Perry Marshall, thought leader extraordinaire, joins Tonya Dawn Recla to explain the potential business benefits of personal development. From demystifying Google AdWords to decoding sales and marketing to deconstructing evolution, Perry leaves no stone unturned. He also happens to be one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after business consultants. Clients seek his ability to integrate engineering, sales, art and psychology. Listen in as he talks super powers and how to spend your time doing $10,000 an hour work.

Hello everybody! This is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert. I’m a particular kind of thrilled today to have with us, Perry Marshall. I’m going to tell you before we bring him on why I’m particularly thrilled about this particular guest. Perry’s resume is very, very, very impressive. Most people will say it looks extremely good on paper, but I will tell you what really jumped out at me. This nice hybrid of the ultimate guide to Google AdWords and he’s a business consultant. He also serves as the expert witness in Google AdWords litigation, which who knew that was a field, right? It didn’t even register, but it makes perfect sense when you hear it.

“Perry’s an honest man in a field rife with charlatans.”

But what really jumped out at me was this quote. It just really got to the heart of me and I’m really excited about our conversation. He quotes from somebody saying, “If you don’t know who Perry Marshall is — unforgivable. Perry’s an honest man in a field rife with charlatans.” Here at Super Power Experts we are very, very, very big on transparency, in showing up fully in your own authenticity and autonomy. And that just really jumped out at me. In a world where, you can imagine, in the litigation world, even in the Google AdWords world, in all of those fields. He happens to also be an electrical engineer. He dances in some of these really traditional arenas. For somebody to say that and to have that perspective and in the short time that I got to chat with him before the interview, I can say that in full transparency that you can feel that from him. And so, I’m excited to have him share that perspective. So Perry, welcome to our show today. We’ll actually take a pause because I’m excited about our title too. Today’s show is about “Can Perry Marshall explain the potential business benefits of personal development?” Hi Perry. Welcome.

Hey, it’s great to be here. And I’m just glad that we can kind of have a little fireside chatter. It’s summertime, so I don’t know, maybe it’s not a fire, maybe it’s an iced tea chat.  I am kind of a personal development junkie of sports. I mean, I didn’t go to the Anthony Robbins seminar Walk on Fire but I’ve been to a lot of seminars and I spent an awful lot of my money trying to make myself better and yet is a personal development scam or not. It’s six o’clock.

Like I said, my bias is I think you absolutely can explain the potential benefits of it. Let’s jump in first and ask you, what are your super powers?

I actually have a list of six that I can tell you. I’ll give you the story after I tell you. I deconstruct. I invent. I write. I teach. I encourage and I evangelize. Those are my six things. The way that I came up with this is I got this assignment from Dan Sullivan and strategic coach and it was email 10 of your friends and ask them, “What do I do better than anybody else?” and take this class and can you tell me in your own words and people and the assignment was to sift, sort and distill the answers down until like you looked at what all the people said what most of the people said and reduce it down to one word or one phrase. I did that. Everybody should. The way I look at my work is that the more of those six that I’m using at any one time, the better fit that task is for me. The more valuable it is and the more I’m going to get paid for it. And in my book between sales and marketing I talk about how there’s a $10 an hour work and there’s $100 an hour work and there’s $1,000 an hour work and there’s even $10,000 an hour work. You’ll only do that $10000 an hour work if you’re on all your zones pretty much simultaneously. You must know yourself. That’s my super powers. That’s all six of them.

Well, those are impressive enough to say you are very prepared for that question. I love it. But I feel very clearly that it wasn’t necessarily preparation for that question that it feels very intrinsic to how you operate. I appreciate that even more. The value in the business sector and it’s fascinating because you really do see the delineation between business owners who are willing to take our look at themselves versus the ones that want to keep everything kind of external and off of them and about the business or about other people or about strategy and sales and everything else, without incorporating that real internal process. What have you seen over the years and in your experience distinguishes the folks who accomplish the most in business and experience the most in business success?

People that get the farthest are voracious about learning and implementation.

I found that the people that get the farthest are not just good learners. They’re voracious about learning. They’re voracious about implementation. They don’t starve themselves. I’ll tell you a story, my personal development stuff goes back to the early 90s and I got into Amway. I’m going to all the rallies and the seminars and I’m buying the tapes and I’m reading the books and basically drinking the pink Kool-Aid. That didn’t really work. I got a lot out of it and I got a lot of payoff, but I didn’t get a lot of payoff from that, if you know what I mean. Fact is, the whole thing was kind of a bust. Then I did find some good sources. For about two or three years, I kind of had this whole budget and “okay, this is what I’m going to spend developing myself.” Our money was pretty tight and stuff and I wasn’t. Go for broke about it as I was in Amway because I’d been burned. Does that make you all sense?

It absolutely makes sense and we talked to a lot of people who have that same experience. It creates a lot of resentment over time and I think that that’s where a lot of people get turned off from the conversation altogether. That’s really what jumped out at me about that quote was the idea of here’s this guy in the midst of the charlatans. I love that word, the snake oil salesman. My husband and I coming out of the counter intel arena we started a business doing due diligence and B2B transactions specifically because we saw a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs getting taken for their money for reasons that really didn’t need to happen. That critical thinking deconstruction kind of thing is really helpful in those situations. I absolutely feel what you’re talking about there.

Planet Perry

The irony is I was go for broke when I was getting ripped off. And then I was cautious when I wasn’t getting ripped off anymore and that’s a little backwards. I think  you can see in. What I see is that people that really kind of break out and run ahead of the pack are able to kind of shed that reticence or the reluctance and just like, “man, I’m running for word. If I find a really good author I’m going to buy all their books. I’m going to go to all their courses. I’m not just going to kind of sample a little bit of this, a little bit of that and give their permission to be a little bit obsessive, if you will.” Look, really successful people are obsessive. In fact, a lot of customers that I have. One thing about my little tribe, we call it Planet Perry. We do have a lot of candid conversations. I had a lot of customers and clients who have addictive personalities and it’s usually multiple things. So it’s usually like really good things, like running their business and being excellent. And there’s usually some bad ones that come along with it. Like, no joke, I had a customer die of an opioid overdose about a month ago. Very sad. Now this is not normal. I’m not beginning to suggest that Period got like a little tribe of drug users or not. Not at all. But just to say that an addictive personality is an addictive personality and like you’re really into stuff. My friend who followed Van Halen all over the country. He’s also a good entrepreneur. For the same reason, when he chops down on something. I mean he is chopping down on that thing and he is not letting go just remorseless and relentless. Along with, I also think the ones that are most successful long term are the ones that are willing to be introspective. They’re willing to look at their demons. They’re willing to confide in other people. They’re willing to be critiqued and criticized by other people. They don’t live in some little bubble that feeds their ego. That’s a dangerous one. If you’re constructing a little world that feeds your narcissism, that’s a very bad sign.

Well, you’ve touched on so many key points. When I first heard the call, if you will, to create this like international personal development and what not, it was some of the key elements of it were exactly you’re talking about like the collaboration effect the accountability effect the you know peer to peer, like they growing transparently in the presence of others and things that over a period of business consulting and kind of coaching timeframe I saw really distinguish who was moving forward and who wasn’t not. And the balance of the inner and the outer worlds I think you encapsulated that really eloquently in the sense that you have to be out there and experiential and doing and experiencing and failing and getting back up and all that stuff. Interweave the inner journey also and I see that there seems to be folks that kind of are on either side of that: fully introspective or fully out there in the world. It’s that balance in that integration I think that where the sweet spot lies. So talk to me a little bit about how you know you’ve got kind of a vast array of experience from the using the ultimate guide a Google AdWords and all the way into this Evolution 2.0. You’re the perfect profile of something that’s doing this experiential thing. Talk to me a little bit about how you’ve kind of gone into all these different environments.

Engineering was where I learned all about digital code.

I believe, one of my core beliefs is that the whole universe runs on a fairly short list of simple principles and that they just combine together to make a very complicated world. Most people live at the level of all of the surface level complications and they think that every situation they encounter is new. When in fact, if you can just wrap your head around a few simple principles you’ll start to recognize that you’re dealing with the same stuff all the time. For example, people ask me all the time actually. So you’re an electrical engineer who built a marketing career and then wrote an evolution book,  like,  what does any of these things have to do with the other. My answer is all three of these things have everything to do with each other. The short answer is the engineering was how I learned all about digital code. And the whole you know the whole digital world is built on that. Google AdWords is a big giant evolution machine where you test ads and the winners dominate markets and the losers go bankrupt. It’s like a big giant videogame where you make lots and lots of money if you win. Right. Google AdWords is only a microcosm of how the wider world of evolution works it or it’s on the exact same rules. So like when you take antibiotics the doctor says, “you have to finished this bottle. Do not stop taking these until they’re all gone.”

Well the voice the voice of the universe: God is that you?

Perhaps. Well, why do you have to finish your antibiotics? Because if you don’t kill those little bugs they’ll evolve into super bugs in about a week and they will they will develop new features and they will rearrange their DNA because they are. If you’ve ever done Google ads or Facebook ads you hopefully know that you’re supposed to split test ads. Let’s try this, let’s try that. Well, that’s what germs do. So if you don’t kill them you don’t finish them off. Man they’re roaring back with a vengeance later. In fact, a germ can make a major evolutionary leap in about 30 minutes if he finds the right combinations like cracking the code on a walk. Which is sort of the feral invincible entrepreneur. You can knock him down but if you don’t kill him, you’re in trouble.

Oh, you said feral invincible entrepreneur.

I had this friend named Tom. Tom was visiting his friend at Stanford University . They had thrown away these rat cages. On the sight of these rat cages, Tom was looking at him he’s like what’s this tinfoil and the guy says that’s not tinfoil, that’s stainless steel but rats are feral and they gnaw on that stainless steel until it’s thin as tinfoil. Then we have to go get a new cage and throw the old one away, otherwise they’ll break out and they’ll spread all over the place. And Tom says to me and  just then I realized and this is how Tom thought, “just and I realized, entrepreneurs are feral men.”

It is not I would say.

You have to know how to evolve. When I wrote the book Evolution 2.0, it was actually because I was skating on the on the boundary between science and religion. I really wanted to know how this stuff all works. I just wanted to just get me to the truth here. What I realized is I got into in this is that I’ve been living this my whole entire life. Like the same thing that happens in a petri dish happens in one of those incubator centers that that they have down the street from the college campus where all the startups are. It’s like the same thing. It’s like we’re recombining different genes and different DNA. We’re crossing different organisms together and work or making hybrids and we’re making duck billed platypuses. If we do enough of these interesting experiments something amazing is going to happen. We’re going to be the next Uber or we’re going to be the next AirBnB. And our balls are going to be so big that everybody’s not going to be able to believe it.

We will get invited to banquets. And then we’ll run for president.

That doesn’t happen?

Sounds like, Zach is the next guy that wants to be president. How many lunatics can we have in a row?

Oh, I get it.  As much as I hate to take a quick break here, you’ve been listening to the SuperPower Up! podcast and we are searching for the answer to the very important question, “Can Perry Marshall explain the potential business benefits of personal development.” We will be right back to see if we can get a definitive answer on that. Stay tuned.

Visit SuperPowerExperts.com/theNET for more!

The feral invincible entrepreneur.

Awesome. We’re back again. We’re here with Perry Marshall and we are uncovering the very very earth shattering answer to the question, “Can Perry Marshall explain the potential business benefits of personal development?” And I got to say, Perry, you might be close, if not right spot on. I just can’t get over the feral invincible entrepreneur. I’m seeing all kinds of imagery with like this cape, and like the gnarling teeth and the saliva.

Maybe then you should change the name of your podcast to “The Feral Invincible Entrepeneur.” You got it from me for free.

Let’s not say that you never gave me anything. Let’s be hesitant to test that humor. Oh my goodness. So anyway, back on track. Focus. Focus. Focus. You said earlier, at the beginning of the show, that one of your superpowers was about evangelism. That caught my attention because one of the things that we talk about here a lot on the show and network is the idea that this is not a part time gig. There’s this evolved autonomous whole being type persona that a lot of successful business owners portray. The message that I keep espousing is the idea that it’s not like something that you just happen into. There may be circumstances that come easily but that there’s an intentionality to kind of stepping into that space that’s different than what the majority of the world might exist in. But also there’s this kind of idea of being and embodying it to the point where you kind of embrace this evangelical spirit. What did you mean by that specific word?

Well, evangelism is the idea that if Jesus rose from the dead, then if if it actually happened or if you’re Peter and a guy cut your ear off and he put it back on and it stuck then that’s really good news and you should go tell people about it. You don’t just sit on your butt and keep it all to yourself while the world goes to hell in a handbasket. What that speaks to in a more general sense is that if you create something that’s really great that’s going to help people, then the most natural thing is to go out and tell other people about it and use media and use advertising and use all that to build a business. Business is really actually do help people. There is this really negative anti business miasma that’s floating around out there. Let me tell you a story. In about twelve years ago, I was on this trip and I got invited to speak in Australia and they were paying for the plane tickets. I managed to get them to let me do a stopover in Nairobi. I went and visited this guy who ran a foster care program for AIDS orphans. In other words, kids whose both parents had died of AIDS and they needed help. This is actually a fairly depressing little trip, if you know what I mean. It was not all karma latte’s and frequent flyer bonus points but they’re doing good in the world and I’m right around with this guy. Some kept nagging me and finally said, “Hey, have you ever heard of micro-loans?” And he goes, “Oh yeah, we do those too. You want to see some of those people?” I said, “Sure. Show me some of those people.” So he takes me to this village and we walk in the door of a cobbler shop. There’s a guy fixing shoes. And ironically, the guy is crippled. He’s sitting with his crutches against the wall and he’s fixing shoes and there’s a line of people at the counter. They’re getting their shoes fixed. I looked at the guy and I talked to him and he talked to me through the translator and I noticed something. I noticed was this guy is wide awake, like everybody else I’m meeting there. They’re very nice. They’re very polite but they look worn out. They look wipe out like life is really hard and they just kind of have this dull look in their eye. He did not have that don’t like him. He had that sharp. I am totally here look in his eye. And while we’re talking, I suddenly have a flashback. It was almost Zen like and all of a sudden I imagine I’m back in Amway and I’m standing on a chair in a coliseum and I’m squirting sweet shot in the air, “we’re going to be diamonds” and all that. At first, I think that was kind of ridiculous and hey, wait a sec. This guy owns a cobbler’s shop. He’s totally wideawake. He has a successful business, at least by Kenya’s standards. It’s a successful business. His kids have uniforms for school. They have books. They’re going to school. They’re getting an education. He’s feeding his family. He’s a pillar of his community. He’s got a business that people want to come to. I suddenly realized, “when you were all excited about being an entrepreneur jumping up and down on your chair, what you were excited about was the same thing that this guy just did.” You wanted to have a successful business and you have one. And so does he. And you know what if you want to help people in the world like if you want to help AIDS orphans, it’s nice to have churches. It’s nice to have schools. It’s nice to have hospitals. It’s nice to have missionaries but if you don’t have an entrepreneur, you don’t get churches or schools or missionaries or churches or hospitals or anything. It starts with an entrepreneur. And I thought, “so what do you do for a living Perry. You consult people on getting their businesses off the ground. Hmm. Do you think that might be important?”

My dad was a minister and he did what we consider to be really important stuff like visiting people in hospital and whatever like that. Well, you know what. Being an entrepreneur is just as important as visiting people in hospital. And I realize that I suddenly like, “This is important. What you do is important. Don’t apologize for it.”

I think you should use the universal God’s voice when you say that.

This is important, Perry. This is an extremely important.

Perfect. I love it. I love how one, you were able to identify the fact that this guy was wide awake like he felt it. You knew it. You saw it. You determine the difference. Everything that you’re talking to me is the patterns that I’m seeing in all of the different genres and areas and these folks who are you know coming alive within these spaces and saying, “I think that this should probably look different or it can look different.” I see it in the legal professions and politics here and there in academia and government but ultimately it is the entrepreneurial mindset and the innovators who are pushing that envelope. As you were talking, I was, “it would be interesting if our government was run like a startup or something. Anyway, we could probably do ten shows on that topic but the idea and the connections that you’re drawing between being totally wide awake and doing good things in the world. I think that leads us closer to talking about the potential benefits specifically business benefits of personal development. Now, what’s fascinating is perhaps this gentleman that you interacted with hasn’t been to personal development seminars and perhaps he hasn’t invested any. Perhaps he has but I think we have a stereotype around what personal development is and we automatically equate it to the webinars and the workshops, and the books and the study programs and the coaches. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Do you have another example of maybe where you saw evidence of personal development and it wasn’t like our kind of westernized version of it?

Evolution is actually more cooperation than competition.

I don’t really know anything about the guy but what I do know is that he got a one hundred dollar loan and he got moving. One of the things that I know about micro-loans, a very common way that they’re structured is you get a village of people. Let’s say you got these 10 women and you’re getting a loan one of them $25 and she’s going to buy a sewing machine and she’s going to start a sewing business. And as soon as she pays back her $25 the next person gets their $25. Well, this is an awesome accountability program for her. You know, the $25 almost always gets paid back because there’s 10 people in line who don’t get their self-improvement until this lady bellies up to the bar and gets hers done. That means she’s not only got to take the money and invest it but she’s got to develop profit. She can’t buy beer with it and all this other stuff. There’s a lot of things that you can learn if you travel around and pay attention to this stuff. One of the points I make in the evolution book is that innovations almost always come from outsiders. And that’s actually true in evolution too. And since we’re talking about evolution I want to say something that’s really important. If you read the standard textbook descriptions of evolution, they’re really bad and bureaucratic. They’re written by bureaucrats who don’t know anything. And this was one of my frustrations. This is why I spent six years writing a book about something where it’s probably not even going to make me any money. It was because evolution is actually more cooperation than competition. I used this in business all the time. For example, I’m looking out my window right now and there’s all these trees and shrubs and grass and stuff. Every green thing that’s outside your window is green because it has a chloroplast. You’ll learn that in high school biology. But nobody tells you about chloroplast. Chloroplast actually is that blue green algae that lives inside a leaf or a blade of grass. Oh, I didn’t know that. I did. That is what it is. And so what happened is these big plant cells have formed a merger acquisition with algae. And it really is a merger acquisition. I know a scientist at the University of Tennessee who actually did this with this certain kind of bacteria and a certain kind of amoeba. He put them together and they fought like cats and dogs for about 18 months just like when there’s a merger acquisition in a corporation. People from company A and company B, they don’t get along because the cultures are different. Then, the algae or the bacteria, they did exactly what happens in a corporate merger. A whole bunch of them died and a whole bunch of them had to literally discard chunks of DNA like you don’t need this anymore. You don’t do that anymore. They consolidated their functions and then all of a sudden, they started operating. There is one organism and the bacteria took over certain functions and amoeba did the other stuff and it provided a nice home for the bacteria. While lots of successful merger acquisitions like a Starbucks inside a Marriott Hotel. This is actually how evolution works. It’s innovation. It’s not just blind bloody competition. That’s the bureaucrat version. So if you think about it, evolution is not a passive process ever. When you’re taking antibiotics and you’re trying to kill those germs, they are trying to survive. They are trying to innovate. You just have to get them killed faster than they can innovate. It’s not that this just happened by accident. It’s only the bureaucrats that tell you it happens by accident because everything in their life happens by accident. Are they going to get a promotion? Who knows? We have to make our own breaks.

I like that. I knew what it meant. But  to me what’s so telling about the fact that I didn’t put it together in that way and to me that speaks volumes about how I learned about it. I think that you’re hitting on something really intrinsic in the programming of the majority of the population in the sense that triggered a memory of me hearing those words. But for sure nobody presented it in that way because that’s something that had I learned would have had a shaping of how I might transgress through to the rest of my existence. There’s tons of information coming through on that because the concept of collaboration cooperation, I see is being intricately tied to evolution. But I hadn’t heard an example that was so powerful as a one that you just shared. Thank you so much for that. I feel like we could probably talk for years, but I know that some folks are going to want to know where they can find out more about you. We’ll put a link to the book. Where else can we send them?

You can get three free chapters of Evolution 2.0 at cosmicfingerprints.com. On Amazon, you can get it in hardcover, softcover, audible or Kindle. Then, if you like the business stuff, you should go to perrymarshall.com. I would suggest that you go to perrymarshall.com/8020 and get my book 80/20 Sales and Marketing which will change your whole way of looking at things. If you’re a science geek entrepreneur and you like the evolution stuff, there’s some really cool bonuses that come with the book that are for entrepreneurs, that are for evolutionary advertising writers. I developed this whole advertising thing based on, I stole the ideas from evolutionary biology. I plagiarized plants and algae. And I put in a package it just perfectly for you. Or if you just want to inject the pure business stuff, then get 80/20 Sales and Marketing. It’ll twist your brain. Make you a feral entrepreneur.

It’s been delightful to have you on this show. I really appreciate the conversation and I’m just really excited to know that you’re out there doing what you’re doing. So, thank you for that. And know that we’re here to support you and promote what you’re doing. Thank you for coming on the show.

Well, thanks for having me on this show. It’s a great honor. And, I think we had fun today. It was muy divertido.

So, you’ve been listening to the SuperPower Up! podcast where we’ve been answering the question today, “Can Perry Marshall explain the potential business benefits of personal development?” And I would say definitively, absolutely, yes he can and he has. To all of you out there as always, we appreciate your loyalty. Until next time. Go out, uncover your super powers and change the world. Take care everyone.