Imperative #1: You MUST immerse yourself in LIVE community 3-6X per year.
Mel,
I stuck this on the TOP of the list for a reason. Not optional. (While meeting up in person with your community right now is not possible due to current events, this is still a very important concept. When life returns to some semblance of normalcy, meeting up with your fellow entrepreneurs will be vital.)
Most members of Planet Perry (though not all) are online entrepreneurs.
Marketers are people who like the idea of people… but don't really like people :^}
Marketers are more comfortable referring to people as a "list" or "audience" or a "they" than as living, breathing individual human beings.
You can sit here and judge that or say it's politically incorrect or whatever. You can say it's cold or inhuman.
Well it's not. It's just a way of looking at the world with a certain degree of detachment. Seeing people in terms of what large numbers of them do, and not just individuals.
This is incredibly useful. And necessary.
Entrepreneurs are incredibly fun people to be around because the smart ones almost never drink their own pink koolaid. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Entrepreneurs know and understand what humans are like. We understand what vulnerable, fallible creatures we human beings are. We're a little cynical.
And we talk about it.
There's almost nothing more thrilling, entertaining and informative than gathering with a bunch of entrepreneurs and discussing the results of the mass experiments we each perform on humanity.
Marketers are eternally questioning our own assumptions. One of the reasons is that we are constantly smashing our ideas against the wall to see if they break.
Most of the time, our ideas smash into pieces.
I have LOTS of friends who are scientists. Physicists. Chemists. Geologists. Geneticists. Biologists.
Scientists also smash their ideas into pieces. But scientists are somewhat more inclined to believe their own PR than marketers.
This is because science is even more "who you know not what you know" than business. There's more pressure to conform to a particular school of thought in science than there is in marketing.
(BTW what the average person thinks is "science" is actually marketing, not science.)
Oh, and nobody is LESS likely to buy into some politician's juicy promise of a New Utopia than a marketer.
We entrepreneurs have a job. We've got to sell something because everybody's got to eat. Most of us (especially in Planet Perry) are selling something really good, greatly beneficial, often quite exciting. We have every reason to be enthused about our amazing new invention.
But the PROBLEM with marketers is, we get lonely and isolated. We get lost in our own assumptions. We become victims of the poverty of our own imagination.
We get discouraged and depressed.
Many, perhaps most, online marketers are introverts. Living inside our cave. It's h-a-r-d to pry us out. We have so many excuses. "It takes too much time. I don't like to travel. I'll be away from my family. My business can't run without me."
(If your business can't run without you for 1-3 days, you need to get some help real fast.)
But you MUST escape your cave. And be with real people. You must. This is not optional. It should never be "oh, let me think about that for a few weeks." No, you need to go.
And when you DO come out of your cave, you need to seek out the highest-quality people who will possibly allow you to be in their presence.
This means that if the event that you go to is free or cheap, the bar is too low.
I get invited to ALL KINDS of seminars, mastermind groups, etc. Most of those people would let me come to their expensive event for free, simply because they value my presence.
I turn most of them down. I go to the stuff that costs money.
There are LOTS of free / cheap places to go get around other entrepreneurs. If that's where you're getting your juice, you'll be stuck in the same place in 5 years as you are now.
If you're content with where you are now, stick with free or cheap.
If you want to run with the big dogs, it's going to be expensive.
It's really true that 5 years from now you'll be the composite of the people you hang around most. Your income, your intelligence, your wisdom, and your network will be a function of your peer group.
Who is your peer group?
There is something magical, sometimes almost spiritual, that happens when people get together. There is a mojo in the air, an atmosphere, and you need to CATCH it.
I have a friend who calls it "The Proximity to Perry Effect." Every time we hang together, money has this funny way of showing up for him.
When you come to a Roundtable meeting or City Tour event, you *catch* the atmosphere in the room. You go home more bulletproof. Your ability to ask for the sale, to command the universe to submit to you, goes up.
It's like brand new razor blades. They cut with such ease. Zero friction.
That's what it's like commanding money to show up AFTER you've been around the mojo.
You make friends. These will typically be the best, most reliable and resourceful people in your entire business life. Almost every single one of my real business friends, I met at a conference, mastermind group or live event. (That I paid for.)
And the rest of my real business friends, I met through someone I met at a conference, mastermind group or live event that I paid for.
If you're not showing up 3-6 times a year at a Planet Perry event you're missing out on something VITAL.
There are two simple ways to do this:
1. City Tour events. I do these throughout the USA and sometimes around the world.
Mark Ingles has been to nearly all of my City Tour events and Mark gave this presentation: "What I learned following Perry Marshall around the country."
Watch This
2. Roundtable is a private group that runs January-December of each year. We gather live in January, May and October. Roundtable is a place where you'll discover some of the sharpest people you'll find anywhere.
They are people who subscribe to the 12 Imperatives. We maintain a waiting list of people who want to get into Roundtable. In this video, a group of my Roundtable members problem-solve for a client at a seminar.
To get on the consideration list and apply for Roundtable, email Tiffany (tiffany@perrymarshall.com).
Tiffany will put you on the notification list for City Tour events.
I personally go to 5-10 meetings a year where I try as hard as I can to be the DUMBEST guy in the room. I would not skip these for ANYTHING.
You should do the same. In fact you should come here and hang around until you stop hearing and learning new things.
And if you know for some reason that Planet Perry is not for you then you should find someplace else to go hang out.
Email Tiffany (tiffany@perrymarshall.com) to get on the notification list.
Over and out.
Perry Marshall
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