Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

A year before the birth of Barack Obama, John Steinbeck bought a pickup truck, named it “Rocinante” and went looking for America. His final book, Travels with Charley (1962,) is a journal of his thoughts and memories as he drove that pickup 10,000 miles across 38 states looking back across the years of a lifetime.Steinbeck remembers an incident that happened during the 1940s:“I lived then in a small brick house in Manhattan, and, being for the moment solvent, employed a Negro. Across the street and on the corner there was a bar and restaurant. One winter dusk when the sidewalks were iced I stood in my window looking out and saw a tipsy woman come out of the bar, slip on the ice, and fall flat. She tried to struggle up but slipped and fell again and lay there screaming maudlinly. At that moment the Negro who worked for me came around the corner, saw the woman, and instantly crossed the street, keeping as far from her as possible.When he came in I said, 'I saw you duck. Why didn't you give that woman a hand?''Well, sir, she's drunk and I'm Negro. If I touched her she could easy scream rape, and then it's a crowd, and who believes me?''It took quick thinking to duck that fast.''Oh, no sir!' he said. 'I've been practicing to be a Negro a long time.'”Ten months ago, Wizard Academy's Dr. Oz Jaxxon gathered a dozen unlikely candidates in Tuscan Hall to begin a 2-year discussion on Racism. Is it a continuing problem or a distant memory? If it exists, what can be done about it? Is racial tension the white man's burden to bear alone, or do whites have legitimate complaints of their own?It may have been the most insane thing we've ever done as an organization. The group was Black, White and Latino, Gay and Straight, Liberal and Conservative, Religious and Agnostic, Bombastic and Shy, Streetwise and Embarrassingly Naïve. There were moments during those 3 days when I was tempted to stick the key in the ignition of my own Rocinante and drive quickly and quietly away.Whose idiotic idea was this, anyway?Miraculously (and with no help or encouragement from me, I must confess,) the group stayed in touch with each other and worked through dozens of technical and budgetary problems to launch a blog, InsideFromTheInside.com.I'm extremely proud of these alumni. You should take a look at what they're doing.Roy H. Williams

As you know, I’ve been trying to get one of my favorite business authors to the Academy to host a 2-day event.Today I’m pleased to announce that July 28-29 you can meet and be mentored by the great Jon Spoelstra.Jon is going to teach you how to thrill the public and rock your bank account. He’s going to teach you how to Market Outrageously.Marketing Outrageously is fun.Marketing Outrageously is politically incorrect.Marketing Outrageously is using your imagination.Marketing Outrageously is being willing to be laughed at.Marketing Outrageously is putting revenue first and everything else second.Marketing Outrageously is dropping your assumptions and starting all over with a fresh point of view.Marketing Outrageously is the opposite of marketing safely – but it may be the only truly safe way to market in 2009.A half-hearted marketing strategy is like buying a ticket halfway to Europe. Don’t do things halfway. Jon Spoelstra doesn’t believe in small ideas, small plans or small results. And after attending this class, neither will you.One of my favorite Jon Spoelstra stories happened when Jon worked with the New Jersey Nets back when that team was at the very bottom of the NBA roster. The Nets had no star players, no up-and-comers and no loyal fans, but he made them the most profitable franchise in all of basketball. And he did it without winning games.Jon says, “I’ve got a warped perspective on advertising: I think advertising should get results you can feel. Don’t give me any of that image or identity stuff; I want revenue that I can track to the ad. Anything less is, to me, like throwing money into a tornado and hoping for the best.”In just three seasons, the revenues from paid ticket sales went up from $5 million to $17 million. Local sponsorships ballooned from $400,000 to $7 million. And the market value of the team grew from $40 million to $120 million.Read the course description. This class is going to be amazing.This 1-time-only event will be strictly limited to 100 attendees, all of whom should expect a significant jump in revenues upon returning back to work.Could you use a significant jump in revenues?Roy H. Williams

Your unconscious writing style is how you write when you’re simply being yourself. You also have a formal style and you might even have a whimsical style. But three styles is usually as good as it gets.Language, however, is extraordinarily plastic. You can make it do anything you want. With a little conscious effort, you can speak and write in a thousand voices. The possibilities are intoxicating.I’m going to give you 10 ways to expand your literary voice. But please, I’m begging you, don’t get legalistic or analytical with this stuff. Style is like a frog; you can dissect the thing, but it dies in the process.Let’s begin with a sentence in ordinary language: “The optional ingredients available for your omelet are mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, broccoli, jalapenos and cheese.”1. Add.Now let’s add the word “and” between each of the ingredients. Notice how the list gains rhythm and length: “The optional ingredients available for your omelet are mushrooms and tomatoes and onions and broccoli and jalapenos and cheese.”Adding conjunctions slows a list down. And depending on how the list is intoned, adding conjunctions can (1.) give it greater dignity or (2.) convey the author’s own impatience by signaling that he, too, thinks the list is long.2. Subtract.Next we’ll subtract words from the original sentence, including the standard “and” that usually appears between the next-to-last and last items in a list: “Optional ingredients: mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, broccoli, jalapenos, cheese.”Subtraction adds authority, accelerates the pace, says more in fewer words.3. Substitute.Engage the imagination by substituting an unexpected adjective or verb for the one you would normally write: “Personalize your omelet with Splash! into the bubbling butter: mushrooms or tomatoes, onions or broccoli, jalapenos or cheese or all-of-them all at once.”Okay, I confess, I not only substituted jazzy verbs for boring ones, I repeated “or” four times and “all” twice. On purpose. For Style.4. Rearrange.I might have said, “I purposefully repeated ‘or’ and ‘all’ for the sake of style.” Instead, I rearranged the sentence to create multiple false endings like the multiple punch lines at the end of a Steven Wright joke.You can also rearrange chronology: “We will buy, and rush into the mall.”5. Disconnected Lists.Combine wildly disconnected things in a list, then connect them together in the closing fragment of the sentence.“A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer’s leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.” – Marcel Proust“Sparkling eyes, laughter, sunshine and speed come with every Nissan 370Z Convertible.”6. Personification.Give human attributes to inanimate objects.The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming in,And thought of doing something to the shoreThat water never did to land before…   – Robert Frost, Once By the Pacific“The gas pedal of this car throbs with hot impatience.”7. Break the rules of logic.Tease the imagination by stating things that don’t make immediate sense.“In two words, im possible.”“But I can't be out of money, I still have checks!”8. Break the rules of grammar.Slip the handcuffs, seize attention.When Winston Churchill was reprimanded for ending a sentence in a preposition, he apologized, then added, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” No one remembers the rest of the conversation.Gertrude Stein is remembered for saying, late in life, “There ain’t any answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer.” Were she to have said, “Life doesn’t make any sense,” would her thoughts today be quoted? (That was another little trick of rearrangement. Common language would be, “would her thoughts be quoted today?”)9. Use Calculated Repetition.Arthur Quinn cheerfully points out, “Scarcely a guidebook on writing does not contain an admonition such as the following: ‘Be brief. Do not repeat yourself. Say what you have to say in as few words as possible. To belabor your point is to risk boring your reader – even insulting his intelligence.’”Quinn then wryly says, “We could easily point out that the author of this advice thought it so important that he was not brief, did repeat himself, used as many words as he dared, and insulted our intelligence by contradicting his own advice in the process of giving it.”There is a time for repetition. Amplification is a worthy goal:“A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.” – Shakespeare, Love’s Labors Lost, 1.1.263“At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”– King James Bible, Judges 5:27There is no correct or incorrect style. “Purely subjective, it is.”(That’s a little rearrangement trick Chris Maddock calls Yoda-Speak.)10. Expand Your Reading.The easiest way to augment your style is to fill your ear with sentences strange. Reach for the author unread. Jack Kerouac. Tom Robbins. Robert Frost. Hemingway. Steinbeck. You can even find magic in Shakespeare and the King James Bible.Or you can remain in the small pen of your choosing and compare yourself to littler men.Come. The giants await.Roy H. Williams

Minor key life is the mournful echo of a hollowed-out gourd, bleached in the sun, hard and empty. Life should be lived in a major key, drenched in the colors of nature, quivering with energy, throbbing with purpose.Last week I showed you how to extract liquid color pallettes from famous paintings. This week I’ll show you a similar technique using words. It’s the one taught by Christopher J. Maddock* in Accidental Magic, chapter 15, “How to Color Your Writing.” Master this technique and you’ll wring vivid dictionaries from a single word.Here’s Professor Maddock’s instruction:“First, choose an emotion or feeling to communicate, such as nervous excitement. Think of some words or phrases you associate with that feeling: anxious, waiting, white-knuckled, hesitant, cold sweat. Now incorporate these into your writing:You step into your waiting car, failing to ward off the thought: ‘My first house.’ The seatbelt clutching your shoulder: ‘My first house.’ Engine hesitant, tires chirping, you drive white-knuckled through a cold sweat of rain toward a place you’ve been waiting to come home to your entire life.Voilà! Color your ads with emotions. Enliven them with words fat with association. Don’t just paint pictures – give rides.”In the opening paragraph of today’s memo I gave you a series of words I associate with minor key music. But rather than say the obvious, “sad, melancholy, and pale,” I went one level deeper and gave you my associations with those words: “mournful, hollowed-out, bleached in the sun.”Maddock's technique helps you to avoid clichés and surprise your audience with unexpected combinations and layers of meaning. Listeners and readers love it.I’ve often said to the students of writing at Wizard Academy, “A willingness to write badly is the key to writing well.” When writing descriptions, the first words to pop into your head will be the ones you hear most often, the ones that are overused. Capture these words on paper, then think of what you associate with each of them.Don’t use the obvious words. Use the associations. Don’t worry that your audience won’t understand. Write colorfully and you, too, might be nominated to become president of Chile.“Julian once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind, p. 444 Pablo Neruda was never afraid that his audience wouldn’t understand. That’s what made his writing so colorful:“Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don't want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.” – Pablo Neruda, poet, nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency in 1970.You’ve tasted a peach, haven’t you?Write colorfully. If you don’t, you’ll lose your hair.Roy H. Williams

How to Choose ColorsApril 13, 2009ListenAWe learned last week that numbers are a language.Things communicated in numbers can be spoken in no other language. And because numbers are language, numbers can lie.Color, too, is a language.We use the language of color to reinforce – and contradict – statements made in the languages of shape and symbol, illumination and proximity. Hues, shades, tints, and intensities of color work together to create a mood, an ambience, an attitude.Yes, color is a language and I am fascinated by it.Colors are chosen for websites, logos, furniture, offices and art.The question is, “How do you choose?”Wizard Academy studies what gifted people do when they are feeling inspired. We investigate the greatest accomplishments of great men and women so that we may reverse engineer their unconscious methods.We teach you how to do consciously what a gifted person does unconsciously when they are feeling inspired.How would you like to be able to say, “The color palette of this website was selected by Claude Monet?”Imagine the impact of a color scheme that was the basis of a Gustav Klimt painting that sold for more than 100 million dollars.“The colors in this church were chosen to match the mood of ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo DaVinci.”Do you suppose the color scheme of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch might create a similar mood of disquiet even when separated from the painting? After all, Munch chose the colors to reinforce the scene. We can safely assume the colors are saying the same thing as the painting.Colors sing most eloquently in chorus. Rarely does one color say much alone.I have said enough today in the language of words. It's time to let the colors do the talking.Just click the beagle at the top of today's memo to begin your instructional journey down the rabbit hole. Each painting clicked will take you one step deeper. There are also a couple of strange side tunnels. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of each page.What colors might one find in a minor key rainbow?I'll tell you next week.Roy H. Williams

Activity Based Accounting, Part TwoThe key to Activity-Based Accounting is never to separate the numbers from the activities of the people represented by the numbers. When numbers in a business lose their connection to people and their actions, the numbers are no longer trustworthy.Never forget these 3 things:1. Not all facts are helpful.2. You lose sight of the big picture when you get too close.3. It’s easy to tell lies in the language of numbers because most people believe numbers never lie.Here are a couple of facts taken from the 2000 Census:The average American family size is 3.14 persons.The average number of children per household is .90 children.Problem: Let’s say you want to move to a “family” town, a place where lots of people are married with children still living at home. You’ll need to find a city with more than nine-tenths of a child per household, right?Using the logic of traditional Cost-Based Accounting, you’ve narrowed your search to 3 towns with 50% more children than the national average of .90 per household. Riverview, Prairieville and Mountaintop each have 1.35 children per household. On paper, the 3 towns look equal.But Activity-Based Accounting would reject the 1.35 children per household average and look at the raw data behind the numbers. Here’s what Activity-Based Accounting would discover:The people of Riverview dislike children. That’s why90 percent of all Riverview households have no kids.But Riverview has a Polygamous religious group, so5 percent of Riverview families have 13 children each and5 percent have 14 children each. Welcome to Riverview, where tension hangs thick in the air.Prairieville is composed largely of immigrants from an overpopulated nation. Consequently, the people of Prairieville believe it’s immoral to have more than one child.8 percent of Prairieville households have no children.74 percent of Prairieville households have 1 child.5 percent have 2 kids.5 percent have 3 kids.4 percent have 4 kids.4 percent have 5 kids.In Prairieville, 82 percent of the population looks down on the 18 percent with more than one child. “Breeder” families like yours are social outcasts. You and your 2 kids are just going to love it here.The people of Mountaintop are happy to be alive. The town motto, “Live and Let Live,” is painted on the water towers and the police cars.33 percent of all households in Mountaintop have no children.22 percent have 1 child.33 percent have 2 children.7 percent have 3 children.2 percent have 4 children.1 percent has 5 children,1 percent has 6 children,1 percent has 7 children.Did you notice in the raw data that none of the children were fractioned? In Activity-Based Accounting, any step that creates a fractional person is a false step.Although it’s true that each of these 3 towns has 1.35 children per household, it’s a completely irrelevant fact and(1.) Not all facts are helpful.We took one step too many when we calculated the number of children in the average household. This illustrates the fact that(2.) You lose sight of the big picture when you get too close.I’m sure you would agree that we learned more about Prairieville, Riverview and Mountaintop from the raw data than from their identical averages of 1.35 children per household. Now that you've taken a step back from the misleading “average” and looked at the raw data, Mountaintop is obviously your best choice.Advertising professionals, you realize I’m talking about Gross Rating Points, don’t you?Reach (the number of different people being reached)times Frequency (repetition)equals Gross Impressions.Gross Impressions expressed as a percentage of population equals Gross Rating Points. (One million Gross Impressions in a city of one million people equals 100 Gross Rating Points.)The Cost-Based Accounting logic that created Gross Rating Points isn’t just plain stupid; it’s fancy stupid. (Stupid with raisins on it.)An advertiser is considering 5 different plans. All he knows is that each plan delivers 100 Gross Rating Points. An Activity-Based study of the raw data tells us Plan One will reach 100 percent of the population once. Plan Two will reach 50 percent of the population twice. Plan Three reaches 10 percent of the population 10 times. Plan Four reaches 5 percent 20 times. Plan Five reaches 1 percent of the population 100 times. But with “100 Gross Rating Points” hovering before his eyes, there’s no way for the advertiser to see the varying effectiveness of these schedules because when he multiplied reach times frequency he took one step too many.Gross Rating Points are valid only if you accept the false premise that reach and frequency are interchangeable.Do you believe reach and frequency are interchangeable? If so, you’d be just as happy in Prairieville or Riverview as in Mountaintop. After all, they each have 50 percent more children than the average American town.And real estate is so much cheaper in the first two towns than in Mountaintop! I wonder why? Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Because the numbers are the same.And numbers never lie.Roy H. Williams

How Wal Mart Killed K Mart and Best Buy Beat Circuit CityI spoke to a small auditorium full of business school grad students at the University of Texas last month.They were fascinated by my case study of Transactional vs. Relational customers. I saw their eyes widen and their heads move up and down slowly as I explained how the Relational shopping mode is the foundation of all branding. But then they all dropped their heads and started taking notes like crazy when I began to talk about Activity Based Accounting.I was startled by their reaction. I paused, then said, “You guys have heard about this, right?” They shook their heads no. These young men and women will receive their MBAs in May.I stared at them in disbelief.A man from India spoke up, “For a moment I thought you were talking about activity-based costing but then you took it a whole different direction.”I was incredulous. “You’ve never heard of Activity-Based Accounting?” Again they shook their heads no. Then it hit me. Joe Romano invented this and taught it to his students 20 years ago without ever mentioning that it was his own invention.I smiled. Joe has always been like that.As the years have passed, I’ve seen countless real-life examples of Activity-Based Accounting in action. I just always assumed it was common knowledge and that everyone else was seeing what Joe taught me to see.In a nutshell, Activity-Based Accounting is highly sensitive to trends in customer behavior. It sees the people behind the numbers.Traditional cost-based accounting reduces customers and their behaviors to an “average” or a “percentage.”If a hole is 12 inches deep, how deep is half a hole? Cost-based accounting will answer “6 inches.” Activity-Based Accounting will answer, “There’s no such thing as half a hole.”Have you ever met the family with 2.3 children?Analysts who study Wal-Mart will tell you that the secret to their success is inventory management. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Wal-Mart’s inventory management is highly responsive to the activities of the customer.Wal-Mart has a men’s clothing department. So does K-Mart. Let’s assume they sell exactly the same clothing. K-Mart can tell you that the month started strong, then slowed down, so they pulled out their little stainless steel cart and the store manager got on the intercom and announced “a flashing blue light special.”Wal-Mart, on the other hand, knows it sold 5 Dave Hogan sport shirts within the first 8 hours they were on display and that all of them were blue. The red ones aren’t selling. The next day they sell 4 more blue ones and only 2 red. Wal-Mart’s sales aren’t going to slow down like K-Mart’s, because Wal-Mart is going to make sure they don’t run out of blue, Dave Hogan sport shirts.K-Mart went bankrupt. Wal-Mart became the most successful retailer in the history of the world. That’s the power of Activity-Based Accounting.Likewise, Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson implemented a decision-making technique back in 2004 that I immediately recognized as Activity-Based Accounting. One year later the success of his endeavor was trumpeted in the Wall Street Journal. Four years after that, rival Circuit City was driven into liquidation because they never quite caught on to what Best Buy was doing.Would you like to talk more about it?Activity-Based Accounting dovetails nicely into the principles taught by women’s marketing expert Michele Miller, so I’ve asked her to give me a couple of hours during her upcoming Wonder Branding class April 15-16 at Wizard Academy. You don’t mind a little extra class time, do you?Rooms are still available at no charge in Engelbrecht House. I’d snag one right now if I was you. A couple of days in Austin will make 2009 turn out a whole lot better for you. Just look at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. (Best Buy retained Michele Miller. Those guys aren’t stupid.)“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”– Sir Claus MoserThe Wizard Academy campus is beautiful this time of year. Come.Roy H. Williams

1. Never promise everything you plan to deliver.Leave something to become the delight factor. That unexpected, extra bit you deliver “because we love you” will go a long way toward helping the customer forgive and forget any areas where you may have fallen short. Great ads are written in three steps: (1.) How to End. What will be the Last Mental Image your ad presents to your customer? Begin with the end in mind. (2.) Where to Begin. A clear but interesting angle of approach will gain the customer’s attention. (3.) What to Leave Out. Surprise is the foundation of delight. What will you intentionally leave out of your ad so that you can deliver a delightful surprise? What will you leave out so that the imagination of the customer is engaged?2. Never begin a sentence with the word, “Imagine…”If you’re planning to take your customer on a journey of imagination, plunge them into it. “The wheels of your airplane touch down, but not in the city you were promised…” “You must now choose between two good things…” “If you had more enemies like these, you wouldn’t need friends…”3. Never include your name in an ad more often than it would be spoken in normal conversation.Cramming your name where it doesn’t belong is AdSpeak. Back when Americans encountered one thirtieth as many ads each day, the rule was to repeat the name of the advertiser as often as possible. Do this today and your ads will sound like they were written in the 1940s.4. Never conjure an unpleasant mental image.Fear and disgust work face-to-face, but they often backfire when used in mass media. Conjure these unpleasant emotions in the minds of the masses and you’ll leave your listeners with a vaguely bad feeling attached to your name. They’ll want to avoid you, but they won’t be able to recall exactly why.5. Never respond to a challenge from a competitor smaller than you. Drawing attention to a smaller competitor makes them larger in the eyes of the public. Conversely, if someone bigger than you is foolish enough to shine their spotlight on you, dance in it.6. Never claim to have exceptional service.Most people won’t believe you. And those who do believe you will expect more from your staff than they can possibly deliver. It’s a lose/lose proposition. Rather than promise exceptional service in your ads, tell the public something objective, factual and verifiable that causes them to say, “Wow. Those people really serve their customers.” Never praise yourself. Do things that make the customer praise you.7. Never mention the recession.I understand how tempting it is to say, “In order to help you combat the recession we’re offering…” But all that really does is remind the customer that now is not a good time to be spending money.8. Never make a claim you don’t immediately support with evidence.Unsubstantiated claims are the worst form of AdSpeak. Give the customer facts, details and objective proof if you want to win their confidence. Specifics are more believable than generalities.9. Never use humor that doesn’t reinforce the principal point of your ad.Here’s the litmus test: If remembering the humor forces you to recall the message of the ad, the humor is motivated. Good job. But if recalling the humor doesn’t put you in memory of the ad’s main point, the humor is unmotivated and will make your ad less effective. Sure, people will like the ad. They just won’t buy what you’re selling.10. Never say things in the usual way.From billboards to storefronts to packaging to messages on T-shirts, ads whisper and wheedle and cajole and shout to win our attention. A 1978 Yankelovich study reported that the average American was confronted with more than 2,000 advertising messages per day. But that was 30 years ago. When Yankelovich revisited the study in 2008, the number had jumped to more than 5,000 messages per day. The mundane, the predictable and the usual are filtered and rejected from our consciousness. Win the customer’s attention with words and phrases that are new, surprising and different.Come to Wizard Academy. We’ll teach you how.Roy H. Williams

I am reminded of what Michel Eyquem De Montaigne said with tongue in cheek during the French Renaissance 450 years ago, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.”As expected, we received a firestorm of email 2 weeks ago as a result of the Monday Morning Memo of March 2 in which I said I had chosen not to be fearful about the future. It seems that a lot of people take pleasure in fretting and they want me to get on board.But a frightened person frightens other people. And these newly frightened people will frighten still more people until finally no one is spending any money. Fear is the fuel of recession. I understand perfectly what’s happening in the world. I simply choose not to be afraid.You can choose, too. We are worth more than many sparrows.Warren Buffett agrees with this outlook.“Fear is very contagious. You can get fearful in 5 minutes, but you don’t get confident in 5 minutes.” – Warren Buffett on CNBC, Monday, March 9, 2009CNBC: “We’ve been getting thousands and thousands of emails from our viewers. Warren, we’d like to start with one that echoes a theme we heard again and again. This one comes from Terry in San Antonio, Texas, who asks, ‘Will everything be all right?’”BUFFETT: “Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created. We started with 4 million people back in 1790 and look where we’ve come. And it wasn’t because we were smarter than other people. It wasn’t because our land was more fertile or we had more minerals or our climate was more favorable. We had a system that worked. It unleashed the human potential. It didn’t work every year. We had 6 ‘panics’ in the 19th century. In the 20th century we had the Great Depression, World Wars, all kinds of things. But we have a system – largely free market, rule of law, equality of opportunity – all of those things that cause the potential of humans to get unleashed. And we’re far from done. Your kids will live better than mine. Your grandchildren will live better than your kids. There’s no question about that. But the machine gets gummed up from time to time. If you take the bulk of those centuries, probably 15 years were bad years. But we go forward.”Did you notice the quote the twitchy news people of America lifted from Buffett’s very upbeat, 3-hour interview? They filtered out all kinds of affirming, positive statements (such as the one above) to create the headline, “Warren Buffett Says ‘The Economy Fell Off a Cliff.”Slippery Wall-Streeters triggered this recession but the twitchy news media seems committed to making sure it progresses.And now for happier news: Wizard Academy has contacted the person I consider to be the best in America at making BIG things happen quickly. Within the next few weeks I hope to announce the dates of a special, 2-day workshop that will allow you to interact with this marketing giant in person. I’ve never met him but I’ve read his books and I look forward to having him on campus. Are there any big things you'd like to make happen quickly?When that announcement is made, you’ll want to act quickly. There are only 100 seats available in Tuscan Hall and many more than that will want to attend this event. It will likely be the most profitable thing any of us do in 2009.And now for a final thought: Fear is contagious. Don’t spread it. And if you meet any twitchy, fear mongering news weasels, slap them and say, “Stop it. Stop it right now.”They’ll know what it’s for.Roy H. Williams

8,000 years before Stonehenge and the PyramidsThe rocks of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) are a curiosity, and curiosity rocks.Travel with me to that ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southeastern Turkey.A shepherd wandering on the hillside where grows a solitary Mulberry tree, spies the top of an oblong rock that appears to have been shaped by human hands. He notices others like it in a pattern. He returns to the village and tells what he has seen. The digging begins. The year is 1994.“Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.”– David Lewis-Williams, Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg“Gobekli Tepe changes everything.”– Ian Hodder, Stanford University.Stonehenge was built 5000 years ago in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC. Carbon dating of organic matter adhering to the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe reveal it to be 12,000 years old, meaning it was built around 10,000–9,000 BC.“Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-wheel, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant.” – Tom CoxPerhaps the strangest part of the Gobekli story is that around 8,000 BC, its inhabitants entombed their temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which the unnamed shepherd walked in 1994. It was a task of unspeakable labor.No one knows why Gobekli was buried.“The modern history of Gobekli Tepe begins in 1964, when a team of American archaeologists combed this remote province of southeast Turkey. The archaeologists noted that several odd-looking hills were blanketed with thousands of broken flints, a sure sign of ancient human activity. Despite this, the US scientists drifted away and did no excavating. Today, they must feel like the publisher who rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript.” – Sean ThomasThirty years later, a shepherd saw a pattern of rocks peeking through the soil and said, “I wonder…”Google Gobekli Tepe and you’ll find that everyone mentions the shepherd but none can name him.I want to locate that shepherd and bring him to Wizard Academy. For it’s people like him – men and women without credentials, funding or permission – who notice the daily miracles that surround us and point them out for all to see. Galileo,Da Vinci,Buckminster Fuller,and the shepherd of Gobekli Tepe;to these servants of Curiosity,I give my highest Salute.Roy H. Williams