Boring, ineffective ad campaigns are almost always the result of data-worship. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” He was talking about using data to make predictions. Amos Tversky, one half of the Nobel Prize-winning duo* of Kahneman and Tversky, renowned for their discovery […]
According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds. Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent. In fact, the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. […]
England, 1890 – Barely 5 feet tall on his tiptoes, 30 year-old Jimmy was a pen pal of 40 year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author of Treasure Island, during the final years of Stevenson’s life when he lived on the island of Samoa. The two never met, but if they had, they would doubtless have […]
What do you value? Are there things for which you would be willing to suffer humiliation, rejection, and financial loss? These are your deep core values, your non-negotiables. It’s important that you know what they are. A person without non-negotiables is a person without passion. But it’s also important to know your negotiables. A person […]
On the day he died, long ago, a man said, “In this world you will have trouble.” I’ve never had reason to doubt him. Money trouble Work trouble Relationship trouble Legal trouble Health trouble Family trouble Tax trouble You don’t get to choose whether or not you will have trouble. But you do get to […]
Our nation is changing, of course. Things aren’t like they used to be. Famous clothing brands are at historic lows and major retailers are closing hundreds of stores. In 2016, 2,056 stores closed their doors. The worst year on record is 2008, when 6,163 stores shut down. Brokerage firm Credit Suisse says in a just-released research report, “Barely a […]
Michael Jordan wasn’t a perfectionist; he was an improvisationist. That’s why he was hard to stop. A perfectionist knows exactly what he’s going to do. He plans his work and works his plan. The only problem is that because he knows, the defender knows, too. It’s easy to anticipate what a perfectionist is going to do. […]
Ask a businessperson or a marketing professional, “What is branding?” Go ahead. Go do it. I’ll wait… Did they mention the importance of a having a logo? Did they talk about the consistent use of a chosen group of “brand” colors and a particular font and layout and look and feel? Have you done what they told […]
People read books for the strangest of reasons. I recently read a book about a female aviator in Africa in the 1930s. I have no interest in aviation. I have no interest in Africa. But it was a great book. I began reading it after I stumbled onto something Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1942 letter to […]
Business Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by at least two distinct identities or dissociated personality states that show up in a company’s behavior. BPD emerges when unrelated teams work independently in the areas of (1.) Advertising (2.) Web Presence (3.) Sales Training. If a person encounters your ads, then visits your website, then comes to […]
There are two kinds of advertising. The goal of the first is to make yours the company the customer thinks of immediately and feels the best about when they – or any of their friends – need what you sell. This is called a “relational” ad campaign. It works better and better with each passing year. […]
Four words have echoed in my head for several days. “Not everyone. Not always.” Why do such thoughts leap sparkling like swordfish from the dark waters of the mind? I can’t be sure, but I suspect my heart is responding to all those authoritative voices making silly statements about “the customer” with misguided certainty. They whisper […]
Hi, everyone! My name is _____________________. Because Wizard Academy appreciates your generous donation to help keep Chapel Dulcinea open, free and beautiful, I’m going to take you on a 4-minute walk to Wizard’s Tower, where we’ll enter the underground art gallery, then go straight up to the Star Deck where I’ll tell you a 2-minute story, then […]
I’m experimenting with radio in a way that, for me, is new and different. Many of those who understand what I’m doing won’t agree with the fundamental premise of my experiment. But that’s not what worries me. I’m concerned about those who will agree and then attempt it – and fail. I believe they’ll fail […]
We encounter “meta” most often in the word metaphor. We create metaphors when we see the same pattern in two, unrelated things. Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” But Shakespeare wasn’t […]
If you don’t understand the title of today’s memo, just ask a 12 year-old boy. (If you didn’t grow up in the South, your 12 year-olds may be more familiar with “He who smelt it, dealt it.”) With a title like “The Smeller’s the Feller,” does it surprise you that today’s memo is about a tried-and-true management tool? […]
Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them. If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs. We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones. All […]
Some lessons we never learn. For me, the familiar face of failure hangs like a Royal Portrait above the grand staircase of my social behavior. Lest my meaning be obscured by that flowery metaphor, I am simply stating for the record – before God, the world and you – that my greatest recurring mistake is that I often […]
“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us? Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t need a Buddha head?” Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? […]
I was in the middle of a storm at sea last week when my lover, wife and partner of 40 years spoke some wisdom into my life. She said, “Tell me what happened, step-by-step, play-by-play.” So I did. She said, “Honey sometimes when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you think you’re being clear when you’re […]
Bad ads are about you, your company, your product, your service. Good ads are about the customer and how their sun will shine brighter, the air around them will glitter with magic, and the stars in their darkness will twinkle more richly if they choose to bring you into their world. I’m going to hire […]
People would rather be angry than bored. Anger is a form of excitement. That explains a lot of behavior, doesn’t it? But if you can choose, choose laughter. “Man is the laughing animal…” 1 Anger is dangerous and crying is much less fun. I’m talking about storytelling and communication. I’m talking about books and movies. I’m talking […]
Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published The Three Body Problem. His math is still used by NASA today. In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another. Gravity is a useful […]
I still call it Christmas. I’m told you’re not supposed to do that any more. You’re not supposed to do a lot of things. Forget the religion called Christianity for a moment. Ignore the historical blunders of Christians. I’m talking about Christmas. Those opening few sentences are going to land me in real trouble unless you […]
I was 16 during the winter of 1974. Ted was 52. We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma. I was known as “Schoolboy.” Standing near the heat of the coffee pot waiting for the horn to signal the end of our break, Ted would tell stories about World War II. Those stories […]
When Kermit Roosevelt was fifteen, he shared a book of poems he admired with his father, the President of the United States. As an encouragement to Kermit, his father sent a lengthy review of that book to The Outlook, an important publication of the time, saying, “There is an undoubted touch of genius in the […]
1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings. “The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.” “The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.” Bug is nonspecific. Ant is specific. “…moved along the ground” is mildly specific, but not vivid. “…crawled between the blades of […]
Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey. We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet. If this dirt-covered rock we occupy was the size of a standard schoolroom globe covered with a coat of varnish, the thickness […]
You bought it for 50 cents. You sold it for a dollar. You made 50 cents. What was your percentage of profit? You could say “100 percent” because the 50-cent profit you made is equal to your original investment of 50 cents. But if we look at it from the basis of your selling price, […]
Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive? Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a direct-response television campaign he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy. That ad campaign began as a $100,000 experiment. Ronny told me he’s currently spending nearly a million dollars a […]
A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers. They wanted me to talk about Pendulum, the book we published in 2012. Specifically, they wanted me to explain how we knew four years ago exactly what would be happening right now. […]
It seems to be a fundamental law of the universe that a thing cannot exist without its opposite. Negatively charged electrons revolve around positively charged protons. Male and female. Inhale and exhale. Extend and contract. Seedtime and harvest. Every good thing exists in a state of duality. A voice spoke into the darkness, “Let there […]
The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” […]
Science is the study of objective reality. Art is the study of subjective reality. Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction. We’ve spoken of this before, but I think we need a refresher: Electromagnetic waves exist regardless of whether you perceive them. They […]
Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction. He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had. Rockwell showed my generation a fictional America and we believed in it. I […]
September 17, 1787: When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of Don Quixote de La Mancha.1 According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish […]
I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing. Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments. I say this because 70 percent of our population suffers from […]
Sunlight is composed of red, green and blue light waves. Combine these together and you get white light. Remove the red from white light and you will no longer be able to see red in anything illuminated by that light. Red will no longer exist. Remove the blue and you will no longer see blue. This […]
Each of us likes to think we believe what we believe because the evidence dictates it. But if that were true, wouldn’t each of us believe the same things? We call one person a romantic and another a realist, and we secretly think the realist to be more valuable, do we not? Labels are powerful […]
Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains. “…smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kannnng-aroo, now don’t tell meeeeeeee I’ve […]
The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” – Niels Bohr, physicist “The test of a first-rate […]
Time and Money are interchangeable. We can always save one by spending more of the other. Time and Money are interchangeable. We prize the one we feel to be in short supply. Time and Money are interchangeable. We burn them both like the wax of a candle. What is patience if not the quiet, dark burning […]
Most people associate The Power of Myth with the 1988 PBS television series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, or with the accompanying book of that name. But it was John F. Kennedy who spoke of the power of myth with the greatest clarity and insight. The occasion was his 1962 Commencement Address to the graduates […]
His gifts didn’t prove that he was rich. His gifts proved that he cared. And the smallness of his gifts proved that I could afford to care, too. My long friendship with Percy began exactly 30 years ago when I saw him on the cover of a magazine as it lay on a coffee table […]
The reason people write poorly is because they read too many blogs, tweets, news stories and Facebook posts. As you read, so will you write. Maxwell Rotbart. the son of roving reporter Rotbart, asked me to name 10 books he should read. When I asked the purpose of this reading, Maxwell said, “I just want to […]
She stood silently on the cracked asphalt, her summer dress billowing in the breeze, the calm at the center of the storm that was spreading across the country. Around her swirled police officers and demonstrators that had blocked Airline Highway in Baton Rouge to denounce the death of Alton Sterling, shot by police outside a convenience store. Many protesters […]
Like most men, I’ve long been fascinated with women. But if we look beyond the physical differences, what is it that defines “woman”? Research reveals a series of definitions so conflicted that I believe anyone who attempts to define “woman” is certain to be criticized. But when has that ever been an impediment to a […]
People have been asking me to explain symbols lately. Symbols are a language of the unconscious mind. This is why our dreams are full of them. A person sits alone in a rowboat on the ocean at night, looking up at the stars. That symbol – whether expressed visually or in words – speaks to us of spirituality […]
I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people. The following year it became an important chapter in my first book, The Wizard of Ads. Happily, that book went on […]
Indiana Beagle is the spirit of curiosity, exploration and adventure. His twin sister Intuition is the beagle of my Destinae trilogy and the mother of Faith and Hope. Intuition is wordless but Indy can speak. Intuition came to life in June, 2001, during some early morning laughter with Princess Pennie. There is a beagle in our brain,” […]
When I was a boy, I wanted an older brother. Not just a year or two older, but six or eight or ten years older. I wanted to be able to ask him things and trust the motives behind his answers. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to accumulate seven older brothers who speak […]
Loren L. Lewis always said, Never play another man’s game. Always have a game of your own.” In the advertising business, RFP means “Request For Proposal.” In other words, some big company wants you to dance for them. They want you to sit up and beg like a dog at the dinner table. I’ve never […]
“Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.” The wit of these 7 words is rooted in the fact that the second sentence is an anomaly – an unexpected intrusion into the oft-repeated idea that silence is golden. The anomaly is then brought to closure and resolved in the mind of the listener. Duct tape is, in fact, silver. […]
If the pendulum of the West continues as it has for 3,000 years, our current “We” generation will zenith in 2023. Frankly, I’m looking forward to getting past that zenith and heading back the other way. The early part of a “Me” generation is a beautiful thing. But then again, so is the early part […]
Chronic dissatisfaction is the price of progress. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are famous for never being satisfied. Always pushing, driving, demanding, questioning, never slowing, positively perfectionist. But is it wise to look at them as role models? What’s the value of pushing and driving if you can never be satisfied? These questions occurred to me as […]
Hungry people look for food. Sad people look for hope. Ambitious people look for opportunity. Oppressed people look for escape. But if food is available and you are neither sad nor oppressed and your ambition is – for now at least – satisfied, you are contented. Contented people look for entertainment. The company that wins more […]
In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” But day after day, week after week, month after month, things that are “merely urgent” keep me from doing what is truly important. What? That’s been happening to you, too? On Tuesday, Vice Chancellor […]
When his classmates at Wizard Academy dared him to do it, Garrison Cox rewrote the opening section of the Declaration of Independence to make it more easily understood. According to Garrison, Thomas Jefferson’s original was written at grade level 19.5. That’s a college education plus 3-and-a-half years of grad school! Garrison wrote his first revision at […]
A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.” – Dennis Miller We think everyone else sees what we see. How could they not? And we think everyone would believe what we believe if only we could explain it clearly. […]
The Internet rose to its full height in 2005 and cast a bright shadow across the land. It became our newspaper, our telephone book, our encyclopedia and our primary mailbox. Whole categories of advertising where swept away by that tsunami. Radio suffered the least damage of all the major media. She has proven to be far more […]
Do what people expect you to do, say what they expect you to say, and you will quickly lose their attention. Nothing new… nothing surprising… nothing different. This is the essence of boredom. And it’s exactly what most advertisers put in their ads. And then there is a second group of advertisers who insert a series […]
Let us suppose that this everyday world were at some one point invaded by the marvelous.1 According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, such an event “requires a distinctive mode of organization—what sociologists call an art world. In art worlds, artists (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and so on) gather in inspired collaborations: […]
YOUNG ONE: “Master, does success go to the clever one, or to the lucky one?” MERLYN: “Success is sometimes discovered by the clever one, and occasionally by the lucky one, but it is most often laid hold of by the determined one.” YOUNG ONE: “Will you teach me to be determined?” MERLYN: “Determination is dangerous… […]
Wizard Academy is now 16 years old. If we could find her birth certificate, we’d take her down to the DMV to get her driver’s license and then she could sport about town in Rocinante (above,) the only vehicle she owns. They grow up so fast. When Wizard Academy is 30, I’ll be 72. At least […]
Standing in the corner of a dark theater, Joe listens as melancholy, majestic music rises from the orchestra pit to soar high above the spotlights. Joe has been hired to write lyrics for a musical play about Don Quixote. The first lyricist – the famous poet W.H. Auden – has been fired because his lyrics were downbeat, defeated […]
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. Facts are solid. Stories are seductive. You will find the facts in the paragraphs below. You will find the stories in the rabbit […]
Agnes De Mille once wrote, “No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.” Agnes was right about most of us, but she was completely wrong about Herbert. Herbert sculpts and paints. Abstract expressionism is his thing. “It’s like jazz,” he says. “Art is a feel. I […]
Pressure, pressure, pressure unspeakable then BANG the world breaks open and a plateau pops up from solid rock, creating a fabulous view of the land below. That’s what happened in Central Texas. That’s what happens in life, too. But we’ll talk about that in a minute. Wizard Academy straddles the Texas escarpment, a magical place […]
When you challenge traditional wisdom, the first hand in the air will often be that of a guardian of the status quo who will challenge you with an “outlier argument,” pointing to that rare exception as though it disproves your premise. But an outlier does not disprove the rule. In fact, statisticians consider data to […]
What is the income range of snowboarders? What is the age range of people who do yoga? What is the age and income range of Carolina Panthers football fans? What is the age and income range of Republicans? What are the beliefs and opinions of a person who is 30 years old? What the hell is a Millennial? […]
What stories do you tell yourself concerning your disappointments, failures and embarrassments? Were you the unfortunate victim of evil? Perhaps it’s time you start telling different versions of those stories. Regret and fear are incapable of guiding you to Success. The stories you tell yourself are the foundations of your self-image. “The first principle of self-deception is you […]
Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees and $5.9 billion in revenues at their peak in 2004. Then the installation of cable modems made streaming video possible. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection on September 23, 2010.* Technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is standing on its tracks. Flashback – In the […]
Watson is the mega-powerful learning computer created by IBM. A brief interaction between IBM’s Watson and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan has gathered more than three-and-a-half-million YouTube views in just 90 days. ESTABLISHING SHOT: [Dylan walks into the frame carrying a guitar.] WATSON: Bob Dylan, to improve my language skills. DYLAN: [sits down on sofa with his […]
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 […]
Here’s a link to last week’s Monday Morning Memo, The Other Kind of Excellence, Part One. “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” These are the words of an Entrepreneur who has an idea half-formed and a dream bigger than the sunrise. He or she believes that if you leap, a net will appear. Entrepreneurs are […]
Your company is approaching an intersection. The light is green. Turn left and you’re headed toward Excellence. Turn right and you’re headed toward another kind of Excellence. Go straight and you’ll arrive at Mediocrity. Most companies go straight ahead because if they turn left or right they’ll be moving toward one kind of Excellence but […]
Branding – as it is taught today – will at best cause people to remember you and have a mild opinion. But unlike yesterday’s branding, today’s bonding is the beginning of relationship, the essence of loyalty and the foundation of community among human beings. Bonding, when done properly, makes people feel connected to you. It […]
Words ring like bells when you collide them correctly. It’s in the Bible. In the opening chapter of Genesis we read about the creation of the universe – God spoke it into existence if you can believe it – and we read about the creation of mankind. An interesting chapter, that one. The only information we’re given […]
Some word-people feel it’s their duty to correct you when you use a word improperly. These people are pedantic, pointy-nose dogs determined to give you a posterior probe, pretending it’s for your own good. I am not that sort of word-person. The people of my tribe believe words are colored with sparkling tints of nuance […]
More than 500 people have seen the earth from space and 12 have walked on the moon. Most of these people returned home strangely altered. Their families were the first to notice. In 1987 this phenomenon got a name. “The overview effect” refers to what happens when a person sees, firsthand, the Earth as a tiny, fragile ball of […]
We believe knowledge is freedom. We believe you can learn big things quickly when your instructor is experienced, passionate, organized and entertaining. We believe an expert can teach you – in less than a day – more than you can learn in 4 years of college. We believe traditional wisdom is often more tradition than […]
When each customer buys four and a half times the average amount of stuff per visit and you attract four times the average number of visitors, you make eighteen times as much profit. (4 x 4.5 = 18) If you run your convenience store according to the rules and conventions of convenience stores, you’re going to […]
You have a dream, a hope for the future. But are you willing to spend what it costs to achieve it, endure what is required of you and fight for as long as it takes? Unrelenting action is what turns starry-eyed daydreams into steely-eyed objectives. You say you have a goal. Let me look into […]
A person is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. They say, “One picture is worth a thousand words.” I say, “In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, ‘A word is worth a thousand pictures,’ and a descriptive word […]
I had an interesting moment a couple of weeks ago. A client came to Austin for his annual marketing retreat and brought his top lieutenants with him. His company has a couple of hundred franchisees that do about a quarter-billion dollars a year. Everyone was anxious to hear my marketing strategy for 2016. “I need […]
You own a business. You believe in your company. You believe you deliver a better experience than your competitors. Is this confidence based on your intentions, your goals, your beliefs, your values and your personal commitment to your customer’s happiness? It is? Uh-oh. Judging yourself by your intentions isn’t a danger among friends, because a […]
Magenta. What color is that? It isn’t violet and it isn’t purple. And why isn’t it in the rainbow? Doesn’t the rainbow contain the whole color spectrum? The short answer is that magenta doesn’t actually exist. (Well, none of the colors actually exist, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. Magenta doesn’t exist in an […]
“I could’ve bought that building 5 years ago for $70,000. It’s worth half a million now.” “I could’ve been his partner in that business. He’s worth a fortune now.” “I could’ve…” This went on all day. My host believed I would be impressed that he was “connected” and “in the know,” but the only thing […]
Psychologist Carl Jung saw life as a journey on water. Above the waterline is the conscious mind, this place of sunshine and scenery that you and I call home. Below the waterline is the unconscious, a wet and moonlit world of symbols and meanings and metaphors on which we float like shadows along the upper edge […]
If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call. In other words, you don’t really have a sales lead anymore. In fact, if that sales lead was generated online, your contact rate declines by 99 percent – meaning that you’ll reach just one in one hundred at the end of 30 minutes – […]
You can choose a dragon or you can wait until a dragon chooses you, but every happy person fights one. Our dragons give us purpose. Our dragons give us adventure. The problem with adventure is that we seldom realize how much fun we’re having until it’s over. When you’re having an adventure, you wish you […]
Dean Rotbart once told me that a person can do well without doing good. It took me a beat to grasp his meaning, but then it hit me and I’ve never forgotten it. “Doing well” is financial. It’s about you. “Doing good” is personal. It’s about others. And the difference you’ve made in their lives. […]
“Bonding” is falling in love with a company, a product, a spokesperson, an outlook, a belief system. This bond of love inevitably manifests itself in a tangible way. And then again. And again. A bonding ad is about the customer. A direct response ad is about the offer. Direct response ads trigger immediate action. Bonding ads do not. The results […]
Branding – bonding with a hero or a company or other imaginary character – is merely an entangling of identity hooks. We connect because we are alike. But where do we gather these identity hooks on which hang our self-definitions? “The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn […]
I got some great news last week. A friend who read my Musings of an Old Ad Writer said to me, “You’re not old, you’re middle aged.” Woo-hoo! If he’s right, I’m going to live to be 114. During the years that I was, in fact, middle aged, I was too busy to have a […]
There are words used by young advertising professionals that I try desperately to avoid. Two of the most painful phrases for me are “unique selling proposition” and “branding.” When I was young, those phrases meant the same to me as they did to everyone else. But I take comfort in the words of Muhammad Ali, “The […]
Laughter brings escape from monotony. Sadness teaches us what is important to our heart. Commitment carries us through the dark hours, the dry places, the sad times. Enthusiasm, “God within,” opens our eyes to the possible. JP Engelbrecht says a business owner can learn a lot about managing groups of people by studying famous monarchs. “If you […]
You cannot instruct a person to have enthusiasm any more than you can instruct them to give birth to a redheaded child. The person must first be inspired. Inspiration is what you give them. Enthusiasm is what they give you. People inhale inspiration and exhale enthusiasm. They cannot give you enthusiasm until you give them inspiration. […]
Occasionally a client will send a spreadsheet of company statistics and ask me to comment on what I see. I usually look and see ambiguous statistics but I certainly don’t want to say that. Discussing business numbers with people is like discussing religion. No matter what you say, you’re unlikely to change their intrinsic beliefs, so […]
Whiners, blame shifters, indignant people, people with victim mentalities, online trolls, people who demand things and cheerless givers of “constructive criticism” are all herded into one decrepit old corral in my brain. That corral is a category in my mind. As these unhappy cows moan “moooo” I walk sadly away and think “dog food.” I […]
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