Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

The smartest thing I ever did was drop out of college on the second day. What I wanted to learn, they couldn’t teach me, so I left to figure it out on my own. That was 37 years ago.A number of years later I wrote a series of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling business books and launched a school for grown-ups who are imaginative, courageous and ambitious. Wizard Academy teaches big things fast. Our students are leaving their fingerprints on the world and I am proud of them beyond belief.College isn’t for everyone. It was definitely not for me.If you have among your circle of friends a public school teacher who trusts you enough to speak to you “off the record” about what has happened to our school system, you owe it to America to have that conversation.I predict you won’t be able to sleep that night.None of the teachers to whom I’ve spoken wants to see their own children or grandchildren in public schools. These teachers aren’t afraid of drugs or violence. They’re afraid of an educational system that requires its teachers to wear the handcuffs of strict conformity and “teach to the test” in lockstep fashion so that the school district won’t be penalized. “Cram for the exam, learning be damned.”Every lesson, every day, is simply test-prep for the all-important standardized test.Standardized. As if every child is an identical blank slate, devoid of individual aptitudes or interests.Have you ever heard of the Creativity Quotient (CQ)? It’s like the IQ except that it measures creativity rather than intelligence. All across America, our 2nd graders score higher on CQ tests than our high-schoolers.Evidently, compliance and conformity come at a price.Children starting school this year will retire in 2072. None of us has a clue what the world will look like just 5 years from now, yet we are tasked with educating children for the world they will face 20, 30, and 40 years in the future.Paul Torrance administered the first CQ test in 1958 to a large number of elementary-age schoolchildren in Minnesota. Twenty-two years later, these schoolchildren were located to see if their CQ scores had been in any way predictive of career success. A second follow-up was administered in 1998, 40 years after the original test, and a 50 year follow-up was conducted in 2008 as the schoolchildren were approaching the age of 60.The result? CQ is 3 times more reliable as an indicator of career success than IQ.That Torrance CQ test measured divergent thinking on 4 scales:1. Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.2. Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.3. Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses.4. Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.Professor Ken Robinson defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Creativity is messy and not easy to manage, so public schools don’t like to measure the CQ of their students or encourage creativity in any way.I believe this needs to change. I believe it must.“But what can we do,” you ask?Allow me to answer with the words of Margaret Mead:“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.?”Are you in?Roy H. Williams

Radio Ink magazine, published by Eric Rhoads, is the principal trade publication of the radio industry. Today we examine a feature article I wrote for that magazine recently. In it, I speak directly to the frustrations of the account executives – the salespeople – employed by America’s 10,000+ commercial radio stations and the many hundreds of stations across Canada and Australia. I’ve decided to let you see what I told them; a peek behind the curtain, if you will. – RHW Ad strategy is more difficult to teach than ad writing.Ad writing, essentially, is to choose:1. an intriguing angle of approach into the subject matter and2. the sharpest words and phrases to make your point.Ad strategy, essentially, is to choose:1. the point you need to make.Bad strategy happens when you:1. listen to an advertiser’s wishful thinking and then2. assume that a radio schedule that3. delivers great frequency and4. reaches the perfect audience5. with really good copy will6. make that advertiser’s dream come true.If you’ve been selling radio long enough, you already know that a client’s wishful thinking is a lever that will help you sell that client a radio schedule, but it takes a lot more than wishful thinking to motivate the client’s customer.CLIENT: “I wish I could sell these items.”ACCOUNT EXEC: “Let me help you.”CLIENT: “How can you help me?”ACCOUNT EXEC: “We have a loyal audience.” (Insert success story here.) “Advertising is an investment in your future.” (Insert schedule and contract here.) “Now tell me exactly what makes these items different and special and better than the ones your competitor sells.” (You start taking notes like crazy. The client is animated. Sincere. Hopeful. Excited.)You return to the station with a contract and a run order. Now all you need is great copy, right?Let me pause here to say that it’s not my goal to discourage you. My goal is only to open your eyes. I want you to see the problem clearly so that you no longer walk into a trap from which there is no escape. We will now continue.You work really hard and write a great piece of copy. Excellent copy. Miraculous copy. World-class copy. The greatest copy that has ever been written. Your co-workers love the ad. The client loves the ad. High-fives all around and champagne for everyone.The schedule runs. The ad airs. Everyone is commenting on it. Very little of the product is sold. Beyond generating those comments, the ad has minimal impact on the business.What the hell?Your copy, indeed, was fabulous. You employed an excellent angle of approach, held the listeners’ attention and made your point in a clever way. Well done! But your fundamental strategy was flawed; your ad answered a question that no one was asking.You walked into the trap when you failed to question why the client was overstocked on the item he wanted you to advertise. The real problem is that no one wants the item. It’s a loser, a dog, a mistake. Your client assumed – and you assumed with him – that if people “only knew and understood,” then they’d rush in to buy the product. So you told the people, you made them understand. And they still didn’t want the product.Advertising will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway.Convince your client to let you offer the public what the public already wants. This is what drives traffic into a store. And many of those people will find other things to buy from your client. In other words, fish with bait that you know the fish love. Don’t try to convince the fish to swallow bait they don’t really like.The inexperienced account executive allows the patient to diagnose his own disease then prescribes treatment under the mistaken illusion that the patient’s self-diagnosis can be trusted. If medical doctors did this they would go to jail.The treatment – the copy and the schedule – is the easy part. The diagnosis – the strategy – is the tricky part. A quick glance at the symptoms does not prescribe the cure. Identical symptoms can arise from many different causes. Most account executives are bad diagnosticians because the successful diagnostician must be cold, objective, and suspicious. Not a good way to sell, right?The successful diagnostician knows the truth of a statement is not determined by the sincerity of the speaker. In other words, a deeply sincere, passionate client can easily be wrong in their assumptions.If you allow your client to frame the fundamental strategy and choose the principal point your ad will make, you are at the mercy of your patient’s self-diagnosis. You and your station will be blamed when that patient fails to recover.The solution is simple. You must separate the selling of the schedule from the creation of the strategy. Selling requires you to be warm, receptive and empathetic. Strategy requires you to be cold, objective, and suspicious of the client’s self-diagnosis.Ask yourself this question: “Are customers not coming because they don’t know about this client, or are customers not coming because they do know?”Diagnose the real problem. Offer the client’s customers what you know for certain they want. I’m not pretending this is easy.Are you beginning to understand why it takes years to become a doctor? But stick with it. Don’t give up. Have courage.You’ll get there.Roy H. Williams

For I Am Exchanging a Day of My Life For It.Quixote sees the turning of the windmill as the flailing arms of a giant that must be defeated.Peter Pan will remain young only if he can escape a tick-tocking crocodile that has swallowed a clock.In 1904, old Mrs. Snow spoke of her late husband to author J.M. Barrie on the opening night of his play, Peter Pan, “…and he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it’s all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn’t that right?”Don Quixote doesn’t defeat his giant but is lifted on its revolving arms and slammed into the ground. Yes, each of us is chased by the same crocodile that tormented Captain Hook and Peter Pan; tick-tick-tick-tick… Time is the windmill of Quixote.Can I ask you a personal question? I mean a really personal question? What are you buying with the hours of your life?Rita Mae Brown said, “I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.”Again I ask, what are you buying with the hours of your life?Anne Tyler opens her book, Back When We Were Grownups, with the words, “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”That line scares me a little. Sometimes I worry that I’m turning into the wrong person, too. Don’t you?You and I gasp for breath and wipe tears from our eyes, feet flying barefoot in our daily race against time.“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: ‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”– Isabel Allende, My Invented CountryOur race against time is a race we will lose. But running out of time is not what frightens me. This car will run out of gas. What frightens me is the idea of spending irreplaceable time in a headlong rush to an unworthy destination.John Steinbeck speaks of the unworthy destination in Sea of Cortez,“Most busy-ness is merely a nervous tic. We know a lady who is obsessed with the idea of ashes in an ashtray. She is not lazy. She spends a good half of her waking time making sure that no ashes remain in any ashtray, and to make sure of keeping busy she has many ashtrays.” p. 182, (1941)We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.In chapter 5 of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a fortuneteller, Faxe, answers Genry’s question about time with a question of her own:“What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”“That we shall die.”“Yes, there’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”Make no mistake; the future has yet to be written. For we are a species gifted with choice.The Greeks believed, “A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under which they will never sit.” Wes Jackson adds to this idea a glowing line of his own, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”I confess; my hope as I write this note to you is that you would fling yourself into a purpose. Because if you and I leave this world better than we found it, we are indeed a civilization. The training and encouragement of future citizens is the most ambitious life’s work of all.Children are the living messagesa mother sends to a future she will not see. In gratitude to every mother everywhere,Happy Mother’s Day. Roy H. Williams

Finally, an authentic, encoded message.And you'll never guess where.The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, exactly 10 years ago. The book has been denounced as an attack on the Catholic church and sharply criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies, but that hasn’t keep it from selling more than 80 million copies in 44 languages. The story is fiction, marketed as fiction, and contains only a bare sprinkling of tautly-stretched connections to reality, but millions of wide-eyed gullibles accepted The Da Vinci Code as fact anyway.In 2006, Virginia Fellows published The Shakespeare Code, purportedly proving that William Shakespeare was actually Sir Francis Bacon. This wasn’t the first book written, however, in an attempt to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. More than 4,500 such books had been published prior to 1949 and “Nobody tried to keep a running tally after that.” [Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro, p. 4 of the Prologue]Just 8 days before Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States, reporter Joe Kovacs wrote, “A well-known Bible-code researcher has bad news for Barack Obama, as he claims hidden texts in the Holy Bible indicate Mitt Romney will be America’s next president. (Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew and author of Bible Codes Breakthrough) … For those not familiar with Bible codes, they are said to be secret messages embedded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Those who claim the codes’ validity say they disclose information about both the past and the future.”Heh, heh, heh. We are a funny species, are we not? Methinks Terry Rossio was speaking about all of us when he said, “The magic of a secret decoder ring lies not its ability to code and decode messages, but in allowing children the belief that they possess knowledge worth keeping secret.”When it comes to treasure maps and coded messages, is there anyone among us who is not a child? You keep your secrets and I keep mine. They are among our most prized possessions. But how often do you hold a secret that means the difference between life and death?When Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote de La Mancha in 1605, he was keeping a life-and-death secret and he hid it openly within his book.The Spanish Inquisition was in full swing. Anyone holding a copy of the contraband New Testament translated into Spanish by Juan Pérez de Pineda would immediately be put to death. Indeed, Julián Hernández had already been tortured for 3 years and burned at the stake for it along with more than 100 other people during the 17 years prior to 1605.AWhat do you suppose motivated Miguel de Cervantes to quietly shout, “I have a copy of this forbidden New Testament and I’m looking at it right now!” from the pages of Don Quixote? Yet this is precisely what he does in part one, chapter nine, and again in part two, chapter thirty-four, when he describes in detail the complex image on the cover of the forbidden Pineda New Testament.“Two things can easily be a coincidence, and at a stretch, three,” says my friend Massimiliano Giorgini, “but when you have the convergence of four or five indicators, you’re probably no longer looking at a coincidence… In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the cover of the Pineda New Testament in seven highly specific ways.” Even more compelling is Giorgini’s exposition on the following visual similarity: When the name “QIXOTE” is spelled in Gothic letters, it appears strikingly similar to the classic Greek ICTHYS fish-symbol followed by the Greek spelling for “FISH,” an acronym you’ve seen all your life; one which has been used for two thousand years as a symbol for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”bThe similarity between(1.) QIXOTE and(2.) the fish symbol followed by the Greek letters spelling FISH, could easily be written off as coincidence if it weren’t for this curious passage in part two of Don Quixote, in which Cervantes tells the story of a (fictional) really bad painter:“Perhaps he would paint a rooster, in such a fashion and so unlike one, that he would need to write next to it in Gothic letters: ‘This is rooster.’ And so it must be with my story, which will require a commentary in order to understand it.”rMassimiliano Giorgini has been a highly regarded music producer for more than 20 years, working closely with bands such as Green Day. He holds a degree in Psychology from Purdue University and his Theory of Mind is so compelling that a prestigious government intelligence organization known by its initials recruited Mass one year ago to come to work for them as a cryptographer. His code-breaking of intercepted messages has been so stunningly accurate that more than 90 extremely bad guys were caught in the act and taken off the streets during Mass’s first year on the job.Oh, I forgot to tell you: The world’s greatest Quixote scholars consider Mass to be a colleague. Massimiliano Giorgini was first brought to Wizard Academy 5 years ago by his mentor, Dr. Howard Mancing, a world-renowned Quixote scholar and the author of The Cervantes Encyclopedia.So, no… Mass Giorgini cannot be written off as a wide-eyed fool who sees patterns where none exist. In fact, the little thumbnail sketch I gave you today was just a tiny whiff of his mighty research article published in the Spring, 2012 issue of the scholarly journal of the Cervantes Society of America. Mass calls his article, “Cervantes Lands a Left Hook: Baiting the Inquisition with Ekphrastic Subversion.”Mass Giorgini has proven, to my satisfaction at least, that Miguel de Cervantes disagreed with the Spanish Inquisition and that he shouted so from the pages of his wildly successful book of fiction. But it was a shout that no one would hear for more than 400 years.Since there is no one else to do it, I will take it upon myself, for it is a thing that needs be done: Massimiliano, on behalf of Miguel de Cervantes let me say “Thank You.”The shout has at last been heard.Roy H. Williams

Fear is the bullet that eliminates happiness.Fear is the bullet that kills the dream.Fear is the assassin of success.Why not become bulletproof in 2 easy steps?1. Make peace with the possibility of failure.2. Amputate your sense of shame.“Failure is not an option” is the platitude of people who have attended one-too-many motivational seminars. Failure is always a possibility, whether you admit it or not. Sometimes your very best just isn’t good enough.Do you want to succeed?Learn from each failure.Identify what went wrong.Start all over.Failure is a temporary condition.You cannot have humility until you first have confidence.You cannot fail until you first have courage.Confidence and courage are not shameful.Humility is not shameful.Failure is not shameful.Fear is shameful.A perpetual doubter pops the balloons of high-flying dreams. Armed with the needles of sharply-focused questions, the doubter injects fear into every decision… “But what if…”I say to these doubters, “But what if you live your whole life without ever becoming alive?”Anaïs Nin wrote about these people and your relationship to them:“You are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”The perpetual doubter is a nitpicking needle-snout who can always find a problem and happily poke holes in the solutions proposed by others. Like a mosquito, he sucks the life out of those around him. Slap the bastard and move on.I do not suggest that you become reckless or mindless or silly. I advocate only that you refuse to let Fear cast the deciding vote.If anyone had the right to be afraid, it was deaf and blind Helen Keller. But it was she who told us, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”Devin Wright, one of my co-workers, puts it this way: “It’s like a can at the grocery store without a label. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.”Each of us lives the life we choose. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.The following 9-word summary is on loan to me from that celebrated author of Gulliver’s Travels, the immortal Jonathan Swift:May you live all the days of your life.Roy H. Williams

If you’re not being criticized today, then no one was listening when you spoke.Welcome to the time of the witch-hunt.This is that time when angry cyber-terrorists post incendiary online reviews and pretend their only motive is to protect the public. This is that time when corporate assassins take pleasure in shooting elephants from a distance; their greatest joy is to ruin the reputation of a prominent man or woman or company. The more the elephant is beloved by the public, the greater the delight of the assassin in bringing them down with a well-aimed bullet to the gut.Let me explain my motives in writing to you about this trend:1. I hope to bring you some small measure of comfort in advance. A clear understanding of the social climate can provide a sort of emotional padding and soften the force of the blows when your company is attacked.2. If you deal with a lot of people, your company will become a target. Think of today’s memo as a general heads-up from the air traffic control tower that some dark storm clouds are gathering on the horizon.3. Please don’t assume I’m simply venting my own frustrations. I have not been attacked. This memo isn’t about me. The rise of the corporate assassin is just a symptom of the times.Eighty years ago, when the pendulum of society was last in this position, headed in this direction, Robert Lynd wrote, “There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.” Our current witch-hunt mentality even extends to the courtroom. If you serve as a juror today, you can reasonably expect at least one of the other jurors to say, “If this person wasn’t guilty, they wouldn’t have been arrested.”We are indeed living in dangerous times when an accused person is presumed guilty until proven innocent.How did we get here?“Working together for the common good” is the dream that launches every We generation. Our original goal was simply to “clean this place up and straighten out this mess,” but we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a happy effort for the common good slowly hardens to become the handcuffs of duty, obligation and sacrifice.1933 was the last time the pendulum was in this position, headed in this direction. George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938, so he was familiar with the witch-hunt window of a WE cycle. These are the words he sends to us from the past: “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”Consider with me for a moment: A true, civic hero looks for solutions that are within his or her own power to implement. An assassin looks not for solutions, but for problems, and for someone to blame.The corporate assassin is an accuser, a fault-finder, a nitpicking inquisitor. And when they wear the disguise of a news reporter, they wield the power of public opinion.Although the corporate assassin has long been recognized as one of the 7 types of journalists, their numbers are on the rise and their attacks are becoming increasingly reckless and unjustified. I hope you’ll remember this when listening to the media. I believe it’s extremely important that we continue to give accused companies and individuals the benefit of the doubt.Because next time it might be you.Roy H. Williams

’ve never seen a business fail due to “reaching the wrong people.” So why does every business owner instinctively believe that “reaching the right people” is the key to successful advertising?Who, exactly, do you not want to know about you? Who isn’t qualified to repeat the good things they’ve heard about you? And when is the best time to advertise?Solomon wrote about these things in the 11th chapter of Ecclesiastes:“If you wait for perfect weather, you will never plant your seeds. If you are afraid that every cloud will bring rain, you will never harvest your crops… So begin planting early in the morning, and don’t stop working until evening. You don’t know what might make you rich. Maybe everything you do will be successful.”Advertising is a seed that grows in the soil of the customer’s heart. If you will allow this metaphor, it would appear that Solomon advises, “Don’t overthink it. Just tell your story every day in every circumstance. You never know who might be listening.”Matthew, Mark and Luke felt the following moment to be important enough to include in the books they wrote about Jesus. Here’s how Luke tells it:“A large crowd came together. People came to Jesus from every town, and he told them this story: ‘A farmer went out to sow seed. While he was scattering the seed, some of it fell beside the road. People walked on the seed, and the birds ate it all. Other seed fell on rock. It began to grow but then died because it had no water. Some other seed fell among thorny weeds. This seed grew, but later the weeds stopped the plants from growing. The rest of the seed fell on good ground. This seed grew and made 100 times more grain.'” Jesus finished the story. Then he called out, ‘You people who hear me, listen!'”Neither Solomon nor Jesus advised, “Target the good soil.” What do you think would have happened if Jesus had attended business school? Would they have convinced him to judge the value of each potential customer from statistical data, or would he have convinced his professors of the efficiency of untargeted message distribution?Maybe Jesus just didn’t understand. Maybe Jesus misspoke. And maybe Solomon wasn’t very bright.Uh-oh. Here I am talking about planning again. When will I ever learn?I know it’s counterintuitive, but if you look at all the offers from all the sellers of mass media and then accept the offer that allows you to reach the largest number of people each week, 52 weeks a year, for the fewest dollars per week, it’s hard to make a mistake.An impressive, memorable message is what matters most. How you deliver that message – and who hears it – is far less important than you have been led to believe.It is your choice of message that targets the customer, not your choice of media.There are rare exceptions, of course. But not many.I’m going to deliver a short-but-counterintuitive media buying tutorial during next week’s Wizard Academy workshop, Writing for Radio and the Internet (April 10-11.) The early bird registrants were given all the rooms in Engelbrecht House, but it’s worth sleeping in a hotel to be part of this class. Your lunches and dinners will be on campus with the rest of the group. The only time you’ll be alone is when you’re sleeping. And that’s not so bad, is it? Register now. Jump-up the size of your harvest in 2013. Ciao for Niao,Roy H. WilliamsA

The Private Advice of Harry Connick, Jr.Chandler Canterbury is a child actor with a dazzling future.Immediately following the world premiere of When Angels Sing, a not-yet-released movie young Canterbury made with Willie Nelson, Connie Britton, Lyle Lovett, Fionnula Flanagan, Kris Kristofferson and Harry Connick, Jr., Harry grabbed a microphone and told a funny story about his first encounter with Chandler. (I’ve posted my iPhone video of that moment in the rabbit hole for you.)But Harry C. Jr. told an even better story privately.“Chandler and I were hanging out between scenes,” Harry said, “when he looked at me and said, ‘What’s the secret of being popular? How do you get people to like you?'”An interesting question, don’t you think? Most of us would have responded by saying “Just be yourself,” or “Popularity is overrated,” or some other such claptrap. But Harry believes in answering questions as asked. So the astoundingly popular actor and musician looked young Chandler in the eyes and said,“The secret of being liked is to always ask 5 questions before you say anything about yourself. People won’t remember what you said about yourself, but they’ll always remember what you asked about them.”Harry then let Chandler practice asking him different kinds of ice-breaking questions until the young man finally mastered the art.It kind of makes you wish Harry Connick, Jr. had taken you under his wing when you were a kid, doesn’t it?The bigger story, though, is the movie itself. Turk Pipkin wrote When Angels Sing as a story to be read to his friends and family each Christmas. Year after year, Turk would pull those sheaves of dog-eared paper out of a shoebox and read the story to a roomful of friends who would faithfully gather to hear it.And each Christmas, the crowd got bigger.One year, Fred Miller was in the room. Among his other accomplishments, Fred was executive producer of For All Mankind, that miraculous film documenting the Apollo space missions from 1968 to 1972. When released in 1989, For All Mankind was selected as the Audience Favorite and the Grand Jury Winner at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.That same Fred Miller jumped up and said, “This story needs to be made into a movie.” Then Elizabeth Avellan – producer of 30 movies including the Spy Kids franchise – got on board. Following Elizabeth was Shannon McIntosh, executive in charge of post-production for Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning Inglourious Basterds (2009) and executive producer of this year’s Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012.)And now you want to invite Fred Miller to your Christmas party, right?When Willie and Harry and Connie and Lyle and Fionnula and Kris heard about the project and read the screenplay, each of them volunteered to make the film for a teeny-tiny fraction of the prices they typically command. Each of them knew in their heart this film was a magical Christmas card that would cause tens of millions of people to have happier holidays for decades to come. And each of them wanted to be part of a movie that said, “Merry Christmas. You are loved.”Hollywood desperately wants to gain control of this film but the actors and producers aren’t sure they want Hollywood to have it. During a laughter-filled afternoon on the campus of Wizard Academy a few days ago, the general feeling of the producers was to possibly try and repay the $17,000,000 it cost to make this movie by crowdfunding through Kickstarter.I’m not sure whether the Kickstarter thing will happen, but I can definitely tell you that everyone who was involved in the making of When Angels Sing looks at this not-yet-released movie the same way old hippies look at Woodstock, “I was there. I was part of it. And it was magic.”The iconic Willie Nelson celebrates his 80th birthday in a few days. And although this might sound ridiculous today, I believe it’s entirely possible that 20 years from now When Angels Sing will be the thing for which Willie is best remembered.Merry Christmas, friend. You are loved.Roy H. Williams

f I had any sense, if I had half the brains God gave an aardvark, I’d talk about politics or religion and fewer people would be annoyed.But aardvarks look at me with pity because I’m foolish. My social filter is so misaligned that I’m going to share with you my thoughts about planning.“Plan your work and work your plan.” These are the holy words of a belief system built on intuitive faith in an orderly universe.I do not share that faith.I do not believe that everything happens for a reason.YOWZAH! Are you beginning to see how this simple thing called “planning” can trigger strongly-felt emotions?Your thoughts about planning reflect your innermost beliefs about the workings of the universe. When you speak of planning, you unknowingly speak of religion and politics; you speak of how you believe the world works, and of the best way to fix it.But that’s enough about you. Let’s talk about me some more. (Because if we talk about you and accidentally reveal that you’re horribly flawed and broken, you’re going to be REALLY angry. So we’ll talk about me instead and reveal that I’m horribly flawed and broken and then you won’t be angry. You’ll be able to say, “I knew that.” – RHW)I believe there are only two kinds of planning:(1.) Process planning.(2.) Result planning.A process plan is commonly known as “Plan A.” We give it that name when we’ve decided to abandon it because it isn’t working. Results are most often achieved through Plan B or C or D or K or Q or V.Don’t let yourself be seduced by the promise of a miraculous process that leads to golden results. Yesterday’s perfect process becomes “the box” people are struggling to escape today.Focus on the result, not the process.The Wizard Academy campus is nearly complete and there was never a process plan. The only thing we ever planned was the result. Astoundingly, a multimillion-dollar campus was constructed through nonstop improvisation.I don’t actually know how much money we’ve spent. I could easily look it up, of course, but I’ve never been sufficiently interested. There was never a schedule or a budget. “It will take as long as it takes and it will cost what it costs.”There was usually just enough money in the bank to pay for the work we were doing that week. “We’ll find next week’s money next week.”I apologize if you are horrified by these confessions. Your reaction is perfectly normal if you were raised in a nation that was once a colony of Britain. The machine mindset of the industrial revolution taught our society to overvalue conformity, repetition and process. Improvisation and innovation, those wild, flowering weeds, have been uprooted and cursed for 200 years.Although Wizard Academy didn’t have a process plan, we did have three unifying principles:1. Build with cash. Never borrow money.“When money slows down, slow construction down to the pace of the money coming in.”2. Use whoever shows up.One by one, hundreds of you came to me with ideas and suggestions during the past 12 years. My response never changed, “Great idea! You’re in charge of that.”3. The students are the soul of the school.“Designs, furnishings and decor will be chosen to elevate the thoughts and attitudes of students and guests while they are here. The campus will whisper at every turn and touchpoint, ‘Anything is possible.'”I didn’t come up with this idea of Result Planning on my own.Life comes down to a few moments. One of those moments happened for me when I was 8 years old.AOn October 27, 1966, Walt Disney described his vision for a 27,400 acre “Disney World” in Florida. Walt had purchased 43 square miles of land surrounded by a swamp. His dream was literally twice the size of the island of Manhattan. I watched Walt deliver his 24-minute tutorial in Result Planning when it aired during his weekly television show, The Wonderful World of Disney.NARRATOR: The touchstone of Disneyland’s success has been its concern for people: a whole-hearted dedication to the happiness of the people who visit here. Today Disneyland has established standards of performance unsurpassed in all the world. Yet in the planning and building there were no standards to follow; whatever worked became the code. Whatever failed to meet the public need was changed, replaced by a better idea.A couple of minutes later, surrounded by fabulous scale models, Walt Disney appeared and told me that the vision – the result, and its purpose – were the only things that had to be clear. The process, Walt said, must necessarily be one of ongoing improvisation.WALT DISNEY: The sketches and plans you will see today are simply a starting point: our first, overall thinking about Disney World. Everything in this room may change time and time again as we move ahead, but the basic philosophy of what we’re planning for Disney World is going to remain very much as it is right now. We know what our goals are. We know what we hope to accomplish. And believe me, it’s the most exciting and challenging assignment we’ve ever tackled at Walt Disney Productions…EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.Ten days after filming this announcement, Walt learned that he had cancer and a very short time to live. On December 15, 1966, he died.But the work of his life lives on.The mind of Walt Disney spawned a colorful cast of unusual creatures; Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto are some of the heavyweights. Bambi and Thumper, Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily are a few of the middleweights. Sergeant Tibbs and Pongo, Scuttle and Sebastian are among the lightweights.And then, of course, there’s a foolish 8 year-old boy who stares with big eyes at a black-and-white TV and calls himself The Wizard of Ads.Roy H. Williams

Been Read, Being Read, Will be ReadJeff says I have a confirmation bias, a strong attraction to information that reinforces my convictions and helps me prove my point.That makes sense. I’m an ad writer.Does anyone really want their ad writer to be unbiased? The job of the ad writer is to:1. discover a persuasive perspective, and2. develop a distinctly memorable voice for the ad campaign, and3. find supporting evidence that clearly demonstrates your company and your products to be the only intelligent choices in your category.Yes, I have a confirmation bias. It makes me a living.ARay Bard is a good friend and the publisher of most of my books, including the Wizard of Ads trilogy. So if Ray published a book and I thought it was crap, I’d love that book anyway. But that’s not what’s happening today. The ONE Thing says what I’ve tried to say for years, but haven’t been able to say nearly so clearly. This book will sharpen your focus, cut away your distractions, and zoom your ability to achieve the ONE thing at which you aim your heart. The ONE Thing is written from a powerfully persuasive perspective and includes a lot of interesting, supporting evidence. Do you have a dream? The first step toward making that dream come true is to read The ONE Thing.Mark my words: The ONE Thing will leap onto the business bestseller list. Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. Bard Press. A friend sent me a copy of Steal Like an Artist after reading my advice to “repurpose the proven.” (Better Than Creativity, the Monday Morning Memo for January 28, 2013) You’ll read Steal Like an Artist in about 30 minutes but it will forever change how you look at creativity. I hope to get the author, Austin Kleon, to Wizard Academy later this year. If you can afford both books, buy them both. I feel stronger and better for having read them. And I usually hate nonfiction. Maybe it’s just more proof of my confirmation bias, but even though I felt like I already knew what these books were telling me, they made me feel brightened and tightened. Confident. Hopeful. Bouncy. I believe they’ll make you feel the same way.Now let’s talk about fiction.bIn Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s international bestseller, The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel Sempere is a boy whose father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old and obscure titles. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it, which he must then protect for life.“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago.”I titled this memo “Voices of Books” because I am attracted to writers who craft a vivid voice. When I was 13, I was magnetically attracted to the poetic voice of Robert Frost. Spellbound, I marvelled at how he could say two things at once. On the surface of each of his poems, Frost would describe a moment that is common to us all. But below the surface, he was saying something profound and deep and eternal. This appreciation of Frost has never left me and I’m not alone. Robert Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize on 4 separate occasions.rJ.D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in the first-person voice of a disturbed teenager named Holden Caulfield. That voice is so convincing that you feel yourself drawn into Holden’s confused feelings and troubled thoughts. Salinger crafted a voice that rang so troubled and true that it has echoed within us for 62 years.There has not been another voice as vivid as Holden Caulfield’s until now. Written as a series of letters by “Charlie” to an unknown and unnamed friend, The Perks of Being a Wallflower will trouble you, expand your senses, cast you deep into reverie and stop the hands of your clock. The book has sunk deep roots into the #1 position of the New York Times bestseller list. The Times has it listed as a book for young adults. This seems idiotic to me. It’s a book for anyone who was ever young.The Perks of Being a Wallflower has already been made into a movie. But if ever you trusted me, a known and self-confessed ad writer, trust me now: don’t watch the movie until you’ve read the book.Trust me.Roy H. Williams