The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory.

They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.

This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.

When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.

A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.

A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.

Just now, my muse whispered to me,

“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman’s muse?’”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.

In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”

Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”

Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:

“Silvano Arieti’s book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti’s vast contributions to the field.”

Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world’s foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.

The other book he wrote was about creativity.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?

Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.

I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Roy H. Williams

Today’s rabbit hole is as wacky as today’s memo. You should check it out. I’m Indy Beagle.

Steven Gaffney’s client list reads like a “Who’s Who of America’s Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week’s amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The greatest companies are the ones with the happiest customers.

To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric.

Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.

1. Great companies ask, “How can we give our customers the buying experience that they would prefer?” They work at removing the friction from the customer experience.
2. Average companies ask, “How can we get our customers to give us more money, more often?” Average companies tells their marketing teams, “Sales is just a numbers game. Bring us twice as many leads and we’ll make twice as many sales. You bring’em in. We’ll close’em.”

But no matter what those marketing teams do, a decreasing number of people will respond to their ads. A negative customer experience drives customers away faster than marketing can bring them in.

Do you want to see what real customer-centric thinking looks like?

A client of mine recently wrote this email and sent it to all the people who work in his company. He forwarded it to me only as an afterthought.

SUBJECT: Pricing Reflection — Serving the Everyday Working American

Team,

Today I had a realization around some of our pricing. I’m all for setting prices that protect our margins and keep the business strong – but I’m equally committed to making sure we have price point items that the everyday working American can actually afford.

Let’s take a simple example: a toilet. Right now, most of our toilet installs are priced over $1,000. If we assume the median household income is $85,000, divided over 26 pre-tax paychecks, that’s $3,269 per check. A $1,000 toilet install is over 30% of that paycheck. That’s significant.

We need to remember who we’re here to serve – the nurse, the police officer, the office worker, the firefighter. These are people raising families, keeping their homes together, and doing the best they can. We cannot price them out of basic service. If we do, we risk not only losing today’s job – but any future relationship with that customer.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to run a low-margin business.

But I do want to make sure we have real options for real people. Today’s pricing structure on some of these essential services is a barrier – not just to customers, but to our own techs who are trying to present them.

Because of this realization, I immediately asked Jacob to find a toilet that we could install at a price point of $699. Well, guess what – we found one today. And we’re bringing it in and adding it to the price book at $649.

This one change will give our team more confidence to present a basic toilet option. What I’ve heard from Will – and it’s been consistent – is that this has been a never-ending battle. Technicians don’t feel comfortable presenting a $1,000 toilet to customers, especially when many of them wouldn’t pay that themselves. That lack of confidence translates to lower conversions and frustrated customers.

This reminds me of what we went through in HVAC when we had no system options below $15,000. We lost installs constantly – not because we weren’t good, but because we didn’t have a simple, no-frills option for people who just needed heating and air. Once we corrected that, we started closing more jobs and rebuilding our pipeline.

We need to apply that same logic here. During times like this, let’s price effectively so we can keep building our customer base and generate revenue day by day. When the tide turns – and it will – we can always maximize margin percentage where appropriate.

There’s an opportunity here. We can maintain strong...

The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the...

“Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness.

Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace.

Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.”

– Beagles of Destinae, chapter 4

Ideas pour into the dark waters of the unconscious mind, sparkling like reflected stars. As above, so below. The natives always said it was so.

But as Gemini sat on the throne of Aquarius, a dragonfish was born. And thus our story begins.

The twins did not mean to unleash a dragonfish, but they had never promised not to, either. And besides, a dragonfish is an adventure.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea,

and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,

And brought him strings, and sealing wax, and other fancy stuff.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail,

Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail.

Noble kings and princes would bow whenever they came,

Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name.

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,

Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.

One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

“Puff the Magic Dragon” with lyrics by Leonard Lipton and music by Peter Yarrow appears on the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary album, “Moving.” An urban myth soon arose that the song was about drugs. It’s really a backward look at childhood, and all that was left behind.

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“He saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.'”

– Luke, ch. 5

The book “Peter Pan” was written only after the 1904 play became a huge success.

On opening night, Mrs. Snow spoke to the playwright and author, J.M. Barrie about her late husband…

“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?”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“The secret of The Muppets is they re not very good at what they do. Kermit’s not a great host, Fozzie’s not a good comedian, Miss Piggy’s not a great singer… Like, none of them are actually good at it, but they love it. They’re like a family, and they like putting on the show. And they have joy. And because of the joy, it doesn’t matter that they’re not good at it. That’s what we should all be. Muppets.”

– Brett Goldstein

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust…

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up.”

– Peter

Pennie and I had a difficult week a long way from home.

It began with a piece of gravel that cracked her windshield.

Looking back, we should have just lived with it. But we didn’t know that at the time.

We dropped her car off at the appointed time on the appointed day. When Pennie picked it up, the upper-left corner of her new windshield whistled loudly at speeds above 30mph. She called the windshield people. They gave her a new appointment.

When we picked it up for the second time, the whistle was a little less loud than it had been, but she decided to live with it. There are a lot of things in life more annoying than a whistling windshield.

We didn’t know it, but we were about to experience several of them.

Driving for 4 hours in a rainstorm to see your mother in the hospital is not a bad experience unless your previously-whistling windshield is now pouring quarts of water into your car.

Things went downhill from there for several days.

I won’t bore you with the details because the real purpose of this note is to tell you what happened that turned everything around for us.

We discovered a wonderful French cafe just two blocks from Clearfork Hospital in Ft. Worth. Halfway through the meal, I went to their website to see if they had a location in Austin. They don’t, but I’m sure they soon will.

Meanwhile, Pennie went to romanticspotsfortworth.com to see if Clarissa had discovered and listed this amazing cafe.

Of course, she had. Clarissa is really good at her job.

Angela brought our next course to the table.

I said, “We found out about you at romanticspotsfortworth.”

To our delight, Angela said, “Yes! They sent us an award with the cutest logo on it! Everyone was excited.”

Pennie and I chose not to mention that we own the romanticspots websites.

When Angela departed, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the cafe’s website where I encountered a carousel of remarkable quotes.

“People who love to eat are always the best people.”

– Julia Child

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, from “The Hobbit”, spoken by Thorin Oakenshield

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

– Aesop, “The Lion and The Mouse”

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

– Andre Gide

Having been distracted by every bad thing that had happened since our 4-hour trip in a flooded car, these next two quotes hit me pretty hard.

“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of all.”

– Walt Disney

Each of the remaining quotes at the bottom of that menu lifted me a little bit higher.

“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, “The Secret Garden”

“True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.”

– Fred Jacob

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

– Dr. Seuss

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

And then this line lifted from “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Wolf made me smile and remember where I was.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

And then Andre Gide encouraged me to quit looking at what was behind me.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the...

“If people were paid according to how hard they work, the richest people on earth would be the ones digging ditches with a shovel in the hot summertime.”

That’s what my mother told me when I was a boy. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she continued.

“People who make a lot of money are paid according to the weight of the responsibility they carry and the quality of the decisions they make.”

Second only to grief, the weight of responsibility is the heaviest burden that a person can carry. Compared to those, a shovel full of dirt feels as light as feathers on a windy day.

When forced to choose between two evils, it brings a good person no joy to choose the lesser evil. Fewer people will be hurt, but the pain those people feel will be real.

A person who is not wounded by the pain they cause others is a sociopath.

Authority is power, and power is attractive. Tear away the tinsel. Scrape away the glitter and you will see that authority is just a fancy costume. You wear it when you are about to cause someone pain.

Every good person in authority has scars on their heart, memories of the pain they know they have caused others.

Sociopaths don’t care about the pain of others. They crave authority because they are weak, and the fancy costume lets them pretend they are strong.

Things get ugly when a sociopath has power.

“In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes – courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. – can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”

– Eric Hoffer, “Reflections on the Human Condition” (1973)

A person in authority who lacks compassion is a very small person wearing a badge.

As a young man, I admired cleverness. But I have lived enough years and cried enough tears that now I see the world differently. Today, I admire goodness. This shift in perspective helped me understand what Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

“Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth… In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

Viktor Frankl was a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a survivor of the holocaust. He was imprisoned in four different concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz where his mother was murdered, Dachau,and then Türkheim.

Viktor Frankl believed in freedom, but he refused to see it as a license to do whatever you want. To him, freedom without responsibility was an idiotic idea.

Isabella Bird was a well-educated woman who left Victorian England to explore the world in 1854.

When she arrived in the United States in 1873, she bought a horse and rode alone more than 800 miles to Colorado. In her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” (1879), Isabella wrote,

“In America the almighty dollar is the true divinity, and its worship is universal. ‘Smartness’ is the quality thought most of. The boy who ‘gets on’ by cheating at his lessons is praised for being a ‘smart boy,’ and his satisfied parents foretell that he will make a ‘great man.'”

“A man who overreaches his neighbor, but who does it so cleverly that the law cannot take hold of him, wins an envied reputation as a ‘smart man,’ and stories of this species of ‘smartness’ are told admiringly...

His name was Rab. He died in Bengal, the land of tigers, in 1941. On his way out the door, he said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”

When Rab was sixteen, he published a book of poetry under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, which means “Sun Lion.” Those poems were seized upon by literary authorities as “long-lost classics.”

Where do you hurry with your basket

this late evening when the marketing is over?

They all have come home with their burdens;

The moon peeps from above the village trees.

The echoes of the voices calling for the ferry

run across the dark water to the distant swamp

where wild ducks sleep.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Sleep has laid her fingers

upon the eyes of the earth.

The nests of the crows have become silent,

and the murmurs of the bamboo leaves are silent.

The labourers home from their fields

spread their mats in the courtyards.

Where do you hurry with your basket

when the marketing is over?

Rab wrote this in 1913,

Free me from the bonds of your sweetness, my love!

No more of this wine of kisses.

This mist of heavy incense stifles my heart.

Open the doors, make room for the morning light.

I am lost in you, wrapped in the folds of your caresses.

Free me from your spells, and give me back the manhood

to offer you my freed heart.

Famous for his role as President Jed Bartlet, Martin Sheen spoke several months ago at a White House event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the debut of “The West Wing” on television. He wrapped up his short speech by reciting a poem that Rab had written more than 100 years earlier.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rab knew that you and I would be here today, and he left us a message.

Who are you, reader,

reading my poems a hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower

from this wealth of the spring,

one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden

gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers

of a hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel

the living joy that sang one spring morning,

sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Rab – Rabindranath Tagore – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

He was the first non-European ever to win a Nobel Prize.

Roy H. Williams

NOTE FROM INDY: Speaking of Martin Sheen, his name has recently been mentioned in association with the book, “When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill.” Aroo.

A timber-framed cottage was built in Frog Holt, England, in the year 1450. Today, 575 years later, that cottage provides an important case study for business owners who are scaling their...

Michael Dell and Shaquille O’Neal planned their work and worked their plans.

Dell understood the formulas, and followed the rules, of efficiency.

O’Neal understood the formulas and followed the rules of basketball.

Each of them faithfully followed a Structural plan.

Michael Dell invented nothing, improvised nothing, and innovated only once. But that single innovation made him a billionaire. Dell’s innovation was to bring tested, reliable, proven methods of cost-cutting to the manufacturing and distribution of computers. When all his competitors were selling through retailers, Dell sold direct to consumer. This made his costs lower and his profits higher.

Michael Dell’s strengths are discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking.

Likewise, Shaq says, “I didn’t invent basketball, but I am really good at executing the plays.” Discipline, professionalism, and Structural thinking made Shaq an extraordinary basketball player. These same characteristics also made him an amazing operator of fast-food franchises.

“The most Shaq ever made playing in the NBA was $29.5 million per year. Now, it’s estimated that the big man is bringing in roughly $60 million per year, much of which is coming from his portfolio of fast-food businesses around the U.S.”

– 24/7wallst.com

Shaq didn’t invent car washes or Five Guys Burgers and Fries, but he owns more than 150 of each.

Michael Dell and Shaquille O’Neal are masters of Structural planning and thinking.

Structural thinking relies on proven elements and best practices. “Gather the best pieces and processes and connect them together like LEGO blocks. What could possibly go wrong?”

Structural planning and thinking:

Invent, Improvise, Innovate?

“NO, because those things are untested. We want to avoid mistakes.”

Reliable, Tested, Proven?

“YES!”

Steve Jobs and Michael Jordon are masters of Gestalt planning and thinking.

Gestalt planning and thinking:

Invent, Improvise, Innovate?

“YES!“

Reliable, Tested, Proven?

“NO, because those things are predictable. We want to be different.“

The fundamental idea of Gestalt thinking is that the behavior of the whole is not determined by its individual elements; but rather that the behavior of the individual elements are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.

It is the goal of Gestalt thinking to determine the nature of the whole, the finished product.

Gestalt thinkers who can fund their experiments and survive their mistakes often become paradigm shifters and world-changers.

Steve Jobs got off to a slow start because he refused to use MS-DOS, the operating system that everyone else was using. But he was sensitive to the needs and hungers of the marketplace. When Steve Jobs had a crystal-clear vision of the things that people would purchase if those things existed, he brought those things into existence.

Structural thinkers rely on planning and execution. Gestalt thinkers rely on poise and flexibility, often deciding on small details at the last split-second. Ask a Gestalt thinker why they do this and most of them will tell you, “I decide at the last minute because that is when I have the most information.”

The reason you never knew what Michael Jordan was going to do is because Michael Jordan had not yet decided. Michael’s internal vision was simple and clear: “Put the basketball through the hoop.” With the clarity of that crystal vision shining brightly in his mind, Michael could figure out everything else along the way.

Gestalt thinkers like Steve Jobs and Michael