I was 16 during the winter of 1974.

Ted was 52.

We worked together in a steel fabrication shop in Oklahoma.

I was known as “Schoolboy.”

1. Use Words that have Specific Meanings.

“The bug moved along the ground, deciding which way it should go.”
“The ant crawled between the blades of grass, peeking left and right at every intersection.”

Your life is a singular journey; a generation is a collective journey.

We’re circling an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.

You bought it for 50 cents.
You sold it for a dollar.
You made 50 cents.

What was your percentage of profit?

Do you sell a product or service that is reassuringly expensive?

Ronny is selling $700 vacuum cleaners through a direct-response television campaign he created after attending, “How to Sell Upscale Products and Services” at Wizard Academy.

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour and a half on television speaking to a nationwide audience of several million viewers.

They wanted me to talk about Pendulum, the book we published in 2012.

The statesman, according to Wikipedia, “who is often regarded as the father of modern conservatism,” was Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). I was unaware of this until I stumbled upon it while searching for the origin of the famous statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Science is the study of objective reality.
Art is the study of subjective reality.

Subjective reality is perception through filters. It is interpreted reality, romanticized reality, imagined reality. It is your own personal fiction.

Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction.

He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had.

September 17, 1787: When George Washington saw the Constitution of the United States of America finally adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of Don Quixote de La Mancha.1

I’m betting you’re extremely good at something, perhaps at more than just one thing.

Let’s face it: you’re talented – gifted, in fact – a classic overachiever. But the odds are 7 in 10 that you find it difficult to accept and believe these compliments.

Why do old songs pop into our heads? Unheard for decades – and often a song we never even liked – there it is, filling the echo chamber of the articulatory loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association areas of our brains.

The cognoscenti will remember two big statements glittering on the screen behind me during the opening moments of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop:

Time and Money are interchangeable.
We can always save one by spending more of the other.

I scribbled my original “Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Marketing” on a hotel bar napkin in Portland, Oregon in 1997 and then presented those mistakes in a seminar the next day to 800 people.

In the advertising business, RFP means “Request For Proposal.” In other words, some big company wants you to dance for them. They want you to sit up and beg like a dog at the dinner table.

I’ve never responded to an RFP.

“Silence is golden.  Duct tape is silver.”  The wit of these 7 words is rooted in the fact that the second sentence is an anomaly – an unexpected intrusion into the oft-repeated idea that silence is golden. The anomaly is then brought to closure and resolved in the mind of the listener. Duct tape is, in fact, silver.  You smile a little.

Hungry people look for food.
Sad people look for hope.
Ambitious people look for opportunity.
Oppressed people look for escape.

In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

But day after day, week after week, month after month, things that are “merely urgent” keep me from doing what is truly important.

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods. - Dennis Miller

We think everyone else sees what we see. How could they not?

And we think everyone would believe what we believe if only we could explain it clearly.

But this is almost never true.