Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

My friend is forever shouting about his Freedom. It is the only song he sings. Freedom is a good thing, but our love of freedom is why family sizes are shrinking. Children are a responsibility. Freedom and Responsibility are paired opposites, a duality. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. I had written only those few words when I received a request from the American Smal...

I was the new kid in a new town, ­getting ready to start the third grade. We had moved into a rented house beyond the outer perimeter of Skiatook, Oklahoma. There were no other houses within sight, so there were no neighbors to visit, no new friends to meet, nothing to do except walk in circles. School had not yet started. Our house – like most houses back then – had no air conditioning. The Oklah...

You’ve heard it said, and might even have said it yourself, “Knowing what I know now, if I had it all to do over again, I would…” Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that you, “have it all to do over again.” You can return to any day in your past to begin reliving your life differently, but you must do it  without  “knowing what you know now.” You will have a second chance at a different ou...

I was writing about third gravitating bodies and I needed to know the year that Henri Poincaré wrote The Third Body Problem and won that huge cash prize from King Oscar II of Sweden. I typed “third gravitating bodies” into the Google search block. At the top of the results page was a featured snippet and something about it looked familiar. When I glanced at the source link, I saw that it was...

Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy. When Leo Tolstoy was 54, he wrote a book about the ethical teachings1 of Jesus as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. For the rest of his life, Tolstoy advocated the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change. Gandhi – the person we associate with peaceful, non-violent resistance – was 12 years old when Tolstoy’s...

Predictability is the silent assassin of persuasion. When static electricity saturates the sky, lift the lightning rod of the new, the surprising, and the different and let the concert begin. The booming of the big bass drum will make the draperies tremble as the lasers light up the night. Give that anxious electricity something to focus on. Win the attention of the storm. Don’t tell us, “It was a...

Rugged individualism is the essence of America. It is also the reason that we, as a people, feel isolated and lonely. Our focus on personal, individual success is the reason we feel disconnected from one another. This is happening even in our marriages according to Ian Kerner, author of the book,  So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex,   and Terrence Real, author of  Us: Gettin...

I’m telling you up front that I’m not sharing anything valuable or useful today, but don’t let that keep you from continuing. Today we’re going to talk about 7 guys named Francis. Alan Lightman is not one of those 7 guys. Lightman is a past professor at Harvard and a current professor at MIT and a famous physicist who was responsible for establishing MIT’s policy that requires all students to be t...

Gerald was an unwanted third son to his father, so his mother took Gerald on long walks each Saturday night so they would not be available when his father came home drunk. To avoid a beating, Gerald and his mother would wait outside in all weathers until his father fell asleep. Gerald was 16 when his father died, so he quit school to help support his mother by singing in the London subways for tip...

The long-ago Greeks had two words for time: Kronos (χρόνος) and Kairos (καιρός). Kronos is chronological time, sequential time, the metered time of the regimented left hemisphere of the brain. Kairos is an inflection point, a time-window of indeterminate length during which something consequential happens. On the other side of the Kairos, things are forever different. Kronos time is quantitative a...

If you win the heart, the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided. In 1981, Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his documentation of brain lateralization, which basically says that we don’t have 1 brain divided into 2 hemispheres as much as we have 2 separate, competing brains. The LEFT hemisphere is the home of rational, logical,...

It’s impossible not to like someone who likes you. This is why the secret of success is to just keep showing up. My friend Brett was studying theater in college until the day a professor told him to lie on his back, close his eyes, and “breathe blue.” Brett did his best, gave up, got up, walked out. Brett did not become an actor. But he did become a highly successful political consultant. In Brett...

My partner Kyle started a non-profit called “Neighbor in Need” after a developer made a comment that caused Kyle to become concerned about all the elderly people in his neighborhood who didn’t have the money to repair their homes, buy hot water heaters, replace air conditioners, or fix roof leaks. So Kyle decided to  do something about it. What Kyle did was new, surprising, and different. Tha...

The ancient Greeks understood psychology a lot better than they understood science. Hippocrates, the father of the Hippocratic Oath, believed that our information-gathering and decision-making processes are determined by an imbalance of 4 bodily fluids – red blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – two of which have never existed in the form that Hippocrates theorized. But the four basic ...

I made you a promise on November 22 in a Monday Morning Memo called “Time Travel”. This was how  that memo  began: “My friend Don has a time machine. He takes me with him sometimes. You should come, too! Every person who rides in Don’s time machine is changed by it.” “The United States Department of Justice has booked passage on Don’s time machine for countless prison inmates. State...

A successful cluster manager was one of 36 people in a class I taught 2 months ago. When we went into Q & A, he asked for suggestions about what to do with a poorly performing radio station in his cluster. He expected me to suggest a format change, or a clever promotional campaign using billboards and TV. Or he may have thought I was going to give him some half-baked idea about how he could us...

What you do today is important, because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. What will you do today? “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” – Wes Jackson I knew a man who used to say, “I don’t ever get my hopes up. That way, I’m never disappointed.” If I had been the executor of his estate, his gravestone would say: “He had potential.”...

I write advertising because I’m good at math. According to my calculations at age 18, the odds of making a living as an ad writer were 117,682% higher than the likelihood that I could make a living as a poet. But really, poems and ads are the same thing. Good poems promote a new perspective in a brief, tight economy of words. Good ads promote a new perspective in a brief, tight economy of words. T...

In his 3,000-year-old book,  Ecclesiastes,  King Solomon tells us of the stages and phases of his life, his fads and fancies, his regrets and realizations. Then he gives us his final conclusions and advice. Next to the Good News of John,  Ecclesiastes  is probably my favorite book in the Bible. Oscar Wilde wrote a similar summary of his stages and phases, fads and fancies, regr...

If relationships matter to you at all, don’t put your negative emotions in writing. Spoken words land softly on their feet like a cat that has fallen from a tree. But written words often land with a thud, and the crack of a fractured relationship. My son Jacob taught me an African proverb last week, “The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” That proverb reminded me to warn you, “Never put a...

An affinity group is composed of people who share an identity marker. Backpackers are an affinity group. Corvette drivers are an affinity group. If you like to sew, you are part of an affinity group. Every sports team has “fans,” an affinity group. If you like wine, you are in that affinity group. People who like science are part of an affinity group. If you would rather drive than fly, you are pa...

Thirty-five years ago, he patrolled a stretch of beach as long as two football fields on a Caribbean Island whose name I cannot remember. He pushed a wheelbarrow full of ice as he pranced from one end of his empire to the other, the music of his voice rising and falling over the sound of the surf. “I’m sorry I’m late, but I’m here. You want it. I got it.” His music would often stop. Then resume. S...

It is easier to increase sales than it is to cut expenses. In the words of Adrian Van Zelfden, “You cannot shrink your way to profit.” Cost-cutting CEO’s are hailed as geniuses by Wall Street and lauded as saviors by private equity firms because cost-cutting always works in the short-term. But that’s not how you build a business. When Roger Smith rose from his position of accounting clerk to becom...

The choice between a good thing and a bad thing is never a hard choice. The only hard choice is between two good things. Science is a good thing. And so are the Arts. Why choose? Rube Goldberg became wildly famous 100 years ago because his elegantly absurd inventions combined Science with Art. Elegant absurdity surprises and delights us because it reveals lofty creativity and deep commitment...

The great game of BUSINESS does not come with an instruction manual. The assumption of most players is that Customer Acquisition – lead generation – sales opportunities – is how you win the game. But the understanding of a Highly Skilled Player goes 2 levels deeper: Customer Acquisition (lead gen) Conversion (closing the sale) Remove the Friction (from the buying experience) Highly Skilled Players...