Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

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. “It embarrasses me to admit that there have been seasons in my life when I was so full of myself that there was no room fo...

Reality doesn’t exist; at least not in the way that we usually think of it.  Dr. Jorge Martins de Oliveira writes, “Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way that we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses. We experience electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colors. We experience...

Dave saw adventure where others saw only shadows because  Dave is a creative genius  who never forgot how to play. The mind wants closure, for everything to add up and make sense, for there to be no loopholes, paradoxes or remainders. Intellect wants to believe that it has the answers, that is sees beyond broken logic, that it is ultimately in control, that there is no force greater...

Out in the open Wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the marketplace…” - Solomon,  Proverbs ch. 1 Wendy Clark sponsored a trio of young protégés to attend this year’s annual Young Writer’s Workshop at Wizard Academy. While she was on campus with her crew, she said, “There really needs to be a book of helpful tips for start-up business owners.  The E-Myth  warns you...

A 30-Year Examination of Money and Jews “Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers,” is a phrase I heard a lot as a kid. My school career began at Hilldale elementary in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Having been absent from that fair city since 1973, I Googled Muskogee to see what had changed in 39 years. As it turns out, not much. The person(s) who wrote the Wikipedia entry for this haven of my childhood...

Robert Pirosh died on Christmas Day, 1989, in Los Angeles. He was born in Baltimore in 1910.   But prior to that Christmas Day in L.A., Pirosh taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California.   He was considered a credible screenwriting coach because he had written the screenplays for  Gathering of Eagles  (1963) starring Rock Hudson and Elizabeth T...

Inclusive Communication by Design Roughly 400 years before the wise-ards followed their star to Bethlehem, a Greek physician recognized four basic styles of behavior, calling them Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic and Sanguine in the mistaken belief that these observable patterns of behavior were triggered by excesses of certain bodily fluids. Today’s Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, DiSC, True C...

If I could give you the gift of Curiosity, I would risk a great deal to do it. I would buy it for you illegally, inject it into your arm with a needle and watch as Life flowed into your eyes. I would do this for you because your future would brighten and your days would be full of wonder. Curiosity is addictive, it is true. But it is not unhealthy. Nor is it illegal. Unlike the drug...

Joe Kraus was co-founder of excite.com in 1993. Today he’s a partner at Google Ventures, an angel investor at LinkedIn and on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kraus says we live in a culture of distraction. Prior to the availability of smartphones, we accessed the internet an average of 5 times a day. Now the average is 27 times a day. Kraus is worried about this: “The effect...

A Message at Graduation Time  The person who achieves spectacular failure has at least attempted something bold. Failure is a temporary condition. Success is likewise temporary. Life, itself, is temporary. So quit hesitating. Do something.   Mediocrity comes from having perfectly implemented tried and true, traditional wisdom. The outcome is the only thing that separates c...

1.  Today’s reader is riddled with information hitting us from every side. 2.  Traditional and online media assault our senses to the point of sensory shutdown. 3.  Consequently, today’s reader is strongly attracted to numbered lists. 4.  A numbered list promises a starting point, a conclusion, and milestones along the way. 5.  A numbered list contains the fewest possible...

Want 'em?   “Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” – Maggie Tufu I agree with Maggie Tufu even though she’s a character in fiction. Dare to look closely at what our society admires. It will take your breath away. We’re a nation of addicts, craving that which makes us weak, frail and small. We hunger for fame and fortune...

Fantasy and Science Fiction are alike in that each requires the creation of a complete new world.  Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Avengers  and  Planet of the Apes  each occupies its own imaginary universe. Fantasy and Sci-Fi are great for entertainment but not so great for selling most products and services. The process of selling requires a reality hook, som...

The average person would rather be angry than bored. Anger is exciting. Likewise, love and hate are not opposites. The opposite of both is indifference. I’m not suggesting that you be angry all the time. I’m suggesting only that you care enough to take action. No, that’s not it either.  I’m suggesting that you take action even when you don’t care.  Curiosity and action are...

“You know me; I find a crowd all headed in the same direction and call it my parade.” – Roy Laughlin, April 26, 2012 Brother Laughlin uttered this phrase as he was telling me of his involvement in the development of two new daily radio shorts involving a couple of well-known celebrities. Living as he does in Los Angeles, Laughlin sees crowds headed in the same direction long before these crow...

She jumped from the window of a building on New York’s East Side on January 19, 1981. Her face was erased by the fall. I’m not sure what I was doing that day but I did not kill myself. No one knew her name so her body remained unclaimed until she was reported missing. She was identified by her clothes. Suicide troubles me. I get it but I don’t. I think I’ve known more peop...

Guilt is about what you have done. Shame is about who you are. I’ve always been attracted to people who are guilty, but unashamed. Guilt without shame is audacity, a special kind of courage.  It’s what we admire in the little boy who shouted,  “The king is naked!  Right there in the middle of the street! Naked!” Everyone was thinking it, but no one was willi...

He seems to have been crazy. Seems to have been. Bubbling, babbling in bits of broken English, Sam was a cantankerously crazy old man. But what he left behind was beautiful. He worked on it alone from 1921 to 1954, then signed the deed over to a neighbor and disappeared. Never came back. The Beatles put his face next to Bob Dylan’s on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts C...

How tall is your brand? As long as we’re on the subject of brand identity and reputation, how are brands created in the first place? Is a brand merely the sum total of all the things a company says about itself? Of course not. Ads do, of course, play a big part in branding. Brand personality is communicated by: 1.  what you say, 2.  how you say it, and 3.  what you leave o...

Elijah, according to the Bible, was a Tishbite. Google “meaning of Tishbite” and the first page of results will give you a glimpse of the grand sweep of opinions we have when it comes to things religious. Tishbite means “stranger” according to some sources but Wikipedia says Tishbe was a place, thus, “The phrasing can be reworded as ‘Elijah the Tishbite of Tishbe in G...

“‘Hunches,’ his mother used to call them. The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really just a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.” –  The Alchemist,  by Paulo Coelho, an allegorical tale about an Andalusian shepherd bo...

To Radio Advertisers Before we begin, you need to know that a “3.0 frequency” is RadioSpeak for reaching the same listener 3 times. TSL means “Time Spent Listening” and PPM is “Portable People Meter.” Hi Roy,   I’m sure that you receive this question often, but I didn’t find your personal response to it online. How do you believe the reduction in frequency realized through the imple...

And Don's Single Biggest Mistake This isn’t what Richard Exley said last week, but rather what I took from it: If you want to be truly happy, 1. Commit to a cause greater than yourself. 2. Value people rather than things. 3. Give thanks for what you have instead of complaining about what you don’t have. 4. Celebrate the ordinary. Find joy in life’s daily pleasures.  ...

In 1605, Quixote’s fearsome giants were windmills and Dulcinea1 was his beautiful, impossible dream. “What giants?” said Sancho Panza. “Those you see there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.” “Look, your worship,” said Sancho. “What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turn by the...

My back is against the wall and I don’t know what to do. The vortex of this crisis is pulling me into a toxic blue quicksand of the soul. I struggle until hope is gone. The light is growing dim. I have no one to blame but myself. As I lift my weary eyes one last time, an unexpected angel steps quickly from the shadows. I feel his fingers tighten around my forearm. I am surprised when I s...