Successful advertising touches the hungers, wants and needs of a person. My job as a professional ad writer is to identify these needs and speak to them.

If you have a heart beating in your chest, you have hungers, wants and needs.

We can intellectualize our conscious needs, but we cannot intellectualize our unconscious ones.

All your friends, all your neighbors, all America, all the world has an unconscious need for encouragement right now.

The reason history repeats itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.

When people are frustrated, frightened or angry, they elevate a strongman to become their leader. We smile in memory of England’s blustering Winston Churchill, a devoted servant of his nation, and our own thundering Teddy Roosevelt, a devoted servant of our own. And who can forget the swaggering Douglas MacArthur wading to shore in the Philippines? Or steely-eyed George S. Patton who encouraged his men, his allies and his nation when he said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

We are encouraged by the swagger of the strongman.

But not all strongmen are good.

Russia was frustrated, frightened and angry when she turned to Josef Stalin in 1929.

Germany was frustrated, frightened and angry when a strongman overturned their democracy in 1933.

Japan was frustrated, frightened and angry when the boy they believed to be a god sent airplanes to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Frustrated, frightened and angry people gave power to Manuel Noriega of Panama, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Uganda’s Idi Amin.

It seems that everyone, everywhere today is frustrated, frightened and angry; the people across the street and around the corner; the people across the sea and around the world.

January 27, 2017: Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, said, “It looks as if the world is preparing for war.”

The antidote for frustration and fear is encouragement.

The antidote for anger is to listen, smile, and extend a hand.

I’ve decided to make this my year of encouragement.

I believe it’s what people need right now.

Will you join me?

I’m going to be unreasonably optimistic, ridiculously cheerful and oblivious to fear. Or at least that’s my plan. And I’m going to hand out sincere and honest compliments everywhere I go.

Encouragement can be conjured from the scantiest of materials.

If you do this with me, I can assure you that people will say we’re being foolish and naive and many of them will accuse us of seeing the world through rose-colored lenses. They will tell us we’re not being reasonable.

“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 Shaw

Yes, they’ll tell us we’re being unreasonable.

I’m okay with that.

Are you?

Roy H. Williams