Truth Seminar 2019

DENOMINATORS OF DISRUPTIONNEW TRUTH creates NEW WORLDNEW WORLD destroys OLD WORLDThis will MAKE YOU RICH or MAKE YOU EXTINCT in 2019 and Beyond.Dear Marketing Professional:Do you see ads like this in your PayPal account?This ad is for “Loan Builder,” a business born in Planet Perry. PayPal purchased it from a Planet Perry member for a fortune. Now one of the biggest lenders in the world today, they’ve axis-shifted the banking industry.Another Planet Perry member was earning $50 an hour managing clicks four years ago. Now he has a company worth about a million. It’s profitable, the customers are insanely happy, it’s growing at double-digits. It’s axis-shiftingits market and his company is eminently sellable.Another guy, exactly two years ago, was the typical Planet Perry serial entrepreneur / consultant, hustling, straddling two gigs, trying to manage the ADHD. In 2019 he owns a new movie studio with 1.1 billion dollars in backing. He’s playing in the same sandbox as Disney and Universal. Axis-shifting the movie biz.I’ll tell you more about these guys soon, but they all have three things in common:All sought a deeper truth about their market and business… and accepted that truth before others did.All employed a process to reach this buried truth, a process they performed intuitively which has never been explained before now.All three made business-as-usual obsolete.Each ushered in a New Era. Reminds me of the Jurassic Park movie:MALCOLM: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.ELLIE:(finishing it for him) Dinosaur eats man. Woman inherits the Earth.YOU have a carnivorous T-Rex fixin’ to eat you – all the time.You know: this time next year, your products, services, offerings must be better, faster, cheaper, more impressive, more efficient, more effective… Everything must get better all the time… And you also know that once every three or five or ten years, a little better is not enough. Cuz someone is going to totally disrupt, and all clocks get reset to zero.But if I say to you: Go to Starbucks for two hours this afternoon. When you return, you must bring home at least three options for re-inventing yourself. Your team will cast a vote and in six months have new products on the market.Oh, and by the way… incremental tweaks won’t cut it. Radical re-inventions only.Could you?99% could not. Why? Because there’s no formula.Not before now.At the Truth Seminar, AKA “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” May 21-23, 2019 in Chicago, I’m delivering the formula, along with detailed, up-close insider views of a half-dozen Axis Shifters who’ve done the same.This is NOT the all-too-common dog and pony show of shazam-o speakers and marketers and power point presentations. This is me pulling the stories out of Axis Shifters… turning off the cameras and tape recorders when asked… exposing the meat and grit of their thinking.Because in all these (and many others too) there is the imperative:DECONSTRUCT + RE-INVENTSix months ago, I could not have articulated or explained this to you. But in late 2018 I started tracing the pattern I had missed for so long. This pattern was common to all three cases above; it was common to dozens, possibly hundreds of Planet Perry members, and every single one of my own inventions and innovations.I’ve de-constructed and re-invented …GoogleFacebook80/20Business strategyEvolutionTheologyPsychologyAcousticsManufacturingMathematicsMarketing…and across 100+ industries, as I’ve helped thousands of clients re-invent businesses, careers and professions.…but I’ve never explained how until now. Before now, I couldn’t.Why 99% of business are “Diminishing Returns”99% of businesses are Diminishing Returns businesses. Above a certain point, the more you put in, the less you get out.It provides you with a beautiful lifestyle at $2 million… and it’s a cortisol-injecting, stress-drenched death trap at $4 million.A SELECT FEW businesses (1%) are Exponential Growthbusinesses. Above a certain point, the more you put in, the MORE you get out.It’s a bleeding red money pit at $1 million… and a GUSHER at $10 million.“Info marketing” is a Diminishing Returns business… consulting is a Diminishing Returns business…Manufacturing is a Diminishing Returns business. Most “professional service companies” are Diminishing Returns.But…Software as Service is an Exponential Business. InfusionSoft is a perfect example – estimated to be worth $967 million last year. InfusionSoft was born in Planet Perry.Another good example would be the company Planet Perry member Casey Graham sold. He got over $10 million for an App that collects church offerings.Swift Capital, sold to PayPal for a much larger sum of money, is also an Exponential Business. It is now known as “Loan Builder” and their ads are seen by hundreds of millions of people.DILEMMA:Diminishing Returns businesses are EASY to start… and HARD to cash out of.Exponential Growth businesses are HARD to start… and EASY to cash out of. Often they fetch 4X revenue or more. A $5 million company might fetch $25 million. It makes its founder wealthy.When I worked at Synergetic, we transformed a Diminishing Returns model into Exponential Growth model – and our $4 million company (with $2 million of debt) was bought by a public company for $18 million.But…Is there a way to connect the two? Is there a way to start in a Diminishing Returns business and transition to Exponential Growth so you get the best of BOTH worlds?The answer is a resounding YES. I’ve personally participated in this several times. I’m doing it again now.At 11am May 22, Day 2 of Truth Seminar, I’m going to unveil a “Universal Voltage Adapter” for connecting your Diminishing Returns business to an Exponential Growth business.One of my special guests, who 1 year ago was a regular rank and file Planet Perry consultant and serial entrepreneur, now presides over a movie studio with $1.1 BILLION of backing, because he employed this type of model.You can join us live in person, or via live stream. Register now to get the pre-event education stream!It’s a universal formula. Denominators of Disruption. There is nothing this cannot be applied to. No product that can’t be re-formulated. No industry that can’t be disrupted. No profession that can’t be overturned.The first incarnation where I recognized this pattern was my first time getting fired from a job. It triggered a series of dominoes, one after another, and even the dominoes themselves fit the pattern.This first story has no less than six dominoes. Each would later echo back in the form of million-dollar, even billion-dollar businesses, years later. Can you pick them out? (Once you recognize this pattern, you’ll spot it everywhere.)My first time getting fired was from a rogue FAX. My employer was W.W. Grainger, a billion-dollar wholesale firm. My fax (“from” the CEO, Mr. Keyser) said:“We regret to inform you that Grainger stock has plummeted from 63 dollars a share to 17 dollars a share and we will be closing all branches effective Friday. We want to thank you for your years of service and hard work and we will make every effort to complete payroll for the current week.”I slid it into the FAX machine. Tony pressed SEND. The modem chirped as it made its way to the Omaha branch.Tony and I gleefully waited for them to call us back.No one called. We waited and waited.Finally we couldn’t stand it anymore. We called them.“That was YOU??? Brenda pulled that off the Fax machine and immediately went into hysterics. She started calling all her friends and relatives, sobbing –‘I just lost my job after 12 years and I don’t know what I’m going to do….!’“We didn’t know what to think, so we faxed it to Des Moines.“They didn’t know what to think, so they faxed it to Sioux City.“They didn’t know what to think, so they faxed it to Fort Smith Arkansas…”Apparently, my very first experiment in copywriting and electronic communication went viral! (This was 1990 when FAX machines were state of the art.)Care to guess what my boss said the next day when he came in?I landed a local job delivering coupon books in my car. Telemarketers would pitch folks on helping a children’s charity. Selling $20 books with discounts on restaurants and stuff.I asked the boss: “How much of that money goes to the charity?”He stammered and didn’t answer the question.The next day he fired me for “looking at a lady funny on delivery because she didn’t have her checkbook with her.”(I think the real reason he fired me was my dangerous questions.)I got a warehouse job at a chemical instrument company. Most warehouses have a printout that tells you which shelf the items are on, so you don’t have to memorize where everything is.Their warehouse was a train wreck. These guys had 20,000 parts with no system for finding them. One day I walked across the hall and visited the IT manager. “Rich, Is it possible to add a location field to the stock picking printouts?”“Yes. We used to have those, but Mary told us to take them off.”The next day I got summoned to Mary’s office. Something seemed “off.” Her boss Conrad was there too.“Rich says you talked to him about our stock printouts yesterday.”She was angry.“Uh… Yes, I did. I was trying to make our job easier.”“You went over my head.”“I hoped to find out if they could add those fields before bugging you with a suggestion that might not even be possible.”“You don’t ever go over my head, Perry. I’m sorry but we have to let you go.”Fired again. Third time.Both Conrad and Mary sported company badges with a slogan:“ACME IS A GREAT PLACE TO WORK”ACME was a terrible place to work. Everyone under pressure. Paranoid. Everyone looking over their shoulder. Pins and needles. Every Sunday night I would get depressed about Monday.My trip across the hallway threatened to blow the whistle on Mary. She was terrified news about her incompetence would spread.So that’s how I got fired from three jobs in two months.(My new father-in-law relished his daughter’s new husband who couldn’t hold a steady job.)…Which is the only reason I was willing to listen when my friend Bill kept inviting me to “Network Marketing” meetings.A year before I would have paid zero attention to such fantasies. But having been ejected from three different jobs at the tender age of 21, I was feeling cynical about the employment scene.Bill invited me to yet another meeting. I went… but I still couldn’t figure out how to decide if this was even a good idea. It was just so… out of left field. I was in engineering school, so why would I jump out of that and do… Amway???Laura, always the practical one, said: “Perry, if you graduated from school making $2,000 a month on the side part time, what would you do?”The light bulb flicked on. I’d always entertained a vague fantasy of starting an engineering company. HEY! If I was already financially self-sustaining, this would be a lot easier.All their prattle about Cadillacs and sandy beaches had been lost on me. In that moment, realized “owning your own business” was eminently practical. A profitable business on the side gives you options. So I drank the MLM pink koolaid and most folks have heard my Amway stories.A year later Laura and I moved to Chicago. We hardly knew a soul. I had to recruit people cold. I started going to malls and stores and shaking hands every night, meeting people.In MLM, momentum is EVERYTHING. It’s like starting a campfire. If you stoke it hot enough, you can get a blazing furnace… but if you rub your sticks in slo-mo, you might as well melt a glacier with your bare hands.I horribly agonizingly badly wanted this thing to work… but it was an anvil. When a business refuses to work, it breaks your heart, doesn’t it?I couldn’t “meet enough people” and “make enough new friends” to draw circles 15-20 times every month. This was killing me on the inside.Laura had mentally checked out long before. Her mama was a farmer’s wife, and Laura’s mama didn’t raise no fool. But I was playing the fool. Throwing good money after bad.This dragged on for years. Eventually I found myself in a new job as a young sales rep as well… where I had the same exact same problems I was having in Amway: Not enough people. Not enough leads. Not enough prospects. Not enough appointments. Not enough “deal flow.” Zero momentum.And zero commissions.In my quieter moments (when I wasn’t guzzling down motivational tapes) I would mutter under my breath:“Somehow, some way, I am going to outsmart this thing!!!!” I just couldn’t see how.(I would also catch myself thinking, no sane person would ever inflict this on anyone. But that was “stinkin’ thinkin’,” so I would immediately shove those thoughts down even deeper.)I ambled into a coliseum in Peoria Illinois where Dan Kennedy was selling “Magnetic Marketing.” I spent the $278 and those tapes were a lot more expensive than Amway tapes. “Maybe I can generate leads for Amway AND my sales rep job.”I lugged that giant manual home and started doing lead generation. Sending out sales letters, making offers, getting appointments. I tried a bunch of things. Several panned out.My direct marketing experiments actually DID work – as well as anyone could reasonably expect from a young pup like me, anyway.But the cost of each appointment was $50 to $200. I wrote in to Dan Kennedy. Dan told me: “Your numbers are respectable. $100 an appointment is right in line.”I listened and considered. I said to myself, “Perry, what you just did was you converted shoe-leather, manual-labor, go-to-the-mall-and-meet-people into ‘put money in slot and out comes appointment. You systematized this.”I reasoned to myself: “A top expert says your numbers are not bad. Plus… didn’t you used to spend two to five hours walking around shaking hands to get that one appointment before? Would you spend $10 (or even $40) to save yourself one hour? What is your time worth anyway?“But… if you have to pay $100 per appointment, and you only sponsor one out of five or ten, and most flake out after two weeks… the numbers in this business just don’t pan out. Multiply this out all the way to Diamond… you’ll spend $400K to get $100K back!“Yes, of course you can get people under you to do this, but they’ll just be losing money the same way you are now. If you’re making $100K, it’s only because they’re losing $300K! It’s just passing the buck, that’s all. No sane investor would finance the whole shebang – ever. Your distributors are working for negative twenty bucks an hour. If they valued their time they would stop.“DANG… this is economically impossible. It makes no logical sense!”I also realized: There are tons of other businesses with way better economics.I decided… this phase of my life is OVER. I hung it up.I guess I just had to learn the hard way… it wasn’t good enough for me to take the word of all the cynics and skeptics out there (who were too lazy to do something like this anyway).Just cuz they were lazy didn’t make them wrong about Amway. Someone had to prove to me I was wrong. I had to prove it to myself!So once my own real-life experiment got carried out that way… once I had experienced and seen it with my own eyes… the truth was inescapable.I redirected energy into my job at Synergetic, where I was sales and marketing manager – and into online marketing side businesses, from various websites to selling stuff on EBay.My life quickly transformed from: I pour 55-gallon drums of work, sweat and passion IN and I get nothing but misery and heartache OUT … To…“I am consistently getting traction with every move I make!”I cannot tell you what a ball and chain the previous failures were. They were eating my intestines. And I also cannot tell you how edifying and inspiring my new successes were.Four years later Synergetic got sold to Lantronix. I got $268,000 in stock options. Parachuted out and started my current business.I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I was jamming Direct Marketing and Amway together, I was executing a brilliant, repeatable strategy that I would use for the rest of my career.I wasn’t just taking someone’s word for it. I was experiencing it, in my bones. I wasn’t blindly following the herd. I was getting some of the grittiest life experience you can imagine. The clash of machinery and ruthless sifting of ideas in the lab of harsh reality.Decades later, I would suddenly see: this is also how you axis-shift the loan industry and get bought by PayPal for an obscene amount of money…. This is how a guy deeply in debt creates an industry-defining company worth seven figures in four years… this is how you pivot the movie business 90 degrees and summon $1.1 billion of capital in one year.This is a De-Construction + Re-Invention Engine with a finite assemblage of parts and a specific type of gas tank and transmission and wheels.This is how you transform the landscape YOU live in and work in, right now. You do it by penetrating the darkness and reaching the deeper truth.You see… Amway was a set of beliefs, propositions, assumptions. Amway was a model, it was a product, a service… a collection of teachings and culture. All of which taught you “how to sell.”But Direct Marketing was a larger, more universal set of beliefs, propositions and assumptions. It too was a model, a product, a service, a collection of teachings and culture.DM too told you “how to sell.” But it told you how to do it anytime, anywhere, not just in a cult-like organization with rallies in Salt Lake City and Charlotte, North Carolina.Everything in Amway fit in the direct marketing box, somewhere. DM was a universal acid.A “group” was a list. Recruiting folks and building an MLM organization was simply an alternative means of growing a customer base.Tapes books and seminars? Those were information marketing. They were sold on a continuity program.If you separated the information marketing part of MLM from the “alternative distribution” part, you realized that selling picks and shovels to the coal miners was a FAR more profitable business than coal mining.In fact it was so profitable they didn’t tell you A SINGLE WORD ABOUT IT until you attained ‘Direct Distributor’!(Let’s put it a different way. More accurate way to say it: The coal mining sucked so bad, if they had not bolted a moderately profitable picks-and-shovels business on the back end and cleverly concealed it from the minions, it would have been doomed.)Once I welded these two worlds together, I understood BOTH vastly better than before. When I applied the tools of Direct Marketing to MLM, it revealed to me that the economics were so upside-down, they called for an anti-gravity machine.Then… as I framed what they were teaching me in the craft of copywriting, persuasion, headlines, tribe-building, hypnosis and NLP, I became awakened to how shamelessly manipulative and cultish the whole thing was.I would be lying to you if I told you I coldly, objectively and rationally detached and immediately stopped. I did not. I was not and am not Mr. Spock. It took time to absorb this truth and come to grips with the fact that I had thrown good money after bad for years. I tapered off.It took a long time to face the fact that the those ‘losers’ who told me I was an idiot were right. (Even though they didn’t know why they were right.) Ego and insecurity had made me a MARK with a big red bulls-eye on my forehead.My friends were enjoying peaceful evenings of TV and Doritos with their families while I drove across Indiana in a snowstorm to sell more people more pink koolaid. I was the loser not, them!My rose-colored glasses shattered. Once I fully embraced the truth, I never looked back.(Once or twice a year, I still have a dream where I am supposed to recruit all these people. In my dream, I’m telling myself that it really is possible, and it really is going to work this time… then I bolt awake in pools of sweat and realize it was just a dream…)DM+MLM was one of my early experiences of willfully JAMMING TWO WORLDS TOGETHER – and discovering that one always shatters the other…OR makes it ten times better.(There is a shattering in the world, even now.)I would repeat this again and again and again. Each iteration would improve. Years later, approaching age 50, I saw how do it deliberately, methodically, systematically. With calculated skill, speed and efficiency.THIS is one of the most valuable skills ever. You can use it to spice up your next vacation… or invent the next Snapchat. And it’s not even all that difficult once you get the hang of it.Please don’t miss the fact that if you took all kinds of other industries – like Chiropractic or pet videos or membership programs – when you joined those things together with Direct Marketing, you got something amazing.DM doesn’t break Chiropractic. It brings patients into your office! It educates people about alternative medicine.If you jam together Search Engine + Direct Response Marketing, you get Google advertising. A $100 billion industry!DM doesn’t break the internet… it becomes the internet!If you merge Social Media + Direct Response Marketing, you get Facebook ads… a $50 billion empire!In Other Words:Discover New TruthCapitalize New TruthGet RichPeople in Planet Perry do this regularly. Some version of this is going on all the time, somewhere… but we’ll do it a lot faster once everyone grasps the pattern.The reason Amway splintered into pieces was: it wasn’t a real business. Direct marketing elbow grease exposed it for the papier mâché that it really was.In my career I have used this same formula to not merely execute improvements… but total re-inventions that became movements! Not just in marketing, but across many industries:Principles established in my first Google book in 2003 are now the gold standard of a $100 billion industry. The biggest innovation in advertising in 50 years.I didn’t merely evangelize 80/20. I re-invented it. Transformed 80/20 into a verb. My fractal 80/20 equation was published in Harvard Business review in June 2018. 80/202 has become a movement that will continue long after I have left this earth.“Building the Maze” became the industry standard for email and autoresponders. “Maze 2.0” is likewise becoming the gold standard for social media advertising.My Evolution 2.0 Prize is an award for the most fundamental question in all of science that can be precisely defined. It’s the biggest prize on Peter Diamandis’ HeroX platform. If someone wins this prize, their discovery will transform the world in ways as unimaginable as E = mc2, the discovery of DNA or the invention of the transistor.“Renaissance Time,” “Pre-Gutenberg,” “Memos from the Head Office” and my methods for eradicating Financial Head Trash are among the most transformative resources anywhere in the personal development space.The Star Seminar (2014) with Richard Koch laid new foundations for what entrepreneurs aspire to. A higher standard. Individuals worth millions and now tens of millions credit this event as pivotal to their success.Rosetta Stone (2018) synthesized my most powerful discoveries of the last 20 years. Multiple clients now credit it for millions of dollars of increase. The 3D Tactical Triangle places everything in marketing into the most elegant framework in the history of selling.What all these have in common is: Re-casting and reforming the foundations of entire professions. I said, “Everyone is obsessing about X. But X is not your problem. Your real problem is Y, and nobody is taking about Y.”I ignored X. I fixed Y. And a new profession was born.Why? Because the truth I discovered was more fundamental, more accurate, more foundational than any that came before, it enjoyed superior longevity and adroit results.In ALL these discoveries, the rabbit hole runs deep. For example, 80/20 Sales and Marketing has produced billions of dollars of new revenue and established thousands of successful careers – even though most of those same people grasped less than 20% of what I was really saying.Behind ALL of this there is a map. A way of searching for and defining a truth so solid, no hammer can break it. Plumbing the depths of ANY swamp. Imagine traveling to the very center of the earth and finding the roots beneath the roots… that’s what I do. That’s how I re-invent professions and industries. And you can too.And THAT is the formula I’m revealing at the Truth Seminar. How to locate thereal truth deep in the bowels of the earth… a truth suddenly obvious to everyone once YOU have revealed it. This in turn enables you to re-invent your product, your industry, your profession. In many cases it makes YOU the founder of a NEW industry that did not exist before. It makes you the Star.80/20 marketing was a great concept until 2013. Today it’s an industry and a phenomenon. Everyone in marketing talks about 80/202 now. They talk about it the way I teach it in my book.Pay Per Click was an unorthodox way of buying ad space in 2003. Today it’s a vast profession. Millions of birds nest in its branches.A few months ago I realized that MANY Planet Perry members have done precisely this: THEY have re-invented entire industries!There is a formula behind this formula. Only in the last few months have I become conscious of it.I’m working with a 22-year-old guy with a very small but profitable business. He questioned a key assumption about generating leads and got a big breakthrough in his real estate business. Within a few weeks he had turned this into an information product and was selling it very profitably.But then I asked him to question that assumption. I said, “The business you just created is easy to start and hard to scale. Here’s a different way to do it that’s harder to start but easier to scale. Two years from now you’ll be thankful you challenged your premise.”If this guy gets good at challenging assumptions he’ll be LETHAL by age 35 and a legend in his fifties.MOST people in MOST industries AVOID doing this at all costs. They get their degree and after age 25 they just coast. But let me tell you another example from when I was a teenager.What follows is my personal story of a crucial, axis-shifting decision. This would later echo back in a hundred different ways, enabling me to bridge dozens of worlds that never talk to each other.This story tipped dominoes that continue to fall to this day:My dad was a pastor. His best friend Virgil was in charge of the counseling department at the same church. This was a LARGE church (for Nebraska anyway) – 2,000 to 3,000 people. It was a tiny little city. A beehive of activity. It wasn’t even possible to know everybody.Virgil was an innovator. Virgil endeavored to combine the very best, time-honored Jewish and Christian wisdom about human beings with the tools of modern psychology. Virgil was merging two worlds – ancient and modern. An interdisciplinary integrator. (This might not sound all that cutting edge right now, but please remember this was the 1980s.)His boss, Mr. G, didn’t like psychology. At all. He preached sermons about its evils.My dad defended Virgil’s endeavors against the attacks of Mr. G.Here’s why:When I was 12, my mom went “bipolar.” Manic depressive with mild schizophrenia. But for a year and a half, nobody knew that’s what was wrong with her. We just knew she was impossible to live with.The fights, the arguments and contention would start as soon as I got home from school every day and stretch past bedtime.Our entire family was bedlam for 18 months.Mom would swing from being your best friend to your worst enemy at the slightest provocation. One minute she’s telling me I’m the sweetest, most capable child the world has ever known, then six minutes later she turns on me and I’m the worst burden life could have ever hurled at her.I’d come home from school and find boxes of my stuff tossed in the garbage. She’d say embarrassing things to my friends. She would do strange things when they came over.She insisted dad wasn’t really her husband. She said he was a man who lookedjust like Bob and she was sentenced to live with him until the ‘real’ Bob came back. When he came home from work she would hurl accusations at him. My brother and sister and I would complain bitterly to him about how she was treating us.It was almost impossible to not get sucked into some kind of conflict every day. Home was the most dangerous place a kid could be.My dad was taking her to doctors and counselors, but nobody seemed to be able to reach any conclusion. People watched us with a judgmental eye.Dad started getting heat from his boss, the senior pastor, Mr. G, who didn’t like the fact that one of his pastors’ wives was “out of line.”Mr. G quoted the scripture that says a pastor should be in control of his family and told dad if he didn’t straighten out mom’s problem, he might have to leave.Dad pursued answers. Eventually he got mom to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed her with a chemical imbalance and bipolar disorder.That trip to the psychiatrist was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Psychiatrists and psychologists, in Mr. G’s opinion, were the new high priests of a secular order that would dismiss all human failures as medical malfunctions.According to Mr. G, psychiatrists didn’t have the courage to call evil by its real names – SIN and DISOBEDIENCE. They existed to give people like my mom an alibi. Mr. G declared Mom insubordinate and rebellious.Literally on the same day the diagnosis came back, Mr. G and Mr. J, the pastors of our church, visited our house to deliver the news. We all sat in our living room as they announced, “We’ve asked your father to resign from his responsibilities. He’s no longer qualified to be a pastor.”I listened without much comment. I was 13. My older sister, however, was livid. At 18 she’d formed definite opinions about what had transpired. She started sobbing and retorted angrily to Mr. J: “If people knew what YOUR daughter does when she’s out at night, they’d be forcing you to resign too.”Mr. J said, “We’re not here to talk about me or my family today, Robin. We’re here to talk about you.”Earlier that day, dad had been brought before the Board of Elders to hear their final verdict. One by one, they cast their vote with Mr. G:“Bob, you’re not in control of your family. We’re sorry, you have to step down.” Mr. G demoted dad. Before his sermon on Sunday morning, he announced to 2,000 people that dad had “resigned” so he could “attend to problems with Betty and the family.”(Many people were forced to “resign” under Mr. G.)Dad’s demotion: Before, pastor in charge of Adult Education. After: Back-office editor of Mr. G’s church-published books.Dad followed through with the psychiatrist’s advice to get her on a prescription drug. Literally within a few days, mom transformed from defiant and combative to quiet and cooperative.Mom’s bizarre behavior stopped completely. Not only that, she went from being angry and defensive to feeling deep remorse about her erratic behavior.Soon it became clear that Mr. G torpedoed dad simply because mom had a medical problem – a chemical imbalance – and that mom’s behavior wasn’t “sin” or “rebellion.” It was a well-understood mental illness. She couldn’t help herself.Dad was hurt and humiliated and felt abandoned. He desperately wanted to bail. A lot of people told him he should quit his job, especially our relatives who understood the scope of the situation.Dad thought about pulling up stakes, moving elsewhere.He decided to stick it out. To argue his case and vindicate himself.Mr. G. was powerful, articulate and intimidating. Nobody had the balls to stand up to Mr. G. But dad did. As mom’s condition improved, he said, “Mr. G, you made a wrong judgment and you need to apologize to my wife.”Furthermore, dad made Mr. G write her a letter of reconciliation, because by this time mom had become terrified of Mr. G. He had, after all, the ability to singlehandedly destroy dad’s career.Nine months after dad had been demoted, my