Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

A Look at Choices and ConsequencesYou wrestle with lions daily.Lions are powers outside yourself: circumstance and serendipity, fate and phenomenon, bad luck and good. A lion can oppose or assist you. It can be your enemy or friend.A gang of lions is called a pride. Interesting.Unlike lions, tigers are solitary.Your tiger is your own, inner ferocity: Determination. Commitment. Focus. Hence the phrase, “The eye of the tiger.”The tiger will not be denied.Gentle persons don’t like to believe they possess an inner ferocity, but I agree with William Blake, “He that gently made the lamb hath made the tiger also.”The tiger within you calculates the cost of your choices and agrees to pay the price. Make no mistake; every choice has a cost.Here are 3 more things you should know:1. All tigers have a similar marking on their forehead, which resembles the Chinese symbol Wang, meaning King. Likewise, the tiger within you is king, the captain of your soul, choosing what it chooses and paying in whatever coin is required:Coin 1. Time – Time, like money, is spent. But unlike money, time cannot be replaced.Coin 2. Embarrassment – Embarrassment, or the risk of it, accompanies all your important choices.Coin 3. Deprivation – All the things not chosen are the price of every choice you make.Coin 4. Relationship – You make demands on those who care for you and thereby alter the bond that connects. Will your choice make this bond stronger or weaker?Coin 5. Effort – The pain of “trying” is a coin all its own. And in its shadow is embarrassment if you fail.Coin 6. Conscience – When your tiger sides with your conscience, the price is that which your conscience denies you. But when your tiger overrules your conscience, the price is paid in the coin of embarrassment. And the audience that is watching… is you.2. Shave the fur from a tiger and it will still have stripes. Fur is merely an outward thing. The true shape and color of the animal lies beneath. What stripe is tattooed beneath the fur of your outward personality? The skin-stripes of tigers are the source of the proverb, “a tiger cannot change its stripes,” meaning that we do not change our basic nature. We can only hope to overcome it.3. The tiger’s most developed sense is its hearing. Likewise, the tiger within you is informed primarily by what you hear, including those printed words that echo in your mind as you read.What do you read? What have you been feeding your tiger?Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, understands tigers.Calvin’s tiger, Hobbes, lives exclusively in the mind of Calvin. When anyone else is in the picture, Hobbes is just a small, stuffed toy.Likewise, none of us sees the tiger that lives in another. We see only a sketch of a tiger drawn by their choices and actions.Watterson understands the power of silent voice. He famously decided that Calvin and Hobbes would live only on the printed page. No animated cartoons. The only voices of Calvin and Hobbes are those that each of us hears in our minds as we read their words on the printed page.And Brother Watterson understands “paying the price.” In this case, that price is the many millions of dollars he forfeits each year by not licensing Calvin and Hobbes. No toys. No action figures. No paraphernalia. Tens of millions of dollars would appear in his bank account if the man would simply say the word “Yes.”Bill Watterson is either a giant among men or one of the greatest fools that has ever lived. This you must decide for yourself.But one thing is stunningly clear:Watterson’s tiger does not purr.I like him.Roy H. Williams

From Unstructured DataJune 25, 2012, 8:29 PMStep 1: Create a monster by networking 16,000 ultrafast computer processors.Step 2: Feed the monster 10 billion images chosen at random from YouTube videos.Step 3: See what happens.What Happened: The monster taught itself to recognize cats.“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat.’ It basically invented the concept of a cat.” – Jeff Dean, speaking for the scientists at Google’s secretive X-LabsThe frightening part of this report is that modern computers appear to be capable of independent learning through extrapolation.The comforting part of this report is that it takes 16,000 ultrafast processors working together to do something that’s completely effortless for a human toddler.I drive 40 minutes to meet Jeffrey Eisenberg for lunch in a place that looks like it used to be a Denny’s. I hand him an advance copy of Pendulum. “Hold it up next to your face,” I said. He held it up and smiled. [click]Jeff laid the book on the table and thumbed through it, “This really turned out nice.”“So tell me what’s happening in Jeff-world.”Jeff said he was developing applications of big data for some of America’s largest companies.“What’s big data?” I asked.“You’ve been teaching Practical Applications of Chaos Theory in the Magical Worlds course for about 12 years now, right?”“Right.”“Big data is just one more use of that idea.”“How so?”“Dump huge amounts of unstructured data into a computer, then wait to see the patterns it discovers. The bigger the dataset, the more obvious the patterns.”Jeff went on to explain that ‘unstructured data’ included information from climate sensors, digital photos and videos, purchase transaction records, Tweets and other social media posts, GPS signals from cell phones, things like that.YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, traffic and security cameras and the worldwide proliferation of portable digital devices add up to this: If every book, document, spreadsheet, register, newspaper and photograph created prior to July, 2010, were digitized, they would account for only about 10 percent of the world’s data.Ninety percent of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years.According to Ed Dumbill,“Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn’t fit the strictures of your database architectures. To gain value from this data, you must choose an alternative way to process it.”Institutions can use big data to reduce fraud and errors. Hospitals can use it to improve patient care while reducing healthcare costs. According to IBM, one health care organization used big data this year to decrease patient mortality by 20 percent. A telecommunications company reduced processing time by 92 percent and a utility company improved the accuracy of power resource placement by 99 percent.Huge organizations like these have been the first to embrace big data, but Jeff Eisenberg tells me that he and Bryan are working to make its power available to retailers and small businesses, as well.When Jeff said big data was just another practical application of chaos theory, here’s what he meant: Chaos, in science, is not randomness, but precisely the opposite. Chaos is a pattern so vast that it won’t fit into the human mind.Confronted with the product of a chaotic system, the pattern-recognition function of our brain’s right hemisphere senses a pattern that never seems to resolve, never seems to close, never seems to finish and begin again. As a result, we are drawn to a beauty that is too big for us. All the beauties of nature – mountains, canyons, trees, clouds, snowflakes and the movements of fire and water – are products of chaotic systems.Likewise, works of art that pierce public consciousness to become mass-appeal, runaway successes – top-of-the-chart songs, bestselling books, Oscar-winning movies – always contain a third gravitating body* with a high degree of divergence and an explicit moment of convergence. Third gravitating bodies show up in effective advertising, as well.I didn’t make up that term, “third gravitating body,” by the way. It’s a term that has been used by astrophysicists for more than 100 years to describe a mathematical function of the universe that relates to system evolution and gravity, the ability to attract.Attract…Attraction. That would be a good thing to master, don’t you think?And now you know why it’s called The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop at Wizard Academy, the most interesting business school on earth.Come. We’ll fill in the blanks.It will all make perfect sense before you leave.Roy H. Williams

Jack became dull when he failed to free the beagle in his brain. You let your beagle romp and play, don’t you?Don’t you?The beagle in your brain connects nonlinear events – think of these events as a collection of dots – to reveal fantastic patterns.Intuition. Humor. Leap of Faith. These are just three of the beagle’s names.The beagle is not limited to paired opposites but lives in a place of infinite possibilities. Fantasy and fiction, poetry and song, symbols, rituals and metaphors beckon us into that realm where anything can happen in the color-stained shadows beneath the beagle’s grand forest canopy. Every stick is a sword, every rabbit is an adventure and every tree becomes home base the moment you begin to run.“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” first appeared in a book of collected proverbs published by James Howell in 1659, but it was generations old, even then.An article by Dr. Peter Gray in Psychology Today proves the potency of this 353 year-old warning. Dr. Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. His findings guide the decisions of comparative, evolutionary, developmental and educational psychologists around the world. He has written important articles on innovative teaching methods and alternative approaches to education. He is the author of Psychology, an important college textbook now in its 6th edition.That’s right. He wrote the college textbook.Dr. Gray has recently been studying “the dullest culture on earth,” a people so painfully boring that previous researchers concluded they could not be studied. There was nothing to see, nothing to ask, nothing to probe or investigate among the Baining, an isolated tribe in Papua, New Guinea. According to Dr. Gray, “They do not tell stories, rarely gossip, and exhibit little curiosity or enthusiasm. Their conversation is obsessively mundane, concerned primarily with food-getting and food-processing.”The Baining, you see, do not believe in play. In fact, Baining children are punished when they do frivolous things. The Baining believe only in productive work and “things that make sense.”Grow crops.Harvest crops.Cook crops.Eat crops.Sit and wait silently for tomorrow.Do it all again.The Baining make no room in their minds for romance, fantasy or adventure. They don’t even allow imitation. There are no Baining religions or heroes or humor, no Baining poetry or legends or music. Sex is an unpleasant chore endured only for the production of children. The single Baining ritual is a firedance that initiates boys into manhood. Women and children are not allowed to watch.I promise I’m not making this up. I’m not even exaggerating.Dr. Gray’s report paints a picture so dreary and sad that he opens it by assuring us that he is not a racist. “This essay is clearly not about race but about culture, and if there is value judgment, it is judgment grounded in my own culturally-produced biases.”Dr. Gray ends his report by saying,“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and it apparently makes the Baining the ‘dullest culture on earth.’ In some ways, I fear, we today are trying to emulate the Baining as we increasingly deprive children of opportunities to play and explore freely and, instead, force them to spend ever more time working in school and participating in adult-directed activities outside of school.”I agree with all that, but I took something different from Dr. Gray’s report, namely this: if we don’t make time for intuition, humor and leaps of faith, if we don’t make room for romance, fantasy and adventure, then we don’t know Jack.But it’s very possible we’re on our way to being him.And Jack is a very dull boy.Free the Beagle.Roy H. Williams

“Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.” – David OgilvyA creative problem-solver consciously or unconsciously realizes the problem at hand has already been solved – many times – but the answers have not yet been applied to the immediate situation.Creative problem solving is merely the leveraging of trustworthy patterns – those relationships between elements in a system – to achieve an advantage previously undiscovered in the immediate application.The critical first step in creative problem solving is to identify the defining characteristics of the problem. This is usually achieved, according to David Ogilvy, by “stuffing your conscious mind with information.” That’s the easy part. Our society swims in information. The second part, to “unhook your rational thought process,” is where it gets tricky.I believe there are 5 ways to unhook deductive reasoning. A1. The Arts. Music speaks to us through rhythm, interval, contour, pitch, key and tempo. Theater and Dance speak through foreshadow, symbol and movement. Painting and Sculpture through shape, proximity and color. Poetry and Literature speak to depths beyond our understanding. Connect to the arts and watch the marlin rise from deep water to tail-dance across the ocean in the moonlight.  2. Humor. A statement that belongs and fits is predictable, not funny. A statement that doesn’t belong and doesn’t fit makes no sense: not funny. A statement is funny only when it “doesn’t belong, but fits.” Brilliant ideas often enter the world as jokes. An outrageous suggestion that could theoretically work is always hilarious. Humor is a slippery key that unlocks the intuitive mind as we become aware of obscure but possible connections. Laughter is a portal that takes us beyond the realms of fear and doubt. Look though that window and consider what you see. b3. Time Pressure. I once watched Keith Miller trick a roomful of people into brilliance by giving them too little time to complete a series of detailed lists. “Pick a subject that interests you. I’ll give you sixty seconds.” Keith counted down, “45 seconds… thirty seconds… fifteen seconds…” Each person was then required to stand and name the subject they’d chosen. Keith said, “Write down 16 things you’d want to include if you wrote a book about this subject. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or putting them into any kind of order. I’ll give you 4 minutes. Sixteen things. Go.” Mild panic causes the logical mind to quit “second guessing” as the floodgates of intuition open and spray far more knowledge than you ever knew was there. r4. Play! Without keeping score. Playing to win is just another name for work. Play must be freely chosen, actively engaging and fun. Hide-and-seek. Throw a disc. Sing hit songs with a group of new friends. Play requires the relaxation of the uptight mind. We are rejuvenated and revitalized by it. Children are happy because they play. Adults are unhappy because they do not. i5. Recovery. Humans are like neon; we glow when we release the energy of overstimulation. I once mentioned to Dr. Grant that I often have my best ideas in airplanes on the way home from speaking engagements. Knowing my strong preference for introverted thinking, he said, “Well of course. Working to connect to an audience is extraverted feeling, your least preferred function.” When he saw I was confused he continued, “Psychologists have known for years that a person’s fourth function – the one least preferred – is the trap door to the unconscious mind.” Ten minutes later we created Escape the Box, one of Wizard Academy’s most heralded workshops. (We don’t have one scheduled but we could easily do so if enough of you are interested. Just call Della at 512-295-5700 or email Michele@WizardAcademy.org) Look Inward. Laugh. Panic. Play. Sleep.Welcome to Wizard Academy. Are you beginning to understand why the world’s most interesting business school has an art gallery, a concert hall, a star deck, a wine cellar and a student mansion?Come.Roy H. Williams

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 for anyone else.” – Richard Exley, Dec. 12, 2011(Richard has been a close friend for 30 years. I have witnessed these seasons in him as he has witnessed them in me. – RHW)Confidence without humility is arrogance.Humility without confidence is an inferiority complex.The single prerequisite of true humility is that you must first have confidence.The false humility of inferiority is really just anger in a sad disguise. Courage is good,confidence is better,but humility is the highest lessonand much harder to learn than the previous two.“There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad. Of the good, we always think of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man – a viewing-point man – while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the abstract bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man considers Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good.”– John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, p. 96, (1941)Begin by learning courage. Stare into the face of the tiger that threatens to devour you. Be the excellent soldier who runs toward the sound of the guns. You will do these things not because you are fearless, but because you have chosen to. And when you have stared down tigers and emerged from battles undead, you will notice that your courage has grown into a strutting little rooster called Confidence.And then one day long after, if you are open-minded, open-hearted and wise, you will realize that your successes were never born from the strength of your will, the razor’s edge of your intellect or the power of your focused mind, but from the whim of an inexplicable little fairy called Luck.Laugh at the rooster,Tip your hat to the fairy,And smile.Roy H. Williams

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 vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experience chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colors, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences. They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colorless, odorless, insipid and silent.”Dr. Oliveira isn’t a touchy-feely philosopher, a halfwit existentialist or the delusional leader of a religious cult. He’s the Director of the Department of Neurosciences at an important institute in Rio de Janeiro. (I love Latin American scientists. They speak of the beauty of science more poetically than do scientists in the United States.)According to Oliveira, each of us lives in a private world of our own perceptions.Speaking of this perceptual reality he writes,“Although you and I share the same biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a distinct color and smell is not exactly equal to the color and smell you perceive. We may give the same name to similar perceptions, but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.”But isn’t there an objective reality that’s the same for all of us?Sure there is. In the purest objective reality, 7 billion of us are trapped on a tiny speck of dust that circles an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 252 times the speed of a rifle bullet.And none of us ever thinks about it.That seems almost surreal, doesn’t it?I point out the subjective nature of our perceptual realities to underscore the importance of articulate communication. Are you able to make others see what you see and feel what you feel? If so, you have persuasion, the most powerful of human skills. Physical speed, agility and strength seem puny standing next to it. Indeed, the pen is mightier than the sword.Next Monday we’ll examine the word choices of a great contemporary writer during the first 30 minutes of our monthly, 1-hour video webcast for subscribers. I hope to teach you how to choose words as he chooses them so that you might speak and write with greater persuasive power. I’ll also be revealing a 25-year secret; specifically, the criteria my firm uses to select which radio schedules to purchase from the thousands that are submitted to my media buyers each year. I’ll teach you how to extract more benefit from your ad budget.The Wizards of Ads are known for the growth of their clients, small businesses who currently air 52-week schedules on more than 700 radio stations across the United States, Australia and Canada. Eyebrows will jump when I reveal the criteria we use for choosing these stations. Tempers will flare. Media salespeople everywhere will shout we’re “doing it wrong.”I’ve decided not to worry about that. Instead, I’ll be trying to wrap my head around how we can fly at 252 times the speed of a rifle bullet and feel as though we’re standing still.Whoosh. Roy H. Williams

Dave saw adventure where others saw only shadowsbecause 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 than itself.In short, humans want to be their own god but we are poorly equipped for the job.The study of Magical Thinking includes the examination of common superstitions, justifications and self-delusions. Think you don’t have any? Think again.The same insanity that allows us to believe in a god who has everything “under control and moving forward according to His Perfect Plan” also allows us to believe that the Higgs boson particle is somehow proof that the vast diversity of plant and animal life on this planet is the accidental result of an explosion.“GOD, we are a comic species. Why are you interested in us?” This is a question that’s been asked for at least 3 thousand years. Indeed David, player of the harp and slayer of Goliath asks GOD in the 8th of his Psalms, “What is a human being that you think about him? What is a son of man that you take care of him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings. You placed on him a crown of glory and honor. You made human beings the rulers over all that your hands have created. You put everything under their control.”On a practical level, an understanding of Magical Thinking – this amazing propensity of humans to jump to ridiculous conclusions and become deeply bonded to them – is the most powerful sales tool on which you will ever lay your hand.Fortunately, our not-quite-sane ability to imagine and believe in the unproven, the unlikely and the clearly impossible is not just proof of our brokenness, it is also our greatest gift and highest treasure. Magical Thinking allows us to see possibilities not indicated by the evidence at hand. Intuition depends upon it. Breakthroughs happen because of it. Undiluted play is at the heart of it.Play. Do you remember it? Dave Young was playing when he saw Quixote in the shadow of the cactus.Stated in the simplest of terms, Magical Thinking describes potentialities that are not strictly possible, but are believable nonetheless. And these potentialities can be positive or negative.The obvious question is, “What is a potentiality?”You’re a young man who is about to ask the love of your life to marry you. Special circumstances give you the opportunity to buy a diamond engagement ring for a fraction of its true value. The previous owner was a woman who was murdered by her husband. He then fled the country with all of his assets. The ring is being sold by the cemetary that buried the woman. Do you buy the ring and present it to your fiancé as a symbol of your love?Why not? Diamonds and gold are inert. They have no memory and carry no contagion, no karma, no bad juju. You know this in the left hemisphere of your brain, but Magical Thinking tells you otherwise in your right.Contagion and “bad juju” are negative potentialities. Sports memorabilia, celebrity autographs and historical artifacts are valuable due to positive potentialities.When you understand the seductive pathways of Magical Thinking you’ll be able to write advertising and web copy that causes people to choose you, your company and your brand, above all others, even when it defies common sense.Magical Thinking works like magic, allowing the magician to pull rabbits from hats that everyone knows to be empty. magiimagine magic.Roy H. Williams

Out in the open Wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the marketplace…”- Solomon, Proverbs ch. 1Wendy 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 that being a good housecleaner doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be good at running a housecleaning business. And that’s quite a revelation. But there’s no book that tells a person how to make the leap from wage earner to business owner. The book is needed and needed badly.”Will you help Wendy and I write that book of entrepreneurial tips?Wendy and her sister Jessica overcame an impossibly vertical learning curve by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Their company, Carpe Diem Cleaning in Durham, North Carolina, is the classic success story. Wendy spoke to me of some powerful insights she had been forced to learn the hard way. Tragically, I’d heard them all before. Lots of times. So why hadn’t I warned her?This is a book that screams to be written and you, mi compadre*, are going to contribute what you know. You’ll do it because it’s the right thing to do. You’ll do it because you know every strong economy is built on companies with fewer than 100 employees. You’ll do it because we’re all in this together.I mentioned Wendy’s comment to Wizard Academy’s board of directors last Monday. Jean Backus said, “I taught basic tax tips for 10 years at Austin Community College and a high percentage of my students already had an MBA. When I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ they always said, ‘They don’t teach this stuff in college.’”Jean Backus promised to give us a list of time-and-money-saving tips. Likewise, Dennis Collins and Adrian Van Zelfden promised to contribute what they’ve learned in their several decades as consultants to hundreds of business owners. Doctors Oz Jaxxon and Lori Barr promised to chip in their collected wisdom as well. And I promised that you would send in at least one golden nugget.Here are a few examples of the kinds of tips this book will contain:1. Calculate the potential revenues available to your category in your trade area in 3 ways: (A) Make a list of all competitors in your category, estimate the annual sales volumes of each, then total the estimates for a “country boy” estimate of the marketplace potential. (B) Pull national sales volume estimates from trade publications for your category, then divide that number by the population of the nation, then multiply by the population of your marketplace. (C) Access the government NAICS numbers for your category to derive a per capita average for your state, then multiply that number times the population of your trade area. Don’t be surprised when all 3 answers fall in a narrow range.2. Growing from 5% of your market potential to 25% of your market potential (20 percentage points) is easier than growing from 25% to 33% (8 points.) This is because you win the easiest customers first, then must face customers that are much more difficult to win. It is extremely rare for a business to grow beyond 33% of the market potential for their category.3. Commit all agreements to writing. The clearest memory is no match for pale ink.4. Sometimes your very best just isn’t good enough. Don’t let it get you down.5. In most service businesses, 1/3 of revenues will go to payroll, 1/3 will go to overhead, and 1/3 will be gross profit from which taxes, etc. must be withheld. Take this into consideration when hiring and pricing.6. A talented, hardworking tradesman, craftsman or technician, working alone, can make a lot of money. Soon they’ll have no free time and will be turning away business, so they will hire a helper. Then they’ll discover that it’s faster and easier to just do it themselves than it is to train, motivate and supervise the helper. So they’ll hire a second and third employee and work harder than ever and make less money than when they were working alone. Until that tradesman, craftsman or technician has approximately 10 employees, he or she will usually make less money than when they were working round-the-clock, alone. Be ready for these frustrations if you choose to build a service business.7. A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid that mistake altogether. Share what you’ve learned with others and be quick to hear what they have learned and you can both be wise.“Out in the open Wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the marketplace…” – Solomon, Proverbs chapter 1Solomon… wise man… wise-ard… Wizard Academy,America’s Most Interesting Business School.Good decisions come from experience.Experience comes from bad decisions.What has your experience taught you?What sage advice have you received that you’d like to pass along? Send it to Jackie@WizardOfAds.com and feel good that you’re building a strong economy by helping others to succeed.Roy H. Williams

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 wanted to make sure we knew the following 3 things about Muskogee. These are direct quotes:Muskogee was commemorated in the 1969 Merle Haggard song “Okie from Muskogee”.The Jerry Jeff Walker song “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother“ is a satire of small-town life playfully aimed at Muskogee, which is made evident in the last line of the song: “Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A.”In the sitcom Friends, Chandler becomes excited when he hears a mention of Muskogee, saying that it’s “only four hours from Tulsa,” where he resides. In reality, Muskogee is less than an hour from Tulsa.(That the writer felt the need to correct Chandler and point out Muskogee is “less than an hour” from Tulsa makes me smile. If Oklahoma were Los Angeles, Tulsa would be Beverly Hills.)Oklahoma became a state just 51 years before I was born. As a kid, I knew a lot of adults who grew up in the region when it was still officially “Indian Territory.”The Oklahomans of my childhood were mostly mixed-breed mutts. I say this lovingly. I grew up knowing nothing of ethnicities. I never knew anyone who could call themselves Mexican, Polish, Irish, German, Italian or anything else. Heck, we didn’t even have Catholics.Jews were as rare as Chinese, existing only in newspapers and books.The first “foreigner” I ever met was a Jewish man from New York who did me an extraordinary kindness. The encounter made such an impression on me that I’ve been predisposed toward Jews ever since.Here are a few thingsI’ve learned about Jewish culture over the years:  (Doubtless some of my Jewish friends will take issue and feel compelled to correct me on some point or other but that’s perfectly normal. An Israeli friend, Dror Yehuda, warned me many years ago, “Six Jews, ten opinions.”)1. A solution that is not sustainable is probably unwise. The best solutions are always self-sustaining. Knowledge of this deeply embedded cultural belief helps one to understand the 8 Levels of Charity known to every Jew. The lowest levels of charity are those where you hand someone money and walk away. Jewish thought asks, “What is the problem that causes them to need this money? If I truly care, I should help to solve the underlying problem.” Feeding endless amounts of money into a broken situation is unsustainable. Consequently, the highest of the 8 Levels is to help a person start a business that will give them an income on an ongoing basis and provide jobs for others as well. This is true love. Another form of Jewish love-in-action is to give a person a job. These solutions are considered superior because they solve the problem in a sustainable manner. Although no Jewish person has ever said so to me, I get the sense that Jews feel it’s a little bit tacky to just give a person cash and then walk away.2. It is the responsibility of every Jew to make the world better. “What am I doing that makes a difference?” is the ever-present question in the mind of an orthodox Jew. This is probably why Jews are exactly 100 times more likely to win a Nobel Prize than other ethnicities. This is true. Slightly more than 20 percent of all Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jewish people even though they comprise only 2 tenths of 1 percent of the world’s population. Does it surprise you that every time I’ve ever pointed this out, someone within earshot has immediately said, “Well, it’s the Jews who decide who wins the Nobel Prize, that’s why.” For the record, the Nobel Prize committee is Swedish, not Jewish, and Sweden’s Jewish population is precisely the same 2 tenths of 1 percent as the rest of the world. I did the research.Think about it. If your culture taught you from birth (A.) to always be thinking about how to make the world better and (B.) that the highest form of love is to create sustainable businesses that create jobs for the community, is it any wonder these people have become unusually successful?Roy H. Williams 

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 Taylor and Hell is for Heroes (1962) starring Steve McQueen. Prior to that, Pirosh wrote and directed Valley of the Kings, a 1954 adventure movie, and was nominated to receive an Academy Award for his 1951 film, Go for Broke! Two years earlier Pirosh had in fact won the 1949 Oscar for his screenplay of Battleground, a movie about the siege of Bastogne in World War II. Pirosh found his inspiration in his diaries, having served as a Master Sergeant in the 35th Infantry Division. One bitterly cold and forlorn day during the battle of the Bulge, Pirosh led a patrol into Bastogne to support the surrounded American forces there. Bastogne is a long way from Baltimore and being surrounded by people who want to kill you is not the mark of a very good day. Pirosh was awarded the Bronze Star. But war and movies about war were not what Robert Pirosh had planned for his life. Prior to serving in WWII, Pirosh had written some of the funniest lines of Groucho Marx’s career. In the screenplay for A Day at the Races (1937,) Pirosh has Groucho saying, “If I hold you any closer, I’ll be in back of you,” and picking up a telephone to say, “Room Service? Send up a larger room.” Groucho Marx and Robert Pirosh became lifelong friends. We won’t take the time to talk about Robert Pirosh as a writer for The Waltons, Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, Bonanza, My Three Sons, Family Affair, Combat! and The Fugitive. Our interest is directed at the letter that started it all, a letter blindly sent by 24 year-old Robert Pirosh to every producer, director and studio executive in Hollywood: Dear Sir:I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.I have just returned and I still like words.May I have a few with you?Robert Pirosh385 Madison AvenueRoom 610New YorkEldorado 5-6024 Robert Pirosh has been gone for 23 years, having successfully satisfied the demands of a 79-year adventure. As Chancellor of Wizard Academy, I hereby bestow on Robert Pirosh The Order of the Beagle, the highest award our little institution can offer. Based on his letter and what can be pieced together of his life, Robert Pirosh was our brand of crazy. Do you have nominations for The Order of the Beagle? Send your suggestions and the rationale behind them to MicheleMiller@WizardAcademy.org Wizard Academy belongs to you. What do you plan to do with it? Roy H. Williams