Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Back in those days you didn’t shoot nobody unless they really needed shootin’.So when someone showed you a gun, you knew there was a reason. You didn’t always know what that reason was, so the polite thing to do was ask.“What’s with the hog leg?”“Keeps folks from takin’ the cash box.”“I just want a watermelon. You sellin’? Or just sittin’ here showin’ em off?”The truck was a 1950 International Harvester that had been ugly since the day it was born and the boy was a 1955 Hatfield with a homemade haircut that wasn’t gonna win no prizes, either. He looked to be about eleven.“We’re sellin’. Seventy-five cents.”I dropped three quarters into the slot in his tackle box and heard the slosh of a hundred others when he slid it under the truck seat where he’d been sleeping.“Take your pick,” he said.“You choose.”“They’re equal good.”I flipped him another quarter and he dropped it in his pocket. Barefoot, he clambered to the top of the pile and reached to a spot behind the cab. It was worth the extra quarter.“Truck not runnin’?”“We always sell a few after dark and this is a good spot. Didn’t want to give it up.”“Your daddy’s smart.”“Don’t have a daddy.”“Granddaddy, then.”“Don’t have to be smart to stay parked in a good spot. Just common sense.”“He’s smart for teaching you how to flash that hog leg without pointin’ it.”“Illegal to point it.”“I know. And your granddaddy’s smart for makin’ sure you know.”He held it out to me on an open palm. “Walker Colt. Belonged to my granddaddy’s daddy.”I looked at it and nodded, “Nice one,” but I didn’t touch it. My granddaddy taught me, too.I said, “Want some watermelon?”“Whatcha thinkin’?”“Sell me one for 35 cents and I’ll split it with you.”“Eat it here?”I nodded. He reached into his pocket and with a quick flick of his wrist produced a slender, 7-inch blade.“This time you choose,” he said. Two minutes later I laid my fingertip on a melon and made eye contact. He smiled. “You picked a good one. What’s your name?”“Roy.”“I’m Mack.” He quartered the melon and then with a barely perceptible motion folded the blade against his hip and slipped the knife back into his pocket. The hand became an open palm. “You owe me 35 cents.”I dropped a dime and a quarter into it. We both sat on the tailgate and began eating melon. “I’m named after my granddaddy. You named after your granddaddy, Mack?”He laid his hand on the knife in his pocket as he shook his head slowly from side to side. “After my daddy.” Mack changed the subject. “You don’t look old enough to drive,” he said.I smiled, “The police think I do.”“You fifteen?” he asked. I nodded.I let the subject of his daddy lay for a few minutes as we ate the heart of the melon in silence. When we were done eatin’ and I had put my 75-cent melon in the passenger-side floorboard, Mack said, “Your mama didn’t raise no fools, Roy.”“Why do you say?”“Most people put the melon in the seat. Then when they hit the brakes, the melon rolls into the floorboard and busts.”“How do you know?”Mack smiled, “’cause they always come back and buy another melon.”I started the car, put it in reverse, and started to sing softly, “Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear. And it shows them pearly white.”I heard Mack’s voice in the darkness, “Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe. And he keeps it, out of sight.”I turned on the headlights but Mack was already lying down in the seat of the truck again, falling asleep with his great granddaddy’s hog leg pistol and the knife his daddy left him.Roy H. Williams

Amateur ad writers assume everyone makes decisions based upon the same criteria they use. This causes them to unconsciously frame their messages to reach people exactly like themselves.Professional ad writers frame their messages to speak to the felt needs of a specific consumer.People are multi-dimensional. We make decisions to purchase based on a variety of criteria, but two of the big ones are Time and Money.“Time and Money are interchangeable.You can always save one by spending more of the other.”– Pennie WilliamsA person who feels they have no money and no time is buried in financial and relational obligations.A person who believes they have more time than money is a bargain hunter.A person who has more money than time is overworked and highly paid.A person with lots of money and time is looking for something to do.Consciously or unconsciously, every ad is framed to speak to one of those four perspectives.It isn’t really about whether we can afford to spend the money. It’s about whether we FEEL we can afford to spend it. A person may feel they have the time, but not the money, to purchase a product in one category, but later that day feel they have the money, but not the time, to purchase a different product in a different category.We evaluate messages – news, information, and advertising – based on Relevance and Credibility:Relevance: “Does it matter to me? Do I care about this?”Credibility: “Do I believe it?”A message high in relevance but low in credibility is hype.“I would be interested if I believed you.”A message low in relevance but high in credibility is a tedious waste of time.“I believe you, I’m just not interested.”Are you speaking to the felt needs of your customer, or are you speaking only to yourself?Are the things you’re saying believable, or do they sound like unsubstantiated hype?Identity Reinforcement and Self-Expression:We buy much of what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. A surprisingly high percentage of purchases are about self-expression.We bond with organizations that show us a reflection of our best self-image. When we perceive that an organization shares our outlook and our beliefs, we prefer them and their products.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.Indy said to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’s waiting for you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

The Jewish Sabbath begins each Friday at sunset because the fifth verse of Genesis reads, “And the evening and the morning were the first day.”Every beginning starts with an ending.Thirteen colonies became 13 “united states” when our fight for freedom ended and our government under a Constitution began in 1789. This was the beginning of the first America, a land of freedom and opportunity.Those “united states” became somewhat less united during our Civil War of 1861 to 1865. More about that later.In 1880 and 1881, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington headed west to capture memories of a time they saw to be ending. Their paintings and sculptures of the Wild West now sell for millions of dollars.Teddy Roosevelt took the last traces of the Wild West to Cuba in 1898 when he led his “rough riders” to the top of a now-famous hill during the Spanish-American War. His arrival on that hill signaled the ending of the Wild West, the ending of the Spanish Empire, and the ending of the first America.The second America began when Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1901. America was now a land of achievement, a World Power, a nation of cars and department stores and Coca-Cola, electric lights, running water and tract houses.We fought two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Desert Storm before the end of that century and we taught our children that anyone could work as a tradesman, but if you wanted a “good-paying job” you needed to go to college.It took 112 years to move from the end of our fight for freedom to Teddy Roosevelt’s land of achievement and the beginning of the second America in 1901.In 2013 – one hundred and twelve years after Teddy took the White House – we saw the unwinding of achievement and the beginning of the third America, a land of virtual reality, virtual currency, and virtual ownership. Massive multiplayer online games, Bitcoin and Uber, Facebook and Twitter, Google and Airbnb.*2013 also marked the halfway point in the upswing of society’s pendulum toward the zenith of our current “We.”The halfway point in the upswing of a “We” is where we begin to take a good thing too far. We shift from “fighting together for the common good” to simply “fighting together.” Western Civilization has done this every 8th decade for the past 3,000 years.I wrote at length about this in Pendulum a number of years ago. Do you remember that book?1783 marked the ending of our Revolutionary War.1783 was the zenith of a “We.”1863 marked the middle of our Civil War.1863 was the zenith of a “We.”1943 marked the middle of WWII.1943 was the zenith of a “We.”2023 will mark the zenith of our current “We.”I wonder what we’ll be in the middle of, then?It is important to remember that the swinging of society’s pendulum between the zeniths of the “Me” (1983) and the “We” (2023) is a sociological swing, not a psychological one.Sociology is the study of the values and beliefs and motives of people groups. Psychology is the study of the values, beliefs, and motives of the individual.Let’s talk some more about endings. And sociology.Scientific American recently published the definitive explanation of why the final season of Game of Thrones fell short of the mark set by George R.R. Martin. According to Zeynep Tufekci, we loved the first 7 seasons of the show because, “it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual… This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.”A little help on how to “deal with our world and the problems we encounter,” would be welcome right now, don’t you think?Tufekci then goes on to warn us, “The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about the rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to ‘would you kill baby Hitler?,’ sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be ‘no,’ because it would very likely not matter much.”It’s easy to blame WWII on the psychology of one man because that’s how we prefer to tell stories in America; we like to zoom in so close that the picture and the story become pixelated. But if you pull that camera back to see the bigger, sociological picture, you watch an entirely different story unfold.With a much better ending.America’s problem – whichever one it is that has you most concerned – wasn’t caused by one of us. It was caused by all of us.And its solution will depend on all of us, as well.Roy H. Williams

Life is a series of unintended consequences.Things almost never turn out the way we plan.I remember this single-panel cartoon I read many years ago. Two men on a sidewalk are carrying briefcases. One of them says to the other, “Here’s an idea. Let’s buy a grocery store tabloid and bury it in the park with a copy of our 5-year plan. Then we’ll come back in 5 years and dig them both up and see which one is funnier.”I don’t have “goals” and I don’t have “plans”; because I don’t want to live with the pressure, guilt, and bondage those words seem to always bring with them.Plans are based on assumptions that wiggle away like greased piglets when you try to hang onto them.Detailed plans are the wishful thinking of a scientific mind.Instead of goals, I have objectives.Goals have deadlines, objectives do not.When we began building the Wizard Academy campus 16 years ago, I thought it would take us about 5 years. Right now we’re hoping we can be finished in the next 12 to 18 months. Okay, so it took 3 and 1/2 times as long as I thought it would, but that’s fine because we didn’t have a “goal” and we didn’t have a “plan.” We had an objective that we pursued in accordance with a guiding principle: Never borrow money.For sixteen years people have asked me about the timeline and the budget for building our campus and they always seem confused by my answer, “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.”We built when we had money. We quit building when we did not. The final outcome was never in question. The only variable was how long it would take.Here’s another guiding principle: “When something really matters, don’t worry about how long it will take. The time will pass anyway.”My more disciplined friends tell me that putting timelines on their goals puts a healthy pressure on them to perform. These same friends also complain about the debilitating stress they face every day.Do you have plans that aren’t proceeding as planned? Are your goals wiggling away from you like a greased piglet? Consider the advice of Arianna Huffington, “Just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker.”When I was 20, a wealthy man gave me this advice: “Plan your work, and work your plan.”A couple of years later policemen led him away from his home with his hands cuffed behind his back. I doubt that being arrested for financial crimes was part of his plan.Today I offer you this advice: Choose what you hope to change and make a tiny bit of progress toward it every day. When you commit to a daily action – not an outcome – you will find that passion and hope and serendipity will soon come knocking at your door. You’ll find yourself in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, in the right way. Not because you had a detailed plan, but because you made a commitment and you followed it up with daily action.By the way, changing the balance in your bank account isn’t an objective, it’s merely the consequence of daily actions. So make your commitment to something bigger than that. And remember the words of Wes Jackson, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”Roy H. Williams

My 9-year old grandson, Gideon, asked a big favor of me the other day.“Poobah, I have 11 imaginary friends who need to start staying at your house.”“Okay. Can they all sleep upstairs?”“They could, but I doubt they’ll ever all be here at the same time.”Gideon told me what I needed to know about each of them and which ones would often go out wandering for days at a time – and not to worry about it – and which ones would come and go through the windows and who would sleep exactly where.There was only one imaginary friend who was going to continue staying at Gideon’s house.I am no stranger to imaginary friends. Indy and I have several of them.I, myself, am an imaginary friend.Brian Scudamore, Erik Church, David St. James, and James Alish are the primary leaders of O2E Brands. I write ads for their four franchises. A number of years ago, these guys began bringing groups of their top-performing Franchise Partners to meet “the wizard in the castle on the mountain in Texas.”Okay, I can play that role. All I have to do is unlock the majestic tower Pennie created and give a tour of the magical campus she created that surrounds it.But Brian and Erik and David and James had an altogether different plan.Unbeknownst to me, they told their Franchise Partners that every newcomer was required to present me with a gift when they met me. And that the gift had to be deeply meaningful. And they had to tell me a story about it when they presented it. And if their gifts and stories were acceptable, I would invite them upstairs to spend some time with me.I was, of course, embarrassed at first, but this little ritual in the underground art gallery became precious as time went by. These awkward encounters taught me the importance of the imaginary people in our lives.The people you admire from a distance – the authors you read, the actors who entertain you, the voices on the radio that sing to you, and the faces on Youtube that peer into your eyes – are imaginary people that inhabit your world.The character is always bigger than the actor who brings it to life.I recently received an illustrated letter containing 7 questions from a young boy named Bennett.I will conclude today’s memo by answering Bennett’s questions:Can you make 2 suns?No, I cannot speak 2 suns into the physical world, but I can speak 2 suns into your mind. “As Bennett stood in his front yard in the middle of the night, the darkness on his left melted away when a glowing, silver circle began to rise up out of the ground. When that circle of light was as high as his left shoulder, a golden ball began to rise out of the ground on his right. And when the light from the gold ball touched the silver, 12 sleeping flowers lifted their heads, 9 hummingbirds flew away, 6 big dogs barked in Spanish, 3 policemen blew their whistles, and one old rooster crowed cock-a-doodle-do.”Can you make a copy machine?Yes. If I press special numbers on my telephone and say, “I want a copy machine,” a copy machine will appear the next day.How many floors are in your castle?Five: The Art Gallery, the Banquet Hall, the Eye of the Storm, the Library Floor, and the Star Deck.Can you make a camera?Yes. When I touch a certain button on my computer, a camera will appear on my front porch two days later.Can you make a crayon box?Yes, I make crayon boxes the same way I make cameras.Do you have a wizard family?Yes, there are 46 other wizards in my family. Indiana Beagle will put some photos of them in the rabbit hole for you.Do you have any comments?Yes. This is my comment: You are a very brave boy, Bennett. You do things that other people only think about doing or talk about doing. You drew me a nice picture and you wrote me a good letter. Because you have courage, and because you are a doer, and not just a talker, you will be successful at whatever you choose to do. I look forward to meeting you when your Dad brings you to Austin.Yours,Roy H. Williams

Have you ever seen a photographer look through a rectangle of forefingers and thumbs to “frame” a potential shot?Framing is even more important when using words to capture images.Advertising, like every other kind of storytelling, should always begin with a framing sequence.From what angle will you approach your subject?What will be revealed?What will be excluded?Most importantly, what will be only partially revealed, requiring your reader to supply the parts that are missing?In the prologue of John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, a character explains the attraction of the partial reveal: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”“Mr. Jenkins?”“Yes, Bobby.”“How much should a hamster weigh?”We know from this framing sequence that Bobby respects the wisdom of Mr. Jenkins and feels comfortable enough around him to ask whatever is on his mind. And because Bobby feels comfortable, we feel comfortable, too. We find out later that Mr. Jenkins owns an air conditioning company.Another ad opens like this:“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me…”“Mr. Jenkins told me to work on every system like it was for my mom.”These 3 employee voices frame Mr. Jenkins as a person who loves his mother and who hires people who love their mothers. We also know that Mr. Jenkins believes his customers deserve care, concern, and commitment. But the ad doesn’t make these claims; we come to these conclusions on our own because of the partial reveal.“I think I know why Ken Goodrich hired me to run his plumbing company.”The famous owner of an air conditioning company is now in the plumbing business, too. And the person who runs that company for him is straightforward, plainspoken, and willing to tell us what he thinks. We arrive at these conclusions after just 14 words of framing. This is how the public was introduced to Zach Hunt.The next ad begins:“Zach, have you ever heard of the 7-year itch?”This 10-word frame skyrockets our curiosity. We want to hear Zach’s answer and learn where Ken Goodrich is headed with this question.“Five years before Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders, Simon Schiffman stepped off the train to stretch his legs.”Two heroic icons of American history 125 years ago… An unknown man steps off a train… Framing has set the stage. Now captivate your customer’s attention by surprising them with what happens next.Roy H. Williams

Have you found your identity?Do you know your purpose?Are you ready for your adventure?Identity: Who am I?Purpose: Why am I here?Adventure: What must I overcome?Identity is your self-image; a composite of your beliefs, your preferences, and your relationships. Bits and pieces of your identity will evolve with your experiences, but other bits are carved into your bones, unseeable and unchangeable.Advertising moves you when it connects with your identity.Purpose is like a strobe light, revealing an ever-changing series of tableaus that demand your attention. But that intermittent, guiding light comes from a single place. And that place is your identity.Who are the people inside your circle of light?In one instance, your purpose is to lend a listening ear, to make sure a person knows they have been heard. In another instance, your purpose is to defend someone who is unable to defend themselves. In a third instance, your purpose is to give guidance to someone who needs it.If you don’t know why you are here – or if you have no clue what to do – it’s because you don’t know who you are.“Finding your passion” is you focused on you.“Finding your purpose” is you focused on others.Quit looking for your passion. Step up to your purpose and let your passion find you. All it takes is commitment.When we’re having an adventure, we wish we were safe at home. But when we’re safe at home, we wish we were having an adventure.Adventure is just a fancy word for trouble.Dewey Jenkins told me that trouble presents itself as a problem to be solved and our adventure lies in finding a way to overcome it. If you ignore the problem, hide from it, rage against it, or cower in fear before it, it will just return again and again until you have finally learned how to defeat it.Mr. Jenkins told me that’s when it’s time to celebrate, celebrate, celebrate! Now that you’ve learned how to defeat it, you’ll never have that problem again. But don’t worry, a new and different problem is coming up the trail to meet you and it’s wearing an evil grin.The defeated person sees life as a series of difficulties, disappointments, and dilemmas. The victorious person sees life as an adventure consisting of puzzles to be solved, battles to be fought, and problems to be overcome.Do you think this is all just a mind game; that all we’re really doing is giving our problems a new name and looking at them from a new perspective?How very perceptive of you! That’s exactly what we’re doing.But which of those two people do you think is happiest?Roy H. Williams

Paul Compton and “Jackie” Floyd walked to grade school together in 1934. Their mothers, Clara and Ruby, rented rooms in the same boarding house in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.Paul Compton was Princess Pennie’s father.It was Pennie’s grandmother, Clara, that answered the boarding house telephone on October 22, the night the bad news came.Paul Compton’s friend, Jackie Dempsey Floyd, was interviewed on television twenty-eight years ago. Jackie was 68 years old at the time:“When I was born, I was born at my aunt’s house – my mother’s aunt – and it was during the wintertime, and my father went to the mirror with me and held me up to the side of his face and says, ‘Oh, look! He looks just like me!’ And you know how kids will do their hands? I was doing my hands like that and he said, ‘Oh look, he’s going be a fighter. We’re going to call him Jack Dempsey.’ But my mother wouldn’t go for it. She went for part of the name, but I thought that was kind of nice, that he did that.”Jackie’s father was born in 1904, three years before Oklahoma became a state, back when it was still called “Indian Territory.”“My father had a nice sense of humor. He’d always keep people laughing and everything. And in the short time I got to be with him, I got to know him pretty well. And he was always kidding around with my mother and everything, and keeping her laughing, and he’d cook for us. I remember one time he took me fishing. So we went up in the mountains somewhere to a lake, and we couldn’t get the fish to bite, but it was a very clear lake and we could see them, and he said, ‘You know what we ought to do? We ought to shoot those fish, if we can’t catch them.’ So he let me shoot the gun into the water like we were going to shoot a fish, but we didn’t get one, but he thought it was something I might like to do.”Jackie Floyd was born not many years and not many miles from where Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.“And my mother was always afraid that I was going to be kidnapped, for some reason or other, but anyhow, these larger boys had a pulley in one tree and it went down to another. And you could get up in this bucket and ride from one tree down to the other. Kind of like a carnival ride or something. It was fascinating fun and I stayed after dark. And I went home and my mother was scared to death. And she told my father, ‘You know, you’ve never given him a whipping. It’s your turn to discipline him.’ And it had been raining that day and I had a raincoat on, so he said, ‘Okay, I’ll whip him.’ So he took me in the bathroom and said, “You take that raincoat off and put it over the toilet stool, and every time I hit it with the belt, you yell.’ So he was beating the raincoat and I was yelling and my mother was trying to break the door down. She said, ‘I didn’t tell you to kill him, I just told you to give him a spanking!” But he didn’t hit me. Never in his life did he ever hit me.”When Paul Compton’s mother, Clara, answered that boarding house telephone on October 22, 1934, “the night the bad news came,” she was informed that Jackie’s father had been shot and killed by the FBI.“You’re constantly running and hiding and you don’t know when you’re going to get to see anybody. You might have to sleep in the woods. It’s just a miserable life. It might look exciting to somebody, but you look at the end, the way it came down and everything: he was constantly on the run. He might have had a lot of money at one time or other, but it never did him any good. And you’ve no place to go and really relax or have fun, like you should be able to.”But Jackie understood why his father did what he did.“This bank had taken his grandfather’s money – which he had in the bank – and his grandfather had asked the banker, the day before the bank went bad, if his money was safe. And he told him it was. And evidently the bank started up again. So my father went to his grandfather and told him, ‘Grandpa, I want you to sit across the street over there at the depot and watch as I’m going to rob the bank here today.’ So he robbed the bank and the next time he saw his grandpa, he said, ‘Grandpa, did you see me rob the bank?’ And he said, ‘No, it was nice and warm and I went to sleep and missed the whole thing.'”The stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression. Small-town banks that had taken people’s money were closing their doors, but not before they also took their family farm.“The banks were going under and taking people’s money and foreclosing on farms and everything, and I think the people felt that my father was just one of them, kind of striking back for all of them… and it was kind of like they were pulling for him to stay at large instead of being killed. He was probably the only criminal I ever heard of that people wanted for him to stay alive and at large, instead of being captured.”“But a lot of people started using his method of operation and dressing like him, and he got blamed for a lot of banks that he really didn’t rob. ‘Cause I know one time when I first started to school, we, for about six months my father hadn’t been anywhere – he stayed right there when I first started to school – and every week we’d hear where he robbed a bank in Kansas or in Arkansas or somewhere. And the other guys got pretty smart, y’know? They’d dress like him and do his thing and he got blamed for it. And a lot of banks, when banks were going broke and everything, they got robbed by their own people; a brother-in-law or somebody would come in and rob them and the bank would be off the hook.”I was working on today’s story about Pennie’s father and his friend Jackie, the son of a notorious-but-misunderstood bank robber, when a friend of mine said, “Don’t make excuses for horrible people. You can’t put a flower in an asshole and call it a vase.”I agreed with my friend, of course, but I also disagreed. Sure, Jackie’s dad was a blue-collar criminal, but aren’t white-collar criminals also assholes wearing flowers? Yet we call them “successful business men,” and excuse their crimes by saying, “Well, that’s just how it is in the business world.”You can put a flower in an asshole and call it a vase if you have enough money wrapped around it. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.John Steinbeck wrote about Jackie’s father in chapter 8 of his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. And in 1940, the immortal Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him.The next-to-last line of that song is piercingly insightful:Yes, as through this world I’ve wanderedI’ve seen lots of funny menSome will rob you with a six-gunAnd some with a fountain pen.“Pretty Boy” Floyd was killed by the FBI on October 22, 1934. According to History.com, “he used his last breath to deny his involvement in the infamous Kansas City Massacre, in which four officers were shot to death at a train station.”Based on everything else we know about Pretty Boy Floyd, I, for one, am inclined to believe him.Roy H. Williams

Talent is Unconscious Competence; a superpower you were born with. People born with a superpower usually have difficulty teaching it to you.Skills are Conscious Competence; acquired excellence, learned behavior. People who acquire their skills through study and practice usually make excellent instructors.Talented people are tricky to manage. If you tell them what to do, they will do it to the best of their ability, but the outcome won’t be nearly so wonderful as it might have been had you simply inspired them instead.To inspire a talented person, describe – in abstract terms – the impact you desire. Fill your description with similes and metaphors, such as, “I want people to feel springtime and butterflies and the first kiss of puppy love. I want them to feel new beginnings, forgiveness, fresh hope, and a clean slate.”Your talented person will then surprise you with something you never imagined.I stumbled onto this technique by happy accident in 1980 when a start-up needed a logo. Pennie and I had recently met a graphic artist at a church event, so I contacted him for guidance. When it came to shapes and colors and symbols and signals, Jim Collum lived in a world of his own.He was tentative, reclusive, and moody. But I can speak those languages.Have you heard of Portals and the Twelve Languages of the Mind, the class on multidisciplinary communications at Wizard Academy? I can trace the beginnings of that class back to the 5 or 6 conversations I had with Jim Collum 39 years ago.He agreed to design my logo for $500, exactly the amount I had budgeted. My new problem was that I had to tell a professional artist who was twice my age what I wanted, and I had no idea what I was doing.I was swimming in waters too deep for me, so I did the only thing I knew how to do; I gave Jim a list of metaphors and asked him to design a logo that communicated their common denominator.“Jim, have you ever played Monopoly?”“Sure.”“You know the guy on the cards with the top hat and the monocle?”“The Monopoly Man doesn’t have a monocle. You’ve got him confused with Mr. Peanut.”“Okay, imagine the Monopoly Man wearing the monocle of Mr. Peanut. To me, a top hat and a monocle say, ‘generations-old money’. A dark grey Mercedes sedan. A diamond tie tack. An ivy-covered country club. Safe. Established. Zero-risk. Exclusive. Like a Swiss bank account.”“Got it. Come back in a week.”Somewhere in the detritus of my disorganized life I have a copy of that logo. I wish I could find it for you. It was a perfect square made of 4 smaller squares that were separated by a narrow, void margin: an intersection graph.Three of those quadrants were a darkish, silvery-grey, but the upper-left square was black. And the lower-right quadrant of that black square was 24-carat gold; the glint of light off a monocle. A diamond tie-tack.It was a purely abstract logo that communicated everything I had said to Jim. Everyone who looked at it saw, ‘old money… safe, established, zero-risk, exclusive, like a Swiss bank account.’That golden square was just one-sixteenth of the logo but it commanded all the attention. It was the upper-left quadrant of an invisible square you perceived at the center of the logo.It was the glint of light you see at the edge of the pupil in an eye.Jim never explained any of this to me, but I saw it immediately and so did everyone else.I believe everyone is a genius. Everyone has a superpower. Every person has a hidden talent.Your job is to uncover that talent and inspire it. We do this for our children and grandchildren.Perhaps we should also do it for our co-workers and our friends.Indy is waiting for you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams

One hundred and seventy-four years ago, America’s 11th president sent John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico, authorizing him to pay the Mexican government up to $25 million for their territories in New Mexico and California. When Mexico refused to consider the offer of President James K. Polk, he sent 4,000 troops to occupy land near the Rio Grande—a region Mexico claimed as its own.Mexico responded by sending troops, and on April 25, 1846, an American patrol was attacked by Mexican cavalry. Polk loudly accused Mexico of shedding “American blood on American soil!” and congress immediately voted to declare war on Mexico.Freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln argued that President Polk had goaded the Mexicans into a fight on Mexican soil, and that the war was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.” He labeled “Mr. Polk’s War” a shameless land grab, and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where that first battle of the war took place.Lincoln’s furious “Spot Resolutions” made his reputation as a politician, but damaged him with his with pro-war constituents. One Illinois newspaper even branded him “the Benedict Arnold of our district,” and his own Whig party did not allow him to be renominated at the end of his congressional term.The Mexican–American War was the first American war to be covered by mass media, creating widespread public interest and support. Telegraphed reports of victory from the battlefield sparked wildfire excitement and kept Americans emotionally united when they read about those battles in the penny press.1.  New York City celebrated the double-victory at Veracruz and Buena Vista with fireworks and a grand procession of 400,000 people.The Mexican-American War had a higher rate of casualties than WWI or WWII. It was a nasty, brutal war, with diseases killing as many as did cannons, rifles, and swords.In late 1847, President Polk sent a State Department clerk, Nicholas P. Trist, south of the border to negotiate a peace treaty with the Mexicans. The talks proceeded slowly, so Polk ordered Trist to end the talks and return home. But Trist, believing he was on the verge of a breakthrough, disobeyed the president’s order and sent home a 65-page letter defending his decision to continue his efforts toward peace.Polk was furious. He said Trist was “destitute of honor or principle!” and tried to have him removed, but was unable to stop the negotiations in Mexico. Two months later, Trist finalized the miraculous Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. In that treaty, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and awarded Trist all or part of the future states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.President Polk reluctantly accepted the deal, then fired Trist the moment he returned to the United States.I share these things to cheer you up.Did you think our current political climate meant that we had lost our way as a nation? Don’t worry even a little bit. A clear-eyed study of history reveals that no nation of people has ever lived up to its potential.We are no more – and no less – screwed up than we have always been.L’chaim.Roy H. Williams1. Beginning in 1830, inexpensive newspapers became possible following the shift from hand-crafted to steam-powered printing. Famous for costing one cent while other newspapers cost around 6 cents, penny press papers made the news accessible to the masses.