Roy H. Williams Quotes

Contrary to popular belief, Americans don't hate advertising.

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 the mistake altogether.

The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations.

String Theory describes energy and matter as being composed of tiny, wiggling strands of energy that look like strings. And the pitch of a string's vibration determines the nature of its effect.

Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent are real.

It is a lack of commitment, not a lack of talent, that damns you to mediocrity.

Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.

In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God's creation as music.

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

In marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction. Which do you want?

Preparation, mastery, can help you overcome your fear, but mastery alone is not enough. There has to be something you want that’s worth more to you than your fear.

You see a person when you look in the mirror that no one sees but you. Other people see a person when they look at you, but you're not that person, either.

Everyone is broken a little, I think, and the most broken of all are those who pretend they are not.

Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they're mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.

Our actions are all that separate our daydreams from our goals.

Turning the other cheek isn't submissive. It's defiant.

Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light.

Month after month, Wizard Academy equips people who want to make a difference. This is why journalists and scientists and artists and educators and business owners and advertising professionals and ministers are attracted to our little school.

The person who achieves spectacular failure has at least attempted something bold. Failure is a temporary condition. Success is likewise temporary. Life, itself, is temporary - so quit hesitating. Do something!

Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

Human beings are creators, flinging powerful images into the minds of their fellow men. And all of these images are built of tiny particles of thought.

If you're not worried that you're pricing it too cheap, you're not pricing it cheap enough.

Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.

Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say.

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

The value of an item—in the mind of a consumer—is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag.

According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the 4 dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time.

Small thoughts fit easily into a closed mind, but big thoughts require an open one.

A meaningless statement remains meaningless no matter how often it's heard.

Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.

What this means is that the first week of every new series of ads will continue to yield softer results than you can expect to see in weeks two and three.

Use half as many words and they'll hit twice as hard.

The risk of insult is the price of clarity.

A polarizing mission statement forces the reader to choose between two sides of a line drawn in the sand. Rare is the business owner who has the courage to craft such a statement.

Consequently, a young business often grows by large percentages. Mature businesses rarely do.

A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the this and the that, pulling us toward itself, allowing us to bridge into the unknown from the known.

Your heart, my friend, is the size of a stadium. If you try to fill it with small things - a new car, a vacation, a promotion at work, a bigger home, a stock portfolio - a mournful echo will fill your life. But if you fill your stadium with all of humanity and search for ways to make their lives better each day, you will find yourself in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing in the right way.

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

Take your inspiration from wherever you find it, no matter how ridiculous.

Follow a trail of bold mistakes and at the end of them you will find a genius.

No trade will be made unless they want the thing more than they want their money.

Passion doesn't create commitment; commitment creates passion. To what are you committed?

Guard the secret theater of your heart. See nothing there that you do not want to see happen in reality.

Embarrassment, or the risk of it, accompanies all your important choices.

Most ads are ignored because every customer has a mental filter that evaluates and dismisses both of these languages of Ad-Speak with a single question: What are they not telling me?

Excitement and reward exist only outside your comfort zone. You'll experience neither of them until you make yourself do something you really don't want to do. So what is it that scares the hell out of you?

A visual image is a simple thing, a picture that enters the eyes.

A good story often increases the salability of an item without increasing its actual value.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that we still have to hear the new ad 2 or 3 times before it begins to affect us, even when we’re already familiar with the advertiser in question and have a positive opinion of them.

The first step in persuasion is to entice your target to imagine doing the thing you want them to do.