If you’ve never failed, it’s either because you’re frightened or you lack imagination.
– Roy H. Williams
I write only for people who like my writing.
– Roy H. Williams
Technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is standing on its tracks.
– Roy H. Williams, Monday Morning Memo, July 20, 2015
Small thoughts fit easily into a closed mind, but big thoughts require an open one.
– Roy H. Williams
When we do a thing intuitively, it is an art. When we do it systematically, it is a science.
– Roy H. Williams
You cannot argue a person into faith. Faith is not logical. Faith is a choice.
– Roy H. Williams
Every door of opportunity begins as a window in the mind.
Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be,
should be, ought to be someday. Keep looking. Watch it grow into a door of
Opportunity through which you can walk into an entirely different future.
Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in the air all around you.
You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.
Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.
Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.
– Roy H. Williams
Bad advertising is about you and your product. Good advertising is about your customer and their life.
– Roy H. Williams
People will give you their time when you offer them entertainment. People will give you their money when you offer them hope.
– Roy H. Williams
Authority can be given to a person. Leadership cannot. People with authority often have no followers. People with followers often have no authority.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
The future seems inevitable once you’re past it.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Encouragement happens when a person needs courage… and you give them yours.
– Roy H. Williams
You must attempt the ridiculous to accomplish the miraculous.
– Roy H. Williams
Every person faces their own windmill of Quixote.
– Roy H. Williams
Failures are footlights along the dark pathway to success.
– Roy H. Williams
I am annoyed by people who think they will become leaders by imitating what others have already done.
– Roy H. Williams
An incompetent person with a great attitude is still an incompetent person.
– Roy H. Williams
Passion does not produce commitment.
Commitment produces passion.
– Roy H. Williams
Our paths have crossed and our lives have intersected.
– Roy H. Williams, Oct. 27, 2012
I like Don Quixote because he, like me, is completely ridiculous. There is no quality about him that would indicate success. I identify with that. He has nothing to offer save for this: he is completely and utterly committed.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
It flashed a sparkle of water as if to say goodbye and then the river curled away to go searching for the sea.
– Roy H. Williams, June 30, 2014
A wise man sees both sides of a matter. The fool sees only one.
– Roy H. Williams
NIGHT WIND
Come with me and I’ll take you to where an invisible ballerina shoves icy clouds through the night, pausing only to spin on hilltops and watch the leaves fall sighing to lie quiet among the bones of other white leaves from other cold years. Down in the village, little dogs bark like freight trains. Or is this only the ballerina’s song? Come. It is time for us to go.
– Roy H. Williams
Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.
– Roy H. Williams
Each of us is a time traveller, moving forward at a single speed.
– Roy H. Williams, July 2, 2014
I’ve never met a business owner whose advertising failed because they were reaching the wrong people.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Your choice of heroes changes your behavior, your future, the very trajectory of your life.
– Roy H. Williams
You may cheer for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
The dragons are too many, Lord, and I am weary.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 8, 2013
Don’t do what you’re passionate about. Be passionate about what you do. Don’t follow your passion. Let your passion follow you.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
It is not the victory, but the audacity of the attempt that makes us feel alive.
– Roy H. Williams
There are things that people feel but are afraid to say because they fear that people will think less of them. In moderation this is etiquette. But in excess it is cowardice.
– Roy H. Williams
Gurganus is right. The truth happens to everyone, but stories only happen to people who can tell them.
– Roy H. Williams, The Truth of the Story, June 2, 2014
The media doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work.
– Roy H. Williams, Ask to See the Ad, May 26, 2014
Opportunity begins as a window in the mind through which we glimpse possible futures. And then one day we leap through that window.
– Roy H. Williams
If you want to waste a lot of money on advertising, just target exactly the right audience and then make an offer that fails to move them.
– Roy H. Williams
A company without values and traditions is a train without a track, unable to gain momentum.
– Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo for July 14, 2014
If you’re offended by my use of the word ‘midget,’ please let me know. I’ve got some other words that will really rock your world.
– Roy H. Williams
Have you ever noticed that most suggestions are really just complaints wearing a cheap disguise?
Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo for Feb. 9, 2015
If you will expand your world, you must crawl on your hands and knees, get on your belly and squirm under the fence that surrounds your insulated life.
– Roy H. Williams
Grasp your courage. See your objective. Identify your adventure.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
When you’ve said it aloud in front of people you care about, you are no longer a spectator. You are a player.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
Cherish the caterpillar. Trust in the butterfly you cannot see. An angel is dressed as a beggar. Wisdom wears the hat of a fool. Power hides behind the
eyelids of a quiet old woman. Every miracle wears a disguise.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
Education is theoretical. Experience is practical. Battle scars are the marks of a warrior. Happiest are those moments when you rise from the ashes of bitter defeat to try again, smarter, wiser, unstoppable. Everyone is watching you. Smile at them. Show your teeth.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
Yes, rejoice when you fail because nothing is more tragic than winning quickly.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
Fantasy is frozen and changeless in the mind but a worthy objective is durable and alive. Your objective will grow and mature as you do. Don’t be surprised when it changes, because you are changing, too.
– Roy H. Williams, I’ve Come to Encourage You, May 12, 2014
It is a harsh mirror that lets us see ourselves clearly.
– Roy H. Williams
It’s never the wrong time to hire the right person.
– Roy H. Williams
You say you have a goal.
Let me look into your eyes.
Now tell me what you did today.
– Roy H. Williams
I did not choose it but it chose me.
– Roy H. Williams
Politics in a Thimble: Guilt makes a man a Democrat and Fear makes him a Republican.
– Roy H. Williams
Commitment looks exactly like courage when you’re committed to something more important than your fear.
– Roy H. Williams
‘Cream rises to the top’ is what we tell talented people who are frightened. It’s a lie, of course, but it makes them feel like they have a chance.
– Roy H. Williams
Don Quixote is a book about a man who sees beauty where others do not. He selects an identity, announces a purpose and launches an adventure. Can there be a better book for the budding entrepreneur?
– Roy H. Williams, March 16, 2014
The message of Don Quixote is this: It’s never too late to become who you might have been.
– Roy H. Williams, paraphrasing George Eliot
A child is a caterpillar. A young adult, a butterfly. Adolescence is that time when we’re wrapped in the cocoon of our own private world and no one, not even ourselves, knows in the least what we shall become.
– Roy H. Williams, March 6, 2014
‘Haggard, Inconstant Splashes of Beauty…’ I stole that line from the ending of an Italian movie about a guy who, on his 65th birthday, begins to reevaluate his shallow life. The movie is visually arresting but a bit of a downer. Life can be like that, too, even when it’s not a shallow one. Visually arresting sights are all around us but we’re too pressed for time to notice. We’re in a mood, in a hurry, in trouble, in a crisis or incapacitated. We’re anxious or angry, distracted or distraught, bedazzled, bedeviled or bedraggled. But still those splashes of beauty creep in – barely noticeable at first – but there they are, haggard and inconstant, limping and laughing, splashes of miracles that would show up more often if only we would
notice.
– Roy H. Williams
I’m thinking about writing a book called Agonies of an Ad Man. There are some fundamental truths in this business that are difficult to learn and almost impossible to teach. We have to learn them again and again.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
A cost-cutter buys grapes and makes raisins. An entrepreneur buys grapes and makes wine. You’ll never see a person arrive to a celebration carrying a box of raisins.
– Roy H. Williams
Raisins are grapes that didn’t have the courage to be crushed into wine.
– Indiana Beagle
I was told that story by a multimillionaire Wall Street speculator. He says American businesspeople have a peculiar blind spot to the all-at-once backlash that comes from watering the soup. He said American businesses expect to see incremental declines when they are incrementally abusive, but that’s never how it
works. When the wife packs up to leave, she takes the kids and leaves all at once.
– Roy H. Williams
You’ve heard it said that, ‘Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ Yet we routinely craft our own facts from the fabric of personal experiences, preferences and prejudices. A stereotype is nothing more than a pattern we’ve observed. This pattern isn’t always predictive, but it is a pattern nonetheless and we trust it. We do this in the misbegotten belief that we have correctly interpreted our past experiences and that our preferences and prejudices are, in fact, correct and reliable interpretations of objective reality. We’re a funny, funny species, aren’t we?
– Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo for March 24, 2014
I hate dimly-lit rooms and barren landscapes; patches of death and malaise. Give me indirect lighting with hot spots and shadows and landscapes filled with too much to see. Give me life and life abundant.
– Roy H. Williams
Do something that needs to be done. Fight for someone who needs you to fight for them because they cannot fight for themselves. Rise up from the pleasure-saturated society in which you live and tackle a problem that is bigger than you are.
– Roy H. Williams
There is a slithering moodiness, an echoing loneliness, a melancholy danger in the swamp.
– Roy H Williams
Passion is created when determination and commitment are joined by the nitroglycerin of action. Leonardo da Vinci said it 480 years ago and he said it in Italian. Here is the clearest translation: ‘People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.’
Listen to Leonardo.
Go out and happen to something.
– Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
Never – not once – has a successful person said to me, ‘I followed my passion.’ But this is the answer you will hear again and again from people who are serving time in prison.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
The ‘Follow-Your-Passion’ myth is pervasive because successful people are usually passionate. But those people would have been passionate about whatever they chose to do. Their jobs don’t give them passion. They give passion to their jobs. The same is true in successful marriages.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
The world is full of rich people who are not, and never were, successful. People who stole the money, inherited the money, married the money, won the money in the stock market or in the lottery, cheated others out of the money or were awarded the money in court, do not qualify as ‘successful’ in my admittedly subjective opinion.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
Passion doesn’t always manifest itself as happiness; passion is also behind deep grief. Passion isn’t always confident; worry is misguided passion, fearful passion, but it is passion nonetheless. Don’t do what you’re passionate about. Be passionate about what you do. Don’t follow your passion. Let your passion follow you.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
Passion doesn’t always manifest itself as happiness. Passion is also behind deep grief. Passion isn’t always confident. Worry is misguided passion, fearful passion, but it is passion nonetheless.
– Roy H. Williams, the Monday Morning Memo for Oct. 21, 2013
We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are. We see in each item a dim reflection of self. The intellect then creates logic to justify what the heart has already decided. A good salesperson points to this reflection, ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ and then helps the intellect find the facts it needs to justify the purchase.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Do not confuse pleasure with happiness. Unhappy people can have pleasure. And uninterrupted pleasures are not happiness. Happiness is the result of knowing who you are, why you are here, and what you should do.
We need identity, purpose, and adventure.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 23, 2013
In the 1605 book by Cervantes, Don Quixote never meets Dulcinea. She’s never aware he exists. Yet everything he does is in her name and for her honor.
In reality, the woman he calls Dulcinea is just a common village girl named Aldonza Lorenzo. Dulcinea exists only in the mind of Don Quixote de La Mancha, who, by the way, doesn’t really exist, either. He’s really just a romantic old fellow named Alonso Quijano who dreams of purpose and adventure.
Business is nothing more than a search for purpose and adventure.
If you believe otherwise, you’ve obviously never really thought about it.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 9, 2013
Business is nothing more than a search for purpose and adventure.
If you believe otherwise, you’ve obviously never really thought about it.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 9, 2013
The Psalm of a King
The dragons are too many
And I am weary.
Obstructionists tie ropes
To my ankles
And believe they are right.
Betrayers rally men
Against me
And believe they are right.
Tiny men like mosquitoes
Suck my blood
And believe they are right.
Those who love me
Point at every danger and difficulty
And believe they are helping.
The dragons are too many, Lord,
And I am weary.
And alone.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 8, 2013
Most advertising isn’t written to persuade. It’s written not to offend. An ad too weak to offend is an ad too weak to persuade. Mission statements are even worse. Have you ever noticed they all say the same thing? A powerful statement forces the reader to choose between two sides of a line drawn in the sand. Rare is the business owner who has the courage to craft the mission statement that effectively asks the reader, ‘So are you in, or are you out?’
Tigers do not purr.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
When David rocks, Goliath rolls.
– Roy H. Williams, Aug 1, 2013
Three ideas:
1: You are the product of your genetic code, hardwired to behave in certain ways.
2: You are a product of your environment, the sum total of your influences.
3: You are the product of your choices. It is your preferences, not your surroundings, that define you.
I believe it is a mistake to cling too tightly to any of these 3 ideas. Each of them is true, I think, but not to the exclusion of the other two.
– Roy H. Williams, July 30, 2013
Others may cheer for the giant with a spear but I sing for the boy with a sling.
– Roy H. Williams
When you ask God for a miracle, he gives you an instruction. Search the scriptures and you’ll see for yourself. This assumes, of course, that you believe in God and in miracles and that you believe the stories in the Bible to be true. Which, strangely, I do.
– Roy H. Williams
A man without purpose walks through his day like a man who doesn’t know where he is going.
– Roy H. Williams
A smokestack is spewing.
Don’t look up.
A tornado is dropping.
Don’t look up.
A drone is bombing.
Don’t look up.
If you don’t see it, it isn’t there.
– Roy H. Williams, Ignorance is Bliss
Art is symbolic and some symbols mean more to us than others. Art puts us in another time, a different place, and connects us to the life of the artist. It is a magic mirror, allowing us to examine perspectives and realities beyond our own.
– Roy H. Williams, June 20, 2013
I should not have conquered until first I conquered the government.
– Roy H. Williams, an interesting opening line I will one day use
A promise was broken long ago, and now I grow old in mirror after mirror.
– Roy H. Williams
Anthony Fidget was a twitchy little bastard. I’m glad he was the first to go.
– the opening line of a chapter yet to be written. When you’ve finished writing the rest of that chapter, please send it to me. I’m anxious to read it:
Roy H. Williams
Wizard Academy
16221 Crystal Hills Dr.
Austin, Texas
78737
You know, if you’re at all curious, I can tell you exactly how you’re going to die.
Roy H. Williams – opening line of a book yet to be written
The old lion is dead. Where shall we find another like him?
– Roy H. Williams
Creativity that blurs clarity is pretentious. Creativity that sharpens clarity is genius.
– Roy H. Williams, June 4, 2013, On the Art of Writing
Owl was neither wise nor old. She was just a teenage assassin whose large, dark eyes said she was sleepy or depressed or bored. I was never really sure which.
– Roy H. Williams, June 2, 2013, Vess Barnes Says Hello
Rules are demanded by people who have not the wit to understand and apply the appropriate, all-encompassing principle.
– Roy H. Williams
Every customer is the right customer. What you’re looking for is the right moment.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Quit looking for the right customer. Start looking for the right moment.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
I’m sorry if my mention of God annoys you. (Just for the record, He is never annoyed when I mention you.)
– Roy H. Williams
Hope is the glow that surrounds creativity and courage is the confidence we gain in that light.
– Roy H. Williams
Advertising will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
You are in business for yourself and your only inventory is time.
– Roy H. Williams
The line between fiction and reality is forever blurred when we become what we pretended to be.
– Roy H. Williams
Ad writing is much easier to teach than ad strategy.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
We are always proud of our own children. It is other people’s children who disappoint us.
– Roy H. Williams
Your story isn’t always about you.
– Roy H. Williams
Happiness is rarely a product of circumstances. Happiness is usually a choice. Are you choosing it?
– Roy H. Williams
It is your choice of message that targets the customer, not your choice of media. There are rare exceptions, of course. But not many.
– Roy H. Williams
It wasn’t the truth when I began the sentence, but it became the truth before I finished it.
– Roy H. Williams
Don’t talk to me about your beliefs; show me your actions.
– Roy H. Williams
We are, for the moment, trapped on a planet spinning out of control.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Is it wise to protect the ones we love from the hardships that taught us all we know?
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
The lamb was not given the ability of the lion. Is this the fault of the lamb? Survival of the fittest says, ‘The weak are meat and the strong do eat.’ This will forever be the result of any system that promotes equal opportunity without acknowledging inability.
– Roy H. Williams
All the things you didn’t do are the price of the choice you made.
– Roy H. Williams, Oct. 15, 2012
Few of my friends believe in God but I have had many encounters with him. To speak of these encounters makes me sound like a loon and that doesn’t help anyone. God is undeniable when you have met him. But you cannot explain him to someone who wasn’t there without sounding like you need therapy and pharmaceuticals. Seven billion of us are crammed on a tiny speck of dust circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 252 times the speed of a rifle bullet. We are passengers on a world spinning out of control.
Having wrongly been taught that God is in control, we blame him for every sadness.
– Roy H. Williams
Commitment happens when something is more important to you than yourself.
– Roy H. Williams
He arrived at Perfection, sat down and sighed, ‘Now what?’
– Roy H. Williams
A paragraph feels casual and informative. A numbered list feels authoritative and useful. When presenting a big idea, reduce the big idea to a numbered list and your audience will more quickly grasp it.
– Roy H. Williams
The American Success Myth of the 20th Century taught us to buy things we didn’t need with money we didn’t have to impress people we didn’t like. We were told, ‘Whoever dies with the most toys wins.’ So we chased happiness with dollars in our hands and it fled from us faster than we could run. Exhausted, we sat down and learned the truth: ‘The key to happiness is an ability to celebrate the ordinary.’
– Roy H. Williams
Art is valuable to the degree that it triggers emotions. But it isn’t always the art, itself, that triggers the emotion; sometimes the art is merely a point-of-contact with an iconic figure with whom we identify.
– Roy H. Williams
The key to happiness is an ability to celebrate the ordinary.
– Roy H. Williams
Use half as many words and you’ll hit twice as hard.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
A wise man sees both sides of a matter. The fool sees only one.
– Roy H. Williams
We are passengers on a world spinning out of control.
Having wrongly been taught that God is in control, we blame him for every sadness. – Roy H. Williams
Are you stayin’ up late and doin’ wrong or gettin’ up early and doin’ right?
With who…
With who…
With who…
have you heard the chimes at midnight?
– Roy H. Williams, the chorus of a song yet to be written, Nov. 5, 2012
Atlas Shrugged is an anthem of individual achievement and exceptionalism. If you want to fall to your knees before an idol of yourself and worship your own magnificent greatness, Ayn Rand will happily be your prophetess.
Meanwhile, I will read Ozymandias and laugh at you both.
– Roy H. Williams
Say the thing in half as many words and it will hit twice as hard.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
If your marketing people talk a lot about colors and logos and layouts, you’re dealing with graphics artists posing as marketing consultants.
– Roy H. Williams
I have many irrational idiosyncrasies. I refuse to listen to country music, drink Budweiser, watch NASCAR or eat white bread. I will never drive a minivan or embrace multilevel marketing. And unless I suddenly become a 14-year-old girl, I will never create a Facebook page and ask you to ‘like’ me.
– Roy H. Williams
If it turns out well, they will say you were dashing and bold. If it turns out badly, they will say you were reckless and foolish. But ‘say’ is all they do. They say.
– Roy H. Williams
Success stories are dangerous if you don’t tell them right. Improperly presented, a success story promises miracles to people who are never going to do their part to make those miracles happen.
– Roy H. Williams
When you grow up poor, you’re not frightened by things that frighten other people. It’s a gigantic advantage. And the realization of that has shaped the bulk of my life.
– Roy H. Williams
Courage might look like confidence to onlookers but confidence and courage are not the same. Confidence means you’re not afraid. Courage means you do your best even though you’re scared half to death. Courage does not rely on confidence. Courage relies on commitment.
– Roy H. Williams
‘Let there be light!’ commands knowledge to spring from non-knowledge, revelation to burst from mystery. It is the shout of a guiding star that appears in the darkness, illuminating the path, showing us the way.
– Roy H. Williams
In the subterranean symbology of the Monday Morning Memo, the female beagle is Intuition. The male beagle, Indy, is reckless adventure and discovery.
– Roy H. Williams
Shadows speak of mystery. Light speaks of revelation.
Overmuch shadow is gloom, then darkness.
Overmuch light is boring, then blinding.
Photographs, paintings, literature and romance require navigation of light and shadow, the revealed and unrevealed.
– Roy H. Williams, July 6, 2012
What people think they would do is almost never what they actually do when confronted with that decision in real life. So why do we ask for their advice?
– Roy H. Williams
Mediocrity comes from having perfectly implemented tried and true, traditional wisdom.
– Roy H. Williams
The person who has achieved spectacular failure has at least attempted something bold.
– Roy H. Williams, June 3, 2012
If you are committed to speaking the truth, it will be your choice of tools that defines you. Oscar Wilde was a playwright. He put his words, like a ventriloquist, into the mouths of actors on the stage. Ad writers, screenwriters and novelists differ only in their ventriloquist’s dummies, the masks they hide behind.
– Roy H. Williams, April 23, 2012
Magi.
iMagine.
Magic.
– Roy H. Williams, April 2, 2012
Blue is the color of darkness.
– RHW
How many things have you learned that you no longer know?
– Roy H. Williams, March 16, 2012
The party ended.
And no one went home.
– Roy H. Williams
METABOLISM:
Razor thin, we edged our way through the day jamming chips and cheeseburgers into the white-hot furnace of youth.
– Roy H. Williams, Feb. 28, 2012
My nose banged into his sternum with such vigor it began to bleed. So no, you cannot say we stepped through a doorway and met face-to-face.
– Roy H. Williams, Three and Three, a novel currently underway
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug.
– Roy H. Williams
Reaching a person once is cheap and easy. But reaching that same person a second and third time in that same week is expensive and difficult. Yet the success of your radio campaign depends upon it.
– Roy H. Williams
She panthered up to him, slipped her arm into his, and smiled a broken smile.
– Roy H. Williams, Three and Three, a novel currently underway
Sometimes I look in the rear-view mirror and notice myself looking back at me. I look tired.
– Roy H. Williams
As a marketing consultant, I’m very territorial. I can work with you, or I can work for your competitor against you. If you don’t respect the size of my gun, you leave me no choice but to shoot your ass with it.
– Roy H. Williams
I’ve got underwear older than you and my wife’s been washing them for longer than you’ve been alive.
– Roy H. Williams
Fargo. The Big Lebowski. No Country for Old Men… The Coen brothers fish the dark waters.
– Roy H. Williams
Put together a group of intelligent strangers and move them beyond small talk. This is how you change the world.
– Roy H. Williams
Bright blue be the blood of outer space.
Red be the blood of John Paul Grace.
Green be the blood of dark brown earth.
Gold be the blood of sparkling mirth.
White be the blood of times gone by.
A winter’s day.
Albino sky.
A walk alone.
A telephone.
A quick goodbye.
The whitest lie.
– Roy H. Williams
One of our number is missing… 2011 is gone.
– Roy H. Williams, Christmas Day, 2011
Happiness is not an outcome. Happiness is a choice.
– Roy H. Williams
The person who seems happy without good reason forever frustrates the person who believes happiness to be the outcome of an event.
– Roy H. Williams
Knowing and doing are entirely different things.
– Roy H. Williams
Wrap a small idea in many words and you will succeed in academia.
– Roy H. Williams
I like Quixote because he is heroic, ridiculous, and utterly, irrevocably committed.
– Roy H. Williams
Although he wasn’t known for his sweetness, Marvin showered like he was made of sugar: rarely, reluctantly, and very quickly.
– Roy H. Williams
When a creation or a person rises to the level of Cultural Icon, it becomes a symbol of something much bigger than itself.
– Roy H. Williams
Sports: the opiate of the masses
– Roy H. Williams
How do we answer death? When she speaks softly we have no words. When she speaks darkly all light is swallowed. When she speaks sharply time collapses into a moment and that moment lasts forever.
– Roy H. Williams, Sunday Nov. 27, 2011
Before you can take people where you want them to go, you have to meet them where they are.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Fear of failure causes people to be afraid to experiment. Consequently, most people with 20 years’ experience really have just 1 year’s experience 20 times.
– Roy H. Williams
When Death snatches your friend you walk into the darkness a little, calling his name, waiting to hear his voice in answer. It is a lonely and quiet time.
– Roy H. Williams, October 29, 2011, 5 days after the death of Woody Justice
A good idea is a moonlit fish that flashes beneath the waters of the conscious mind. How good a fisherman are you?
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
PS – Big fish swim in deep water.
It is a lack of commitment, not a lack of talent, that damns you to mediocrity.
– Roy H. Williams
Advertising is what companies say about themselves. This is a simple thought, I know, but it’s too often overlooked.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
You looked directly into my eyes and asked, ‘What is the answer?’
I looked back as steadfastly as I could and said, ‘What is the question?’
– Roy H. Williams
The pessimist believes everything is meaningless, nothing matters. The optimist believes nothing is meaningless, everything matters.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Clarity follows commitment more often than commitment follows clarity.
– Roy H. Williams
Confidence without humility is arrogance. Humility without confidence is an inferiority complex.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Transition is that moment when we are dissatisfied with where we have been and frightened by where we are headed.
– Roy H. Williams
Think about it. We live in an age when something can happen – anywhere in the world – and be known moments later throughout the rest of the world.
– Roy H. Williams
There is a spot from which your next step, regardless of the direction you choose, will be perfectly North.
– Roy H. Williams
Faith can find logic. Logic cannot find faith.
– Roy H. Williams
If you will see into the heart of a people, look closely at what they create. Examine the inventions to which they pay attention. Read their bestselling books. Listen to their most popular music. This is how you will know them.
– Roy H. Williams
Confidence and humility are not opposites. In fact, you can’t have true humility until you first have confidence. Confidence without humility is arrogance. Humility without confidence is an inferiority complex.
– Roy H. Williams
Allow yourself to like people for the most ridiculous of reasons.
– Roy H. Williams
Things rarely turn out as well as we had hoped or as badly as we had feared.
– Roy H. Williams
And there it sits, hovering between the dictates of Nature and Nurture: Choice.
– Roy H. Williams
You will hear people say, ‘Do what you love,’ but my experience has been that this is rarely an option. So here’s an equally effective alternative: Love what you do.
– Roy H. Williams
Each of us lives the life we choose.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
The quality of an hour is determined by where you choose to turn your attention.
The quality of a day is determined by where you choose to turn your attention.
The quality of your life will be determined by where you choose to turn your attention.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Your opinion regarding what should be done to white-collar criminal CEOs will be determined by your thinking. When you are through, your conclusion will be a direct reflection of what you believe to be irrelevant.
– Roy H. Williams
As long as Mick Jagger struts the stage and Keith Richards acts like he doesn’t care, the 70’s will never end.
– Roy H. Williams
We are driven like frightened sheep by the snap of the lash of the Merely Urgent. Head down, eyes forward, move quickly, and then one day you wake up dead like Michael Jackson. The merely urgent is rarely important and the really important is rarely urgent.
– Roy H. Williams
We are a haphazard people. We name our months after Roman gods. We count our years from the birth of Jesus. We print ‘In God We Trust’ on all our money, but feel anyone who publicly acknowledges God to be a rube.
– Roy H. Williams
Duality is marked by the contrast of opposites. This is the essence of successful marketing and the underlying theme of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop. The truth is never black or white or ‘somewhere in the middle.’ The key to miracles is to recognize the beauty of both sides of a duality – black and white – while not allowing yourself to get trapped in the perspective of either side. Please don’t think I’m saying there’s no such thing as Absolute Truth. Of course Truth exists. But not everything is objective. There is also a subjective reality – a perceptual reality – that lives in the heart. It is to this reality that persuasion is aimed.
– Roy H. Williams, in the Monday Morning Memo of Feb. 14, 2011
Is your mind broad enough to hear the beauty of birdsong in the land of your enemy?
– Roy H. Williams
Journalists write about important moments. Novelists write to make common moments important.
– Roy H. Williams
‘Talent’ is any natural ability to swim in the deep waters of the unconscious and pull up the timeless fishes.
– Roy H. Williams
What is a novelist but a person who fantasizes and then shares their fantasy with others?
– Roy H. Williams
I shield myself from the barbs of my critics, happy in the illusion that I am understood.
– Roy H. Williams
I place my cell phone on the marble-topped sofa table, not because that’s where it belongs but because that’s where I’m most likely to look for it.
– Roy H. Williams
There is an idea forming in my mind, and I do not yet know what it is.
– Roy H. Williams
Daytime television and country music are America’s grand celebrations of willful ignorance.
– Roy H. Williams
More than Nature or Nurture I believe in the terrific and terrible power of Choice… and its consequences.
– Roy H. Williams
People never change their minds. If you give a person the same information you’ve given them in the past, they’ll make the same decision they’ve made in the past. A person who appears to have changed their mind, has, in reality, made a new decision based on new information. In the absence of new information, there will be no new decision.
– Roy H. Williams
When your objective is clear and your commitment is absolute, budgets and schedules no longer apply.
– Roy H. Williams
Strong young men too crazy or too lazy to do any work stand on the street corners in the town where I live. Staring, they expect you to give them money. Someone always does.
– Roy H. Williams
I think I’ll write a book about people moving from California to Oklahoma and call it The Wrath of Grapes.
– Roy H. Williams
A joke is told and people laugh. But not everyone. Not always.
Food is served and people eat. But not everyone. Not always.
A threat is made and people quake. But not everyone. Not always.
The sun will rise and people wake, But not everyone.
Not always.
– Roy H. Williams
Some people are blessed with fame and others are cursed by it.
– Roy H. Williams
Loyalty is an expression of commitment. Determination is an extension of commitment. In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.’ Kill the ox and burn the plow. Throw your cap over the wall. Strike the ground.
– Roy H. Williams
Everyone is broken a little, I think, and the most broken of all are those who pretend they are not.
– Roy H. Williams
Commitment is the only true form of passion.
– Roy H. Williams
Methinks Opportunity and Equality are in a cosmic tug-of-war, like Justice and Mercy, Honesty and Loyalty, Protons and Electrons, Objective Science that speaks to the mind and Subjective Art that speaks to the heart. Yes, a cosmic tug-of-war.
– Roy H. Williams
If I let you keep the cheese will you let me out of the trap?
– Roy H. Williams
You must attempt the ridiculous to accomplish the miraculous.
– Roy H. Williams
I’ve never found anyone who could explain to me the difference between constructive criticism and just plain criticism.
– Roy H. Williams
When your thoughts depend on what you’ve been taught, you’re letting someone else do your thinking. This is the truest definition of what it means to be ‘inside the box.’
– Roy H. Williams
If it turns out well, you had confidence. If it turns out badly, it was hubris.
– Roy H. Williams
You are the god of the world you create in your mind. If you don’t like living in that world, change it.
– Roy H. Williams
Lions are external.
The tiger is within.
– Roy H. Williams
Obstinate people are not determined.
They merely suffer from too much pride.
Endurance is determination; the willingness to pay the price.
No turning back.
No turning back.
– Roy H. Williams
No business ever failed due to their ads reaching the wrong people.
– Roy H. Williams
With every purchase we make, we shout who we are.
– Roy H. Williams
Sophistication is the art of looking slightly bored and a little condescending.
– Indiana Beagle
‘In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.’ Capitalism is economic feudalism; ‘Whoever has the gold makes the rules.’ Communism is Democracy applied to economics.
– Roy H. Williams
Young men know what they’ve been taught. Old men know what they’ve learned.
– Roy H. Williams
We tend to remember people as much better or worse than they really were. And thus we create the mythologies that haunt us the rest of our lives.
– Roy H. Williams, Memorial Day 2010
The simple explanation is rarely complete.
– Roy H. Williams
If you will expand your world, you must crawl on your hands and knees, get on your belly and squirm under the fence that surrounds your insulated life.
– Roy H. Williams
Average people are afraid of looking stupid. This is what holds them back. It is only by attempting the ridiculous that we can accomplish the miraculous.
– Roy H. Williams
America’s grand celebrations of willful ignorance are daytime television and country music.
– Roy H. Williams
Headlights pierce the darkness, Narrow needles of light. I don’t remember any of this. Things look differentat night.
– RHW
His moustache and beard were the color of a Siberian saber-toothed rat, the mean kind, and his eyes sparkled with mischief. I liked him.
– Roy H. Williams
The world overflows with people who understand advertising, who can critique and discuss and explain it. But there are precious few who can write ads that actually work.
– Roy H. Williams
“Preparation, mastery, can help you overcome your fear, but mastery alone is not enough. There has to be something you want that’s worth more to you than your fear.”
– Roy H. Williams
CASINO
Girls in black spandex pants, high-heeled boots and baggy leather coats punctuate Las Vegas. Vodka fumes trail like invisible puppies as they pass the dead-eyed, spent ones going through the motions of having fun without having any of it.
– Roy H. Williams, January 28, 2010
It’s not what you include, but what you exclude that defines you.
– Roy H. Williams
Time, like money, is spent. What are you buying with the hours of your life?
– Roy H. Williams
There are only four people.
The Drifter,
Spun by wind and wave,
Helpless, says, ‘Whatever…’
The Drowner
Plays for sympathy. ‘It’s been
Just the worst week of my life.’
The Surfer
Scans the horizon, wanting forever
‘The next big thing.’
But the Magi
Follow the star.
Adjust the sails. Twist the rudder.
The Magi know.
– Indiana Beagle
I have known tigers.
A tiger on his own
Is not the same
As a tiger in a cubicle.
Self-employed tigers
Are hunted and killed
For profit and sport.
But it is better, I think,
To be dead in a box
Than to live in one.
– Roy H. Williams
Intensity of effort is the seed of passion.
– Roy H. Williams
The world overflows with people who understand advertising, who can critique and discuss and explain it. But there are precious few who can write ads that actually work.
– Roy H. Williams
People paid by the hour are paid for their activities. People paid royalties, license fees, or sales commissions are paid for their accomplishments.
– Roy H. Williams
When a man wears the handcuffs of public opinion, his words become flaccid and his advice becomes suspect. I don’t want to be that man.
– Roy H. Williams
Predictability requires no investigation.
– Roy H. Williams
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 lie in the language of numbers because people think numbers never lie.
– Roy H. Williams
Fear is the fuel of recession.
– Roy H. Williams
They said, ‘Debt is a tool.’ But debt, in my mind, was bondage; an occasionally necessary evil, but always to be escaped at the earliest possible moment. ‘You just don’t understand finance,’ they would say as they patted me on my head.
– Roy H. Williams
Talk is cheap and dreams are free but actions come at a price. Lives – like money – are spent. What are you buying with yours?
– Roy H. Williams
Ritalin is a stimulant to normal people but acts as a depressant when given to a hyperactive child. For me, the book of Ecclesiastes is like that. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life. Ecclesiastes is depressing to a person in high spirits, but when I’m feeling dark, it lifts me out of my gloom. Here’s an example from Chapter 8: ‘For every matter there is a time and judgment, though the misery of man increases greatly. For he does not know what will happen: so who can tell him when it will occur? No one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit, and no one has power in the day of death. There is no release from that war.’ See what I mean? It says ‘Nothing really matters because you’re going to die. And so is everyone else. So the thing that has you down is really no big thing, see?’
Like I said, it only works if you’re feeling depressed.
– Roy H. Williams
I allow myself to like people for the most ridiculous reasons.
– Roy H. Williams
We drag the corpses of our mothers and fathers throughout our lives, each of us responding in our own weird way to their expectations.
– Roy H. Williams
The person who doesn’t believe in time travel has never laid on their back on a summer’s day in a field of grass with their eyes closed.
– Roy H. Williams
Never assume that other people make decisions using the same criteria you use. EXAMPLE: A product comes in two sizes. A ten-ounce package costs a dollar. A forty-ounce package costs two dollars. Half the people will buy the ten-ounce package because it’s cheaper. The other half will buy the forty-ounce package because it’s cheaper. – Roy H. Williams
Never assume that other people think like you do. You’ve got to be willing to see your own opinions as those of an irrelevant freak.
– Roy H. Williams
There is no such thing as the general public.
– Roy H. Williams
Cultural Icons are contemporary archetypes, mass-appeal public art. You’re attracted to art when it stands for something you believe in, shows you a reflection of your own values, gives you a glimpse of your own, inner, face.
– Roy H. Williams
A polarizing mission statement forces the reader to choose between two sides of a line drawn in the sand. Rare is the business owner who has the courage to craft such a statement.
– Roy H. Williams
Cultural icons are the contemporary embodiments of Archetypal Patterns.
– Roy H. Williams
Impact in advertising today is 80 percent strategy, 20 percent copy. This makes it nearly impossible for good copy to compensate for weak strategy.
– Roy H. Williams
The problem with fictional characters is they’re uncooperative. You need them to be a certain way for the sake of the plot but they won’t hear of it. They have ideas of their own. Every writer of fiction knows what I’m talking about.
– Roy H. Williams
I make no apologies and offer no explanations for what the beagle finds in the rabbit hole.
– Roy H. Williams
There was a hole worn in the linoleum in front of the serving counter, its edges smooth, tapering down to a mirror of grey cement, the silent work of a million shoes standing, twisting, turning to leave with their tinfoil treasures and sparkling jars. I looked into that mirror and saw the soul of America. And it was beautiful.
– Roy H. Williams, from the Monday Morning Memo for February 11, 2008
TRAVEL ADVICE: If you are a people person, go to Newfoundland. If you are not a people person, go to Newfoundland.
– Roy H. Williams
The Blackberry is an evil, mechanical fruit of a technology out of control.
– Roy H. Williams, Jan. 9, 2008
The risk of inaccuracy is the price of simplicity.
– Roy H. Williams
The risk of insult is the price of clarity.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads, chapter 1
A visual portal makes a 2-dimensional surface psychologically 3-dimensional.
– Roy H. Williams, Advanced Thought Particles and 3rd Gravitating Bodies
Do you have a quiet ferocity? Are you willing to take a chance? Will you throw your cap over the wall, kill the ox and burn the plow, run toward the sound of the guns?
– Roy H. Williams
Momentary clarity. Ocean deep, mountain high. Then we return sadly to sea level.
– Roy H. Williams
Where do years go when they’re over?
– Roy H. Williams
A resort is where you go to have it all.
A retreat is where you go to get away from it all.
– Roy H. Williams
I’ve never known a successful man who could stay retired.
– Roy H. Williams
Young people in advertising have enthusiasm, theories and fresh ideas. Old coots have experience and answers gained by spending piles of other people’s money to learn what will and will not work.
– Roy H. Williams
I am paid shocking amounts of money because I write ads that bring in customers. Yet when I attempt to describe how to sell art, for example, the lesson quickly degenerates into a discussion of what is ‘true’ art, versus artists who ‘sell out.’ The emotions and opinions of the unlistening student bubble over the top and out
the ears and any lesson is instantly ended.
– Roy H. Williams
Particle Conflict is the way to make a brand interesting. Achieve this by adding an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.
Symbolic Thought is how to make a brand meaningful. Access this by linking the unknown to the known.
Procedural Memory is the key to your brand being automatically remembered. Accomplish this through Salience x Repetition.
– Roy H. Williams
Particle Conflict is created by adding an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.
Symbolic Thought is accessed by linking the unknown to the known.
Procedural Memory is a product of Relevance x Repetition.
– Roy H. Williams
When something makes us sad, we learn what’s important to us.
– Roy H. Williams
Collaboration is promoted on the assumption that 10 people are smarter than one person. But breakthroughs are usually the gift of a solitary figure, often working alone through the night.
– Roy H. Williams
If we train our children only to harvest, who will plant the seed?
– Roy H. Williams
Creativity is pointless until clarity has been achieved.
– Roy H. Williams
The mind is full of clever ideas. But few of them will actually work.
– Roy H. Williams
People with no stomach for conflict are quick to gloss over problems. They dodge a small problem now and create a bigger problem later. I’d rather feel the needle of inoculation than the symptoms of disease. Give me the small pain now.
– Roy H. Williams
A nitpicking needle-snout can always see a problem and will happily poke holes in whatever solutions are proposed by others. Like a mosquito, he sucks the life out of those around him. Slap the bastard and move on.
– Roy H. Williams
Confidence isn’t produced by perfect plans. It’s produced by determined people.
– Roy H. Williams
He lays quiet in the darkness and we cover his grave with platitudes and clichés and words so thin you can see through them.
– Roy H. Williams
Few things turn out as well as we had hoped or as badly as we had feared.
– Roy H. Williams
Cuff-links and a Rolex don’t mean a man is rich. They mean only that he wants you to think he is rich. Our eyes can easily distinguish the well-groomed from the scruffy. But the assumption that grooming indicates wealth is a mistake that con-men count on you to make. Don’t be fooled. Posers work hard to look wealthy.
True wealth works hard to look common.
– Roy H. Williams
We do not remember days. We remember moments. Change the moments you remember and you change your expectations. Change your expectations and you change your actions. Change your actions and you change your future.
– Roy H. Williams
When Too Big wedges into a head too small,
When Too Hard crowds into a life too soft,
When Too Much has happened to make sense of it all,
I am Sleep.
Let me do my work.
– Roy H. Williams
I’ve arrived at that age where you begin to realize that all the things you thought mattered, don’t.
– Roy H. Williams
We feel for them.
And with them.
And through them,
these characters in good books.
– Roy H. Williams
Every door of opportunity begins as a window in the mind.
– Roy H. Williams
But we are of those who dream by day.
– RHW
We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.
– Roy H. Williams
No person can make another do anything. The most one can hope to do is to cause the other to want the thing. But in the final moment there is only Choice.
– Roy H. Williams
Waves of Sadness
wash through me,
tumult over me,
ripple around me,
as I ride the escalator
upwards in an airport
to a new and
different place
to meet new and
different strangers.
– Roy H. Williams
I woke up this morning and turned 48 which is funny, because yesterday I turned 25.
– Roy H. Williams, March 29, 2006
CURIOSITY… If I could, I would inject it into your arm with a needle. It will take you on trips like no other drug.
– Roy H. Williams
Is commitment a manifestation of passion, or the cause of it?
– Roy H. Williams
God and I spoke further. I will not tell you what we said.
– Roy H. Williams
What is it that you think you have to say? And what makes you think anyone will care? These are the questions that underlie great ads.
– Roy H. Williams, Wizard of Ads
The willingness to risk a big mistake is often the birth of big success.
– Roy H. Williams
Every writer of fiction must decide how many days of his life he is willing to give to that other world. For while he is there, he is here no more.
– Roy H. Williams
The problems that come with a too-much focus on ‘reaching the right customer’ are:
1. it keeps us from seeing the importance of delivering the right experience
2: it keeps us from feeling compelled to explain our offer in the most compelling possible way.
– Roy H. Williams
We create Failure when we pretend that Creativity can magically overcome the fact that an advertiser has nothing to say.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
We create failure when we pretend creativity can overcome the fact that the advertiser has nothing to say.
– Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads
Anxiety is anti-hope. It is the fear of things not yet known, the fear of possibilities.
– Roy H. Williams
There’s nothing like a series of disasters to make you evaluate your priorities.
– Roy H. Williams
The planting of seed seems an unproductive thing to him who has done nothing but harvest.
– Roy H. Williams, speaking of the difference between branding and direct response marketing
They always tell you it’s going to be a pushbutton war, these rich white men who send other people’s kids off to die.
– RHW
A willingness to write badly is the key to writing well.
– Roy H. Williams
When faced with a polarity, the fool chooses one pole and disparages the other. But a wise man stands between the two and feels the energy that passes between them.
– Roy H. Williams
The hardest part of public speaking is escaping the nitpickers; those annoying people who hover offstage, mosquito-like, to tell you how their opinion differs from your own.
– Roy H. Williams
All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don’t get it right then nothing else matters. It gets lonely in the promised land by yourself.
– Roy H. Williams, Jr., my father, scribbled on a notepad as he was dying. I found it the next day.
It was a crystal cold, chemical rage. The kind that oozes from the underbelly of the mind, freezes for lack of empathy, and shatters into shards that cut to the bone.
– Roy H. Williams
The advantage of the written word is that it allows each hearer to listen at precisely his own rate of comprehension.
– Roy H. Williams
Introspection, like every other medicine, is beneficial in small doses. Consumed in quantity, it is a deadly poison.
– Roy H. Williams
…sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but always playing. That’s how I’d like to be remembered. Now all I need to do is go and live that kind of life.
– Roy H. Williams
Sarah invaded the room in full cocker spaniel romp, flinging her paws and tossing her rump like Bronc 14 coming out of chute number 3 at the Friday night rodeo.
– Roy H. Williams
And there are other secrets I have not told you.
– Roy H. Williams
Failure awaits any writer who attempts to create an exciting ad campaign for a company that is not committed to delivering all that was promised in the ads.
– Roy H. Williams
Obstinance is the patience of the wrong.
– Roy H. Williams
I don’t teach anything new. I just bring to people’s attention things they’ve always known.
– The Wizard of Ads
Don’t you hate it when herds of social robots begin bellowing their criticisms before they have all the facts?
– Roy H. Williams
When a wealthy person asks us to do something, why do we do it? Is it because we harbor a secret hope of receiving something from them? Is it because we fear them in some unspoken way?
– Roy H. Williams
Your book, like a message in a bottle, is a window into your soul. You write never knowing who will peer in.
– Roy H. Williams
…well-intentioned religious people, acting like gate-keepers to God.
– Roy H. Williams
Talk is cheap. The world doesn’t want to hear what you believe. They’re watching to see what you do.
– Roy H. Williams
Small people complain.
– Roy H. Williams
Wisdom is knowing what’s right. Understanding is knowing why it’s right. Wisdom is knowing what to do. Understanding is knowing why to do it. ‘With all your getting, get understanding.’
– Roy H. Williams
Tension and stress simmered like summer. Anxiety and impatience weighed heavy like a blanket. Shortness of breath; a fever’s heat; contractions of muscles all coming together for a black explosion in that dreadful and holy dark temple of rage. – from Destinae, book 3, chapter 11,
– Roy H. Williams
…the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace. Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness. Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this. – from Destinae, book 2, chapter 4,
– Roy H. Williams
Religion is that cage into which man tries to coax a too-large beast named God.
– Roy H. Williams
The truth wears many faces. Loyalty, but one.
– Roy H. Williams
To see yourself as you really are is to spiral downward into depression. To see yourself as God sees you is to rocket upward to the skies.
– Roy H. Williams
I have such a secret that if I didn’t already know it, I wouldn’t tell it to myself.
– Roy H. Williams
Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?
– Roy H. Williams
One should never attempt to launch a revolution with people who are content with the status quo.
– Roy H. Williams
No man is so unnecessary as the one who states the obvious.
– Roy H. Williams
As you read, so will you write.
– Roy H. Williams
I come from Oklahoma where we believe you should always keep a watermelon in the refrigerator because you never know when company might drop in.
– Roy H. Williams
A company wearing a syndicated advertising program is like a man wearing a toupee. It’s not really their own identity, but they figure it’s better than not having one at all.
– Roy H. Williams
Consulting is not merely the business of having opinions, but of selling them.
– Roy H. Williams
They say that no two snowflakes are alike. But did you ever meet the guy in charge of making sure?
– Roy H. Williams
If making a profit were quick and easy everyone would be doing it.
– Roy H. Williams
More irritating than the person who has many faults is the person who has none at all.
– Roy H. Williams
I’ve never seen a business fail because of ‘reaching the wrong people.’
– Roy H. Williams
Reality is what’s left when opinion is gone.
– Roy H. Williams
Trendy marketing cookbooks teach us how to mix the dry powder of jingoistic buzzwords with the water of passing fads. But I have no tongue for mental Jell-O and I’ve long doubted its nutrition.
– Roy H. Williams
Follow a trail of bold mistakes and at the end of them you will find a genius.
– Roy H. Williams
Our actions are all that separate our daydreams from our goals.
– Roy H. Williams
Few problems are so big they cannot be successfully ignored.
– Roy H. Williams
Little girls grow up and become adults. Little boys just grow taller.
– Roy H. Williams
Sad is the man who has no place to put his faith other than in himself.
– Roy H. Williams
Have you ever met a man so small he could hide behind a technicality?
– Roy H. William
The truth wears many faces. Loyalty but one.
– Roy H. Williams
The secrets of telling a story well are three:
1. How to end
2. Where to begin
3. What to leave out.
– Roy H. Williams
My insurance company has hired a chauffeur for my youngest son. They’ve calculated that it will be cheaper than letting him drive.
– Roy H. Williams
If an hour has passed since the sales lead was generated, you’re no longer following up a lead. You’re making a cold call.
– Roy H. Williams
Their sister’s name was Stormy, the boys who lived next door.
– Roy H. Williams
There is a slithering moodiness, an echoing loneliness, a melancholy danger in the swamp.
– Roy H. Williams
Commitment carries us through the dark hours, the dry places, the sad times, but we live to experience enthusiasm: ‘God within.’
– Roy H. Williams
When you have nothing to say, don’t let an advertising salesman convince you to pay money to say it.
– Roy H. Williams
Pomp and circumstance are hollow and silly things, unless, of course, your goal is to cause men and women to rise up and accomplish the impossible.
– Roy H. Williams
A person not doing anything is often exactly what they seem.
– Roy H. Williams, March 24, 2015
Most suggestions are just complaints wearing a smile.
– Roy H. Williams
Most suggestions are carefully disguised complaints.
– Roy H. Williams
Knowledge without experience is deceptive. It makes you think you can do something when you can’t.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 5, 2014
Knowledge is not ability. Just because you understand how to do it doesn’t mean you can do it, too. This is our fundamental misunderstanding of education.
– Roy H. Williams, Sept. 5, 2014
Whiners piss me off.
I’m not trying to be shocking or crude, I’m just trying to make a point.
The reason whiners piss me off, I think, is because they seem to believe that injustice and hardship have somehow singled them out for a special beating.
Listen, whiner, everyone is ambushed by catastrophe occasionally.
Quit acting like you’re someone special.
The other people who piss me off are the ones who pretend like they’ve got their life so together that they live each day with their chins held fearlessly high and their hair blowing carefree in the wind.
Those people are posers who want to be admired.
Everyone gets tackled from behind occasionally.
Bad things happen to good people.
Bad things happen to bad people.
Bad things happen to everyone.
So yes, you’re going to get clobbered.
You’re going to occasionally find yourself on your hands and knees asking, “What just happened and how can I stop it?”
Getting clobbered doesn’t make you exceptional.
Getting back up, dusting yourself off, finding something to smile about and continuing on your journey, those are the things that make you special.
In the 24th chapter of the ancient book of Proverbs, we read,
“A good man will fall seven times and get back up again.”
It does not say, “A good man never falls.”
So get back up.
Dust yourself off.
Find something to smile about.
And continue on your journey.
– Roy H. Williams
Faith is hope that has written its name in the wet cement of time. Faith is that realm where actions speak louder than words.
– Roy H. Williams, The Monday Morning Memo, for Dec. 29, 2014
We awaken in a semi-transparent world to the touch of a doctor’s rough fingers, expectations of mothers, echoing voices of fathers, instructions from teachers, rebuffs from lovers and a final, big surprise.
– Roy H. Williams
I love, as did Cervantes, the Romantic icons of my day. Yet not those that are shabbily and predictably and hollowly done. These, Cervantes and I do mock. But even in our mocking is a little love, for the silliness of Romance is never boring.
Roy H. Williams, Oct. 18, 2014. Aroo.
Most ads underperform because they say, ‘Here’s what we do and here’s how we do it. You should buy it.’ Ads that change hearts and minds say, ‘This belief is why we wake up in the morning. It’s why we come together. Here’s how we live out our belief. Do you believe what we believe?’
– Roy H. Williams
The goal of communication is to cause another person to see in their own mind what you see in yours. The goal of persuasion is to cause another person to believe what you believe. Unless, of course, you are lying. Then the goal is to cause another person to believe what you, yourself, do not.
– Roy H. Williams
Why I refuse to deal with advertising committees:
1. Committees force you to spend precious time and energy debating things that should not have to be discussed. Every committeeperson feels it is their job to question and challenge and make demands, even when they have no idea what they’re doing.
2. These tedious debates cause creativity to shrivel up. The joy is gone from advertising. The adventure is gone. It’s not the client’s competitors we must fight; it is the client with a thousand faces; the committee with eyes like a housefly, seeing in every direction at once, always frightened and skittish, quick to fly away, unable to focus and commit to a direction.
3. A committee waters down your plan and then blames you when it doesn’t work.
– Roy H. Williams
The Problem With Being There…
We rarely recognize significant events while they’re happening. The most insightful business strategies I ever developed and the most successful ads I ever wrote weren’t considered exceptional by the people for whom they were written. Those ads made them millions, but when they first saw them, they sighed as though they were hoping for something better. I share this only because I know it happens to you, too. Take heart. I know you’re good. You know it, too. Aren’t we two enough?
– Roy H. Williams
Springtime pierced the pale heart of winter
with a shout of green and a blade of grass.
The rumbles of summer are wooden wagon wheels
banging hollow in the dust far away.
Autumn sings of passage in a minor key
as the quail fly up for the hunters.
The white of winter
is a splinter
under a fingernail.
– Roy H. Williams
Pete Hamill’s bestseller, Why Sinatra Matters, is not so much about a person, but about a time. Read it and you’ll have a better understanding of how we all became America.
– Roy H. Williams
Education and news are informative.
Realizations and epiphanies are transformative.
Education and news are easy; just listen and remember.
– Roy H. Williams
A realization is fully original to every individual it comes upon, even if that same realization has been had by millions of other people over the centuries.
– Roy H. Williams
The primary motive can become secondary when new information enters the scene. Motives evolve. These appear as forks in the road during the customer’s journey to Decision.
– Roy H. Williams
Facts are stacked like bricks to become a tower. Do you see it? But a story is a wave that takes you on a journey and leaves the memory of the tower far behind.
– Roy H. Williams
It takes a very small person to hide behind a technicality.
– Roy H. Williams
Fame is the girlfriend of Success. They often walk hand-in-hand.
– Roy H. Williams, Feb. 24, 2016, in an email to Morty Silber
Reality is for people who don’t have enough imagination to make things up … Quixote forever.
– Roy H. Williams, in an email to Tom Grimes, March 13, 2016
Adjectives, adverbs and exclamation points are crutches used by writers unable to craft a sentence that can stand alone.
– Roy H. Williams
To gain and hold attention, you need only to introduce an enigma, write a riddle, make a mystery, pose a puzzle.
– Roy H. Williams
Live each day as if you believe it to be your last. Because one day you’ll be right.
– Roy H. Williams on the day Prince died, April 21, 2016
People would rather be angry than bored.
People would rather be frightened than bored.
But anger and fear are unhealthy entertainment.
– Roy H. Williams, Aug. 25, 2016
Violence may kill the body, but criticism kills the spirit. If you hope to bring about change, you must armor your soul against it.
– Roy H. Williams, Oct. 17, 2016