Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

When Glenn Gould retired from playing the great concert halls of the world, he climbed aboard a Canadian train and rode it north to the end of the line. During this journey, Glenn recorded the conversations of his fellow passengers and mixed them into a strangely compelling audio presentation called The Idea of North (1967). It was the first installment in his Solitude Trilogy.Solitude is when you push the world away.Isolation is when the world pushes you away.A simple reversal of energy is all that separates the two.Energy must always have a direction. Glenn Gould knew this.Music is energy.Life is energy.Notes in a song can go North or South: up or down.Life has its ups and downs, too.The movement of music West to East – left to right – is tied to the passage of time. So we experience music all in one direction, exactly as we experience life. The speed of music is called its tempo.What is the tempo of your life?The line traced by the rising and falling of the notes as we move left to right is called musical contour: melody.If your emotions could be charted throughout the day, you would see that a day, a month, a season, a life has a melody, too.Does night follow day,or does day follow night,or does the earth just spinaround a ball of light?Evidently, these are the things I think about when I’m on vacation.When I’m not on vacation I think about how to attract customers to your business.I’ll bet you’ll be glad when I get back from vacation, right? I look at what I’ve written so far and think, “It’s good that I don’t keep track of how many people subscribe and unsubscribe, because a Monday Morning Memo like this one is likely to set a new record for losing the largest number of readers in a single day.”That’s as much as I had written when I received an email from Mia Erichson, the woman that caused Jeffrey Eisenberg to abandon Brooklyn.This is what she wrote:For no reason that matters to this discussion, this afternoon I was thinking about The Trivium.The Trivium is a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.The Trivium – is the lower division of the Seven Thinking ArtsGrammar  – the art of lettersLogic – use and study of valid reasoningRhetoric – the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situationsThe Quadrivium – is the upper division of the Seven Thinking ArtsArithmetic (number)Geometry (number in space)Music (number in time)Astronomy (number in space and time)Mia then went on to describe – rather brilliantly and with details – how the curriculum of Wizard Academy might be organized in a similar way, thereby giving students a clear path of progression toward their goals.Mia’s note was encouraging to me for a variety of reasons:It made my wandering thoughts feel a little less crazy and a lot less irrelevant. (I’d never heard of the Quadrivium, so I Googled it and learned that Plato and Pythagorus and the scholars who followed them thought of medicine and architecture as practical arts, but the Trivium and Quadrivium were the liberal or “thinking” arts. Wow. People have been pondering this idea of mapping things in space and time for more than two thousand years.)It reminded me that Wizard Academy is being built by many hands and minds. Now in its fifteenth year, the Academy is growing increasingly independent of Pennie and me with every passing month. This is a very, very good thing.Mia is the very successful Chief Marketing Officer of a large national company. Her 9 to 5 job is similar to my own and her idle thoughts are just as crazy as my own, so maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all.Perhaps Pennie and I need to take more vacations.Roy H. Williams

You’re twelve.Everyone treats you like a kid, but you and I know better, right?You’ve known the difference between boys and girls for a lot longer than anyone suspects. But girls aren’t the mystery you suppose them to be. They’re far more mysterious than that. You’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to figure out just one of them.I remember twelve.You’re about to start getting a lot of advice from people who love you and some of that advice will be pretty good. But you’re also going to be told some things that are absolute crap.You’ll be told the secrets of success are to be smart and to work hard. But that’s not entirely true. The world is full of successful people who rose to the top simply because they overcame their fear and took chances other people weren’t willing to take.Successful people usually fail multiple times before they succeed.If working hard were the way to wealth, men who dig ditches in the heat of summer would be the wealthiest of us all.We’re paid according to the size of the responsibilities we’ve been entrusted to carry.You’ll be given responsibility when you demonstrate that you’re willing to do what other people aren’t willing to do. You’re not going to want to do those things, either. But do them and do a good job. That’s how you gain authority.People will tell you that a single success can cause you to be “set for life” or that a single mistake can “ruin your life.” But success and failure are both temporary conditions.Grown-ups will tell you that you need to go to college to be successful. If you want to become an employee and climb the corporate ladder, college will definitely help you do that. But the downside of college is that it trains you to think like everyone else. If you want to leave your fingerprints on the world you’re going to need to have your own way of thinking.Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. So never be afraid to experiment. Just make sure you can afford to fail.People will tell you that you need to “find your purpose.” But this would lead you to believe that you have only ONE purpose and that it’s a secret.Piffle and pooh. You don’t need to find a purpose; you need to choose one.You fall in love with a purpose exactly like you fall in love with a girl: by reaching out and touching it each day. When you make daily contact with something, it becomes an important part of your life. You make your mark on it, and it makes its mark on you.You’ll be told that you must plan your work and work your plan. But the winners are those who know how to improvise when things don’t go according to plan.You can choose what you want to do, but you can’t choose the consequences.There’s a big difference between the way things ought to be and the way things really are. If you moan about how things ought to be, you’re a whiner. And the only people who like whiners are other whiners.But if you work to make things better, you’re an activist. If you fling yourself headlong into making things better, you’re a revolutionary. Congratulations, you found a purpose.Grown-ups with good intentions will tell you that you should “enjoy these years of no responsibility, blah, blah, blah.” But grown-ups who have warm and fuzzy memories of the years between twelve and sixteen aren’t remembering those years as well as they think.It’s pretty cool when you can hop into a car and go anywhere you want to go. But after a few years you’ll realize that no place is quite as special as the place you came from. But you can never really go home again because “home” changes just like you do. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said you can’t step into the same river twice.The best advice I can give you is that you should marry your best friend and never let anyone or anything be more important to you than her. If you’ve always got your best friend with you, life is pretty amazing.Hang in there, kid.And remember what I told you.Roy H. WilliamsPS – As Pennie and Indy and I are out outside the U.S. for 2 weeks, the fact that you’re getting this MMMemo at all is a miracle. Our internet here is dial-up slow when it’s working at all. Anyway, there’s a chance you won’t have an audio memo next week, but we’ll move heaven and earth to make sure you get the text version. We haven’t missed one of those since the Monday Morning Memo began in 1994. – RHW

This is an ad you’ll be hearing soon for the world’s fastest-growing franchise for in-home elder care:When Peter Pan first appeared in 1904, children didn’t understand the significance of the crocodile that swallowed an alarm clock. But as those children grew older, they realized that time is the ticking crocodile that chases us all. Time… we just can’t outrun it. I’m Cathy Thorpe, president of Nurse Next Door. Let us help you fight the crocodile. You can live in your OWN home and get all the help you need. It’s what we do… (two second pause) because we care. Nurse Next Door dotcom.”“Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older. And then before you know it, they’re grown.”– Johnny Depp playing J.M. Barrie in a movie called Finding Neverland.Have you accomplished things that other people said you could never do?Welcome to Neverland. You’re obviously one of the Lost Boys.The Lost Boys are risk-takers who rise above their circumstances, constantly dodging the Crocodile of Time, narrowly escaping the Bear Trap of Tradition, zigzagging away from competitors and fools, always happy, always helping, forever embracing that moment called Now.It is a marvelous tribe. When they get together and tell stories it’s like summer camp for grown ups. So they should have a tree house, right?On the first page of today’s rabbit hole, Indiana Beagle is showing off Marley Porter’s architectural rendering of The House of the Lost Boys – soon to be Wizard Academy’s third student mansion – three interconnected towers facing Chapel Dulcinea from directly across the valley of Engelbrecht. Each of those towers will have two rooms, raising our total number of on-campus rooms to twenty-four.One of the reasons they’re called the Lost Boys is because they’re invisible; you can’t find them.The House of the Lost Boys is being funded by a secret society of men and women who are donating $15,000 each toward the cost of construction. In return, they will attend a special 2-day event on the campus of Wizard Academy each year for the next five years (2015 – 2019) where they will enjoy the edgiest teaching, the most futuristic thinking and the liveliest discussions of the year.The names of the Lost Boys will never be listed. The Lost Boys themselves will be the only people who know the identities of the other members of the tribe. A Lost Boy is free to tell you they’re a member, but they’re forbidden to name anyone else in the group. Cool, huh?The seven Lost Boys who have already stepped forward are an amazingly magnetic group. If I published their names and accomplishments, we’d attract a big crowd of outsiders anxious to donate 15k apiece just to get next to these men and women for a couple of days each year. But we’re not going to let that happen.One of the most deeply embedded traditions of Wizard Academy is that no one tries to do business while they’re here. We’re not a networking organization. We’re a school, a retreat, an island of restoration and stimulation and recovery where interesting and excited people prepare for the next stage of their journey.Yes, we’re a little bit ridiculous.Okay, maybe more than a little bit. But that’s what keeps us safe from people whose minds are narrow and closed.Can I tell you my biggest fear? I worry that someday the wrong people will gain control of our school and rename it the American Small Business Academy. After all, we already own AmericanSmallBusiness.com, .net and .org and a simple name change would instantly escalate the revenues and authority of this place to a dramatically higher level.But then the magic would be gone, the laughter would stop, and music would no longer fill the air.Thank you for being a little bit ridiculous with me. It makes me feel good to know you’re there.Roy H. Williams

Sometimes I think we go through our lives trying to impress an invisible audience called “everyone.”“What will everyone think?”Invisible would be bad enough, but I think “everyone” might also be imaginary. Emil Cioran was probably right when he said, “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”We buy cars, clothes, furniture and art to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.Is it possible that everyone isn’t watching? Is there a chance that everyone is under the mistaken impression that is it we who are watching them?It’s funny when you think about it.And it’s also how I make my living. I’m an ad writer.When you have a strong attraction to a brand, it’s because that brand stands for something you believe in. You see in that brand a reflection of yourself as you like to believe you are. What authors do you read? Do you subscribe to any magazines? What type of architecture attracts you? Do you listen to music? What kind?Tell me what a person admires and I’ll tell you everything about them that matters.Does it bother you for me to say these things? Please don’t let it. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about an “else” named Everyone.There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” – Robert Louis StevensonThe hidden mechanisms of explosive ad writing are rarely seen because most people don’t want to believe they need identity reinforcement and affirmation. They are offended by the very suggestion of it. But the truth is that most of us need these things deeply.I met a man a year ago who paid me to give him advice for a day. We spent that day talking about several companies he owned. At the end of the day he asked if I might be willing to write ads for these companies and I – for a variety of reasons – declined. A few months later I received a long email from him telling me about a troubled company he had acquired that had lost two-thirds of all its customers, a loss of about 20 million dollars in annual revenues. I wrote back and told him that I would write ads for this troubled company, but not for the others.The first ad I wrote shares a bittersweet, true story from the childhood of the man who hired me. It’s about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old and it’s why he bought the troubled company. Upon receiving the ad, he called six different people and read it to them. Each of them got tears in their eyes.Not because the story was about him, but because it was about them, too. The story in the ad is about a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure. Even you.I have every confidence that the ad campaign will recover those lost customers and lift this once-troubled company into a sunlit sky.To write an explosive explanatory ad, you must choose:How to end.Where to begin.What to leave out.You must include specific details in your ad or it won’t have credibility: “a year ago… two thirds… 20 million dollars… 10 years old.”But you must also leave something out of your ad or it won’t trigger curiosity: “…a certain kind of magic that each of us guards deep in our heart like buried treasure.”You really want to read that ad now, don’t you?For obvious reasons I won’t be sharing that ad in the Monday Morning Memo and I’ve instructed Indy not to put it in the rabbit hole, either. But I will be deconstructing it – along with the next two ads in that series – in the April session of the Wizard of Ads LIVE webcast.It’s all about what you leave out.Roy H. Williams

The hardest decisions in life occur when we must choose between two good things:Honesty or Loyalty?Justice or Mercy?Frugality or Generosity?These often come into conflict, do they not?If one could remove the vitriol from political debates, these are the six beautiful sisters we would see in a magnificent tug-of-war: Honesty, Justice and Frugality on one side ——– Loyalty, Mercy and Generosity on the other.Let us hope neither side ever wins.A person not doing anything is often exactly what they seem.If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.Rick Sorenson, one of my partners, tells of the day he decided to plunge headlong into the riptide of life. His moment of truth arrived when he saw himself dead and buried. On the tombstone six feet above him appeared these tragic words: He Had Potential.Sorenson read those words and immediately leaped into the churning sea of life.Do the storms ever cease on that sea?A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are for.”– John A. Shedd“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”– Mark TwainYou are busy because you do things.You are getting things done.You are having Mark Twain’s adventure.You are not torn between two beautiful things.You are torn between three: Work and Rest and Play.Which of these three have you sat in the corner with her face turned to the wall?Why have you chosen just two of these when all three are required for happiness?I have given you many things to think about today.I will think about them, too.Roy H. Williams

You’ve been told, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But it’s a misquote. What Wolfgang Köhler said more than a hundred years ago – in 1910 to be exact – is that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”Kohler was famously irritated for the next 57 years by the insistence of writers to turn his statement into something different than what he was saying.But he shouldn’t have been surprised. As a psychologist, Köhler knew that we collect sensory data from verbal and nonverbal sources and then add it up into an “impression” that may or may not be accurate.The reason our impressions are so often wrong is because few of us ever studied a language that wasn’t a language of words or numbers.You didn’t realize that numbers are a language? There are things that can be said in the language of math that can be translated into no other. If you want to learn advanced mathematics, just think of it as a foreign language and you’ll be able to learn it much more quickly.Benjamin Zander delivers a charming and funny and profound TED talk about The Transformative Power of Classical Music. He begins with a short segment on the piano from Chopin, then pauses to explain the relationship between two of the principal notes in the sequence.So let’s see what’s really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. (plays the note) The next note is a C. (plays the note) And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn’t it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (plays more notes, ending with B-C-C-C-C) But basically, it’s just a B, with four sads. (Laughter)”This is the moment when we realize that Zander has just taught us a two-syllable word. In the language of music, “sad” is spelled B-C.Zander then says,I’ve one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who’s no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you’ll hear everything that Chopin had to say.”You listen for exactly 107 seconds as the music written by Chopin triggers detailed memories of specific times. You understand perfectly what Chopin was trying to say.This is when it really hits you that music is a language. And if you control the music, you control the mood of the room.Color, too, is a language.Symbols are a language.Motion is a language.I believe there are exactly 12 languages of the mind and they’re self-referential. This means you will find them embedded within each other and they can be added together to create distinct artifacts.Tempo is the Motion component within Music.Symbol plus Motion equals Ritual.Anger plus Joy equals Cruelty.1Sadness plus Surprise equals Disappointment.1These are just a few of the equations you’ll be taught when you look into Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind. I’m not sure when we’ll be teaching it again, but if you’d like to receive an advance notice from Vice-Chancellor Whittington before he publicly posts it on the schedule, just ping Daniel@WizardAcademy.orgFourteen students attended last week’s class and none of them were writers. But I think you’ll be impressed with the things they wrote during a brief exercise on the second day of class.You’ll find 13 of their compositions in today’s rabbit hole. We’re editing a video of the 14th student that we’ll post in a week or two.Fascinating.Roy H. Williams

If you can’t tell funny stories about embarrassing mistakes you’ve made, you’re not taking enough chances.Are you letting the fear of failure turn you into a narrow guardian of the status quo?Good judgment comes from experience.Experience comes from bad judgment.I met a woman when I was a boy – I promise I’m not making this up – who had the power to change the future. She taught me how to do it, too.Shall I teach you?The past was written by the choices of yesterday.The future is written by the choices you make today.The key is to do things that matter.You spent your day yesterday. You invested your time. But did you make a difference? Did you bring anyone joy? Did you matter? Or did you play it safe because you were worried that you might make a mistake?I’m not suggesting that you try something new all the time, just 5% of the time.The time to try something new is when:1. you feel itchy that there’s room for improvement,2. you’ve counted the cost,3. you can afford to fail.That’s when you should take a chance. Follow your instinct.Few things turn out as well as we had hoped or as badly as we had feared.You learn a little from small mistakes. You learn a lot from big ones. You learn nothing at all from mediocrity.Failure is never a waste of time. Mediocrity always is. The fear of failure is what keeps you average. Success is the result of taking chances.America is plagued by mediocre primary schools, subpar infrastructure, and dysfunctional government. But somehow, this country manages to get at least one big, important thing right: innovation. That’s the deep magic of the world’s leading economy.”– James Pethokoukis, May 9, 2014Innovation occurs when you take a chance that you might be wrong.We want to encourage greatness in men. We want to encourage ambition. We believe that nobody wants to be sort of gray-normal. Often, the definition of normal is ‘average.’ We live, it seems to us, in an age under the curse of normalcy, characterized by the elevation of the mediocre.”– Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine“When you worry about what ‘might’ happen, you’re living in the shattered wreckage of your future.”– Teresa ShapiroPennie and I will spend April in Paris with the woman who taught me how to change the future.She married my father before I was born.Roy H. Williams

What are you trying to make happen?Is your goal actionable, or is it ambiguous and vague?Do you have an empirical method for measuring daily progress?Empirical: adjective, based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation rather than theory or pure logic.I’ll admit that I’m on a bit of a rant today and that the perspective I’m about to share may be nothing more than a quirky, personal preference.But I don’t think so.I’ve never been a big fan of what most people call “goal setting.” This isn’t because I have no goals. It’s just that I believe what most people call goals are little more than aspirations, hopes and dreams: wishful thinking. My goal is to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty.”“My goal is to run a Fortune 500 company.”“My goal is to write a bestseller.”I don’t consider these to be goals but outcomes, by-products, consequences.I promise I’m not trying to rile you.I believe every honest goal:1: has an explicit action plan embedded within it.2: can have its progress monitored and measured by observers.3: will manifest itself in daily action, even if that action is occasionally limited to just few moments; a telephone call, an email, a note written to yourself on the back of a cash register receipt during lunch and then tucked into your wallet.My goal is to build a free wedding chapel that hosts more than 1,000 weddings a year for couples who travel to reach it from every continent on earth.”Chapel Dulcinea hosted 960 weddings in 2014 but we have not yet had guests from Antarctica. We hosted 824 weddings in 2013.A meaningful goal requires that you touch it each day and take action to move it forward, even if that action is microscopic. If you’re not taking action each day, you don’t have a goal. You have a delusion, a wish, a fantasy, a dream.Student: My goal is to be a published author.Me: Show me what you wrote yesterday.Student: Well, I haven’t actually started writing yet, it’s just my goal.Me: Do you really want to write, or do you want to have written? Is there a chance that what you actually want is just to have a book in print?”Make no mistake: I am a fan and an advocate and a steady imbiber of delusions, wishes, fantasies and dreams; but these are entertainment, comfort, and the sometimes-necessary components of a healthy self-image.But they are not goals.Roy H. Williams

The ground moved beneath our feet.There. It did it again.That first tremor was the growing reality of gender equality.The second was the shrinking of mass media.These trends aren’t connected, but they’re both significant.Gender equality is changing the nature of romance. Don’t believe me? Watch any romantic movie from 20 years ago and count the anachronisms, those interactions that belong to the past and do not seem to fit the present.Gender equality also affects advertising and marketing in ways you might not expect.Not many years ago, it was assumed that lovers would marry and buy a home and establish a life together. But then an entire generation of women was taught not to depend on a man, but to establish a career and a life on their own.I’m not being critical. If Pennie and I had daughters instead of sons, this is probably what we would have urged them to do.That advice to young women changed the landscape in marketing. A study published by Pew Research Center indicates that in 1970, 84% of U.S.-born 30-to 44-year-olds were married. By 2007 that number had declined to just 60% and if we extrapolate the trend into 2015, the percentage of married 30-to-44-year-olds is currently at 54.8% and falling. We went from 16% single to 46% single in just one generation.A once-proud nation of families is evolving into a proud nation of individuals.The motivations that drive husbands and fathers and wives and mothers are different from the motivations that drive individuals who have no one depending on them but themselves. Consequently, the language and logic of ad copy must be altered to connect with this altered audience.The trend toward singleness is sociological.The erosion of mass media is technological.Each trend accelerates the other.If the majority of a nation is watching the same TV shows at the same time, listening to the same hit songs at the same time, and receiving similar news from similar sources simultaneously, we can expect that nation to think and feel in similar ways.Mass media ruled America in 1970. Radio was a rock station, a country station, a talk station, an easy listening station and an instrumental format called “beautiful music.” Then you had ABC, CBS and NBC TV. Ted Turner wouldn’t create the first cable network until 1976 and FOX didn’t appear until 1986. When a movie left the theaters, it would go to the drive-in theaters where it would be shown for a reduced price, then appear on network television for free about a year later. DVRs, DVDs and videotapes did not exist. You either had to be where a movie was showing at exactly the right time or you missed it. This forced us to gather together at specific times for entertainment where we all heard the same commercials.Mass media brought us together physically and it united us psychologically. It also gave advertisers a platform for telling their stories.Advertising was easy in those days.Today’s technology allows us to opt-out of mass media. This is good for the individual but it presents a significant challenge to the advertiser. The advertising opportunities created by new technology are highly targetable but they’re also shockingly expensive. The most efficient thing we’ve found so far costs 4 times as much per person as broadcast radio. And although the digital product gives us the ability to pinpoint target a specific audience, that advantage doesn’t deliver anywhere near enough benefit to justify the inflated cost. This is not theoretical. We’ve learned these things through testing.I’ll bring this to a conclusion:We’re approaching the end of a golden time when courageous advertisers can invest money in mass media and see their businesses grow as a result. My suspicion is that we’ve got perhaps 5 to 7 more years before retail businesses and service businesses will be forced to begin playing by a whole new set of rules. No one yet knows what those new rules might be, but this we do know: the sharply rising costs of digital advertising are not being offset by a rise in efficiency.Buy mass media while the masses can still be reached.Reaching people one at a time doesn’t offer nearly the return on investment.Roy H. Williams

If success were the result of a formula, we would achieve it more consistently.Every business has its little formulas for success.These formulas, however, are always incomplete because they were reverse-engineered by connecting the dots after success had been achieved: the second thing (success) followed the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door,) therefore we assume the second thing (success) was caused by the first thing (cable TV ads, or raising your prices, or handing out coupons at the front door.)Logic then whispers into our ear, “If you connect these dots prior to your next attempt, success will surely follow.” This seductive logic has been frustrating humanity for so many years that it has a fancy Latin name: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.“Success is not a dog that can be led about on a leash.”No, that’s not the interpretation of the Latin phrase. It’s just something that popped into my head just now and I decided to share it with you. Actually, post hoc, ergo propter hoc is translated as “after this, therefore resulting from it.”Analysis and ego and weasels with calculators use post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic to assert that we can map our way directly to success without making any wrong turns along the way. But if you keep your eye on these data-weasels, you’ll see them make as many wrong turns as the rest of us. And most of the weasels never arrive at the destination at all.In truth, the variables that contribute to the creation of success cannot be fully calculated in advance. This is due to “the third body problem,” a mathematical conundrum that governs anything that would attract and hold another. Are you trying to attract and hold the attention of your customer? Welcome to “the third body problem.”This same third body problem can also be used to your advantage if you have the courage, but we’ll save that discussion for when we have at least 3 uninterrupted hours together.If you’d like to try to figure it out for yourself, just Google “Henri Poincare third body problem.”Another common misdiagnosis of success – and one that’s much easier to explain – occurs when we judge results too quickly. We see the early stage of success and call it failure.This is because when you’re doing exactly the right thing, the results will often get worse before they get better.I’ve always attributed this to the law of seedtime and harvest, but my friend John Marklin prefers to call it the J-Curve.Roy,In the grocery industry, which is the world in which I live, a key component… is the J-Curve. For example, I built a ground-up store 4 years ago and was told I would do “X” in sales.For two years I did 60% of X in sales. As I came out of the J-Curve I gained momentum and hit the budgeted number in year three.J-Curves happen any time there is change and sometimes they defy logic.For example, in one of my stores my meat sales sucked. So I doubled the size of the meat case and added variety. The result was lower meat sales. It took about 30 days for people to accept the change. Once they did, they liked the added variety and selections. Slowly sales increased and today they’re at the desired level.Very few people speak of the J-Curve.If you wish to discuss more, I would love to do so while on campus at the Valentine weekend.Thank you.John MarklinThe front side of the J-Curve is what I privately call “the little death” and publicly call “the chickening-out period.” The backside of the J-Curve is what my friend Chip calls “hockey stick growth.”I’ve seen a lot of companies abandon brilliant ideas that would probably have led them to hockey-stick growth but they chickened out during the late stages of seedtime when they misinterpreted the early dip of the J-Curve to be failure.Sigh.But here’s where the J-Curve gets really messy: when you’ve made a mistake and you’re doing the wrong thing and sales begin to fall as a result, it looks exactly like the J-Curve before hockey stick growth.How do you know when to hang on and when to bail out?The only solution I’ve ever heard of is to take a deep breath, close your eyes and click your heels together as you whisper again and again, “The J-Curve is a bitch. The J-Curve is a bitch. The J-Curve is a bitch…”I wish you success and joy in your adventure.Come see us if you’d like to have some companions.Roy H. Williams