My 8 year old digs Minecraft. Minecraft is a video game where you build castles and walls and landscapes and moats and anything else you can imagine. It’s like virtual Legos.
One day he was showing me a fortress he’d built. He said, “Dad, I’m an ARCHITECT!”
“Yes, Z-Man, you are. You are an Architect!” Suddenly I thought of something that would inspire him. A memory took me back 18 years.
It’s the summer of 1995. No kids yet. I’m a circle-drawing, mile-driving Amway Marker Man. My credo is “Massive Action Solves Every Problem” and I’m Mach 2 with hair on fire. I’ve been banging this HARD for four years and have never achieved any momentum. I have maybe 20 people in my ragtag group, from the comatose to the desperadoes. I’m deliciously close to a tipping point.
I’m doing presentations left and right and I always carry a copy of the May 1995 issue of Architectural Digest. It’s my “Dream Building” magazine and I’ve learned that if you want to get people to engage you have to get ’em dreaming first.
So when I give presentations I flip open that Architectural Digest and show them a picture of a glass house on the ocean in Japan – which is so totally The Bomb.
I say to Z-Man, “I’m going to get you an old magazine that I think you’re going to like.” I don’t offer any other details, I just get online and find a company that sells back issues. I order a copy of that magazine.
A couple of days later he’s badgering me to see when this special “thing” is going to come.
Yesterday, it came. Z-Man intercepted the mail before it even got to me. He pranced into my office while I was on the phone and pointed to the exact picture I was thinking of when I ordered it.
He spent the entire morning poring over that magazine, conjuring up new structures he could build in Minecraft.
Photos from the World Architects Project
The summer of 1995 was a sweltering 106 degree heat wave. During that spell I got tantalizingly even closer to that elusive MOMENTUM stage, the magic carpet ride that’s the dream of every network marketing maven.
Close.
But no cigar.
Actually, 30 stragglers and a few hundred bucks a month was as close as I ever got. It was downhill from there. I cranked the stalled engine for another two years before I finally quit and turned to other endeavors. All in all, six years of sweat and money and scraping nickels together.
For nothing.
Or so it would seem.
18 years later, kid #4 was catching a different kind of dream. I said to Laura, “Back when I was showing the plan like a banshee I never imagined that I’d dig out that magazine for a son who wouldn’t even be born for another ten years.”
Was my circle-drawing, marker-man effort wasted?
Consider my discovery that nobody would engage with me about the “logic” of business until I got them to dream first. Do you think that was a natural discovery for an electrical engineer? Do you think I might have picked up other vital lessons about human nature while I was pounding the steaming pavement?
How about all those tapes and seminars we bought and couldn’t afford, the tens of thousands of dollars of revolving credit and 2nd mortgages? Do you think those might have imparted anything to me about how to…
Tell stories?
What about the schemes I concocted to make contacts, arouse interest and book appointments? Trips to the mall, striking up conversations with strangers… my reverse telephone directory experiment where I called people in my neighborhood and dropped off a tape… the directory of local businesses… targeting niche businesses with niche pitches, going miles beyond what I learned on the books and tapes?
Do you think any of that prepared me to “get” direct marketing when I finally discovered it?
How about the years of Chinese Water Torture, eroding my financial head trash? I had grown up with a calcified, entrenched resistance to financial success. My religious upbringing was deeply conflicted about money. The people I admired were delighted to take the large donation from the successful businessman, yet they looked down upon his “lesser calling” in the marketplace, sullying his hands with mammon instead of the true riches.
I guess his donation was buying him a bit of redemption and self respect.
Yeah… it took something like six years to straighten myself out about the fact that mediocrity is just mediocrity and conflictedness is conflictedness and there’s nothing virtuous about it what – so – ever.
After my convo with Z-Man about the Architectural Digest – including a gander at luxury safari huts in a Kenya article – I said to Laura, “Ain’t it funny how hardly ANYTHING actually got wasted along the way. It ALL got used, somehow, somewhere.”
Solomon famously said, “In all labor there is profit.” How right he was. But in order to harness that reality, you must acknowledge and accept it. You must know that in the turbulent weirdness of life, cause and effect are not linear, paths are not straight.
Necessity is the mother of invention and you never know when that odd thing you picked up 18 years ago is suddenly going to come in handy.
I don’t know what you’re doing today, and I don’t know if it’s going to take you exactly where you’re trying to go or not. Odds are, it’s going to take you to a different place than you expect. I love that old Jewish saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
What I do know is, in all labor there is profit, and you’re storing up treasures of wisdom and experience.
IF.
If you value those treasures.
If you store them away and protect them with labels that say “Treasure still in process.”
And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s to treasure DREAMS. You might think they’re nutty sometimes, and they usually are. But it’s the nutcases who change the world. There’s no reason it can’t be a reasonably sane nutcase like yourself, instead of some psychopath.
Cuz in life it’s not the mediocre vs. the passionate. It’s the crazy sane vs. the crazy insane, the deranged dreamers vs. the directed dreamers. If you’ve got your shoulder to the wheel and you’re chasing your dream, you’re a directed dreamer. In fact you may not even realize how much the people around you depend on you to hold their world together.
Seize the Day.
Perry Marshall
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw
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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.
46 Comments on “Architectural Digest and Minecraft, Marker Man and Z-Man”
Perry,
I’ve read this one at least 7 times since you wrote it, occaisionally going back to it in my email account. In fact, I just printed it today for highlighting. Each time I read it, it moves me.
Right on!
That is great to hear. Happy to have you in Planet Perry.
Well said, Perry. Thanks – I needed that.
Of course a glass house would provoke the trite “Those who live in glass houses should not throw rocks.” On the other, less obvious tack, someone who could build a glass house might want to do so because he had gotten rid of so much head trash that he (or she) really understood the value of being able to see things as they really are.
As for things that have unanticipated usefulness–I used to think I could have ‘saved time’ if I’d known about screenwriting instead of getting three novels out first. But the more screenplays I read the more I perceive the missing parts a novelist would instinctively include. The screenplays I’m writing have a richer story line and more advanced characters as a result.
Hi, Phyllis. I clicked on your name and looked through your website. Great job! And good luck with sales!
Thank you. :D
You always seem to speak from a deep well of wisdom, Gemma. You see life in full spectrum, from the bottom to the top!
Thank you for the inspiring story, so masterfully told.
(continuation from above)
They ate them because they **tasted good**.
The real problem in our modern world is that the sort of entertainment that you get from a computer is easy to lap up. You don’t have to work hard.
And yet … the only really satisfying thing is having achieved something you’ve worked for! That is when the sweat of the brow becomes reality. That is when the computer is put aside.
Until people realize that dreaming your way through life isn’t living, we aren’t going to get far.
I can imagine someone who has chased their dreams all their life – and with death staring them in the face realize then that they have five minutes left to get a life.
Reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes strip: There’s treasure everywhere.
http://summitview.com/Portals/0/candh_treasure.gif
LOL! Priceless!
Well what does one say when a master has woven his spell? Indeed words fail and only one word seems adequate, maybe because no one really knows its full meaning – Amen!
Its more than the story, its more than the lessons one may get from it. It is the spirit, it is that ‘thing’ in it that makes one’s core being say this is it! It awakens the story teller in us all, the dream weaver that ‘working for a living’ has almost killed. It is being given the right to dream, to be different and an invitation to join like-minded people.
Which ever way I got onto your list Perry, am I glad I did!
Thanks a lot!
Really great post Mister M – I remember those pictures of the glass house from when I was a kid – maybe not from the same magazine but so memorable.
A fabulous theme explored with verve and topped with a clarion call to action.
You’re a Poet Perry! Make no mistake…
On a site note Perry – I’m frantically looking for the piece you did about the Software Safety Engineer who landed the Big Fish client by guaranteeing his performance. Do you remember – was that an email sequence or in one of your newsletters? I can’t find the newsletter I thought it was in.
Thanks
Nick
“every mistake in the book, blow by blow”?
I believe that’s it. I’ll ransack the office until it’s found! Thank you.
At the height of prosperity or the ashes of ruin, the key is knowing that life’s treasures are found in what you’ve become, not what you’ve experienced.
Becoming something great is a choice that takes place separately from experience. It’s optional because it requires a worthy cause. Worthy of defending dreams when others laugh, and equally worthy of doing what is required even when it’s long cold road.
Not to get too far into religion on the business blog Perry – but I’m reminded of an explanation of Christ’s sojourn in mortality that’s always felt as deep as the universe to me. It comes from the Book of Mormon:
11) And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people.
12) And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.
Alma 7:11-12 Book of Mormon
That passage has released me from the feeling I had in my youth that life for a true Christian should be hap-hap-hap-happy all the time. On a side note – it’s also led me to a strong defense of my white man’s love of the blues.
6 years in Amway may have been Hell as an experience, but it created a merciful father who knows how to succor Z-Man – who if born, as many boys are, to a father who tore him down rather than built him up, would be headed for a lifetime of infirmities/headtrash, rather than a lifetime of rabbit whole diving.
Thanks – as always – for keeping a candle in the window for all of us i-ntrepreneurial ramblers.
Nick
Thanks, Nick Neilson. I’m passing this on to family and friends, with credit to you:
“At the height of prosperity or the ashes of ruin, the key is knowing that life’s treasures are found in what you’ve become, not what you’ve experienced.”
Perry thanks – Guess what?
You’re an architect in your own right. You appreciate structure & space & so does Z-Man. Does not mean he (Z-Man) will be a building architect. We don’t know. You’re an electrical engineer, but you harnessed your analytics an experience in your creative life to become an entrepreneur – a marketing ‘guru’- I was fascinated with this story because I have an architectural degree and still my goal is to do the license, so I don’t have to depend on other architects/engineers to stamp my drawings.
I thought I would have a traditional architectural practice, but I don’t. This is not realistically taught in college.
My business is performing construction drawings so contractors could get them submitted to the building department of their respective districts to obtain building permits.
I do enjoy going to sites, drawings, performing artwork of all descriptions. But I realize I needed to outsource my work to others to alleviate myself of 50-dollar an hour work. sometimes dwindling to 10-dollar an hr. work. Between going to the site, gathering info and performing dwgs. Took at min. 8 hrs. per project. I started charging $400.00 typically/per project, which could take me 3 days to get done – I have my regular life to live.
I have come to realize, they (contractor, building owners) needed the drawings/permits quickly & I could not churn them out that quickly & my cost had to go up to at min 3 times what I was charging – $1200 on average. BTW that is the realistic cost. I am in the midst of doing this & I know will succeed continuously.
I thought I would loose out on the enjoyment of doing the drawings myself, which has its draw-back of being time consuming.
But, with outsourcing to college techies and other designers who might potentially become associates, I will be able to use the time to design my own things, and develop the business itself, and even additional business design off-shoots.
Yes. I realize, whatever one does in life, once creative – and I like the George Bernard Shaw quote – They are architects in their own right. They make the world conform to them. Not the other way around.
Gerald
Yep all 3 of us are architects and engineers, and many times I have pictures in my head of all these marketing functions as though they are physical spaces. No doubt you know exactly what I’m talking about :^>
My mouth dropped open when I read this article today, especially when I read this:
‘ What I do know is, in all labor there is profit, and you’re storing up treasures of wisdom and experience. IF. If you value those treasures. If you store them away and protect them with labels that say “Treasure still in process.” ‘
Just last night at 9:30 pm EDT I composed the From the Author section for my first Amazon Kindle eBook (31 Messages for a Cold December):
“There are few things so revealing of oneself as writing a book. Every message here was dictated to me by years of both defeat and victory … As I distilled the essence of an experience I would jot it down or tuck it away in a corner of my mind. I was a teenager when I wrote the first message: I already wanted to know how to find my way back to childlike happiness, and I saved my insight in case I might need it when I got older. Now it’s time to pass these ideas on. Not to everyone in the world. Only to you and others like you. They are messages in a bottle floating in the ocean. And you found them. Enjoy!”
Treasures of wisdom and experience, stored away and protected. Taken back out, with interest, when the investment has matured. Dreams, storylines, and the magic of adventure … all withing the framework of a very real and difficult world.
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00APUI06G
Being on your email list for Google Adwords somehow magically preceded the production of my first eBook, and I soon recalled your laser-precise admonition: “It’s a matching game: *match* the precise keywords to your ad title and the words on your landing page.” Click: searching for the perfect character string on a Google search … of course! In a computer-driven environment, words have to match, dummy.
And that was just the beginning. I felt like you were taking me by the hand and leading me through this new land.
Thank you, Perry. Thank you.
Bravo! Congrats on your book.
Nice Post Perry,
It is always heartbreaking to deal with failures and hardships; thinking all is lost… and pretty much amazing to look back five, ten, twenty years later and see how they were actually blessings in disguise.
My fear is wasting the lesson because of the mind clutter affecting me in the present.
I was in that same business. “Where there’s soap, there’s hope.” “It doesn’t leave a residue like Tide.” Well maybe the residue it leaves is the changes you make in your head while you figure out why you can’t make the business work. It set me on a course of asking questions about things and those questions are bearing the fruit that is my dream now.
It was a little weird reading your story because I had a similar experience at the weekend. I was visiting my family and my 9 year old nephew was showing me the castle he’d made in Minecraft. I didn’t even know he was interested in buildings. He was so enthusiastic about it. I asked him if he was interested in some other software. I found a youtube video of a building being contructed in SketchUp. He was amazed by it. I installed the free version of SketchUp then we downloaded some models of beach houses, mansions and even a McDonalds restaurant! Then I showed him some of the basics, spending the rest of the afternoon building a simple house and stairs. He kept calling SketchUp a game! To him it was. It was natural for him to use it. It’s all play. I could see the dreamer in my nephew and I knew it was something to encourage and nurture.
Perry – I have a saying that came out of my 7 years in an engineering career which I despised – “Dreams are forged in the fire of a restless heart.”
If I had a career straight out of college that I loved I never would have had the courage to leave the Dilbert cube. It took 7 years in the desert to muster the strength to leave, even more so to endure the next 7 years of struggle as a newbie Entreprenuer.
And now…I would trade none of it! My engineering chops also pay off as a consultant bringing order to chaos for clients.
Peace and wealth to you my friend,
Travis Smith
2/13/13 3:41 pm EDT
“Dreams are forged in the fire of a restless heart.”
That is a stunning quotable quote, Travis. If you could produce one such as this, you surely have more. If you have no more, then you have a task waiting to be finished. Not everyone can take a complex life experience and whittle it down to a few words with this kind of impact.
Excellent story! Getting them to dream… I like that! Thanks for posting :-)
This spoke to my soul… was what I needed to hear today… that it is worth it… that I am working toward something, even if it’s not clear at the moment what that something is.
Thank-you Perry. Thank-you very much.
Jonathan Kraft
Man did you hit a nerve…..thanks for the clarity
Now, as to Amway – I wonder if they ever got “it”. They used their basic knowledge of getting people to dream, they didn’t take it any further.
Why?
Because they didn’t know how. Even those in the inner circle were only in the inner circle to get better deals. They weren’t any closer to Amway’s secrets – because there weren’t any.
My guess is that in Perry’s inner circles, you come across some real secrets. Only being that sort of inner circle, they aren’t his – they’re your own secrets that you discover. It takes a special kind of person to see the one possibility that links your dream to the reality of your life.
It’s never very big. It never needs to be.
2/13/13 3:33 pm EDT
Gemma, you got me right in the heart with that one: “see the *one* possibility that links your dream to the *reality* of your life. It’s never very big. It doesn’t have to be.” This tiny statement is so deep.
It’s the difference between so-called “positive thinking” and “effectuation.”
QUOTE from The Wall Street journal:
“… 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research. They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls “effectuation.” Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends.”
“The Power of Negative Thinking”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578147333270637790.html
Thanks, Gloria.
The problem comes when someone doesn’t like that one special thing. That’s when you get opposition. The problem is that all their customers come to them for just that reason!!
What a funny world we live in.
Good luck with your book, too! I presume that in your saying “I already wanted to know how to find my way back to childlike happiness, and I saved my insight in case I might need it when I got older.*” you have found this, the kernel of the secret to happiness?
(*In your comment below). GL
Hi, Gemma.
The “kernel” of regaining our sense of happiness isn’t anything spectacular or secret: it’s our memory, our capacity to “RE-member” things, to “put back together” the various fragmented parts of things digested and stored away. We can RE-construct emotional states. Can you still get back the memory of the love of your life? Of course, and you replay it endlessly for a long time.
If you click on the link to my December “Messages” at the Amazon Kindle Store, you can “Look Inside” the eBook by clicking on the cover image. The first message for December is “A Sense of Wonder,” and it lays out the simple steps for getting back in touch with your passion for life.
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00APUI06G
By the way, you can download Kindle software for your PC for free:
PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311
Mac: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000464931
We all know this. But we forget it while we are in a negative frame of mind. That’s why we need to be RE-minded … taken again to a state of mind we want to revisit.
What I didn’t realize as a teenager is that poor health and lack of exercise are formidable obstacles to feeling excited about anything. A full night’s sleep gets rid of having a blank mind or resisting a job to be done. You don’t need a shrink or an expensive seminar on self-sabotage: you just need to get some sleep!
Your body is the car, the carriage, the vehicle, for your mind. You can’t expect your mind to go anyplace good if your body is a wreck. Within only a few days of treating your body right your mind just kind of wakes up.
My second eBook, “31 Messages for a Wintry January” (yes, I’m working on the series of all 12 months), is full of practical encouragement, like “Rescuing a Raw Deal.”
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00BB5IV8
There’s no nirvana we can reach where we will never again struggle or be slapped down by life. What we do when we lose makes the difference. What we do when we lose our ability to feel happy brings us back to it.
The goal is to shorten your recovery time, but that can’t happen if all your inner resources have been exhausted. The inner wisdom of your mind and body will force you to shut down.
When we are desperate for income it’s hard to attach ourselves to the reality of living with time and with the cycles of life on this planet. You know, stuff our parents tried to tell us … that we still need to be RE-minded of so that we can succeed.
2/14/13 3:51 pm EDT
Typo. The URL for “31 Messages for a Wintry January” is:
http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00BB5IVG8
“There’s no nirvana we can reach where we will never again struggle or be slapped down by life. What we do when we lose makes the difference. What we do when we lose our ability to feel happy brings us back to it.”
Thanks Gloria. Needed that.
Hi Gloria, what a remarkable thing to say:
“What I didn’t realize as a teenager is that poor health and lack of exercise are formidable obstacles to feeling excited about anything.”
Yet all teenagers want to eat hamburgers and loaf in front of their Xbox … what is it about modern society that makes it so desirable – comfortable – to do the very things you speak out against? In catering to the desires of our teenagers, we are destroying them.
My family didn’t allow junk food, so that wasn’t a problem. No one was fat, but no one was in top shape, either. A love of books was overly indulged, because a reader isn’t getting into trouble or talking back. I developed my love of physical fitness after I left home to go to college.
The job of the parent or caretaker is to instill life-saving and productive habits into the offspring. The backlash against authoritarian child rearing fostered the indulgent model of parent and child as peers. The old model decided parental direction by asking, “What will produce the best outcome in my child?” The new, indulgent model asks, “Will my child still like me after I take this course of action?” The first question is asked by an adult. The second is asked by someone who still hasn’t grown up, who is more concerned about being liked by his friends than about achieving an effective result.
Electronic devices ruin eyesight, produce visual and mental addiction, and are physically as confining as being chained in a dungeon. If someone else did to us what we do to ourselves at the computer, we would sue them for abuse.
Some phrases deserve to be preserved for all time. “Living by the sweat of your brow” is one of them.
Our goal here should be to learn from Perry Marshall how to use the computer effectively so that we spend very little time at it.
Just teaching people how to do something doesn’t always work. My kids didn’t eat their greens because they were told to. Nor did they because they knew it would do them good.
(continued below … )
Perry,
Nice post, hope you do not mind if I for now ignore the more philosophical elements of your post and focus on the kids playing mine craft bit. My own children love mine craft and are impenetrable when on it. I never thought to show them a picture of a building I like and ask them to design it in mine craft. Might be an in for me with them when they are playing it.
John
Encouraging words spoken in season.
Thanks, Perry
I am a firmly believer that all your experiences and all the hardwork always pays off, I arrived to a foreign country and in my lonely afternoon and nights instead of watching TV or bitch about my solittude I bought a “cray internet ebook” written by some dude called Perry MArshall about how to buy PPC and get people attention, fastforwarding 6 years after I do a full time income living on those principles that you taught me when there was just solitude and darness… in a different part of this country where they speak a different launguage in a small town etc… thank you again.
Perry, you could also connect the fact that all those years of marketing and the difficulty of direct sales & MLM to be able to first see, then appreciate and finally capitalize on the profit potential of Google AdWords. Especially with its ability to leverage yourself and your time with laser like focus towards your target market.
Great story Perry. I have a 3 1/2 year old son that is starting to really cling to me. I look forward to continuing to pour myself into his life and teaching him everything I can. It’s an awesome feeling!
There’s a TED talk with Steve Jobs addressing a bunch of university graduates. He tells a story of not knowing what do in his youth and at some point ends up taking a typography course. There he learned about setting type and the beauty of letters and fonts.
Little did he know, that small course would have a huge impact many years later when they were developing Macs – the computers, that amongst other things – went on to revolutionize typesetting and graphic design.
Great post. Reminds me that life for most of us isn’t a straight shot to success but rather a journey with some dead ends and plenty of bumps and scratches. And if there isn’t any of that stuff, then we aren’t reaching high enough.