Listen To What Heroes Google Adwords Marketing Consultant Perry Marshall Says When He Answers the Heroes Question "Who are the HEROES in your life now?"
Perry Marshall: That’s a hard question to answer because I think I’m old enough to realize that nobody is perfect. It seems that most of the people who have influenced my life in extraordinary ways also have extraordinary weaknesses.
If you meet a person with really great strengths, they almost always have really great weaknesses to go along with them. People that I know who are alive today, I don’t know if I would categorize them as heroes but it would be interesting to do: Make a top ten list of the most influential people in my life.
My dad would be on that list.
Another guy that would be on the list is an English Professor in college. He pulled me aside one day and said he had been reading my papers and would like to talk with me sometime. So a few weeks later I went to his office and he starts telling me all this stuff that he had figured out from reading the papers I had written, that I hadn’t figured out about myself. It was amazing. He really saw way further down the road than I ever did. He was a great, great teacher. He would definitely be on the list.
I think different people affect your life in different ways. For example, and this is a weird example, about seven or eight years ago I went to a Rush Concert. It was three hours of the most extraordinarily executed musical performance that I had ever seen.
The drummer stole the show. I have never seen musicianship like that. In the musical arena that guy is definitely a hero. It changed my awareness of music.
A definitely big influence in my business life is Dan Kennedy. I first heard Dan Kennedy speak in 1997. He coaxed $300 out of my pocket and I bought some of his books and tapes and it transformed my understanding of sales and marketing.
I actually know Dan pretty well now. I’m in one of his coaching groups and I talk to him every month. Is Dan like a hero of my whole life? No, but he is a luminary in business.
When there are people who change the way you think about things, people who influence you that way, a lot of times it’s worthwhile to dig all of that water out of that well that you can. You don’t just skim it from the surface.
Like with Dan, I was just at a group meeting for two days just last week. Why do I go to that, because Dan consistently brings insights into situations that I would not come up with myself, and it continues to happen.
Now if the time came where I wasn’t really getting anything new that I hadn’t already gotten, then I would stop, but as long as you continue to learn something new, you keep going back.
We had a discussion about one topic that was very illuminating that no one else in the room had really fully considered.
There are other people. I would have to sit down and think about this, but you get the idea. There are authors, people who you may never meet. There are very influential thinkers.
Any direct marketer has been enormously influenced by Claude Hopkins whether they read his stuff or not. It would be a very good idea for anybody in marketing to read Claude Hopkins because he is one of those true luminaries.
When somebody is one of the really first people to figure a whole bunch of things out it probably means that they are brilliantly smart, and that what they tell you about other things is equally valuable.