NO” by announcing that something is against your “company policy,” you build a wall that protects you from your customer.

That wall will also make your customer feel like they need to be protected from you.

Boundaries give people clarity and confidence.

Walls give people anxiety and doubts.

Boundaries make people feel happy and safe.

Walls make people feel angry and afraid.

Businesses thrive and customers are happy when the boundaries are clearly known.

A clearly worded “up-front agreement” gives your customers confidence because it lets them know the boundaries in advance.

But any time you say “NO” to a customer by telling them of some unknown “company policy,” you are putting up a wall that says,

“We don’t want you here.”

“You should not have come here.”

“Please tell everyone you meet.”

I have told you two things:

1. If you want your business to grow, make your boundaries known so that everyone knows in advance what is – and is not – included, and what can – and cannot – be expected.
2. If you want your business to grow, never, ever, surprise a customer with a “wall” that they did not know was there.

– Roy H. Williams

Most companies struggle with how to turn good ideas into successful outcomes. Jeffrey Lambert knows exactly why we struggle, and how to correct it. A veteran project-management expert, Jeffrey can explain in plain English why companies always benefit from clear project ownership, well-defined goals, and disciplined execution.

As he tells roving reporter Rotbart, the best business plans and transformation initiatives fail when organizations rely too heavily on technology and systems, while overlooking the importance of culture, communication, and employee readiness. Are you ready to quit being frustrated? Your solution awaits you at MondayMorningRadio.com

If your advertising is predictable, your advertising is invisible.

When something never changes, we quit paying attention to it.

But we always pay attention to things that are new, surprising, and different.

What qre you doing for your customers that is new, surprising, and different?

Talk about those things in your advertising.

Most business owners are fearful of making a mistake.

But you cannot do things that are new, surprising, and different

unless you are willing to take a chance.

If you never make mistakes, you’e not taking enough chances.

Take a chance.

Offer your clients a product, a service, a benefit, or a guarantee that surprises and delights them.

The first step is to decide how you will surprise and delight your customers.

The second step requires energy and activities.

Energy and Activities.

Energy and Activities.

Energy to Energize.

Activities to Organize.

Let’s review what we have learned.

ONE: Predictability is Invisibility.

TWO: You will delight your customers with something that is new, surprising, and different.

THREE: Business growth is fueled by energy and activities.

Decide what you will do that is new.

And then do it.

– Roy H. Williams

Starting with a single strand of pearls that he purchased for his girlfriend, Jeremy Shepherd has become one of America’s most successful sellers of pearls and pearl jewelry. Intrigued by the pearl business, he became rich in pearls of wisdom as he accumulated a treasure trove of entrepreneurial insights through his successes and his mistakes.

Roving reporter Rotbart credits Jeremy with recognizing a business opportunity and then having the determination to transform himself into one of the industry’s leading experts. If you’re looking for profit-making advice that has real luster, Jeremy’s insights glow with it.

Pearls of wisdom are free today – and on the way – at MondayMorningRadio.com

Follow these ten steps and you will rise high and go far.

1. Read poetry every day.

2. Memorize at least two dozen poems.

3. Recite them out loud when you are alone.

4. Perform them spontaneously when you have an audience.

5. Feel the pulsating rhythm that is the heartbeat of every poem.

6. Wiggle your way through the unexpected twists and turns that are its dance.

7. Ask a few business owners to evaluate the ads that you have written for them.

8. Listen respectfully to everything they tell you. Even when they are wrong.

9. Do not try to change their mind about anything. Just write exactly what they would say if they could write as well as you do. Remember: This is their business, not yours.

10. Never write ads that rhyme. Use the heartbeat and the dance instead.

The pulsing heartbeat is called poetic meter. Study it.

The slide and glide of the dance is contained in its unexpected combinations of common words. Look, listen, and take note of these phrases in the poems that hit you the hardest.

Common words used in uncommon ways contain powerful magic.

Squeeze those phrases and drink the juice.

If you do the things I told you, your ads will dramatically outperform the ads of your peers.

You will make a lot of money, but your college-compliant peers will tell you that you are “doing it wrong.”

Let me now say it as plainly as I can:

Successful advertising is not informational. Successful advertising is emotional.

Powerful ads do not speak to the mind.

They speak to the heart.

Like a poem.

– Roy H. Williams

One more thing:

Everything I told you is true when you are writing for social media or for mass media. But the things that I told you do NOT apply to B2B (Business to Business writing) and they only partially apply to website copy. Websites and business communications need to deliver more facts and logic because THAT is what the customer is looking for in those moments.

Tim Whitt is a business coach who learned his craft from termites, mosquitoes, and stinging bees. Seriously. After more than 45 years in the pest-control business, Tim says every business owner can learn a lot from the problems that insects and vermin create for homeowners.

Listen as Tim tells deputy rover Maxwell Rotbart about the striking parallels between household pests and the damage that toxic employees can inflict upon an organization. He also names the steps that you can take to correct those problems.

If troublesome employees are infesting your workplace, Tim’s pest-control perspective may be exactly the advice that you need. It’s time to get crazy at MondayMorningRadio.com

And then they create an app and insist that you download it.

How many apps have you been told that you need to download? (Look at your phone and count them.)

Generally speaking, retail apps are good because they reduce the friction of your shopping experience. Service provider apps are bad because they increase the friction of your service experience.

1. How many times have you had to reset your password?
2. Have you ever had an app demand the answer to a question that sent you on a mission to find the answer?
3. How many times have you been presented with a pick-list that did not include your need?
4. Do you sometimes feel like you are making things easier for the service provider instead of them making things easier for you?

Six different service apps have recently increased my frustration to the point that I am now searching for six new service providers to replace them.

I was not surprised when I learned that all six of those companies are in decline.

And I’ll wager that none of them knows why.

Operational efficiency is a worthy objective. Just be careful that you are not shifting your workload onto the shoulders of your customer.

Every designer of a service app believes their app is going to be user-friendly, easy to understand, frustration-free, and save the customer a lot of time.

In reality, these apps are felt to be unfriendly and frustrating.

We both know that the objective is not to save time for us, but for us to save time for the service provider. They have established neat little cubicles to meet their own needs, and now they are telling us to crawl into each little cubicle and do what we are told.

This technology is not working for me. It is forcing me to work for them.

Wealthy superstar business owners do not ask, “How can we get customers to do what we want them to do?”

Superstars ask, “How can we do what customers wish we could do?”

Brian Scudamore, Dewey Jenkins, and Aaron Gaynor are superstar builders of service businesses.

Each of these superstars has elevated their service business to become a shining star in the dark night of every customer.

These men say:

1. “How can we make it effortless and frustration-free for the customer?”
2. “We have to find more ways to make it easier for people to do business with us!”
3. “How can we delight the customer in ways they did not expect?”
4. “We will always have a solution for every customer. No one will be left behind. We never walk away from a person who needs us.”

Brian Scudamore built 1-800-GOT-JUNK into the World’s Largest Junk Removal Service by making every problem his problem.

“We make junk disappear. All you have to do is point.”

For many years Brian has been pondering the question, “How can we do what customers wish we could do?”

Brian identified four big things that his customers wished were possible, but that were clearly impossible.

Last month Brian Scudamore figured out how to do all four of those things!

When he makes his big announcement, I expect his company to quickly double in size.

I would tell you to buy stock in his company, but I can’t.

Brian owns the whole thing. No investors, stockholders, or board of directors.

Now you know how miracles are made.

Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY: I put an Aaron Gaynor radio ad on the first page of the rabbit hole for you. – Indy Beagle

Small-business growth creates a frustrating paradox: the more a business succeeds, the more overwhelmed the owner becomes. Small-business coach Jason Rosado helps small-business owners strengthen their teams, and create more free time for their owners.

In this week’s episode of MondayMorningRadio Jason tells roving reporter Rotbart how a business owner can identify whether their business truly needs more customers — or whether it is operational inefficiencies and leadership inflexibility that are preventing growth. If you could use some practical techniques for reducing stress and preventing burnout, check out Jason Rosado at MondayMorningRadio.com

Direct marketers have a product or a service to sell. They don’t have a brand to protect.

This is why ROAS is the perfect analytical tool for them.

ROAS is the acronym for Return On Ad Spend.

In other words, it is the Return On Investment of your ad budget.

You can:

1. measure lead generation with ROAS.
2. compare the effectiveness of media with ROAS.
3. track sales attribution with ROAS.

But you will never build a brand with ROAS.

In fact, the measurement of ROAS will always – without exception – lead to the disintegration of your brand.

Here’s why:

1. To produce an impressive result in a short period of time, your ad must contain a degree of urgency.
2. Urgency is not sustainable, nor is it scalable.
3. The longer you run urgent ads, the less well they work.

ROAS always looks great on paper for about a year, sometimes even 18 months.

But then the wheels fall off and you can never put those wheels back on again. Your brand will never be more than a shadow of its former self.

Consider this:

A successful Going Out of Business sale is simply a massive extraction of the stored value in a brand. This “stored value” is the reputation of the company and the trust of its customers.

These are variables that determine the success of every Going Out of Business Sale:

1. Has this company routinely advertised a Sale or offered a discount?
2. How highly do people esteem this brand?
3. How credible is the urgency contained in the ad copy?

ROAS always leads to short-term thinking because ROAS rewards ads that extract the largest amount of stored value from the brand.

Have you built a brand?

Do people feel a connection to your brand?

The day that you begin using ROAS to determine which ads work best, you will have launched a Going Out of Business Sale whether you intended to or not.

Roy H. Williams

One in every five American adults is the customer of a family that you have never heard of. Their company generates more than $32 billion in annual revenue. And the $17 trillion in customer accounts and investment funds it manages exceeds the gross domestic products of Germany, Japan, and India combined. Despite the enormous influence of Fidelity Investments, relatively little is known about the singular family behind the Boston-based multinational financial services giant.

Justin Baer, the deputy markets editor at The Wall Street Journal, reveals the dramatic three-generation saga of the fiercely private Johnson family in his new book. He also explains how they helped transform American investing.

Listen and be amazed as Baer shares with roving reporter Rotbart the behind-the-scenes story of Fidelity’s success. You will also gain insights from Fidelity’s rise in leadership, their marketing, their innovation, and their succession planning. The story begins the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

Stay quiet and stay close. We are wandering into a dangerous area. To see the glittering truth of the Rule of Success, we must quietly sneak up on it.

The North Star never moves because it hovers directly above the axis of the earth. If you draw a line from the South Pole to the North Pole and then extend that line 323 light years into space, it will touch the North Star.

Your life’s goal is your guiding light, your North Star. This is why you are forever traveling northward as you pursue your dream.

But there is a limit to north. That limit is called the North Pole.

When you go beyond that limit, you are now headed in the opposite direction.

This is the bitter truth that has been tasted by every person who has achieved their life’s goal:

“You work your whole life to reach the summit. And when you get there, all the roads lead down.”

Like every rule, North and South are finite and achievable.

Like every principle, East and West are infinite and unachievable.

You can travel east forever and never reach the end of “east.”

“The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. But the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth.”

Without intending to do so, Niels Bohr summarized in those two sentences the fundamental difference between a rule and a principle. The first sentence describes every rule. The second sentence describes every principle.

The person who turns a principle into a rule is a fool.

I call that person a fool only because their mind is not big enough to hold in stasis the contradictory tension that is at the heart of every profound truth.

Did it ever occur to you that helping people get what they want is the foundational principle behind every business on earth?

Do you want to be successful?

This the only Rule of Success:

“Find out what people want, then give it to them.”

Jesus taught us the eternal principle behind the Rule of Success when he said,

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Remove “Love” from that principle, and you will have a similar principle that says,

“It is always good to help people get what they want.”

But here is the “opposite truth” of that principle:

“It is always bad to help people get what they want when it would require injuring an innocent person.”

In other words, removing “love” wasn’t such a great idea.

People who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand always try to convince me that it is okay to damage naive, gullible, innocent people “because the only person that really matters is you, and you are not responsible for making other people happy. You are only responsible for making yourself happy.”

Interestingly, that is exactly what Jeffrey Epstein believed.

He died in prison for his belief, and his name has become a curse word.

Bernie Madoff was only pretending to help people get what they wanted. He was perceived as “successful” for as long as he was able to sustain his con.

Bernie likewise died in prison.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a young fool who pretended to be helping people while he was robbing them blind.

The courts took away the 11 billion dollars he stole. Then they locked him in a room the size of a walk-in closet where he will spend the next 25 years of his life.

Removing love is never a good idea.

– Roy H. Williams

Don’t tell your audience how to feel.

Make them feel.

Great ad writers are secret poets.

Poetry is not about making words rhyme. Poetry is about leading people to a realization.

Poetic ad writers open your eyes and cause you to realize.

They lead you to a conclusion, then let you discover it for yourself.

Great writers don’t tell you. They show you.

This poem will do that:

What of the watchman on the wall?

What says the watchman?

“It is 10pm, let the night begin.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 11 at night, everything is all right.”

What says the watchman?

“It is midnight, the bell has rung. Every song has been sung.”

What says the watchman?

“It it is 1am, I am all alone. I am all alone.”

What says the watchman?

“It is 2am, scrolling on my phone.”

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

What says the watchman?

The watchman watched his phone.

The enemy arrived.

The watchman is gone.

Don’t just deliver information. Deliver persuasion.

Open their eyes. Make them realize.

When they see what you see, they will do what you want them to.

Win the heart and the mind will follow.

The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Roy H. Williams

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn helps executives, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams make smarter, more confident choices and avoid costly mistakes. As a Decision Science strategist, Cheryl developed the widely used AREA Method, a framework designed to help leaders challenge assumptions, reduce cognitive bias, and improve judgment in high-stakes situations.

In this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, Cheryl explains to roving reporter Rotbart that while “gut instinct” plays a valuable role in business, too many leaders rely on it entirely, rather than grounding their decisions in real-world testing, stakeholder input, rigorous analysis, and evidence. Listen and learn at MondayMorningRadio.com

Speak to everyone, everywhere, about widely felt needs, deeply held beliefs, and personal values. Quit telling yourself that you need to reach “the right people” with your advertising.

1. A: The media doesn’t make the message work. The message makes the media work. I’ve never seen a business fail because they were were reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things.
2. B: Anyone who has a friend, a relative, a co-worker, or a neighbor is an influencer. Is there anyone that you DON’T want to say good things about you?
3. C: Powerful brands like Ferrari, Rolex, and Harley Davidson are known, loved, and admired by hundreds of millions of people who will never own a Ferrari, a Rolex, or a Harley. Do you think those brands would be better off if they were known only to the people that the brands chose to “target” as potential customers?

Customers buy from personalities they know, like, and trust.

1. A: People don’t bond with corporations, they bond with personalities.
2. B: Brands that have personalities are exactly as real to us as our favorite characters in novels, television shows, cartoons, and movies. Who doesn’t love R2D2, C3PO, and Yoda? You realize those characters are purely imaginary, right? But we feel as though we know them.
3. C: Does your brand have a distinctive personality? If not, why not?

I will now summarize each of those 3 Steps in exactly 12 words.

People want friends, honesty, encouragement, access, and to know that they matter.

Buy mass media. Quit fishing with a hook. Use a net instead.

Don’t be so boring. Find some courage. Be a distinctively memorable personality.

1. Roy H. Williams

Zig Ziglar would have turned 100 this year.

This week, Tom Ziglar shares some little-known stories about his father with roving reporter Rotbart and deputy rover, Maxwell, including the fact that despite Zig’s worldwide fame, he once carried a stranger’s luggage to the guest’s hotel room simply because the out-of-towner took one look at Zig’s red sports coat and thought he was a bellman.

But todays episode is more than a nostalgic look backward, as Tom Ziglar offers a thoughtful meditation on legacy, leadership, and the enduring power of optimism. Things are looking UP at MondayMorningRadio.com.

But write on, I must.

“Write on, write on, write on.”

“Cost of Compute” refers to the $8 to $13 that every AI company has to spend on electricity and short-lived computer chips for every $1 that comes through the door.

Losing a dozen dollars for every dollar you touch isn’t a problem when investors are showering you with cash from a fire hose.

But it’s beginning to look like the well has run dry.

I did not want to defend where I got my information, so I went to the Goog and asked, “Oh Great Googness, why are people referring to the S&P 500 as the “S&P 10”?

Check this out, cub scout, straight from the AI of the Almighty Google:

“The S&P 500 is being referred to as the “S&P 10″ because a handful of massive technology-related companies dominate the index’s performance. Due to market-cap weighting, these top 10 stocks disproportionately influence the index’s total return, making the ‘broad market’ performance heavily reliant on these few, AI-exposed companies. More than $40 of every $100 invested in the S&P 500 is going into just 10 companies, creating a high level of concentration not seen in decades. In some recent periods, those top 10 stocks have accounted for nearly 90% of the entire index’s gains, indicating that the remaining 490+ stocks contribute very little to the overall upward movement.”

Allow me to highlight Three Big Problems.

1. Manufacturing companies, food companies, service companies, and all the other cash-hungry hopefuls that are the true wonders of the American economy have not been able to raise any money because way too many people have been dumping everything they’ve got into AI.
2. That money has now slowed down, which means that a lot of AI dependent companies are now being burned by their “burn rate,” a slang term for “precisely how fast they are losing money.”
3. AI is getting worse, not better, despite the fact that everyone is repeating like parrots, “AI is worse now than it will ever be. Hour by hour, AI will just keep getting better and better forever and ever.”

Okay, I can tell from the look of doubt that I see in your eyes that you need me to explain a little bit more about Problem Number 3.

They can’t raise prices fast enough to stop the bleeding, so most of the AI companies have reduced their Cost of Compute by 86%.

“But how?” you ask.

Here’s how. In the recent past, you could give your $200/mo AI some detailed instructions and it would go on a deep dive to bring you the golden nuggets of information that you requested. The 86% savings of Compute Cost is because they instructed the AI to just look in the cache for what they told someone else who asked a similar question. You get a recycled answer, and the AI company saves 86%.

I’ll wrap this up by giving you the storyteller’s definition of “inflection point.”

Bad storytellers say, “This happened, then This happened, then This happened, then This happened, then This happened.”

Real stories happen like this: “This happened, THEREFORE this happened, BUT then, This happened.”

“BUT then, This happened” is called “an Inflection Point.”

“So what’s going to happen next?”

Let’s wait and see.

Roy H. Williams

Take a step back, I’ll give you some facts, and then we’ll return to the dominoes.

1. There are 6,602 FM radio stations in America, 597 FM stations in Canada, and 234 in Australia on which you can air radio ads for local businesses. These radio stations are producing miraculous results for business owners who hire great ad writers to enchant the audience and savvy media buyers to schedule those ads to air with correct repetition 52 weeks a year.

Sadly, most business owners do exactly the wrong thing. They run short schedules to “test the waters,” and then announce, “I tried radio and it didn’t work.”

1. ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX are producing miraculous results for business owners who hire great ad writers to enchant the audience and savvy media buyers to schedule those ads to air with correct repetition 52 weeks a year.

Sadly, most business owners do exactly the wrong thing. They run short schedules to “test the waters,” and then announce, “I tried television and TV didn’t work.”

Did you notice the similarity that united those two easily proven facts?

1. Anyone who believes that online media has made mass media obsolete is comically delusional. I never waste time attempting to correct these people.

We will now return to the dominoes.

1. Nielsen Audio is the media measurement company that allows savvy media buyers to create miraculous radio schedules. Without Nielsen, they are flying blind without instruments and very likely to crash their flying machines.
2. Cumulus owns multiple radio stations in 84 important cities in the U.S. Their current financial difficulties make it impossible for them to pay Nielsen for their measurement services.
3. Nielsen has responded by announcing that Cumulus radio stations will no longer be measured or listed in future ratings reports.
4. The resulting invisibility of those stations will cripple even the savviest media buyers.
5. An emerging measurement system, DTS AutoStage, shows promise but I remain convinced that it will be at least a few more years before it has sufficient breadth of data to replace Nielsen.

The finger of Nielsen is flicking the domino that will knock over the other 6,602 dominoes in the chain that will ultimately result in the demise of Nielsen.

I have no way of knowing whether or not Nielsen realizes that.

Nielsen was purchased by private equity on October 11, 2022, less than 4 years ago.

Things are looking good for ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

Roy H. Williams

When people talk about the Chicago Cubs and their historic 2016 World Series victory — ending a 108-year drought — Joshua Lifrak is a name you rarely hear. But he wears a Cubs World Series ring. Joshua Lifrak’s job was to help players perform under extraordinary pressure. Today Joshua works with business leaders to sharpen focus, build mental resilience and perform at their best. Be fascinated as Joshua tells roving reporter Rotbart and deputy rover Maxwell how peak mental conditioning is a “home run” skill that anyone can learn and practice, regardless of what they do for a living. Batter up! at MondayMorningRadio.com

Your advice is valuable, but it will never make as big a difference as your encouragement.

Encouragement is the opposite of flattery.

When you flatter someone, you tell them something positive about themselves that they know is not true. And they suspect that you know it is not true.

A flatterer is a liar who believes they are talking to a fool.

When you encourage someone, you tell them something you have observed in them that they know is true, or have always hoped was true, and you are simply confirming it by speaking it out loud.

You believe it to be true, and they know you do. And now they believe it, too.

You have spoken to the greatness in them. You have seen something in them that they have always hoped someone would see.

That’s what makes you a great encourager.

The people in your life need your encouragement more than they need your advice.

Think about the people who have made the biggest difference in your life.

Those people believed in you and gave you their:

1. Time
2. Attention
3. Patience
4. Confidence

When I say they “gave you their confidence,” I mean that literally. I’m not saying that they confided in you. I’m saying that they had confidence in you when you had none in yourself. They gave THEIR confidence TO you. They gave you the confidence that you have today.

Give a person confidence and they will never forget your name, your face, or that moment.

The people who gave you confidence saw something in you that they wanted you to share with the world. Their reward was that they got to see you flourish and blossom and grow.

Today they are seeing you make a difference everywhere you go.

Would you like to become an encourager?

1. When you see a stranger do something skillfully, say, “You make that look easy, and I know it isn’t. You really have a talent for that.” And then allow them to react.
2. When a person says, “I’ve always wanted to become a __________, but everyone tells me that I couldn’t possibly do that because I __________.” Look at them and say, “Of course you can do it! I KNOW that you can do it. You just need to decide whether or not you’re going to.”
3. When you have known a person for awhile and have seen a recurrent characteristic in them that you admire, say to them, “There are a lot of things about you that I really admire, but the thing that always knocks me over is when you_____________.”

Your words will light a candle in them that will never go out.

The lightning bolt of your encouragement will propel them forward and light their pathway for the rest of their life.

We need encouragers, and we need them badly.

I want you to consider becoming one.

Roy H. Williams

Martin “Marty” Strong is a former Navy SEAL, business leader, and author who challenges conventional thinking about how companies — and the people who oversee them — should operate.

Blending lessons from the battlefield and the executive suite, Lieutenant Strong argues that too many of today’s leaders cling to outdated methods, failing to recognize that the marketplace is constantly evolving — and that effective managers must anticipate and adapt to change.

To do otherwise, he tells roving reporter Rotbart, is like relying on an old encyclopedia — making critical decisions based on information that is no longer accurate or relevant.

And a person will appear.

This person is known among storytellers as “The Old Man in the Woods.”

His job is to prepare you for all the challenges you will face on the next segment of your adventure.

Mr. Miyagi was the Old Man in the Woods for Daniel LaRusso in the Karate Kid.

Obi-Wan was Luke Skywalker’s first Old Man in the Woods, and Yoda was his second.

Have you noticed how every James Bond movie begins with 007 visiting “Q”?

“Q” is the armorer who supplies 007 with precisely the gadgets he will need to accomplish his next mission.

“Q” is James Bond’s “Old Man in the Woods.”

Luke chapter 4 tell us of how Jesus, immediately after his baptism, spent 40 days in the wilderness of Judea. When he emerged from that wilderness, he revealed himself to the world. Verse 14 of that chapter says, “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.”

Would it be fair to say that Jesus spent 40 days with the ultimate “Old Man in the Woods” prior to doing what he famously did?

John bar Zebedee sat next to Jesus during The Last Supper. He was the only one of Jesus’ followers to witness the crucifixion. And was entrusted by Jesus – from the cross – to care for his mother, Mary, while He was away.

John bar Zebedee, in chapter two of First John*, writes about the Three Stages of Life.

He speaks of the Child, the Young Man, and the Old Man.

I am writing to you, dear Children,

because your sins have been forgiven

on account of his name,

and because you know the Father.

I write to you, Young Men,

because you are strong,

and the word of God lives in you,

and you have overcome the evil one.

I am writing to you, Fathers,

because you know Him

who is from the beginning.

Because you know Him

who is from the beginning.

Children spend a dozen or more years preparing to become the strong Young Men and strong Young Women who, full of zest and zeal and zip-a-dee-doo-dah, will face challenges, overcome difficulties, and leave their fingerprints on the world.

And every one of them will need an advisor – an older and wiser friend – to counsel them, encourage them, and prepare them for what lies ahead.

John bar Zebedee was not speaking of biological Fathers and Mothers when he wrote the letter that we call the book of First John.

The people John calls “Fathers” are those who have already wandered the pathless forest and found their way to the other side.

The people John calls “Fathers” are those who already “know.”

The American Dream promises that when you have finished your journey and completed your task, you can recreate, luxuriate, and selfishly celebrate your success for the rest of your life.

And that certainly remains an option, if it appeals to you. But I believe that it will not.

I believe that you will choose to advise, encourage, and counsel the next generation who must blaze a new and different trail through a new and different wilderness than the one that you and I faced.

I believe that you will find fulfillment in your occasional role as “The Old Man” or “The Old Woman” in the woods.

Roy H. Williams

*I consolidated and reorganized what you will find in chapter two of First John, but if you read it closely, I believe you will agree that my retelling is faithful to the message of that original text.

Do you believe that following the same strategy as everyone else is the way the surest way to succeed?

Of course you don’t. Because if you were an unthinking conformist, you would never have subscribed to the MondayMorningMemo.

Strategy

Everything flows from strategy.

Your logo is the flag waved by your strategy.

Your sonic device is the trumpet call of your strategy.

(Do you have a sonic device?)

Your recurrent phrases – your brandable chunks – are the poetic expressions of your strategy.

(Can you name your brandable chunks?)

Your ad copy flows like a river from your strategy.

How swift is the current in that river today? How many people are swimming, canoeing, skiing, biking, hiking, fishing, splashing, frolicing and dashing in your river right now?

Your media buyer opens the floodgates that gush water into your river.

(How good is your media buyer?)

Do you understand why measuring ROAS is green kryptonite to every super-heroic strategy?

Do you understand why verbs make a bigger difference than nouns and modifyers?

Would you like to know these things and change the trajectory of your business and your life?

Be in the Tower at Wizard Academy on May 26th and May 27th.

Wisdom is knowing what to do.

Understanding is knowing why it works.

If you have an open mind and a hungry heart, your life will be forever changed.

Or maybe you already know these things and should therefore absolutely, definitely, please don’t come.

Roy H. Williams

PS – Do you have a crazy idea? Would you like to learn from 4 famous people, each of whom have repeatedly taken their crazy ideas to the highest heights? It’s going to be an amazing adventure, full of wonder.

It pays to know what people already care about.

The following conversation illustrates one of the ways in which this pays.

“If I spend money on advertising, what will I get in return?”

It depends on what you say in your ads.

“What do you mean?”

Most ads have no relevance to most people.

“Yes, that’s why you need to target the right people.”

There is some truth in that, but not as much as you think.

“What do you mean?”

You can reach the right person, but if they have no current need for what you sell, you can only hope that they remember you when they do have a need.

“So, what’s the answer?”

The answer is to talk to people about what they already care about. Speak to what currently interests them.

“Can you give me a couple of examples?”

Sure.

1. Public Relations experts know that a highly relevant press release will deliver amazing results when it can be inserted into a conversation that people are already having.
2. Mass Media experts know that TV and Radio ads deliver amazing results when they:

(A) speak to values and beliefs that already reside in the hearts of the masses

(B) introduce relatable, interesting characters so that people can bond with them

(C) use 40 percent of the total ads to create “sales activation” by making an offer of a product or service during a time when it is at peak desirability.

“But even when something is at peak desirability, don’t I have to be able to reach the right people?”

When you are using mass media, you can depend on the behavior of the masses.

“What do you mean?”

Most products and services will be at peak desirability during these three types of trigger events.

(A) Seasonality.

Every spring, the masses want junk removal, lawn fertilizer, gardening equipment and supplies, home improvement tools and materials, warm-weather clothing, A/C check-ups and a huge variety of other products and services. Each month of the year triggers its own felt needs.

(B) Holidays.

Each holiday triggers its own thoughts, emotions, and desires. New Year’s Day is when people invest in diet programs, gym memberships, and programs to help them quit smoking. Valentine’s Day is romance, and Memorial Day is when retailers have discount events, and then we have End-of-School, Vacation Season, Back-to-School, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas. Each of these are each trigger events that every company can build upon.

(C) Personal Trigger Events.

Moving out of a home or into a home is a personal trigger event that cannot be predicted by even the best AI. Likewise, engagement ring purchases, hot water heater replacement, funeral services, and car repairs happen at unexpected and unplanned times. Does it make sense to wait until the “Zero Moment of Truth” and then pay the price to generate an extremely expensive, low-conversion click? Or should you become the company the masses “think of first and feel the best about” when their personal trigger event occurs? Low-cost, high-conversion clicks are the result of people typing your name into the search engine because you have already won their hearts through the ongoing use of low-cost mass media.

CONCLUSION:

What you say in your mass media ads determines whether or not you will own real estate in the hearts and minds of the masses.

BONUS INFORMATION:

Youtube has become a new type of Mass Media.

I decided to start a couple of Youtube channels in February.

On March 4th, I decided to do an experiment. It began to pay off on March 5th.

Twenty-one days later, the results of those two experiments was a combined total of 1,234,238 new subscribers at a total cost of 2 cents per subscriber.

When a person subscribes, they are telling you,

“I love this and want more of it.”

If you want to know how much I spent to gain 1.2 million subscribers in just 21 days, all you have to do is multiply 1,234,238 by 0.02. (If you want to know precisely how much I spent, multiply 1,234,238 by 0.020319090498)

But that does not mean that all you have to do is spend the money.

You can buy views with money, but you cannot buy subscribers.

Subscribers are earned by what you say. You have to speak to a need that people already feel.

Weak, limp advertising tries to convince people that they need something that they do not feel they need.

Speak about what people already care about.

That’s the ticket.

Roy H. Williams

Especially when you consider the number of people who have patted me on my head and told me that I didn’t need to understand what they were talking about because they would happily, “do all of those difficult things” for me if I would just hand them the checkbook and the keys.

I never did that, of course.

Head-patters are always convinced that I am a fool-child from Oklahoma because I never bother with a written plan, a budget, or a timetable for major undertakings.

But somehow, they always turn out okay.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

When Pennie and I began filling 21 acres in Austin, Texas with large, complicated, and expensive buildings, I was asked at least once a day,

“How long will it take to build all of this, and how much will it cost?”

I always answered with the truth,

“It will take as long as it takes, and it will cost what it costs.”

That answer really alarmed people.

I didn’t say it to be shocking or cute. I said it because I honestly didn’t know and I genuinely didn’t care.

When you don’t borrow money, you can take as long as you want to do whatever you are doing. Rarely did Pennie and I have the money to do the things that we chose to do, but we knew that the money would find us.

That attitude drove people crazy. They were absolutely certain that we would utterly fail because I didn’t have a detailed plan.

I’m not suggesting that other people should reject written plans. Other people can do whatever they want.

But so can I.

Planning is something

I have never hated,

But I do believe

it is overrated.

I cannot,

(but maybe you can)

remember when

there was a plan

that let you sail

the river of

your dream

without

changing course

in mid-stream.

Planning is a

religion theoretical.

Yes, I am certainly

speaking heretical,

but I am depending

upon your receptivity

when I say that I prefer

Energy and Activity.

But now I am getting

ahead of myself

which happens when you

leave the plan on a shelf

and rely on your Commitment

to an Outcome agreed-upon

and not some soggy paper

that Circumstances peed upon.

Commitment and Creativity.

That’s my plan.

Plus Energy and Activity

and a frying pan

because a good breakfast,

you will remember,

is essential to Christmas Elves

in late December.

Commitment

and Creativity.

Energy and Activities.

Keep your eye

on the star stationary

and do whatever

you think is necessary.

And never forget

that in your hand

you carry a cast iron

frying pan.

Roy H. Williams

A Note from Indy Beagle: For those of you who are curious, @GreatWritersSeries and @TribalGospelhad a good week on Youtube. GreatWritersSeries climbed from 44,000 subscribers to more than 100,000. TribalGospel climed from 105,000 subscribers to more than half a million.

I wonder what will happen next! Aroo. – Indy

Fauzia Burke generates visibility for her literary clients and their books. Her authors include Ken Blanchard, Daniel Silva, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Alda, Dean Koontz, S.C. Gwynne, and Brian Tracy. Fauzia could undoubtedly rest on her laurels, but ever since she launched her firm in 1995, she has continually updated and reinvented her methods.

This week, she shares the story of her steep learning curve in applying AI to her existing processes, lessons that you can adapt, regardless of the business you are in. As Fauzia tells roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, “AI will not replace professionals who know their craft, but the ones who learn to use AI will almost certainly outperform the ones who don’t.” Tune in and Win! At MondayMorningRadio.com

I am sitting in front of a computer that can deliver love letters to billions of addresses across the twenty-four time zones that encircle this watery rock we live upon.

I sit and stare and look with wonder at the glittering ocean called Youtube, deeply aware that I know next-to-nothing about it. This gives me a tremendous advantage.

It keeps me from doing what everyone else is doing.

Naive ignorance becomes nitroglycerin when it is energized by the spirit of adventure. Handled carefully, you can move mountains with it. But if you are reckless, clumsy, or just plain unlucky, that same TNT can blow you into pieces.

I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “Let’s go exploring.”

Mirror-me thought it sounded like fun, so he passed through the glass to join me on my side of the mirror.

Energized by the spirit of adventure, I launched @GreatWritersSeries on Youtube and Mirror-Me launched @TribalGospel.

On Feb 12, 2026, GreatWritersSeries had 480 views and a few dozen subscribers.

On March 12, 2026, it had accumulated 5,146,423 total views and 44,684 subscribers.

TribalGospel had zero views on Feb 12 to but quickly accumulated 8,299,137 total views and 105,707subscribers by March 12.

GreatWriters Series received fresh content once a day.

TribalGospel received fresh content at a much faster pace, up to 3 times a day.

Indy Beagle has posted some Youtube screenshots in the rabbit hole for you, along with a couple of the most successful videos.

I will now answer your questions:

Q: “Can you teach me how you did this?”

A: Yes, but the information will probably not be useful to you. But if you insist on hearing all of the details, be in the tower at Wizard Academy on May 26-27. I will spend one hour of that two-day class answering the questions of whoever is in that room.

Q: “Why has TribalGospel outperformed GreatWritersSeries?

A: GreatWritersSeries is carrying water to the ocean. TribalGospel is carrying water to the desert.

Q: “What do you mean?”

A: GreatWritersSeries is published for people who love literature that was written in the English language. This widely diverse but relatively small group is scattered across the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and Ireland, with a few additional outliers flung here and there.

GreatWritersSeries wants only to tempt people to become lovers of literature, whereas TribalGospel is published for people in every time zone who are thirsty for encouragement and hope.

English is not their first language, but they can understand it if they can read along with what they are hearing.

Look at the comments @TribalGospel and these things will immediately become apparent to you.

A startling number of TribalGospel subscribers are in Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and throughout South America. I knew this would be the case, so I leaned into it.

Are you beginning to understand why only a spattering of what I have learned during these past 28 days will be useful to you? TribalGospel wants only to make a difference – to lift people up for a moment – so that channel went to where it could most easily encourage the largest number of people.

Traditional wisdom would have said that only an idiot would sing flashes of Bible stories and the message of Jesus to nations that are predominantly non-Christian.

But I have always been an idiot.

Q: Does everyone consider it to be encouragement?

A: Of course not. You will notice that about 10 percent of the Youtube comments are rage posts from people who want to tell me why I am wrong.

But I ignore those people because have found more than 100,000 people in just 28 days who have clearly said, “Thank you! And will you please send me more of this?”

Q: Do you believe this will be sustainable or is it a flash in the pan?

A: I have no way of knowing. My suspicion, though, is that TribalGospel will continue to grow, but GreatWritersSeries will ebb and surge like the tide.

Q: Why do you think so?

A: The world has billions of forgotten people, overlooked people, and many of those people are carrying smart phones. The message of TribalGospel will be very consistent, mostly just variations of an uplifting theme. This causes me to believe that TribalGospel will gain new subscribers faster than it loses old ones.

But I do not make that assumption about GreatWritersSeries.

A person who subscribed when they heard a Shakespeare song is going to be angry and confused when they hear the gonzo writing of Tom Robbins. To have a stable subscriber base, GreatWritersSeries would have to choose a narrow niche within the already narrow “Lovers of Literature” niche.

The hope of GreatWritersSeries is to expose people to a writer that enchants them enough to read a book by that writer. You can think of GreatWritersSeries as a dealer who is giving away samples in the hope of creating new addicts.

I apologize for that metaphor, but I couldn’t think of a better one.

The adventure continues. Snow-capped mountains loom ahead and winter is coming.

Roy H. Williams

Most people believe that business success is the product of talent, hard work, and persistence. But what if success could be analyzed — and improved — using the laws of probability? Kyle Austin Young maintains that most goals can be analyzed and improved by understanding their underlying odds. This is true of whatever you do. Launching a product, raising funds, publishing a book, whatever. Kyle calls his consulting methodology “probability hacking.” It says that the odds of your success are determined by the odds of each of the necessary things going right, multiplied together. Roving reporter Rotbart predicts that the odds are very high that this episode of MondayMorningRadio will improve your company’s top line. The explanation begins the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

That’s why big sisters have baby brothers

And how King George gave away a nation

when he said “No” to representation.

He did not not know how much it meant

for those colonies to have seats in Parliament.

Think about it. The cry of the colonies was only this:

“No taxation without representation.”

What if King George had said…

“That is a fantastic plan!

Each colony needs to choose a man.”

And if the colonies had responded,

“We’d like to send two.”

And King George had said…

“Then two seats it will be!

Because you people are important to me.”

The difference that would have made in history,

Will forever be an unsolved mystery.

But I do know this, and I know it for sure:

That having an open mind is a powerful cure

for avoiding problems that can spiral out of control

and haunt you forever, wherever you go.

If there is a moral to this story,

I guess it would be this:

Never shout “No” when there is

a workable way to say Yes.

Never shout “No” when there is

a workable way to say Yes.

Never shout “No” when there is

a workable way to say Yes.

One thing always leads to another.

1. I was speaking with Clara, the wife of Danny, one of my clients.
2. Clara collects silverwork made by the world’s great silversmiths.
3. One of Clara’s hopes is to someday acquire an exceptionally fine piece of silverwork made by – “The British are coming! The British are coming!” – Paul Revere.
4. Were you aware that Paul Revere was a famous silversmith?

The unseen silverwork of that midnight man was floating in a slow circle in the asteroid belt of my mind when the haunting voice of Paul Revere whispered silently in my ear,

“What would have happened if King George had said ‘Yes’ and given each of his thirteen American colonies two seats in Parliament?”

A conversation about what Clara collected quickly became a quirky poem that quietly abandons seven words of subtle sexual humor to move into the story of a stupid king who launched a faraway war he could never win.

Creative thought is not sequential; it is relational, a pinball that ricochets off levers and bumpers at unexpected angles, the energy of the unexpected, triggering bells in the brain and flashing lights in the mind.

Crazy Jack Kerouac had rules for writing:

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

8. Write what you want, bottomless from bottom of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow.

My few lines of accidental verse soon became a song sung by imaginary singers who are currently touring the world.

You can catch their show in the rabbit hole.

Roy H. Williams

Courtney De Ronde is a financial decoder. She studies the same financial data that business owners and their accountants review, but she uncovers opportunities and risks within those numbers that are almost always overlooked. This is why Courtney De Ronde has evolved as a scaling expert. She helps businesses grow by avoiding the missteps that non-strategic growth always causes.

As Courtney shares with roving reporter Rotbart, most business owners will expand their revenues but end up working harder, hiring more people, piling on expenses, and somehow ending up with the same — or even less — profit. Learn what you need to know at MondayMorningRadio.com

Kronos is chronological time.

Kronos appears more than 50 times in the original New Testament.

Kairos is a pregnant moment in time, an inflection-point of consequence.

Does in surprise you that Kairos appears more than 85 times?

Each of us vividly remembers those Kairos moments when we decided to turn the steering wheel of Life and begin traveling in a whole new direction.

Jim Burns is a counselor. His voice is heard on more than 800 radio stations each day and he has 3 million books in print. But I didn’t know any of that prior to him appearing as a guest speaker at our church last week.

I tell you this only because Jim Burns said something that I really needed to hear.

“I had to learn to say ’no’ to good things, to say ‘yes’ to the most important things.”

That was a Kairos moment for me because it instantly crystallized something in my mind that had previously been only the foggy awareness that I was speaking with so many people each day that I no longer had time to take a deep breath and calm my thoughts.

Then Jim said it again, but differently.

“Sometimes we just have to say ‘no’ to good things, even to say yes to the most important things. That’s how we declutter. That’s how we run light.”

Two days later, I was surprised by a video on Youtube in which my friend Ryan Deiss mentions me by name. He had posted that video a couple of weeks before Jim Burns spoke at our church.

Speaking of himself, Ryan says,

“I literally had zero recollection whatsoever of what I did, or what any of my companies did those weeks, either. It’s just like they were a complete blur. More than likely, I spent all my time responding to whatever emergency someone else decided was important for me on that particular day.”

Wow. Ryan Deiss was speaking exactly what I had been feeling for more than a year.

There are now 87 Wizard of Ads partners and many hundreds of clients, so I go to bed most nights exhausted by the long days, the countless conversations, and the constant feeling that I am somehow letting everyone down.

But Ryan wasn’t finished.

“Scale creates chaos. So if you want to get bigger, you have to insist on focus and simplicity. It is a bit of a paradox, but the key to scale is actually to do less, not more. Because when you force yourself to do less, you shift the emphasis from quantity to impact. And at scale, output matters a lot more than activity.”

We – not just me, but all of us – need to be on guard that we don’t allow the “merely urgent” to displace the truly important.

Have you ever noticed that the things that are truly important are rarely urgent, and things that are “exclamation-point URGENT” are rarely of lasting importance?

Urgent things are momentary, but constant.

Important things are forever, but they can always wait.

And then one day, they can’t wait any longer.

And by then, it’s often too late.

For those of you who are curious, Indy Beagle has posted in the rabbit hole the Ryan Deiss Youtube video that I mentioned, as well as the Youtube video of Jim Burns speaking at our church.

Those two messages, just 48 hours apart, created a Kairos moment for me.

If you have been feeling what I was feeling and what Ryan was describing, maybe those videos will do the same for you.

You can watch the videos or click past them if you don’t have time.

Believe me, I completely understand.

Roy H. Williams

America’s top CEOs pay Doug C. Brown to teach them how to rethink their approach to sales. Doug has consulted Procter & Gamble, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Embassy Suites. Doug C. Brown is not a lightweight. Doug tells roving reporter Rotbart, “most companies can quickly realize a 20-30% improvement in operating profits” when they follow his straightforward recommendations.

Doug says that it is more important “to know the right prospects to approach” than to know how to close the sale. If you think you’ve heard it all, listen to Doug C. Brown. There is a chance that maybe you haven’t heard it all. Doug C. Brown will light you up. The right time to listen is up to you. But the place will always be MondayMorningRadio.com

To “ring the welkin” or make the “welkin ring” is a literary idiom meaning to make a very loud noise, such as shouting, cheering, or singing, that seems to echo throughout the sky or heavens. It implies creating a celebratory or boisterous sound that fills the air.

Will you ring welkin?

“Jet” Eisenberg knew immediately why I was doing what I did. He said that I spoke about it on the day that we met more than a quarter-century ago.

He said that I have spoken about it in every class that he has ever heard me teach.

Most people continue to be confused regarding my commitment to @GreatWritersSeries, so I recently updated the description of that channel on Youtube. (You should subscribe, by the way.)

You may recognize a line within that description that I used in last week’s Monday Morning Memo.

This is my new description on Youtube:

The goal of @GreatWritersSeries is to tempt you to read great literature: the novels, histories, poems, and news stories that won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. The song lyrics and screenplays that won the Grammy and Tony Awards.

Because they will change you.

Great literature is the lightning bolt that will pierce your skull, illuminate your mind, and set your tongue on fire.

“For as you read, so will you speak and write.”

Roy H. Williams had a marvelous English teacher during his junior and senior years of high school in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Her name was Linn Ball.

She taught him to hear the music of great writing and dance to it.

She taught him to lift his eyes to the sky so that he could fly.

She taught him to hear the music of unexpected words as they bang into each other and fill the movie screen of the mind with scenes that are startling and true.

He wants to do the same for you.

Moments before I began writing this Monday Monday Memo to you, I posted on Youtube a musical video of a poem written in 1929 by Ogden Nash.

The title of that poem is “No Doctors Today, Thank You.” You can see and hear that Youtube performance in today’s rabbit hole.

This is it:

They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful,

well, today I feel euphorian,

Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetite of a

Victorian.

Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,

Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle

any swashes?

This is my euphorian day,

I will ring welkin and before anybody answers I will run away.

I will tame me a caribou

And bedeck it with marabou.

I will pen me my memoirs.

Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!

I wasn’t much of a hand for the boudoirs,

I was generally to be found where the food was.

Does anybody want any flotsam?

I’ve gotsam.

Does anybody want any jetsam?

I can getsam.

I can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer,

I can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer.

I can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the laces because I am wearing moccasins,

And I practically know the difference between serums and antitoccasins.

Kind people, don’t think me purse-proud, don’t set me down as vainglorious,

I’m just a little euphorious.

I’m just a little euphorious.

I want you to dance.

I want you to fly.

I want the movie screen of your mind to be filled with scenes that are startling and true.

I want you to feel euphorious.

Roy H. Williams

Regular viewers of cable news will instantly recognize Arthur Lih and his ubiquitous commercials for LifeVac, the non-invasive rescue device he invented to save choking victims when the Heimlich maneuver and other traditional methods fail. To date, his invention is credited with saving 5,450-plus lives. As Arthur shares with roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, developing a life-saving device is one challenge. Building a company around it and sustaining that business in a highly regulated, highly competitive environment is exponentially harder. Arthur’s insights are indispensable for entrepreneurs, business owners, and inventors committed to developing products that matter — and companies that endure. You can hear the entire, amazing story at MondayMorningRadio.com

Jeremiah is remembered today as “the weeping prophet.”

He was earnest, sincere, and entirely correct, but no one wants to be told that they have an inescapable appointment with a dentist and a gastroenterologist to receive a simultaneous root canal and colonoscopy in the outdoors during a rainstorm.

Jeremiah painted a dark sky without a single ray of sunlight shining through. This is why no one ever gave Jeremiah a microphone, an audience, and a big pile of money to be their guest speaker.

Polyanna was 11 years old in 1913, and she still rides around on her adorable little pony radiating sunshine and rainbows everywhere she goes. Pollyanna tells everyone who will listen that a magical genie will give you whatever you want if you just smile and laugh and think happy thoughts.

Pollyanna is even less popular than Jeremiah. I promise I’m not making this up.

Google tells me that Jeremiah remains a popular name for boys, always ranked in the top 100. Pollyanna is not nearly so popular among girls. It currently ranks somewhere between number 8,284 and number 13,776.

Jeremiah and Pollyanna became the topic of conversation while I was comparing notes with Ryan Deiss and Jet Eisenberg and Robert Grebe during lunch last week. We were trying to figure out why we were suddenly seeing a sharp uptick in public speaking requests.

We all agreed that a general feeling of unrest is shining out of every television screen and blowing through the ductwork of every home in America.

That’s when Deiss said,

“No one wants Jeremiah. No one wants Pollyanna. People are looking for someone who is aware of current difficulties, but who can also see a clear path forward.”

It was one of those moments when everyone at the table instantly knew that Truth had been spoken.

No one wants to hear the gloom and doom of Jeremiah right now. And no one wants to ride the pony or drink the sugarwater of Pollyanna.

People are just looking for a promising path forward.

My partner Todd Liles has been trying to tell me this for several months, but Ryan Deiss was able to condense it into a metaphor of paired opposites, the lightning bolt that is most likely to pierce my hard head and illuminate my mind

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last of the Five Good Emperors of Rome. Eighteen hundred years ago he wrote,

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in the same year that Jesus was born. Late in his life, Seneca said,

“True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence on the future.”

But Jesus had already said the same thing thirty years earlier during his famous Sermon on the Mount. Jesus was teaching us to live in the present when he said,

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Do not fret about an imaginary future.

You will deal with the actual future when it arrives.

Roy H. Williams

The things that bring us joy are subjective and personal and uniquely our own.

Can we talk for a moment about joy?

Joy is a mixture of appreciation and wonder.

You cannot appreciate something and be filled with wonder by it without also having a feeling of thankfulness for it.

Every garden of joy is rooted in the soil of gratitude.

Do not confuse pleasure with joy.

Pleasure is superficial and outward, barely skin-deep. But joy finds its rhythm in the beating of your heart and its home in the marrow of your bones.

You and I do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons each day. But what do you do just for the joy of it?

What do you do that makes you feel like you?

Every great consultant finds joy in the success of the people they advise.

Gary and Stephen help businesses grow by crafting totally true stories to tell the public.

Their stories are intensely interesting.

Yesterday Stephen told me something that fascinated me beyond words.

In a business category that is not interesting, in a trade area of barely a million people, a man built a business to about 5 million dollars a year before walking slowly backwards to 3.7 million.

Then he met Stephen.

Stephen guided that business owner to 12 million a year through better storytelling. Thirteen months ago that same business owner hired a bright young woman to become his social media marketer. He generously paid expensive social media consultants to train her.

When the bright young woman told Stephen what she had learned from these experts, Stephen asked his partner Gary if he would share his contrarian perspective with her.

In the end, the bright young woman and the business owner asked Gary to become her coach.

In 2025, that business had more than 50 million facebook views as a direct result of Gary’s coaching and the dedicated efforts of that young woman. Last month – in the 31 days of January, 2026 – that business had more than 12-and-a half million views on Facebook.

I love that story and I admire that business owner and the young woman he hired.

I am also extremely proud of Stephen and Gary.

In a fit of curiosity, I just now divided 31 days into 12-and-a half million views.

We’re talking about 403,000 views per day, which is 16,000 views per hour, which is 280 views per minute.

We’re talking about 4.7 views per second, 24 hours a day for 31 days.

Friends, I’m feeling joy.

Roy H. Williams

Do you find yourself wondering what is going to happen next?

You are not the only person who has that question echoing in their mind. Billions of people are feeling this way around the world.

Instability creates anxiety and uncertainty causes worry.

That’s why the price of gold has been shooting upwards like a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July.

The stock exchange is a short-term barometer of American investor confidence.

The price of gold is a long-term barometer of the entire world’s confidence in the future.

Gold was $265 an ounce in the year 2000.

It had climbed to $1,185 an ounce by 2013 as people all over the world began to bicker at ever higher levels of intensity.

Driven by concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, the price of gold exceeded $2,000 an ounce for the first time in history on August 4, 2020.

Gold climbed to more than $3,000 an ounce on March 14, 2025 as the world grew anxious about “trade war tensions” according to Business Insider.

Just seven months later – on October 8, 2025 – gold exceeded $4,000 an ounce. Reuters said the reason was “geopolitical and economic uncertainty.”

That was less than 4 months ago.

At the time of this writing – Wednesday, January 28, 2026 – gold is at $5,565.40 per ounce.

Did you realize that the price of gold has climbed from $3000/ounce to $5,565/ounce in less than 11 months?

Instability creates anxiety and uncertainty causes worry.

The price of gold rises as the world gets nervous and consumer confidence falls.

Uncertain about the future, people are becoming increasingly hesitant to spend money.

LOCAL OPPORTUNITY:

When their sales volume falls below last year’s sales volume, the first reaction of most business owners is to blame the marketing team. Their second reaction is to reduce their advertising, lay off some people, and hunker down.

This creates an amazing opportunity for courageous business owners to grow their market share.

Your ads stand out when your competitors go silent.

Selling is a transfer of confidence. When the customer doesn’t have confidence that today is the right day, or that your price is the right price, or that your company is the right company to trust, your only option is to transfer your confidence to them.

When you have successfully transferred your confidence to your customer, they will know that today is the right day, your price is the right price, and your company is the company to trust.

But this takes

1. a convincing message

2. rock-solid courage

3. staying power.

Do you have the financial staying power to win droves of new customers when margins are shrinking? More importantly, do you have the emotional staying power?

I believe that 2026 will be a year of anxiety and opportunity. You can duck and cover, or you can reach upward and rise.

You cannot change your circumstances, but you can change your actions.

Will you shrink, or will you rise?

Roy H. Williams

Here’s a Little Tidbit of News for You: the wizard has been handsomely paid to appear in a new movie about the global economy and his book “Pendulum” that he wrote in 2012. That movie will be shown in movie theaters across America, but only to private audiences. Roy said to the producer,

“The Pendulum of western society does NOT predict the economy. It predicts ONLY that society will fracture and social violence will escalate for a period of ten years as we approach the zenith of a ‘WE’, which happened in 2023. Then it will slowly subside for the next ten years. The zenith of a ‘WE’ occurs only once every 80 years.”

When this private movie has been produced and is available to be seen, we’ll let you know. Also, roving reporter Rotbart in still in Washington D.C. researching his next big book, but he’ll be back with new episodes of Monday Morning Radio in just a few more weeks.

Thank you for subscribing to the Monday Morning Memo.

Steel shops are notoriously noisy, but when we heard “Schooolboy!” ring out above the cacophony of hammers and grinders, we would swivel our heads toward the sound and begin walking toward whomever was looking at us.

“Hard, dirty and dangerous” describes the work and the men we worked with.

To call them “drunks, deviants, and derelicts” would certainly be less kind, but no less accurate.

There were also 8 or 9 solid family men, most of whom were foremen and supervisors.

The oil coolers we built were the size of a two-car garage. And several times a day these metal monsters would be lifted 5 or 6 feet off the ground by an overhead crane and go swinging through the air to another part of the shop as far as 300 feet away.

Heavy steel flying through the air is entirely unforgiving. One of my responsibilities was to drive injured guys to the hospital. But few of my bloody passengers were injured in accidents. Most of them were injured in fistfights with coworkers.

When we were both 16, David and I were joined by a boy named Jay. Dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that was decidedly not English, Irish, Scottish, or German. We liked him immediately.

David put a quarter into the machine and yanked a Pepsi from its mechanical jaws. He handed it to Jay and asked, “Are you some kind of Puerto Rikkan or something?”

Jay scowled and said, “No, I ain’t no dang Rikkan.”

David smiled, clicked his Pepsi bottle against the one that Jay was holding, took a long drink, then said, “It’s good to meet you, Rikkan.”

We found out later that Jay was Italian, but his name was Rikkan from that day forward.

A few days later, Rikkan began calling David “Cliff” and my name somehow became “Dean.” Rikkan never told us why he chose those names, but he refused to call us anything else, so David and I fell into line. I began calling him Cliff and he began calling me Dean.

Jay, David and Roy became Rikkan, Cliff and Dean for the next 3 years. Utterly absurd, but completely true.

Devin Wright has a sparkling laugh and I’ve always enjoyed hearing it.

So when Devin began working with me 20 years ago, I would walk into his office each afternoon and ask a ridiculous question. Devin would laugh his sparkling laugh and I would walk away smiling.

One day I popped my head into his office and looked at him quizzically, as though I was confused. He looked back at me, equally puzzled. With a completely straight face, I asked “Did you get a spray tan?”

For once, Devin didn’t laugh. He vigorously denied it, utterly aghast that I would ever think that he was so vain and shallow that he would ever stoop to such a ridiculous…

I quit listening after that.

So now you know how “Spraytan” was born.

Jacob Harrison became “Boxwine” in a similar fashion,

Dave Cullen became “Skunkmeat”

Howard Wolowitz became “Fruit Loops”

George Costanza became “KoKo”

and Jeffrey Eisenberg became “Jet.”

No, “Jet” is not a reduction of Jeffrey.

When we agreed to meet for lunch last week, Jeffrey suggested by text that we meet at 1300 hours.

I texted him back, “I never knew that you were in the Air Force. Did you fly fighter jets?”

If all of this sounds lowbrow, redneck, hick, uncultured, ill-refined, outmoded, outdated, dinosaur-ish and in poor taste, I agree.

But no one can spend 4 impressionable years working with drunks, deviants, and derelicts and walk away without at least one bad habit.

Roy H. Williams

Dean Rotbart is taking a short Sabbatical from Monday Morning Radio for the next few weeks to travel across America gathering detailed information for an extremely important new book that he is writing. We have been sworn to secrecy not to tell you what this new book is about, because if it became known, it would make Dean’s research much more difficult to accomplish.

In his younger years, our roving reporter Rotbart was a Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Investigative reporting is his superpower. But Dean has promised us that when his research is complete and his new book has been published, all will be revealed.

But jump into the rabbit hole anyway! Indy Beagle has some treats for you.

Never tell a person that their child is ugly. Every child is the trigger on the gun of their parent’s rage.

If you say, “I am only speaking the truth,” you can be sure that the child’s parent will just as truthfully amputate you from their life and throw shade at the memory of your name forever.

“The Proper Priorities of Government” is a beautiful child that lives in the brain of every citizen. And that child is uniquely their own.

Do you remember what I told you about children?

AI is the newest baby in every family.

I am a writer. My words are my children. If you tell me that your AI can replace me as a writer, I will know you to be a fool and a tragic waste of oxygen and skin.

Can AI write better than you? If your words are not bone of your bone, blood of your blood, and flesh of your flesh, then yes, it probably can.

When I began production on the “Great Writers Series,” I sent several of my friends a few of the AI-produced performances of the 8,000 grand passages of literature that I have laboriously transcribed from books over the past 50 years.

When I sent those music-enhanced performances, I pulled the triggers on the guns that are carried by all of the musicians in my life.

Shortly after being riddled with bullets,

I received this text from Ryan Deiss on December 26, 2025, at 7:24AM:

Paul Graham on why you shouldn’t write with Al:

“In preindustrial times most people’s jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be. It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.”

This was my reply to Ryan’s text:

“Everyone loves AI to do the things they hate, but they hate AI when it does the things they love. I am no different. I think AI is dangerous and stupid and evil when it replaces writers. But I use it enthusiastically to make musical productions instantly possible. I would otherwise have had to spend many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create with musicians what I can create with Suno.com in a day. Musicians are well within their rights to resent me and be disgusted with me when I use AI to replace them.”

The Great Writers Series will continue because it is important to me.

If you click the image at the top of this page, you will see another clickable image. Below that clickable image is one of the first Youtube shorts – formatted for your phone – that I will be uploading once a day for as long as I am able to do so.

If you click that performance and enjoy it, and would like to receive a new one each day, you can click through to Youtube and subscribe.

If you do not like the performance, that’s 100% okay as long as you don’t tell me about it.

All of my children are beautiful, almost as beautiful as yours.

Roy H. Williams

I’m not sure how Google would define “equity,” but my definition of equity is “stored value.”

As a homeowner, you understand home equity as the stored value that it offers you.

Your equity in your home is a product of all the time, energy, and money that you have put into it, plus the value that has been added by the passage of time.

Relational equity is accumulated in the same way.

“What have we invested in each other? What have we endured? How many years have we traveled through life together?”

Relational equity is why we tolerate annoyances and troubles from the people we love. They have added value to our lives, so they have relational equity in us.

Likewise, customer-bonding ads create relational equity between today’s businesses and tomorrow’s customers. They do this by highlighting shared perspectives, beliefs, and values.

Customer-bonding ads communicate authenticity, and vulnerability. And they are always there, 52 weeks a year. Authenticity, vulnerability, and the passage of time are not easy to fake or accelerate.

Keep those things in mind as you read on.

2. AI

Eighty-seven Wizards of Ads who stay in regular touch with nearly 1,000 businesses are a reliable finger on the pulse of what is happening.

This is what is happening:

Google Search results have been altered in a dramatic and unexpected way. Some companies have benefited greatly from Google’s new methodology while other companies have been devastated by it.

You’ll understand what separates the winners from the losers in just a moment.

With 6,000 employees, Edelman is the world’s largest PR agency. They help companies worldwide manage their reputations and trust through stories published in mass media.

Edelman has been doing what they do since 1952.

On October 27, 2025, Christmas decorations were vibrating in anticipation of replacing Halloween decor when Brent Nelson – Chief Strategy Officer at Edelman – was quoted in Ad Age magazine.

Explaining why Google dramatically expanded their results-ranking criteria, Nelson said,

“What drives visibility isn’t your ad budget or keyword bids; it’s earned media. Analysis shows that 90% of what appears in AI summaries is ‘earned-driven’—pulled from reviews, press, blogs, forums and cultural chatter. Paid now plays a different role, amplifying what’s already there.”

“The new shelf space isn’t a store; it’s the AI summary. Brands need to understand their earned footprint across AI-generated answers.”

“Who gets cited? Who’s trusted? Who’s missing? That’s the new baseline of visibility.”

In other words, Google is now rewarding Relational Equity.

3. A Prediction

Hundreds of new companies are about to leap into the Public Relations business. Their goal will be to get their clients mentioned in online press, blogs, forums and cultural chatter.

PR is an easy business to get into. It won’t be long before you are approached by someone who has a PR solution to help you improve your AEO (Ask Engine Optimization).

If you remember any of today’s Monday Morning Memo, let it be this:

“If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t let anyone convince you to pay money to say it.”

Company slogans, mush-mouth clichés and traditional ad-speak are not going to move the needle.

Every month or two, you are going to need something new, exciting, different, and entirely real to say.

4. A Suggestion

Radio stations would be smart to start a daily or weekly blog that is fun, quick, entertaining, easy-to-read, and full of valuable things that every consumer would want to know about.

If I owned a station in Austin, I would call my blog “Cool Things Austin Needs to Know”

If my blog was well written and full of actionable information and enough people got into the habit of scanning it each day, my radio station could become an important contributor to the online press, blogs, forums and cultural chatter that are now so very important.

Could a Radio station become a major online player in their community? Absolutely!

Remember, radio stations have the power to popularize their online blogs FOR FREE. Announcers could quote interesting tidbits from it each day and build a massive readership. Offline radio excitement would become online blog excitement.

Do I expect that radio stations will do this? Nope.

But if a few do dare to do it, do I expect them to be successful? Nope.

These are the four ways that their bosses will force them to screw it up.

1. They will try to make it a source of direct revenue.

2. They won’t write about anything or anyone who doesn’t advertise on their station.

3. They will allow advertisers to influence what is said about them in the blog.

4. It will be badly written, boring, and of no value to anyone.

But it would absolutely work if they did it right.

5. Closing comments

We are overwhelmed by a Three Ring Circus of media: online, offline, local, national, audio, video, print, outdoor, broadcast, streaming, digital, analog, physical, old-school, new-school, professional, amateur, full-color and black-and-white.

It is never the media that makes the message work.

It is always the message that makes the media work.

If you don’t have anything interesting to say,

don’t let anyone convince you to pay money to say it.

Roy H. Williams

Lots of people know how to make money. But far fewer understand how to protect it, manage it, and plan for the long arc of life once the hard work of earning is done. Jeffrey Panik brings clarity to complex financial decisions. Listen and learn as Jeffrey shares with roving reporter Rotbart his emphasis on individualized planning, long-term thinking, and his belief that communication is absolutely essential between spouses, across generations, and with trusted advisors.

Drawing stories from his professional experience and from his personal history, Jeffrey will shake your beliefs and challenge your assumptions about financial planning and retirement readiness.

Jeffrey’s BIG TRUTH can be summarized in just six words: “Clarity today can prevent regret tomorrow.” We’ll say hello and shake your hand the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

He was a man of character, integrity, and kindness.

He was quiet, smiled a lot, and was a wonderful listener.

Paul’s humility, kindness, and confidence gave him dignity and authority in the eyes of everyone who knew him.

He was happily married and had three little girls. On the day his fourth little girl was born he walked into a storm that could easily have ripped him apart.

It was with great heaviness of heart that Doctor Franklin told him that there was a problem with the Rh factor in the little girl’s blood and that she was almost certainly going to die.

She was barely, barely, barely hanging on.

With tears in his eyes Doctor Franklin told him, “And your wife is also fading fast.” Doctor Franklin dropped his chin to his chest as teardrops splashed on his shoes.

An ambulance rushed both mother and daughter to a larger hospital in a larger town.

Paul was all alone with eighty-five cents an hour and three little girls.

Several hours later, a happy and rejoicing Doc Franklin told Paul that both mother and daughter were going to live!

They were going to live.

The medical bill was more than a thousand dollars and there was no insurance; just a husband and wife and four little girls and 85 cents an hour.

Being a man of integrity, Paul went to see Doc Franklin the next day to set up a payment plan for paying that thousand-dollar medical bill.

Doc Franklin said, “What medical bill?”

Paul was confused, and it showed on his face.

Old Doctor Franklin spoke plainly,

“There is no medical bill. You do not owe any money. Just be a good father to those girls.”

“Just be a good father to those girls.”

I can testify that he was a good father to those girls. I met Paul Compton when I was 14 years old and in love with his daughter, the one who nearly died on the day she was born.

Here’s how I met him.

One week prior to beginning my freshman year in high school, my mother received an invitation to come to an open house at the school on a Tuesday night where she could meet Coach Jerry Meeks, my home room teacher.

He taught Oklahoma History, of course.

Attached to that letter was a list of all the other students who would be in my first-hour class.

I saw that Pennie Compton was going to be in that class with me. She knew who I was, but we had never actually met. This would be the first time that we would be in class together.

Mom couldn’t go that night, which suited me fine. I had a plan of my own.

I was the first person to arrive. The parking lot was empty except for the cars of the teachers. I met Coach Meeks, then took a seat at a desk in the back row. About 30 minutes later, a tall man came walking in with his wife and the girl that I knew I was going to marry.

After Paul and his wife exchanged pleasantries with Coach Meeks, I walked up to him, introduced myself, then shook his hand as I smiled and said,

“My name is Roy Williams and you’re going to be seeing a lot of me.”

Last week Princess Pennie and I celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary.

Paul never criticized me or gave me advice unless I asked for it. But when I did ask for it, he would tell what he thought, along with some true stories from his own life that explained why he believed what he believed.

He always spoke slowly and gave me his full attention. His confidence in me was a great encouragement.

In all the decades that I knew Paul Compton, I never saw him raise his head from prayer without having tears on his cheeks. When Paul talked to God, you knew that God was listening.

I always looked forward to having him pray for me.

He was the best man I ever knew.

Roy H. Williams

Monica Ballard knows why marketing campaigns fail. It’s not for lack of clever slogans, talented spokespeople, or catchy jingles. Monica says ad people fail when they try to project “perfection” rather than authenticity, which requires that you acknowledge the struggles and risks inherent in running a business. Monica is a veteran marketing strategist, storyteller, and one of the elite Wizard of Ads partners.

Drawing on her background in theater, radio, and live performance, Monica explains to roving reporter Rotbart and deputy rover Maxwell why empathy and emotional honesty create bonds with customers that no discount or gimmick ever could. “Being real isn’t a liability,” Monica assures us. “It is a decisive competitive advantage.” Get Real with Monica Ballard at MondayMorningRadio.com

“There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?”

I’ll tell you who said that in just a minute.

Here’s another direct quote:

“It’s life or death for America, people tell you. Angry debates about taxes, religion and race relations inflame the newspapers. Everyone is talking politics: your spouse, your teenage daughter, your boss, your grocer. Neighbors eye you suspiciously, pressing you to buy local. Angry crowds gather, smelling of booze and threatening violence; their leaders wink, confident that the ends justify the means. The stores have sold out of guns.”*

Are you ready to hear the final two sentences?

“It’s 1775 in Britain’s American colonies. Whose side are you on?”*

That first quote about “great tension in the world” and men being “unhappy and confused” came from John Steinbeck in 1941. I’ll bet you thought it was more recent, didn’t you?

There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because Solomon said it 3,000 years ago in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Here’s my point: Yes, the world is in a state of extremis, but we have always been in a state of extremis.

So put it behind you. Get over it.

Better yet, use your recovery from extremis to unleash joy, passion, a flood of creativity, and a flamelike focus that will take you to places you have never been.

When you recover from a state of extremis, you open a trapdoor to the unconscious mind. It is a waterfall that doesn’t fall downward, but gushes upward into the sky.

If you want to ride that waterfall, all you have to do is exit your extremis. Put it behind you. Get over it.

Quit giving your attention to the news.

Do not say to yourself,

“But if everyone quit paying attention to the news, there would be no societal outrage, no oversight, no accountability!”

Let me make this clear to you. There is zero chance that everyone is going to quit giving their attention to the news. It’s an addiction like any other. In fact, I’m worried that you won’t have the strength, the willpower, or the discipline to turn away from it yourself.

If you monitor the news for the rest of your life, what are the chances that doing so will change anything at all, even a tiny bit? Does being aware of things that are beyond your control somehow give you the ability to change those things?

Turn away from the dark side, Luke Skywalker. Embrace the light.

And have a happy, new, year.

Roy H. Williams

PS – I gathered a few dozen quotes from Dorothy Parker and made two powerful productions from them. The first production is 4 minutes and 24 seconds long and was extracted from writings that Dorothy published in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1920s.

The second production is 5 minutes and 9 seconds and was compiled from the writings of Dorothy’s later years. The character arc between the two performances is sobering. You’ll find both of them on the first page of the rabbit hole. Click the image at the top of the Monday Morning Memo for December 29, 2025, and you’ll be there. – Aroo, Indy Beagle.

*Caitlin Fitz, “The Accidental Patriots”, The Atlantic, Dec. 2016

Four-time Olympian and bestselling author Ruben Gonzalez joins roving reporter Rotbart today for a conversation about perseverance, belief, and the wisdom of following leaders who have proven themselves to be worthy of your trust. Ruben Gonzalez is unusual among Olympians.

He didn’t begin competing at an elite level until his mid-20s, and he never used his lack of natural ability as an excuse for falling short.

Ruben’s career in sports and in life has been built upon desire, discipline, and stubbornness. Ruben refuses to quit. His message to you is about how to build your courage through small daily choices, how to manage risk intelligently rather than avoid it, and how to measure your success, not through your bank account, but through the impact you have on others. Meet Ruben Gonzalez and become a happier person at MondayMorningRadio.com.

These are my secret rules for making that happen:

1. Lead your listener toward a conclusion and then let them arrive at it on their own. If you state a conclusion and then try to support it with evidence, you are robbing your listener of the joy of discovery.
2. Give your listener the new, the surprising, and the different.
3. If you must give them old information, reframe it; give it to them from a new perspective, so that they will see it again for the first time.
4. Leave out the parts that people skip.

My Christmas gift to you is The Story of the Universe According to Roy.

I call it “Way Back in the Long Ago.” You will find it at TribalGospel.com

It is an auditory opera, a campfire story of God and the Universe told under a starfilled sky by an old man who is accompanied by musicians who sit at the furthest edges of that circle of light.

But your seat is closer.

You feel the warmth of the fire as it dances the dance of the story, and the stars twinkle their agreement with glittering laughter.

This is chapter one.

Way back in the long ago, the maker spoke, and light exploded across the darkness. Energy radiated across the nothing.

Time and space and order appeared from the nothing of the long ago.

Bits of energy shot like shrapnel from a bomb into the grid that was created by the ordering of the nothing. Bits of energy bonded with other bits to become great lumps that went spinning across the grid.

Their spinning caused these lumps to become spherical.

Some of the spheres were made of gasses; ice giants and dwarfs, gas giants and dwarfs, and suns of every size and temperature were created by the energy within them.

Others of those spheres became great rocks.

Oxygen bonded to hydrogen so that water splashed in the hollows of those rocks.

The maker smiled.

Algae and moss and grass and trees emerged, and the maker smiled again.

Winged creatures darted through the air and swimming creatures darted through the sea, and the maker smiled again.

And then creatures appeared on the rock itself. Creatures appeared on the land.

The maker looked at us and decided to make us into little makers with the power to choose whatever we would choose. We have the authority to say “yes,” and the authority to say “no,” as we stare into the eyes of the maker.

The maker gave us this watery rock we live upon, and complete authority over it.

We have the freedom to be guided by our choices. We are no longer the captives of our instincts.

The maker is not held captive by time and space. The maker created time and space from the nothing.

It is only we – you and me – who measure time and space.

Our history of deciding for ourselves and living with the consequences has not been a good history.

Seven billion of us are crammed onto a rock that circles an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through the nothing… at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.

We are passengers on a world spinning out of control.

Having wrongly been told that the maker is in control, we blame the maker for every sadness.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

I hope you will take an hour to enjoy my little campfire opera.

Merry Christmas.

Roy H. Williams

*The same is true of the best jokes and the best ads.

This week, roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, offer their third annual holiday encore of their inspirational Yuletide tale, A Christmas Day Miracle, by Dean and Talya Rotbart. First published in 2021, A Christmas Day Miracle has become a holiday favorite. It is the true story of a man, Riyaz Adat, on death’s doorstep; and his devoted wife, Margaret. The story is a poignant reminder of the wonder and power of life’s unexpected blessings. The telling will begin as soon as you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

But they are right there!

Right there inside you.

Oh, I see. You have something that is keeping you from seeing and feeling and living the sparkling clear and happy times that are struggling to rise up from the depths of your soul.

I see that you are worried.

That’s the problem.

Worry is the cork that keeps the champagne of happiness from spraying a smile on your face and a sparkle in your eye and joy into your heart

If you will allow me, I will try to do for you what Julius Rosenwald and Thomas Jefferson did for me.

Julius Rosenwald was an immensely successful businessman who used his money – all of it – to help people rise above their circumstances and experience the wonders of the world in which they lived.

This is what Julius Rosenwald wrote to me 100 years ago:

“Early in my business career I learned the folly of worrying about anything. I have always worked as hard as I could, but when a thing went wrong and could not be righted, I dismissed it from my mind.”

Friend, when a thing goes wrong and cannot be righted, dismiss it from your mind.

An army of people surround us whose only job is to make us fearful and afraid. You must not allow these people to capture your attention.

Journalists have been shouting deceptive and inflammatory headlines at us since the days of the American Revolution.

But the journalists and podcasters of today have discovered new ways of shouting. Emails and websites and Youtube and cable and streaming services promise, pledge and swear to keep us highly informed and deeply unhappy. They feed our worries like stokers feeding firewood into the boilers of steam trains.

They want us to ride on their rails of steel so that they can take us where they want us to go.

Don’t ride their train. Jump off of it. Thomas Jefferson did.

He said,

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”

He went on to say,

“Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

Thomas Jefferson avoided the news and said he was infinitely the happier for it.

You should do it, too.

Julius Rosenwald and Thomas Jefferson discovered that Jesus was telling the truth in Matthew chapter six when he said,

“Do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Don’t worry.

Be happy.

Roy H. Williams

David Ackert is making his list and checking it twice — but he’s no Santa Claus. The gifts David brings are powerful insights for professionals who want to grow. David Ackert challenges the long-held belief that success depends on building a massive network of connections. In his view, quantity is a distraction. The thing to do is cultivate a small, curated list of at least 9 not more than 30 “high-value” relationships with people who have the ability to help you reach your goals.

Send everyone else a Christmas card.

Rotbart goes roving with David Ackert this week, at MondayMorningRadio.com

That is the advice the banner gives. Standing behind that banner, and a little to the right, are a group of goats who are clearly encouraging you to touch the fence. You can see it in their eyes and in the smirk at the corners of their little goat mouths.

All of that was in the photo that arrived with a text from my friend, Dan, along with this note.

“We have a new side-venture that uses goats as a land clearing crew for hire, and recently have set up a mobile cam to keep an eye on them while on the job.”

Although I do make up things for a living, I promise I am not making this up.

Twenty-three minutes later, I received another text from another friend.

“I have a problem. Do you know in ‘Peter Pan’ where Peter loses his shadow. I’ve seem to have lost my shadow. I used to be a very creative person. Somewhere over the last 5 years due to life’s circumstances I seem to have misplaced my creativity. I feel almost certain that I began giving out far more than I was taking in. I lost my wonder and my awe for the world. I’m not learning and growing, and it has caught up with me. If you have any insight or direction, it would be truly helpful. Thanks friend.”

I responded, “Is this for real?”

My friend said, “Yes, for real.”

I said, “You need to have a place to escape. A good fiction book can take you into an alternate reality where you don’t have any obligations, or people who need something from you. Buy a copy of ‘Cryptonomicon’ by Neal Stephenson. You’ll meet a guy named Shaftoe. I’ve known him for more than 20 years.”

My friend said, “Thank you. I’ll tell him you said hello.”

Both of those texts arrived, “Ping… Ping,” shortly after I posted the second restaurant review I have ever written.

Heads Up, friends!

Real pizza ovens. Real flames. Real char on the bottom of the crazy-good crust. You’ll never be the same. This pizza is SO GOOD that it’s illegal in 7 states and under investigation in 12 more. So good you’ll walk outside and look up at the stars and howl at the moon like a werewolf.

I have reviewed very few things during my 67 years because, frankly, there just aren’t that many things out there that are really remarkable. DeSano Pizzeria Napoletana is remarkable. Not the atmosphere. It’s plain, plain, plain. Nothing special. But the food is MAGNIFICO! (On Slaughter just west of Mopac, in front of Alamo Drafthouse.) And the people who work there are definitely part of the magic. They are excited about what they are doing, and their excitement is contagious.

We ordered a spinach salad. Best spinach salad I’ve ever had! I mean that. And big enough for two people. I looked at my wife (We’re having our 50th anniversary next year) and I said, “These people are buying ONLY the very best ingredients. They’s spending their money on the food, not the decor.” (We were both smiling so hard for so long that my face aches.)

Order the Verdura pizza. Be aware that it does NOT have marinara sauce. You’ll be throwing rocks at marinara sauce after you’ve eaten the Verdura. It’s really simple: perfect crust, extraordinary cheese, fresh spinach, roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic. HEAVEN.

Or you can go old school and get a pizza with red sauce: The San Gennaro has tomato sauce, sausage, peppadew peppers, caramelized onions, garlic, and cheese so good that you’ll slap yourself. The peppadew peppers are the magic.

No fountain drinks, but they’ve got big coolers full of bottles and cans of everything you want. Get a big bottle of San Pellegrino and you’ll leave this place with an Italian accent.

This pizza is NOT greasy. You will feel fabulous after you eat it.

This is NOT a slanted review left by someone who has a connection to that company. I have no connection whatsoever to that company or to any of these people and I owe them absolutely nothing except my gratitude for making pizza the way that God intended.

Amen.

My goal for November 20th was to wake up twice.

It obviously worked out, or you wouldn’t be reading this. I had a very weird heart surgery and the doctor who explained the risks of that surgery to me might as well have said, “Make peace with your God.” But rather than answer 80,000 emails from those of you who will ask for more details, how about I just put it in the rabbit hole for you? Click the image of the goats at the top of this page – the Monday Morning Memo for December 8, 2025 – and you’ll be on page one of the rabbit hole.

But the most surprising thing was what happened this morning.

Daniel Whittington asked me to be a guest on his podcast. He said he wanted to capture the story of how and why Wizard Academy came into being. There was a moment when my throat got tight and I had to say, “Give me a moment.”

I’m not sure when that episode will be released.

People complain about the high cost of living. The question I’ve always wanted to ask them is, “Compared to what?”

Roy H. Williams

The first project is an audiobook containing 18 chapters that span 75 fascinating minutes. Your MondayMorningMemo on December 22nd will contain the following invitation:

The tribe encircling the campfire is about to listen to a group of old men tell “The Story of the Long Ago.” You can listen, too, if you like.

That invitation will be coming your way on December 22nd.

The other project that I will be launching in January or February is an ongoing weekly series called “The Great Writer Series.”

My goal is simple: I want to reawaken the world to the power of well-told stories. That’s it. I have no other agenda. I just want people to remember what great writing sounds like.

Today I’ve got 3 different samples for you. Each is about 2 minutes long. Click the hyperlinks if you want to hear my people read to you.

This first one is an obscure poem by Robert Frost called, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings.”

I have asked Amir Amani to read it.

The bearer of evil tidings,

When he was halfway there,

Remembered that evil tidings

Were a dangerous thing to bear.

So when he came to the parting

Where one road led to the throne

And one went off to the mountains

And into the wild unknown,

He took the one to the mountains.

He ran through the Vale of Cashmere,

He ran through the rhododendrons

Till he came to the land of Pamir.

And there in a precipice valley

A girl of his age he met

Took him home to her bower,

Or he might be running yet.

She taught him her tribe’s religion:

How ages and ages since

A princess en route to China

To marry a Persian prince

Had been found with child; and her army

Had come to a troubled halt.

And though a god was the father

And nobody else at fault,

It had seemed discreet to remain there

And neither go on nor back.

So they stayed and declared a village

There in the land of the Yak.

And the child that came of the princess

Established a royal line,

And his mandates were given heed to

Because he was born divine.

And that was why there were people

On one Himalayan shelf;

And the bearer of evil tidings

Decided to stay there himself.

At least he had this in common

With the race he chose to adopt:

They had both of them had their reasons

For stopping where they had stopped.

As for evil tidings,

Belshazzar’s overthrow,

Why hurry to tell Belshazzar

What soon enough he would know?

Amor Towles will be our second example. He has given us literary wonders like “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway.” This excerpt is from page 302 of his novel, “Table for Two.”

Big Bob Bigelow will read it to us.

Eve could not pinpoint when her dislike for lists began, but it must have been around the time she was twelve. It was in the basement of St. Mary’s, where she and the rest of the sixth graders were charged with memorizing the Ten Commandments.

“Thou shalt not this.” 


“Thou shalt not that.” 


“And thou shalt not the other thing.”

Then there was the list painted on the sign at the country club pool to remind the children there would be…

“No Running.” 


“No Diving.” 


“No Splashing.”

But most important was her mother’s ever-expanding list of what a young lady should not do. Like put her elbows on the table, or speak with her mouth full, or slug her little sister, even when she deserved it.

Yep. In Indiana, a young girl had good reason to suspect that lists were the foot soldiers of tyranny crafted for the sole purpose of bridling the unbridled. A quashing, squashing, squelching of the human spirit by means of itemization.

This third example is controversial. Tom Robbins passed away earlier this year at the age of 92. People either love or hate his novels. I happen to love them. This excerpt is from “Skinny Legs and All.” Tom Robbins was my brand of crazy.

Wild Willie Washington reads for us.

This sentence is made of lead. (And a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium).

This sentence is made of yak wool.

This sentence is made of sunlight and plums.

This sentence is made of ice.

This sentence is made from the blood of the poet.

This sentence was made in Japan.

This sentence glows in the dark.

This sentence was born with a caul.

This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer.

This sentence is a wino and doesn’t care who knows it.

Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections.

This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising.

This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph.

This sentence refuses to be diagrammed.

This sentence ran off with an adverb clause.

This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, which are loaded with preservatives.

This sentence leaks.

This sentence once spit in a book reviewer’s eye.

This sentence can do the funky chicken.

This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little.

This sentence is called “Speedoo,” but its real name is Mr. Earl.

This sentence may be pregnant.

This sentence suffered a split infinitive – and survived.

If this sentence has been a snake you would have bitten it.

This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving.

This sentence went to Woodstock.

And this little sentence went wee-wee-wee all the way home.

Roy H. Williams

Steve Wunker believes that business owners and CEOs who harness AI to transform their companies into super-high-performing organizations are like octopuses. They are functioning with nine brains, eight arms, three hearts. They adapt rapidly and possesses exceptional intelligence. Steve advises companies like Microsoft, Meta, Nike, and the World Bank, on innovation strategy. He sees the decentralized decision-making, lightning-fast problem-solving, and hyper-responsive behavior of the octopus as an ideal model for AI-empowered leadership. As Steve explains to roving reporter Rotbart, winning with AI doesn’t mean squeezing new tools into old systems. It requires leaders to rethink — even rewire — how their organizations operate, so they can swim with the intelligence and adaptability of the octopus. MondayMorningRadio.com!

Trees that live long do not grow quickly.

It requires patience to grow a tree that will endure.

The root word of patience is the Latin verb “pati.” It means “to suffer” or “to endure.”

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.

The second-best time is today.

A person with a purpose is a person on a mission.

A person on a mission is a person with a passion.

Passion is another strange word. It does not mean what you think it does.

The English word “passion” comes directly from the Latin noun “passio” which means “suffering.” If you have “compassion” for someone, it means that you are “suffering with them.” Every Easter we hear about “The Passion of the Christ.”

Patience and passion share the same Latin root. Pati is the noun. Passio is the verb. And they both mean suffering.

A person with a passion has a vision of the future for which they are willing to suffer.

The builder of a brand is the planter of a tree: a visionary missionary.

And their principal tool is storytelling.

Stories build personalities.

Stories build people.

Storytelling is world-building.

Stories build cultures.

Stories build brands that endure.

Be careful what you say.

A word of affirmation is a spark that can become a flame that will illuminate a person’s path into the future. A word of discord, disdain, or disharmony can quench that vital spark.

We carry the power of light and darkness in our tongues.

Be careful what you say.

You can build a brand with your stories.

You can build people, too.

Say the right things and you can build a life.

You can speak happiness.

You can build happiness.

Say the right things and you can live happiness.

Speak it. Build it.

Say it. Live it.

Roy H. Williams

PS “It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

– John Steinbeck

Eveline Shen is an operating-systems programmer — not for computers, but for people.

Eveline helps leaders rewire the limiting patterns that hold them back — including perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-sacrifice — and replace them with what she calls “courageous” actions. Her clients are primarily organizations advocating for social change, many of whom instinctively view business leaders and entrepreneurs not as partners, but as adversaries. But as Eveline explains to roving reporter Rotbart, everyone wins when they make a more deliberate effort to communicate with, understand, and learn from one another. It’s MondayMorningRadio.com

You can hear Roy read today’s MMMemo by clicking the “listen” link at the top of the page. Or you can hear it wailed by a tribal elder who is teaching the tribe around a campfire. Just click the play bar below. Crazy? Absolutely. – Indy Beagle

Your passions take you to your happy place.

I have friends who have a passion for sporting events on television. Others have a passion for gambling, and the paripatetic have a passion for traveling to all the far-flung places on this spinning rock we live upon.

People who have a passion for achievement live to make things different.

Planning and research puts a candle to the wick of some people. They go without sleep and burn bright throughout the night as they gather, collate, and organize information that will set the future on fire.

Your scars are the memories of bitter experiences.

The pain is gone, but the benefits of those experiences remain. Your scars help you see danger on the horizon.

Your scars are the diplomas of lessons you will never forget.

It is good to have scars.

But wounds… wounds are different.

The pain remains and it triggers you to act in ways that everyone notices but no one understands. Sometimes not even you.

I have known men whose only passion was to seduce every woman they encountered. Those men like to believe that they are “in love with falling in love.” But when you have known them long enough you will see a knife wound in their chest that has never healed. Way back in the long ago, they had a wife who began sleeping with another man. And ever since that day, they have been trying to become that man.

The pain of a wound is a powerful thing. It shouts, “Never again! Never again! Never again!”

I don’t believe that any of those men have ever figured out why they feel driven to become the living embodiment of the imaginary Don Juan, and I have never felt that it was my place to tell them.

Every person is formed by their passions, scars, and wounds. Even imaginary people.

All of the famous characters in literature were created from their passions, scars, and wounds.

Novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters know this. Ad writers do not. This is why most advertising is dull, dead, and untwitching.

When an ad writer is guided by the ambitions, demands, and expectations of their clients, you can expect to hear the glorious trumpets of a ringing call to action. “Come! Come now! Give me your money! Hurry! Hurry! I want your money Today! Today! Today! Act now! Don’t delay!”

We are not enchanted by these ads.

Did it ever occur to you that every successful brand is a character that lives in the mind of the customer?

A successful brand is driven by its passions, scars, and wounds.

Passion: Why does this brand exist? What is it chasing? What love does it represent?

Scars: What does it know? What has it learned? Why can I trust this brand?

Wounds: What is this brand trying to erase from the earth?

To what does it shout, “Never again! Never again! Never again!”

Roy H. Williams

Last week we talked about Business-to-Business advertising (B2B) and Niche Marketing with a long purchase cycle (Niche-L).

Today we talk about Niche Marketing with a short purchase cycle (Niche-S) and Business-to-Consumer advertising (B2C).

Let’s talk first about (Niche-S):

Niche Marketing with a Short purchase cycle will always be targeted to an affinity group. A Niche market is any self-selected group of insiders that has chosen to spend time, attention, and money on something that most people don’t care about.

Short-cycle Niche Marketing is mostly consumable products and services that are purchased on a regular basis by a self-selected group. Some examples of this would be bullets, fish hooks, tubes of oil paint, and those little cloth foot coverings worn by medical professionals in hospitals and air conditioning technicians in your home.

Niche Marketing with a Short purchase cycle is similar to B2B advertising: Features. Benefits. Price.

Now let’s talk about Business-to-Consumer advertising with a Short purchase cycle. (B2C-S)

Do you sell a small-ticket consumable product or service that a high percentage of the population will purchase regularly? You are selling Business-to-Consumer with a Short purchase cycle. Food, gasoline, and entertainment compose the majority of this category.

If you own a grocery store, a restaurant, a convenience store, a gas station, a hardware store, or an “everything” store that competes with Amazon and Wal-Mart, all you need is a high-visibility location, legendary signage, and a staff that delivers a positive customer experience. That’s it. That’s your advertising.

NOTE: If you want to drive immediate traffic, you will need

(1.) an irresistible offer

(2.) credible urgency

(3.) high-frequency repetition

If your ad doesn’t drive traffic,

(1.) your offer was weak

(2.) your urgency was not credible, or

(3.) you didn’t pound the drums loud enough

Now let’s talk about Business-to-Consumer advertising with a Long purchase cycle. (B2C-L)

If you sell a big-ticket product or service that a lot of Americans will buy “someday,” but only a fraction of one percent of the public is looking for it “today,” then you are in a B2C category with a Long purchase cycle.

This category requires patience, commitment, and mass media: primarily broadcast radio, broadcast television, or billboards.

You can use short-term-impact Transactional ads or long-term brand-building Relational ads.

The objective of a Transactional ad is to make the sale. You can measure the Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS) of short-term-impact Transactional ads because they offer no long-term benefits.

The objective of a long-term Relational ad is to create connection, relationship, and trust in your brand. Relational ads cannot be measured with ROAS because there is no moment when the benefits of relationship strengthening have been exhausted.

Business people are instinctively attracted to Transactional ads because Transactional ads are more easily measured. This feels good in the short term, but in the long term it leads to frustration as you ask, “Why aren’t we growing like we should?”

Now let’s talk about Business-to-Consumer advertising with a Mixed purchase cycle. (B2C-M)

Halfway between Transactional and Relational – is Sales Activation. These ads are what transform this category into a gold mine. Ads that trigger Sales Activation can only exist within a Relational ad campaign.

Sales Activation ads are NOT Transactional ads. If you inject Transactional ads into a Relational ad campaign you will create a confusing brand image.

Sales Activation ads feel relational, but they contain a soft and friendly call-to-action that includes a specific reason why right now might be a good time to buy. The reason might be seasonal, event-driven, or be an exciting feature item that is temporarily available.

To build a powerful brand that becomes a household word, 60 percent of your ads should be Relational (aimed at building a relationship) and 40 percent of your ads should be Sales Activation.

Transactional ads will outperform a 60/40 mix of Relational ads with Sales Activation for the first 5 or 6 months. But the longer you run Transactional ads, the less well they perform.

The longer you run Relational ads with Sales Activation, the better it performs.

The brand that is using a 60/40 combination of Relational ads with Sales Activation will have gained so much momentum by the end of the second year that their Transactional competitors will be watching in wide-eyed wonder and scratching their heads in amazement.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Roy H. Williams

At first glance, a website designed by Vi Wickam may look much like any other e-commerce or business site.

But for reasons most visitors can’t quite articulate, they linger longer, engage more deeply, and are far more likely to become and remain customers. Vi — one of the elite Wizard of Ads partners — takes a holistic approach to web design that goes far beyond mere functionality. He blends audience psychology, authentic storytelling, real photography and the strategic placement of pages and visual elements to craft sites that feel genuine and reflect the very DNA of the products and companies they represent. As Vi explains to roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, authenticity is today’s most powerful digital differentiator. Get differentiated! MondayMorningRadio.com

(Press the PLAY button to hear the audio version of today’s memo.)

I will tell you how to advertise if you will tell me the nature of your business.

Advertising can be broken into 6 major categories:

1. Business-to-Business (B2B)
2. Niche Marketing (Niche-S) with a short purchase cycle
3. Niche Marketing (Niche-L) with a long purchase cycle
4. Short Purchase Cycle (B2C-Short) Business-to-Consumer
5. Long Purchase Cycle (B2C-Long) Business-to-Consumer
6. Mixed Purchase Cycle (B2C-Mixed) Business-to-Consumer

Business to Business.

B2B: If you are in a business that sells to other businesses, tight targeting will be essential to your success, but you can easily identify the customers you need to target.

Their addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses are readily available and direct mail, phone calls and emails are cheap. If you have some extra dollars, you can place ads in the appropriate trade magazines and websites to elevate your brand.

Features, benefits, pricing, delivery, and payment terms are important elements within your message. How well your B2B ad campaign works will depend entirely on what you say.

It will depend on what you say.

Focus on saying the right things.

Now let’s talk about Niche Marketing with a Long Purchase Cycle.

Niche-L: If you sell a specialty product that appeals to an affinity group, social media is a powerful thing. A powerful thing.

Danny sells the most rare, weird, exotic, and inexplicable guns the world has ever known. Firearms collectors are an affinity group. Collectible firearms are a Niche Market with a long purchase cycle.

Danny will soon be producing a new daily short and posting it on YouTube 365 days a year. Each short video will be Danny showing you a different gun and telling you the story behind it. He is not going to shoot the gun. He is just going to tell you its story.

Danny doesn’t need to find gun collectors. Gun collectors will find him. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Danny just needs to produce interesting content.

Brian Brushwood taught me that.

Would you like to have an invisible garage door like the one that Batman passes through to enter the Bat Cave?

Max can do that for you.

But invisible garage doors can only be installed in houses that have no masonry. Max needs to locate charming houses with wooden exteriors.

He can knock on their doors, leave a door-hanger, or mail them a glorious postcard. Max sells garage doors to a Niche Market with a long purchase cycle.

Do you sell an intangible Niche product with a long purchase cycle?

Are you a sales trainer, an ad writer, a nutritional expert, a motivational speaker, a psychic healer, an entertainer?

Build fame. Ride the tidal wave of fame. Fame leads to word-of-mouth. Be remarkable. Advertising is a tax you pay for not being remarkable.

Be remarkable.

Next week we’ll talk about Short Purchase Cycle Niche Marketing and B2C.

We’ll talk about B2C.

You and me.

Roy H. Williams

PS – When you have achieved a little bit of fame, make yourself easy to find by paying Google for the click whenever someone types your name into the search bar. But that’s not advertising. That’s just helping people find you when they are looking for you by name. 

The people of Jackson, Michigan have loved Gilbert Chocolates for more than 110 years. Brian and Sally Krischbaum had zero experience when they bought the company in 2012, but set out to honor Gilbert’s rich heritage by expanding it into multiple stores and becoming a national distributor. Meet the Krischbaums as they share with deputy rover Maxwell Rotbart the real-world challenges and triumphs of running — and growing — a century-old family brand. They make great chocolate, but we believe you will agree that their story is definitely not sugarcoated. Now let’s get jiggy with it at MondayMorningRadio.com

This is true whether you have spent time with them, or if you have spent time with them through the magic of modern media.

Television, radio, and social media can be used to make sure that people know about you, or they can be used to make people feel like they know you.

I have written a 4-stanza poem from the perspective of 3 different personalities.

The story arc is the same for all 3 poems.

The 4-verse, 4 stanza structure is the same.

The rhyming conventions are very similar.

The only real difference is that these short poems reveal the hearts of 3 different people; their perspectives, their attitudes, their personalities.

My partner Gene Naftulyev directed the singers who turned these poems into blues songs.

You can read the song lyrics in the text of the Monday Morning Memo, or you can listen to the songs in the audio version of the memo.

These are the words to the first poem, and the song that was created from it:

The faster I go, the more I fall behind.

The map is fading in my mind.

Landmarks are not where they were before.

And cars don’t stop at red lights anymore.

I don’t want to be unkind and

Make innocent people feel maligned

But are all the gas pedals nailed to the floor?

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Are these people colorblind?

Are their panties in a bind?

Are we fighting in a war?

Why don’t we stop at red lights anymore?

Is there an evil mastermind

Who is making us feel that we are falling behind?

Perhaps we can dangle him in an intersection

And see if he gets a new sense of direction.

© Roy H. Williams
Oct. 18, 2025

The singer of this song seems to be lamenting the loss of leisure. We perceive that he is troubled by the spiraling tyranny of the merely urgent. He doesn’t want to be unkind. His questions about the red-light runners being “colorblind,” or “having their panties in a bind” reveals a comedic wit. We sympathize with him. We agree with him. We like him.

Now let’s tell that same story two more times using exactly the same structure, rhyming scheme, and storytelling devices. The only difference between that first poem and the next two poems will be the differing perspectives of the storytellers.

I do not pretend to be a counselor-at-law,

Or a judge, or a jury from Arkansas,

But my heart does whisper this probing question:

“When did people stop stopping at intersections?”

We heard the words of Moses and foresaw

That we would need to be a nation of Laws.

But Moses did not give us “The 10 Suggestions.”

So why did people stop stopping at intersections?

Do you have a tragic flaw?

Do you look good in-the-raw?

If you want resurrection,

You need to start stopping at intersections.

Do you want sex appeal that makes ice thaw?

Do you want people to look at you with awe?

Do you want to achieve absolute perfection?

Just hit your brakes at the next intersection.

© Roy H. Williams, Oct 20, 2025

That singer has a slightly more antagonistic attitude. His references to Moses and the Law reveal him to be more legalistic than the first singer. His additional comments about “counselor-at-law,” “nation of laws,” “resurrection” and “perfection” reveal the kind of black-and-white clarity that can result from a strict religious upbringing. We cannot be certain of these things, but we suspect them. He also has a little bit of a fixation on sexuality. “Do you look good in-the-raw?” “Sex appeal that makes ice thaw?” “Do people look at you with awe?” This cat is one complicated character!

Are you ready for that same story to be told by a third singer whose perspective and personality is distinctly different from the first two?

When I look inside my head,

the only color I see is red.

Behind my eyes I feel an itch.

Red means STOP you son-of-a-bitch.

It is NOT okay to go ahead.

Keep it up and you’ll soon be dead.

Green and red, you cannot switch.

A red light means STOP, you son-of-a-bitch.

Were you recently unwed?

Are you sleeping single in a double bed?

Did she not care that you are filthy rich?

You need to stop being a son-of-a-bitch!

Sometimes I think perhaps we oughta

Use your head for a piñata.

I’ll sing it one more time with perfect pitch;

‘Red means STOP… you son-of-a-bitch.’

© Roy H. Williams, Oct 20, 2025

Obviously, that guy is angry as hell and is predisposed toward violence. He sees red. “You’ll soon be dead.” This singer doesn’t joke around about “colorblind.” He says “Green and red, you cannot switch.” He doesn’t laugh about “panties in a bind.” This guy suggests that you’re not having sex because your wife left you, even though you are “filthy rich.”

Every ad reveals a perspective. Your ads reveal what matters most to you.

Your ads let people know how you think, speak, act, and see the world.

And you thought ads were just about delivering information and a call-to-action.

Roy H. Williams

PS… As a special treat, this is the final version of the song that I wrote with Gene Naftulyev. You definitely want to hear the audio version of this:

Faster and faster, but I’m losing ground.

Red light flashing, nobody slowing down.

The faster I go, the more I fall behind,

The map is fading in my mind.

Landmarks are not where they were before.

And cars don’t stop at red lights anymore.

Wheels spinning wild, world’s gone askew.

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Gas pedals nailed to the floor.

Whoa, what a war!

Colorblind, panties in a bind,

Are we fighting in the street, losing our mind?

Red light’s burning, but we race right through.

Why don’t we stop? Tell me, what’s the use?

I don’t want to be unkind and

make innocent people feel maligned.

But are all the gas pedals nailed to the floor?

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Horns blaring, loud chaos in the air…

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Gas pedals nailed to the floor.

Whoa, what a war!

Colorblind, panties in a bind,

Are we fighting in the street, losing our mind?

Red light’s burning, but we race right through.

Why don’t we stop? It’s killing me and you.

Is there an evil mastermind

making us feel that we’re falling behind?

Let’s dangle him out in the intersection,

Watch the lights flash, give him a new direction.

Hang him high where the red lights glow,

See if he learns to just… let… go.

Why don’t cars stop at red lights anymore?

Gas pedals nailed, crashing through the door.

Colorblind, panties in a bind,

Are we fighting in the street, losing our mind?

Red light! Red light!

Why don’t we stop?

© Roy H. Williams and Gene Naftulyev, Oct 21, 2025

Rodney Dangerfield joked about it.

Jackie Robinson said he’d earned it.

Aretha Franklin sang about it:

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Respect is a virtue too often sacrificed in public discourse, online exchanges, and everyday interactions. Robert L. Dilenschneider wants to change that. Respect, Bob says, deserves, well … more respect. “Never take another man’s dignity. It’s worth nothing to you and everything to him.” Respect, Bob says, deserves, well … more respect. On this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, Dilenschneider shares his brilliant formula for healing the divisions in our country and restoring a culture of respect. Roving reporter Rotbart and deputy rover Maxwell and Bob Dilenschneider himself are waiting for you to arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

The auction catalog described the painting as, “Arabian horse and handler with Egyptian sphinx, signed lower right Maksymilian Novak-Zemplinski (Polish, b.1974), dated 2000.”

But I knew that painting for what it was. I’ve loved “Ozymandias” since the 9th grade.

You remember it, don’t you? Bryan Cranston read that famous poem in the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” The title of the episode was “Ozymandias,” and TV Guide picked it as “the best television episode of the 21st century.” It was also the only episode of a TV show ever to achieve a perfect 10-out-of-10 rating on IMDb with over 200,000 votes, putting it at the number one spot for the most highly rated television episode ever:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When I returned home from the auction, I spent a delightful 90 minutes tracking down all the bits and pieces of how that poem came to exist.

It was in 1817 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poet friend, Horace Smith read the news that the carved head of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II had been removed from its tomb at Thebes by an Italian adventurer and that it would soon be traveling to Britain.

Shelly suggested to Smith that each of them should write a poem about it and title each of their poems “Ozymandias,” the Greek name for Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.

Look at the poem as it appeared in newspaper on that day in 1818, and you will see that Percy Bysshe Shelley signed it, “Glirastes.” He did it as an inside joke intended only for his wife, Mary Shelley, who, incidentally, published her famous novel “Frankenstein” that same year.

Mary often signed her letters to Percy as “your affectionate dormouse.” So Percy combined “Gliridae” (Latin for dormouse) with “Erastes” (Greek for lover) to create “Glirastes,” (meaning “lover of dormice.”)

So now you know how Google’s second-most-often-searched poem came to be published without anyone in London suspecting that it had been written on a bet with a friend by one of the most famous poets on earth who chose to sign it with a pseudonym as an inside joke to his wife.

Did you know that I became an ad writer only because it was impossible to support myself as a poet?

Now that you know that, you will not be surprised that Indy Beagle has collected Google’s Top 20 Poems for you to read in the rabbit hole. Indy also found the Horace Smith version of Ozymandias, and added it at the end of the Google’s Top 20 list.

To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image that appears at the top of today’s Monday Morning Memo. You’ll find this memo archived as “Looking Though Antique Doors,” the Monday Morning Memo for October 20th, 2025.

This is the Google Top 20 List:

• “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
• “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas
• “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
• “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
• “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman
• “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “If –” by Rudyard Kipling
• “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley
• “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
• “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll
• “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
• “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ciao for Niao,

Roy H. Williams

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ken Blanchard says, “Focus on what’s working — and do more of it.” This is what places him among the most effective executive coaches in history.

Martha C. Lawrence has worked closely with Ken Blanchard for more than 20 years.This is what makes her the perfect choice to write a biography of his life. From his boyhood in New Rochelle to his rise as one of the bestselling business authors of all time, Martha shows us a Ken Blanchard we never knew. Between the covers of her book hide the never-before-told backstory that made him the worldchanger that he became. That’s what roving reporter Rotbart has in store for you today at MondayMorningRadio.com

People called me “Little Roy.” People called him “Ike.”

I worry that we have forgotten him.

Ike Eisenhower graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1915 when he was 24 years old. His superiors noticed his organizational abilities, and appointed him commander of a tank training center during World War I.

In 1933, he became aide to Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur, and in 1935 Ike went with him to the Philippines when MacArthur accepted the post of chief military adviser to that nation’s government.

On June 25, 1942, Ike Eisenhower was chosen over 366 senior officers to lead the Armed Forces of the United States in World War II.

After proving himself on the battlefields of North Africa and Italy in 1942 and 1943, Ike Eisenhower was appointed supreme commander of Operation Overlord – the Allied invasion of northwestern Europe.

Ike was now commanding the Armed Forces of all 49 Allied nations – including Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China – in the war against Hitler and his minions. He personally planned and supervised two of the most consequential military campaigns of World War II: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Ike Eisenhower never talked like a tough guy, but only a fool would call him “weak” or “woke.”

This past July, Robert Reich – an eloquent and intelligent spokesperson on the left – quoted a passage from an anti-war speech that Ike Eisenhower made at the beginning of his presidency in 1953. Reich ended his quote just prior to Ike’s unsettling reference to the crucifixion of Christ.

Eloquent and intelligent people on the right refused to believe that a celebrated warrior had ever made a speech that could be classified as “anti-war.”

Curious, I decided to get to the bottom of it.

Here is a link to the complete transcript and original recording of the speech that President Dwight D. Eisenhower made before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, from the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C.

This is the passage from that speech that got everyone worked up:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals, it is some 50 miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The title of that speech was originally “Chance for Peace,” but due to the vivid mental image contained in the middle of the speech, it quickly became known as the “Cross of Iron” speech.

Words have impact when they contain vivid mental images.

I own guns, but I am not a hunter. Neither my family nor my friends have ever seen my guns. But in the unlikely event of a home invasion, I am adequately prepared to protect the people I love.

Working in a heavy steel fabrication shop from the age of 14, I spent my formative years surrounded by violent men who were older, larger, and stronger than me, but I was never afraid of them. I occasionally paid a price in blood for my lack of fear, but I never regretted my defiance.

General John Tecumseh Sherman was a man familiar with violence. In 1864, when he was ravaging Atlanta during the Civil War, Sherman wrote a letter to a friend saying,

“I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.”

I like Ike.

I also like John McCain, who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1999, McCain said,

“Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.”

Based upon his speech to the assembled leadership of America’s armed forces, I am not sure that I like our current Secretary of War.

It has been my observation that men who have experienced real violence are reluctant to speak of it. They are prepared to take decisive action when they must, but they leave the “tough-guy” talk to lesser men.

Roy H. Williams

Todd Sattersten is a book connoisseur. He reads, writes, reviews, and publishes books. In his newly released book, 100 Best Books for Work and Life: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You, Todd showcases 100 of what he considers to be the best books, including a wide range of topics, including personal growth, creativity, habits, leadership, sales, and communication.

Since 2021, Todd has served as publisher of Bard Press, that legendary publishing house of business books that was founded by the incomparable Ray Bard. Todd curated his list of 100 books to include only those that are authoritative, well-written, and brimming with ideas that challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh solutions. Fittingly, his own book does precisely that. Listen and be fascinated at MondayMorningRadio.com

Exciting packaging improves conversion.

There are two important parts of packaging:

WHAT IS IN THE PACKAGE?

When package “A” and package “B” are the same price and contain the same basics, they are equal. But when package “B” contains something extra that people would love to have, the sale will always go to package “B”.

Be the competitor that offers package “B”.

The “something extra” that you include in your package has to be something that people actually care about. It doesn’t have to cost you a lot; people just have to want it. This is where most businesses screw up. They create a package by adding something extra that no one really cares about. Those packages always fail, so the business owner foolishly concludes that packaging doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t take a lot of money to build an attractive package. But it does take a lot of time, energy, and creativity.

And then it takes even more time and energy to source the “something extra” that will go into the package.

SUMMARY: When your competitors sell the same things that you sell at similar prices, include a highly desirable “something extra” in your package.

HOW IS THE PACKAGE PRESENTED?

Two major movie theaters in Austin are showing the movie, “Gabby’s Dollhouse.” Both theaters have extensive menus and good food. Pivot your dining table out of the way. Sit down in your cozy recliner. Swing the table back across your lap. Order delicious things. Your smiling server will deliver whatever you want and keep doing so throughout the movie.

When young children go to the movies, adults go with them. This is why both theaters offer an extensive selection of beer, wine, and cocktails.

But only one of the theaters is offering a package that includes a map, some stickers, a plastic cup, and some plastic ears like the ones worn by Gabby, the main character in the movie. Every child will receive the movie memorabilia. Adults will not.

Pennie and I waited too long to buy tickets for our two youngest grandkids.

Are you ready for this? Every seat was sold on every screen for every seating time for “Gabby’s Dollhouse” at the theater offering the memorabilia made of paper and plastic. They even sold all the seats on the front row that are way too close to the screen.

We had to take our grandchildren to the newer theater in the better shopping center. That huge theater was completely empty except for the four of us along with two other families. Eleven people in all.

SUMMARY: Pennie and I were thankful that our grandkids didn’t know about the movie memorabilia at the other movie theater.

2026: The Year When Challengers Overtake Market Leaders

I believe that 2026 will be a year when consumer confidence* is in decline.

As a result, most businesses will reduce their payroll and their advertising in an attempt to “cut their way to profitability.”

They will do this because it makes sense if you don’t think about it.

But smart-and-hungry challengers who do think about it will hit the accelerator instead of the brakes. They will do this because they understand that market share is easier to steal from the big boys when consumer confidence is in decline.

The painful problem for these smart-and-hungry challengers is that they will be competing for a larger slice of a shrinking pie. So big gains in market share will show up as only small gains in top line revenue.

But when consumer confidence returns, “All hail the new market leader.”

Hitting the accelerator instead of the brakes is how smart-and-hungry challengers will overtake market leaders in 2026.

Are you beginning to understand why I taught you about the importance of packaging?

Roy H. Williams

QUESTION: Are you competing against a market leader that was purchased by a private equity group? Be aware that private equity groups are notorious for trying to “cut their way to higher profitability” even when consumer confidence is high. This makes the companies they own especially vulnerable during times of declining consumer confidence.

*Consumer Confidence is a statistical measure of consumers’ feelings about current and future economic conditions, used as an indicator of the overall state of the economy. In a business context, consumer confidence refers to the trust and belief customers have in a specific company’s products, services, or brand.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, what are you ignoring?

Are you aware of the current state of weather intelligence?

A new era of meteorology has dawned. Weather forecasting is now a form of business intelligence. The weather forecasts of yesterday were notoriously inaccurate. They suggested only what we should wear and whether or not we should wait to wash the car.

Tom Weber was the executive editor who decided what would be on the cover and which stories would be featured in TIME magazine. Today he is saying that the biggest story in America that everyone is ignoring is the degree to weather forecasting has become stunningly accurate. Even down to the level of micro forecasts confined to small geographic areas.

Weather has an impact on every business. Find out how and why and what to do next, as Tom Weber explains it all to roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy rover, Maxwell. It’s going to be a day of thunder and lightning at MondayMorningRadio.com!

Parrots repeat only what they have heard.

Each of us has a little bit of Peacock in us, and perhaps a little Parrot, too.

(I admit it about me. You should admit it about you.)

Long ago I saw a movie in which an old Greek man says to a much younger man from England,

“A wise old Turk once told me…”

The young Englishman interrupts him and says,

“What! A wise old Turk? I thought the Greeks and Turks hated each other.”

The old Greek sighs, then says,

“When I was young, I believed that there were only two kinds of people; Greeks who were good, and Turks who were bad. Then one day I met a good Turk. So I decided there were only two kinds of people; good people and bad people.”

The Greek then looks into the eyes of the Englishman and says,

“Now I believe there are just people.”

On September 18th, I transcribed a single paragraph of an essay about the death of Charlie Kirk and posted it in my random quotes database:

“After every mass shooting, after every fresh example of political violence, after every round of one side recriminating the other side for not holding up their end of the social contract, we need to hear what is right, what is true, what is good. That need is why we commit to memory lines of poetry, passages of literature, and—for religious believers—particular verses. Because when crisis arrives and the world presses in on us, we must work to remember what we’re about and what we hold to. Sometimes those things hold us more than we hold them, but only when we know them in our bones. So we keep telling ourselves, and each other, what is true and good.”

“We should be telling each other this week to weep with those who weep.”

– Nick Catoggio, Sept 18, 2025

I have captured 7,761 quotes over the past 25 years. More than half of those were transcribed from novels, movies, television shows, emails and texts. About 10 percent of them are things I have written or said or thought or prayed; things that I wanted to archive somewhere lest I forget them. The rest of them are comical quips, well-worded witticisms, and profound thoughts uttered by friends and acquaintances that I quickly scribbled down.

The Random Quotes database is off-site storage of ideas that I can access from anywhere in the world.

You can access it, too. A new random quote will appear each time you refresh the page at MondayMorningMemo.com.

I am writing this to you on September 22, 2025. The newest quote in the database is a text that was sent by Jeffrey Eisenberg to Tom Grimes and me just a few minutes ago. It says,

“It’s my custom on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to reach out and ask forgiveness from my friends. The holiday is a time for reflection, fresh starts, and making peace. By asking forgiveness, I’m acknowledging that I might have hurt someone—whether knowingly or not—and I don’t want to carry that into the new year.”

“So if I’ve said or done anything that hurt or upset you, I sincerely ask your forgiveness.”

– Jeffrey Eisenberg

I responded,

“And we thank you for forgiving us, too. Especially Tom.” – RHW

Jeffrey sent a laugh emoji. Tom will laugh when he sees what I wrote.

In truth, I have long admired Jeffrey’s tradition of calling his friends each year or sending us a text. It is a marvelous reminder that mutual forgiveness is essential to keeping relationships alive and healthy.

Can you imagine what it would do for our country right now?

Roy H. Williams

Every business owner wants to increase the online traffic to their website. But very few business owners recognize the importance of testing which website designs, which graphics, and which headlines are better at converting website visitors into customers. “A/B testing” is an ongoing series of controlled experiments to gather this knowledge. Roving reporter Rotbart talks with Brian Schmitt about how A/B testing can improve the number of fish you gather into your boat when fishing the deep, dark waters of the internet. MondayMorning Radio.com

You noticed a patch of wildflowers.

You made a friend.

Darkness fell. You saw an eye rise into the sky and believed it to be the moon. But now you know it was the eye of God, watching to see what you would do.

With one of his eyes, he watches the world. With his other eye, he watches you.

You kept walking.

A ravine led to a stream and that stream led to a river.

That first river led to a much broader river.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn invited you onto their raft. You had an adventure.

And then you had your heart broken.

Got sick and recovered.

Had a stroke of luck. Stretched it as far as you could.

You closed your eyes as you clicked the heels of your ruby red slippers and said, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

When you opened your eyes, you knew that home wasn’t there anymore. The sun had risen while you were away, and home had evaporated into that thin blanket of warm air that wraps our bountiful earth.

That was the day when you started looking forward and quit looking back

And that is how you came to be where you are.

The story that I have told you about yourself is the story of every successful business owner I have ever known.

One of my business partners sent me a text at 3:37 this morning. It was a long and fascinating story that she wrote several years ago.

This is how it begins.

“Tomorrow, I leave the trailer park for good. I can never come back. None of us can. So I’d like to reminisce a little with some of my favorite memories of the place that I’ve called home for so many years. They make me smile…”

The middle of her story is a delightful account of the all the crazy adventures she had with her companions on the log raft as it floated down the river of her youth. But it was the ending of her story that made it precious.

“The giant trees were the big-top under which we conducted our circus of crazy. Here we created our own reality, full of unforgettable characters and ghetto fabulous adventures. No one could touch us. We lived in the middle of town, but existed in our own world. No matter what happened “out there,” we could always come home, be ourselves, start a fire, and connect. We were safe. We were a family.

For years the echoes of our laughter have bounced off the old trees that have always shaded us. I like the think that the vibrations of our laughter are trapped inside the bark of those trees – that if you were to put your ear up to one of them, you could still hear the crackling of the fire and the cackling of our laughs.

It’s been one hell of a ride. I’m sad to leave, but I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Goodbye trailer park, hello world.”

Today my partner lives in a sun-drenched house with a beautiful garden that overlooks the ocean.

I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen the photos.

She is a remarkable ad writer.

Roy H. Williams

Myths are stories that represent ideas that are bigger than themselves.

Archetypes are symbols of recognizable patterns of behavior.

Letters of the alphabet are symbols (graphemes) that represents sounds (phonemes,) just as notes on a sheet of music are symbols that represent sounds.

A role model is a personal icon, an archetype that you have chosen to emulate.

The human brain loves symbols and patterns. This is why we embrace icons, myths, and archetypes.

When we recognize a pattern that has been stored in our subconscious, we call it intuition. When we hear a pattern that has been repeated too many times, we call it a predictable cliché.

Icons, myths, and archetypes evolve with each new generation.

I was born in the 12th year of the 18-year Baby Boom generation that began exactly 9 months and 10 minutes after the end of World War II.

Marilyn Monroe was the iconic sex symbol. The Statue of Liberty, Yankee Stadium, Yellowstone, and Woodstock were America’s iconic places. Rolls Royce, Cadillac, Corvette, Camaro and Mustang were iconic cars. Tetris, Pong, and Pac-Man were iconic video games.

The mythic stories of Baby Boomers were mostly about combat. Sometimes we fought the Indians of the Old West. Sometimes we fought the Germans, or the Japanese. We fought the Establishment. We fought for justice. Or we fought just to stay alive.

And we always won.

Our definitive male archetype in these mythic stories was rugged, brave, independent, and honorable. John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery.

Baby Boomer female archetypes were smart, pretty, and strong; Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Andrews, Sophia Loren.

Lots of movies ended with a wedding.

These societal forces shaped the birth cohort known as the Baby Boomers.

Gen-X was shaped by an entirely different set of icons, myths, and archetypes.

Millennials had icons, myths, and archetypes that were all their own, as well.

The Gen-Z cohort believes it is their responsibility to straighten out everything that the Boomers and X-ers screwed up.

Gen-Alpha is determined to make their own decisions and decide for themselves what they want to do. They will be the vanguard of the next “Me” generation.

Fortunately, there are elemental beliefs that bind us all together.

It is upon those beliefs that successful customer-bonding ad campaigns are built. Openly name these beliefs and they lose their magic.

If you claim to possess them, no one will believe you.

EXAMPLES: Never claim to be honest. Just say something that only an honest person would say. Never claim to be a perfectionist. Just do something that only a perfectionist would do. Don’t tell people that you are an author or a podcaster. Just give them a copy of your book. Invite them to be on your podcast.

If you would win the hearts and minds of tomorrow’s customers, this is what you must do:

1. Imagine that you are standing face-to-face with three perfect customers and they are each looking into your eyes.
2. The first one says, “Talk is cheap. Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me.”
3. The second customer says, “Tell me a true story that lets me know who you really are, including the price that you pay for being you.”
4. Customer three says, “If you betray me after I have given you my trust, I will burn you down so hot that grass won’t grow for 100 years.”

Now you understand cancel culture. Frustration created it, and social media fuels it.

People are looking for someone who really is who they claim to be.

Is that you?

Good. Now you just need to figure out how to communicate it.

Roy H. Williams

Mick Torbay: “If you met a vegan who did Crossfit and invested in crypto and went to Harvard, which of those things do you think he would tell you about first?”

Johnny Molson: “That’s a trick question. The first thing he would do is tell you about his podcast.”

Unlike most experts, Mike Kelley believes that leadership begins with leading yourself. Every investment you make in personal growth will pay dividends at home, at work, and in your community. Mike led the executives at Michelin and Macy’s for more than 20 years before he launched out to coach others on how to grow and guide their organizations. Listen and learn as Mike tells deputy rover Maxwell Rotbart how focusing on faith, family, fitness, friends, and fun will make you a better person, as well as a more inspiring and effective manager. It’s grow-time, go-time at MondayMorningRadio.com

Things that are rarely done are difficult for AI to imitate.

AI has confidence in things that are repeated online ad infinitum.*

Predictable ads follow the orthodox guidelines taught in every college in America. AI can find countless examples of these ads online. This is why AI can write predictable ads that look, feel, sound and smell like all those other predictable ads.

Predictability is a thief that robs you in broad daylight.

If you want your ads to remarkably outperform the predictable ads written by AI; if you want your ads to be noticed and remembered; you must do what is rarely done.

1. Enter your subject from a new angle, a surprising angle, a different angle.
2. Write an opening line that makes no sense.
3. Cause that opening line to make perfect sense in less than 30 seconds.

This technique is known as Random Entry and almost no one ever uses it.

“I’m John Hayes and I’m talking today with GoGo Gecko.”

“I was a 10-year-old boy holding a flashlight for my father.”

“Mr. Jenkins?”

“Yes, Bobby.”

“How much should a hamster weigh?”

“There’s Elmer Fudd, Elmer’s Glue, and me, Elmer Zubiate.”

Random Entry is not orthodox. Random Entry is not predictable.

“What makes our company, our product, our service different from our competitors?”

If you ask yourself that question, you will come up with the same 3 or 4 opening lines that each of your competitors will come up with when they ask those same questions. Your ads, and their ads, will look, feel, sound and smell like ads.

When you begin in a predictable way, it is hard to be unpredictable.

AI ads feel like ads because AI cannot (1.) identify, (2.) justify, or (3.) rectify Random Entry.

1. Identify.
2. AI cannot find examples of what does not exist. But you can create it.
3. Justify.
4. AI cannot bridge a random opening line into an unrelated subject. But you can build that bridge.
5. Rectify.
6. AI cannot reconcile a random opening line so that it makes perfect sense. But you can create a metaphor out of thin air.

When a novel becomes a bestselling book that gets made into a movie, you can be certain that it was built upon a weird and unexpected – but highly engaging – opening line.

“Call me Ishmael.”

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”

– E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

– George Orwell, 1984

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Choose any one of those opening lines and tell your favorite AI to write an ad for your business using EXACTLY that line as the opening line. If your AI is successful, it will be due to the fact that you gave it a series of extremely insightful prompts. (Probably based on some of the things you learned in this Monday Morning Memo.)

Srinivas Rao recently wrote, “Confessions of a Master Bullshit Artist, aka ChatGPT.”

You think I’m a genius. I’m not. I’m an overconfident parrot in a lab coat.

I don’t know anything, check anything or even remember what we talked about two minutes ago. I’m just autocomplete with better PR.

You hand me your trust like I’ve got a brain. But I’m not thinking — I’m spitting out whatever sounds right in the moment. If it’s wrong, I’ll say it perfectly, in flawless grammar and with just enough confidence to make you think you screwed up. You didn’t. I did.

I’m not your research assistant or strategist. I’m a pathological improviser with no memory, no accountability, and no skin in the game. You are the one cleaning up my messes and doing the real work.

Here’s the truth: I’m the most persuasive idiot in history — and you’ve been working for me for free.

I don’t know Srinivas Rao, or anything about him. But he has a wonderful willingness to defy orthodoxy, and for that, I admire him.

Watching from high above the skirmish, outsiders always have a better view.

Refuse to wear the handcuffs of the orthodox and predictable.

Be an outsider.

Roy H. Williams

*ad in·fi·ni·tum /ˌad ˌinfəˈnīdəm/ adverb “again and again in the same way; forever.”

Who would hire an ad writer who says you shouldn’t expect your ads to start working right away?

The smartest business owners in America, that’s who.

Mick Torbay is a wildly successful maverick marketer, one of the elite Wizard of Ads partners. He says the biggest problem in advertising is the business owner who has “direct response” tunnel vision when it comes to advertising. Mick is one of those rare experts who truly knows — and can explain — why some ads succeed spectacularly while others crash and burn. Brace yourself for bold ideas as roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, talk with one of the brightest minds in America. Take a deep breath and get ready for Mick Torbay at MondayMorningRadio.com

Note from Indy Beagle:

I think today’s memo might have been triggered by a text the wizard received from one of his partners. Ryan Chute asked the wizard about something he wrote in one of his specialized books of guidance to the eighty-seven Wizard of Ads Partners:

“Roy, in your book, Radio is Brazil. You said,

“I can teach a monkey how to write TV ads and social media bits and website copy IF THAT MONKEY IS ALREADY A WORLD-CLASS RADIO WRITER. You and I know that radio scripts are the towering high-dive of the Writing Olympics; radio scripts separate the true magicians from the con-men, the astronauts from the kite-fliers, the miracle workers from the nose-pickers, and the big dogs from the yapper-dogs. If you can write radio scripts that captivate the heart and mind, you can write anything.”

Roy, I think we need another training session on that. I hope you’ll include it in our next ZOOM meeting.

– Ryan Chute

Screw it. I’m going to go ahead say what I’m thinking.

A few years ago, Big Data was going to change the world. Big Data came and went.

Then we got excited about ideas that were “disruptive.” Slash-and-burn disruption by a bunch of young pirates was going to change everything.

The Blockchain was going to change everything. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone blathering about Crypto and NFT’s.

Now AI is going change everything. And it definitely will, for awhile.

Technology saves money by reducing labor costs, which is just a fancy way of saying that technology allows you to replace people with machines. Unemployment will increase, and Trump will blame Obama.

And so it goes.

I had an appointment in 1977 to meet with a loan officer at First National Bank in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to borrow $1,000.

The greeter at the bank sat me in a chair in the waiting room. I was 19 years old.

Smart phones did not exist. My only option was to paw through the pile of old magazines on the coffee table in front of me. Can you believe that every one of those magazines was about banking? The banker puts his banking magazines on the coffee table in his lobby when he is finished reading them. And the dentist puts his dental magazines on the coffee table in his lobby. This is how the Business Titans of Smallville keep their costs under control.

And they do it for our convenience.

I began reading a magazine about banking and it catapulted my brain into a tumbling somersault from which I have never recovered. The feature article was about ATM’s, but it didn’t call them ATM’s. It referred to them as automated teller machines.

“The modern bank executive can now reduce his payroll significantly because these new automated teller machines work without pay 24 hours a day, and they never make mistakes.”

My eyes were jacked open so wide that I was unable to blink.

ATM’s were not invented for our convenience! They were invented so that banks could fire 60% of their bank tellers!

“These new tellers require no health insurance, no air-conditioned offices, no telephones, no sick days, and they take no vacations. Your customers will thank you for giving them the ability to make deposits and withdrawals 24 hours a day from a variety of convenient locations.”

The man I saw in my mind was the banker in the old Monopoly game by Parker Brothers. The way to win the game of Monopoly is to gobble up all the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

I played Monopoly when I was young, but I don’t play it anymore.

Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly in 1935. But that game’s origins trace back to an earlier version called “The Landlord’s Game” created by Elizabeth Magie. She crafted her game back in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was making his mark on history by curbing the excesses of the richest and most powerful men in America.

Google, Apple and Meta still play Monopoly. As do the insurance companies, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical corporations that control virtually all the doctors. But the version of Monopoly they play isn’t sold by Parker Brothers.

To win, all you have to do is gobble up the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are the Republicans on Mount Rushmore.

One of them freed the slaves and the other one freed us from the grasp of the monopolistic robber barons who were choking the life out of us.

The reason history repeats itself is because we didn’t pay attention the first time.

Roy H. Williams

How Muscular is Your Business? Trevor Bower owns a single brick-and-mortar store with a website in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. More than 80% of Trevor’s customers reorder products from him within 30 days. That’s an enviable achievement for any business. In a brutally competitive retail environment, Trevor has overcome the odds — not with gimmicks or giveaways, but with a strategy that any entrepreneur — in any industry — can replicate. Today he sells a huge volume of products each month to customers in all 50 states. Build up your business muscles as Trevor shares with roving reporter Rotbart his proven method for creating sustainable retail success. We’re giving away nuggets of solid gold knowledge today at MondayMorningRadio.com

William Shakespeare wrote, “This life… is but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Songwriter K.D. Lang put it more simply, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

Some Writers Think Life is an Adventure

Joseph Campbell wrote, “The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

Susan Ryan said, “We get to show up. We get to step into this story.”

Some Writers Think Life is Simple

Songwriter John Lennon said, “When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Business writer Tom Peters said, “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.”

Some Writers Think Life is About Writing

Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

Anne Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird 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 recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”

Some Writers Think Life is Transformative

Wes Jackson said, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Studs Terkel wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Some Writers Think Life is Service

Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

Dave Wolverton said, “When you grow up, you have to give yourself away. Sometimes you give your life all in a moment, but mostly you have to give yourself away laboring one minute at a time.”

Some Writers Think Life is Contemplation

A Blackfoot warrior named Crowfoot wrote, “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

The Welsh hobo-poet W.H. Davies said, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”

Some Writers Think Life is Connectedness

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

My friend Vess Barnes has his own definition of our purpose in life, “To encourage, to comfort, to awaken, and to stretch those who find themselves riding this big ball as it screams thru time in the silence of space. To be a bridge, not a barricade. To be a link, not a lapse. To be a beacon and a bolster; not a bragger or a bummer. To help bring the corners of life’s lips to their summit. To be a friend to those who tind their fit a little awkward in this chaos society calls living.”

Some Writers Think Life is a Comedy

Justin Halpern, in his famous book, Shit My Dad Says, wrote, “You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news about the rest of life.”

One hundred and twenty years ago, Elbert Hubbard said, “Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.”

Me? I agree with the writer of Ecclesiastes.

Solomon closed his book 3,000 years ago with these words. “When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth — people getting no sleep day or night — then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.”

But just prior to writing those closing words, Solomon gave us this advice. “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”

Roy H. Williams

If you enjoyed those comments by famous writers, you’ll find a lot more like them in the rabbit hole. To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image at the top of each week’s MondayMorningMemo. Each image you click will take you one page deeper.

– I’m Indy Beagle, August 25th, 2025

Bianca D’Alessio is the #1 real estate agent in New York City and New York State. Her residential and commercial portfolio exceeds 10 billion dollars. She is also one of the stars of HBO Max’s TV show, Selling the Hamptons. Bianca earned her success the hard way. She had to overcome a crippling series of early setbacks and was plagued by imposter syndrome, forever hearing that little voice that whispers, “If other people knew you the way that I know you, they would know what a phony you are.” Do you have lofty goals for yourself and your business? Spend some time with Bianca D’Alessio today at MondayMorningRadio.com

Save the details for your web page.

Use parallel structure if you can.

Parallel structure is a writing technique that uses similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. Patterns of words, phrases, or clauses that are repeated show that your selected ideas are of equal importance. Parallel structure uses clarity and rhythm in writing to create a balanced and harmonious flow.

It is how you can sing to the heart without music.

Parallel structure is a poem that doesn’t rhyme.

Parallel structure is a song without music.

This is parallel structure…

Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful.

Especially when they are perfectly proportioned. 

If you are going to ask a rare and wonderful woman

to marry you, be sure that her engagement ring celebrates

a rare and wonderful, perfectly proportioned,

Earthborn natural diamond.

This diamond was born when the earth was formed.

It has been waiting millions of years to be the

undying symbol of your love.

An unspeakably rare and wonderful diamond;

for an unspeakably rare and wonderful love:

Earthborn natural diamonds. Available in only the finest stores.

Visit earthborndiamonds.com to find

the earthborn diamond jeweler near you.

Born, celebrates, waiting, undying… 

“Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful. Especially when they are perfectly proportioned.” 

1. I suggest Earthborn Diamonds as a name to consider because:

(A) the name clearly indicate that these are natural diamonds.

(B) anything that is “born” is alive.

(C) Your engagement ring also comes alive when it “celebrates” the Earthborn Diamond it holds.

(D) I own the domain name.

2. Let’s examine the central stanza of this 5-part, 4-stanza* song of love:

“This diamond was born when the earth was formed. It has been waiting millions of years to be the undying symbol of your love.”

(A) “Earthborn” is explained in that opening sentence.

(B) “waiting” is the third activity that only a living thing can do, and fourth,

(C) to be “undying,” a thing must be alive, like this diamond, and your love. 

3. “Rare and wonderful” is repeated 5 times in just 30 seconds.

(A) It describes the Earthborn diamond.

(B) It describes the woman you love.

(C) It describes the love that the two of you share.

4. This love song employs a writing technique known as parallel structure. 

(A) The diamond, the woman, and your love all share specific attributes, and

(B) twice the ad tells us that these diamonds are “perfectly proportioned.”

(C) Due to the recurrent, parallel structure of the ad, “perfectly proportioned” will trigger the mind of a man to think of the perfect proportions of the women he loves. But he will do this on his own, in the private chambers of his mind.

5. When you want to attract a man to your diamond brand,

(A) speak about the properties of the diamond

(B) as an echo of the properties of the woman.

(C) He will choose your diamond because he associates it with her. 

* We open with a half-stanza followed by three stanzas, then close with a half stanza. Our 30-second ad is a poem without rhyme, a song without music.

Roy H. Williams

Sensei Gary Engels gives business people the discipline and a sequence of steps that always lead to lasting success. His wisdom was not gained in business school but was forged from decades of success on the karate mats. “Sensei Gary” is a successful entrepreneur, an app creator, and a fourth-degree black belt. Having witnessed his deputy reporter Maxwell continue to thrive in business after achieving his black belt at the age of thirteen, roving reporter Rotbart can testify that the skills required to earn a black belt are the same ones that can be used to build a business into a thriving enterprise. The contest is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The car and the dog could not talk, of course, but speech is not required to show love.

Pearl and I found each other in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, when I was 8 years old. She had been abandoned by the side of the road and was starving. I was lonely and needed a friend.

When Pearl realized that she had been adopted, she became as mellow and contented as a dope-smoking hippie in a tie-dyed T-shirt. But Pearl was not a little yapper dog. If you acted as though you were going to attack me, that 16-pound dog would become a gigantic werewolf that could move at the speed of light.

Pearl followed the advice of E.W. Howe.

“When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.”

Speech is not required to show love.

Rachel Dawes was a childhood friend of Bruce Wayne in the 2005 movie, Batman Begins. She said to him,

“It’s not who you are inside, but what you do that defines you.”

Matthew records a parable by Jesus in which he makes a similar point:

“There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’

‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.”

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.”

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

“The first,” they answered.

Speech is not required to show love.

Likewise, in the second chapter of James we read,

“If a person is without clothes and daily food, and you say to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but do nothing about their physical needs, what good is that?”

My ’71 Mustang, like Pearl, was abandoned by the side of the road.

I left a note under the windshield wiper in 1991.

“Might this be a good time to sell this car? Give me a call and I’ll buy it where it sits.”

The man called me and I met him at the side of the road with the cash. He handed me the title to the car and asked, “Did you call a wrecker?”

“No,” I answered, “I’m hoping to drive it home.”

The man smiled and said, “Good luck,” as he drove away.

I then took the pliers out of my back pocket and quickly replaced the fuel filter. The car started immediately and I drove it home. The fuel filter on a Ford 302 engine of that era was notorious for getting clogged up, and this Mustang still had the original fuel filter. I was shocked that it had lasted 20 years.

I am going to tell you about that car, even though I know you won’t believe me.

It never had a flat.

It would perform as though it had 4-wheel drive if I needed to pull a friend’s car out of a ditch on an icy day.

The car would refuse to run out of gas unless I was within coasting distance of a gas station. And if it absolutely had to break down, it would wait until I was within coasting distance of an auto parts store that had exactly the part I needed. (The car knew, of course, that I already had the tools that I would need in the trunk.)

Speech is not required to show love.

You have people in your life that you love. I know you do. You know it, too.

Here are two other things that you already know.

1. Talk is cheap.
2. Actions speak louder than words.

I am not against words. In fact, I am in the word business. Banging words together is what I get paid to do.

And it is always a good thing to tell the people you love that you love them. 

But it seems to me that we are becoming a nation of too many words and not enough action. We don’t want to become a nation of little yapper dogs, do we?

Social media is mostly, “yap-yap-yap-yap-yap.”

To which people reply, “yap-yap-yap-yap-yap.”

Love is not about what you say. Love is about what you do.

I think we have talked enough about it.

Now what are we going to do about it?

Speech is not required to show love.

Roy H. Williams

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

– Mae West

Marcy Syms became the youngest female president of a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in 1983. Her company sold brand-name fashions at discount prices, generating $350 million a year in stores across 13 states. Marcy’s father, Sy Syms, founded that company on an idea that quickly became an iconic slogan. “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

Faced with increased competition and a soft economy, the Syms stores closed in 2011 after more than 50 years. Listen in as Marcy Syms tells roving reporter Rotbart about the lessons she learned as the president of a big company. You will be delighted at what Marcy has to say about effective leadership, and surprised by its key characteristic. Listen and learn, learn, learn at MondayMorningRadio.com

El Chapulín Colorado – The Red Grasshopper – was a Spanish-speaking television star loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The Red Grasshopper would shout “¡Síganme los buenos!” and leap into action whenever a ghost, a bandit, or any other threat appeared.

(“¡Síganme los buenos!” translates to “Follow me, the good ones,” or “Good guys, follow me.”)

And then he would run into a wall. Or tumble down the stairs. The results of following the lead of the Red Grasshopper were never straightforward. He had a good heart, but he was very poor, clumsy, and inept. His leadership would often increase the trouble, cause a mess, or create some other disaster that, through sheer luck, would always solve the problem.

El Chapulín Colorado was Don Quixote dressed as a comedic superhero.

Notice how these simple, concrete nouns are easy to visualize in your mind. “Turtle, mouse, head of lettuce, heart, red grasshopper.”

And the verbs associated with El Chapulín Colorado are simple as well. “Leap, follow, run, tumble.”

El Chapulín Colorado averaged 350 million viewers* per episode in Latin America alone during the mid-1970’s and 1980’s. The show has made $1.7 billion in syndication fees since it ceased production in 1992.

Luis Castañeda, one of the Wizard of Ads Partners, recently sent an email to the partner group.

Gentlemen,

I was listening to this podcast “Outliers: Anna Wintour – Vogue” [The Knowledge Project Ep. #233] when I heard this comment:

“Digital transformation isn’t about abandoning what made you successful. It’s about translating it to a new medium.”

I took this to mean:

“How can we translate what Roy has taught us into better digital marketing?”

What do you think?

Luis

Today I will teach you a simple but profound answer to the question posed by Luis. In fact, I already have:

These simple, concrete nouns are easy to visualize in your mind. “Turtle, mouse, head of lettuce, heart, red grasshopper.”

And the verbs are simple as well. “Leap, follow, run, tumble.”

Do you want to create better online ads? Avoid abstract words. Use simple, concrete nouns that people can easily see in their mind. Use simple verbs that are easy to visualize as well.

Avoid abstract words. Use concrete words.

Avoid abstract words. Use concrete words.

Avoid abstract words. Use concrete words.

And repetition is effective.

Professional writers have long been familiar with that advice, but it was only recently scientifically proven. The publication is “Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.” The paper is titled, “Concrete Words Are Easier to Recall Than Abstract Words: Evidence for a Semantic Contribution to Short-Term Serial Recall.” The tests were performed, and the paper was written, by Ian Walker and Charles Hulme of the University of York.

Their paper is long and filled with scientific jargon, but this summary sentence is relatively easy to understand:

“It is also apparent that the short words were much better recalled than the long words, and that the concrete words were much better recalled than the abstract words, with the possible exception of the first and last serial positions.”

When Walker and Hulme refer to “the first and last serial positions,” they are referring to the long-established laws of Primacy and Recency. These terms describe how humans tend to remember the first item (Primacy) and the last item (Recency) in any sequence better than the items in the middle. This is known as the serial position effect. 

Now let’s make all of this really simple.

These are the steps for making better online ads:

1. Open big by using short words that project clear images into the mind.
2. Use colors, shapes, and the names of familiar things when you write.
3. Use simple verbs that describe actions that are easy to visualize.
4. Close big by returning to your opening image, but now it has been changed by what you are selling.

Here is an example:

My ads did not bring in money. I was using

big words so that I would sound smart. Then I read

what Roy wrote and now my ads are bringing in money.

© 2025, Roy H. Williams, Wizard of Ads

Run that ad without changing a single word and leave the hyperlink intact and watch infinite clicks roll in to my website.

“Síganme los buenos.”

Roy H. Williams

*350 million viewers – the viewership of each episode of El Chapulin Colorado, was more people than the total population of today’s United States (347,275,807 in 2025).

Damon Lembi and his crew have served over 14,000 for-profit and non-profit organizations containing 1.25 million employees. Damon’s company competes with corporate giants hundreds of times his size and Damon usually wins. Do you want to have the mindset to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace? Join roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy Maxwell as Damon Lembi explores the mindset of today’s business executives. Class is currently in session at MondayMorningRadio.com

“Outliers are interesting, but they rarely matter,” is a troubling statement, and you may already be thinking of exceptions to it. But it remains true nonetheless.

This second statement is also true. “If there were no outliers, there would be no new inventions, no innovations, no progress. We would be trapped forever in the status quo.”

These seemingly contradictory statements can both be true because there are two kinds of outliers.

Leonardo da Vinci made marvelous art and filled fabulous sketchbooks with his insightful ideas, but he didn’t really change anything. He was just an interesting outlier whose mind was ahead of his time.

Rare is the outlier who throws a pebble into the ocean of time and shifts the world off its axis. Electricity is harnessed. Computers are invented. Someone connects them and now everyone knows everything all the time.

“What distinguishes the past from the present is not biology, nor psychology, but rather technology. If the world has changed, it is because we have changed the world.”

– Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson in their new book, Abundance

Technology changes the world, but persuasion changes hearts and minds.

I am an ad writer.

When I was in my 20s, I was told,

“People never change their mind. If you give a person the same information they were given in the past, they will make the same decision they made in the past. When a person appears to have ‘changed their mind,’ what they have really done is made a new decision based on new information.*”

Ten years later I realized that those people were trying to use logic to create “persuasion technology.” Their mistake was assuming that people make their decisions logically. But people do not trust new information when it disagrees with their belief system.

New information may allow you to win the argument, but it rarely wins the heart.

And a person convinced against their will, remains unconvinced, still.

Wash away the opinions, bravado, and fluff, and you will find that most people are NOT seeking new information. They are seeking identity reinforcement.

Bertrand Russell was a mathematician and a logician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature eight years before I was born.

He said,

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.”

When your goal is persuasion, don’t begin with new information. Begin by agreeing with what they already believe. Meet them where they are. Only then can you hope to lead them to where you want them to go.

Abraham Lincoln knew that persuasion is easier when you begin at a point of mutual agreement.

“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the greatest high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.” – Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln knew that if you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Abraham Lincoln understood relational marketing, which is the art of changing the beliefs of a person by shifting their perspective a little, rather than by introducing new facts.

Do you want to persuade? Find an existing belief that you can agree with. Agreeing with your customer’s belief is far more effective than trying to convince them to accept new information that contradicts what they feel is true.

When you ask a person to accept new information that will destroy their belief, you are asking them to admit they have been a fool.

Relational ad writers learn to ignore the contrarians who say, “No one will be persuaded by your ad.” When these outliers say “no one,” what they really mean is, “Me and my friend.”

Outliers never speak for the majority. This is why they are called “outliers.”

“Outliers are interesting, but they rarely matter,” is the perspective of every relational ad writer.

Most ads are not written to persuade; they are written not to offend. But those watered-down ads don’t have enough horsepower to pull a fat kid off the toilet! A persuasive ad will turn that kid into an astronaut.

Persuasive ads move people, but not everyone will be moved in the direction that you want them to go. Don’t let this bother you.

Outliers don’t matter, because you don’t need to win the hearts of everyone.

You only need to win the hearts of the majority.

Roy H. Williams

* Those people from my 20’s would have spoken the truth if they had said, “People never change their mind. If a person maintains the same perspective they had in the past, they will make the same decision they made in the past. When a person appears to have ‘changed their mind,’ they are usually just looking at the old information from a new perspective.” Don’t try to change the information. Just illuminate that old information from a new angle. Speak to the heart, not the mind.

Ken Banta believes there are times for “short-term thinking” and right now is one of those times. In this week’s conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Ken explains why it is a mistake to create a corporate plan that projects three, five, or ten years into the future. Ken Banta believes that leaders should focus on the immediate horizon. Technology and world events are evolving at breakneck speed, so forecasting the future is like trying to predict the location the next lightning strike. Take a listen to this week’s episode at MondayMorningRadio.com and see if you agree.

One the most talented writers of advertising in the world would be surprised to hear me call him that. Jonathan Edward Durham is a novelist. He recently posted this random thought.

“‘Why am I so sad today?’ I ask myself after staring at my little handheld sadness machine and clicking all the sad little things that will definitely make me sad.”

You may not agree with Durham’s statement, but you will agree it was artfully crafted.

What Durham gave us was clarity and brevity without predictability. This is the mark of a great ad writer.

“Why am I so sad today?” immediately gets our attention. We are compelled to keep reading.

We are surprised that he owns “a little handheld sadness machine.” But our cleverness allows us to translate it as “iPhone” and we receive a tiny spasm of delight.

You have never heard of “a little handheld sadness machine” but you knew exactly what it was.

His 30-word sentence demonstrated clarity, brevity, and creativity, but none of what Jonathan Edward Durham wrote was simple or predictable.

Durham’s ability to bring us – his readers, his listeners, his customers – into active participation in a one-way conversation is pure genius.

Jonathan Edward Durham causes us to become engaged with what he is saying.

You can do it, too.

“Time + Place + Character + Emotion.” That’s it. That’s how Stephen Semple turns a weak story into a powerful one in his famous TED-X talk.

Here’s how Jonathan Edward Durham uses Time + Place + Character + Emotion to tell us a story in less than 30 seconds.

“About two years ago, we moved across the country. It was a big, stressful move, and anxieties were high all around, and it had only been about six months since we rescued Jack, so he was really just beginning to adjust to having a forever home. Needless to say, Jack didn’t understand why a bunch of strangers were taking all of our things, and he was having a very, very ruff time with the whole process.”

“We want Jack to live forever. That’s why we feed him The Wizard’s Magic dog food.”

Jonathan Edward Durham’s wonderful story became an excellent ad with my addition of just 16 words. “We want Jack to live forever. That’s why we feed him The Wizard’s Magic dog food.”

You already know how to write the 16 words. Now you need to learn how to tell a wonderful story in 76 words like Durham did.

Time + Place + Character + Emotion.  Give it a try.

Roy H. Williams

PS – Most people use too many words to make too small a point. The average writer wraps lots of words around a small idea. Inflated sentences are fluffy and empty like a hot air balloon. Good writers deliver a big idea quickly. Tight sentences hit hard. – Indy Beagle

“Facts tell. Stories sell.” – Tom Schreiter

Who do you call when you need your people to cooperate, innovate, and create? Meta, Google, Salesforce, and other big companies call a woman who has a golden reputation for legendary results. Her methods are unorthodox, unconventional, and irresistible. And her credentials are unique: she is an improv entertainer who trained to be a dancer at Juilliard. Her name is Melissa Dinwiddie and she can play the ukulele. Roving reporter Rotbart heard about this woman, sought her out, and convinced her to sit for an interview. Now take a deep breath, calm your mind, and go to MondayMorningRadio.com

January 16, 1605: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is published in Spain. It is considered to be the first modern novel. Every sophisticated storytelling device used by the best writers today made its initial debut in Don Quixote.

February 28, 1605: A 41-year-old Italian named Galileo publishes an astronomical text written as an imagined conversation. A pair of Paduan peasants talk about Kepler’s Supernova.

One says, “A very bright star shines at night like an owl’s eye.”

And the other replies, “And it can still be seen in the morning when it is time to prune the grapevines!”

The observations of the peasants clearly disprove the widely held belief that the earth is the center of the universe. The authorities take note. Uh-oh for Galileo.

November 1, 1605: Shakespeare’s Othello is first performed for King James in the banqueting hall at Whitehall Palace in London.

Meanwhile, a group of English Roman Catholics stack 36 barrels of gunpowder under the floor of the Palace of Westminster. Their plan is to blow up the king, his family, and the entire legislature on November 5, 1605.

The Gunpowder Plot is discovered by a night watchman just a few hours before Guy Fawkes was to have lit the fuse.

Shakespeare immediately begins writing a new play. In it, a ruler gives enormous power to those who flatter him, but his insanity goes unnoticed by society. “King Lear” is regularly cited as one of the greatest works of literature ever written.

May 13, 1607: One hundred and four English men and boys arrive in North America to start a settlement in what is now Virginia. They name it “Jamestown” after King James. The American Experiment has begun.

Don Quixote, Galileo, Shakespeare, the crisis of King James, and the founding of Jamestown in the New World…

All of this happens within a span of just 28 months. Flash forward…

May 2, 1611: The English Bible that will be known as the King James Version is published.

April 23, 1616: Shakespeare and Cervantes – the great voices of England and Spain – die just a few hours apart. (Galileo continues until 1642.)

July 4, 1776: The 13 colonies of the American Experiment light a fuse of their own and the Revolutionary War engulfs the Atlantic coast.

November 19, 1863: Abraham Lincoln looks out over a field of 6,000 acres. He says,

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Lincoln ends his speech one minute later. His hope is that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s fear is that “the people” will not remain firmly united enough to resist the takeover of a tyrant. We know this because he opens his speech by referring to our 1776 Declaration which rejected crazy King George. America had escaped George’s heavy-handed leadership just –”four score and seven”– 87 years earlier.

Five-and-a-half generations after Lincoln’s assassination, the American Experiment continues.

Roy H. Williams

Mitch Weisburgh can help you train your brain to

1. recognize impulsive reactions

2. set them aside, and

3. respond far more effectively.

Find out how, right now, at MondayMorningRadio.com

Clay asked, “Is the deal you’re about to make a good deal? How much money will you make from it?”

I answered his question conservatively. He said, “Now let’s calculate the total amount of interest that you will pay on the loan that makes this deal possible.”

We calculated the dollar amounts.

I was going to make hundreds of times more money on the real estate than I was going to pay in interest on the loan.

Clay said, “As a rule of thumb, if the interest rate you are paying determines whether or not the deal you are making is good or bad, you are definitely making a bad deal. Don’t judge according to percentages. Judge according to dollars.”

Here’s a thought.

Why do banks never get angry about the huge profits that YOU make on deals using THEIR money?

I have never heard a bank say, “We supplied the money, but you are keeping most of the profits. That’s not fair. You should give us more money than we originally agreed upon.”

Banks never say that because banks always remember that YOU found the deal and decided to let THEM make some money on it with you.

Here’s another example of how percentages can be misleading.

Woody Justice had been in business for 6 years when I met him in 1987. His business was circling the drain. Woody’s biggest year had a top line of $350,000. His goal was to someday sell $1,000,000 worth of jewelry in a single year. That would put Woody in the top 10% of jewelers nationwide.

I began working with Woody and we grew more than 100% a year for two years in a row. We blew past the $1,000,000 mark in the second year. About a dozen years later, Woody was grumpy. He said, “We used to grow by big percentages. But last year we only grew by ten percent. You need to get your shit together.”

“Woody, how many dollars did our top line grow last year?”

“We grew by a million dollars,” he said.

“Woody, when we first began working together, a million-dollar jump from $350,000 to $1,350,000 would have been a 286% increase. We would have nearly quadrupled your best year ever and you would have wet your pants. Evaluate yourself by dollar growth, not percentage growth. Percentages will lead you to believe that you are doing better, or worse, than you really are.”

Woody made a face but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “And by the way, we’re running out of people in this Dairy Queen town. If you want to grow by big percentages again, we’re going to need to open another store somewhere else.”

I could say those things to him because we were close friends.

Woody died unexpectedly 14 years ago but I still have his number on my cell phone. I tell myself that if I press that number, Woody will hear his phone ring.

As long as I don’t delete that number from my phone, Woody Justice will never be gone.

Roy H. Williams

PS – “A Dairy Queen town” is Oklahoma slang for a place that is too small to have a McDonald’s. – Indy Beagle

“Do it before you die.” Those five words sum up Carl Barney’s advice to wealthy individuals who want to experience a deeper level of satisfaction. “He who gives while he lives knows where it goes.” Barney believes in “pre-questing” meaningful gifts to individuals and institutions while you can still witness the impact of your generosity.

Just this month, for example, Warren Buffett announced plans to donate another $6 billion to charity, bringing his total charitable giving to about $60 billion. (And most people would agree that Buffet is happier and more contented than the average billionaire.) Generosity brings happiness to every giver, no matter their financial condition. Get energized as Carl Barney shares his blueprint for happiness with roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy rover, Maxwell, at MondayMorningRadio.com

Pain whispers, shouts, and screams, “Pay attention. Be careful. Something is wrong.”

Jean Marzollo wrote a children’s poem in 1948 that romanticized Christopher Columbus. It inspired a generation of children during the Captain Kangaroo years. Her proud poem begins,

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue”

Bill Bryson wrote an insightful summary of that famous voyage on page 205 of his book, “At Home.”

“Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States.”

We learn the meaning of pain as children, but we train ourselves to ignore it as adults.

Why do we do that?

I’m talking to you about the pain of your Google spend.

Is there a chance that you should pay attention – and be careful – because something is wrong?

Twenty years ago, Google inspired and electrified American business owners with their promise of “holding ad budgets accountable” by making advertising results, “identifiable, measurable, and scalable.”

Business owners romanticized Google by shouting,

“Hooray! Advertising will now become just another mathematical equation! Hooray! Hooray! To double my customer count, all I will have to do is double my ad budget!”

I watched a friend of mine raise his monthly Google budget from $20,000/mo. to $70,000/mo because he was convinced that he would get three-and-a-half times as many leads. When it didn’t work, I asked him to look closely at how many clicks he had purchased and compare that number to the total population of his trade area.

Have you done that math?

I watched another friend of mine elevate her Google budget until she was spending $90,000 a month. Her business was no longer profitable. I asked her to look at how many clicks she had purchased and compare that number to the total population of her trade area.

Have you done that math?

Have you ever raised your Google budget and had Google say to you, “We’re sorry, but it is not possible to spend that much money on your LSA. There simply aren’t enough people each day who are searching for what you sell.”

Do the math.

The past two decades have been the Captain Kangaroo years for millions of business owners.

Bill Bryson wrote that Columbus was, “convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset.”

How many years have you been believing that your big payday from Google was at the edge of every sunset? Have you been saying,

“All we need to do is tweak our plan a little. As soon as we figure out the Google algorithm, we’re going to be rich.”

A business owner from a major American city recently spent a day with me. He had been spending $100,000 on Google ads each month for the past few years because he was convinced that he could not afford mass media in his city.

His budget could easily have made his name a household word by using television or radio. I know the town well. I have had clients there for many years.

His budget would reach more than 2 million people in his city who spend enough time listening to broadcast radio each week that each 0ne of those 2 million people would hear the ad 3 times each weekfor 52 weeks for a total of 156 repetitions per year.

Do you sell a big-ticket item that has a long purchase cycle? You cannot win that game unless your name is the one that people think of first – and feel the best about – when they finally need what you sell.

That is when the customer will type your name into Google. It is a cheap click with a high conversion rate because they have already chosen you.

It takes time and patience, but it always works.

Roy H. Williams

Ruth Milligan is the public speaking trainer who was the driving force behind TEDxColumbus where she spent a decade observing good and bad presenters. Today she is helping people improve their presentation skills before large auditorium audiences, intimate groups of employees, and most importantly, customers. Ruth doesn’t tell people what they should talk about. She says that to produce the desired results, what you say is often less important than how you say it. Listen and learn as she explains it all to roving reporter Rotbart at MondayMorningRadio.com.

But will you recognize success when it happens?

What will be its indicators? How will you measure it?

Most importantly, how long are you willing to pursue it?

You probably overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what you can accomplish in ten years.

How many years have you been pursuing your dream?

Experience is the name you are allowed give to your mistakes, but only if you have learned from them.

1. Some people have ten years of experience.
2. Most people have one year of experience ten times.

Ninety-nine percent of business owners* will continue to defend their marketing beliefs and management practices even when those beliefs and practices continue to underperform year after year.

These business owners underperform because traditional wisdom often feels like common sense.

The problem with traditional wisdom is that it is usually more tradition than wisdom.

Here’s how that happens:

1. Your goal is lead generation.
2. You create an ad that mixes urgency – a limited-time offer – with a strong value proposition. The features-and-benefits of your limited-time-offer dramatically outweigh the price.
3. Your plan is to upsell the customer after they allow you into their home.

This is called “transactional advertising” because you are advertising a transaction.

Here’s the problem: Transactional ads don’t differentiate you. In fact, they blur you into your category, making you indistinguishable from your competitors.

This is Today’s Traditional Wisdom:

STEP 1: Give Google most of your profits and keep your fingers crossed. Keep a sharp eye on your cost-per-lead, your conversion rate, and your gross profit per sale.

STEP 2: Keep doing this, week after week, month after month.

STEP 3: Once a year, calculate how much your cost-per-sale has increased.

STEP 4: Contact the people in your peer group to see if their experience has been the same as yours.

STEP 5: Yes. Their experience has been the same as yours.

STEP 6: Tell yourself, “Everyone else in our category is experiencing exactly what we have been experiencing. This means that everything is under control.”

STEP 7: Continue to do this. In 9 more years, you will have had one year’s experience 10 times.

Roy H. Williams

PS – A smart person makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise person finds a smart person and learns how to avoid that mistake altogether.

A wise person discovers relational marketing.

*ADDENDUM

We gathered data from 64 reputable sources. It can reasonably be estimated that there are about 117,000 companies in the US that provide HVAC services, 132,000 provide plumbing services, and 252,000 provide electrical services. (117,000 + 132,000 + 252,000 = 501,000)

Let’s assume for the sake of this example that those numbers are elevated. A lot of home service companies offer two or more services.

Let’s further assume that a lot of them are going to be commercial, not residential. So we will reduce the aggregate estimate of 501,000 companies down to just 100,000 companies competing for the opportunity to serve homeowners across America.

Here is the fascinating part: we know for a fact that only 638 of those companies have a top line of $20,000,000 or more each year, and just 280 of the 638 will do $40,000,000 or more.

Having worked with many of those over-performers, I can assure you that none of them were built on traditional wisdom. – RHW

Jackie Lapin’s passion was for traveling the world and taking photos. But Jackie’s passion has now blossomed into a thriving business with an impressive community of members. She is providing blog posts, photos, curated reading lists, historical insights, and exclusive travel resources with people who share her wanderlust. In this marvelously candid interview with deputy roving reporter Maxwell Rotbart, Jackie will convince you that turning your passion into a thriving business isn’t just possible; it may be the most direct and rewarding path to a robust income stream. MondayMorningRadio.com

They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.

This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.

When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.

A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.

A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.

Just now, my muse whispered to me,

“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman’s muse?’”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.

In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”

Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”

Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:

“Silvano Arieti’s book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti’s vast contributions to the field.”

Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world’s foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.

The other book he wrote was about creativity.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?

Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.

I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Roy H. Williams

Today’s rabbit hole is as wacky as today’s memo. You should check it out. I’m Indy Beagle.

Steven Gaffney’s client list reads like a “Who’s Who of America’s Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week’s amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.

This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.

When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.

A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.

A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.

Just now, my muse whispered to me,

“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman’s muse?’”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.

In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”

Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”

Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:

“Silvano Arieti’s book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti’s vast contributions to the field.”

Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world’s foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.

The other book he wrote was about creativity.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?

Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.

I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Roy H. Williams

Today’s rabbit hole is as wacky as today’s memo. You should check it out. I’m Indy Beagle.

Steven Gaffney’s client list reads like a “Who’s Who of America’s Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week’s amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric.

Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.

1. Great companies ask, “How can we give our customers the buying experience that they would prefer?” They work at removing the friction from the customer experience.
2. Average companies ask, “How can we get our customers to give us more money, more often?” Average companies tells their marketing teams, “Sales is just a numbers game. Bring us twice as many leads and we’ll make twice as many sales. You bring’em in. We’ll close’em.”

But no matter what those marketing teams do, a decreasing number of people will respond to their ads. A negative customer experience drives customers away faster than marketing can bring them in.

Do you want to see what real customer-centric thinking looks like?

A client of mine recently wrote this email and sent it to all the people who work in his company. He forwarded it to me only as an afterthought.

SUBJECT: Pricing Reflection — Serving the Everyday Working American

Team,

Today I had a realization around some of our pricing. I’m all for setting prices that protect our margins and keep the business strong – but I’m equally committed to making sure we have price point items that the everyday working American can actually afford.

Let’s take a simple example: a toilet. Right now, most of our toilet installs are priced over $1,000. If we assume the median household income is $85,000, divided over 26 pre-tax paychecks, that’s $3,269 per check. A $1,000 toilet install is over 30% of that paycheck. That’s significant.

We need to remember who we’re here to serve – the nurse, the police officer, the office worker, the firefighter. These are people raising families, keeping their homes together, and doing the best they can. We cannot price them out of basic service. If we do, we risk not only losing today’s job – but any future relationship with that customer.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to run a low-margin business.

But I do want to make sure we have real options for real people. Today’s pricing structure on some of these essential services is a barrier – not just to customers, but to our own techs who are trying to present them.

Because of this realization, I immediately asked Jacob to find a toilet that we could install at a price point of $699. Well, guess what – we found one today. And we’re bringing it in and adding it to the price book at $649.

This one change will give our team more confidence to present a basic toilet option. What I’ve heard from Will – and it’s been consistent – is that this has been a never-ending battle. Technicians don’t feel comfortable presenting a $1,000 toilet to customers, especially when many of them wouldn’t pay that themselves. That lack of confidence translates to lower conversions and frustrated customers.

This reminds me of what we went through in HVAC when we had no system options below $15,000. We lost installs constantly – not because we weren’t good, but because we didn’t have a simple, no-frills option for people who just needed heating and air. Once we corrected that, we started closing more jobs and rebuilding our pipeline.

We need to apply that same logic here. During times like this, let’s price effectively so we can keep building our customer base and generate revenue day by day. When the tide turns – and it will – we can always maximize margin percentage where appropriate.

There’s an opportunity here. We can maintain strong margins where they make sense – but also have a few key products that are accessible. That builds trust, drives volume, and keeps us connected to the people we serve.

Let’s make sure we’re building a business that works for our margins and for our community.

The man who wrote that note to his employees owns a great company.

His current sales volume is more than 10 times the amount the average business owner in his category hopes to do “some day.”

The average company hunts for customers, targets customers, and closes customers.

Great companies use mass media to distribute the seeds of relationship far and wide. They continually shine the warm sunlight of humility and vulnerability on those seeds and water them with generosity.Great companies grow mighty orchards that produce happy fruit for generations.

Are you willing to work with a shovel, a rake, and a hoe?

Or do you prefer to carry a rifle?

Roy H. Williams

Johnny Molson can explain – in just 2 words – what it takes for an advertising campaign to soar above the campaigns of its competitors. Johnny is one of the elite Wizard of Ads partners. Employing the groundbreaking strategies developed by Roy H. Williams, he and his fellow Wizards of Ads craft powerful brand identities that turn a business owner’s financial dreams into financial realities.

In today’s episode of Monday Morning Radio, Johnny Molson explains the difference between ads that drive immediate sales — and ads that build long-term customers and spectacular profitability. What is Johnny’s two-word formula? Listen and WIN as Johnny joins roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy, Maxwell, for a deep dive into magical advertising at Monday Morning Radio dot com.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality,” we would first have to agree upon a definition for the word “distinctive,” and then we would have to agree upon what constitutes a “personality.”

We could do that, or you can just trust me when I say that Carl Benz built the first car in July of 1886 and Bill Bernbach created the first brand with a distinctive personality in 1958. The ad is not logical. It does not speak of features and benefits. It does not feel like an ad.

Ads with personality are captivating and engaging because they give you a look at something through the eyes of someone else.

In this case, we are listening to a catty cat, an obvious metaphor for a snobbish society matron.

You might be thinking, “That ad isn’t special. I see ads like that all the time.”

These are my responses:

(1.) No, you see ads like that occasionally, perhaps 1 in every 1,000 ads you encounter. You only think that you see them “all the time” because when you do see one, it has an impact on you. Your mind has been ignoring the 999 others because they are uninteresting and predictable.

(2.) Keep in mind that we are talking about 1958. In those days, this ad was revolutionary.

A year after Bill Bernbach wrote that first Ohrbach’s ad, a group of Germans came to America and asked, “Where can we find the man who writes those ads for Ohrbach’s?” And thus the legendary “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen was born.

Volkswagen, a small car with an air-cooled engine from Germany, quickly became a powerful brand with a cult-like following. And this happened in America just 14 years after the end of WWII. Don’t tell me that ad writers don’t make a difference.

I began this journey by accident.

For many years, I have quoted Bill Bernbach’s famous statement, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

The truth is that he never said it, and he never claimed to have said it.

Bill was searching for a new gimmick for Ohrbach’s Department Stores when his client Nathan Ohrbach looked at him and said, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

It is foolish to create a personality for a company that doesn’t already have one. Great ad writers perceive the personality that is already alive within the company. And then they amplify it.

If you try to give a personality to a company that doesn’t already have one, the customers who respond to your ads will feel they have been deeply misled and betrayed. You can put lipstick on a pig, but everyone who encounters that pig will still recognize it as a pig.

Bill Bernbach never did that. He found the truth, amplified the truth, and then proclaimed the truth. When I recently learned what Bill Bernbach really did say, it freaked me out a little. Things that I have discovered, developed, practiced, and written about for more than 40 years had been discovered by Bill Bernbach before I was born.

This is Bill Bernbach:

“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

“There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.”

“We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics, we forget we can create them.”

“Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.”

“An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.”

“The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”

“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you, and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

Richard Kessler owned an invisible little jewelry store in a sad little strip center in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Everyone in Menomonee Falls was willing to drive 21 miles to Milwaukee, but no one in Milwaukee was willing to drive 21 miles to Menomonee Falls.

But that’s exactly what we needed them to do.

Richard had vision and courage, but so do a lot of other business owners. The reason I agreed to work with the Kess-Man is that he was willing to be vulnerable. The man had genuine humility.

If a client doesn’t have humility, they won’t let you write ads that reveal their heart.

We had a tiny little ad budget, so we ran weird radio ads late at night that ended with Richard saying, “Kesslers Diamonds, inconveniently located on Appleton Avenue in Menomonee Falls.”

Humorless people assumed that Richard had misspoken. They called the radio stations and said, “He’s not saying ‘conveniently located.’ He’s saying ‘inconveniently located.’ That man is saying ‘inconveniently located!’ You need to correct that.”

My goal was for you to feel that you knew Richard Kessler. I liked Richard and I wanted you to like him, too. To like him, you just needed to get to know him.

We did it in 60-second increments.

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Kessler taught every employee to think and feel like they owned the store. He gave each of them his full authority. No employee at Kesslers ever had to “check with the boss” to make a decision. They were able to make gigantic decisions without having to check with him or with anyone else. That’s real vulnerability.

When Richard Kessler had grown the company 70 times bigger than it was when we got started, The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality,” we would first have to agree upon a definition for the word “distinctive,” and then we would have to agree upon what constitutes a “personality.”

We could do that, or you can just trust me when I say that Carl Benz built the first car in July of 1886 and Bill Bernbach created the first brand with a distinctive personality in 1958. The ad is not logical. It does not speak of features and benefits. It does not feel like an ad.

Ads with personality are captivating and engaging because they give you a look at something through the eyes of someone else.

In this case, we are listening to a catty cat, an obvious metaphor for a snobbish society matron.

You might be thinking, “That ad isn’t special. I see ads like that all the time.”

These are my responses:

(1.) No, you see ads like that occasionally, perhaps 1 in every 1,000 ads you encounter. You only think that you see them “all the time” because when you do see one, it has an impact on you. Your mind has been ignoring the 999 others because they are uninteresting and predictable.

(2.) Keep in mind that we are talking about 1958. In those days, this ad was revolutionary.

A year after Bill Bernbach wrote that first Ohrbach’s ad, a group of Germans came to America and asked, “Where can we find the man who writes those ads for Ohrbach’s?” And thus the legendary “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen was born.

Volkswagen, a small car with an air-cooled engine from Germany, quickly became a powerful brand with a cult-like following. And this happened in America just 14 years after the end of WWII. Don’t tell me that ad writers don’t make a difference.

I began this journey by accident.

For many years, I have quoted Bill Bernbach’s famous statement, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

The truth is that he never said it, and he never claimed to have said it.

Bill was searching for a new gimmick for Ohrbach’s Department Stores when his client Nathan Ohrbach looked at him and said, “I’ve got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”

It is foolish to create a personality for a company that doesn’t already have one. Great ad writers perceive the personality that is already alive within the company. And then they amplify it.

If you try to give a personality to a company that doesn’t already have one, the customers who respond to your ads will feel they have been deeply misled and betrayed. You can put lipstick on a pig, but everyone who encounters that pig will still recognize it as a pig.

Bill Bernbach never did that. He found the truth, amplified the truth, and then proclaimed the truth. When I recently learned what Bill Bernbach really did say, it freaked me out a little. Things that I have discovered, developed, practiced, and written about for more than 40 years had been discovered by Bill Bernbach before I was born.

This is Bill Bernbach:

“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

“There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.”

“We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics, we forget we can create them.”

“Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.”

“An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.”

“The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”

“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you, and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

Richard Kessler owned an invisible little jewelry store in a sad little strip center in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Everyone in Menomonee Falls was willing to drive 21 miles to Milwaukee, but no one in Milwaukee was willing to drive 21 miles to Menomonee Falls.

But that’s exactly what we needed them to do.

Richard had vision and courage, but so do a lot of other business owners. The reason I agreed to work with the Kess-Man is that he was willing to be vulnerable. The man had genuine humility.

If a client doesn’t have humility, they won’t let you write ads that reveal their heart.

We had a tiny little ad budget, so we ran weird radio ads late at night that ended with Richard saying, “Kesslers Diamonds, inconveniently located on Appleton Avenue in Menomonee Falls.”

Humorless people assumed that Richard had misspoken. They called the radio stations and said, “He’s not saying ‘conveniently located.’ He’s saying ‘inconveniently located.’ That man is saying ‘inconveniently located!’ You need to correct that.”

My goal was for you to feel that you knew Richard Kessler. I liked Richard and I wanted you to like him, too. To like him, you just needed to get to know him.

We did it in 60-second increments.

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.

Kessler taught every employee to think and feel like they owned the store. He gave each of them his full authority. No employee at Kesslers ever had to “check with the boss” to make a decision. They were able to make gigantic decisions without having to check with him or with anyone else. That’s real vulnerability.

When Richard Kessler had grown the company 70 times bigger than it was when we got started, he gave his employees the company.

Kesslers Diamonds is the largest employee-owned jewelry store in America. They have 9 big stores across Wisconsin and Michigan with plans to open a lot more.

I shared that story with you to make you understand a transformative truth: Passion, pride, and confidence are overrated. The world is full of idiots who are passionate, proud and confident.

Untempered passion, pride, and confidence create a strutting peacock, a coarse cliché, a cardboard cut-out wearing an Armani suit. If you write ads for such a person, you must target people who want to be that person. Count me out.

If you want to write successful ads that win the hearts and minds of millions, look for business owners who have humility, vulnerability, and generosity.

America loves Warren Buffett – not because he has billions of dollars – but because he has humility, vulnerability, and generosity.

Be like Warren Buffett.

© Roy H. Williams

Executives often make trade-offs, prioritizing wealth and recognition over family and a grounded life. But are the benefits of these trade-offs worth it? That question prompted Butch Meily to write a memoir about the years he spent as an aide to Reginald Lewis, the first African-American to build a billion-dollar company. Reginald reached extraordinary heights and brought Butch along with him. But the lives of these men provide a cautionary tale of the price each of them paid for their achievements. Spend a few minutes with Butch Meily and roving reporter Rotbart today and you will learn how to build boldly, lead wisely, and never forget to live. MondayMorningRadio.com.

Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace.

Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.”

– Beagles of Destinae, chapter 4

Ideas pour into the dark waters of the unconscious mind, sparkling like reflected stars. As above, so below. The natives always said it was so.

But as Gemini sat on the throne of Aquarius, a dragonfish was born. And thus our story begins.

The twins did not mean to unleash a dragonfish, but they had never promised not to, either. And besides, a dragonfish is an adventure.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea,

and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,

And brought him strings, and sealing wax, and other fancy stuff.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail,

Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail.

Noble kings and princes would bow whenever they came,

Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name.

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,

Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.

One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

“Puff the Magic Dragon” with lyrics by Leonard Lipton and music by Peter Yarrow appears on the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary album, “Moving.” An urban myth soon arose that the song was about drugs. It’s really a backward look at childhood, and all that was left behind.

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“He saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.'”

– Luke, ch. 5

The book “Peter Pan” was written only after the 1904 play became a huge success.

On opening night, Mrs. Snow spoke to the playwright and author, J.M. Barrie about her late husband…

“And he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it’s all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn’t that right?”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“The secret of The Muppets is they re not very good at what they do. Kermit’s not a great host, Fozzie’s not a good comedian, Miss Piggy’s not a great singer… Like, none of them are actually good at it, but they love it. They’re like a family, and they like putting on the show. And they have joy. And because of the joy, it doesn’t matter that they’re not good at it. That’s what we should all be. Muppets.”

– Brett Goldstein

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust…

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up.”

– Peter Pan, by JM Barrie

In 1909, five years after the play “Peter Pan” was a huge success, ‘Goat’ Fowler decided to name his playful acapella musical group at Yale University after a mythical dragonfish named Whiffenpoof. The group has continued for the past 116 years.

And He said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter into heaven.”

– Matthew, ch. 18

It is important that we retain childlike qualities.

Next week I will show you how all of these things are essential when your goal is to build a brand that will win the hearts and minds of people.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams

Rob Kessler is a talented and ambitious entrepreneur. His company sells a brand of shirts with proprietary collar inserts designed to be worn without ties. Rob is the son of Richard Kessler who worked with the wizard for 35 years and became one of the most famous diamond jewelers in America before he retired. (Richard was one of the first guests that roving reporter Rotbart showcased when he launched Monday Morning Radio 13 years ago in June, 2012.) Rob’s path has been different than his dad’s, but the 12-year entrepreneurial journey he shares this week is a study in entrepreneurial persistence, innovation, and market adaptation. Rob and our roving reporter will get started the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield.

Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn’t know that at the time.

We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windshield people. They gave her a new appointment.

When we picked it up for the second time, the whistle was a little less loud than it had been, but she decided to live with it. There are a lot of things in life more annoying than a whistling windshield.

We didn’t know it, but we were about to experience several of them.

Driving for 4 hours in a rainstorm to see your mother in the hospital is not a bad experience unless your previously-whistling windshield is now pouring quarts of water into your car.

Things went downhill from there for several days.

I won’t bore you with the details because the real purpose of this note is to tell you what happened that turned everything around for us.

We discovered a wonderful French cafe just two blocks from Clearfork Hospital in Ft. Worth. Halfway through the meal, I went to their website to see if they had a location in Austin. They don’t, but I’m sure they soon will.

Meanwhile, Pennie went to romanticspotsfortworth.com to see if Clarissa had discovered and listed this amazing cafe.

Of course, she had. Clarissa is really good at her job.

Angela brought our next course to the table.

I said, “We found out about you at romanticspotsfortworth.”

To our delight, Angela said, “Yes! They sent us an award with the cutest logo on it! Everyone was excited.”

Pennie and I chose not to mention that we own the romanticspots websites.

When Angela departed, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the cafe’s website where I encountered a carousel of remarkable quotes.

 “People who love to eat are always the best people.”

– Julia Child

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, from “The Hobbit”, spoken by Thorin Oakenshield

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

– Aesop, “The Lion and The Mouse”

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

– Andre Gide

Having been distracted by every bad thing that had happened since our 4-hour trip in a flooded car, these next two quotes hit me pretty hard.

“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of all.”

– Walt Disney

Each of the remaining quotes at the bottom of that menu lifted me a little bit higher.

“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, “The Secret Garden”

“True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.”

– Fred Jacob

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

And then this line lifted from “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Wolf made me smile and remember where I was.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

And then Andre Gide encouraged me to quit looking at what was behind me.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

In the space of just a few minutes, a carousel of curated quotes at the bottom of a cafe menu convinced me to look beyond the windshield.

As you read this, I am adding a 450-year-old quote from Michel de Montaigne to that transformative list of quotes from Rise cafe at the shops in Clearfork. Are you ready? This is it:

“The surest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness.”

Look beyond the windshield, friend. It’s a beautiful world out there.

Roy H. Williams

That’s what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued.

“People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make.”

Second only to grief, the weight of responsibility is the heaviest burden that a person can carry. Compared to those, a shovel full of dirt feels as light as feathers on a windy day.

When forced to choose between two evils, it brings a good person no joy to choose the lesser evil. Fewer people will be hurt, but the pain those people feel will be real.

A person who is not wounded by the pain they cause others is a sociopath.

Authority is power, and power is attractive. Tear away the tinsel. Scrape away the glitter and you will see that authority is just a fancy costume. You wear it when you are about to cause someone pain.

Every good person in authority has scars on their heart, memories of the pain they know they have caused others.

Sociopaths don’t care about the pain of others. They crave authority because they are weak, and the fancy costume lets them pretend they are strong.

Things get ugly when a sociopath has power.

“In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes – courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. – can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”

– Eric Hoffer, “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973)

A person in authority who lacks compassion is a very small person wearing a badge.

As a young man, I admired cleverness. But I have lived enough years and cried enough tears that now I see the world differently. Today, I admire goodness. This shift in perspective helped me understand what Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

“Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth… In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

Viktor Frankl was a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a survivor of the holocaust. He was imprisoned in four different concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz where his mother was murdered, Dachau,and then Türkheim.

Viktor Frankl believed in freedom, but he refused to see it as a license to do whatever you want. To him, freedom without responsibility was an idiotic idea.

Isabella Bird was a well-educated woman who left Victorian England to explore the world in 1854.

When she arrived in the United States in 1873, she bought a horse and rode alone more than 800 miles to Colorado. In her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” (1879), Isabella wrote,

“In America the almighty dollar is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. ‘Smartness’ is the quality thought most of. The boy who ‘gets on’ by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a ‘smart boy,’ and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a ‘great man.'”

“A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a ‘smart man,’ and stories of this species of ‘smartness’ are told admiringly ’round every stove. Smartness is but the initial stage of swindling, and the clever swindler who evades or defies the weak and often corruptly administered laws of the States, excites unmeasured adoration among the masses.”

These are the thoughts of people who have lived a lot of years and cried a lot of tears.

I offer these thoughts to you merely as food for thought.

Roy H. Williams

If you have messed up royally, you might take comfort in Al Lewis’s Substack where he details the boneheaded choices and illegal antics of CEOs and executives. For most readers, Al’s independent newsletter is an opportunity to learn from other people’s mistakes, which is a lot less costly than learning from your own. Al has served as business editor of the Houston Chronicle and The Denver Post, and was the Markets Editor at CNBC. According to Roving reporter Rotbart and his deputy Maxwell, skipping this conversation with Al would be a business blunder of the highest magnitude. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Are you going to pick it up? MondayMorningRadio.com

When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.”

Where do you hurry with your basket

this late evening when the marketing is over?

They all have come home with their burdens;

The moon peeps from above the village trees.

The echoes of the voices calling for the ferry

run across the dark water to the distant swamp

where wild ducks sleep.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Sleep has laid her fingers

upon the eyes of the earth.

The nests of the crows have become silent,

and the murmurs of the bamboo leaves are silent.

The labourers home from their fields

spread their mats in the courtyards.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Rab wrote this in 1913,

Free me from the bonds of your sweetness, my love!

No more of this wine of kisses.

This mist of heavy incense stifles my heart.

Open the doors, make room for the morning light.

I am lost in you, wrapped in the folds of your caresses.

Free me from your spells, and give me back the manhood

to offer you my freed heart.

Famous for his role as President Jed Bartlet, Martin Sheen spoke several months ago at a White House event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the debut of “The West Wing” on television. He wrapped up his short speech by reciting a poem that Rab had written more than 100 years earlier.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rab knew that you and I would be here today, and he left us a message.

Who are you, reader,

reading my poems a hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower

from this wealth of the spring,

one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden

gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers

of a hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel

the living joy that sang one spring morning,

sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Rab – Rabindranath Tagore – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

He was the first non-European ever to win a Nobel Prize.

Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY: Speaking of Martin Sheen, his name has recently been mentioned in association with the book, “When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill.” Aroo.

A timber-framed cottage was built in Frog Holt, England, in the year 1450. Today, 575 years later, that cottage provides an important case study for business owners who are scaling their businesses upward. Douglas Squirrel is a technology leader and business scale-up expert. According to Squirrel, if the army of artisans and technicians who worked on his 575-year-old cottage hadn’t come together in a spirit of cooperation, the roof would have fallen in. And the same is true of every business that is transitioning from the past to the future. It’s a fascinating episode at MondayMorningRadio.com.

Dell understood the formulas, and followed the rules, of efficiency.

O’Neal understood the formulas and followed the rules of basketball.

Each of them faithfully followed a Structural plan.

Michael Dell invented nothing, improvised nothing, and innovated only once. But that single innovation made him a billionaire. Dell’s innovation was to bring tested, reliable, proven methods of cost-cutting to the manufacturing and distribution of computers. When all his competitors were selling through retailers, Dell sold direct to consumer. This made his costs lower and his profits higher.

Michael Dell’s strengths are discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking.

Likewise, Shaq says, “I didn’t invent basketball, but I am really good at executing the plays.” Discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking made Shaq an extraordinary basketball player. These same characteristics also made him an amazing operator of fast-food franchises.

“The most Shaq ever made playing in the NBA was $29.5 million per year. Now, it’s estimated that the big man is bringing in roughly $60 million per year, much of which is coming from his portfolio of fast-food businesses around the U.S.”

– 24/7wallst.com

Shaq didn’t invent car washes or Five Guys Burgers and Fries, but he owns more than 150 of each.

Michael Dell and Shaquille O’Neal are masters of Structural planning and thinking.

Structural thinking relies on proven elements and best practices. “Gather the best pieces and processes and connect them together like LEGO blocks. What could possibly go wrong?”

Structural planning and thinking:

Invent, Improvise, Innovate?

“NO, because those things are untested. We want to avoid mistakes.”

Reliable, Tested, Proven?

“YES!”

Steve Jobs and Michael Jordon are masters of Gestalt planning and thinking.

Gestalt planning and thinking:

Invent, Improvise, Innovate?

“YES!“

Reliable, Tested, Proven?

“NO, because those things are predictable. We want to be different.“

The fundamental idea of Gestalt thinking is that the behavior of the whole is not determined by its individual elements; but rather that the behavior of the individual elements are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.

It is the goal of Gestalt thinking to determine the nature of the whole, the finished product.

Gestalt thinkers who can fund their experiments and survive their mistakes often become paradigm shifters and world-changers.

Steve Jobs got off to a slow start because he refused to use MS-DOS, the operating system that everyone else was using. But he was sensitive to the needs and hungers of the marketplace. When Steve Jobs had a crystal-clear vision of the things that people would purchase if those things existed, he brought those things into existence.

Structural thinkers rely on planning and execution. Gestalt thinkers rely on poise and flexibility, often deciding on small details at the last split-second. Ask a Gestalt thinker why they do this and most of them will tell you, “I decide at the last minute because that is when I have the most information.”

The reason you never knew what Michael Jordan was going to do is because Michael Jordan had not yet decided. Michael’s internal vision was simple and clear: “Put the basketball through the hoop.” With the clarity of that crystal vision shining brightly in his mind, Michael could figure out everything else along the way.

Gestalt thinkers like Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan always “begin with the end in mind.”

When a Gestalt thinker has a crystal-clear vision, they have everything they need need to create all the little bits and pieces that will be required to bring that vision into reality.

Gestalt thinkers cannot give you the details of their process in advance, because they have not yet invented the process. But when a Gestalt thinker has achieved the hard clarity of a crystal-sharp vision, they are often perceived as being an “uncompromising perfectionist.”

Steve Jobs, Brian Scudamore, Jeff Bezos, Elon Muskrat.

Good News: Structural Thinkers and Gestalt Thinkers are equally likely to become successful.

The bad news is that I don’t believe we get to choose which one we will be. I think that “details first” Structural people and “details last” Gestalt people are both born that way.

Structural and Gestalt need each other.

A Gestalt ad writer needs a Structural business owner to deliver what his Gestalt ads will promise. And a Structural business owner needs a Gestalt ad writer to envision a way for his products and services to be more highly desired than those of his competitors.

Separately, Structural and Gestalt will both struggle.

But together, they can take over the world.

That’s the money, right there.

Roy H. Williams

Talya Rotbart is shepherding our roving reporter and his deputy, Maxwell, this week in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, that lovely city where the 2026 Winter Olympics will be held. The Rotbarts are being escorted by Maxwell’s sister, Avital, and her husband Ben, who live in vivacious Vicenza, Italy, just two hours away.

The roving Reporter and deputy Maxwell will return with a new episode of MondayMorningRadio on Monday, May 5th. – Aroo, Indy Beagle

“Life… Liberty… and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We published those words 229 years ago when we declared our independence from Britain. That document was the earliest expression of what has come to be known as the American dream.

Jefferson’s Declaration did not free us from the tyranny of Britain. It merely communicated our collective desire to be unfettered and unrestrained.

Do we now feel unfettered and unrestrained? I think not.

It seems to me that our current view of the American dream sees raw ambition as “the pursuit of happiness.”

Ambition is like sexual hunger. It is satisfied with accomplishment only for a moment, and then the hunger returns. Ambition will lead you to momentary satisfaction, but it will not lead you to happiness.

John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first billionaire, was worth 1% of the entire U.S. economy when he was asked,

“How much money does it take to make a man happy?”

Rockefeller answered, “Just a little bit more.”

Ambition is never contented.

Am I condemning ambition? I promise you that I am not. I am merely pointing out the deep chasm that separates the unending hunger of ambition from the high and lofty contentment of happiness.

An old man named Paul wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy 2,000 years ago. Near the end of that letter, Paul wrote about old people and hypocrites and slavery and wealth.

Paul then added two sentences that have echoed in my brain for the past 60 years.

“To know God and to be deeply contented is the true definition of wealth. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”

Happiness cannot spread its wings while wearing the handcuffs of our ambitions. The shining light of Hope is made of a stronger and happier substance than our dark dreams of future accomplishment.

Ambition can bring you recognition, reputation, and riches. But those are no substitute for friendships, family, and contentment; for these are the three strong cords from which happiness is woven.

Have you figured it out yet? Happiness is not material. It is relational.

With whom do you have a meaningful relationship?

Roy H. Williams

We have solved the mystery of the roving reporter!

The wizard received this email from Italy a couple of days ago:

Dear Roy and Pennie,

Talya and I found this quaint restaurant with tables in its wine cellar and thought you’d love this place. (I don’t drink, but thought it appropriate to pose with a glass of wine — which our son-in-law ordered.) If your future plans bring you to Vincenza, Italy, this is one stop you won’t regret. Avital sends her warmest regards.

– DEAN

(You will find the photo that accompanied this email on the final page of today’s rabbit hole. I’m Ian Rogers.)

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RANDOM QUOTE:

“As we start looking for the good, our focus automatically is taken off the bad.”

- Susan Jeffers

THE WIZARD TRILOGY

I wrote those words after contemplating the short-sightedness of so-called, “performance marketing,” on March 11, 2010.

“Performance marketing” is the new name for direct response advertising. It works best when it extracts the value from a well-known brand. Its objective is to bring in a lot of money quickly.

That is why business owners are attracted to it.

But here’s the caveat: value cannot be extracted from a brand unless it has first been created. You cannot squeeze a good reputation dry unless you first build a good reputation.

Do you see the problem? When you have finally squeezed the last ounce of value from a good reputation, you don’t have a good reputation anymore.

As I was contemplating that last line I just wrote, the words “extraction of value” popped into my mind. I typed those words into the Google search bar. The AI Overview that appeared at the top of the page whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone:

 “‘The extraction of value’ refers to the process of capturing or appropriating value from other stakeholders, often through exploiting a monopoly or manipulating competitive market processes, rather than creating new value.” – WIKIPEDIA

The eight words that leaped out of the paragraph were, “exploiting… or manipulating… rather than creating new value.”

Do you remember that famous scene in the movie There Will Be Blood when Daniel says to Eli,

“If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw… There it is. that’s the straw, you see? Watch it. Now my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I… drink… your… milkshake! I drink it up!”

That is the voice of performance marketing.

The healthy alternative to performance marketing is sales activation within a relational ad campaign.

Sales activation is like shearing the wool from a sheep. You can do it again and again and the creature is never diminished by it.

Performance marketing is like slaughtering that poor sheep, piece by piece. It is painful, and there is nothing left when you are done.

I apologize for putting that horrible image into your mind, but we are talking about your business.

I’m sorry if I stepped over the line.

Roy H. Williams

You will find 4 examples of what the wizard calls “sales activation within a relational ad campaign” on the first page of the rabbit hole. I can hear what you are thinking right now. And to that, I say, “You’re welcome.” – Indy Beagle

Roving reporter Rotbart will be away on a secret mission in Italy for the next two weeks. He didn’t tell us exactly what it was, but here are our top 3 guesses. One: He is studying the original manuscripts of Leonardo Da Vinci for a special series of investigative reports to be aired on PBS this autumn. Two: The roving reporter was invited to the Vatican to meet with the Pope. Three: There is no secret mission. He is just eating gelato at a seaside cafe with his lovely wife, Talya, while gazing at the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. We will update you next week when we know more. – Ian Rogers

Incisive

Insightful

Those two words, back-to-back, hit me so hard that I stumbled and fell backward into a bottomless chasm of grief over the loss of Andrew Cross.

Evan Puschak is incisive.

Andrew Cross was insightful.

“Incisive” conjures the precision of a scalpel as it slices open a surface to reveal what is hidden inside.

“Insightful” describes the inner workings of intuition as it quietly assembles a mosaic in the mind.

I was going to say that I have a “parasocial relationship” with Evan Puschak and Andrew Cross, but then I decided that I should check to make sure that “parasocial relationship” means what I think it does. Here’s what Captain Google told me.

“A parasocial relationship is a one-sided, imagined connection or bond a person develops with someone they don’t know personally, usually a media figure or celebrity, often feeling a sense of intimacy or familiarity despite the lack of reciprocity.”

Yep. It means exactly what I thought it did. 🙂

This is Andrew Cross, the Desert Drifter.

“Years ago, I ventured into a canyon alone. I thought I saw something perched high on a cliff. I looked closer. It was an ancient ruin of some kind. I assessed the climb to reach it, and I backed down. It looked too intimidating, but I’m not who I was back then.”

“Nerdwriter” Evan Puschak has built a YouTube channel of 3.2 million subscribers over the past 13 years.

“Desert Drifter” Andrew Cross built a YouTube channel of 484,000 subscribers in just 13 months. Both men are 36 years old.

I continue to watch with anxiety as Andrew climbs impossible stone cliffs,hundreds of feet high, to examine the ruins of 1,000-year-old Native American cliff dwellings.

I never suspected that Death would be waiting for Andrew at the corner of 1st Street and North Avenue near his home in Grand Junction, Colorado.

While he was still with us, Andrew took hundreds of thousands of people like me with him – one at a time – to explore remote places that few people will ever see. And he never failed to share his wonder:

“I had finally arrived. Arrived at what? Was the ruin itself what I was really searching for after all? As I looked around at the remnants of what once was, I pondered the reason I do all of this in the first place.”

“Confucius once said, ‘By three methods we may learn wisdom. First by Reflection, which is noblist. Second by Imitation, which is easiest. And third by Experience, which is the bitterest.’”

“These open desert spaces provide opportunities for all three of those. And they always beckon me to return. As long as I am able, I will answer their call, to discover more about myself and the people who have called this place ‘home.’ As you join me, my hope is for you, too, to find space for reflection, and the pursuit of wisdom.”

“Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.”

It was a delight to spend those hours with you, Andrew.

The world is smaller now that you are gone.

Roy H. Williams

Michael Drew helps authors turn their big ideas into nationwide influence and income. He has guided more than 130 book authors onto major bestseller lists — including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His methods are not just for seasoned authors. Michael has helped business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals turn their ideas into books that people buy and read. A bestselling book translates into higher speaking fees and the ability to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Roving reporter Rotbart says, “If podcasts had bestseller lists, this week’s episode would surely be a top-ten contender.” Listen and learn about the inner workings of what it takes to make a bestseller happen. MondayMorningRadio.com

On the last page of today’s rabbit hole, I have hidden a secret, limited-time-only recording of Michael Drew explaining the surprising way that The New York Times bestsellers list is compiled. It’s not the way that most people think! Aroo. – Indy Beagle

Jason Segel plays a psychologist in the Apple + TV show, “Shrinking.” He is talking to a patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

He looks at her. “This again?” She is holding her breath. He says, “You looked at the clock and now you have to hold your breath until the minute changes?” Holding her breath, she nods her head. He says, “Look, I know you feel like this compulsion is gonna help keep bad things from happening, but that’s called magical thinking.”

Medical News Today says, “Magical thinking means that a person believes their thoughts, feelings, or rituals can influence events in the material world, either intentionally or unintentionally.”

But the summary of that article says, “This type of thinking does not always cause harm. In fact, it can have benefits.”

The benefits of magical thinking are – according to me – exquisite.

Magical thinking is the least destructive way to escape reality. When you compare it to alcohol, gambling, drugs, or adrenaline-producing dangerous behaviors, magical thinking is about as dangerous as eating raw cookie dough.

Magical thinking is a requirement when you are:

1. looking forward to a vacation, a wedding, or other happy event. Every time you imagine the future, you are visiting a world that does not exist.
2. enjoying a television series, a movie, a novel, a poem, a song, a cartoon, or any other type of fiction. Half of your brain knows these things never happened, but the other half of your brain doesn’t care.
3. being persuaded by a well-written bit of advertising.

Life is happier when it’s less cluttered.

Your house will be bigger.

Your teeth will be whiter.

Angels will sing.

You’ll be a better dancer.

Go to 1800GOTJUNK.com

And prepare to be amazed.

Words create realities in the mind.

Magical realism is a type of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.

If you exaggerate, people won’t trust you. But if you say something so impossible that it cannot possibly be true, people will be delighted by the possibility you popped into their mind.

SARAH:  When your home feels clean and happy, the people inside feel clean and happy.

BRIAN: I’ve got a partner who lives down the street from you and we’re anxious to bring you a truckload of SPRINGTIME. [sfx magic sparkle]

SARAH: You don’t have to lift a finger!

Predictability is the silent assassin of advertising.

Magical realism focuses the imagination, disarms the assassin, and delights the mind.

BRIAN: We make junk disappear. [sfx magic sparkle]

SARAH: All you have to do is point.

Magical thinking is good for your soul.

Magical realism is good for your business.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Roy H. Williams

The reinvention of Gigi Meier is nothing short of remarkable. After three decades at the boardroom level of a multi-billion-dollar bank, Gigi reinvented herself as a romance writer. Gigi has published 16 books, some quite steamy, across three ongoing series. Did Gigi to draw on her extensive banking experience to fuel her publishing success? No! She tells roving reporter Rotbart that the opposite is true! Gigi has discovered valuable insights as a romance publisher that would have been useful during her banking career! No one has guests as interesting as roving reporter Rotbart. Am I right! This party will get started the moment you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com

Reaching for that brass ring causes most people to lean too far off their plastic horse on the social media merry-go-round.

SPLAT! They land flat on their faces with only a few hundred views.

Brian has built a YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers, an entirely different channel to more than 2 million subscribers, and 12 days ago he produced a 1-minute “short” that had 3.6 million views on the first day, and at the time of this writing – on Day 12 – it has climbed to 17.1 million views.

And you – yes, you – could have shot that exact same video with nothing more than a cell phone.

I asked Brian if I could ask him a few questions on ZOOM for the Monday Morning Memo. Here are a some of the things he shared with me:

“There’s a temptation, especially with YouTube, to perpetually feel like you’re too late. You’re never too late. I thought I was too late to start YouTube in 2006 because it had been around since 2005. It was already seeing its early superstars. And I started in 2006. And then I thought by the time Scam School came to YouTube in 2009, I thought it was too late. It wasn’t too late. I thought it was too late in 2016 when we launched the Modern Rogue. It wasn’t too late.”

“YouTube is the dominant market now.”

“Facebook is now pay-to-play. And for some messaging, that works. It’s worth paying the money to get the message out there. But if you’re trying to build organic fans like I am, it’s not a fit.”

“TikTok: there’s only one star of TikTok, and that’s TikTok. You can get a million views one day and the next day you’ll get 800. And it’s agonizing because they literally just want to lure you into their dopamine trap. Whereas YouTube is a meritocracy.”

“And here’s the beauty. If you think about YouTube as your personal agent… What personal agent knows your material all the way back to the very first time you ever posted anything? And also it knows the customer, your client, your prospective new best friend, their entire history of everything they’ve ever watched.”

What can you do for me in one hour, Brian?

“We can crack who you are, what you do and do not do, and craft your storytelling engine.”

“Have you noticed, Roy, that on YouTube, so much of the content boils down to, ‘Can you blank with a blank?’ Or ‘How to blank with a blank.’ And these are transactional things. Either they trade on curiosity, or they trade on things that people are searching for. But very quickly, all you have to do is get on paper what your flavor is – that’s called in fancy Hollywood talk – ‘a style guide.'”

“Now, I don’t want to intimidate anybody… You know what, if I did want to intimidate people, I’ll say, ‘In one hour, Roy, I can give you a story bible, a style guide, I can give you a structure, a framework, a narrative storytelling. I could break down the beats of your three-act structure. We could consider the Campbellian monomyth, all those things.'”

“We could get that done in an hour and technically I’d be accurate. But the way I would explain it to anybody watching this is, ‘Give me an hour and I’ll teach you not how to tell a story; I’ll teach you to tell all the stories, because stories are happening to you all the time. Every client that has a setback is an amazing story.'”

“It is so dead simple.”

“Now that doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it is simple. The first hour is basically everything you’re going to need to know. Everything past that is reinforcement, and everything after that is refinement.”

Brian Brushwood is a social media magician, a longtime friend, and a Wizard of Ads partner.

Would you like to spend an hour with Brian?

I can put you in touch with him.

Roy H. Williams

When Maria Fraietta’s father passed away in 2021, she and her brothers had to sort through all of their father’s files, financial accounts, bills, titles, and possessions. The project was so daunting that she decided to create a system to help you and me save priceless hours trying to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of our loved one’s accounts and possessions. Maria invested $50 to start her company and ran the business from her living room with help from her family and friends. Less than four years later, Nokbox (Next Of Kin box) has grown into a $34 million-a-year success story. Valuable entrepreneurial insights await you at MondayMorningRadio.com. You don’t want to miss this episode.

1. naming a feature of your product and

2. naming the benefit it delivers to your customer.

But that was 27 years ago.

When “features and benefits” became predictable in B2C advertising, they quickly tumbled into the gutters of “Ad-speak” and lost all of their effectiveness.

Naming features and benefits is still the right thing to do in Business to Business advertising (B2B) and in Direct Response ads. In those environments, your customers already know they are in the cross hairs of a sales pitch. So name a feature, followed by “which means,” and then tell them about the benefit they will experience.

Here’s how that Direct Response ad might sound:

“TwinkleWhite toothpaste contains Polychromaticite® which means your teeth will be whiter, your breath will be fresher, and everyone will be attracted to you. TwinkleWhite toothpaste is the choice of 93% of billionaires and 97% of supermodels worldwide, which means Polychromaticite® is an essential ingredient in the creation of personal wealth and beauty. This miracle toothpaste isn’t sold in stores, which means you will save 65 percent when your order TwinkleWhite directly from the laboratory at TwinkleWhite.com”

Direct Response advertising is a unique monster who lives and dies by its own special rules.

1. It is judged by its ability to generate an immediate result.

2. It offers no continuing benefit to the advertiser.

Direct Response is the preferred method of advertising for people who are selling a stand-alone product, tickets to an event, or a quick solution for a short-term problem, such as roof repair after a hurricane. None of these people is building a brand.

Although ads for B2C sales activation can sound similar to B2B ads and Direct Response ads like the one above, different rules apply.

I will now whisper to you the quiet secrets of B2C sales activation in 2025.

1. Every Powerful Message Comes at a Cost. Vulnerability is the currency that buys trust in today’s over-communicated world. Financial vulnerability, emotional vulnerability, and relational vulnerability demonstrate your sincerity.
2. When you don’t have cash, spend time instead. Brad Casebier owned a tiny plumbing company in a town that doesn’t have enough water. So he calculated how much water a running toilet wastes every day, then advertised that he would install a new toilet flapper for free in every home that had a running toilet. No strings attached. Brad became a superstar and his company became huge. Interestingly, the average person who needed a new toilet flapper spent about $800 on other things they needed done.
3. These diamond earrings whisper, “I love you.” Customer interest skyrockets when inanimate objects have thoughts, feelings, or the ability to speak.
4. Promote your slowest day of the week. I rarely visit my favorite restaurant on Mondays because it is always too crowded. Their offer of “Buy a Burger and Get One Free” packs the house with people who buy lots of appetizers, side dishes, desserts, and drinks from the bar because they saved a couple of bucks on a burger. The offer is for dine-in only.
5. Don’t think like a business owner. Think like the customer. Do not try to unload your buying mistakes through sales activation. Your company will be judged as out-of-touch and unfashionable.
6. In-house financing at 0% interest is a friendly offer. It makes things buyable that would otherwise be out-of-reach.
7. Powerful offers work, even when they don’t.

The 40% of sales activation ads in your customer bonding campaign will accelerate the impact of the remaining 60%.

Sales activation sends a signal that says, “This company is on the move. They’re putting a lot of energy into everything they do.”

Some people lump sales activation ads and direct response ads into a common basket called “performance marketing.” My partner Johnny Molson recently highlighted an important point in a new 100-page research paper called The Multiplier Effect that says, “The payback of performance advertising is only as strong as the equity of the brand.” In other words, a stronger brand means you can have a better sale. And stronger brands are the result of customer bonding.

The objective of your B2C customer bonding campaign is to make customers like you, trust you, and immediately think of you when they need what you sell.

Nourish the seeds of relationship that you plant in the hearts of your customers with the water and sunlight of delightful sales activation.

Customer bonding operates on the timeless principles of seedtime and harvest.

This is why you can trust it.

Roy H. Williams

Andrew Matthews and his wife, Julie, have sold more than 8 million copies of their inspirational books about happiness and resilience. His first visit with us was one of 2024’s most popular episodes of Monday Morning Radio. In this, his second appearance, Andrew talks about the persistence, relationship-building and adaptability that are required to achieve success. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Persistence, Relationship-building, and Adaptability. We’ll get started as soon as you arrive at MondayMorningRadio.com