Perry & Laura, less than one week in

June 8 was also my parents’ wedding anniversary. A month before, my dad’s cancer had been diagnosed terminal. I was craving companionship. Laura was painfully shy and determined to break into a new social circle.

She was SO easy to talk to. Excellent listener. She admired the fact that at age seventeen, I already had a business. She wanted to run it.

My dad died four months later. A year later her parents moved to Oklahoma. We started college. Married at age 20.

John McGee famously says, “All the best decisions Perry ever made, Laura made, and Perry just carried them out.” She’s the one who told me when my employer got sold right after September 11, “Perry you should start a company.”

She’s the one who said, “I want to adopt kids and do foster care.” She’s the one who insisted, “You need to go to Ireland. You need to go to Antarctica.”

Once we owned a rental property and I let a tenant talk me out of $150 he owed us. When she heard about it, she said, “Perry, I haven’t had new clothes for years. I was going to use that money to buy a dress.”

We’ve endured lean times with debt up to our eyeballs.  We’ve also enjoyed prosperity and traveled the world. Our love relationship has spanned from deserts to lush oases.

I am extraordinarily proud of our six kids. Every one of them is remarkable…

…and when they have a problem, she’s the first one they call. Her license plate is “MamaLaura.” Any kid within a 50 foot radius is safe. I call it the “MamaLaura force field.”

Laura, I love you so much. Thank you for being my best friend, business partner and lover, and creating our unique life together.

The last few months have been my most productive in 15 years. And created a ridiculous hyper-exponential relationship to my body of work, and it’s like living a dream.

I call it Exponentiating Your Body of Work. Taking what you already created and catapulting it to unprecedented levels of insight and effectiveness – because you can analyze and apply in seconds what would have taken days or weeks. Or been flat out impossible.

It’s intoxicating.

What this is

I installed two programs on my computer: Claude Code, which is Anthropic’s AI running in the Mac terminal window on my desktop; and Obsidian, (https://obsidian.md/download) which is sort of like Evernote – a free file-reader for the kind of plain-text documents AI loves to read.

Together they create a completely different experience from using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude in a browser.

Instead of interfacing to AI through a browser, constantly uploading files and copying / pasting information back into other applications, Claude accesses my computer directly and writes files into Obsidian. I don’t have to copy/paste much of anything. I mostly don’t have to remember where anything is. No searching browsers chats for a previous ChatGPT session.

I generate stuff and the outputs go right into a searchable file structure. AI knows where all of it is.

So I’ve given it full access to 25 years of books, courses, seminars, transcripts, newsletters, selected emails and handouts. I’ve been assimilating it for the last 4 months. I’m up to 900 personal stories, 240 distinct frameworks (Star Principle is just one of them; 5 Power Disqualifiers is one).

Then I started building very disciplined, precise frameworks documents, relating all of the various methods and principles to one another.

I made some jaw-dropping discoveries. My entire body of work turns out to have a hidden geometric structure. Eerie parallels between my frameworks and other thinkers’ work I’d never spotted before. Gaps in my thinking I didn’t know were there, filling themselves in.

At the bottom of this page I’ll tell you more about how revelatory it’s been.

A bunch of epiphanies are tumbling out of this.

The epiphanies

I suspect MANY people who have built a body of work and worked in a problem-solving profession can enjoy their own version of what I’m experiencing. Consultants, authors, subject matter experts, programmers, engineers, teachers, technicians, researchers, therapists. Anyone who has curated their own unique view of the world across 10, 20, 30 years.

As impressive as SuperConductor is – and I am extremely proud of it, it is already superior to most human business consultants – the frameworks we have embedded in it are JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. SuperConductor is perhaps 3% of the Planet Perry arsenal. It is remarkable. There is much more coming.

I have brand new clarity on dozens of problem-solving patterns I always knew and did instinctively, usually from my gut. Now I have diagrams and descriptions and models that explain what I do and how I do it. You can see the patterns right in front of your face. Many of them produce very satisfying A-HA moments.

Across all my seminars, courses and books, there had always been a ceiling of “what the audience can absorb.”

I bet a lot of you can relate to this. You can’t explain quantum physics or heart surgery or advanced Formula 1 engine mechanics – or advanced geometry or PhD-level massage therapy – to a lay audience.

The only course in which I ever (almost) CUT LOOSE was Marketing in 10 Dimensions, which is EXTREMELY nerdy. We made many disclaimers when we sold it. That course got rave reviews. Clients said it was a trip to a whole new universe.

That’s because it was.

That ceiling is no longer a limitation.

Now you can make Lenses and GPTs that have quantum physics equations inside, or Formula 1 race-car principles, or transmission-line impedance analogies of a sales funnel – and the client doesn’t have to see or understand ANY of it.

We can still solve his problem with those metaphors, and NAIL it.

You can be certain that nobody else in the world is solving business problems with those same metaphors.

Rich Schefren’s Claude Code+Obsidian Recommended Setup

A few months ago Rich Schefren told me:

Your AI MUST know you very well. Otherwise you’re constantly fighting with it.

Most folks skip this part. They get the tool installed, fire up a chat, and start barking orders. Then they get generic mush back, get frustrated, and conclude AI is overhyped.

The AI you cuss at doesn’t know you. It doesn’t know your frameworks. It doesn’t know your voice. Or your customer. It didn’t know what you’d already tried.

So it gives you what it gives everyone else – the average of the internet.

Once the AI knows the body of your work – your books, your transcripts, your private notes, your worked examples, the way you actually talk – the output stops being generic. Now it’s yours. It becomes a collaborator that has read your entire mind.

Before you ask important questions, the AI needs to know who you are.

How to set it up

I’m running mine in the Macintosh Terminal app, with Claude Code. Not Claude Desktop. Desktop has come a long way – GUI install, no command line, friendly to non-coders – but for the cumulative multi-month knowledge work I just described, the two are different animals under the hood. The gap is closing fast. For now, Mac Terminal + Claude Code is the setup I’d point you to.

The instructions at https://zenithhub.ai/ will get you most of the way there. But they skip steps and you should do what I did: I used the regular Claude in my web browser (https://claude.ai/) to walk me through every error message I got along the way. I had one Claude talking me through how to install another Claude.

It looked like this. I’d hit a snag in Terminal. I’d copy the error code into the Claude browser window. Browser-Claude would say “Try this command.” I’d paste it into Terminal. Terminal would spit a new error. Copy. Paste. New command. New error. Copy. Paste.

Two hours of that later, I was finally in.

Not glamorous. Worth every minute.

If you’re not a coder, this part will feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. You haven’t. The dialogue between the two Claudes is the install path right now. Trust it.

Once you’re in, you install Obsidian from https://obsidian.md/download (it’s free). It’s a file reader / manager / editor for Markdown documents – .md files – which AIs love. Markdown is the AI version of a web page. Set up a folder where you want your knowledge base to live. Point Claude Code at that folder.

Now you have an AI that lives on your computer and writes directly to files you can see, edit, and back up.

Two programs. One feeds the other.

Tell it who you are

The zenithhub.ai walkthrough asks you to create a file called CLAUDE.md in the folder where your knowledge base lives. This is your AI’s instruction manual. It’s the first thing Claude reads every time it wakes up.

This is where Rich Schefren’s stipulation lives or dies.

Mine has my Marketing DNA Test loaded in – it tells Claude that I’m an Alchemist who leads with words and feelings, not charts and bullet points. My Kolbe scores – so Claude knows I’m 35% Quick Start, 30% Fact Finder, which means: give me a deadline and let me improvise; don’t make me argue every point. Writing samples – so Claude knows what I sound like at my best, and what I never sound like. The frameworks I lean on. The people I work with by name. My company structure. What I’m focused on this quarter.

The first time you ask Claude to do something important, it reads this file. Then it acts like a colleague who has worked with you for a decade, not a chatbot you have to brief from scratch every conversation.

Write yours over a weekend. Add to it as you discover what’s missing. Mine gets sharpened every week. If you’ve taken Rich Schefren’s ZenithMind program, dump your outputs into your Claude/Obsidian setup and ask it to tightly summarize and insert that into your profile.

This gives it the ability to do the kind of work you want it to do.

What to do once you’re in

The work you most care about begins after the install is done. Feed it.

• Books, reports or papers you’ve written
• Content from your website
• Course transcripts
• Seminar recordings
• Newsletter archives
• Customer interview notes
• Worked examples – the things that show what you actually do, not just what you say you do

Take your time. Don’t dump and walk away. Curate. Ask the AI to summarize back what it’s learned. Correct it where it’s wrong. Make it write the index, the cross-references, the framework maps.

The first time the AI surfaces a connection you’ve sensed for ten years but never wrote down, you’ll get a chill up your spine.

That’s exponentiating your body of work.

“How do I use this new capability?”

A friend in my mastermind put it to me last week: stop asking “how do I learn to use AI.” It’s the wrong question, the same way “how do I learn to use the internet” was wrong in 1999. Nobody sat down and ‘learned internet.’ People emailed Aunt Sally, looked up a recipe, sold a baseball card collection. Each was a specific blockage; the internet was the path around it.

AI is the same. Pick the thing in your business that’s taken too long this week, or the information you keep digging for, or the passion project you’re geeked about. Just ask: “Here’s what I’m trying to do, here’s what I have, how do we solve this?” Then do it.

Most people ask: “I want to learn AI ? what should I do?” You need to flip it: “I have a specific friction ? what tool solves it, AI or otherwise?”

Every person who does this ends up somewhere completely different. My operations manager Rachell uses hers to pull a member’s coaching-call themes and remaining payment count in four minutes – without opening four different apps. A real estate friend uses his to dig through tenant emails and lease terms.

I have mine mapping two decades of frameworks. There’s no template. There’s no “right way.”

I see the distance between “generic ChatGPT” and “what a custom setup like this can do” only growing with time. Any one person’s rabbit hole goes far deeper than what any search engine has access to. The body of work you spent 20 years building is suddenly a working asset, not a filing cabinet.

What experiences are YOU having? Reply and tell me.

Perry

P.S. Here are some specific discoveries that fell out when I fed my own body of work to the AI:

Anyone who’s read 80/20 Sales and Marketing is familiar with the Tactical Triangle. Those who took the advanced course know there’s a 16-element fractal Tactical Triangle from Rosetta Stone. You might also recall a 3D tetrahedron, folded into a shape where the edges and points have additional meaning. A lot of Planet Perry members have these on their desk. Truth Seminar alumni have Axis Shift triangles, both 2D and 3D. Influence Retreat alumni have Influence triangles, both 2D and 3D.

I discovered that my entire body of work has a tetrahedral geometric structure, and it’s like taking a magnifying glass to a snowflake. All of this seamlessly connects to my science work. There is a path from everything to everything else, and it is beautiful and mathematical.

I discovered meta-patterns I had not seen before.

I found eerie, sharp, EXACT parallels between some of my frameworks and Megan Macedo’s storytelling and creativity models. (I fed in a document from her 2018 Dunfanaghy retreat where I’d filled in the worksheets.)

I found several gaps where my own frameworks had obvious spaces in them, and easily filled them in.

Your body of work has a shape too. You’ve likely never seen it. It may be like a tree, or a snowflake, or a piece of music or a poem. Maybe it looks like a race car. But I am certain that just as I discovered relationships I’d never seen before, you will as well.

They’re wrong.

I’m in the liberation business. And I didn’t fully understand that until I met a crippled cobbler in a muddy village outside Nairobi, Kenya.

The Day That Shattered My Assumptions

I went to Kenya expecting to see poverty. What I didn’t expect was to have my entire worldview turned upside down by a man who couldn’t speak a word of English.

The day started like a gut punch. I spent hours meeting AIDS orphans, touring overcrowded shelters, listening to social workers recite statistics that would make your head spin. The problems felt infinite. The resources felt microscopic. Everyone – and I mean everyone – had that thousand-yard stare of learned helplessness.

Then, late in the afternoon, everything changed.

The Man Who Refused to Be Helpless

Paul Mungai – Chief Systems Architect & Technical Partner

His name was Paul Mungai. He was a cobbler who’d started his shoe repair business with a $100 microloan.

While everyone else moved through the world with glassy, defeated eyes, Paul was awake. Alert. Purposeful.

His small shop was nothing special – just a few tools, a wooden bench, and shelves lined with worn shoes waiting for repair. But his kids? Well-fed. School uniforms? Clean and pressed. Education? They were getting one.

Paul didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak his tribal language. But when our eyes met, we had a conversation that transcended words.

It was the conversation that happens between two people who understand something fundamental about life: There is immense dignity in being self-sufficient. In building something. In being useful to your community.

The Epiphany That Changed Everything

In that moment – standing in a muddy village 8,000 miles from home – the scales fell from my eyes.

I realized there’s one and ONLY one thing that consistently lifts people out of poverty:

It’s not charity. It’s not UNICEF. It’s not government handouts. It’s not missionaries with good intentions. It’s not relief workers with PhD’s.

It’s entrepreneurship.

It’s doing mundane things like fixing shoes for $1 a piece. It’s solving small problems for real people with real money. It’s the same force that built every thriving economy in human history.

Paul Mungai was an entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur. We make civilization happen at the most fundamental level.

Why Your Business Actually Matters

Here’s what hit me like a freight train:

When I teach someone to write better sales copy, I’m not just helping them make money. When I show them how to optimize their Google Ads, I’m not just increasing their ROI.

I’m making more Paul Mungais possible.

Every successful entrepreneur I create has the potential to:

• Hire people
• Solve problems
• Generate wealth
• Lift up their community
• Create dignity through productive work

The ripple effects are infinite.

Permission to Be Evangelical

That day in Nairobi gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: Permission to be an entrepreneurship evangelist.

Permission to sell people – hard – on the idea of taking the plunge into business ownership. Even when it seems impossible. Even when they’re scared. Even when the odds look terrible.

Because I believe in what I’m doing right down to my bones.

I’m not just teaching marketing tactics. I’m spreading a force of nature that has lifted more people out of poverty than every charitable organization combined.

The Real Reason You Should Build a Business

Maybe you started your business to make money. Maybe you wanted freedom. Maybe you were tired of working for someone else.

All fine reasons.

But here’s a bigger reason: Every successful business is a voting machine for human dignity.

Every customer you serve, every employee you hire, every problem you solve is a vote for the idea that people can improve their circumstances through voluntary exchange.

You’re not just building a company. You’re building civilization.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

The world doesn’t need more charity cases.

It needs more entrepreneurs.

It needs people willing to risk their own resources to solve real problems for real people.

It needs people like Paul Mungai. And people like you.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to start that business, launch that product, or make that investment.

The question is: Can you afford not to?

Because somewhere in the world, there’s a Paul Mungai waiting for what you’re going to build.

Don’t keep him waiting.

A study by Goddard published in Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology considers the impact of cancer prevention, screening, and treatment on mortality rates for breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancers in the U.S. from 1975 to 2020.

They estimated 5.9 million deaths were avoided in this period, with prevention and screening responsible for around 4.8 million of those avoided deaths.

Early detection is the real game.

VERY simple levers steer those systems.

Simplicity Controls Complexity

Your body has 10 trillion cells. Every cell has a trillion atoms. Your body is more complex than anyone can fathom.

Yet… Denis Noble, a famous Oxford scientist says:

“Your blood pressure, weight, breathing and heart rate predict your health 4X better than sequencing your entire DNA.”

4 simple things give you more information than 3 billion letters of DNA.

Think about that for a second. Scientists spent billions mapping the human genome, yet my $20 blood pressure cuff and bathroom scale tell me more about my health than analyzing all 3 billion letters in my DNA.

Simple trumps complex. Always has, always will.

The Star Principle: A Masterclass in Market Dominance

This is also true in business. The clearest example I’ve ever seen is the Star Principle.

The Star Principle explains why 80% of business owners never make real money. Why they trudge through a sad, even miserable existence… even though they are good people selling a good product.

I know because I’ve been there. In 2003, I was a direct marketing consultant. I had good clients. decent income. But there are LOTS of marketing / communication consultants. Consequently I was working a heavy load, constantly chasing the next client, and taking almost no vacations. My business wasn’t terrible, but it sure wasn’t making me rich.

I discovered Google advertising, which at that time was VERY new and almost nobody understood it. It didn’t fit what most people in advertising considered to be “what you do when you advertise.”

It was very chaotic at first and it wasn’t even clear what the rules are. But I figured out the rules and wrote a book called “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.”

As the online advertising market began to form, and as Google became more mainstream, competition intensified. Suddenly there was a new ebook literally every day. I was in the fray. After about a year I emerged as the top provider in that space.

I found: 

It’s FAR easier to be #1 in a market than to be #3, #4, #5… and you make more money than the other guys put together.

Ten years later when I discovered the Star Principle, I saw in retrospect that it accurately described everything I had ever done that actually worked.

I had, without knowing it, carved out a Star position in a new and growing market.

The first time I discovered this (by accident at the time, and didn’t have a name for it) I was the #1 direct marketing consultant in the impossibly narrow field of industrial networking. I wrote a book on “Industrial Ethernet” -I as the first author in a teeny tiny niche. It made me #1. And brought me a handful of very good clients.

I discovered: Being the only fish in a TINY pond is far easier than being a “competent” fish in a big pond. My first experience of Star Principle.

Like blood pressure & heart rate, a simple 2×2 matrix predicts with 80% accuracy how healthy or sick your business is. (It also shows you how to escape the trap.)

According to the Star Principle, there are only 4 types of companies. Based on the famous ‘Boston Box’, they fall on a simple 2×2 chart:

• On the left are companies that are #1 in their market
• On the right are #2, #3, #4 and so on
• The top row represents markets growing more than 10% per year
• The bottom row represents markets growing less than 10% per year

The Four Business Types

STAR: If your market is growing more than 10% per year, AND you’re #1 in that market, you’re on your way to being super valuable, growing your equity, and dominating your market.

Amazon in the early 2000s? STAR. They dominated e-commerce when online shopping was exploding. Jeff Bezos didn’t need to be a management genius to become the richest man on earth. The Star Principle did the heavy lifting.

QUESTION MARK: If your market is growing faster than 10% per year, and you’re #2 or 3, you might be OK. For a while. But when the market stops growing, you’re screwed. Because ONLY #1 players are consistently profitable.

Remember Myspace? Perfect example. They were #2 when social media was booming. For a few years, things looked great. Then Facebook consolidated its #1 position, the market growth slowed, and Myspace collapsed. From a $580 million valuation to practically nothing.

CASH COW: If your market is growing less than 10% per year, and you’re #1, then you’re an entrenched player enjoying most cash and profits. But your business, because of limited market growth, is unlikely to appreciate rapidly.

Think Coca-Cola. Massive profits, dominant position, but the soda market isn’t growing much. They make tons of cash, but their stock doesn’t perform like a high-growth tech company.

DOG: If your market is growing less than 10% per year, and you’re not #1… your life probably sucks. Period. And you need to eject as soon as you can. Because no amount of “optimization” can fix it.

This was my consulting business in 2003. I was in a crowded market that wasn’t growing explosively. I worked my fingers to the bone trying to optimize my way out of the problem. But the Star Principle was working against me. No amount of hustle could fix the fundamental problem.

This Is Not Just Theory

This is not merely an interesting ‘model’ to bandy about at the pub.

LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY:

If you’re not a Cash Cow or a Star, you can have…

• Superb marketing
• Superb product
• Superb managers
• Superb company culture
• And pretty much ANYTHING ELSE THAT’S COOL, INNOVATIVE AND ADMIRABLE you might find in any great business book…

…but your life will STILL be a slog.

Look at BlackBerry. They had incredible technology. Devoted users. Brilliant engineers. But when iPhone and Android took the #1 position in the exploding smartphone market, BlackBerry became a Question Mark, then a Dog. All their excellence couldn’t save them.

If your business IS a star, you can have:

• ‘Good enough’ marketing
• ‘Good enough’ product
• ‘Good enough’ managers
• ‘Good enough’ culture
• NOT scour 100 business books

…and you will still make a lot of money and have a great life.

Google’s original search algorithm wasn’t perfect. Their first business model was a mess. But they were #1 in a market growing well over 10% per year. The result? Two guys in a garage built a trillion-dollar company.

Applying the Star Principle: 4 Steps to Transform Your Business

When I realized my consulting business was a Dog, I knew I needed to make a change. Here’s exactly how I did it, and how you can too:

1. Evaluate Your Current Position

First, you need the naked truth: where does your business actually sit on this 2×2 matrix?

I had to admit I was a Dog. I was maybe #18 in the business to business consulting world, in a market growing maybe 5% annually. The math was simple: I was in trouble.

Look at your market’s annual growth rate. Is it above 10%? Be honest. Next, are you truly #1? Not in your mind, but in reality? Do you have the largest market share? If you answered “no” to either question, you’re not a Star.

2. Narrow Your Focus

I couldn’t be #1 in “B2B marketing consulting” – too many established players. But I could dominate a specific niche: “AdWords education for small businesses.”

This is crucial. Most businesses are trying to be everything to everyone. Big mistake.

Look at how Zoom crushed WebEx. WebEx tried to serve all online communication needs. Zoom focused obsessively on making video meetings dead simple. They became #1 in a specific, fast-growing segment.

Ask yourself: What sub-niche could you absolutely dominate? What slice of the market could you own 80% of?

3. Innovate or Acquire

Sometimes you need bold moves. When I pivoted to AdWords education, I didn’t just create another course. I created the DEFINITIVE system, innovating how the information was delivered and organizing an entire philosophy of marketing integration.

Facebook didn’t just compete with Myspace – they created a fundamentally different approach. Then, when Instagram threatened them, they acquired it to maintain their #1 position.

Your options:

• Create a genuinely new approach that makes you clearly #1
• Buy out competitors to consolidate the #1 position
• Partner strategically to leapfrog into the lead

Don’t play catch-up with the leader. Change the game.

4. Monitor Market Growth

I chose AdWords education because Google was growing explosively in 2004. The market was expanding at 100%+ annually.

Netflix saw streaming coming before Blockbuster did. They pivoted to a high-growth market while Blockbuster clung to their low-growth DVD rental business. We all know how that ended.

Set up systems to track your market’s growth rate. Read industry reports. Watch for emerging segments. Be ready to pivot to the next wave BEFORE it crests.

My Own Transformation

When I applied these four steps, everything changed:

• Income increased 3X
• Work hours decreased by half
• Business value grew 10X

Not because I became a better marketer or worked harder. Simply because I applied the Star Principle correctly.

I went from competing with countless AdWords consultants to dominating the AdWords education niche. Instead of chasing clients, I had a waiting list. Instead of trading hours for dollars, I built equity in a scalable business.

The Ultimate Test

The 2×2 Star Matrix is the ultimate litmus test.

Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

If you’re not a Cash Cow or a Star, you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing.

I’ve watched dozens of friends and clients transform struggling businesses by simply moving to a position where they could be #1 in a fast-growing market. Sometimes that meant:

• Narrowing their focus to a specific sub-niche where they could dominate
• Abandoning a “good” business to start a potential Star
• Merging with competitors to claim the #1 position
• Pivoting to a related market that was growing faster

One client was making custom software for small businesses – a classic Dog position. He narrowed his focus to dentists only, built specific features they needed, and within 18 months owned 40% of the dental software market in his region. His income tripled.

Another was struggling selling general fitness coaching online – too much competition, modest growth. She focused exclusively on postpartum fitness for new mothers, a niche growing 30% annually. Within a year, she was the go-to expert, featured on national TV, with 5x the revenue.

Conclusion: Simple Always Trumps Complex

In my next post, I’ll show you how to see exactly where your business lands on the 2×2 Star Matrix, and the specific steps to take if you’re not a Star.

Remember: If you’re not a Star, your business is very unlikely to make you and your team rich. No amount of optimization, hard work, or brilliant strategy can overcome this simple truth.

The world runs on simple principles. Your body’s health is predicted by four simple metrics. Your business success is predicted by one simple 2×2 matrix.

Simple trumps complex. Every. Single. Time.

—

Frequently Asked Questions on the Star Principle

1. What is the Star Principle, and how does it affect business success?

The Star Principle is a concept that explains why businesses either thrive or struggle. It highlights that businesses positioned as the #1 player in a fast-growing market (more than 10% growth per year) are most likely to succeed. These businesses enjoy massive growth and success while those that are not #1 or are in slow-growing markets face ongoing struggles, no matter how good their products or marketing are.

2. Why is being #1 in your market so important?

Being #1 in your market means you dominate the space, and that gives you a huge advantage. When you’re number one, you make more money and have more opportunities than your competitors. Think about how Amazon thrived because they were the dominant force in e-commerce when the market was growing rapidly.

3. How can I know if my business is in the right position?

You can assess your position using a simple 2×2 matrix. If your market is growing more than 10% per year and you’re #1, you’re in a “Star” position and are on your way to success. If not, you might be in a “Dog” or “Question Mark” position, and it’s time to consider shifting your focus or strategy.

4. What can I do if my business is not in a “Star” position?

If your business isn’t in the #1 spot, consider narrowing your focus to a smaller, specific niche. By specializing and dominating a sub-niche, you can become the #1 player in that space. This strategy helps you avoid the competition and ride the growth wave in a rapidly expanding market.

5. Can excellent marketing or a great product make up for not being a Star?

Unfortunately, no. Even with the best marketing or product, if you’re not the #1 player in a fast-growing market, your business will face limitations. The Star Principle shows that you can’t compensate for not being #1 in a growing market. You need to find your position or shift to a better market.

—

Want to learn more about applying the Star Principle to your business? Join us at the Equity 2.0 Seminar where we’ll dive deep into these concepts and more. Get all the details at https://www.perrymarshall.com/equity-2025

It was birthed in the school of hard knocks when I gave away over 170 Apple MacBook Pro computers at my very first seminar.

The hotel “promised me” my computers were safe… but would NOT guarantee a single thing. Their promises and assurances were a puff of smoke. We had a bare-knuckles standoff with the hotel manager and the security team.

Full story @2 minutes in the Hard Knock podcast with David and John Fox:

(The heckler story right after is VERY funny as well.)

Getting to the Bottom of the Swamp: Putting my most cherished ideas on an anvil and inviting the world to pound on them… in a desperate quest for the real truth:

@46 minutes.

One of the most terrifying decisions I ever made – Adopting a child:

@1 hour, 23 minutes

How to find your own unique God-given success formula:

@2 hours 19 minutes

David and John are the best interviewers – this is a splendid conversation and I urge you to listen to the whole thing.

Perry Marshall

In high school or college, did you have to read the epic poem Beowulf? I did. I’m guessing most were bored by it.

I didn’t grasp its true meaning until I was in my late 40s.

King Hrothgar has built an impressive beer hall. All his merry men love to come together and drink there every night.

But there’s a problem: Grendel, an evil monster, shows up every now and then, kicks down the door, demolishes the place, and slaughters the knights and soldiers. The killings are resulting in a lot of bad Google reviews for Hrothgar.

Enter Beowulf. Hired gun. Not terribly different from a great many entrepreneurs—guys and gals who solve problems nobody else can solve.

A few nights later, Grendel kicks down the door and goes swashbuckling through the mead hall, smashing warriors and terrifying everyone.

Beowulf, clothed in chain mail, attacks Grendel.

Beowulf’s weapons don’t work, so he ends up relying on his secret superpower: the mighty death grip of his own right hand.

Beowulf grasps Grendel by the shoulder and literally rips shoulder and arm right out of the socket and tosses them onto the floor. Grendel stomps back to the swamp from which he came and plunges into the water, leaving a trail of blood and gore.

Grendel is dead! A great toast is raised to Beowulf!

But the story is only one-third over.

~

A few nights later, another monster kicks down the door.

It’s Grendel’s mother. And she is MAD.

As poet and essayist David Whyte puts it in his excellent book The Heart Aroused, “It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear.”

How many entrepreneurs have solved a perceived difficulty at the first stroke only to realize it was merely a symptom of a deadlier disease at the heart of the business?

Back to the poem: The swamp where Grendel’s mother lives is so dreadful, even a deer being chased by wolves would rather get eaten than dive in. But Beowulf dives in anyway, to confront the new monster. He brings a magnificent sword given to him by Hrogarth … and loses it almost immediately.

Grendel’s mom attacks him in a rage. The only thing that keeps Beowulf alive is his chain mail. He manages to wriggle free, and just when she’s about to impale him, he spies an ancient sword, crafted by ogres. Beowulf seizes it and takes a swing at Grendel’s mother. The new sword slices all the way to the bone, killing her instantly.

I bet the Beowulf saga describes every big, ugly, badass problem you’ve ever solved in your life. It does for my life.

It’s me getting a sales job and being thrown into the cold-calling swamp. I nearly drowned, but then I discovered direct marketing.

It’s me hanging out my shingle to become a marketing consultant, and then desperately needing sales leads. Writing articles and getting publicity put a patch on the problem for a while, but I didn’t really solve it until I mastered Google Ads. Then the problem of buying Traffic still wasn’t solved until I solved Conversion and Economics.

You have a monster to kill. The weapons others gave you don’t work. You have to find new superpowers … your own gleaming sword at the bottom of the swamp.

From Perry Marshall’s book Detox, Declutter, Dominate

Perry Marshall (00:00:01):
Good morning everybody, and welcome welcome to Andrew Bob Krista, Keith Lawrence. The names are jumping around because they’re coming in fast. Mark Milee, Marlene, Mitch Muhammad. I got a lot of Ms. Paul Perez, who’s going to be at our retreat. Pete Thompson, Rick Johnson. Lots of people popping in. I have two very, very special guests with me today. I have Karen Parker, who is a serial entrepreneur. She runs a, a book publishing and author publicity company. She also runs a company organized around interior design which is a, she’s probably the leading author of books on interior design. And and I have Ron Wilder, who, well, I’ll, I’ll tell you a story about Ron. We had our subversion summit in May which was our how to get traffic Not from Google, not from Facebook, not from TikTok, not from YouTube seminar.

Perry Marshall (00:01:26):
And on the fourth day, Ron was wrestling with people on the floor at the seminar, and everybody’s like, oh, yeah, well, that, I guess that’s not too surprising. . Ron runs a company called CEO Dojo. And if, if you’ve ever heard the phrase, how you do anything is how you do everything, Ron applies that principle in order to find out why CEOs are stuck on things. And he does it by wrestling with them. And he says, if you get somebody to my house and we put on our Dojo uniforms and wrestle around for 15 minutes, I will tell you where you’re stuck in your business and why it’s how you do anything. It’s how you do everything. And well, if you believe in fractals the way I do, that’s completely believable. Also, I’ve done a little martial arts stuff, so yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Perry Marshall (00:02:26):
And so both of these characters came to the Influence retreat that we had a year ago. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago. And I showed up have with with my notes and like, well, here’s what we’re gonna do. But then, like something else just kind of happened and it wasn’t incongruent with what I showed up planning to do and wanting to do, but it was certainly far and beyond and above expectations because the whole thing just kind of took on a life of its own. And and like I said, both of these people participated in that, and I asked them, would you come and join us today and just talk about that? Because one thing that was very, very clear about everyone in the room was it was almost like the, the mission there on, they didn’t choose it.

Perry Marshall (00:03:37):
It shows them, and this, it, it, it was a, it was an event for exploring what do you do when that’s who you are, and that’s the role that you’ve been given in this life. And and it just turned into a really, really fascinating thing. And so I’m gonna kind of go back and forth between these two, and we’re just gonna talk about what is it like to know that there’s a job out there with your name on it. And they’re and it’s a very interesting kind of job. Like, it’s not like being a plumber or being an automotive mechanic or, or being a home builder or something like that, where you’re just going to make these mechanical things happen. It is a sum to influence the world and influence people and influence other people’s behavior and other people’s beliefs in a particular way, because you know that if you don’t do that the world’s gonna turn out a lot worse place than if you did. So it comes with a certain amount of weight and it’s exciting and it’s terrifying. Like, well, you know, if I do this right, wow, like maybe I could go down in history. Or even if I don’t, quote unquote go down in history, I will still know that a whole lot of things happened in the world in a particular way that definitely would not have happened had I not done my part. And so I just wanna start with Karen. Karen, you live in Wisconsin near Minnesota.

Karen Parker (00:05:34):
I’ve lived a lot of places. , I’m in Wisconsin though, currently. Yes.

Perry Marshall (00:05:38):
And and you’ve been a very active person in our renaissance world for the last year. And why don’t you give people a little bit of an idea of who you are and whatever part of, you know, the interior design, the book publishing, and all of that, that you would like everyone to know.

Karen Parker (00:06:05):
Thank you. So I would, I wanna just start first by saying, when you say Interior di design, what I actually do is teach a personality assessment system called Human Design, which is really about consciously designing your inner landscape so that how you think and how you show up and create matches the world, you’re the world you’re living in. So you know, I, I will say that I’ve literally been a writer my whole life. I wrote my first novel at 17. I went to school and studied journalism and nursing and got a degree in both. I started my first publishing company when I was 20. You know, I definitely would say I’ve been on a mission, I’ve been on a mission since I was four. I was told by my imaginary friend Thomas at Ford that I’m here to teach love. And that has been woven into everything that I’ve done.

Karen Parker (00:06:56):
And as you said, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’ve done a lot of stuff. And you know, one of the things that you talked about just now in your introduction is what you call the weight of I’ll call it the weight of purpose. And, you know, one of the things that I think is so powerful and so important, and actually really what, why I think, you know, being in group, doing group work around purpose as you led us through in this program is so essential. Because when you’re on this purpose, and, and Ron, you probably relate to this too, and I know you relate to this period, there’s a certain loneliness with purpose because not everybody’s purpose. And, and it means you have to be a little bit delusively confident. You, you are oftentimes serving something that nobody gets. And your job oftentimes is to translate this thing you’re carrying into regular language. And I think there’s an experimental, a lifelong experimental process with trying to translate that. And, and, you know, translating that into writing this very fixed, finite body of inspiration and transformation, whatever you’re bringing, and to do it on your own without support, it is daunting. And as I said, oftentimes really lonely, really heavy and kind of a burden on some days.

Perry Marshall (00:08:21):
Well, I, I identify that with that because it is kind of a, it is a lonely like if, if you walk into a restaurant or like any, any place you look around, you know, Mo most people are not trying to do what I’m trying to do, right? They’re, they’re, they’re getting their coke, they’re buying a dress, they’re they’re just kind of moving the checkers piece, like one step on the board. And like, I’m on this, like, like, I’ve got this, I got this burning in my bones. I got this thing that I got this message I’ve been given. So you, you said well, there was a lot packed in what, what you just said. You wrote your first book, did you say, at age 17?

Karen Parker (00:09:21):
17, yep.

Perry Marshall (00:09:23):
Okay. So already that early you knew that you needed to teach people, explain things to people, and then you, what did you say you’d done at age 20?

Karen Parker (00:09:36):
I started my first publishing company at 20.

Perry Marshall (00:09:40):
Can you tell us a little bit about what that looked like? Yeah. . What is

Karen Parker (00:09:44):
? Well, it doesn’t exist anymore. So the, so I was in, as I said, I got a degree in nursing and journalism. And at that point in time, I started off as a labor and delivery nurse. I lasted about 60 days. That was the longest job I’ve ever had. ’cause I’m technically unemployable. And I, I, part of why I didn’t make it is I didn’t wanna be, I didn’t take orders well, honestly. So I started my own midwifery practice. So I was delivering babies on the, at, at home on the border of Texas. And this was before home birth was a trendy thing. And I thought the research really showed that it was important that women get a specific kind of support during the birth process. So I wrote books about how to choose a midwife and how to make conscious choices around the birth of children, so that parents had autonomy and sovereignty over the process, and nobody wanted to publish them.

Karen Parker (00:10:44):
So I decided, well, I’ll just publish ’em myself. This was way before lulu and eBooks and all that stuff. And so I started a small company called Medical Alternatives Press, and we published what today wouldn’t be so fringy information, but at that point was very fringy information about home birth and eating organic and those kinds of pieces. And, you know, we sold, we sold books at health fairs at little pamphlets and tried really hard to make sure the FDA didn’t find us. ’cause We would’ve been in big trouble in those days. But it was, it was a mission. It was definitely a mission. I wanted women to know that they had choices. And I wanted women to understand the history of childbirth and the medicalization of childbirth, and how that actually wasn’t in their favor necessarily, especially when we looked at research. And you know, that was the first iteration, the first publishing company. It, it didn’t last very long because it was very difficult at that point in time to distribute books. This was before eBooks before, you know, all this ease with self-publishing that we have. And it was very expensive, and you had to order a bunch of books and have ’em in your garage. And at a certain point, I was fed up with having a garage full of boxes of books. So, Mm-Hmm. I shifted gears a bit.

Perry Marshall (00:12:04):
Okay. So between then and now you’ve gone through several Evo evolutions that, that still, they, they, they tend to revolve around the same themes, even though you’ve done a whole lot of, of different things, right? You’re, you’re still helping people publish books who and, and they, they tend to be people who, they’ve accumulated a lot of wisdom. They’ve paid a very heavy price for whatever it is that they know. Mm-Hmm. getting that wisdom to other people isn’t necessarily about being on the New York Times best seller list, but it absolutely is about making an impact and transferring knowledge to the next generation, or changing their profession or getting their story told, because their story may not be the kind of story that you naturally expect to hear. You’re, so you’re, you’re still doing that Mm-Hmm. , you’re still defying the status quo. Human design. And I apologize for, I don’t know where I got interior design, but I, I should know better. I’ve been working with, with Karen. Human design is, I mean, I don’t know how much you want to get into that, but like, what, what I’ve noticed is that it, it, it’s kind of the Ron Wilder, how people do anything is how they do everything. There’s kind of a certain orbit Mm-Hmm.

Perry Marshall (00:13:43):
What you do. So could you tell us some touch points along the way? Like, well then 10 years later, I found myself once again, and then, you know, 15 years later, I found myself once again, c could you kinda weave this together and tell us more of the story?

Karen Parker (00:14:01):
So, so I had children and so I, that, that caused me to quit a lot of things for a short period of time. But shortly after I had kids, one of the things that I really thought about as a value for being a parent and a mother, and eventually I was a full-time single parent for a lot of years, you know, I looked at my kids and I, I felt like these really unique and beautiful, precious people. I did not want them to be in a box. I did not want them to go through a formula of, you are this and, and a school systems machine. And so, very quickly after quitting, I decided, well, the only way I’m gonna show them that it’s possible for you to follow your mission and your purpose is I’m gonna have to do it. And they’re gonna have to see what that looks like.

Karen Parker (00:14:46):
So I can’t compromise on, on showing them what does it look like to live your purpose? And so I cranked the business back up. I became one of the very first life coaches trained in the world. And I trained with Thomas Leonard before he passed. I gave up my nursing license because I began to learn energy psychology. And at that point in time, that’s the meridian based acupressure, EFT. This was in 2000. At that point in my professionals were losing their licenses for tapping. And because it was inappropriate touching. And I thought, well, that’s ridiculous. This is working better than anything I’ve ever taught. You know, done. Mm-Hmm, . So, you know, again, I had to sort of say, here’s the box. Here’s what feels true and right and on purpose for me. And I, I just slowly had to let go of everything that was in that box, including my nursing license.

Karen Parker (00:15:37):
And again, started to get frustrated because the speed at which information was being disseminated, the speed at which I could help people make change, get out of pain, create something better for their lives, was being hampered by the old ways of doing things. And so I cranked up another publishing company, indigo Heart Publishing Company, because I thought, I have a message. There are other people I’m encountering that also have a message. And, you know, we, I, I started up a second iteration while raising kids, while teaching that, that time tele classes. And, you know, and trying my best to get people to get on purpose, to stay inspired, to find who they are, and to sync up the true story of who they are so they could get out of the box and do what we came here to do. You know, part of my personal mission has always been this inner knowing that we’re on the cusp of a creative revolution, and that the world has to change that part of what needs to happen.

Karen Parker (00:16:40):
And this is part of what I use human design for. Part of what has to happen is people have to remember their right place in the world and the value of who they are, because those two pieces, people know what they’re here to do, and they remember the inherent value of who they are, then what they can create from that place. And the, and the productivity and the support and the sustenance and, and the wellbeing they generate from that place goes up exponentially. And I really do believe that people are more creative when they’re being who they were born to be. And more than anything in the world now, we need creative solutions to the challenges facing humanity. And we’re not gonna get there if we’re not creative. If we are staying in a box, the solutions were generated in that box. We can’t create solutions if we’re still all creating out of this box.

Karen Parker (00:17:29):
So it’s a long story, Perry, I’m old. Basically second, second iteration of publishing company. And, you know, I love publishing. I personally love writing. I’ll tell you, the frustration of being a publisher is that there are a lot of people who didn’t understand or weren’t on fire enough maybe, or were maybe still in the box enough, maybe they had one foot in, one foot out. They didn’t understand that it’s not just writing, it’s not just creating a lead generation tool, which is what some people do, because that lead generation tool, that driver, it’s great. If you want money, it’s great, but it does. It’s not really, oftentimes, it’s not really the fire in your soul. It’s gonna force you to stay with the editing process, which by the way, sucks. Nobody likes the editing process. It’s horrible. You write this beautiful manuscript, you think that’s it, I’m done.

Karen Parker (00:18:29):
I did it. And then you give back this document that’s got all these comments on it, and you’re like, what’s wrong with this editor? How come they don’t understand what I’m saying? This is stupid. Right? And you have to go through this horrible public humiliation, basically, with the editor, and you have to rewrite. And oftentimes you have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. And then you have to figure out how are we gonna put it all together and make it look beautiful, and then market it and sell it. And it’s not fun sometimes a lot of times. And if you’re not connected to that fire and you don’t have that deep alignment with, why am I doing this? You’ll get, I, I think of it as, I think of publishing as like a race. You know, you get to the countdown, you know, 3, 2, 1, and then you cross the finish line.

Karen Parker (00:19:13):
You know, most people stop at three and two, and they don’t, they’re, and they look behind them and they’re like, well, I wrote the manuscript and it’s good enough. And they stop. And good enough is okay, but good enough isn’t on fire. And oftentimes good enough really doesn’t do enough. And you know, that that connection to purpose really gives you the fire to go from 3, 2, 1, and then cross the finish line and actually create an excellent progress, a pro a pro project or something that you’ve really self-actualized with through the journey. And I quit that publishing company ’cause I got frustrated at all the people who stopped at number two and didn’t go to one and, and to finish the race. ’cause It, it wasn’t fun for me to try to drag people into their evolution.

Perry Marshall (00:19:58):
And it’s, and it’s costly for you.

Karen Parker (00:20:02):
It it’s costly. I mean, publishing

Perry Marshall (00:20:03):
Tremendously invested.

Karen Parker (00:20:05):
Totally, totally. And this was, this was at the beginning when self-publishing suddenly became a lot easier. You know, the publishing industry is so, it’s still in flux. This is when eBooks, you could sell an ebook for $47. And, you know, people, people weren’t excellence really was in the shadow of ease at that time in publishing. So it was easy for people to do it easily, but not always excellently. Mm-Hmm. . And that made me very disappointed as a publisher. So I went back to, well, I’ll just publish my own books again for a while, which I did. And then the market changed again. And I think people started to get serious about, well, it’s easy. Anybody can publish. And they started to look for excellent material again. And so that was sort of the, the birth of the third publishing company, Gracepoint Publishing, which is the publishing company that I’m the co-founder of right now with my partner Michelle Vanap Pass.

Karen Parker (00:21:10):
And now we’re pretty, we’re pretty serious about, and, and we get a lot of people who are willing to do the work and cross the finish line and turn around and do the work. When we just published a book by a woman named Toby Dore, who some of you may know as a woman who broke a prisoner outta jail and a dog kennel, and ran away with him for three weeks before she was caught and went to jail for a year and had an incredibly transformative experience in jail, and emerged from jail with a mission. I mean, she’s a mission driven person to mission to help other women in jail because she learned that a lot of, most of the women she encountered in jail had been victims of terrible sexual abuse and all kinds of trauma. And they were there because they didn’t have a sense of what else to do with their lives.

Karen Parker (00:21:55):
And so she works with women in prison, and she was on the Today Show, and Lifetime made a movie about her. And she was all over the place. So we, we have a, I think the quality and the caliber of people who are willing to take on that mantle of owning their mission and their purpose, I think, I think I like to serve those people more . Those are the people that are my sweet, my sweet and powerful clients. And those are the clients that I think, as you said, they carry that, that deep burning desire to make the world a better place. And the world is a better place because of their commitment to that, to, to finding their voice and sharing it no matter what, no matter what.

Perry Marshall (00:22:34):
So I really like the, the way that you’ve put this together, because this is like, like there’s all these Venn diagrams and we, we’ve gotta get all of them to overlap. So first there’s just the, the conviction and the purpose necessary to go do the thing in the first place, right? Mm-Hmm. , right? And then there’s the story as the author understands it, which in the author’s mind, like, Hey, it, it’s good enough. Like, I explained this. And, and then you get to the editing process and you find out I’m sorry, but this is terrible. , possibly like, evolution 2.0 I think had something like eight or 10 editors. Mm-Hmm. . And, and the reason was, is because it still wasn’t good enough. And I knew it wasn’t good enough, or the editors told me it was good. It, it was like, no, we gotta take another run.

Perry Marshall (00:23:38):
You, you can’t imagine how many pages were on the cutting room floor, and it’s just so painful. You sit there in labor for hours and weeks and months and you’re typing away and you, you go to coffee with your friend and you say, so what if I explain it this way, right? And you go all of these iterations, right? And then, and then you get it that far. And then there’s still lead generation and there’s still messaging, and there’s still, well, how do I compress this into a click bait headline? And if, if the author or the influencer does not have the will to end, if you go 3, 2, 1, and you get to, it’s nothing.

Ron Wilder (00:24:44):
You broke up for a second, Perry,

Perry Marshall (00:24:59):
Then it’s all for naught. Mm-Hmm.

Perry Marshall (00:25:08):
Ron?

Ron Wilder (00:25:09):
Yes, sir. ,

Perry Marshall (00:25:11):
Let’s bring you into the stir fry.

Ron Wilder (00:25:14):
Alright.

Perry Marshall (00:25:16):
And, and then we’ll kind of tie this together. So gi give us the Ron version of what Karen, just like how did you know, when did you know that you had this unique way of seeing the world?

Ron Wilder (00:25:37):
Career-Wise, I would say I knew like when I was around 25, but I really knew when I was like two years old. And

Ron Wilder (00:25:51):
So people often say, Hey, where are you from? And I’ve never been able to answer that question with a place I have to answer it with an identity, which is, I was a military brat. I, I moved, I was born in Germany. I lived in California, Alabama, Colorado, south Georgia, Hawaii, all before I was like 10 years old. And every time I moved, I was kind of confronted with this clash of cultures and different ways that people thought and believed and, and behaved. And I was sort of this alien. And it, it always felt like a strange experience growing up. And, and, but fast forward, later on in, at, at a, at 25 in my career, I had started working in a consulting firm doing business strategy, sales strategy for tech companies in, in California. And I would develop consulting reports for our, our clients, and I would hand them to the CEO of, of the client company.

Ron Wilder (00:26:58):
And even the partners of the, of my firm who were older than me, like they, you know, they would do their thing. But I found myself in situations where the CEOs of a company would take the report I had just written and set it aside and say, Hey, can I ask you another question? And it would, it would inevitably veer into a deep organizational challenge or a personal challenge, or something in the realm of wisdom. And I discovered that’s what they needed from me. It was almost like spiritual guidance in the, in the context of this business that they were leading. And and so I realized you know, they, there’s something else here deeper than what’s on the surface. And so I’m gonna jump back then a second. So growing up, I went by the name Ronnie, that was my nickname.

Ron Wilder (00:28:03):
And so I got all the way through high school, and I was getting ready to go to college, and I changed my name to Ron. So it was kind of like, I couldn’t leave a place behind, but I could leave an identity. And so I made this decision to leave Ronnie behind. And, and I say that with all gratitude, like Ronnie was a great kid, there was nothing wrong with him, but he had completed that experience, and it was time for him to expand into something new. And that’s really critical, like identity shift because it applies to the work that I do now. So I went from Ronnie to Ron. I went from the academic high performer, valedictorian was gonna be a professor, and I went into the business world, and then I said, wait a minute. I don’t want be an academic. I want to go into business.

Ron Wilder (00:28:54):
And then I moved from California to North Carolina and started my own consulting coaching business in 2004. And I went from employee to entrepreneur. And that was a huge, huge transition of identity. I went from you know, son of an alcoholic father to being a committed father, to creating my own family. And so in all of these scenarios, it was a, a decision to change identity. Right around that time I became a martial artist. And I’ve been now doing martial arts for about 20 years and discovered how much of our identity lives in the body, and, and we carry it physically. Mm. And even though we may make a, a cognitive mental decision to change something, it still lives in our body. And but it als I discovered from that experience how to heal, how to master my emotions how to change things that I wanted to change intellectually, but I had to change them in my body.

Ron Wilder (00:30:05):
And I had to move and, and be in different ways. And after about eight years, I had earned a black belt in Hop Keto, which is a Korean martial art. And one day we had some visiting visiting teachers from another school, juujitsu juujitsu practitioners. And I got to spar with them, and I found myself on the ground, . And, you know, juujitsu is all about how do you fight when you’re on the ground? And so here I am, a black belt and I find myself on the ground and nothing worked. And I remembered this moment of panic, like, why isn’t any of my stuff working? Hmm. And all I tried to do in that moment was to try harder. And that just made it worse, , because in Juujitsu, if you try, if your opponent tries harder, they know how to use that against you.

Ron Wilder (00:31:03):
And so I left that day, and within a few months I had, I went to my hot keto teacher and I said, I’m, I’m le I’m leaving. I’m retiring my black belt, and I’m went and I got a white belt in Juujitsu, and I started a new path Mm-Hmm. And the relevance of that to what I’m doing now is you know, I’ve taken all of that, all the work of 20 years of coaching CEOs, 20 years of being a martial artist, being a father, changing identities multiple times. And what I’m really helping people do is to complete an old identity, not to lose it, but to, to then evolve that into the next phase of identity for who they are. And sometimes, sometimes that process can be messy, but with my guidance, I think people will kind of grow through it effectively. And with, I can give you some various examples, but I find that, that people have black belts in their own personality, right?

Ron Wilder (00:32:09):
They have developed a personality that’s very effective. They know, they know how to get results in their life, and it works great right up to the day that it doesn’t. And then they don’t know what to do, . And, and they’re, I find executives or entrepreneurs and, and they’re going through a transition in their company or they’re trying to scale it, or they’re trying to change it in some way. And all of the leadership traits and behaviors that made them very effective at one level don’t work or translate to the new level. And now they’re really stuck because they’re the public face of this organization. They need to make a change. It’s terrifying. Like the inner dialogue that they’re experiencing is, they don’t know how to change that. I know how to teach you how to change that. And, but you have to be willing to put on a white belt and put on the white belt of your own personality in a way to be able to look at your own behaviors and beliefs and to learn a new way of doing things, and then embody that. But I think I’m a gentle teacher and I can help you do that you know, without and guiding you through that process. And that’s really, I mean, I, I just kind of evolved into that path and here I am, and it’s a lot of fun. I’m doing like the best work of my life now. And you know, I’m just seeing it evolve one day at a time.

Perry Marshall (00:33:46):
So this reminds me of one of my favorite stories, which is the drummer for Rush Neil Period, who died a couple years ago by the time he had been playing for 25 years, he was literally the most celebrated drummer in ROT music and his faces on all these magazines. And he sold millions records. And if you ever went to any of his concert, they were just absolutely incredible what he could do on the drums. And he said, I, I didn’t even practice anymore because I had pushed my technique as far as it can physically be pushed. Mm-Hmm. . And one day he was with a bunch of jazz guys recording a jazz album. They were doing a tribute to Buddy Rich, and he noticed that one of the drummers was playing just way easier and more fluidly and with less effort than he’d ever seen him play before. And he is like, what’s up with that? And he goes, oh, I, I started mentoring with this guy named Freddy Gruber, and he taught me all this new stuff about motion and everything. Mm-Hmm. . And so Neil goes to Freddy, right? So, you know, best rock drummer in the world goes to a jazz guy. Mm-Hmm.

Perry Marshall (00:35:09):
And Freddy says, well, you’re wearing the wrong kinda shoes and you’re holding your sticks wrong. Yeah.

Perry Marshall (00:35:17):
He, he wore tennis shoes. No, you need to wear Dan’s shoes because Dan’s shoes are slick on the bottom. You can move your feet around all the different pedals. And he goes, you’re, you’re holding your sticks like this. You need to hold your sticks like this. Mm-Hmm. , he said, all of your all of your motion is about linear motion. Like you’re, you’re always thinking about like swinging that stick as hard as you can at the drumhead. He goes, it’s not about linear, it’s about circles. It’s about motion. Everything needs to go in a circle.

Perry Marshall (00:35:52):
And I am just, I’ve worked with so many people, many, I am certain that 90% of rock drummers would like give the guy the finger and leave. Mm-Hmm. like you do you know who I am? Do you know how, you know? And he literally started over and he completely learned to play the drums a different way. And his band members said that after, like they had to learn a different cadence in order to play with him, because his style had changed. I went, I went to a couple of his concerts and he, he would do this drum solo and the drum solo. He would switch back and forth between the old and the new, depending on what he was playing. And, and he really got to a breakthrough. And what what I learned from that was that at what, when you start in any profession or any field of expertise somebody shows up and says, gentlemen, this is a football.

Perry Marshall (00:37:06):
And you, like, you learn to throw a football, or you learn to do, and you learn these very basic things. And then like, you do it for 20 years and you get really, really good, and you have this giant reset button, and they push the reset, and, and you, you start all over like, gentlemen, this is a football. And it’s like, we are gonna start from a completely different set of assumptions. And the old assumptions that you had, will, you will never get where you want to go. Mm-Hmm. . And, and you have to relearn. And, and what, what I’ve seen is that anybody who gets to like 10,000 hours, as they say, they get really, really good. And then they have to start over. And, and what, and some, most people will never do this. They’ll just be really, really good and they’ll finish their career and they’ll retire and they’ll have all the plaques on their wall and all be fine. But like the really, really, really good people, it seems like once every 10 or 15 or 20 years, they hit one of these giant resets and they que they throw away everything they knew before and they reinvent themselves. The, the Ron, this is what I’m hearing.

Ron Wilder (00:38:24):
Yeah.

Perry Marshall (00:38:25):
Okay. Now, and the,

Ron Wilder (00:38:26):
The other thing I might add to that, Perry is, and I don’t know if this is true from Neil perk, but there’s something about our personality that I’ve observed, and Karen I think has a lot of insight on this as well. Like, our personality evolves in our family environment, and we are subject to a lot of conditioning from our family, from our culture, from so, and our, you know, my view is that our personality is like our strategy to survive all, all that. And it’s sort of, you know, we develop these strengths be, but very often there are, there’re strategies of overcompensation. Like we figure out ways to do things to overcome or deal with an environment. And sometimes that’s where aggressive or we’re passive or whatever that is. And so there, there’s something about that in that initial personality that we develop. It consumes a lot of energy.

Ron Wilder (00:39:23):
It consumes a lot of energy because there’s this, there’s this fear-based striving and struggle and, and challenge and pushing through. And to some degree our culture like paints that as a, as a heroic thing, . Right? And, but you know, now that I’ve been studying jujitsu for so long, you realize instead of pushing, if I just change my angle one centimeter and change my hand from here to there, I can completely change the outcome of a, of a, of an interaction. But you have to train your whole mind to be even aware of that opportunity. And then you have to train your body to be able to make that adjustment in the moment. But then you unlock all of this power that you never had before. And the cool thing is, it’s not based on fear anymore, it’s based on something more transcendence, you know, faith, abundance you know, universal mind, whatever your word for it is.

Ron Wilder (00:40:29):
But, you know, once you experience that and then you realize I can access that, that then I’m, then where I come in is like, I want to train that. I want to figure out how to work with that energy and approach like that way. Mm-Hmm. . ’cause It’s way more interesting, . It’s like I look at back at the old ways that I do things, that I used to do things, and I don’t judge it. I think of it as like, I used to do it that way, and that was great. But there’s something much more interesting here to explore. It’s like the infinite wells of, of mastery.

Perry Marshall (00:41:02):
Well run it at some point you had to be more interested in being a white belt in a new thing than you were at being a black belt at the old thing, because black belts get a lot of respect.

Ron Wilder (00:41:13):
Yeah, yeah. Right. Totally agree. Yeah. Okay. Now, and I could have stayed at my previous school and become a teacher and got more, you know, second black belt, and I could have done that and it would’ve been fine. And, you know, in a weird way, that’s my biggest client attraction, client selection problem, is that there are many CEOs who you can cruise. There are many people who can cruise in their career. They don’t really need to do this work necessarily. They’ve gotta want it. And and it’s kind of a filter for me in a way. It’s like, well, are you willing to come get on the mat with me, ? And, you know, they either are or they’re not. And if they’re not, then I can’t, I’m like, I can’t really help you.

Perry Marshall (00:41:58):
So, Karen,

Karen Parker (00:42:00):
Yes.

Perry Marshall (00:42:02):
I have this feeling that your friends and family members and colleagues have said to you over and over in your career, Karen, why can’t you just cruise?

Karen Parker (00:42:15):
I, I think the cor the correct statement was, this was my dad’s mantra to me. Why don’t you just be normal? Why can’t you go get a real job? And, and I, and I, I kept telling him, look, I tried . I’m just unemployable. I can’t do Totally.

Perry Marshall (00:42:33):
Now, now, Karen, in your story Mm-Hmm. you told of three publishing companies. I don’t know if there’s a fourth one.

Karen Parker (00:42:41):
Oh, I hope I, I hope this one sticks. I like this one. . So far so good. Well,

Perry Marshall (00:42:46):
Were were those three publishing companies, new white belts?

Karen Parker (00:42:53):
Oh, totally. As, as Ron was saying, you know, it, there’s so many different iterations and so many different cycles and so many different rebirths. I mean, I think if I, if I do a linear overview of both story of Karen, I would say the beginning of every decade had some kind of weird renewal, rebirth. And, you know, I, and, and it wasn’t always pretty. I mean, I got divorced at 30. I got breast cancer at 40, 50 was kind of okay. It wasn’t too bad. But 50 was when I started the new publishing company. And, you know, I’m coming up on 60 and I’m starting to get a little nervous like, what’s next? What, what new white belt will it be this time? So, yeah.

Perry Marshall (00:43:36):
Okay. So, so here you, you both are Mm-Hmm.

Perry Marshall (00:43:42):
Karen is Oh, okay. I also think it’s interesting. So you, you started in birthing Mm-Hmm. . And you’re still birthing, you’re just working books.

Karen Parker (00:43:52):
Totally. I, I, I call myself a midwife of the new world. That’s my, that’s my official title that I’m, I am coaching, supporting, nurturing, helping other people birth their books. And, and I love the midwife metaphor. For me, it’s a very good metaphor because it, you know, that that process of writing is a, it’s a birthing process, whether it’s a book or an essay, or just a clarification of a platform. It’s as I, you know, as I kind of said in the beginning, you, you come and you show up and, and you have this fire, and you have this sense. And oftentimes the sense of what it is, it isn’t always clear. I’ll, you know, I knew I was gonna be a midwife when I was 17 because the guy I was dating at the time, his sister had a baby, and she basically went to the hospital.

Karen Parker (00:44:42):
And, and this isn’t meant as a judgmental thing. So let me just say, as I say this, people have to do what feels right and correct for them. This was just a story that really landed for me in this way. She really wanted a medicated birth. She got, you know, an epidural at two centimeters dilated and spent her time laboring watching tv. And I had such a visceral response to that. Like, how can you go through this ex, you know, this extraordinary transformation while watching tv? And that, that reaction was sort of my spark that said, okay, I have to go explore something different. And I think oftentimes for us, we, we don’t know what that different thing is. It’s just we know what it isn’t sometimes. And, and that process of clarifying over and over again through cycles of rebirth and renewal and redefinition is really just sort of shedding layer and layer of, okay, it’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not this.

Karen Parker (00:45:34):
Until I think at a certain point you land on that diamond of, okay, this is it. This is the platform, this is the message, this is, this is the offering. And, and I’m not, you know, I’m certainly not naive enough at this age in my life to think, oh, I’ve landed on it. I got it. This is my legacy. Who knows, who knows? In two years from now, the message itself could continue to evolve. Because I think we also, I think as creatives, as influential people, we’re always in response and living in a place where we’re responsive to the needs of what’s next for the betterment of humanity. And that’s always changing. The needs change. The, the demands change, the message changes, but the, I think the connection to service is the thing that stays consistent over, over the course of all of it.

Perry Marshall (00:46:22):
Well, so if I listen to your story, the story is I realized I needed to be a midwife when I watched somebody sorry. I, I, I have have to piece the words together here. I watched somebody sleep, walking through the birth of their own baby watching TV instead of being in tune with like, the most extraordinary thing that nature has ever provided to humans. And I, I needed to help people do this awake instead of asleep.

Karen Parker (00:47:09):
Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. ,

Perry Marshall (00:47:11):
Right? Mm-Hmm. .

Perry Marshall (00:47:14):
And, and then in publishing, when self-Publishing started to become, oh, a book is like the best business card, and let’s just get the business card out there. You’re like, no, stop watching tv. Mm-Hmm. . And do this awake instead of asleep. Because you, your job is to produce something that you as a mother, like, only you can produce this thing in the world at this time and affect the world in this way. And if you do it watching tv, the world will be poorer as a result. And I, Karen I hear too many fingernails on the chalkboard when somebody does that, and I can’t stand it,

Karen Parker (00:48:14):
But, well, and I, I, I have to speak to that point because I think, and one of my very favorite stories about publishing, and I think that illuminates this, and, and it’s not just do it, show up and be awake, it’s also do it and trust that if there’s a calling, there’s a reason for it. And you might not know what that reason is. It might not be yours to know. Mm-Hmm. . But it’s bigger than you just writing the book. So I had a client one time who wrote a book who was, again, the survivor of terrible sexual abuse, ritual abuse. She wrote the book, it wasn’t a sexy topic, nobody really wanted to read this story. And I think we probably, this is way in the beginning of my publishing career, we probably sold 20 copies, and she handed them out to her clients.

Karen Parker (00:49:02):
And I got an email like three mo three years after we published the book. And it was a, a note from a, a man looking for the author Lydia. And he said, I really need to connect with Lydia. And I, and I sent back a note and I said, why, why do you need to connect with Lydia? And he said, she saved my life. And I said, how? And he said, well, I walked, I was ready to kill myself. He said, I decided that before I would kill myself, I would have a, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. So I took myself to the health food store, I walked into the health food store, and on the end cap of the book section in the health food store was Lydia’s book. Now the thing that’s really interesting is I didn’t have, I, now I’m really good at distributing and I can get into any brick and mortar, and I know how to do that. That time I didn’t know how to do that. So I have no idea how that book made it into the health food store. He said, I don’t know what happened, but I saw that book and it called me. He said, it was like a light was around it. I went, I picked up the book, I bought the book, I took it home, and I read it, and he said, Lydia’s story was my story.

Karen Parker (00:50:05):
And I read this story and I decided I was gonna live. Hmm. And the magic and the serendipity and the synchronicity around that whole piece, you know, Lydia didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. We didn’t know that. But there was something about Lydia being called to tell that story and, and being willing to publish that story, which is a very vulnerable story to begin with. And being willing to publish it and go, okay, well, you know, it didn’t work. I’m not famous. I wasn’t on Oprah. I didn’t make a bajillion bucks from it. But when we came back around three years later and I said, Lydia, look what you did. You know, that was it. That was worth it. That she saved this, this life and who knows what this young man will end up doing. Right.

Perry Marshall (00:50:49):
So Karen, at the May round table meeting, Mm-Hmm. , we had a conversation in the group about, so we were talking about what is the USP of Grace Point publishing? Mm-Hmm. . And, and we’re like, we’re really trying to get to it. Like, I, I don’t think we, everybody quite in the room quite gets what is unique about you as a publisher. And what came out was right. There’s other people, you can write ’em a $300,000 check and get ’em in the New York Times, and that’s not what we’re about. And there’s other people that have marketing, we do that well, but that’s not really what’s what we’re about. And you kind of said, we pull, we birth the story of the woman who wrote that book that ended up being in the health food store. And we make sure that it’s good enough that it’s going to touch that guy because it’s properly told.

Perry Marshall (00:52:01):
And that led to somebody said, well, maybe it’s an artistic selling proposition instead of a definitive selling proposition. Then we wrote a whole newsletter about what is an artistic selling proposition? Mm-Hmm. . And, and maybe one way of describing that would be, I don’t really think it’s possible to write a book and go, well, the reason I’m writing a book is so that a guy who buys Ben and Jerry’s ice cream at the, at the store will buy this book and not commit suicide. Like, that’s too particular of an outcome for anybody to promise or predict. But it certainly is a USP that you are going to make sure that the person that have has had that lived experience, that that, that every part of the story from the telling of the story to the packaging of the story, to the selling of the story is going to be done the way that it deserves to be done. Mm-Hmm.

Perry Marshall (00:53:07):
And then with you personally, you know, that you’re not doing your work in the world unless that is happening. Is that

Karen Parker (00:53:19):
Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. And I think, you know, part of it is,

Karen Parker (00:53:27):
I think the way I would articulate it is I would say that we work with people who are willing to serve the great mystery. And, and because there’s a mystery around it. Mm-Hmm. . And, and, and Ron was alluding to it too, it’s like you, you know, he’s bringing people into this space where they tap into something greater than themselves. And I certainly think the creative process and certainly the writing process, if you’re really, you know, living in that field of information, that is the journey of writing that that is a, a a journey of service. And, and it’s not necessarily only serving humanity, it’s also serving, you know, cosmic mind, God source, whatever you wanna put it. And, and trusting that and being willing to have the courage to trust that if you trust that mystery, it’ll unfold the way it needs to, and you’ll be supported along the way.

Karen Parker (00:54:23):
I do also just wanna say Lydia was supported along the way, just not in the way Lydia thought she would be supported. I mean, she ended up being okay, but, but you, you also, I I think one of the things I do as a book midwife is say, you know, 90% of what I say is you’re gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. It’s all gonna be okay. Just, just do it. And I think the people who have the courage to say, okay, I’m gonna take this leap of faith and I’m going to basically expose my soul to the world and be willing to stand here sort of completely cosmically naked with this experience and, and, and be okay with it and trust it. And they do that, you know, I think the other piece is the support does show up and it shows up in, in really magical ways. And there’s a, there’s a traject, I don’t know, trajectory and a, a quantum mystery that unfolds when people let the surrender to that process. And that’s, personally, that’s what I love to do, is to let, you know, support people in surrendering to that process, because it’s in that process, they find, you know, this is my place in the cosmic pu in the cosmic puzzle.

Perry Marshall (00:55:31):
So, so Karen, could you elaborate? Mm-Hmm. as a first, like, take midwife. Mm-Hmm. , explain what it means to teach a, a birthing woman to surrender. And then can you kind of bridge the gap? So, and then what does surrendering and a book and an influence project, can you

Karen Parker (00:55:55):
Totally, totally. So, okay. Without getting too graphic certainly I would say that when you’re in the experience of birth, if you’re resisting it, you know, basically what’s happening with the womb is when it’s contracting it’s smooth muscle, it’s doing its thing, it, you’re resisting it, you’re getting in the, in the way of the process of the contraction of the muscle. And actually, you know, as a midwife doing it outside of the hospital without medication, you know, you learn to dial in to what’s the environment like, what’s the relationship like with the partner? Does this woman feel supported? Is this woman and at peace with the process? Does she trust herself? Does she trust her body? Does she trust the process? You know, does when you can be in that energy, then I’m not gonna say, oh, hey, it’s painless birth. You’ll be like, you know, three seconds later the baby will be out.

Karen Parker (00:56:47):
It’s still gonna be a process, and it’s a process that’s gonna have a big transformation associated with it. The birthing process of a book is very similar. There is a, I mean, again, this is my variation of it. I don’t know if everybody has this experience, but it’s certainly the experience that I see a lot in my authors, that there’s a flow of creativity. There’s a, there’s a connection point in that pure place of plugging into inspiration. And again, when it’s purpose-based, I think it’s really hard to write a book where you’re gonna use it as a lead generation tool. I struggle with that. I recently have a book coming out this fall that my, not not my publishing company, but I have another publisher. This was a book that, you know, he basically talked me into about four years ago. And it, it is not my natural kind of book.

Karen Parker (00:57:39):
And I struggled with it. And I’m not gonna lie, I actually hired a ghost writer to do part of it. ’cause I was like, I just literally can’t. And that is that process of trying to craft something that isn’t connected to that spark, that isn’t part of the, part of the natural cycle of creating. It’s really hard to do it that way. But if you can connect to that spark, that place where, and, and any of you who have written, you know, that space where you sit down and all of a sudden it’s almost like the book or the information or the platform or the manifesto, whatever it is, it’s writing itself through you. You’re just literally, you’re the physical body doing the translation of spark into third dimensional form. But it’s a flow and it’s, it’s easy. It’s literally effortless. I mean, I won’t say, I mean, you can see in the corner, it’s not completely effortless.

Karen Parker (00:58:29):
It’s, I have a sous, I use the sous all the time. Sometimes I have to go find a word. But but there’s, there’s a flow to it that facilitates the birth. And, and there’s something intangible. You use the word ineffable a lot, Perry, and I love that word. It is like, there is something ineffable and intangible too about offering that comes from that place. And, and it, as I said, it is not what I want to say to people from a business perspective. But it’s not always gonna be the thing that sells the most. I mean, I would say evolution 2.0, not trying to say it didn’t sell a lot, but it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not Oprah level sales yet. No, no, it’s not. And, and yet it’s your, that’s your spark. And that’s the translation of your spark and your effort and your work and your, you know, the light that is you and that message that you’re here to initiate people into. That’s a very different book than some of the other books that I think we think our heads tell us, oh, we should write that. That would be a good book right

Perry Marshall (00:59:30):
There. There are many things that would be necessary for that book to be an Oprah level bestseller that I was not willing to do, because it would compromise what the project is about, and it would bastardize it. And, and, and I think part of the USP of Grace Point publishing is that you are for people who are not willing to do that. It’s not, it’s not that you’re against being on Oprah at all

Karen Parker (01:00:01):
Totally.

Perry Marshall (01:00:01):
But if that is incongruent with the higher purpose that you have been given, or if it’s just gonna create more of the same garbage that keeps us going around and around in circles Mm-Hmm. You are not going to do that.

Karen Parker (01:00:15):
Totally. Totally. And, and I think, you know, going back to the surrender metaphor, it means you have to let the book be written through you. And you have to have the courage to detach yourself from the outcome and trust that the outcome is gonna be okay. Mm-Hmm. . And that’s, that’s not always easy because, because we tend to translate value into money and numbers. And I think part of it too is we have to redefine what’s the value of a, of a book and what’s the value of influence? ’cause It’s, you know, it’s, it’s not necessarily something you can measure in numbers.

Perry Marshall (01:00:50):
I think the essence of this whole question that we are exploring here is how do you be influential? Mm-Hmm. , which is measurable in some sense. You can tell whether an author is influential or not. Mm-Hmm. , how do you be influential without selling your soul, compromising your values, compromising your message? It’s a slalom.

Karen Parker (01:01:21):
Mm-Hmm. .

Perry Marshall (01:01:24):
And like, how do you do this? Who’s gonna teach you how to do it? And, and then one of the things we talked about at the retreat last year, last, which we’ll we’ll come back to this year, is how do you create a mass movement that’s not just a, a bunch of jacked up people drinking pink Kool-Aid mouthing a bunch of bumper sticker slogans and doing stupid stuff. There’s like 98 wrong ways to do it, and maybe two right ways to do it. And you don’t want to get to the end of your life and go, wow, I, I think I made the world a worst place. So, run. How would you, what dots are you connecting into this birthing book? There’s a wrong version of this

Perry Marshall (01:02:24):
You’re birthing, like you’re, you’re getting on a mat and you’re helping people figure out how to make that two degree shift into the new CEO, the white belt, who’s gonna be Sunday, a black belt and a new thing?

Ron Wilder (01:02:39):
Yeah. I think there’s the this concept of resistance is really fascinating to me because, you know, when you’re, I’ve written a few books and I’ve noticed each book had its own point of resistance. And it wasn’t about the writing. It was about me. We, me being willing, me being will, me being ready to become not the person who was writing the book, but the person who had written the book and, and which is a different thing. And but I think there’s, there’s something on the other side of the resistance, and that’s why we, we guard it so much. There’s some unknown on the other side of it. And, you know, and jujitsu will continue to present you with the resistance until you learn the lesson . And so that’s why I love it as a, as a tool. Not as a, just a way of being.

Ron Wilder (01:03:43):
I had a client o over here last earlier this week or LA last week. And you know, he’s a, he lives in the, in North Carolina where I live, and he comes over once a month and we start off with a Jiujitsu lesson and we spar and then we, you know have breakfast and then talk about his business. And it’s, it’s a fun way to spend half a day. And but he’s gotten pretty good at Juujitsu now, he’s been training now for a year or so, year and a half. And he trains at a school nearby. So we actually we’re doing some real sparring, and he had a moment of recognition where he was trying to attack me repeatedly. And, you know, but none of it was working because my defenses are, you know, were, were pretty solid. And and the more he kept trying to attack he would jeopardize his own position and I would escape. And one of the concepts in Juujitsu is position before submission, where you have to establish a position before you can, you can win the fight. But he had that moment of frustration and recognizing the futility of how he was trying to attack me, and none of it was working. And we finished and the, the session and started talking about his business. And he had this moment of awareness as the CEO. And he says, that’s what I’m doing with my sales team.

Ron Wilder (01:05:16):
Like I am pushing my sales team to close, and they’re closing early and they’re trying to close the wrong thing. And that’s why I have like customers that are, that are falling out late in the pipeline.

Ron Wilder (01:05:29):
You know, and I have to coach my sales team differently. Like, that’s what we then spent the rest of the day talking about. And so is this, it was this resistance of holding onto something that you think you have or you’re, you know, you’re, you’re, I don’t know, there’s something about the ego is attached or whatever it is. And we have to surrender that at some point and allow something else to show up,

Perry Marshall (01:05:57):
Show. So,

Ron Wilder (01:05:58):
And you know, and I’ve seen that in my own progression. I wanted to go, part of the, my mission at the CEO Dojo was to go from consultant and coach to teacher. And I had to like do the same thing of surrendering and letting go of that old model and let something new come up, show up. And so I think that there’s a key point of wherever we find resistance in our growth of, of surrendering to it at some and letting the unknown come in.

Perry Marshall (01:06:33):
So I think everybody has a pretty good idea of how you guys roll in and what you do in, in your origin story, what was it that you felt you were looking for that caused you to take three or four days outta your schedule and come to an influence event? Mm-Hmm.

Karen Parker (01:07:01):
I’ll go . I, I would say that for me, you know, I think it goes back to this whole idea of recalibration, rebirth, renewal, recalibration, rebirth, renewal. I think I had gone through just in my personal life and with business, both just really had gotten quagmire in the work. And maybe not the surrender piece. There was a lot of just stress and anxiety and working through, I mean, building up the, the, the company as it was. And I sat up, you know, honestly, I, I saw the sales letter and I read the first three sentences and I really didn’t know you that well Perry, at that time. And I was like, I have to go to this. And for me, I think it was just about getting reconnected back to my birthing process. ’cause I think I worked so hard to midwife everybody else’s stuff in every area of my life. I needed that respite and that container to say, okay, wait, hold on, time out. I am the orchestrator of all of this stuff for everyone. And if I don’t create this space of, of reconnection for myself, my ability to serve others is, is starting to fray and get fr and I’m not operating at the optimal level. I’m having to draw on willpower instead of that ease in my own creative process.

Perry Marshall (01:08:30):
How about you, Ron?

Ron Wilder (01:08:31):
Yeah, it was very similar. I mean, I’ve I mean, I read like two, two lines of the sales letter and signed up, I think because I mean, I, and I’ve been to many of your big picture events over the years, and so I trust you as a, as a teacher and a thinker. And but it, i, it was really about me being in a place where I had a lot of ideas. I was in intentional about wanting to make a transition in my business. And at a surface level, I knew I needed to take my, my strategies and tactics in a new direction. But the event itself is not really about strategies and tactics there. It’s much more about who you are. And, you know, I think that’s what made the event so special was, you know, it was, you, it was called, I think last year it was like influential writing retreat and you think, oh, you’re gonna learn copywriting.

Ron Wilder (01:09:29):
But that wasn’t what it was about at all. It was it, do you take all of these ideas that are sw swirling around you and they’re unique to you and, and you know, they’re unique to you because you have a vantage point to see them that no one else has. You have a path, a life path that has put these ideas in front of you in a way that no one else can see them. What do you want to do with that? And, and who are you? And I think that’s so I think it was just great to be able to kind of ex be deep in that question for a few days.

Perry Marshall (01:10:05):
My experience as the teacher was for months. I, you know, I keep these old notebooks and, and, and I was just constantly adding, adding, adding and looking, oh, we, we need to do this and we need to do this. And about five weeks out, I had this massive amount of stuff and I had no idea how it was all gonna come together. It was like, and, and I was scared and . Well, I think most of us know what it’s like to be in a creative process and be like, I have no idea. I cannot see from here how this thing is ever gonna come together. Most book projects are like that. Most CEO trans company transformations are like that. Like, oh my God. Like what if this does not turn out well? But then a framework snapped in place and then, and then, and then it, it started coming together.

Perry Marshall (01:11:06):
And if, and if I was gonna describe how it feels when you’re in the right space, it was like, look, it, it’s not about the headline. It’s not about the writing technique. It’s not about like, here’s how you string words together. It’s like if the rocket engine inside your body or your soul is like, if you’re tuned into it and, and you, you, you realize that you have like a divine calling to do this, then like, it locks in and it’s okay. And, and, and, and you, and then you know that it’s okay. Like, like Karen, you, you telling the pregnant, it’s really gonna be okay. It’s really gonna be okay. But I think it’s, it’s you as the influencer knowing deep down, yes, this is actually going to be okay. Mm-Hmm, and I absolutely should be doing this.

Perry Marshall (01:12:09):
And then a whole lot of things just become a lot easier. And it flows out of who you are and what it naturally is, rather than this chattering inside your head that’s constantly questioning. And what I wanted to happen was there were definite obstacles that I wanted people to be aware of and, and, and that we work around. And I, I want to see pitfalls that happened in the process, but I also wanted everybody to leave with the knowledge including help from my memos team. I brought, I mean, I bring my memos team into this thing that, that by the time you leave, you know, you are pointed in the right direction and you don’t have that doubt and that, and you’re not gonna be intimidated by anybody or anything because this is so important.

Ron Wilder (01:13:04):
Mm-Hmm, . Yeah. I would, if I could ex I, my experience was like, that’s why I came to the event and I had that, and I didn’t totally know what I was getting myself into. But my experience in the year that has followed has been really profound in that everything I’ve been working on has now like, solidified to it this depth of power that I couldn’t name it before. Mm-Hmm. and , there’s a book by Christopher Moore called Lamb. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it. You know that book? Hmm. You would love it, Perry. It’s called The Gospel according to Biff, Jesus’, childhood Pal,

Ron Wilder (01:13:49):
And it’s hilarious. And it explores the un the, you know, the tea, the, the gospels don’t address what happens between Jesus at age 13 and 30 when his ministry starts. And so this is a a hypothetical scenario of Jesus as a teenager. But the, but the, the metaphor is he knows he’s the Messiah. He just doesn’t know what to do with that.

Ron Wilder (01:14:14):
Mm-Hmm. and his exploration is kind of like figuring out what does that mean? And then towards the end of the book, you get into, he arrives at his ministry is starting and he’s still figuring it out. What does it mean to speak as the Messiah? And it, to me, it, this past year feels a little bit like that. Like you come into this event thinking, I know I’ve got something to work on. I’ve got all these ideas. I don’t, I’m called in some direction. I don’t really know what to do with it, but I get grounded in it.

Karen Parker (01:14:42):
Mm-Hmm.

Ron Wilder (01:14:43):
. And now I, my experience over the past year is like, that is basically being like permeating all of my work. And now I feel like I can really begin to, scale is not the right word. ’cause I don’t think about it that way, but I can expand into it in a very thoughtful way because there’s like a foundation underneath it. I’m not just like running tactics on something.

Perry Marshall (01:15:11):
You’re nodding.

Karen Parker (01:15:12):
Yeah, I totally second that. So I walked away with a 16 point manifesto that, that sort of came to me throughout the course of the, the three days. And I, I, first of all, it was just such the perfect codification of everything that’s been like crunchy in my head and, and, and over my entire life. I took that manifesto two weeks later to our International Human Design conference. And I, I literally just put each point in a slide as the keynote and slapped a picture of my grandson at the end because he’s really cute. And I’m not allowed to post pictures of him in social media, I’m just gonna be honest. And so I wanted everybody to see how cute he is. And I read the Manifesto, that’s all I did. I just read the Manifesto and everybody in the room was in tears and the power of saying, oh my God, I finally can say, here’s what I’m doing, here’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, here’s where it’s going. And have that, having that clarity, which, you know, I don’t, I would never have said before, oh, I’m not clear, and I don’t think anyone would’ve said that about me, but the, the amplification, the exponential am amplification of the clarity that I had when I walked away changed the way I talk about everything from that point on.

Perry Marshall (01:16:30):
Well, I, I don’t know how to say it better. That’s ex that, that that’s what I wanted to happen. Mm-Hmm. and we’re doing this on October five. It’ll be kind of similar. It won’t be the same, but it, it’ll be, you know, roughly in the ballpark of, of what we did last time. But it’ll be new people and new experiences and a new chemistry. I have put a link into the chat. You can click to register October five to seven. It’s in the Chicagoland area. It’s 12 k. It includes hotel and includes meals and everything. And you know, if this is resonating with you and like you’re trying to birth your own influence I would like you to come to this event and and I just want to thank Ron and Karen for just the way that you stir ride this thing together.

Perry Marshall (01:17:29):
We didn’t rehearse this and we didn’t put it on PowerPoint, anything. Just the way this your stories came out and the way the dots connected was beautiful. And I want to thank you and I, I want to congratulate both of you on, I mean, I’ve been watching you for the last year and you guys are making strides. You’re, you’re doing what the assignment that you’ve been given and it’s beautiful and thank you. So take care everybody.

Listen in as I dive deep into my personal and professional evolution (from my early days of tinkering with stereo equipment to becoming a pioneering force in internet marketing and beyond), in this wide-ranging conversation with cop-turned-copywriter “Doberman” Dan Gallapoo.

I had the pleasure of being a guest on the podcast “Beyond Curious” hosted by Brandon Fong.

The title of the episode is “From Electrical Engineer to Curing Cancer.”

But it’s not about how I’m curing cancer really.

It’s more about how YOU can solve your most perplexing problems.

As Brandon put it…

This is one of those “break your brain” kind of episodes, where you get to see inside the mind of a man that is solving some of the biggest problems around town.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How you can approach solving the biggest problems in both your life (and the world) leveraging insights from a poem written 1,300 years ago
• How to apply 80/20 thinking at a whole new level to find greater alignment in your life and business with your natural strengths
• How you can use “Renaissance Time” to gain clarity and discernment (and why Perry has been using this practice without missing a day for the last 10.5 years)

If you’re the kind of person who wants to be a clearer thinker and learn how to solve problems more effectively, this is an episode that you WILL NOT want to miss.

Listen below: