Did your mother ever say this to you?

“Bundle up today, it’s cold outside and if you’re not careful you’ll come down with something.”

You go outside and sure enough, the next day you feel that dreaded sensation. “Ooof, I am definitely coming down with something.”

That’s what we talked about during lunch yesterday at the 4-Man, at my dining room table. I said, “So do you guys know what’s actually going on when you’re ‘coming down with something’?”

“You come down with strep throat or something and you think you caught it while you were outside. Actually what happened was, those bacteria were quietly multiplying for weeks. They were having conversations with each other – ‘Hey guys, is there enough of us yet?’

‘Not quite . . . not quite . . . hey, he just went outside and he’s freezing cold and he’s spending all his energy staying warm. ATTACK NOW!’

And they all go to work, little soldiers marching into battle. They work together. Scientists call it “quorum sensing.” Bacteria talk to each other. Different species even speak different dialects.

OK, so now you take antibiotics to kill the germs. Everybody knows you gotta be careful with antibiotics cuz germs develop resistance and then you can’t kill ’em anymore.

I say to everyone, “Has anyone ever explained to you how the germs develop resistance?”

Nobody’s heard this either.

“There’s a germ floating around in your body. It says, ‘This poison is leaking into my cell wall and it’s killing me. I’ve gotta find a pump to pump this out or I’m gonna die.’

That germ goes around your system hunting for another cell that has a pump. Cells have a file folder called a plasmid. It has a public copy of their DNA.

Your germ finds a cell that has a pump, it grabs its DNA from the file folder and reads it.

It finds the part of the DNA that codes for a pump and inserts that DNA into its own DNA. It builds a pump and starts birthing new germs that have pumps. That’s how smart those little guys are and it’s why germs keep getting smarter. Bulletproof bacteria.”

Ronak, the guy sitting next to me says, “OK, so the best germs are the entrepreneur bacteria that go around looking for the best ideas, and they’re the ones that survive, right?”

“Right on, baby,” I say. “Germs go out and conquer the same way we do. By getting the best ideas they can find and implementing them.”

Another guy at the table, Drew, says, “Well I guess that’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?”

When seasoned business people get together and share their entire collective experience, power happens. It turns ordinary entrepreneurs into bulletproof superbugs. They create viruses that nobody knows how to kill.

How would you ever kill Ebay? Or Starbucks? Or Google? How hard would it be to take out *anybody* who regularly seeks out the sharpest people in the world, and learns from them?

In history you have different eras – the Renaissance, the major world wars, the “60’s”, the digital age and so on. The world is in a major transition right now. We’re transitioning from the era we’re in now (we won’t even have a name for it until 20 years from now) to a brand new era.

This is a massive reset.

It means that only half of what you think is true actually is. And that’s being generous.

The agile and well equipped will prosper. Everyone else – the also-rans– will be working for the agile ones in 10 years.

Which one will you be?

Will you be one of those bulletproof bacteria, a superbug that nobody knows how to kill? Or will you be a carcass?

You get to decide. And if you’re not in a killer mastermind group, a place where you can borrow pumps and DNA code and other peoples’ lethal weapons, you’ve already decided.

Perry Marshall
http://www.perrymarshall.com/roundtable/

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.