Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Have you ever casually started down a path and then the journey got a life of its own?The White Rabbit appears in chapter one, inexplicably wearing a waistcoat. So what does Alice do? She follows him down the rabbit hole. There’s just no turning back after a decision like that.The journey is alive and it’s bigger than you.At twenty, I followed a White Rabbit and became an ad writer.At forty, I wrote The Wizard of Ads and it became Business Book of the Year.At sixty, I announced I was going to create The Ad Writers Masters Class for The American Small Business Institute and that its graduates would be qualified for admission into The Ad Writer’s Guild.The journey got a life of its own.Becoming an AdMaster will be like becoming a Black Belt in the art of ad writing.I expressed my biggest fear about that 52-week online class in last week’s Monday Morning Memo. Did you read it?“I sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert how a thing is done, we now have the ability to do that thing expertly. But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency. And then there is a second long and winding road from Proficiency to Authority.”My partner Jeff Sexton read that and immediately sent me a video featuring Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program This American Life.“Nobody tells people who are beginners – I really wish somebody had told this to me – is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. Okay? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite good. But, your taste – the thing that got you into the game – your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is a disappointment to you.”“A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. The thing that I would say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through a phase of years where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short.”“Everyone goes through that, and if you’re going through it right now, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. The work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”“It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that. Okay?”When I followed up on that idea of becoming a black belt, I learned that it was a far more accurate comparison than I had realized. WIKIPEDIA says,“In Japanese martial arts; the shodan black belt is not the end of training, but rather a beginning to advanced learning: the individual now ‘knows how to walk’ and may thus begin the ‘journey.'”When The Ad Writers Masters Class is finally announced, I hope you’ll consider it. And if you decide to pursue your black belt in ad writing, I hope you’ll remember that there’s a long and winding road from Information to Proficiency.In the meantime, you can learn How to Become a YouTube Influencer. Not that it’s any easier. But that class is fully polished and coming up in September.Indy said to tell you “Aroo,” and that he’ll see you in the rabbit hole.You know the way.Roy H. Williams

Pennie and I have criteria we use to judge the success of Wizard Academy. In a recent meeting of the board of directors, they asked us to share those criteria with them.I began by saying, “A non-profit educational organization would be foolish to judge its success by its revenues. And we would be equally foolish to judge our success by the number of people who attend classes. When we complete The House of the Lost Boys, we’ll be able to accommodate 24 students per class. But we have just 40 classes per year. Nine hundred and sixty students per year is our self-imposed maximum and we’ve been hovering at that number for a long time. The goal is the high-touch sharing of valuable insights, processes, formulas, tips and lessons with self-selected insiders who had to pass through a lot of filters to even hear about this place and then cross a lot of barriers to get here.”“So how, exactly, do you measure success?” asked one of the board members.“Three things, ” I answered.“Number one is how often we hear reports from students saying they went home and implemented the things they learned and it made a gigantic difference.”“Number two is how often they return for additional classes. Because this tells us they had a great experience the first time.”“Number three is the number of newcomers who were told to come by someone who had already been here.”“Results, Returns, and Referrals,” echoed 38-year-old Ryan Deiss as he nodded his head in affirmation.“I thought I made those criteria up!” I said. “Are you telling me they’re a known thing?”“They’re not widely known, but all the better schools use those criteria,” he said.Manley Miller is another 38-year-old that the board has asked to fill the position of a member who has been serving for 20 years and has announced he will be retiring next year.In Manley’s not-yet-published book, he writes,“When you have a talent for something, you have an aptitude. But when you become a master of it, you have proficiency.”“When you have something to say that is worth hearing, you have wisdom. But when people are willing to listen to you, you have authority.”Manley says he learned that from reading the Bible. “Jesus spoke with wisdom in the Temple when he was 12 years old, but when he was 30, he spoke with authority. You’ve got to add a lot of experience to your wisdom before you can speak with authority.”A few days later, Rex Williams, another 38-year-old board member said,“We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions. Likewise, we judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by the depth of our feelings, but others judge the value of our thoughts and opinions by our words.”Rex went on to say,“Millions of people are involved in social media, podcasting, video blogging, ad writing, book writing, speech writing. Everyone wants to be heard, but few learn how to be heard.”Listening to these 38-year-olds, I had a revelation.Let’s say you have an aptitude for communication, (because you probably do.)You’re still going to need:Information, which becomesKnowledge, which leads toExperience, which leads toProficiency, which gives youWisdom, which gives youDeeper Experience, which gives youAuthorityI sometimes worry that we have an instant-gratification attitude regarding education. We believe that when we have learned from an expert how a thing is done, we now have the ability to do that thing expertly.But there is a long and winding road to be traveled from Information to Proficiency.And then there is a second long and winding road from Proficiency to Authority.I believe this is a message every high school and college graduate needs to hear. Because when we fail to tell them, we condemn them to learn these things the hard way.Indy says Aroo.Roy H. Williams

When you’re in “inside” sales, customers come to you.When you’re in “outside” sales, you go looking for customers.When I was a baby ad-man in outside sales, I had the good fortune to spend a day with Gene Chamberlain. He taught me three things that day that made me a lot of money. Today I’m going to teach those things to you.A: When You’re in Outside Sales, You’ve Got to Prune Your Account List.There are only 24 hours in the day and no way to get any more. Outside salespeople run out of time long before they run out of opportunity.If you’re in outside sales, this is how to prune your account list:Look at your total billing for the past 12 months.Divide that dollar amount by the number of accounts on your list.This will give you an “average annual yield” per account.Give away every account that spent less than that amount with you last year.Sell no new accounts that are going to spend less than that amount with you this year.When you run out of time again, repeat this exercise.Follow these steps and you’ll see your sales volume spiral higher and higher.B: Always Add, “Which Means…”No matter how well we understand features and benefits, we too often name a feature and assume our prospective customer knows the benefits. What I’m about to teach you will increase the impact of your sales presentations and the effectiveness of your ad copy, even when your customer does already understand the benefits of the feature you named.Always add “which means…” after every feature you name. You can add these words verbally, or you can add them silently, but this habit will bridge you into language the customer can see in their mind.“This blade is made of Maxamet steel which means you’ll never have to sharpen it.”“This is a 52-week schedule which means your name will become the one people think of immediately and feel the best about.”“I’m going to write your campaign in a conversational style which means the customer will categorize you in their mind as a friend.”C: When Asked, “How much?” the First Digit of a Number Should Always be the First Syllable Out of Your Mouth.I was one of only a few advertising people in the room on that fateful day I met with Gene Chamberlain. He said, “When a customer says the word ‘How’ followed by the word ‘much,’ there is only one intelligent way to answer that question: Take a breath and name a number and then – without pausing – name everything that is included in that price at no extra charge.”Most of the crowd sold mobile homes, so Gene used their industry in his example.“A man wants to buy a mobile home, so he drives up and down mobile home row, then back to his office. He saw two mobile homes he liked, never realizing it was the same model on two different lots.”“So he calls the first mobile home dealer and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ The first dealer said, “Sir, you have an eye for quality! That’s a Northwind mobile home. Those are made in Minnesota where it gets really cold, so they’re extremely energy efficient. That mobile home is made with 2 by 6 lumber instead of 2 by 4s, and it comes fully furnished and fully carpeted and with all your major appliances…” Gene stopped in mid-sentence and said, “The customer was no longer listening, he just wanted off the phone. He was thinking, ‘That mobile home is overpriced and the salesman knows it.'”Gene looked at us for several seconds before he continued,“So the man calls the second dealership and asks, ‘How much is the mobile home next to the road?’ ‘Thirty-four thousand two hundred and seventy dollars,’ the second salesman answered, ‘which includes at no extra charge, vaulted ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace in an open-concept floorplan, every room furnished with your choice of Bassett or Broyhill furniture, granite countertops in the kitchen and bathrooms, Kohler fixtures, mini-blinds and draperies on every window and we also deliver it, set it up, and tie it down at no extra charge, then we build a 20 by 30-foot redwood deck outside your back door along with a two-car carport for you to park under. And that’s just the beginning. Would you like to hear everything else you get for just thirty-four, two-seventy, or would you like to come down and walk through it first?”The more things you list that are “included at no extra charge,” the cheaper the price becomes. But only if you name the price first.Gene Chamberlain is gone now, but I honor his memory by passing along the best advice on selling I was ever given. My only regret is that I didn’t tell him ‘Thank you’ before I left the room.Roy H. Williams

I was bagging my groceries when the checker handed me my receipt and said, “Happy Yesterday.” Unsure of the correct response, I just smiled at him and nodded.A few moments later I realized he had said, “Happy rest-of-your-day.” But that brief exchange put my mind on an interesting track: can we choose to have a happy yesterday?Strangely, we can. According to a number of studies published since 2012, we don’t really remember the events in our lives. We remember only our last memory of those events. Events in our memories alter and morph with each retrieval until, finally, we are “remembering” things that never really happened.The first of these studies was conducted at Northwestern University and published in the Journal of Neuroscience.On September 19, 2012, journalist Marla Paul wrote,“Remember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling.”“Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time.”“‘A memory is not simply an image produced by time-traveling back to the original event,'” says Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. ‘Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.’”In a subsequent article in Psychology Today, we read,“Not only are our memories faulty, our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by. Memories are malleable constructs that are reconstructed with each recall. What we remember changes each time we recall the event. The slightly changed memory is now embedded as ‘real,’ only to be reconstructed with the next recall. Memory isn’t like a file in our brain, but more like a story that is edited every time we tell it. We attach emotional details with each re-telling. Not only do we alter the story, we alter our feelings about it.”We unconsciously choose to alter these emotional details and feelings for better, or for worse. To make ourselves happier, or more miserable.I vote for remembering happiness. “Have a happy yesterday.”“But Roy,” I can hear you say, “you’re saying that we should lie to ourselves.”No, I’m simply saying that you’re already lying to yourself when you believe that you recall past events accurately.The simple, scientific truth is that you colorize events each time you recall them. I’m merely suggesting that you consider the colors you are choosing.Will they be dark, sad, angry colors? Or will they be warm and happy ones?Roy H. Williams

Vertical thinking is step-by-step, procedural, outcome-focused. It helps you get things done.Always asking, “What is the obvious next step?” vertical thinking leads to incremental evolution and refinement. It is a ratchet that maintains what you’ve accomplished, then “click,” gives you a little bit more. The Japanese call it kaizen, “continuous improvement.”Vertical knowledge is narrow and deep. Specialized. Expert. Orderly.Horizontal thinking is boundless and broad. It is a searchlight that spots anomalies in a sea of similarities. It is the network of intersections in a map of metaphors. It is a detective that solves puzzles by seeing patterns, connections and relationships.Intuitive and instinctive, horizontal thinking leads to innovations by asking, “What doesn’t belong, and why?” It is a magnet that pulls the needle from the haystack. Linguists call this the Aha! moment or the eureka moment, that common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.Horizontal knowledge knows a little bit about everything. It is chaotic, pattern-seeking, creative.Every healthy person thinks vertically and horizontally, though most of us tend to prefer one or the other.The most effective partnerships have one partner who prefers to think vertically and another who prefers to think horizontally. These partners are the makers of miracles when they’re not driving each other crazy.Do you have a strong preference for one type of thinking? The first major milestone on your journey to success will be to find a partner who is your opposite. A person who brings the Willy to your Wonka.But that’s the easy part. That hard part is to respect that person’s opinion and take action on it, even when your instinct is to dismiss it out-of-hand as “irrelevant.”Chances are, you’ve got that person in your life already. Probably more than one. So here’s a suggestion: the next time they offer an opinion, or a possible solution, look at it as a valuable gift that needs to be opened and examined.You’re going to be surprised at the difference it makes.Roy H. Williams

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