Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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,” I shouted in mock rage, “and it must be unleas...

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 wisdom into my life. These brothers give me the benefit of all their experiences – their successes and their mistakes – and...

“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. You smile a little. Bad ads  leave n...

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 of a “We.” It’s as we approach a zenith that everything goes out of control. If you want to under...

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 Pennie and I drove to the new home...

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 of the customer’s time is the one most likely to win their money...

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 Whittington and I slowed down long enough to have our first rea...

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 grade level 10.3 and his second revisi...

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. But this is almost never true. Two people stand shoulder-to-shoulder observing a scene....

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 durable than I had suspected. In their recent study of annu...

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 of “Once-in-a-lifetime! Don’t miss this event! One-week-only!” exclamation po...

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: They wor...

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… relentless… remorseless… and inescapable. It returns to...

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 I hope I’ll be 72. Not everyone who attempts to hike to that mile marker gets there. Will you help us take...

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 and bitter. Joe Darion is his replacement, alo...

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 hole. A Harvard graduate, Maria Konnikova received her Ph. D. in psychology from Columbia. She...

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 like to journey into a world where words don’t exist.” Edgar “Yip” Harburg, the ly...

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 where the green meets the brown along a 480-mile crack in the crust o...

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 be more reliable when it has an appropriate number of outliers. Data that present...

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? Your intellect believes those questions have answers but your heart knows the answ...

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 mu...

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 year 2000, 4.4% of American households had a home c...

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 guitar] WATSON:&...

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. Our Earth experiences seasons as it orbits the Sun because of its 23.5° tilt. What does your t...

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 confident in the  street-smarts  they glea...