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hi. this is ralph zuranski. i'm speaking withperry marshall. he is considered the king of adwords, of working on google and generatingincome for his clients. he has written many courses to teach people how to gain the samesuccess that he has and minimizing the amount of investments that people make in pay perclick advertisements and maximize the gain. how are you doing today, perry?i'm doing great. it's good to be on. well good. the reason i chose you to be oneof the heroes is your desire to provide quality service and products above and beyond thecall of duty. so maybe you could explain a little more in detail what it is that youdo. well, in the bigger picture i'm a direct marketer.i help people sell at a distance, sell through
media. that's become more and more and moreimportant compared to decades ago or a century ago. before telephone and television and radioand everything, all selling had to be done face to face. before the post office it hadto be hand delivered at best. but technology has brought about a whole completelydifferent way of people doing business with each other. of course now you can stick upa web site and anybody in the world can access it.with tools like google you can pay them $5 and start advertising on their ad-words programand people can find out about it almost instantly almost anywhere in the world. the communicationtools that we have now are so incredibly powerful it's really bewildering to people.there are two aspects to that. one is more
of the technical aspect which is constantlychanging but is usually something you can hire somebody to do for you for not a hugeamount of money. but the other aspect of it is how do you actuallycommunicate this to people? how do you persuade people?when i left my job four years ago i started consulting with sales people, for the mostpart, on how to not do cold calls any more. i told them how to advertise in such a waythat people come to them instead of them chasing the customer.then later that year google adwords came out and i became intrigued with it really quickly.about a year later i started publishing courses on it.but basically adwords is google's advertising
system. it's the right side of a page on agoogle search where you see the little sponsored listings.those ads are triggered by keywords. an advertiser pays when a person clicks. that became a fascinatingmicrocosm and it's turned into a very, very important thing on the entire internet.i don't remember the exact numbers but it's a good healthy double-digit percentage ofall internet advertising. it's one of those things where you can lose your shirt if youdon't know what you are doing or you can have enormous leverage if you do.it's an exciting time to be alive. i was particularly impressed with just yourquality and your style and your integrity. i was curious what was your definition ofheroism?
i guess it's doing the right thing regardlessof the consequences. that suggests that there are principles that are above and beyond theimmediate concerns of safety or expediency. usually the word "hero" refers to someonewho saved someone's life. such as the men at pearl harbor who helped others get outof the boat and got stuck there and drowned. that is what heroism is.in today's business i think there is a very pervasive culture in the marketing world thatsays that whatever b.s. you have to make up to get the transaction done is okay. and evena more subtle belief that truth itself is a very relative thing. 'what is true for youis not true for me.' so what you end up with is, you have a lotof people who really don't have any appreciation
for the golden rule and don't really treatcustomers the way they would want to be treated. it makes people cynical and untrusting.i think the biggest thing that anybody in the marketing profession deals with is cynicismand distrust. we have all this stuff about deep throat inthe news today, right? 30 years ago richard nixon lied to the american public and everybodywas just shocked. now you have bill clinton lying about the lewinsky thing.you have the bush administration obviously fabricating things to get us into the iraqiwar. i'm not going to get into the politics of any of this. but nobody is particularlyshocked or surprised today if somebody is lying to them.so it creates this cynicism inflation in the
world that becomes harder and harder to overcome.if you make things up and couch them in very believable language in order to overcome somebody'sskepticism, then when they find out the truth, all you have done is you have contributedto cynicism inflation. you have made it harder for them to believe anything you say later.on the other hand, if you are exceptionally truthful about things then your customersover time will discover what is true of you and they will believe you when they don'tbelieve others. that's kind of a long answer to a short question but i think it is important.it's interesting you are asking me all this stuff because these topics rarely come up.everybody wants to talk about tricks and techniques and clever ways of saying things and cleverways of getting internet traffic.
but let's talk about some really simple thingshere. that's what we are talking about today. yes, it's important to know who people areand what they actually believe. that's one of the reasons for the heroes program, thepeople that i'm interviewing. people can learn a great deal when you hearthe people who are trying to market this stuff answer questions that have real depth andmeaning. so the next question i want to ask you is did you ever create a secret hero inyour mind that helped you deal with life's difficulties?that's a great question. it triggers all kinds of possible answers. i think everybody haswhat might be called alter egos. people you envision in your mind. like what would thisguy do, or what would that lady do, or whatever.
i think in the midst of all this chaos it'skind of interesting that people wear a little armband that says, "wwjd, what would jesusdo." i think the truth be told the average person doesn't have a huge amount of knowledgeabout jesus. but even people who have only a passing familiaritywith jesus somehow intuitively know that he was a guy who would not advocate violencebut is someone who would advocate honesty. he is someone who would be a hero and wouldsacrifice the immediate safety or convenience for a larger purpose.that is really what the whole jesus story is about. certainly for me, jesus is in theforefront when i think about things like that. there are other things, too. i was thinkingnot too long ago about my parents. my dad
died almost 20 years ago.but when i was a teenager my parents went through a horrendous period in their marriage.my mom had a psychiatric disorder and it caused her to behave very strangely.anybody who has had a person with a psychiatric problem living at home would relate to this.it can be very weird and very stressful. i remember me and my brother and sister havinga little pow-wow with my dad. we told him we thought he should just leave her and hersilly perception of what is going on and go have a real life.he steadfastly refused to do that. he said, "no, i stood up in front of god and a wholebunch of people and said i would stick with her till death do us part and that is exactlywhat i am going to do. because when you make
a promise, you keep it."when things like that happen at the time it is like, "okay, i guess mom and dad are goingto grind through this." but later, when i got into college, i majoredin electrical engineering. it didn't take too long to see that i was on a very steeplearning curve. the first couple of years the freshmen and sophomore classes were weed-outclasses where 40-60% of the class would fail. you would stay up all night just to get ac, not to mention a b or an a. and on top of that, it was really rudimentary materiallike calculus and all that. i didn't really find much of it particularlyinteresting, either. it didn't get interesting until my junior and senior year. it was justa big grind and i wanted to quit.
but for some reason i didn't. there was somepart of me that would not give me permission to go do something easier. because i knewdeep down that i really belonged there. i really needed to master the stuff and getthe hard stuff out of the way to do the fun stuff later. but you had to master the basicsbefore you could do the more creative things. i think my dad's persistence in the face ofadversity probably had a lot to do with me sticking it through. and today i'm very glad.what i was thinking at the time when i was in college was i would much rather be majoringin english or something. that stuff came a lot easier to me than the math and the sciencedid. i was very interested in the math and science.i had some very specific reasons why i was
there. but it just did not come as naturallyto me as writing papers, which i thought was a lot more fun.but i stuck with it. today i don't spend most of my time doing math problems. i spend mostof my time writing copy and being a communicator and really operating in my talent zone.but one of the reasons that i'm good at what i do as an internet marketer is i developedthe analytical side. i'm very glad today that i ground through all that engineering stuff.i can pick up a physics journal or a math book or something like that and understandit. i understand what it's talking about. some of my marketing projects get me intomore advanced mathematics like the taguchi method and stuff like that.it's really nicewhen you have something under your belt and
you have mastered it. you don't use it everyday, but when you do need to use it it's there. in business, it differentiates me from otherswho do what i do who maybe don't have that analytical capacity.again, another long answer to a short question but i think at the root of everybody's lifeis certain principles and values that you either believe in or don't believe in. thingsthat you subscribe to or don't. they definitely affect everything else thatyou do. but most people never directly see those. and most people never ask about themor talk about them but they are there. i agree. your dad gave you a great exampleof what true commitment and being a person of your word. that is so critical to haveany integrity in the businesses that you are
involved in.their integrity seems to be one of the major considerations that i had when i chose peoplewho i thought were heroes. do you believe there are certain principles that you believepeople should be willing to sacrifice their lives for?yes, i do. it's very interesting you would ask me that question. just last night my wifeand i went to a play. i think it was called "big time." i'm sure it's kind of obscure.it was about this guy, paul, who works on wall street. he has the big office and worksin the big company. the world bends to his will because he is wealthy and powerful. he'sa young, successful guy. all the characters in the play are in thiscategory. they are all living this kind of
shallow existence and they're all kind ofpetty. paul has these fights with his girlfriendthat shows this pettiness. if he doesn't get his way he tells her that she is the loser.she decides that she is not sure about him and tells him that. he bursts out in thistirade about what a loser she is and if she wasn't such a loser she would realize howimportant he is and how much he is helping her.this is proof positive that she shouldn't be with this guy. and proof positive thathe doesn't love her at all, because if you love someone you don't call them a loser andtreat them that way. in this story paul has dealings with a ministerof finance from somewhere in south america,
venezuela i think. and the country is in turmoil.it's a big deal and there is a lot of money involved.the implication is that this is all tainted money that was probably stolen from poor peopleand it is all corrupt government slush fund. but of course paul doesn't really care aboutthat. so he goes down to venezuela. he goes downthere to meet with this guy and in the middle of this meeting the government caves in. oneof the rebels who helped overthrow the government kidnaps paul.so paul is in this room with the kidnapper who is wearing this military uniform and ispacing back and forth. so now you have this young business man dude in a shirt and tie,locked in a concrete cell in venezuela.
it turns out the guy who kidnapped him wentto school in the u.s. and is probably a lot smarter and more educated than most peoplewould assume. this rebel had his reasons for being part of a group that overthrew the government.the government was corrupt and was oppressing people. the rebel says to paul, "i'm fightingfor freedom. i'm fighting for what i believe is right and i'm willing to die for it. "isthere anything you are willing to die for?" paul just stares back at him like he is speakinggibberish. so he repeats, "is there anything you are willing to die for?"paul came down there to do a financial deal, right? so what is his life all about? so heasks again, "i said, is there anything you would be willing to die for?" and paul says,"no."
i think that line was the whole point of thewhole story. that if there wasn't anything you would be willing to die for, if therewasn't anything you would sacrifice for, it's because you believe that you are the centerof the universe. and everything is supposed to revolve around you.that's why everyone in this play acts like the world revolves around them, which is whyno one can get along with each other because there is no sense of higher purpose. thereis no sense of honor. there is no sense of decency. there is just me, me, me, me, me.the only reason we live in a free country is because people paid with their lives believingthat the freedom of their children, the future of their country, was more important thanthey themselves were.
that is so true. i think that a lot of peopledon't ever get to that point where they think of what would they die for. or even more importantly,what would they live for? not until they have experienced the lowest point in their life.what was the lowest point in your life and how did you change your life and how did youchange your life to win a victory over those obstacles?that's a good question. everybody has different hard spots in their life. they are alwayshard for different reasons and lots of times you can't compare one to the other.my dad died when i was 17. there was a three year process of fighting cancer and the emotionalroller coaster of "dad is going to be okay, dad's not going to be okay, dad's going tobe okay" and all that.
most people, by the time they are well intoadulthood have probably experienced that with somebody. i remember being really upset aboutthat. i remember having this conversation with mymom where i said, "well, i guess god gave me a dad and if god is going to take my dadaway then god can do that." later on -- it would have been about a monthafter my dad died -- i was a senior in high school and i was taking this class. we hadthis interesting assignment to write a philosophy of life. by virtue of having been throughthe wringer with this i had given those questions a lot more thought than probably most kidsdo at that age. i hope i remember this correctly -- i wrotedown three things and i turned this in. i
said, "nothing is worth living for unlessit's worth dying for, because to live for something is to spend time which you can notget back in pursuit of it." that was the first one.i didn't make up any of this stuff myself. i got it all from other people. the secondone was "the difficult things you deal with in life will make you a stronger, better person,but only if you let them." the third one i think comes from the westminsterconfession. it says, "the chief end of man is to glorify god and enjoy him forever."that was my philosophy of life at age 17. and i don't think i would change that now.i think that was pretty good. but being forced to confront a lot of hard issues is, i think,the only way you really figure out what is
important and what is not.so you really think that it's important to have a positive view of setbacks, misfortunesand mistakes? it's very important. it's one of these dealswhere you can have it either way. which way do you want it? do you want to lookat the tragedy in your life like life sucks and then you die. that it's all meaningless?there are a lot of people that do. they look at life exactly that way. and they actuallyresent people who don't. there's a saying that goes something likethis: "people who dance are considered crazy by those who can't hear the music." and ithink it's really like that. is tragedy just tragedy? is that all thatit is? or is there music somewhere, is there
purpose going on somewhere?this really gets into the deepest aspect of what your philosophy of life really is. theseare all very religious questions. i think we have this sort of taboo in western societythat you aren't really supposed to discuss that kind of stuff.but the fact is, everybody is going to have to wrestle with it some time or other. andwhen they do, they are either going to be equipped to deal with it because they havebeen discussing it, or it's going to blind-side them. then they are going to be forced intothis new train of thought that they never learned about in school and nobody was supposedto talk about in polite company. they end up going through it alone. and doesn'tthat make a person all the more cynical if
they think that life sucks and then you die?do you think that it is important to have a dream or vision that sets the course ofyour life? absolutely. when you talk about dreams andvisions and stuff sometimes i think you can trivialize it.for example, "what's your dream?" "my dream is to drive a mercedes."well, i hope your dream for your life is bigger than that. and i don't mean more expensive,either. i mean more substantive. but even in the mundane sense it always helpsif you know what you are working for. when i was a kid it always helped if i knew whyi was doing the paper route. it was never enough to just think that i was saving upsome money for some day.
do you think it takes courage to pursue newideas? it seems that in everybody's life, other people are comfortable with the waythat you are and if you start changing, they are either going to have to reject you orthey have to change also. i think courage is the king of all virtues.if you asked, "what are the greatest virtues?" you could talk about love and honor and trustand all that. but none of those things really have any dimensionto them unless you have the courage to pursue them. it always takes courage to do it. youare always at odds with most of the rest of the world when you embrace virtue.it's always easier to fudge a little bit. it's always easier to make it up. i'm certainlynot saying that i'm perfect in those regards.
but what i can be is aware. or if somebodycalls it to my attention that i said i would do something but never did, well then i needto agree and fix that. one thing that everybody experiences is doubtsand fears. they fear injury, failure, rejection, and some even fear success. how do you overcomeyour fears? when i feel trepidation about something i'mplanning to do it's usually because it is important. you usually don't feel fear aboutdoing trivial things. some people don't even feel fear about getting on a motorcycle andgoing 100 miles an hour. i know a lady who got in a very compromisingsexual situation with somebody. it happened years ago and it was just kind of sitting there, simmeringunder the surface.
nobody knew about it. she had to deal withthis all the time but it was too taboo to really bring up.finally she was talking to my wife and i about this and we told her that she needed to talkto the other person about it and confront them about what happened. this is somethingyou would categorize as abusive, she being the victim.she was afraid of wrecking the guy's life. and if you think about it there is somethinghonorable about that, because even though the other person had hurt her very deeply,she was still concerned for his well-being. but we told her that she simply could notkeep trying to sweep this under the rug. we told her it would not get better until shedealt with it.
well, eventually she did, and it took an enormousamount of courage to bring it up. but that opened the door to making the situation somethingthey could deal with and begin to solve the problem.things like that are really scary. but again, the fact that it is scary tells you that itneeds to be done. a lot of times it's things that are a wholelot less onerous than that. it takes courage to take out a small business loan and hangout your shingle. you know that the odds are against you and that you could fail.one of the things that i learned in my 20's was that if i fail, if i get rejection, ifpeople say no, if they don't take me up on my proposal, or if i get an f class and haveto take it over, guess what? it's not the
end of the world.life did not come to a screeching halt when i flunked this test. life did not grind toa screeching halt when i flunked the class and i had to take it over. and it didn't makeme a bad person. it just means that i didn't make it that time.successful people of any stripe learn to look at failure as a corrective force in theirlife. that it's something that kind of shakes the slag and the garbage off of you. it weedsout the trivial stuff and focuses you on what is important and eventually you figure outthe formula. it's interesting that you would say that andthat you would tell that story about that lady. there is always the question, as faras the importance of forgiveness, of those
who offend and oppose us. and on the oppositeside of that there is accountability of people who do offend us.where do you think is the balance between having people be accountable for the bad thingsthat they do or the wrong things and actually forgiving them for the things that they didto you personally? that is a really great question. i think it'smore important than it might sound on the surface because everyone of us has peoplethat we have forgiveness issues with. each of us has done things to people thatwere wrong and that we need to be forgiven for. but that doesn't really help very muchuntil we realize that is the case. you can't just live in denial thinking youhave gone your whole life without hurting
anybody or doing anybody wrong. all of ushave hurt others. on the other side all of us have little grudges,or sometimes big grudges, that we hold against other people. i don't think you can be healthywhile walking around with those things. i think it's impossible.everybody talks about how if you eat peanut butter and the peanuts had insecticide onthem or something, are you going to get cancer? does this cause cancer, does that cause cancer?i would be willing to bet you every penny i have that things like anger and grudgesand stuff like that cause more diseases and mental health problems than any of those otherthings. i have a friend who is a minister. he likesto say there are a lot of churches where if
they caught the pastor smoking they wouldthrow him out in a heartbeat. but if that same minister bickers with peopleand fights with people and spreads rumors about people and has these little fiefdomsand wars for 30 years, they never throw him out for that. i mean, which is worse?i'd rather live with a smoker who is at peace with himself than a non-smoker who is contentious.so there are all these things that are surface level. but everybody has to deal with thatstuff. if you ask, "is there anybody you need toforgive?" all of us can think of somebody that we need to forgive that we only partiallydid or maybe didn't at all. maybe we're still swearing that we are going to get even withthem.
you just have to let go with that. i interviewedone of my customers and he told a very interesting story.he worked at some company, one of his vendors. he kind of knew this guy who worked there,but not very well. one day that guy just disappeared. it turns out what actually happened is hemolested a child or something like that and was put in jail. he was in jail for threeyears and then they let him out. so now the guy has a probation officer andhe has this thing around his leg. he has to come to the office and plug it in.the thing around his leg lets the probation officer know where this guy is 24/7. he has20 minutes to get home and plug the thing in.he has maybe 1 â½ hours on saturday to go
to the bank and go grocery shopping and thenhe has to be home to plug it in again, just like that.so he comes to see john one day and tells him his story. he says, "john, i knew youway back when. i was working at this company and then i got in trouble. i lost my family,my wife divorced me, i lost my job, i went to jail, and my entire life fell apart. "john,would you give me a job?" well john gave him a job. later, john endsup hiring another one like this, too. now he has two former sex offenders working athis company. john was raving about both of these guys becausethey always show up on time every single day. they work very hard. he doesn't have to paythem as much as he pays other people because
they are thankful to have any job at all.they are so appreciative of john for giving them a chance. if john gives them a problemto solve they figure out how to solve it. they are great employees.this is a strategy for finding an employee. now obviously john does not run a daycarecenter. there aren't any kids there so that's not an issue. but this was a strategy forgetting a good employee, and we all know that really good employees are very hard to find.so i interviewed john and john told this whole story on one of my cd's that went out to mysubscribers. then i got this angry email from this guy that says, "i can't believe you areadvocating that we take these criminals and give them jobs."i said, "i can only give you my opinion. first
of all, the information you get from me isa cafeteria. you can take it or leave it. not every idea applies to you."i told him, here's how i look at this: those two guys went to jail and as far as societyis concerned, these men have paid the price they are supposed to pay. these men are stillon probation. the lord's prayer says "forgive us our sinsas we forgive others who sin against us." i told him that if a person has done theirpenance to society and they want to be forgiven, then as a christian, my obligation is to forgivethem. it doesn't mean that i have them run my daycareor that i do anything stupid like that. but it's a two-sided coin. all of us have bonesin our closet. we all have things that we
are ashamed of.we all hope that other people will give us some slack. so we have to give other peopleslack, too. it doesn't mean you are to be stupid.i had a tenant steal from me. so we evicted her. she was sorry and she cried and apologized.we told her that we forgive her, but that she needs to find another place to live.i did not think it was appropriate to not have a consequence. she needed to learn.after all, it took us awhile to figure it out. it had become a pattern, which almostalways there is. there is never just one cockroach. just because you forgive somebody doesn'tmean there aren't consequences. i did forgive her and i'm not angry at her.she never even paid us back, but i'm not going
to go after her. that's just going to be unnecessarytime and money and headache. it's easy to forgive somebody if they haveoffended us or stolen from us, but the harder part is to hold them to accountability andmake sure that they realize there are consequences for their wrong actions.right. and there are consequences. consequences are the only way that people learn to straightenthemselves out. if somebody is coming to work drunk everyday, you better make sure there are some consequences because the problem isn't going to solve itself.that's for sure. so a lot of times the most loving thing youcan do with somebody is to have a harsh consequence. and that's the reality of living in an imperfectworld.
i think that's the true definition of love.that if someone is going down the wrong path to actually try to steer them to a betterpath or help them find a better path. absolutely. you remember jerry garcia, theguitarist with the grateful dead? i listened to an interview with his drummer, mickey hart.it was a radio show and someone called in and said, "how come you didn't keep jerryfrom overdosing on drugs?" and mickey goes, "dude, have you ever had a friend with a drugproblem? you ever tried to get him to stop? it's not like we didn't try."jerry did what jerry was going to do. who knows what they did to try to stop it? butobviously it didn't work. and obviously the consequences for jerry alongthe way were not bad enough. if the consequences
had been worse when it was a less onerousproblem, jerry garcia might still be alive and would still be doing grateful dead concerts.you can just do your best and leave it in god's hands. there is only so far that youcan go. you have to realize that when you try to helppeople going down the wrong path the first thing they are going to do is to hate youand blame you. it takes a tremendous love for that person to be willing to accept theiranger and to accept that abuse. yes, and i'll even go further. i'll say thatmost people with a big problem blame the problem on the solution.can you explain that? if some guy has an alcohol problem and hiswife tells him that he needs to get help,
he is probably going to tell you that thereason he drinks is because of her. the truth is she is the one who loves himthe most of anybody in the world. that is why she is telling him to get help. but becauseshe is telling him and no one else is, he is mad at her.he might be really, really angry at her. and really, if you aren't willing to deal withthe consequences what can you blame but the solution?i think the answer and one of the big solutions is just serving others.right. about six years ago my wife's brother lived in sao paulo, brazil. we went down tovisit him. he had been there a long time and we had never gotten down there because ofthe time and expense.
but we scraped together the money and we went.he had this friend named paulo who took me and her to the slums of sao paulo.it was shocking. we have nothing like that kind of poverty in the u.s. after i came backfrom brazil, i thought to myself, "bill clinton is an honest president and we don't have anypollution. we don't have any poor people and we don't have any violence."i can truthfully tell you that aside from a gated community, the best neighborhood insao paulo is more dangerous than the worst neighborhood in chicago. and it gets worsefrom there. paulo knew his way around and knew where hecould go and where he couldn't. so we trusted him and he took us around and we met all thesepeople and saw how they lived. it made us
very thankful for what we have.he had this program where he was helping kids get off the streets and keeping kids off thestreets in the first place. and we decided after that, whenever we get a chance we aregoing to go see how the other half lives. because of that, in the meanwhile i have beento mozambique, which is the 18th poorest country in the world. last fall i was in nairobi,kenya, and saw a bunch of orphans. in various different ways we have been ableto help people in those kinds of circumstances. that is a whole lot more fulfilling than drivinga new car off a parking lot. because when you do that you are honoringthe fact that some things are more important than 'my little agenda.' you are getting outsideof yourself.
when you spend a day meeting kids or parentswho are dying of aids you don't come home and say, "my latte is too foamy!" it totallygives you a different point of view. here in my daily life, if my kids are sickwe take them to the doctor. it's good to get reminded every now an then that not everybodyhas that luxury. i met a seven year old boy who was dying ofaids for lack of a $1 bus ticket to go get a free shot. he was already too far down theroad to be helped. i'm not going to try to describe to you whathe looked like or what it was like. but suffice it to say it was very sad.but you can do things about that. matter of fact, if i had a few wishes one of them wouldbe for every person who can afford it to go
to africa just once.go to a place like nairobi and see how other people live. spend a little bit of time thinkingabout what we can do about this. people need medical skills, education, businessskills and all this kind of stuff. we have things. not just money, but skills and helpinghands. what could people do? if people did that itwould solve those problems and we would live in a much better world. people are very slowlysolving those problems but it sure would be nice to see them get solved faster.that's so definitely true. what power does prayer have in your life?it's one of my core disciplines. i think it's one of the most important things. most ofthe time i think the biggest role that prayer
plays is not so much getting what you wantor having some wish granted or whatever. it's more like saying, "well god, i don'tknow what you want me to do today but to the best of my ability i'm going to align myselfwith that. i'm going to try to follow where i'm led."there have been a handful of situations where i wouldn't know any other way to describe whathappened other than to say a miracle happened. not often, and it's few and far between.i have this friend in ohio named geri and she had lupus for years. she did all the stuffyou do for it. i don't have time to go into all the details, but basically one day someoneprayed for her and it was gone, never to come back.it was very sudden, too. it didn't happen
over a period of three months or something.now if you look up lupus, "lupus" and "cure" do not usually go together in the same sentence.so sometimes, things do happen. there is certainly no question in my mind that prayer changesthings. but the thing that changes the most is me. and frankly, i'm the one that needsto get changed. sanctification is a long process. salvationcomes as a free gift but sanctification is much harder and it takes a lifetime. there'sno doubt abut that. that's why it's important to have a senseof humor in a serious problem. you have a sense of humor? i have a friend who says that his purposein life is to make god laugh. that's his little
thing. i'm quite sure god has a sense of humor.i see it every day. who are the heroes in your life, perry?that's a hard question to answer because i think i'm old enough to realize that nobodyis perfect. it seems that most of the people who have influenced my life in extraordinaryways also have extraordinary weaknesses. if you meet a person with really great strengths,they almost always have really great weaknesses to go along with them. people that i knowwho are alive today, i don't know if i would categorize them as heroes but it would beinteresting to do: make a top ten list of the most influential people in my life.who would be those people who have had that major positive impact on your life? i knowyour dad would be on the list.
my dad would be on the list. another guy thatwould be on the list is an english professor in college. he pulled me aside one day andsaid he had been reading my papers and would like to talk with me sometime.so a few weeks later i went to his office and he starts telling me all this stuff thathe had figured out from reading the papers i had written, that i hadn't figured out aboutmyself. it was amazing. he really saw way further down the road thani ever did. he was a great, great teacher. he would definitely be on the list.i think different people affect your life in different ways. for example, and this isa weird example, about seven or eight years ago i went to a rush concert. it was threehours of the most extraordinarily executed
musical performance that i had ever seen.the drummer stole the show. i have never seen musicianship like that. in the musical arenathat guy is definitely a hero. it changed my awareness of music.a definitely big influence in my business life is dan kennedy. i first heard dan kennedyspeak in 1997. he coaxed $300 out of my pocket and i bought some of his books and tapes andit transformed my understanding of sales and marketing.i actually know dan pretty well now. i'm in one of his coaching groups and i talk to himevery month. is dan like a hero of my whole life? no, buthe is a luminary in business. when there are people who change the way youthink about things, people who influence you
that way, a lot of times it's worthwhile todig all of that water out of that well that you can. you don't just skim it from the surface.like with dan, i was just at a group meeting for two days just last week. why do i go tothat? because dan consistently brings insights into situations that i would not come up withmyself. and it continues to happen. now if the time came where i wasn't reallygetting anything new that i hadn't already gotten, then i would stop. but as long asyou continue to learn something new, you keep going back. we had a discussion about onetopic that was very illuminating that no one else in the room had really fully considered.there are other people. i would have to sit down and think about this. but you get theidea. there are authors, people who you may
never meet. there are very influential thinkers.any direct marketer has been enormously influenced by claude hopkins whether they read his stuffor not. it would be a very good idea for anybody in marketing to read claude hopkins becausehe is one of those true luminaries. when somebody is one of the really first peopleto figure a whole bunch of things out it probably means that they are brilliantly smart. andthat what they tell you about other things is equally valuable.why do you think heroes are so important in the lives of young people?i think everybody is going to have heroes one way or the other. the question is whetherthey are good ones or bad ones. if some basketball player thinks he is nota role model he is sadly mistaken. at any
given time there are thousands of guys shootinghoops dreaming about being an mba basketball player. a few of them actually make it.well, how many of them are consciously aware of the fact that there is another part oftheir job description that they never really thought about. no, you don't just play basketball.you live a certain way and kids want to be like you.that's an important part of the job. is that basketball player going to influence themto be more responsible and to be a better citizen? or does he think he is only teachingthem how to shoot hoops? the other day somebody sent me a link to aweb site where the guy had made his web site look exactly like mine. it wasn't a copy,but the format, the colors, the layout, the
writing style, everything was exactly likemine. i don't think he crossed any legal boundariesor anything. i suppose i'm sort of flattered by that. i hope it works for him. but thepoint is, like it or not, i am obviously a role model for other people.anybody in a public sphere is. and so that means that how i conduct myself in publicis more important than i would like to think. it means that i am teaching people simplythrough my actions at any given time whether i realize it or not, because i am in the publiceye. that's kind of scary. you have to be carefulabout zinging off some email to somebody. they are upset with me so i'm going to beupset back and be belligerent or whatever
-- that just adds to the negativity.i agree with that. do you think there are any heroes in our society today who aren'tgetting the recognition that they deserve? oh yes. oh yes. what i think of when you saidthat is when i was in mozambique two years ago. her name is robin perry. she was about55-60 years old. she and her husband were retired and theydecided to spend their retirement years helping very poor people in very poor countries, includingmozambique. so for a couple of days i just followed robin around.so i'm just trailing around behind her and she marches into a village with a box of medicineunder her arm. she marches into a mud hut with all her stuff and all these women andchildren line up.
she has this guy that is translating fromsena into english and the impromptu medical clinic begins. i saw everything. i saw aids,malaria, protein deficiencies, scabies, burns, malnutrition, infections, everything.i'm just sitting there watching this. and it's not like they have some privacy formthat everybody is going to fill out or anything. i'm just watching all these people come onthrough. with the supplies that she had and the knowledgethat she had, she did what she could to help them. i swear that if she had sat there forfour days straight, that line around the hut would have been coming and coming and comingfor four days. there was like this inexhaustible supply ofneed. that was quite an experience.
she died a little over a year ago. i went to her funeral in iowawhere she and her husband were from. she had gotten sick and they came home. we knew thiscould be coming; in fact i remember a conversation with her. she'd had some surgeries and itlooked like the problems were taken care of but everybody knew it could come back andit did. so i'm at her funeral and at the end of theservice they had this open mike where people could tell stories, and one after anotherafter another got up. it was amazing. robin was a hero.do you feel that the people who are really the heroes are the ones who reach out andhelp others? those people that basically want
to make a difference in the world and in thelives that god places along their path? yes, and everybody has a different kind ofopportunity to be a hero. i don't think everybody is supposed to go to mozambique, althoughit would be nice if more people did. i have a friend who was on that trip. shewas just like me. she was just visiting and seeing what was going on.but she decided to go back there and live there and she is living there now. and that'sher calling. for almost 20 years it's been my feeling thatit's my job to be a regular business guy, but to be interested and involved and supportiveof things like that. to tell other people what is going on.it's just like any other marketing problem
in the world of inventors and inventions andnew technologies and those kinds of things. the guy that can invent the better mouse trapis often not the person who is talented at telling the world about it.the world doesn't beat a path to his door unless he figures out how to be the marketerof that mouse trap. that's also true of people who go do good things.take for example my friend, jeanine, who decided to go live in mozambique. does she have anyparticular fundraising skill, or communication skill, or letter writing skill or abilityto make television commercials about all the stuff she is doing?no, she is just using her talent and she is exercising it to the best of her ability.but everybody has talents.
i'm helping out children's relief international,the organization that is sending jeanine and who sent robin over there. i can help themcommunicate better. i can help them raise funds better and help them find people tosponsor children and stuff like that. that's my skill.then every year or two, i can get on a plane and go over there and be reminded that i havethe easy job. and really it's true. i kind of joke that in the next life it's going tobe me doing the work and they're going to be doing the fundraising.that may be so. there are so many people out there who say, "look at the great things i'mdoing for god." yet they don't look around in their own families and their own communitiesand see what god is already doing and join
in. i know that's what jesus did. he saidhe did the work of his father. it's important to just look at your family,your friends and the people in your community that you are involved with. that's where ithink the hardest work is ever done because that's where our greatest joys come from andour greatest sorrows. charity begins at home.isn't that the truth. well i know you are making the world a better place by just thethings you have shared with us so far. do you have good solutions to the problemsfacing society, especially racism, child and spousal abuse and violence among young people?this gets me into another story. a long time ago, way before we had kids, laura my wifeone day mentioned to me that one day we should
have foster kids.i looked at her like, "you want to do what???" like this is totally out in left field andis something that i would never think about. when you say "foster kids" the first thingi think about is that some kid is going to come live with you for a few months or a fewyears and then leave. you will never see them again.that's too hard. especially after you get to like them and have a relationship withthem and then they just get sent off somewhere. so that was really foreign.it took a long time, but she slowly warmed me up to this idea. after our oldest was bornwe decided to take a foster baby for a few months. we would be the interim solution forjust for a little while. we would stick our
toe in the water.everybody knows that this is not going to last for very long. it's just a temporarysituation. we are just going to try this out. sure enough one day the agency has a 1-weekbaby girl named drea. "do you want her?" "well, okay, we'll take her." so i come home fromwork and we get this little black baby from the west side of chicago.while she was living with us i felt like a glorified babysitter. to me it was just temporaryand i wasn't going to get attached to her. laura was, but not me.as far as i was concerned it was just a lot of work. with our own kids laura nursed them.but you don't nurse a foster baby so guess who gets to get up in the middle of the nightand get the bottle? me.
so i kind of do not like this. i'm mutteringto myself, "how come drea's mother has to be into drugs and all this stuff and can'ttake care of her?" i'm being kind of gripey. well finally we get another phone call anddrea's grandmother is going to take her in so they don't need us to be doing this anymore. so 2 â½ months later drea disappears and i figured that we would never see heragain. laura is kind of depressed and i was probablya little relieved. i'm just being honest with you.oh, i know. i grew up taking care of foster kids. my mom was a nurse so she took the mostseverely damaged children into our home. i had to change the diapers like you did, butat an early age. so i know what you are talking
about.we thought that was the end of things. but a couple of weeks later we get this phonecall again. it's the case worker and he says that drea's grandmother wanted to know ifwe would like to be drea's godparents. she didn't know anything about us. but shedecided that, so we said we would. i had never been anybody's godparent before. that hadn'tbeen a tradition in our family. other people do that but not us.so we truck on over to the old ship of zion church of god in christ on the west side ofchicago. we are the only white people there. now i have to explain something about chicago.there is a lot of racism in chicago and it's all kind of under the surface. it's kind ofan icy, nobody-talks-about-it kind of racism.
when we first moved here 12 or 13 years agoit seemed very hard to make friends with black people. later i came to understand there area lot of good reasons for that. there is an unbelievable amount of discrimination thatgoes on in the workplace. i was a manufacturer's rep selling stuff tomanufacturing companies in chicago. i want to say that in two years, except for an automotiveplant and a steel mill, i'm not sure i ever met an african american person who was ina management position. in chicago it's like black people get thecrummy jobs and white people get the good jobs. and white people are oblivious to this.they just don't know what is going on. they probably don't think about it.so there has always been this kind of icy
feeling that i felt around black people. theydidn't really want to talk to me. it wasn't that they were mean or rude, it was just thatthey weren't interested and please don't bother them.it became apparent that whatever racial barriers there were with most people suddenly did notapply to us with drea's grandmother and her family. and ever since then, and i see themevery week, it's like we are their white cousins from the suburbs. and they are our black cousinsfrom chicago. with them and us, whether someone is white or black doesn't matter. it's a non-issue.it's not like there aren't differences. it's not like we don't joke about them or talkabout them or whatever, but they aren't a barrier.of course their culture is different. it is
completely different. but that's okay. weare all people. i definitely learned that if people do things like take in foster childrenthat can break down racial barriers. you mentioned violence. there is a lot ofviolence in the inner city. drea has three brothers and they are all older than her.one of them is 13 and he is getting into that teenager zone where you are hoping that hestays on track. i look at it like i can't fix all his problems.i can't solve all the problems that you have when you live in the inner city and all that.but i can be a steady, unwavering person in his life. i can be an example that not everyguy is hanging out on the street corner or doing whatever people do in the inner city.i think in the long run that will make a difference
for him and the direction he goes. i can'tsolve every problem but i can do what i can do.so you believe that the way that we can change a lot of problems in society is being goodrole models for others and also being involved in their lives. being a source of supportand inspiration and being examples of integrity. it's just doing the right thing. as you saidearlier, the definition of a hero is just doing the right thing when no one is looking.that seems to be a common theme of all the hero interviews that i have done. a lot ofheroes had wishes for the world and their life.if you had three wishes that would come true for the world and for your life, what wouldthey be? i know you already expressed one wish, so you have
two more.i'm not sure exactly how i want to put this, but maybe one way to put this is that i wouldwish that everybody would have the persistence and the opportunity to discover that god reallydoes hear us when we pray. matter of fact i think that the whole ideaand that whole personal experience of spirituality is really at the root of a lot of things.that includes people who insist that there is no god and that all that stuff is madeup. i think at the root of that is usually a personalexperience: "i tried praying. i was in a hard time and my prayers just bounced off the ceiling."i know what that feels like. i think all of us do.one thing that i consider to be self-evident,
needing no further proof or discussion, isthis: i do not judge god. god judges me. i think there is a world of difference betweenbelieving that the world is a senseless, crazy place and believing that there ultimatelyis some order to everything. if i had another wish, maybe one of thosewishes would be that every kid could grow up in a family that's kind of like my parentswere. even though everything was really tough and really brutal at times, they stuck togetheranyway. again, at the time i did not look at my dadas a hero. to me it was like a stubborn policy he had that i wasn't sure i agreed with.it was only later that i realized that it was a heroic choice. for a little while, atleast, it would have been easier for him to
renege on his commitment. how are those fora couple of wishes? those are good wishes. and i understand whatyou are talking about. trusting god and leaning not on your own understanding and acknowledginghim in all your ways and letting him direct your paths.that takes a tremendous amount of faith. looking to see what he is doing in your life or inthe people around you. probably one of the hardest things in the world to do is to lethim direct your path. just having that faith and seeing everythingas a part of his plan for you and more importantly a plan for everybody in the entire world becausenothing can happen to you that doesn't affect everybody else.that's true. in the 1960's a guy came up with
the term "butterfly effect." at mit he wasstudying weather patterns when he discovered that the tiniest little change could potentiallycause an enormous change somewhere else. the wings of a butterfly here could causea hurricane there six months later. there was literally no way to know or track allthe cause and effects down to the granular level but that's how nature really works.i think when you make a right choice or a wrong choice, if you do the right thing youdecide to be a hero even if nobody is paying attention, or not to. it's the same thing.you just never know. you don't have to know how things are goingto turn out. you trust that there is a plan and you do the right thing in the interimsimply because it's the right thing.
what do you think about the "in search ofheroes" program and its impact on youth, parents and business people?i think if you are asking these kinds of probing questions of business people you are certainlybringing out a whole dimension in business. business people hardly ever get asked thesekinds of questions. you are trying to create some air time soyounger people are hearing from business people and different leaders and getting the insidestory. i think if the inside story gets heard it can only help.the good thing about these questions in the heroes program is that it's based on the philosophyof earl nightingale and his program "the strangest secret of the mind of man." it's the realizationthat people will only achieve the level of
success that they desire until they actuallybecome the type of person who has excellence and integrity. until they begin providinga service to humanity that is worth the financial gain that they desire.by letting people listen to these individuals like you who are very successful in the businessworld they are given role models. they learn from listening to the interviews.they learn what type of people you have become and what you think about. they learn how yourmind works and about testing those areas with difficult problems.they learn how that will give them the role model that they need to basically become thetype of people that will allow them to achieve the level of success that they desire. it'sgoing to be a lasting success.
like what you were talking about earlier regardingthose people who take the short cut and anything that is expedient. rather than being likethose people they learn to be like those who do the right thing when nobody is looking.to be like those who provide quality service and that are always seeking to provide a servicethat goes above and beyond everybody's expectation. they learn that this is the true model forsuccess. and they learn to not only to follow this in their personal and financial life,but in every area of life. i think it is possible to be successful ina whole bunch of areas of life. i think a lot of people have this idea that they canbe successful in business or help poor kids somewhere or do whatever but that they certainlycan't be successful in all the spheres.
well you certainly can't do everything. butat the same time i think you can be successful in all the arenas of your life, at least insome measure. it's not like i have to be a loser in this department and a winner in thisother department. what do you think of the things that parentscan do that will help their children realize that they too can be heroes and make a positiveimpact on others? well, i think it starts with taking responsibilityto be a hero yourself. there's the old phrase, "what you do speaks to loudly, what you sayi cannot hear." we aren't perfect and we don't have it allfigured out but we can do what we know we need to do. and sometimes when those toughdecisions come along our kids need to see
us make the tough decision and do the rightthing and not take the easy way out. this is a little bit of a rabbit trail, butanother thing. i think the best success manual for a business person is the book of proverbsin the bible. i think that in proverbs there is more useful,practical wisdom about how to deal with other people and the kinds of people you deal withthan just about any other place that i could name. i know every entrepreneur has his listof books that had a big impact on him. for me that one would be right at the top of thelist. what is proverbs about? it's all of the fundamentaldifferences between wise people and fools. i don't know of any other kind of discernmentthat would be more valuable than being able
to go into a crowd and have conversationsand start working with people and quickly figure out who is wise and who is foolish.who is honest and who is not. the way that you learn to frame the worldfrom that book is absolutely priceless. you can't really appreciate it until you reallyread through it a couple of times. you could read the whole thing, probably,in about an hour. but that's not how you read it.there are 31 chapters so my favorite way to read it is to read one chapter a day. if todayis the 21st then you read the 21st chapter. and it has something for you.yes, and it always seems to have different information each time you read it dependingupon what is going on in your life that day.
right.well perry, i really appreciate your time. i know how busy you are. thank you for sharingall the things that you did. it is really profound all the informationthat you provided. is there some parting information that you would like to share with the youngpeople listening to this interview? pursue wisdom. it's an elusive thing but it'sout there. proverbs is a great place. be a hero. whatever circumstances you arein and whatever skills you have, there is a way that you can harness those and be successfuland do the things that are going to be important to you in your life. i think life is justa process of discovering what that is. that is so profound. and again, i really appreciateyour time.
