The Internet rose to its full height in 2005 and cast a bright shadow across the land. It became our newspaper, our telephone book, our encyclopedia and our primary mailbox.

Whole categories of advertising where swept away by that tsunami.

Do what people expect you to do, say what they expect you to say, and you will quickly lose their attention.

Nothing new… nothing surprising… nothing different. This is the essence of boredom. And it’s exactly what most advertisers put in their ads.

Let us suppose
that this everyday world
were at some one point
invaded by the marvelous.1

YOUNG ONE: “Master, does success go to the clever one, or to the lucky one?”

MERLYN: “Success is sometimes discovered by the clever one, and occasionally by the lucky one, but it is most often laid hold of by the determined one.”

Facts are stacked like bricks to become a tower. Do you see it?
But a story is a wave that takes you on a journey and leaves the memory of the tower far behind.

Facts are solid.
Stories are seductive.

Agnes De Mille once wrote,

“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”

Agnes was right about most of us, but she was completely wrong about Herbert.

Pressure, pressure, pressure unspeakable then BANG the world breaks open and a plateau pops up from solid rock, creating a fabulous view of the land below. That’s what happened in Central Texas.

That’s what happens in life, too. But we’ll talk about that in a minute.

When you challenge traditional wisdom, the first hand in the air will often be that of a guardian of the status quo who will challenge you with an “outlier argument,” pointing to that rare exception as though it disproves your premise.

What is the income range of snowboarders?
What is the age range of people who do yoga?
What is the age and income range of Carolina Panthers football fans?
What is the age and income range of Republicans?
What are the beliefs and opinions of a person who is 30 years old?
What the hell is a Millennial?

What stories do you tell yourself concerning your disappointments, failures and embarrassments? Were you the unfortunate victim of evil?

Perhaps it’s time you start telling different versions of those stories. Regret and fear are incapable of guiding you to Success.

The stories you tell yourself are the foundations of your self-image.

Blockbuster Video had 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees and $5.9 billion in revenues at their peak in 2004.

Then the installation of cable modems made streaming video possible.

Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection on September 23, 2010.*

Technology is a freight train that doesn’t care who is standing on its tracks.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

These are the words of an Entrepreneur who has an idea half-formed and a dream bigger than the sunrise. He or she believes that if you leap, a net will appear. Entrepreneurs are confident in the street-smarts they glean from their failures and their optimistic futurevision lets them see beyond the awkward and ugly “proof-of-concept” phase to the glowing innovation that lies beyond it.

Your company is approaching an intersection. The light is green.
Turn left and you’re headed toward Excellence.
Turn right and you’re headed toward another kind of Excellence.
Go straight and you’ll arrive at Mediocrity.

Branding – as it is taught today – will at best cause people to remember you and have a mild opinion.

But unlike yesterday’s branding, today’s bonding is the beginning of relationship, the essence of loyalty and the foundation of community among human beings.

Bonding, when done properly, makes people feel connected to you. It is the little-known secret of marketing to millennials* and their parents.

Some word-people feel it’s their duty to correct you when you use a word improperly. These people are pedantic, pointy-nose dogs determined to give you a posterior probe, pretending it’s for your own good.

I am not that sort of word-person.

You don’t need to go to college to become successful.

You own a business.
You sell a product or a service.
Your growth is limited by one of two things:

Since the year 2000, the cognoscenti of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop have happily endured the fanfare and pageantry of my 3-day explanation of Third Gravitating Bodies.

I made the decision 20 years ago that the Monday Morning Memo would rarely be about news or current events.