Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

My friend Jeffrey and I were talking one day about this and that when he said, as much to himself as to me, I think, “What is it that separates confidence from hubris?”I replied, “The outcome.”“That’s it!” Jeff gasped through his laughter, his head thrown back as tears began to inch toward his ears. “If you succeed, it was confidence. Fail, and it was hubris.”I’ve never been sure why my answer gave Jeff such pleasure, but isn’t it great to see a friend laugh uncontrollably?For the past 30 years I’ve livedwith my finger on the pulse of business owners.I know the rhythm of their heartbeats.I know what raises their blood pressure.I know what puts them to sleep.I feel the thump, thump, thump of their hunger for success.I know the storms that rise above them.I know the rains that fall.And I know what keeps them moving.Time and Chance are variables beyond our control.Money and Love are fuel.Time and Chance affect the flow of Money and Love.But Money and Love have no effect on Time and Chance.I’ve always been simpatico with the writer of Ecclesiastes.I think I understand him. He said,I have seen something else under the sun:The race is not to the swift?or the battle to the strong,?nor does food come to the wise?or wealth to the brilliant?or favor to the learned;?but time and chance happen to them all.Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:As fish are caught in a cruel net,or birds are taken in a snare,so people are trapped by evil timesthat fall unexpectedly upon them.It is not my goal to bring you down or give you melancholy. I hope only to broaden your perspective. I want you to enjoy this adventure called Life, regardless of the scenery that surrounds you. You made it here. You exist. You’re alive. How cool is THAT!We choose our destiny with every choice we make.We create our reality with every action we take.And Time and Chance happen to us all.Roy H. Williams

Do not confuse pleasure with happiness.Unhappy people can have pleasure.And uninterrupted pleasures are not happiness.Happiness is the result of knowing who you are, why you are here, and what you should do.We need identity, purpose, and adventure.Identity – Who am I?Purpose – Why am I here?Adventure – What will I do now?Selling is theater and each customer is an actor in that play.The marketing person – an ad writer – creates the storyline.The salesperson is the director, the narrator, the master-of-ceremonies and the usher.The customers sit quietly in the audience until they realize the play is about them.Are your customers sitting quietly in the audience? Your job is to entice them out of their seats. You want them to stand up and take action. You need them to storm the stage, perform their parts, walk on clouds of laughter, dance in the rain of the spotlight, revel in the thunder of applause.This play called Life should always be about identity, purpose and adventure. Make it about something else and your play is certain to be a parody, a tragedy, a satire or a farce.These are the motivations of the characters:Identity: Who am I? We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. We even choose our service providers based on how closely they mirror the way we would run their company. We’re attracted to reflections of ourselves. A salesperson points out this reflection, “That’s you, isn’t it?” and then gives the intellect the facts it needs to justify the purchase. Win the heart and the mind will follow.Purpose: Why Am I Here?If you’re sitting alone in the darkness, it’s because you’re afraid. Stand up fearfully, but stand up anyway. Flip the switch of the spotlight with a trembling finger and walk wobbly-kneed to center stage. We measure ourselves by our intentions but others measure us by our actions. Let your intentions become your actions and you will have stumbled onto your purpose. Quit thinking. Start doing. And whatever you do, do it with set-jaw determination. Your purpose will reveal itself soon enough.Adventure: What Will I Do Now?It is not the victory, but the audacity of the attempt that makes us feel alive. Small plans do not enflame the hearts of men. If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough. Waiting is a kind of dying. Indecision is a decision. When you let enough time go by as you wring your hands and say, “Well, I just don’t know,” the opportunity will pass and your decision will have been made. Procrastination is the passive assassin of happiness.Opportunity has been knocking for a long time now. In fact, it’s pounding on your door as you read this. Get up and answer it.Do something that scares you.What’s the worst than can happen?Answer the door.It’s showtime.Roy H. Williams

I’m 21 years old but my thinning hair makes me look about 30. I consider this to be my greatest asset.I walk the retail sidewalks, looking in windows, deciding if I will go in. A peddler goes door to door unthinkingly, playing the odds, tossing his pitch to anyone who will catch it like the common cold. But I choose my doors carefully, walking past most, looking always for those little indicators that whisper, “The owner of this business has a brain.”I climb wooden stairs to the trailer house office of a mobile home dealer on Admiral Boulevard. Standing on the cedar deck outside the glass door I see myself looking back at me, the sport coat I bought for 3 dollars at the Goodwill store, the briefcase I carry to look educated. Behind me is the neighborhood of Ponyboy Curtis, an unfiltered assortment of bent automobiles, broken houses and discarded people.My footsteps drum the wooden deck. Behind the glass, two men drink scotch at a coffee table in a cloud of Winston and Lucky Strike. The heavier one looks up at me, then back to his scotch as I swing open the door and step inside.“Whatever you’re sellin’, we’re not buyin’.” His eyes never leave the scotch.“Probably advertising,” said the other, careful not to look my way.“I came in here because you guys appear from the road to be smarter than most. Don’t tell me I made a mistake.”Both men turn to look at me. They stare. I stare. The second one speaks again. “What makes you think we’re so smart?”“The sign, the flags, and the angle of presentation.”His eyes grow cold and hard. “Explain.”Holding a solitary finger in front of me, I give them the facts. “Five sheets of inch-and-an-eighth tongue-in-groove plywood gave you an 8 by 20 sign on which you painted ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ in exactly the same style and colors a government agency would use. You’re looking for that Veterans Administration ‘one-dollar-move-in’ money that you know every Viet Nam vet has available to them. You’re smart enough to paint the sign. I’m smart enough to know it’s working.”A second finger joins the first. “Every other dealer on mobile home row uses exactly the same strings of cheap vinyl flags to get attention. Red, yellow, blue, green and white. But you paid extra for unicolor strings of metallic silver and metallic gold. It makes your mobile homes look upscale.”Three fingers. “You have the least inventory of any dealer but your customers never realize it because while every other dealer places their homes parallel to the road, you’ve angled yours so that no home is ever blocked from view. This is visually more interesting, gets more attention, makes the homes seem distinctive AND you’re creating leading lines in a V-shape that guide the eyes of passers-by to your seemingly official ‘Veterans Housing Specialists’ sign.”The second one stood up and shifted his scotch to his left hand. “I’m Jim McDuffie.” Pointing to his partner he said, “That’s Mac McKean.” Reaching toward me for a handshake, he said, “And you’re our new advertising guy. Tell me what I need to buy.”I like to tell that story because it makes me look smart. There are other stories I don’t like to tell.Jim McDuffie’s business is big enough to advertise in multiple ways. This means I have a safety net. If the ads on my tiny little radio station don’t produce results, the traffic generated by the other stations will cover me. I rarely have this luxury.The upside of working for the smallest radio station in the city is that I can make presentations to businesses with budgets too small for any station but mine. In other words, the salespeople who work for the larger stations are limited to just 1 of every 100 businesses. The other 99 can’t afford their rates, but every business in town can afford me.That’s the problem. People buy my station because it’s all they can afford. I mean it’s all they can afford. Nothing else. No safety net. If my ads don’t work, the electric bill doesn’t get paid, the kids don’t have money for school lunches and the ad man – me – becomes a con man.In The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost speaks of taking “the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” For me, the road less traveled by was to accept the weight and pain of my client’s failure. When my ads failed, I had nowhere to hide because my clients could afford no one but me. I was the guy.Pain is the teacher you never forget.When I lost my hair at an early age I knew it gave me an advantage. But only later did I realize that being the only salesperson for the number 23 station in a city of 22 stations gave me an even bigger advantage. No other salesperson had a private physics laboratory in which they could accurately measure the cause and effect of each of the variables in advertising. Salespeople asking for pieces of bigger budgets saw the results of their ads through a blurry lens. They had no clear way to see how their ads were working, no way to sift their own results from the results generated through all the other media their advertisers were buying.Thank you, Mr. Kitchell, for trusting me with your money 34 years ago. I learned some hard lessons at the expense of a lot of good people like yourself who couldn’t afford to lose what I cost them. I used the education you bought me to help a lot of people. Many of them became hugely successful.None of those happy people will ever know the debt they owe you but I’ve never forgotten what we learned, you and I. The parts that worked. The parts that didn’t. I think of you often, Mr. Kitchell, and I still regret that I was unable to take you where you deserved to go.Roy H. WilliamsA

A brief summary of this episode

Reverse Your Thoughts, Increase Your IncomeUnifying Principles are those guiding thoughts around which all your actions revolve. When you hold them in plain sight, you always know what to do next.Brilliant people stumble when they focus on the parts and neglect to see the webs of connections between those parts. This is what causes medical doctors to treat each symptom separately while failing to recognize the underlying disease.Such compartmentalization is an even bigger problem in business, causing owners and managers to wrestle with symptoms instead of solving the problem. Not enough customers, low profit margins, high employee turnover and negative online reviews are merely compartmentalized symptoms of a systemic malfunction.Unifying principles eliminate compartmentalization.Let’s develop some unifying principles for your business that will help you create your happiest possible future:1. Think of your perfect ending; leap forward in time and see the outcome you most desire. How does that future company behave? Who are its customers? What marvelous things does it do that cause its customers to recruit their friends? What do these happy customers say about you? Describe, right now, the perfect day in this business you’ll own in the future. See, feel, taste and smell all the details of that soon-coming day.2. Hold those thoughts clearly in your mind.3. You are now equipped to identify the constituent components of this happy future. You’re ready to create the steps that will take you there. You’re ready to draw the map you will follow.ONE: Where would such a company be located?TWO: How would such a workplace be decorated?THREE: How would such a company recruit its employees?FOUR: In what ways might such a company train its employees?FIVE: How would such a company compensate those employees?SIX: What hours would such a company be open?SEVEN: How would their ads make you feel?EIGHT: What would their written warranties and guarantees include?NINE: What would such a company NEVER do?TEN: What might such a company do for its customers that its competitors would be unwilling to do?Are you beginning to get the picture?A clear and stable vision of the End Goal is required to inform the small choices that will bring that goal into existence.You’ve previously heard of Gestalt Theory but now you’ve actually used it.AThis particular application of Gestalt Theory springs from TRIZ Principle 13: turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards. If you want to learn the other 39 Principles of TRIZ, check out Mark Fox’s book, Da Vinci and the 40 Answers or attend that class when Br’er Fox teaches it on Oct. 30-31. Wizard Academy cognoscenti Dr. Kary Mullis never heard of TRIZ Principle 13 but he instinctively used it to create Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR,) the invention that opened the door for DNA research and won him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kary said, “Everyone was looking for a needle in a haystack, so I said, ‘Why not turn the haystack into needles?'” Turn it upside down; reverse the process; do it backwards. That’s how PCR was born.More recently, Kary used Principle 13 to create Altermune, the invention that will probably win him a second Nobel Prize. Speaking of that portion of our immune system that attacks foreign tissue and of how it has been studied for decades so that it can be suppressed during organ transplants, Kary said, “Suppress it, hell, why not aim it?” And from that bit of backwards thinking Kary Mullis invented an antidote for anthrax. He will likely use this same technique to invent cures for dozens of other things for which our bodies have no defense.Watch the video at TED.comWizard Academy Cognoscenti rock the world.Rock on. Roy H. Williams

Agrees With Wizard AcademyHeadlines often tell the truth more powerfully than is completely accurate, a disturbing trend in this day of sound-bite news.The mental image conjured in the mind by the headline, “Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Agrees With Wizard Academy,” is one in which the Nobel Laureate (1.) is aware of Wizard Academy and (2.) makes a statement of affirmation regarding it.Neither of these things has happened. So how could the writer of that headline say such a thing? The Monday Morning Memo you received on July 29 was titled, Fortune’s 500 or America’s 5.91 Million? Perhaps you remember reading it.In that memo I stated,The Fortune 500 are the newsmakers but they are not the backbone of the American economy. According to the U.S. Census, America is home to nearly 17 million sole proprietorships, plus an additional 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These 5.91 million are the backbone of the economy since they create more new jobs than all the other companies combined. The press will cheer for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.If the Fortune 500 suddenly vanished from the earth, a new group of giants would arise. But if America’s 5.91 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees suddenly vanished from the earth, the fabric of our society would be shredded and democracy would be gone.Free enterprise doesn’t depend on democracy.Democracy depends on free enterprise.On August 17, 2013, more than 2 weeks after that MondayMorningMemo appeared, Jeffrey Eisenberg sent a story from the August 17th New York Times in which the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, Robert J. Shiller, contemplated the newly-published worries of Edmund Phelps, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.According to Shiller,“Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend… He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.”I’m not suggesting that Phelps or Shiller was influenced by what I wrote. In fact, I’m reasonably certain they’ve never heard of me. But I do feel I’m well within the mark to say both men agree with me.Phelps is worried about corporatism. Me? I’m worried about a disturbing trend toward overstated sound bites. I gave today’s memo a reckless headline to underscore my point, but better examples are all around us.A recent story boasted the headline, “Right Brain, Left Brain? Scientists Debunk Popular Theory.” Google it and you’ll find dozens of variations of that story reposted by online parrots who never pause to contemplate what they hear before squawking it to all the world.Invest 3 minutes to actually read that story and you’ll find the headline to be false and misleading to the point of absurdity. The discovery for which Dr. Roger Sperry won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology stands as tall and proud as ever. Here’s a direct quote from the story that supposedly ‘debunks’ Dr. Sperry’s findings:“‘It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain,’ explained Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study. ‘Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection.’”Dig into that study by Dr. Anderson and you’ll find he merely summarizes what we’ve always known: both sides of the brain are in constant use. There is never a moment in which thoughts and the associative memories triggered by those thoughts are contained entirely on one side.This is news?I believe this trend toward overstatement has its roots in the “corporatism” decried by Professors Schiller and Phelps. Listen to the most highly paid pundits on radio and television and you’ll hear sociopathic children who have learned to cry “wolf” louder and more frantically than their peers.Corporatism rewards any spokesperson who can control the thinking of others.A society that no longer has time for contemplation, scholarship, or independent research is at the mercy of little boys who have no conscience and who are desperate for attention.Time and attention are commodities more precious than diamonds and gold. We have only so many moments. It is a heartless thing to trick a person into giving them to you.False shouts of “Wolf!” should be cast into oblivion, along with those empty-headed parrots who reheat, repeat and retweet them. Just sayin’.Roy H. Williams

The Essence of Content MarketingThe perfect customer is like a beautiful woman, distant and desirable and pursued by countless competitors. An appropriate metaphor, don’t you think?Most advertisers want ads that equate to a magical pickup line. “Tell me what to say to this beautiful woman so that she’ll rip off her clothes and jump into bed with me.”Some advertisers get downright self-righteous as they demand these magical lines. They lift their chins and sniff, “I want to hold my ads accountable.” In other words, “I want it to work immediately. Tell me how to make this beautiful woman give me what I want. Tell me what to say. I’ll say anything.”Advertising people know how to craft these “direct response” messages. And the lines we tell you to say to the woman very often work! Not surprisingly, the “beautiful women” who can be won in a single conversation are mostly interested in money. It’s usually about the price.And they tend not to be loyal.Courtship takes a longer path.According to behavioral psychologist Desmond Morris, the strength of a relationship is usually determined by the process that formed it. Relationships that are quickly formed are quickly broken. True courtship is an adventure and adventures take time. You’ve got to let the woman of your affections get to know you.You do remember that we’re talking about business, don’t you? All this stuff about beautiful women was just a metaphor for building long-term relationships with customers.If your website or blog provides valuable, insightful content, you’re likely to become a sustaining resource that your prospective customer will grow to depend upon. This form of customer courtship is called “content marketing.” Think of it as the advertising equivalent of love letters.Ray Seggern, one of my Wizard of Ads partners, explains customer courtship as the convergence of Story, Culture and Experience. According to Ray:Story isWhat You Say. (Marketing)It is the personality and promises you put in your messages.Culture isWho You Are.It is the experience your employees have within your company.Experience isWhat You Do.It is what your customers perceive when they interact with your company.Authenticity occurswhen your story and your customer’s experience align.When these don’t align, you get bad reviews.High Employee Morale is what happenswhen your story and your culture align.When these don’t align, you have cancer in the building.Brand Ambassadors are bornwhen story and culture and experience align.This is when your happy customer chooses to become a member of your family, part of your brand.In other words, the beautiful woman agrees to marry you.And because who you are and what you say and what you do are in perfect alignment, I honestly believe you’ll live happily ever after together.Roy H. Williams

Commentators say that people today have a shorter attention span than in the past, but Jerry Seinfeld and I don’t believe this is true.“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.” – Jerry Seinfeld“If you are entertaining them.”I believe it’s presumptive to say that today’s generation is more easily distracted than previous generations. It is accurate, perhaps, to say they are more often distracted, but might not their forefathers have been just as often distracted had they carried electronic worlds in their pockets?The truth is that people today have a low tolerance for boredom. Combine this with the constant availability of entertaining attractions and it’s easy to see why this question of attention span keeps popping up like a prairie dog.Of course people today can pay attention. But why should they?“We frequently forgive those who bore us, but cannot forgive those who we bore.” – Francois, Duc de La RochefoucauldWe are insulted when people turn their attention away from us, especially when we believe what we’re saying is important.You can blame today’s generation for bad manners and a short attention span. You can blame video games and smart phones. You can blame poor parenting and too much television. You can blame Alfred E. Neuman. You can blame God.Or you can realize that attention will always turn toward whatever stimulus is most interesting. You can see the competition for attention is fiercer today than it has ever been. You can see that we need to up our game.Our ability to gain and hold attention depends entirely upon our ability to stimulate the curiosity of others.Can you stimulate curiosity? If you can’t, you will not hold attention. Not in your ads, not on the telephone, not face-to-face.I tell my business partners, the Wizards of Ads, not to be offended when someone in the audience begins texting or playing a video game, but to take it as a signal to add some sparkle to their talk; do something more interesting than the distraction; win back the wandering mind. They are now among the most riveting speakers in America.So what will it be? Will you blame the audience or blame yourself?If you blame the audience, you eliminate all hope of improvement because there is nothing you can do to fix the audience. You must then conclude that society is circling the drain. “America is in decline, blah, blah, blah”.But if you blame only yourself for not rising to the challenge of increased competition, that problem is easily solved:All you have to do is become more interesting.Begin by entering your subject from an unusual angle.“Jerry Seinfeld and I don’t believe this to be true.”Use examples that are relevant to the audience.“…electronic worlds in their pockets.”Specificity is more interesting than generalities.“…this question of attention span keeps popping up like a prairie dog.”Don’t over-explain. Let your listeners figure it out for themselves.“You can blame Alfred E. Neuman.”Unusual intonations and inflections captivate the ear and make it difficult to quit listening.Talk faster than usual. Our speed of hearing greatly exceeds the speed of speech. Nothing bores people faster than taking too long to say too little.Deliver big ideas quickly like boulders in an avalanche. Rapid distraction is a machine gun that requires you to collect bullets in advance.You can no longer just make it up as you go along.The future is a magical world that will belong to those who can gain and hold attention. How much of that magic would you like to own?And that’s why it’s called – you have wondered, haven’t you? – “The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.”The next 3-day session begins November 5, 2013.Preparation and practice. These are the keys.Let us hand them to you.Roy H. Williams

We tend to think of imitation as the opposite of innovation but I don’t believe this is true. “Opposite” indicates opposed positions, left and right. But my observation is that innovation and imitation are usually the second and third positions in a continuing circle that has improvisation as its starting point.Here’s how that circle is usually drawn:You are faced with a problem for which you have no solution, so you improvise. Or a known and trusted solution fails to perform as it has in the past, so you improvise. It is through such improvisation that innovation is most often discovered. Then, when the innovation has proven to be more efficient, it is imitated again and again to become our new state-of-the-art. It will be touted as a “best practice” for a while, then lose its luster to become merely the status quo, “the way things are done.” Yesterday’s brilliant innovation then becomes traditional wisdom, and as new circumstances arise, we begin to suspect it to be more tradition than wisdom until finally it becomes “the box” in which we feel trapped.You’ll say, “I need to think outside the box,” and improvisation will begin again.1. Improvisation*2. Innovation and3. Imitation are three positions on a continuing circle, or more accurately, a spiral.Practical Applications of Chaos Theory is the final session on the last day of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy, America’s school for the imaginative, the courageous, and the ambitious. In that climactic session, the cognoscenti learn that a fractal image is merely the map of a chaotic system and that chaos, in science, is not randomness but rather precisely the opposite: a level of organization more complex than the human mind can follow. The cognoscenti then learn that fractal images are three-dimensional due to the repetitive nature of fractal self-similarity: a repetitive series of complex patterns that interlock to become a larger iteration of precisely that same pattern. In the simplest possible manifestation of this idea, a spiral is a series of spinning circles interlocked to become an increasingly larger series of spinning circles.That’s when we begin to hear the voice of Solomon echoing through time and space as it has echoed for 3,000 years:“What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one can say,‘Look! This is something new’?It was here already, long ago;it was here before our time.No one remembers the former generations,and even those yet to comewill not be rememberedby those who follow them.”– Ecclesiastes, ch. 1Another good Jewish boy, Brian Greene, is the theoretical physicist widely known for his ability to explain String Theory, reconciling quantum mechanics to general relativity and explaining the fundamental nature of time and space along the way.“Among the many features of String Theory, the following three are perhaps the most important ones to keep firmly in mind.First, gravity [general relativity theory – RHW] and quantum mechanics are part and parcel of how the universe works and therefore any purported unified theory must incorporate both. String theory accomplishes this.Second, studies by physicists over the past century have revealed that there are other key ideas – many of which have been experimentally confirmed – that appear central to our understanding of the universe. These include the concepts of spin…”– Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, p.383Wow. The spinning spiral must really be an essential law of nature if Brian Greene gives it first place on his short list of the laws of the universe.Improvisation, innovation and imitation are just repetitive phases in the ever-expanding spiral of human improvement.This leads us to the comic but profound paradox:“The only thing permanent is change.”Roy H. Williams

When you find your mind wandering, ask yourself these two questions:What am I thinking?Why am I thinking this?And when you’re busy, ask these three:What am I doing?What do I hope to gain by it?Why does this matter to me?Ask these questions and you’ll sidestep the bullet Socrates fired into the future when he said,“The unexamined life is not worth living.”Reality Television. Why are we so quick to examine the lives of others and so reluctant to examine our own?Carl Jung gave us another lens for self-examination when he said,“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”Make a list of your pet peeves and you’ll learn something about yourself.But then we must contend with Dr. Richard Cytowic, that famous neurologist who tells us,“Not everything we are capable of knowing and doing is accessible to, or expressible in, language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is off limits even to our own inner thoughts! Perhaps this is why humans are so often at odds with themselves, because there is more going on in our minds than we can ever consciously know.”Wow. According to Cytowic, there’s stuff happening in our heads that can’t be spoken; stuff we don’t even know that we know.And then, just to make absolutely certain that we don’t get too cocky about this whole self-examination thing, MIT’s Dr. Jerre Levy throws her own special molotov cocktail into the mix:“The left brain maps spatial information into a temporal order, while the right brain maps temporal information onto a spatial order. In a sense understanding largely consists in the translation of information to and fro between a temporal ordering and a spatial one – resulting in a sort of stereoscopic depth-cognition.”Huh?Strangely, the solution to unraveling this hopelessly tangled knot we call self-identity can be found in the advice of an imaginary person in a science fiction book about archaeology on other planets:“Show me what a person admires, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu, The Engines of God, p. 398Do you want to know yourself better?Quickly make a list of:2 favorite visual artists3 favorite poems4 favorite stories5 favorite movies6 favorite songsWhen you’ve made these lists, take them with you into the rabbit hole and Indiana Beagle will tell you what to do next.I’ll see you there.Roy H. Williams