I was watching a few of Evan Puschak’s “Nerdwriter” videos when I heard my own inner voice composing a thank you note to him. In the quiet of my mind, I told Evan that I have always found his analysis of literature, movies, music, photographs, and paintings to be incisive and insightful.

Incisive

Insightful

Those two words, back-to-back, hit me so hard that I stumbled and fell backward into a bottomless chasm of grief over the loss of Andrew Cross.

Evan Puschak is incisive.

Andrew Cross was insightful.

“Incisive” conjures the precision of a scalpel as it slices open a surface to reveal what is hidden inside.

“Insightful” describes the inner workings of intuition as it quietly assembles a mosaic in the mind.

I was going to say that I have a “parasocial relationship” with Evan Puschak and Andrew Cross, but then I decided that I should check to make sure that “parasocial relationship” means what I think it does. Here’s what Captain Google told me.

“A parasocial relationship is a one-sided, imagined connection or bond a person develops with someone they don’t know personally, usually a media figure or celebrity, often feeling a sense of intimacy or familiarity despite the lack of reciprocity.”

Yep. It means exactly what I thought it did. 🙂

This is Andrew Cross, the Desert Drifter.

“Years ago, I ventured into a canyon alone. I thought I saw something perched high on a cliff. I looked closer. It was an ancient ruin of some kind. I assessed the climb to reach it, and I backed down. It looked too intimidating, but I’m not who I was back then.”

“Nerdwriter” Evan Puschak has built a YouTube channel of 3.2 million subscribers over the past 13 years.

“Desert Drifter” Andrew Cross built a YouTube channel of 484,000 subscribers in just 13 months. Both men are 36 years old.

I continue to watch with anxiety as Andrew climbs impossible stone cliffs,hundreds of feet high, to examine the ruins of 1,000-year-old Native American cliff dwellings.

I never suspected that Death would be waiting for Andrew at the corner of 1st Street and North Avenue near his home in Grand Junction, Colorado.

While he was still with us, Andrew took hundreds of thousands of people like me with him – one at a time – to explore remote places that few people will ever see. And he never failed to share his wonder:

“I had finally arrived. Arrived at what? Was the ruin itself what I was really searching for after all? As I looked around at the remnants of what once was, I pondered the reason I do all of this in the first place.”

“Confucius once said, ‘By three methods we may learn wisdom. First by Reflection, which is noblist. Second by Imitation, which is easiest. And third by Experience, which is the bitterest.’”

“These open desert spaces provide opportunities for all three of those. And they always beckon me to return. As long as I am able, I will answer their call, to discover more about myself and the people who have called this place ‘home.’ As you join me, my hope is for you, too, to find space for reflection, and the pursuit of wisdom.”

“Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.”

It was a delight to spend those hours with you, Andrew.

The world is smaller now that you are gone.

Roy H. Williams

Michael Drew helps authors turn their big ideas into nationwide influence and income. He has guided more than 130 book authors onto major bestseller lists — including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His methods are not just for seasoned authors. Michael...

Magical Thinking is often misunderstood.

Jason Segel plays a psychologist in the Apple + TV show, “Shrinking.” He is talking to a patient with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

He looks at her. “This again?” She is holding her breath. He says, “You looked at the clock and now you have to hold your breath until the minute changes?” Holding her breath, she nods her head. He says, “Look, I know you feel like this compulsion is gonna help keep bad things from happening, but that’s called magical thinking.”

Medical News Today says, “Magical thinking means that a person believes their thoughts, feelings, or rituals can influence events in the material world, either intentionally or unintentionally.”

But the summary of that article says, “This type of thinking does not always cause harm. In fact, it can have benefits.”

The benefits of magical thinking are – according to me – exquisite.

Magical thinking is the least destructive way to escape reality. When you compare it to alcohol, gambling, drugs, or adrenaline-producing dangerous behaviors, magical thinking is about as dangerous as eating raw cookie dough.

Magical thinking is a requirement when you are:

1. looking forward to a vacation, a wedding, or other happy event. Every time you imagine the future, you are visiting a world that does not exist.
2. enjoying a television series, a movie, a novel, a poem, a song, a cartoon, or any other type of fiction. Half of your brain knows these things never happened, but the other half of your brain doesn’t care.
3. being persuaded by a well-written bit of advertising.

Life is happier when it’s less cluttered.

Your house will be bigger.

Your teeth will be whiter.

Angels will sing.

You’ll be a better dancer.

Go to 1800GOTJUNK.com

And prepare to be amazed.

Words create realities in the mind.

Magical realism is a type of writing characterized by elements of the fantastic – woven with a deadpan sense of presentation – into an otherwise true story.

If you exaggerate, people won’t trust you. But if you say something so impossible that it cannot possibly be true, people will be delighted by the possibility you popped into their mind.

SARAH: When your home feels clean and happy, the people inside feel clean and happy.

BRIAN: I’ve got a partner who lives down the street from you and we’re anxious to bring you a truckload of SPRINGTIME. [sfx magic sparkle]

SARAH: You don’t have to lift a finger!

Predictability is the silent assassin of advertising.

Magical realism focuses the imagination, disarms the assassin, and delights the mind.

BRIAN: We make junk disappear. [sfx magic sparkle]

SARAH: All you have to do is point.

Magical thinking is good for your soul.

Magical realism is good for your business.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Roy H. Williams

The reinvention of Gigi Meier is nothing short of remarkable. After three decades at the boardroom level of a multi-billion-dollar bank, Gigi reinvented herself as a romance writer. Gigi has published 16 books, some quite steamy, across three ongoing series. Did Gigi to draw on her extensive banking experience to fuel her publishing success? No! She tells roving reporter Rotbart that the opposite is true! Gigi has discovered valuable insights as a romance publisher that would have been useful during her banking career! No one has guests as interesting as roving reporter Rotbart. Am I right! This party will get started the moment you arrive...

Brian Brushwood knows how to gain and hold attention in social media.

Reaching for that brass ring causes most people to lean too far off their plastic horse on the social media merry-go-round.

SPLAT! They land flat on their faces with only a few hundred views.

Brian has built a YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers, an entirely different channel to more than 2 million subscribers, and 12 days ago he produced a 1-minute “short” that had 3.6 million views on the first day, and at the time of this writing – on Day 12 – it has climbed to 17.1 million views.

And you – yes, you – could have shot that exact same video with nothing more than a cell phone.

I asked Brian if I could ask him a few questions on ZOOM for the Monday Morning Memo. Here are a some of the things he shared with me:

“There’s a temptation, especially with YouTube, to perpetually feel like you’re too late. You’re never too late. I thought I was too late to start YouTube in 2006 because it had been around since 2005. It was already seeing its early superstars. And I started in 2006. And then I thought by the time Scam School came to YouTube in 2009, I thought it was too late. It wasn’t too late. I thought it was too late in 2016 when we launched the Modern Rogue. It wasn’t too late.”

“YouTube is the dominant market now.”

“Facebook is now pay-to-play. And for some messaging, that works. It’s worth paying the money to get the message out there. But if you’re trying to build organic fans like I am, it’s not a fit.”

“TikTok: there’s only one star of TikTok, and that’s TikTok. You can get a million views one day and the next day you’ll get 800. And it’s agonizing because they literally just want to lure you into their dopamine trap. Whereas YouTube is a meritocracy.”

“And here’s the beauty. If you think about YouTube as your personal agent… What personal agent knows your material all the way back to the very first time you ever posted anything? And also it knows the customer, your client, your prospective new best friend, their entire history of everything they’ve ever watched.”

What can you do for me in one hour, Brian?

“We can crack who you are, what you do and do not do, and craft your storytelling engine.”

“Have you noticed, Roy, that on YouTube, so much of the content boils down to, ‘Can you blank with a blank?’ Or ‘How to blank with a blank.’ And these are transactional things. Either they trade on curiosity, or they trade on things that people are searching for. But very quickly, all you have to do is get on paper what your flavor is – that’s called in fancy Hollywood talk – ‘a style guide.'”

“Now, I don’t want to intimidate anybody… You know what, if I did want to intimidate people, I’ll say, ‘In one hour, Roy, I can give you a story bible, a style guide, I can give you a structure, a framework, a narrative storytelling. I could break down the beats of your three-act structure. We could consider the Campbellian monomyth, all those things.'”

“We could get that done in an hour and technically I’d be accurate. But the way I would explain it to anybody watching this is, ‘Give me an hour and I’ll teach you not how to tell a story; I’ll teach you to tell all the stories, because stories are happening to you all the time. Every client that has a setback is an amazing story.'”

“It is so dead simple.”

“Now that doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it is simple. The first hour is basically everything you’re going to need to know. Everything past that is reinforcement, and everything after that is refinement.”