Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Media Buying Lesson Number OneI’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong customer. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things. Most ads answer questions no one was asking.How did we Americans become so fixated on “targeting the right customer” in our advertising?That question has two answers. The first is, “because it’s completely logical” and our natural inclination is to follow the footsteps of lovely Logic, even when she leads us to erroneous conclusions.  The second reason we’re fixated on targeting the right customer is, in two words, “advertising salespeople.”If you were selling a commodity that was only mildly different than the same commodity sold by your competitors, you’d focus your sales presentation on those mild differences, right? Because if you didn’t, price would be the only remaining factor for your customer to consider.I’m not accusing the ad-selling community of deception. I know these people and I like them. A lot. Many have been good friends for years. But like all sellers of products, they cannot be successful unless they convince themselves that buying advertising from anyone else would be a tragic mistake. And they care too much about you to let you make that mistake.Advertising salespeople rarely succeed unless they(1.) sincerely care about their clients and(2.) believe they are telling their clients the truth.But mass media – in all its forms – is a commodity. We call it “mass media” because it reaches the male and female, young and old, rich and poor, white-collar and blue-collar masses.“Who is your primary target?”“Females 25 to 34 years old.”“Excellent! Barbie 98 is the Number One radio station for females 25 to 34! That’s exactly who we reach! If you don’t buy our station, you’re going to be missing the Barbies. We fit your needs like a hand in glove.”“The Wizard of Ads told me to buy Wacko 103.”“Well, I like the Wizard of Ads and I read all his books, but this time he’s wrong. Wacko 103 ranks number 7 with females 25-34 and they cost 20 percent more per ad than Barbie! That just doesn’t make any sense at all. Oh my god! Look at this data. Just 7 percent of Wacko’s audience are 25 to 34 year-old females while 17 percent of Barbie’s audience is exactly your target. Wacko 103 is just a tragically, horribly inefficient buy for you. The Wizard really missed it this time.”Before we look deeper into this Barbie/Wacko fiasco, let me ask you a different question: Do the people outside your target have value? Is there anyone whose opinion you DON’T care about? Is there anyone you would rather NOT recommend you to their friends?Decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. Each of us is guided by co-workers and family members, neighbors and friends.If you are normal and healthy, you maintain about 250 people in your “realm of association.” Some of these are permanent members of that realm while others will pass through your life and be replaced. But the number hovers at about 250. And guess what? Beyond their connection to you, these 250 people have little, if anything, in common. They are your personal world: the male and female, young and old, rich and poor, white-collar and blue-collar “masses” that give your life purpose and meaning.You are someone’s target customer. If I fail to reach you with my ads but my company is beloved by half the people in your realm of association, what’s the likelihood that you’ll hear about me?Google and Facebook, radio and television, magazines and mailers, billboards and flyers are called mass media because they reach the masses. The ability to “target” using mass media is more illusion than fact.Now let’s get back to glorious Barbie 98 and that tragic mistake, Wacko 103. (This example, by the way, is not extreme in any way. My media analysts see this scenario several times a day.)The plain facts are these:17,000 of Barbie’s 100,000 listeners are females 25-34.14,000 of Wacko’s 200,000 listeners are females 25-34.Do the math and you’ll see the advertising salesperson was telling the truth. Seventeen percent of Barbie’s audience is your “target” while only seven percent of Wacko’s audience fits that profile. (17% versus 7% sounds a lot bigger than the reality of 17,000 persons versus 14,000 persons, doesn’t it? But still, it is 3,000 more persons…) But wait! While Barbie gives you an additional 83,000 people outside your imaginary “target,” Wacko 103 delivers an astounding 186,000 additional people.If we calculate Gross Rating Points for the 25-34 female “target,” Wacko appears to be 46 percent more expensive than Barbie on a cost-per-point basis. But if we consider that we’re paying for the entire audience of each station and step back to look at the question from this strange, new perspective, it becomes obvious that Wacko 103 offers twice as many people for just 20 percent more money. This means that Barbie, in truth, costs nearly twice as much as Wacko.To be fair, there are other factors to consider: Average Quarter Hour persons (AQH) and Time Spent Listening (TSL) will dictate how many ads will be needed on each station to insure the average listener will encounter your ad with sufficient repetition each week, but these calculations are easily made.Unless, of course, you accidentally multiplied Reach times Frequency to calculate Gross Impressions, the first required step in calculating Gross Rating Points (GRPs.)Oh? You did that? You calculated Gross Rating Points? Well then you’re screwed. Sorry. Have a nice life with Barbie.And tell her to eat a little, okay? No one should be that thin.Roy H. Williams

People today are different, less naïve, less gullible, less open to suggestion than in the past. Christopher Isherwood describes this difference perfectly: “To live sanely in Los Angeles or, I suppose, in any other large American city, you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you from the cradle to the grave and beyond which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up… you’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment.” Yes, people today are definitely more skeptical than they used to be. Have you noticed how few people these days spout the old “positive thinking” platitudes that were so popular during the revved-up years of Reagan, George Sr., and Bill Clinton? Quiet determination and clenched-teeth endurance are the virtues we admire today. A person spewing happy platitudes and cliché’s is likely to be told, “Talk is cheap. Shut up and do something. Don’t tell us what you believe. Show us.” Conversations among friends are less likely to be shallow and superficial than in the past. Concerns run deeper, fears lie closer to the surface and frustration often simmers deep inside. Even the happiest people are a little bit angry. The public is no longer looking for a perfect icon to worship. Most of them are looking for an equally-flawed friend with whom they can connect. The online world gives us instant access to information. This has sensitized the public to the absence of facts in most selling messages. Unsubstantiated claims in advertising are likely to fall on deaf ears. Much has been written about the importance of transparency as though transparency were still a choice. But it isn’t. You are transparent whether you choose to be or not. Search engines have removed any veil you might have hidden behind. I hear a voice whispering in the night:“Relevance and credibility, ad writer, are the words you must engrave on your heart if you will write ads that move the needle. The customer is asking, ‘Does this matter to me?’ They are looking for relevance. And their second question is, ‘Do I believe what they’re telling me?’ They are looking for credibility.” Today’s customers have been lied to by the best. All but the stupidest of them can spot a half-truth a mile away. Make no mistake; there are still plenty of stupid people left in America. Fools must outnumber con men or the con men could not find enough to live upon. My seat-of-the-pants estimate is that roughly 15 percent of Americans are gullible fools whose prejudices outweigh their intellect. I’m not trying to be vicious. I just don’t want you to cling to those obvious exceptions that would appear to disprove the larger truth. Fifteen percent of the population is still a pile of people and frankly, you can make a lot of money by yanking their chain with hyperbole, misdirection, overstatement and lies. But to me, writing ads that target stupid people is like beating up little children. I can do it. I just don’t want to. I’ll bet you don’t either. Eighty-five percent of your prospective customers are intelligent people with unprecedented access to information. And as such, they are a hard public to convince. These are men and women who have seen an actual war launched by imaginary weapons of mass destruction, an actual economy ruined by imaginary credit-default swaps, and billions of dollars bilked from hard-working investors through imaginary securities created by Bernie Madoff and his Wall Street cronies. Yes, today’s customers have been lied to by the best. As an ad writer, I’ve chosen to write ads for the intelligently suspicious 85 percent. It’s hard work, requiring clenched-teeth determination and a willingness to wrestle with advertisers who desperately want to turn back the hands of the clock.The simple truth is that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are gone, Norman Rockwell is dead and the Reagan years are over.  But I believe the best is yet to come for business owners who understand the new rules of communication. Come, the future awaits us. Roy H. Williams

1845: This is the year Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman will plant his final apple tree. Mark Twain is 10 years old, living the boyhood that will bring us Tom Sawyer. Florida will be added to the U.S. this year, raising the total number of states to 27. We think of life as being simpler, more idyllic back then, don’t we?The American Revolution was more recent to them than World War II is to us today. Memories of colonial times were only just beginning to fade. But Thoreau felt compelled to take a sabbatical in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, saying, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”Stéphane Mallarmé was 3 years old and living in Paris in 1845, much too young and too far away to extend a hand to Thoreau. But in just a few more years he’ll bring a generation of world-changers together on Tuesday nights at 89 Rue de Rome.Gertrude Stein never met Mallarmé though their houses were only 3 miles apart. Stein arrived in Paris in 1903, 5 years after Mallarmé died. Stein’s living room is where Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salvador Dali and Man Ray banged ideas together while Josephine Baker danced to the music of Cole Porter who played the piano and sang. None of them was yet famous.Prior to 1953, America was too uptight to embrace outside-the-box thinkers so Paris was the haven for renegades. The living rooms of Mallarmé and Stein were like cabins in the woods. But when several Henry Davids arrive at a cabin simultaneously, the dust in the air begins to sparkle as the place becomes an island of pirates. Tinker Bell can be seen if you look quickly enough. Peter Pan is learning to fly.The salons of Stein and Mallarmé brought together the great minds of their day and tumbled them like clothes in a dryer, influencing, stimulating, inspiring one another to new heights above the accepted norm.Stein and Mallarmé were unimportant writers who surrounded themselves with the shapers of fashion, the inventors of tomorrow, the makers of the future.I strongly identify with Stein and Mallarmé.Funny, isn’t it? No one wants to be average, but everyone wants to be normal.How about you? Will your need to be “normal” condemn you to a life of screaming mediocrity? You’re familiar with the phrase, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” but the truly frightening part is the thought that follows, “and go to their graves with their songs still in them.”Thoreau went to Walden Pond because Wizard Academy was not yet built.This bizarre little business school in Austin, Texas, is barely a dozen years old but its alumni and friends include an astounding array of scientists and musicians, journalists and authors, businesspeople and government officials. Tony Hsieh of Zappos recently sent us his endorsement of Pendulum, the book we’ll release this spring. Two of our alumni will be elected to congress in November.Don’t go to your grave with your song still in you. Come and tumble topsy-turvy with people who will make you sparkle and shine. It’s time you learned to fly.The day-to-day can wait. Don’t allow the merely urgent to displace the truly important.Let 2012 be your year.Roy H. Williams

America contained about two and a half million people when we declared our independence in 1776. Today’s Portland, Oregon is bigger than that.The Constitution (1787) empowered every citizen who was white, male and a landowner. Minorities, women and poor people? Not so much.America was unlike Europe in that we didn’t divide our population into nobles and peasants. We divided our people into landowners and land workers. This was different from Europe where the nobles owned the land and the peasants worked on it. You see the difference, don’t you?Three years later (1790,) our first census reported that America had mushroomed to 3,929,000 people; roughly the population of Seattle. But Seattle did not yet exist. It would be another 13 years before Thomas Jefferson would buy the Louisiana Territory and send Lewis and Clark to the other side of the continent to search for Starbucks. They didn’t find it, but they did find enough land to ensure that everyone who wanted to be a landowner could easily become one.“Land? I can own land?” Here came the people.Study America’s history and you’ll find that most of us are the children of castoffs, rejects and refugees. Some of us were even brought here against our will. But that was also true of the original settlers of Australia, wasn’t it? Australia, wow. What a gorgeous place to start a penal colony! If you’re going to banish me, England, please send me there.My own belief is that modern America – America 2.0 – began in 1883 when a 34 year-old writer born in New York City penned a poem to be auctioned in a fundraiser to help erect a 305-foot statue of a woman lifting a torch to the sky; “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” Emma Lazarus died just 4 years after she wrote that phrase, never suspecting her words would help shape the personality of America for a century. The rest of the money needed to erect the statue was raised by another Jew, a young refugee who had started a little newspaper in New York. His name was Joseph Pulitzer.Jews understand the importance of tolerance.The Dutch understand inclusion. Throughout history the Dutch have been quick to shelter the outcast and embrace the oppressed, so you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a fifth-generation Dutch New Yorker was President of the United States at the zenith of the “Me” in 1903* when the statue was finally finished and those now-famous words of Emma Lazarus were officially placed on the pedestal beneath it. This visionary Dutchman shut down the power of big corporations to oppress the poor and put an end to child labor. But before he did any of this, his first official act as President of the United States was to invite an African-American, Booker T. Washington, to the White House.Tolerance and inclusion. “I accept that you are different and I want you to be in our group anyway.”  This is America.Humility and courage. “I cannot do it alone, but working together, I believe we can.” This is America.Audacity and a sense of humor. As Babe Ruth reportedly introduced himself when he met the Queen of England, “Hey Queen, pull my finger.” This is most definitely America.Emma Lazarus, Joseph Pulitzer and Teddy Roosevelt believed in the beauty, the power and the wisdom of the little guy. They believed in you.Wizard Academy does, too.The US census tells us there are 5.91 million businesses in America with fewer than 100 employees. Wizard Academy is a business school created expressly for them. This is where we teach big things quickly, the kinds of things that often mean the difference between failure and success.The American Dream is alive and well and 2012 is going to be a very good year for you.Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.Roy H. Williams

A Barely Explicable Collection of MomentsEvery person is a collector, I think.Businesspeople collect money.Travelers collect places.Competitors collect shining moments.Insecure people collect conquests, panties hanging from the bedpost.My own collection consists of curiosities, tokens of moments nearly forgotten; captured glimpses of interesting lives. I’m not certain what this says about me but I like to think it says I’m a writer. Marcel Proust lectured, “The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.” So I try to interpret what I find.Arthur Schopenhauer added, “The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.” So I do my best to make each small item in the collection interesting.Mignon Eberhart echoed my soul when he confessed, “I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.”My collection of curiosities is a rock that skips across 500 years of cultural icons. The worldwide ocean of art is impossibly deep and wide and my rock touches only a few superficial places.But the ripples are amazing:A 500 year-old Spanish ship’s bell dragged up from the ocean floor in the Philippines, very possibly from one of the two ships Ferdinand Magellan lost there in 1521 during his historic circling of the earth.A pencil sketch of Napoleon drawn by his little brother, 24 year-old Lucien Bonaparte, shortly after the pair of them captured the throne of France in 1799.Don Kehan, Marshall of Manchon, the original manuscript of an unpublished book about Don Quixote written by John Steinbeck.The world’s only copy of a 1936 photo of Jacqueline Bouvier at a horse show when she was just 6 years old, but already unmistakably “Jackie O.”The Wise Men who sat on the piano of Liberace each Christmas, complete with Joseph and Mary and an angel with just one wing. A one-of-a-kind, handmade set dressed in velvet. (Liberace was a flamboyant piano player known for his over-the-top costumes, the original Elton John.) A cultural icon is never about the thing itself, but the idea it represents.Magellan = ExplorationNapoleon = StrategyQuixote = Commitment to a DreamJackie O. = EleganceLiberace = ShowmanshipYou’ll find these and other curiosities touching Teddy Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, the Wright Brothers, Oceanic Flight 815 and dozens of other ripples on the water of time as you tour the campus at Wizard Academy.You’re coming, aren’t you? Roy H. Williams

I’m a Merry Christmas person. Does that make me bad? “Happy Holidays” doesn’t carry quite the same exuberance for me as “Merry Christmas.” And I must shamefully confess that deep in my heart I still think of Navajos, Cherokees and Apaches as Indians. My publisher tells me there is no such place as the Orient anymore! So are the boundaries of Asia the same as they were back when I was in school? In those days Asia was everything east of Constantinople. I’m sorry. My bad. Istanbul. Russian Cossacks with their knee-high boots and furry hats, Arab Sheiks with their flowing robes and elegant turbans, and those squinty, inscrutable men wearing silk gowns with big sleeves are no longer to be differentiated from one another. They’re all just “Asians” now. Evidently, the goal is worldwide homogenization. We’ve already achieved it architecturally so now we’re spreading that colorless twilight over every other expression of individuality. Welcome to Zoloft Grey where the mood is forever funereal. Cultural Splendor lies quietly in the coffin there but please don’t look at it, admire it, comment upon it or celebrate it. If you do, you’re obviously a racist. If you fail to ignore cultural differences you are a very bad person indeed. Indians? The Orient? Shame on you! What were you thinking? I just finished Agatha Christie’s mystery novel, Murder on the Asian Express. John Wayne starred in a lot of cowboy and Native American movies. I’m sorry. My bad. Cowperson and Native American. The best Indian food I ever had – (I can still say “Indian” if they’re from India, right?) – was in 1986 at the Bombay Palace restaurant in Washington, DC. I’m sorry. Mumbai Palace. I don’t want to be insensitive. What the…? I just Googled Bombay Palace in Washington DC and they’re closed! I wonder if it was because they failed to change their name to Mumbai Palace in 1995? Does the word holiday come from holy day?  I should check into that. I don’t want to be insensitive to people who prefer to live deity-free. I’ll let you know what I find out. In the meantime, from me and mine to you and yours: Merry… Happy… Have a good day. Roy H. Williams

Do Creative People Have to be Self-Destructive? New York Times writer Samuel G. Freedman asks,“Can the forces that make you creative also kill you?”“Can you live with control and yet create free of restraint?”“Can you live enough of the dark side to tell the tale without becoming a casualty?”Freedman’s curiosity is well founded. History is littered with the corpses of creative geniuses who were self-destructive. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear and mailed it to his girlfriend. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko would likely have made out the mailing label and taped up the box. Rothko is the lightweight of this trio. His most valuable painting is worth only about 80 million dollars, while Van Gogh and Pollock have paintings worth 150 million each. Nobel laureates Hemingway and Faulkner are the opening names on a Who’s Who list of alcoholic authors. James Joyce, Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and dozens of others trot faithfully behind. Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain and Winehouse are the high-stepping drum majors in a holiday parade of musicians who flirted with death until it finally seduced them. Each of these artists deserved better than what they gave themselves. In her research paper, Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, Dr. Maureen Neihart says, “The belief that madness is linked with creative thinking has been held since ancient times. It is a widely popular notion.” In his book, Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes, Dr. Albert Rothenberg says, “Deviant behavior, whether in the form of eccentricity or worse, is not only associated with persons of genius or high-level creativity, but it is frequently expected of them.” But we still haven’t answered Freedman’s questions. Let me do that for you now: Q: “Can the forces that make you creative also kill you?”A: There are no “forces that make you creative.” Practice and determination are what make a person good at basketball, ice skating or cliff diving. The same is true of creativity. Q: “Can you live with control and yet create free of restraint?”A: Yes. Q: “Can you live enough of the dark side to tell the tale without becoming a casualty?”A: Can a man fight in a horrible war and return home safely to the people he loves? Examine the life of a creative genius who got lost in the dark and you’ll find that he or she had no partner watching out for them. When Pennie says, “Honey, help me carry the trash to the curb,” it’s not because she needs help with the trash. I’m always annoyed that she broke my concentration in the same way a pot smoker is annoyed when you harsh their mellow. But I help her carry the trash to the curb. As we fall ever deeper into creative thought, we float weightlessly in a silent world underwater where time stands still and everything is beautiful. But it is dangerous to go swimming alone. Be sure someone who loves you ties a rope to your leg so they can haul you up when you’ve been under too long. Self-talk is the other key to keeping your balance. Do you want to drown in the darkness alone? All you have to do is say to yourself, “No one understands me… I’ll never be appreciated… Some people have all the luck but nothing ever works out for me… It just wasn’t meant to be.” Each of us believes what we hear ourselves say. The maternal side of my DNA includes a strong predisposition to depression and suicide. I am familiar with that darkness. The most effective antidote I’ve found is to tell Pennie 2 or 3 times a day about some small thing that makes me happy. Many of the things I choose to celebrate are admittedly stupid but the technique works anyway. “This bowl of beans and rice is really hitting the spot tonight! I’m glad I found this can of beans in the pantry and I put exactly the right amount of black pepper in them. And this Fuji apple is the perfect side dish. Food just doesn’t get better than this.” Pennie smiles and nods. She knows I need to find something to be happy about, no matter how small it might be. Each of us believes what we hear ourselves say.And it changes our mood. What have you been hearing yourself say lately? Roy H. Williams

“Added value” is the popular name for what’s included at no extra charge. But we are entering a time when it will no longer be sufficient to tell the world what you include and what you stand for. To hold the attention of the public in 2012 and beyond, you must identify what you leave out and what you stand against.Organic fruit and vegetable growers leave out the fertilizer and pesticides. Netflix leaves out the trip to the video store. Southwest Airlines leaves out meals and assigned seating. Digital cameras leave out the film. The Full Plate Diet leaves out fiberless foods. What does your company leave out? My friend W. Reed Foster and his partner Joel Peterson were men ahead of their time. They employed this technique more than a decade ago to distinguish their brand in what is perhaps the most overcrowded retail category on earth: wine. If they had described their wine as “intense and full-bodied, with hints of…” they would have sounded exactly like 1,000 other wineries. But the slogan “No Wimpy Wines” made Ravenswood an important, worldwide brand. (Their wine also had to be good, of course, but that’s the easy part. Lots of vineyards produce good wine.)You can’t have insiders unless you have outsiders. I demonstrated this technique in last week’s Monday Morning Memo. I’ll wager you remember it: “Wizard Academy is not a school for whiners, posers, devil’s advocates, nitpickers, hand-wringers, crybabies, complainers, chicken-hearts or fools. But it is definitely the school for you.”I’ve written before about “leaving things out” and it’s becoming more important than ever. But definition though exclusion is about to be taken too far. John Steinbeck spoke of a similar time when he wrote, “a teetotaler is not content not to drink—he must stop all the drinking in the world; a vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat.” I’m not saying that’s how it ought to be. I’m saying that’s how it’s going to be. And I have 3,000 years of history to back me up.We’re about to enter the final 10 years in the upswing of a “We” cycle, an event that happens only once every 80 years. It is a time of high polarization, Us versus Them. “Working together for the common good” produces, over time, a gang mentality. The Salem witch trials, Robespierre’s reign of terror in France, the American Civil War and the rise of Adolph Hitler are just a few of the angry, Us versus Them events that have occurred within 10 years of the zenith of a “We.” Just three weeks ago, Joan Smith, a reporter in Britain for The Independent wrote, “The red poppy has been a symbol of remembrance since shortly after the First World War… a means of honoring the fallen and raising money for veterans and their families… This year, the pressure to wear one has been greater than ever… This year, coercion of reluctant red-poppy wearers has been joined by an outbreak of sheer nastiness towards the few who wear white ones.” Stand-up comedian Chris Rock makes this point more sharply in the rabbit hole. I know today’s memo makes me sound like a raving loon, but I trust that our new book, Pendulum, will change your mind when it’s released in April.David Farland warns us, I believe, very presciently, “Men who believe themselves to be good, who do not search their own souls, often commit the worst atrocities. A man who sees himself as evil will restrain himself. It is only when we do evil in the belief that we do good that we pursue it wholeheartedly.” “Choose who to lose” works well in marketing. Not so well in life. Roy H. Williams

Man of La Mancha rocked Broadway in 1965 with its thundering theme song, The Impossible Dream. You remember that song, don’t you? It opens in soft reflection, “To dream the impossible dream… To fight the unbeatable foe…” but then it defies mortal gravity to rise heavenward on a column of fury like an old Apollo rocket from Cape Canaveral:This is my Quest: to follow that star!No matter how hopeless, no matter how far!To fight for the rightWithout question or pause,To be willing to march into hellFor a heavenly cause!And I know, if I’ll only be trueTo this glorious Quest,That my heart will lie peaceful and calmWhen I’m laid to my rest…Wise Men follow a star when they believe the destination will be worth the journey.Time and money: you can always save one by spending more of the other. But money can be replaced and time cannot. We spend the hours of our lives like a pocketful of pennies, one by one until they are gone. What are you buying with yours?Can you name your current journey? You can call it your 5-year plan, your business plan, your goal, your mission. You can dress it up with numerals and call it a pro forma or wrap it in legalese and call it a prospectus. All that really matters is that you understand your time, your energy, indeed the hours of your life are being spent in the pursuit of something.“And I know, if I’ll only be true to this glorious Quest, that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest…”Wait a minute… are we talking about business goals, life goals, the Christmas story of Matthew chapter two or the Broadway musical of 1965?Yes, yes, yes and yes; we are talking about those. That’s the thing about an archetypal story. Its message will echo through different actors dressed in different costumes but the play never changes: Each of us follows a star. How clearly can you see yours?Wizard Academy is a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization committed to helping individuals achieve the things they have committed to do. You choose the star. We don’t care. Our only job is to get you there.A solid limestone plateau rises 900 feet above downtown Austin, overlooking that city from 20 miles away. We cut perfectly northward into that limestone with heavy diesel equipment for 4 months, then planted a vertical sword in the wall of the Stardeck that sits like a crown on the million-dollar tower we built at the end of it.Walk to the center of that deeply cut limestone becauseway and stand on the Laughlin stone on any clear night. The point of light just above the hilt of the sword is Polaris, the North Star that rises above the axis of the earth. The whole world revolves around it. Polaris has served as a navigational tool for millennia because unlike other stars, its position never changes.Can you name the star that beckons you?We cut a 300-foot furrow 14 feet deep in solid rock on top a 900-foot plateau and then built a landmark tower with a sword in its crown purely as a symbol to help us make a point: that’s how serious were are about the importance of picking a destination and launching your life’s journey.Wizard Academy is not a school for whiners, posers, devil’s advocates, nitpickers, hand-wringers, crybabies, complainers, chicken-hearts or fools.But it is definitely the school for you.Come. The next chapter of your adventure is about to begin.Roy H. Williams

Most people see life as a linear progression, a canoe ride on the river of time. The scenery passes. The sun rises and sets. Occasionally there is a storm.It’s a tempting metaphor because we often think of time flowing like a river and to see ourselves as passengers on that river is a natural extension. But my life hasn’t been like that and I’ll bet yours hasn’t either.I see us as boulders tumbling down a mountainside, our rough edges smoothed by all the hard places we encounter that make us older and wiser. We’re not often sure which way is up.Time is the gravity we cannot resist, the energy behind this avalanche called life. Before a thing is dealt with another is upon us and as we turn to it we’re bumped from behind because we don’t have time for this while the telephone rings and someone is at the door and then we go over a cliff.I didn’t see that coming. Did you?It’s hard to tell a person who you are because you are so many things.Quantum Theory was born when Werner Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle in 1927. He wrote, “It is impossible to determine accurately both the position and the direction and speed of a particle at the same instant.” His Uncertainty Principle opened the door to Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry, the mapping of chaotic systems.Like you and me, Heisenberg lived the avalanche. I HAD ALREADY WRITTEN EVERYTHING ABOVE THIS LINEand was staring at the computer screen unsure of what to write next when “ding,” a little pop-up alerted me that one of my business partners, Manley Miller, had just sent me an email:Have you ever heard of the Droste effect?Apparently it’s Fractals + Portals. I clicked the hyperlink in Manley’s email and was greeted by a video that illustrated precisely what I was trying to describe. Manley’s boulder was evidently tumbling next to mine. I spent some time reading about the Droste Effect and said, “Wow. What I’m feeling is so common that it even has a name.” Here’s the weird part: No one on earth could have known what I was thinking and feeling in that moment. I had just received some unexpected news that caused me to lean against the wall, unable to focus my eyes. Stumbling to the computer I pecked out the words, “Life in the Clothes Dryer” and wrote the nine paragraphs at the top of this page. I didn’t plan to send them to you but then Manley’s email arrived.The Droste Effect is a powerful tool that combines the visual suction of a spiral with the infinity of a picture-within-a-picture-within-a-picture. The result is that the viewer is pulled into the alternate reality of a fractal image, the map of a highly specific infinity, one of the “many worlds” predicted by Quantum Theory.Variations of this visual technique will likely prove to be highly effective in online marketing. Do you want someone to click a button? Sprinkle a little Droste into the mix and watch what happens.Manley recognized the Droste Effect as a simple combination of fractals and portals because he remembered studying each of these in Wizard Academy’s Magical Worlds Communications Workshop and the even-more-advanced sequel to that class, Advanced Thought Particles (including Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind.)These classes are taught back-to-back just once every other year.February 20-24, 2012.  I can hardly wait. It’s a wild, wild ride.Roy H. Williams