Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

A person capable of creating is happiest when they are creating.Artists create visual and auditory artifacts that affect our thoughts, moods and attitudes. Riddle-solvers perform feats of engineering and invention. Teachers create new understanding in the minds of their students. Entrepreneurs create businesses that offer us new and different experiences. Communicators create stories and speeches and ads.Made in the image of God, humans are creators by nature. All humans.Yes, that includes you.What do you create? What do you change? What effect do you have on the world around you?The Success Myth of our culture is an evil one. We are told that “the freedom to do nothing” is the reward provided by great wealth. Have you spent much time among the idle rich? Sadly, I have, and on many occasions.Leisure feels good when you are weary from intense creating. Leisure is restorative, allowing you to return to your creation with renewed intensity. But when you are satiated with food, it is no longer pleasant to eat. When you are satiated with rest, it is no longer pleasant to rest.The idle rich aren’t bored because they are rich. They are bored because they are idle. The idle poor have exactly the same feelings as the idle rich, but the idle poor call it “hopelessness.”Political radio shows exist because people would rather be angry than bored. Horror movies exist because people would rather be frightened than bored. Sensational films and photos exist because people would rather be shocked and offended than bored.Boredom is a kind of death. Being angry, frightened or offended reminds you that you are alive. But these emotions are sad and fruitless substitutes for the joy that comes from creating.Happy people value something much more than they value themselves. If there is nothing in your life that means more to you than you do, I fear you will be unhappy. No, that’s not right. I fear you are already unhappy.Are you feeling lethargic? Apathetic? Bored? Aimless? Hopeless? Get off your ass and do something. It won’t be the outcome that brings you joy; it will be the effort. You’ve probably excused yourself from taking action in the past by saying, “but I’m not very good at it.” Friend, no one is ever “good at it” in the beginning. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly until you get better at it.Find something that needs to change. It can be anything bigger than you. Fight for it, work for it, throw all your creative energies into it. You will soon be frustrated, angry, disappointed and tired.But happy.I’m sorry if this offends you. I thought it might. But I care enough about you to say it anyway.Doing the best I can.Roy H. Williams

Your Spotlight of Words?A radio commercial begins, “I’m Ronald Watersdown, and I’m here to tell you about a very important opportunity that I’m sure you won’t want to miss. It’s an incredible chance for you to…”What did those twenty-nine words make you see in your mind?Not much, right? But what about these?“Owl was neither wise nor old. She was a teenage assassin whose large, dark eyes said she was sleepy or depressed or bored. I was never really sure which.”You saw (1.) a momentary owl, then (2.) a young female assassin with half-shut eyes, then (3.) you considered the emotions she might be feeling and (4.) you wondered about the relationship between her and the narrator. All in just twenty-nine words.Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, radio ads just can’t be as interesting as the opening lines of novels.”But why is that, do you suppose? Why couldn’t a radio ad begin with twenty-nine words about a teenage assassin?“Owl was neither wise nor old. She was a teenage assassin whose large, dark eyes said she was sleepy or depressed or bored. I was never really sure which. But her sister Procrastination was even harder to read. Procrastination… the passive assassin of Opportunity. Silently killing one day at a time… Don’t let Procrastination take what you love. Give yourself a new [name of item] today and feel on top of the world. Feel like you can fly. Feel like liquid Springtime. Procrastination says ‘wait.’ But what do you say?”The absence of a real product disallowed the inclusion of specifics in that ad, so we can’t be sure it would bring in customers, but it would definitely hold the attention of listeners with a much tighter grip than the limp, wet hand of Ronald Watersdown.“A great big, bright red…”English is a language built backwards. We speakers-of-English string together a list of modifiers before naming the thing we modify. In so doing, we require our listeners to commit to memory those modifiers so they can later be applied to the thing we name. I’m told the Romantic languages have solved this problem with a more efficient sentence structure: “A rose, bright red and big.”A good ad is a series of vivid mental images projected onto the movie screen of imagination. Here are a few tips for writing opening lines that will flash and crackle in the mind with the smell of burnt electricity:1. Name something easily seen.2. Modify it only after you have a named it.3. Choose verbs that carry context. I said “flash… crackle… burnt electricity,” and you saw lightning even though I never used the word. You were engaged by the language, a willing participant in our co-creation of a vivid mental image.4. Clarity first, creativity last. A few paragraphs ago I wrote, “English is a language built backwards. We speakers of English…” My original line was, “We speakers of this inverted tongue…” but I decided that was a little too clever. “Inverted tongue” is visual, yes, but it’s also potentially confusing.Creativity that blurs clarity is pretentious.Creativity that sharpens clarity is genius.Words carry energy. What will you light with them?Isaac Newton discovered that impact is mass times acceleration. How big is the idea in your mind? How quickly can you transfer it?5. Shorter is quicker, and quicker hits harder.Always hit hard.Roy H. Williams

Laid side-by-side, a stick and a rope of the same length share a similar appearance. Likewise, rules and principles look alike even though they have virtually nothing in common.Rules are like sticks.You can prod people with them.You can threaten people with them.You can beat people with them.But you cannot lead people with them.When a rule doesn’t fit the circumstance, your only choice is to break it.Principles are like ropes, able to conform to the shape of any problem. They are less brittle than rules, and stronger. Principles whisper valuable advice and people are happily led by them.A rule requires obedience.A principle requires contemplation.Rules are demanded by peoplewho have not the wit to understand and applythe appropriate, all-encompassing principle.Segmentation is a principle. Elimination is another. These are, in fact, the first two principles of TRIZ, an uncanny toolbox of 40 Answers that shine their own, unique light on your problem from 40 different directions, revealing a wide range of creative solutions.The principle of segmentation urges you to consider the perspective of connected pieces. Trains, chains and sliding windowpanes are expressions of segmentation.The principle of elimination urges you to consider that less is more. Pruning a plant, cropping a photograph and editing an ad are expressions of elimination.If the other 38 principles of TRIZ were as self-explanatory as these, I’d simply encourage you to tap T-R-I-Z into your favorite search engine and study it on your own. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.Go ahead. Do it. Throw some Google on that acronym and see what you find: T-R-I-Z. I believe you’ll see that a journey into the jungle of TRIZ would make a lot more sense with an experienced guide at your side.Anti-Weight (Principle 8,)Preliminary Anti-Action (Principle 9,)Equipotentiality (Principle 12,)Another Dimension (Principle 17,)Homogeneity (Principle 33,) andPhase Transitions (Principle 36)are easy to understand when SuperFox reveals them. Not so easy when you attempt to follow someone else.Mark Fox is the Chairman of the Board at Wizard Academy. Before rising to that illustrious position, he was the youngest Chief Engineer in the history of the space shuttle project. Yes, Mark is a rocket scientist. He’s also been Chief Marketing Officer of some famous hi-tech companies. My favorite thing about Mark, though, is that he’s a fascinating instructor and a lot of fun. You’ll want a room in Engelbrecht House when Mark unleashes the 40 principles of TRIZ in his world-changing workshop, Da Vinci and the 40 Answers. (If you’re smart, you’ll register for the October session today while free rooms are still available.)If October isn’t an option, you’ll at least want to read the book. A working knowledge of the 40 Answers is like having Batman’s utility belt.Wizard Academy is a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious. Dull people, cowardly people, and people without purpose find nothing here they can use.But you, you’ll find exactly what you need. We built this whole place for you and frankly, it’s pretty amazing.Come. Even if it’s just for the principle of the thing.Roy H. Williams

The principal benefit of creative thought is hope.New possibilities are electric, and hope is the light that shines from them.Creativity is the source of hope even when your hope is in God: “I don’t see a way out of this, but I’m betting that He does.” We depend upon God’s creative thoughts to do what we cannot.I’m sorry if my mention of God annoys you. (Just for the record, He is never annoyed when I mention you.)Creative thought is much on my mind these days.President John F. Kennedy told a story in 1962 about a mother who wrote to the principal of her son’s school, “Don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to run for Congress.” Kennedy commented, “I’ve never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart. I think politicians and poets share at least one thing, and that is their greatness depends upon the courage with which they face the challenges of life.”Hope is the glow that surrounds creativity, and courage is the confidence we gain in that light. Kennedy seemed to know this.We want to think ‘outside the box’ because we can’t breathe in there. The box is made of rules and the lid of the box is the heaviest rule of all.Rules are created with the gentlest of intentions.We know a thing best when we’ve learned it the hard way. Wisdom springs from experience. The best of the past is brought forward when we give others the benefits of what we’ve learned. Such advice is valuable and often deeply appreciated until some fool carves it in stone and it becomes an unbreakable rule. Did you notice how quickly the darkness fell? What happened to the breeze? Why can’t I breathe?Help me push open this heavy lid.Rules kill hope by suffocation.Creativity brings hope to life again.I see a person in your life with whom you have some difficulty. I see a health issue about which you’re worried. I see financial fears. Possibilities, possibilities, possibilities.I came to encourage you.Eighteen hundred years ago, Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome’s Five Good Emperors, said, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”The day after this day is called Tomorrow and it’s never been here before. I hope you’ll show it a good time.A touch of creativity is all it takes. And you’ve got the touch.Roy H. Williams

The smartest thing I ever did was drop out of college on the second day. What I wanted to learn, they couldn’t teach me, so I left to figure it out on my own. That was 37 years ago.A number of years later I wrote a series of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling business books and launched a school for grown-ups who are imaginative, courageous and ambitious. Wizard Academy teaches big things fast. Our students are leaving their fingerprints on the world and I am proud of them beyond belief.College isn’t for everyone. It was definitely not for me.If you have among your circle of friends a public school teacher who trusts you enough to speak to you “off the record” about what has happened to our school system, you owe it to America to have that conversation.I predict you won’t be able to sleep that night.None of the teachers to whom I’ve spoken wants to see their own children or grandchildren in public schools. These teachers aren’t afraid of drugs or violence. They’re afraid of an educational system that requires its teachers to wear the handcuffs of strict conformity and “teach to the test” in lockstep fashion so that the school district won’t be penalized. “Cram for the exam, learning be damned.”Every lesson, every day, is simply test-prep for the all-important standardized test.Standardized. As if every child is an identical blank slate, devoid of individual aptitudes or interests.Have you ever heard of the Creativity Quotient (CQ)? It’s like the IQ except that it measures creativity rather than intelligence. All across America, our 2nd graders score higher on CQ tests than our high-schoolers.Evidently, compliance and conformity come at a price.Children starting school this year will retire in 2072. None of us has a clue what the world will look like just 5 years from now, yet we are tasked with educating children for the world they will face 20, 30, and 40 years in the future.Paul Torrance administered the first CQ test in 1958 to a large number of elementary-age schoolchildren in Minnesota. Twenty-two years later, these schoolchildren were located to see if their CQ scores had been in any way predictive of career success. A second follow-up was administered in 1998, 40 years after the original test, and a 50 year follow-up was conducted in 2008 as the schoolchildren were approaching the age of 60.The result? CQ is 3 times more reliable as an indicator of career success than IQ.That Torrance CQ test measured divergent thinking on 4 scales:1. Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.2. Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.3. Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses.4. Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.Professor Ken Robinson defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Creativity is messy and not easy to manage, so public schools don’t like to measure the CQ of their students or encourage creativity in any way.I believe this needs to change. I believe it must.“But what can we do,” you ask?Allow me to answer with the words of Margaret Mead:“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.?”Are you in?Roy H. Williams

Radio Ink magazine, published by Eric Rhoads, is the principal trade publication of the radio industry. Today we examine a feature article I wrote for that magazine recently. In it, I speak directly to the frustrations of the account executives – the salespeople – employed by America’s 10,000+ commercial radio stations and the many hundreds of stations across Canada and Australia. I’ve decided to let you see what I told them; a peek behind the curtain, if you will. – RHW Ad strategy is more difficult to teach than ad writing.Ad writing, essentially, is to choose:1. an intriguing angle of approach into the subject matter and2. the sharpest words and phrases to make your point.Ad strategy, essentially, is to choose:1. the point you need to make.Bad strategy happens when you:1. listen to an advertiser’s wishful thinking and then2. assume that a radio schedule that3. delivers great frequency and4. reaches the perfect audience5. with really good copy will6. make that advertiser’s dream come true.If you’ve been selling radio long enough, you already know that a client’s wishful thinking is a lever that will help you sell that client a radio schedule, but it takes a lot more than wishful thinking to motivate the client’s customer.CLIENT: “I wish I could sell these items.”ACCOUNT EXEC: “Let me help you.”CLIENT: “How can you help me?”ACCOUNT EXEC: “We have a loyal audience.” (Insert success story here.) “Advertising is an investment in your future.” (Insert schedule and contract here.) “Now tell me exactly what makes these items different and special and better than the ones your competitor sells.” (You start taking notes like crazy. The client is animated. Sincere. Hopeful. Excited.)You return to the station with a contract and a run order. Now all you need is great copy, right?Let me pause here to say that it’s not my goal to discourage you. My goal is only to open your eyes. I want you to see the problem clearly so that you no longer walk into a trap from which there is no escape. We will now continue.You work really hard and write a great piece of copy. Excellent copy. Miraculous copy. World-class copy. The greatest copy that has ever been written. Your co-workers love the ad. The client loves the ad. High-fives all around and champagne for everyone.The schedule runs. The ad airs. Everyone is commenting on it. Very little of the product is sold. Beyond generating those comments, the ad has minimal impact on the business.What the hell?Your copy, indeed, was fabulous. You employed an excellent angle of approach, held the listeners’ attention and made your point in a clever way. Well done! But your fundamental strategy was flawed; your ad answered a question that no one was asking.You walked into the trap when you failed to question why the client was overstocked on the item he wanted you to advertise. The real problem is that no one wants the item. It’s a loser, a dog, a mistake. Your client assumed – and you assumed with him – that if people “only knew and understood,” then they’d rush in to buy the product. So you told the people, you made them understand. And they still didn’t want the product.Advertising will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway.Convince your client to let you offer the public what the public already wants. This is what drives traffic into a store. And many of those people will find other things to buy from your client. In other words, fish with bait that you know the fish love. Don’t try to convince the fish to swallow bait they don’t really like.The inexperienced account executive allows the patient to diagnose his own disease then prescribes treatment under the mistaken illusion that the patient’s self-diagnosis can be trusted. If medical doctors did this they would go to jail.The treatment – the copy and the schedule – is the easy part. The diagnosis – the strategy – is the tricky part. A quick glance at the symptoms does not prescribe the cure. Identical symptoms can arise from many different causes. Most account executives are bad diagnosticians because the successful diagnostician must be cold, objective, and suspicious. Not a good way to sell, right?The successful diagnostician knows the truth of a statement is not determined by the sincerity of the speaker. In other words, a deeply sincere, passionate client can easily be wrong in their assumptions.If you allow your client to frame the fundamental strategy and choose the principal point your ad will make, you are at the mercy of your patient’s self-diagnosis. You and your station will be blamed when that patient fails to recover.The solution is simple. You must separate the selling of the schedule from the creation of the strategy. Selling requires you to be warm, receptive and empathetic. Strategy requires you to be cold, objective, and suspicious of the client’s self-diagnosis.Ask yourself this question: “Are customers not coming because they don’t know about this client, or are customers not coming because they do know?”Diagnose the real problem. Offer the client’s customers what you know for certain they want. I’m not pretending this is easy.Are you beginning to understand why it takes years to become a doctor? But stick with it. Don’t give up. Have courage.You’ll get there.Roy H. Williams

For I Am Exchanging a Day of My Life For It.Quixote sees the turning of the windmill as the flailing arms of a giant that must be defeated.Peter Pan will remain young only if he can escape a tick-tocking crocodile that has swallowed a clock.In 1904, old Mrs. Snow spoke of her late husband to author J.M. Barrie on the opening night of his play, Peter Pan, “…and he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it’s all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn’t that right?”Don Quixote doesn’t defeat his giant but is lifted on its revolving arms and slammed into the ground. Yes, each of us is chased by the same crocodile that tormented Captain Hook and Peter Pan; tick-tick-tick-tick… Time is the windmill of Quixote.Can I ask you a personal question? I mean a really personal question? What are you buying with the hours of your life?Rita Mae Brown said, “I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.”Again I ask, what are you buying with the hours of your life?Anne Tyler opens her book, Back When We Were Grownups, with the words, “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”That line scares me a little. Sometimes I worry that I’m turning into the wrong person, too. Don’t you?You and I gasp for breath and wipe tears from our eyes, feet flying barefoot in our daily race against time.“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: ‘snack’ and ‘quickie,’ to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”– Isabel Allende, My Invented CountryOur race against time is a race we will lose. But running out of time is not what frightens me. This car will run out of gas. What frightens me is the idea of spending irreplaceable time in a headlong rush to an unworthy destination.John Steinbeck speaks of the unworthy destination in Sea of Cortez,“Most busy-ness is merely a nervous tic. We know a lady who is obsessed with the idea of ashes in an ashtray. She is not lazy. She spends a good half of her waking time making sure that no ashes remain in any ashtray, and to make sure of keeping busy she has many ashtrays.” p. 182, (1941)We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.In chapter 5 of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a fortuneteller, Faxe, answers Genry’s question about time with a question of her own:“What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”“That we shall die.”“Yes, there’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”Make no mistake; the future has yet to be written. For we are a species gifted with choice.The Greeks believed, “A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under which they will never sit.” Wes Jackson adds to this idea a glowing line of his own, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”I confess; my hope as I write this note to you is that you would fling yourself into a purpose. Because if you and I leave this world better than we found it, we are indeed a civilization. The training and encouragement of future citizens is the most ambitious life’s work of all.Children are the living messagesa mother sends to a future she will not see. In gratitude to every mother everywhere,Happy Mother’s Day. Roy H. Williams

Finally, an authentic, encoded message.And you'll never guess where.The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, exactly 10 years ago. The book has been denounced as an attack on the Catholic church and sharply criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies, but that hasn’t keep it from selling more than 80 million copies in 44 languages. The story is fiction, marketed as fiction, and contains only a bare sprinkling of tautly-stretched connections to reality, but millions of wide-eyed gullibles accepted The Da Vinci Code as fact anyway.In 2006, Virginia Fellows published The Shakespeare Code, purportedly proving that William Shakespeare was actually Sir Francis Bacon. This wasn’t the first book written, however, in an attempt to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. More than 4,500 such books had been published prior to 1949 and “Nobody tried to keep a running tally after that.” [Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro, p. 4 of the Prologue]Just 8 days before Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States, reporter Joe Kovacs wrote, “A well-known Bible-code researcher has bad news for Barack Obama, as he claims hidden texts in the Holy Bible indicate Mitt Romney will be America’s next president. (Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew and author of Bible Codes Breakthrough) … For those not familiar with Bible codes, they are said to be secret messages embedded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Those who claim the codes’ validity say they disclose information about both the past and the future.”Heh, heh, heh. We are a funny species, are we not? Methinks Terry Rossio was speaking about all of us when he said, “The magic of a secret decoder ring lies not its ability to code and decode messages, but in allowing children the belief that they possess knowledge worth keeping secret.”When it comes to treasure maps and coded messages, is there anyone among us who is not a child? You keep your secrets and I keep mine. They are among our most prized possessions. But how often do you hold a secret that means the difference between life and death?When Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote de La Mancha in 1605, he was keeping a life-and-death secret and he hid it openly within his book.The Spanish Inquisition was in full swing. Anyone holding a copy of the contraband New Testament translated into Spanish by Juan Pérez de Pineda would immediately be put to death. Indeed, Julián Hernández had already been tortured for 3 years and burned at the stake for it along with more than 100 other people during the 17 years prior to 1605.AWhat do you suppose motivated Miguel de Cervantes to quietly shout, “I have a copy of this forbidden New Testament and I’m looking at it right now!” from the pages of Don Quixote? Yet this is precisely what he does in part one, chapter nine, and again in part two, chapter thirty-four, when he describes in detail the complex image on the cover of the forbidden Pineda New Testament.“Two things can easily be a coincidence, and at a stretch, three,” says my friend Massimiliano Giorgini, “but when you have the convergence of four or five indicators, you’re probably no longer looking at a coincidence… In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the cover of the Pineda New Testament in seven highly specific ways.” Even more compelling is Giorgini’s exposition on the following visual similarity: When the name “QIXOTE” is spelled in Gothic letters, it appears strikingly similar to the classic Greek ICTHYS fish-symbol followed by the Greek spelling for “FISH,” an acronym you’ve seen all your life; one which has been used for two thousand years as a symbol for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”bThe similarity between(1.) QIXOTE and(2.) the fish symbol followed by the Greek letters spelling FISH, could easily be written off as coincidence if it weren’t for this curious passage in part two of Don Quixote, in which Cervantes tells the story of a (fictional) really bad painter:“Perhaps he would paint a rooster, in such a fashion and so unlike one, that he would need to write next to it in Gothic letters: ‘This is rooster.’ And so it must be with my story, which will require a commentary in order to understand it.”rMassimiliano Giorgini has been a highly regarded music producer for more than 20 years, working closely with bands such as Green Day. He holds a degree in Psychology from Purdue University and his Theory of Mind is so compelling that a prestigious government intelligence organization known by its initials recruited Mass one year ago to come to work for them as a cryptographer. His code-breaking of intercepted messages has been so stunningly accurate that more than 90 extremely bad guys were caught in the act and taken off the streets during Mass’s first year on the job.Oh, I forgot to tell you: The world’s greatest Quixote scholars consider Mass to be a colleague. Massimiliano Giorgini was first brought to Wizard Academy 5 years ago by his mentor, Dr. Howard Mancing, a world-renowned Quixote scholar and the author of The Cervantes Encyclopedia.So, no… Mass Giorgini cannot be written off as a wide-eyed fool who sees patterns where none exist. In fact, the little thumbnail sketch I gave you today was just a tiny whiff of his mighty research article published in the Spring, 2012 issue of the scholarly journal of the Cervantes Society of America. Mass calls his article, “Cervantes Lands a Left Hook: Baiting the Inquisition with Ekphrastic Subversion.”Mass Giorgini has proven, to my satisfaction at least, that Miguel de Cervantes disagreed with the Spanish Inquisition and that he shouted so from the pages of his wildly successful book of fiction. But it was a shout that no one would hear for more than 400 years.Since there is no one else to do it, I will take it upon myself, for it is a thing that needs be done: Massimiliano, on behalf of Miguel de Cervantes let me say “Thank You.”The shout has at last been heard.Roy H. Williams

Fear is the bullet that eliminates happiness.Fear is the bullet that kills the dream.Fear is the assassin of success.Why not become bulletproof in 2 easy steps?1. Make peace with the possibility of failure.2. Amputate your sense of shame.“Failure is not an option” is the platitude of people who have attended one-too-many motivational seminars. Failure is always a possibility, whether you admit it or not. Sometimes your very best just isn’t good enough.Do you want to succeed?Learn from each failure.Identify what went wrong.Start all over.Failure is a temporary condition.You cannot have humility until you first have confidence.You cannot fail until you first have courage.Confidence and courage are not shameful.Humility is not shameful.Failure is not shameful.Fear is shameful.A perpetual doubter pops the balloons of high-flying dreams. Armed with the needles of sharply-focused questions, the doubter injects fear into every decision… “But what if…”I say to these doubters, “But what if you live your whole life without ever becoming alive?”Anaïs Nin wrote about these people and your relationship to them:“You are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”The perpetual doubter is a nitpicking needle-snout who can always find a problem and happily poke holes in the solutions proposed by others. Like a mosquito, he sucks the life out of those around him. Slap the bastard and move on.I do not suggest that you become reckless or mindless or silly. I advocate only that you refuse to let Fear cast the deciding vote.If anyone had the right to be afraid, it was deaf and blind Helen Keller. But it was she who told us, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”Devin Wright, one of my co-workers, puts it this way: “It’s like a can at the grocery store without a label. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.”Each of us lives the life we choose. It could be beans. It could be pineapple.The following 9-word summary is on loan to me from that celebrated author of Gulliver’s Travels, the immortal Jonathan Swift:May you live all the days of your life.Roy H. Williams

If you’re not being criticized today, then no one was listening when you spoke.Welcome to the time of the witch-hunt.This is that time when angry cyber-terrorists post incendiary online reviews and pretend their only motive is to protect the public. This is that time when corporate assassins take pleasure in shooting elephants from a distance; their greatest joy is to ruin the reputation of a prominent man or woman or company. The more the elephant is beloved by the public, the greater the delight of the assassin in bringing them down with a well-aimed bullet to the gut.Let me explain my motives in writing to you about this trend:1. I hope to bring you some small measure of comfort in advance. A clear understanding of the social climate can provide a sort of emotional padding and soften the force of the blows when your company is attacked.2. If you deal with a lot of people, your company will become a target. Think of today’s memo as a general heads-up from the air traffic control tower that some dark storm clouds are gathering on the horizon.3. Please don’t assume I’m simply venting my own frustrations. I have not been attacked. This memo isn’t about me. The rise of the corporate assassin is just a symptom of the times.Eighty years ago, when the pendulum of society was last in this position, headed in this direction, Robert Lynd wrote, “There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer.” Our current witch-hunt mentality even extends to the courtroom. If you serve as a juror today, you can reasonably expect at least one of the other jurors to say, “If this person wasn’t guilty, they wouldn’t have been arrested.”We are indeed living in dangerous times when an accused person is presumed guilty until proven innocent.How did we get here?“Working together for the common good” is the dream that launches every We generation. Our original goal was simply to “clean this place up and straighten out this mess,” but we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a happy effort for the common good slowly hardens to become the handcuffs of duty, obligation and sacrifice.1933 was the last time the pendulum was in this position, headed in this direction. George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938, so he was familiar with the witch-hunt window of a WE cycle. These are the words he sends to us from the past: “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”Consider with me for a moment: A true, civic hero looks for solutions that are within his or her own power to implement. An assassin looks not for solutions, but for problems, and for someone to blame.The corporate assassin is an accuser, a fault-finder, a nitpicking inquisitor. And when they wear the disguise of a news reporter, they wield the power of public opinion.Although the corporate assassin has long been recognized as one of the 7 types of journalists, their numbers are on the rise and their attacks are becoming increasingly reckless and unjustified. I hope you’ll remember this when listening to the media. I believe it’s extremely important that we continue to give accused companies and individuals the benefit of the doubt.Because next time it might be you.Roy H. Williams