Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo

Looking to make a change? Remember: transformation happens experientially, not intellectually.We often receive instruction and agree, “I see what you're saying,” but seldom do we actually do the thing we learned. We just agree with it in our minds.This is a problem.Daniel J. Boorstin said, “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.”Boorstin's statement becomes particularly poignant when you learn that he graduated with highest honors from Harvard, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and earned his PhD at Yale. By occupation he was a lawyer, a university professor and the U.S. Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. Yet Boorstin warned us that the illusion of knowledge was the greatest impediment to discovery.Are you willing to go exploring with Boorstin and Dewar and Michener and me? Tommy Dewar said, “Exploration makes one wiser; even if the only wisdom gained is to know where not to return.”James Michener won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his book, Tales of the South Pacific. He went on to earn more than one hundred million dollars as the author of more than 40 novels.In his memoirs – published just a year before he died at the age of 90 – Michener wrote, “I feel almost a blood relationship with all the artists in all the mediums, for I find that we face the same problems but solve them in our own ways. When young people in my writing classes, for example, ask what subjects they should study to become writers, I surprise them by replying: ‘Ceramics and eurhythmic dancing.' When they look surprised I explain: ‘Ceramics so you can feel form evolving through your fingertips molding the moist clay, and eurhythmic dancing so you can experience the flow of motion through your body. You might develop a sense of freedom that way.'” – This Noble Land, chap.10Michener, a novelist to whose success George Washington testified one hundred million times, instructed thousands of aspiring young writers during his years at the University of Texas and he gave each student the same advice. But do you suppose any of them actually took classes in ceramics and eurhythmic dancing?I doubt it.Would you have done what Michener said? Or would you have thought, “I get it,” and then walked on to seek advice from other experts?Would you have allowed the illusion of knowledge to rob you of the joy of discovery?Roy H. Williams

She judged us one-by-one as we entered the building. Chin held high, she looked down the ridgeline of her nose like she was sighting along the barrel of a gun. A quiet sniff let us know she did not approve.I hope to God she doesn't know how to fire that thing.“You're here for the Dana Gioia lecture?”Her tone suggested this woman was trying hard to be perceived as an aristocrat. Just like the man who spoke from behind me.“Lovey!”Wow. There really are people who talk like Thurston Howell III.It was like we'd stumbled into a costume party where the game was to act bored and superior. Throughout the room every pose, every comment was calculated to deliver an impression of “tut-tut” sophistication. It was a voice-symphony of condescending tones.The little hand was on 7 and the big hand on 12 in a tiny auditorium in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Dana Gioia, (JOY-ah) the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was scheduled to speak. I'd come with 7 students from Wizard Academy's Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.It turned out to be one of the most stimulating nights of my life.Gioia, a Harvard graduate and published poet, bemoaned the modern trend to analyze and critique poetry as though it were an intellectual thing. Throughout Gioia's riveting performance I wondered, “Do the people in this room realize that he's saying they are the problem?Gioia performed his own poems and others. Whether the poetry served as punctuation to his comments, or whether his comments were the punctuation between poems, I cannot say.During the Question and Answer session, a woman asked, “What do you think of these so-called ‘cowboy poets?'”Her loaded question backfired. Gioia got happy as he explained that the first of today's cowboy poets was encouraged by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, “and now there are more than 200 chapters of cowboy poets who meet across America to read their poetry.”The cowboy has found his soul and that makes Gioia happy: “If you don't hear anything else I say tonight, please remember this: The goal of public education in the arts is not to create more artists, but to create complete human beings in an age of technology. We're failing our children, especially our young men. We provide them a cognitive, analytical education, but we are failing to educate their emotions.”David of Israel was a warrior poet. His son Solomon was a scholar poet. Neither of them was considered effeminate. Just ask Goliath. Yet David and Solomon gave us deep treasures of poetry in Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the intensely sexual Song of Solomon.It was when Gioia confessed his frustration that night that I began to feel pride for Wizard Academy. “If I had one wish,” he said, “it would be that we immerse our children in a performance of the arts. Let a storyteller or a poet perform in a way that leaves the audience breathless and every child in the room will say, ‘I want to learn to do that.' They'll become better readers, better writers, and more complete human beings.”I was proud of the academy because we're doing what Gioia said needs to be done. Just last week Kim, Peter, Paul and Will taught a class called Making It As an Artist. All four of these gifted instructors perform in public schools at every opportunity. Those of you who have heard me speak publicly will recall that I always perform at least one important poem relevant to the topic of discussion. The audiences are surprised, attention is elevated and people are delighted.Wizard Academy is putting adventure into science, romance into writing, and art into the heart. We're going for Broca.The late poet Robert Graves said, “There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.”If Graves was unable to find money in poetry, it was only because he failed to look where it might be found.Philip Dusenberry said, “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.” Dusenberry is a successful motion picture screenwriter, was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1994, and is the chairman of BBDO, one of the largest advertising agencies on earth. He began as a copywriter at a radio station.If you're a poet and would like to make your living with words, the secret is to aim part of that energy at ad writing.Here's what some famous men have had to say about poetry. Listen closely and see if their advice doesn't also apply to ad writing:Jean Cocteau said, “The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”The same is true of great ad writers.Paul Engle said, “Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”Couldn't the same thing be said about great ads?Sigmund Freud, that spelunker into the human psyche, said, “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” On another occasion Freud wrote, “Poets are masters of us ordinary men in knowledge of the mind because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”Anyone who's tried the scientific approach to ad writing has bumped their nose against this same hard truth. It is the poet, not the scientist, who understands the hearts of men.“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert FrostAmen, Brother Frost. And precisely the same thing is true of great ads. Semper infinitas.And now it's time for me to go to work and print money with me pen.What will you be doing today?Roy H. Williams

Modern schools teach Journalism and Creative Writing.Study Journalism and you'll write ads that are informative. Study Creative Writing and you'll write ads that entertain. But neither is likely to persuade.Only one school of writing always1. introduces a new perspective,2. causes readers to feel differently, and3. does so in a tight economy of words.And that school is very ancient.Should you ask me, whence these stories?Whence these legends and traditions,With the odors of the forestWith the dew and damp of meadows,With the curling smoke of wigwams,With the rushing of great rivers,With their frequent repetitions,And their wild reverberationsAs of thunder in the mountains?Do you want to speak in full color? Enroll in the school of the poet.Rhythm is essential to us. Feet patter, hearts beat, lungs breathe, planets circle and seasons cycle to a rhythm. Music, poetry and dance are built on it.The rhythm of a poem – the drumbeats of its stressed and unstressed syllables – is called its meter.Meter is music. Meter is magic.Did you feel the Indian drumbeats in the preface to Longfellow's Hiawatha? Those drumbeats are caused by Longellow's careful arrangement of words so that their naturally accented syllables fall into a rhythmic pattern. But Longfellow's poem doesn't rhyme.Meter is more powerful than rhyme.By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,By the shining Big-Sea-Water,Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.Dark behind it rose the forest,Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,Rose the firs with cones upon them;Bright before it beat the water,Beat the clear and sunny water,Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.There the wrinkled old NokomisNursed the little Hiawatha,Rocked him in his linden cradle,Bedded soft in moss and rushes,Safely bound with reindeer sinews;Stilled his fretful wail by saying,“Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!”Lulled him into slumber, singing– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)Wow. Henry's been gone 125 years but his word-dance continues to enchant us.The poet hopes to move you, to make you see things differently, to alter your perspective. The poet hopes to persuade.If you don't want to hear any more about poetry and its power to move people, you should plan on skipping next Monday's Memo.Because I'm going to aim an arrow at your heart.And it's not even Valentine's Day.Roy H. Williams

Advertising isn't working like it did a few years ago. You've noticed this, right?Most advertisers are convinced that technology is to blame.TV advertisers will tell you that TiVo and her sister Digital Video Recorders are blocking their television ads. But according to a recent report released by Leichtman Research Group, only 12 percent of American households own a DVR.But TV ad results are down far more than 12 percent.Radio advertisers will tell you that everyone is listening to iPods and satellite radio. But in truth, most of radio's loss has been in the 12 to 17 year-old age group. These pre-adults are now spending only 51 quarter-hours per week listening to commercial radio, down from a zenith of 65 quarter-hours per week during the pre-Internet 80s and early 90s. The rest of us are listening about as much as we ever did. We wake up to radio alarm clocks and listen at work and in our cars. Overall, the audience for commercial radio has declined only about 4 percent over the past 3 years.But Radio ad results are down far more than 4 percent.Online news aggregators gather worldwide news for us and deliver it instantly to our desktops. Traditional Newspaper subscriptions are at an all-time low and so are Newspaper ad results. But the results are declining faster than subscriptions.Yes, technology is to blame. But not in the way that you think.I'm paid according to how much my clients grow, remember? So I don't really care what the problem is. My job is to find it and fix it.Here's what I've discovered, tested and proved:1: Internet surfing has trained us to disregard empty words.2: Relevance has become more important than repetition.Bottom line: Meaningful messages are working better than ever, especially when the fundamental premise of your ad is clearly stated in the opening line. Ads full of unsupported claims and overworked “image-building” phrases are being rejected before they ever enter the brain. So say what matters. Say it tight, say it true.The audience is still there. What's gone is their willingness to pay attention to drivel.You spend about a minute each day going though the mail delivered by the Post Office, right? Before Yahoo and Google came along, those 6 minutes each week constituted your total weekly exercise in the high-speed evaluation of content. But now you're spending more than a quarter-hour per day scanning search engine results and web pages for relevant, meaningful, salient information. These daily quarter-hours are teaching you – and your customers – to more quickly recognize and disregard word-fluff and other irrelevant information. We're learning to filter out hyperbole and empty phrases.Is this beginning to make sense to you?To make your advertising work like it should, you're going to have to:1. Talk about things your customer actually cares about.2. Write your ads in a style that rings true.3. Avoid heroic chest thumping. “We are the number one…” is now considered gauche and passé.4. Close the loopholes in your ads. Offer evidence to support what you say.5. Be specific. Details are more believable than generalities.6. Deliver a real message. Substance is more important than style.Creativity and repetition can no longer cover up the fact that an advertiser has nothing to say. You've got to have a message that matters.Do you?Roy H. Williams

Are you a one-person company with a lunch-money ad budget?Good News: Time and money are interchangeable. You can always save one by spending more of the other.When money is tight, spend time.(If you don't have any money AND you don't have any time, then you're spending your time on the wrong things.)The key to low-budget advertising is to focus on small groups and individuals.Here are some ways to do it:1. Door-hangers on Doorknobs. If your target is geographically defined, print doorknob-hangers and hang them on doors in your area. Results will be proportionate to the strength of your offer. So make your offer detailed and specific. “Join us for worship this Sunday morning” is less likely to bring visitors to a church than “Single Parent Support Group meets Wednesday nights at 7:00. Childcare provided.” When I was young and in the seamless guttering business, I'd walk yard-to-yard diagramming rooflines on estimate sheets. The homeowner came home to find taped to their door a schematic of their roofline with my detailed bid for what it would cost to install seamless guttering on their home. Worked like magic. COST: Ink, estimate sheets, and shoe leather.2. Flyers under Windshield Wipers. If you need to reach the drivers of a specific type of vehicle, such as pickup trucks, what better way than to walk your doorknob-hanging shoes across parking lots putting flyers under windshield wipers? Yes, you'll occasionally get run out of a parking lot by a security guard in a golf cart and some lonely soul who needs a life will call to complain that you're ruining the environment, but the results are usually worth the hassle.3. Purchased Word-of-Mouth. Ride up and down in the elevators of tall buildings, stand at bus stops, wait at crosswalks or hang around in coffee shops to tell strangers about your business. “Have you heard about _______? It's awesome.” It sounds nuts, I know, but it works. Pay a kid or do it yourself.4. Virtual Showroom. Convert your website to a virtual showroom. Use it as an instantly deliverable, interactive brochure when people call to ask details about your company, your products or your services. “Are you sitting in front of a computer? Good. Now go to BlahBlah.com. Yeah, that's me. Now click the button that says ‘Equipment.' See that second photo?” Think of this website as a place where you sit down to talk with interested prospects. Make sure the virtual showroom is equipped with all the same tools and props as your physical showroom. You'll be shocked what it does for the conversion rate of inquiries.5. Nighttime Silhouettes. You've probably never seen one of these… which means no one else in your town has seen one either. First, locate a tall wall in a part of town that has lots of traffic at night, especially foot traffic. Then arrange with the owner of that building – and the building across the street – to let you install a logo projector. They're effective and cheap. In some situations you can even use an old slide projector to achieve the desired effect.6. T-shirts and Vests. My little ad firm with its 41 offices worldwide was launched in 1978 with a T-shirt advertising a thought-for-the-day recorded on a telephone answering machine. “Take a Break in Your Day. Dial Daybreak. 258-7700.” I could only afford one such printed t-shirt. I wore it a lot. Daybreak evolved into the Monday Morning Memo and a trilogy of bestsellers, then became the foundation upon which Wizard Academy was built. Have you visited our 22-acre campus?7. Hand Stamps. One of my friends recently attended a ticketed event that required a hand-stamp for readmission. The hand-stamp was a delightful little mini-ad for one of the sponsors. Can you imagine a better advertising vehicle for creating personal identification with a brand? There's something about looking down at your own hand and seeing a logo and knowing that the image has value. You're having fun, the brand is there, and it's part of you. The ink might wash off, but the impression doesn't fade so quickly.8. Publicity Stunt. Few things are as powerful as a publicity stunt that wins public attention. Going for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records requires a lot of work, but holding a world record is extremely cool. Did you hear about the guy who dropped a golf ball at the edge of Mongolia, then whacked it 1,234 miles all the way to the other side? The journey required 12,170 swings of the club, 90 days and 510 lost balls. But he got interviewed by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show followed by The Today Show, CNN, CNN International, CTV, ESPN Cold Pizza, and PGA Tour Sunday. Articles were published about him in the New York Times and the Times of London. Then the Associated Press issued a worldwide story about the exploit. Outside Magazine featured him as one of its 25 Coolest People, the Men's Journal put him in their Hall of Fame, National Public Radio broadcast their interview with him from coast to coast, then several European radio networks jumped on the bandwagon. Not a bad R.O.I. on a 90-day investment.9. Self-Publish a Book. Nothing screams “expert” quite so loudly as writing a book on a subject. So get an ISBN number, register it with the Library of Congress, pay a printer to print your book, then sell it on Amazon.com. You may sell only a few copies, but the copies you give away will make you a fortune. You won't make any money on the book. But you'll make a fortune because of the book.10. Spray-Painted Signs. In the early 1970s, “Hamp Baker says Drive with Care” was spray-painted on car hoods salvaged from crumpled automobiles, then those hoods were tied with bailing wire to barbed-wire fences across the state. Nobody in Oklahoma had ever heard of Hamp Baker, but his name was soon a household word. When he ran for public office, he won by a landslide.You may have noticed that each of these things requires time and creative energy. There's no one you can call to do these things for you, you've got to do them yourself. But if you're willing to spend a little time to make a lot of money, pick 1 or 2 items from the list above, then get to work.And prepare to be amazed.Roy H. Williams

Are you anxious to look foolish in front of others?Will you happily submit yourself to ridicule?Are you willing to do a thing badly until you've learned to do it well?Probably not, unless you're the one in five hundred who has what it takes to succeed.“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. KennedyThe lone pioneer plunges ahead and discovers a world while four hundred and ninety-nine settlers whine for maps and roads.America was founded by pioneers.How might we dull a glistening nation?1. Pay the dullest and least impressive to educate the children.2. Create a system of teaching that judges everything as “correct” or “incorrect.” This will allow the dull and unimpressive to easily grade the children's tests.3. Discourage exploration.4. Reward conformity. Teach that inside the box is good.5. Celebrate sports. Make sure the children understand that taller, stronger kids have natural advantages that cannot be overcome. Build stadiums and hire announcers to shout the names of students who display physical dominance.6. Minimize school concerts and science fairs and art shows. Treat them as though they're for losers. Have them in the school cafeteria.Follow these 6 Simple Stepsand you can expect:1. Drop-Outs. Currently, 38 percent of America's children are dropping out of high school and that number is rising.2. Cloned Repetition. Have you noticed that every mall has exactly the same stores as every other mall and that every city has all the same restaurants?3. Death of Industry. The cars of once-mighty GM and Ford no longer excite us. We want cars designed by the children of foreigners.4. Street Gangs. If school taught us anything, it's that physical dominance is the key to reward.An outsider, observing how we educate our children, would be forced to conclude that we value:1. Efficient mediocrity, and2. Going in circlesBut do we really want to become a nation of Wal-Mart shoppers and NASCAR fans?Jeffrey Eisenberg told me that last line would horribly offend you. I hope he was wrong.Princess Pennie said that bright, motivated school teachers would feel marginalized and attacked. This certainly wasn't my intention. I know that every school has two or three dazzling teachers who are committed to doing all they can within the current, flawed system. These teachers know they could earn twice the money in the private sector but they're selling their lives just as surely as any other missionary, and they deserve our respect and admiration. But such teachers are the exception, not the rule.America's school system needs a major overhaul. My goal today is to remind you that, “If we don't change direction soon, we're likely to arrive where we are headed.”GOOD NEWS: Wizard Academy is now recognized by the government of the United States as an official, non-profit educational organization. Thanks to the tireless efforts of board member Corrine Taylor, we've been granted our 501c3.Unleash the hounds.Roy H. Williams

My friend and fellow Worthless Bastard Brett Feinstein occasionally quotes his business partner, Jamie, as saying, “Be for what is.” I think I understand what Jamie is saying.There are basically two ways of seeing:1. the way things ought to be.2. the way things are.Do you find yourself moaning about the injustice of it all and wishing that things were different? Follow the advice of Jamie and Bigteeth Ted, who said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”Be for what is.I wrote about this in chapter 76 of my first book, The Wizard of Ads. “Weasels are everywhere, incessantly singing their sad little song: If Only. 'If only I had a better education.' 'If only my boss liked me better.' 'If only I had married someone else.' 'If only I had invested in Chrysler when it was fifty cents a share…' There's a little weasel in all of us, and that weasel needs to be slapped. When your ears hear your lips start to sing the Song of the Weasel, you must learn to immediately slap the weasel within.”Now that we've established the wisdom of a pragmatic, clear-eyed worldview, let's examine the equal-but-opposite wisdom offered by that other hemisphere of your brain, the right:What might happen if a person simply rejected the way things are and insisted on seeing them as they ought to be?1. First, the person would be considered irrelevant, an impractical dreamer.2. If persistent, they'd become a nuisance.3. Then a renegade, a rebel, a lunatic and a heretic.4. Finally, a serious troublemaker and a borderline criminal.5. Later, the founder of a movement.Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King.“Every man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.” – Mark Twain“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard ShawI'm not trying to be mysterious when I say I agree with both of these equal-but-opposite worldviews. We must Be for What Is if we are to accomplish anything in the short term, and we must Be the Crank with a New Idea if tomorrow is going to be better than today.Wizard Academy is a school for cranks with new ideas. Our plan is to change the world, one perspective at a time. I really can't put it more plainly than that. Is there anything in your world that needs changing? Come to Austin and we'll talk about it.It was my favorite pioneering educational genius from Brazil, Paolo Freire, who said,“Education either functions as1. an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or2. it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”Paolo Freire would have liked Wizard Academy.Helen Keller would have been at home here, too. She said, “The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”Wizard Academy alumni are the creators of tomorrow's orthodoxy in the sciences, the arts, and marketing.I believe Pablo Picasso would have loved it here. “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”You gotta love the Pablo.But I think Robert Frost may have said it best:“Most of the change we think we see in lifeIs due to truths being in and out of favor.”Like me, Frost realized that both perspectives are true. Our society simply moves from one extreme to the other in an arc spanning exactly 40 years. And we've been doing it since the beginning of time.I suppose that's enough rambling for one day. Click the hyperlinks above and below if you want to stay on the trail of the elusive rabbit.Be well.Yours,Roy H. Williams

Silence is a language of context.White space is silence in print ads.Visual saturation is its opposite.Shadow is another language of context.Silence is seen and shadows are heard in the dim-light quiet of the printed word:We had come home.We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat….I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.John was talking, then he wasn't.– excerpted from The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion's attempt to comprehend her husband's sudden death after 40 years of marriage.The Cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop – next class Mar. 6 – will remember a visual technique called Frameline Magnetism which calls upon the imagination to fill in what was strategically left out. The technique works with words, as well.What did Joan Didion leave out? By stripping away the adjectives, Didion polished and accelerated her words toward greater impact.Here's another example of Verbal Frameline Magnetism:“You can't come in now,” one of the nurses said.“Yes I can,” I said.“You can't come in yet.”“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.– from Hemingway's A Farewell to ArmsAgain, no adjectives. Neither did the following words appear: room, entered, lying there, dead, sadness, love. Yet we saw and felt these things just as surely as if the words had floated above the paper and sparkled with light. Hemingway, like Didion, wrote cleanly, leaving your imagination to fill in what he strategically left out.Here's what the technique looks like when aimed at advertising:You've seen the condos in Myrtle Beach that overlook the ocean.Rich people own those. And when they're not using them, we rent them out to nice families like yours for about the same prices you've been paying for hotel rooms.Put yourself in their shoes.The condo is paid for and empty.Why not let it generate a few bucks?Now put yourself in their condo.We're Condotels. Our job is to welcome you upon your arrival in Myrtle Beach and hand you the keys to your luxury condo. It's as easy as staying in a hotel. But better. A lot better.VacationLikeKings.com# # # #The amateur knows what to include.The expert knows what to leave out.Adjectives are crutches.Clean is fast.Can you writefast and light?Do it. Watch what happens.Roy H. Williams

You're deeply unhappy with the way things are, but you're not quite sure what to change or who to blame. Depression is the name we give to unfocused anger.Grief is the name we give to Anger + Sorrow.Cruelty is the name given to Anger + Joy.And Envy is Anger + Desire.The difference between desire and envy is that desire isn't angry. But if you desire a thing and you're angry that you don't have it and another person does, that's envy.Any theatre actor can portray sorrow. If the corners of the mouth and eyes turn downward, the person is obviously sad. It's an emotion easily communicated. But grief is harder to portray because grief is two feelings at once. An actor who understands this – and knows which two feelings equal grief – is better equipped to deliver it.This technique for portraying complex emotions onstage is just one more application of Thought Particle Theory.Likewise, this same theory of Thought Particles is being used to quantify the 100 touchpoints of the Customer Experience Factor. When you walk into a store and it feels good to you, what are you unconsciously measuring? What sensory factors are being gathered and totaled in this unspoken mathematics of feeling?Using Thought Particle technology, these factors have now been identified and made measurable so that your physical store can be objectively scored in each of the most relevant touchpoints. Would you like to know how your facility compares to your competitors in all the different ways that customers care about but can never quite articulate? Would you like to know how your aggregate score compares to the national average for your specific NAICS category? Would you like to have a list of exactly the changes you'd need to make to take your store to the next level?Readers who love my simpler stuff often sneer at my theory of Thought Particles. Do you?Stay tuned. The beagle is alive and well and on the loose.Would you like to go romping through the woods with us?Roy H. Williams

Glance at the headline above and you think, “Imaginary characters.”Add angels to that list and the category will blur to “Characters who do good” if you're a believer in angels, but will remain unchanged if you consider them to be imaginary.Change it to read “Peter Pan, Superman, Angels and Airplanes” and a new category will emerge, “Things that can fly.”Pattern recognition is an important function of the right hemisphere of your brain.Grouping is a form of pattern recognition.The Atomists of the late 1800's believed the nature of things to be absolute and not dependent on context. Gestalt theorists disagreed. They believed the human mind instinctively creates wholes out of incomplete elements and that the nature of a thing is greatly altered by its context.You've likely never heard of the Atomists. This is because they were wrong.The Gestalt Theorists, however, were right. They said that humanity's instinctive grouping of characteristics causes us to interpret things in predictable ways.The laws of organization that determine grouping are:(1) proximity – items will be grouped according to their nearness(2) similarity – items similar in some respect will be grouped together(3) closure – items will be grouped to complete a larger entity(4) simplicity – items will be organized into simple figures according to symmetry, regularity, and smoothness.Understand these laws of organization* and you will:(A.) enlarge your power to transfer perception, communicate.(B.) accelerate your ability to solve problems.New subject: Can you fly?Can you?Now let me ask differently: In your mind, can you?You probably weren't sure how to answer the first question, “Can you fly?” because you didn't know if I was being literal or figurative. When I asked the follow-up “Can you?” it triggered some doubt and caused you to think that perhaps I was asking if you could actually fly.Context matters. Claude Monet knew the color of an object would change according to the reflections of objects near it. This understanding of context allowed him to unleash a visual phenomenon known as French Impressionism.And great writers know the same thing; the meaning of a word is altered by the reflections of the words near it.John Steinbeck, in a note to his friend, Pascal Covici, said, “It is as though the words spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.”Choose your words according to the baggage they carry. And then pair those words with others that carry similar bags and watch for the reflected colors.Superman + Peter Pan = Imaginary Characters.Superman + Airplanes = Things That Can Fly.Teacher, are you ready to fly? Before you stretch your wings, let your face feel the glow from the words of the Great Ones. John Steinbeck, Tom Robbins, Neal Stephenson…You know your way to the bookstore, right?Happy flying,Roy H. Williams