Interview with Ken Perseverance

Everybody, it's Adam. I hope you're having an absolutely spectacular day. Whatever you're doing, I have a real treat. I mean, this is spectacular on so many levels. For me personally, I'll try to not get emotional, but I hope this is going to be hugely valuable. I know it's going to be hugely valuable for all of you. So let me just start with a little bit of the backstory. As many of you know, I've had a very varied experience in life and in business. Was an attorney for 20 years, practicing lawyer in New York City and in New Jersey. I've owned lots of different businesses, commercial real estate, title insurance, restaurants, residential properties, things of that sort. I'm also a father of four healthy kids, married to my amazing soulmate, college sweetheart, love of my life for 27 and a half years at this point. And I get asked a lot because I reinvented a significant part of myself. When I decided probably 10 years into my law practice that I didn't love what I was doing. I loved being successful. I was making lots of money, and I mean, doing really well financially. But I woke up in the morning and didn't feel great about myself. I didn't feel great about my life. It kind of made my heart hurt. And now, as I think back on it, it was a time in my life where my soul was sort of dying. It was dying on the inside, and I knew I needed to make a change. And then ultimately, in that process of pivoting, of changing my direction to find work, that really called to me, that was more of a calling on my. On my purpose in life and why I was born in the first place. I started going down this road of human performance and human potential and personal growth. And I started as student and ended up becoming a trainer and a teacher and then ultimately an owner of a company that helps people transform and reinvent and find more happiness and more peace. And that's what we're committed to, helping people find their peace so that our world can be more peaceful. And so through all that experience and my blessing of having trained and worked with and taught, you know, thousands and thousands and, you know, at last count, probably more than a hundred thousand people around the world in very far away places and very, you know, places very close to home, I've been asked a lot of the time, you know, what it is that that helps to create success. Like if there's a recipe, you know, almost like you're making a, you know, a cake or a pie or something else you would love to Eat. You know, what's the recipe for creating great results in your life? Because success, you know, even that word success has different meanings depending on who you're asking. For some people, success is just to wake up and feel healthy, to be, you know, not with pain. And some people's success is really tied up with your title and the position you hold in your business or in government or in something, or it has to do with money. It can be so many things to so many people. So I think of the word results. What is it that creates really great results in your life? And for me, I do think there's a recipe. And without sharing the full recipe at this moment, because we don't have time for that, I just want to share one ingredient. And then what's really a blessing for me personally is not only do I get to share this ingredient with you that's made such a profound difference in my own personal life and my personal results in life, both the things to do with relationships, the things to do with health, the things to do with money and business and entrepreneurship and all of that. But I get to share that ingredient, and then I get to also share with you the origin of that ingredient by introducing you to somebody that is the model for that ingredient for me in my personal life, the person who mentored me and taught me about this, and. And that's going to be spectacular. So, very quickly, the ingredient, as I define it, is perseverance. So the common ingredient in all of my successes or the really amazing results that I've been able to have happen is the result of my being persevering. So whether it was when I started practicing law, I came out of law school and I had two kids. Randy and I, we had already had two kids while I was in law school. One, my first year, right before I took my first year's exams, finals in the first year, and then our second child, before I took the bar exam in the third year. So we had two kids while all these things were going on. And I got out of law school, and I needed to earn money. I had to support two kids. And we wanted to have a house and want to have nice things in life. And I started working as a lawyer in a small little firm. And I was, you know, had no clients, and I was just getting going. And one of the first things that I realized was that I was especially in the work that I was doing, which was litigation. I was routinely coming up against law firms that had 10 lawyers and 50 lawyers and 150 lawyers and I was out, out, out, manned, out gunned all the time. But I found pretty quickly that I could achieve significant results in those situations. And it wasn't because I had more resources. I certainly didn't have more people. There weren't men or women working for me or with me. It was just me. I was a solopreneur, a sole practicing attorney, and yet I was beating some of the biggest firms in the world in employment discrimination cases, which was the area of law that I began practicing. And the reason that I was able to beat those firms or to get them to do what we wanted them to do was because I wouldn't give up, I was tenacious. I would work all hours. I mean, I would be in my office sometimes till 8 or 9 o' clock at night. That wasn't unusual. I've slept in my office. That wasn't terribly unusual. I worked on Saturdays. I remember I was up against this very large law firm. We had five cases in federal court against Tiffany, Tiffany and company, major, major law firm that was defending them. And at a certain point, about six months into this litigation, I was working in my office on a Saturday, which was very usual for me because I just was not going to relent. I was going to be tenacious till the end and I would persevere no matter what. And so they were burying me in paper and motions and all kinds of things. And I got a phone call on a Saturday in my law office, this little law office, it was a little room in a walk up building in Freehold, New Jersey. And I got a phone call on a Saturday and I pick up the phone and it's my adversary from this mega large law firm. And he just said to me, I knew, he goes, I knew you, his name was Jonathan. He says, I knew you were going to be there. He said, because I've been sending out motions and counter attacking and doing all the things to really keep them on their heels. And I was most of the time sending out those papers on the weekends. And so he just knew that if he called me that I was going to be there. And I'll just tell you that we resolved all of those cases and I was able to achieve something really significant for my clients. And because I would not give up because I persevered. And perseverance to me is one of those ingredients. No matter what it is that you are doing, you know, you want to be a great parent, you have got to be persevering. You want to have a great body physically, you have got to persevere. When it is cold outside and it is dark outside and you are supposed to get up and get out of your bed and get to the gym or go walk or go run or go swim or any of those things, you know, it's the difference between a person that has that result, which is that great healthy body, and the person who just wants that healthy body. The difference is often going to be that perseverance. And I can say that among the most important things that I've learned in my life, I've learned that when you want something, when something's important to you, when you're passionate, you're passionate about something, you've got to persevere. In essence, there's no quit. There's no quit if it's something you truly love and you want. So where on earth did I learn perseverance from? Well, I'm going to send. I'm going to introduce you guys right now to the source of my influence and my mentoring and where I learned it from. The beautiful thing here is that I didn't learn that lesson words. I learned it in watching, in actions that my dear father taught me by not what he said, but what he did. And so I'm just going to give a small introduction here and then gonna just turn, turn this over to my dear old dad. So my father's name is Ken, Kenneth Markel. And he is, you know, by way of just some of his background, he spent more than 20 years working as a preschool teacher for the City of New York, the New York City Parks Department. He also was a recreation director and ran. Ran parks for the City of New York. So beautiful heart, work, service, you know, very, very passionate about helping kids and about being a wonderful influence. But his true love was, and still is, a creative passion, a creative project, and that is writing, creative writing, fiction, writing, novels, plays, poetry, music, things of that sort. And throughout my childhood, my dad would work during the day, you know, very difficult work, exhausting work, and would come home and we'd eat dinner as a family. And then after dinner, he'd stack these records because back in those days, you know, we had vinyl and we'd stack them on this little. On this thing, and I forget what they called it, but you stack the records 5 and 6 high, and the records would drop down one at a time. After they'd play, the next one would drop. And we would have these long, long dinners where we'd get to talk and catch up on the day with each other. And I got to learn my dad's own philosophies about things during those meals, which was just, what a blessing. And then after dinner, my brother and I would go do whatever kids were doing. My dad would start his passion, he would start to write. So it could be 8 o' clock or 9 o' clock at night when most people, you know, are sitting down to watch tv, they're just gonna relax and go to sleep for the night. And he would begin the thing that was most important to him in his. In his world other than us, and that was to write, to express his creativity through writing and very challenging field. And so for more than 50 years now, and I probably, he can correct me on the dates maybe, but for more than 50 years, he's been writing, pursuing his passion to express himself creatively through stories. And that's how I grew up. Just going to sleep at night, listening to music, hearing my dad on the typewriter, because no computers back then, just like typing keys like this. And he would be either typing or he'd be rewriting, editing very painstakingly. So, Ken Markell, it is more than a pleasure for me to have you on and be our guest at this moment and introduce you to our community.

That's a very nice introduction.

Perseverance.

Want me to talk about perseverance? Okay. Well, most of my life has been, I wouldn't say difficult, but challenging. And I began as a graduate at the age of 20 out of New York University. I got a job on Madison Avenue in magazine work and took charge of two adventure magazines and did all the work that was necessary to be done on them. And they kind of had a formula type of writing which was common in pulp fiction. And I learned that technique. And I stayed with him for about four years and then took a job, like Adam said, in public service. But I continued to write in my free time. I probably did five or six novels in all those years, but I never considered them publishable. It wasn't until I took early retirement and came up to the Berkshires, where I am now, that I really began in all seriousness, to, as Adam said, persevere. Persevere beyond working almost as a second job. This was my first job and I meant to give it all I had. And so for the next, I don't know, 20 some odd years now, I've been doing that. And what I have to show for it is a couple of books. One that was self published called White Perfume, and one that I'm happy to say has been published by Changing Lives Press and is now out there. Adam, you want to tell us something about. Oh, there it is. Yeah, you got the title.

So you know what's really cool about this is that you, you have been persevering and modeling that for your family and for others for a long time. And then you wrote a book called To Catch a Nazi, which is a magnificent book. And what's really cool is that it's a book about persever, isn't it?

It's a story about a young boy of nine who gets kind of bamboozled by the Gestapo into revealing his mother's whereabouts. She's been doing some undercover work. This is back in 1933. And eventually after revealing her whereabouts, he on his way home, discovers her body in an alley and she's barely alive and whispers a couple of words to him. And that would serve as a clue to put him on a hunt, let's call it a hunt for the people responsible. That's not an easy thing for a nine year old boy, much less anyone that's grown up. But he perseveres and he continues to follow that pursuit. And then he begins to get letters from an uncle, an Uncle Kurt in Germany. By this time he's living in the United States. He's like brought up as an orphan by a family and he's now a bookbinder living in New York City. And he will begin to fill in the missing spaces between the time that he left Germany and the present. And those letters from his uncle help him to do this. And.

What I would say too is that I know you're not going to give away the sort of surprise piece of this, but the book which I absolutely love, and I mean that not just because I'm your son, but because it's just such a beautiful book about perseverance. And that's the subject of our talk tonight, it's about perseverance. And so to see this, as you say, from a nine year old up to an 80 year old man. And I won't give anything away because it's a mystery. If you like mysteries, you'll love this book. If you like books where the human spirit endures, where people can overcome obstacles to get to a place of more just a higher state of being. So for him on some level it's to vindicate and to really fulfill a promise that he made to his dying mother. So to see him move through that process to get to that place where he's fulfilled his mission or a part of his mission and purpose in life is, is magnificent. And then of course, one of the unsung heroines in the book is the mom herself. So Frida, I won't say anymore, just give you her first name. But Frida is this incredible, incredible woman. Just so strong and so inspirational to not only her son, but to her husband. And again, it's a mystery. So I won't say sort of how those things all tie together. If you want to find out how they tie together, how they move from beginning to end and how the perseverance pays off for the main character, this young nine year old boy, and where he ends up as an older man, not an old man, but an older man. Then you've got to get this, you've got to read this. And what's great is that To Catch a Nazi is available now. So as my dad said, as Ken said, it's been published and it came out in the fall this year and you can get it on Amazon. So the simplest way to find this book and to read it and to get, you know, unravel, you know, see the mystery unraveled is to go to Amazon.com and you just put in To Catch a Nazi. And if you also put in Kenneth Markell, you'll find, you'll find the other titles that, that he's produced. But this book is just magnificent. And again, when I invited, I wanted to invite my dad to come and speak in this.

I appreciate that.

Well, selfish, because to me it's the main ingredient for me that I know that no matter what it could be in anything, it doesn't matter what aspect of life, I know that I've got a better than fighting chance to be, to get a good result. Because you trained me and had trained my brother by what you did in your life, what you modeled for us, you trained us to persevere. I've seen it happen again and again and again that when I've been able to be successful, oftentimes it's because other people just got out of my way. Meaning they quit, they stopped, they weren't nearly as committed to. Therefore because I was committed, I was left with the, you know, prize at the end. And that's what this book is about. I think that's what is so important that people adopt. I don't, I try not to suggest, you know, should. There's no shoulds for anybody. But to me, to be more persevering, especially when times are tough, when, when things might be difficult, whatever it is that might not be going the way you want it to go, that's the time to up the ante so to speak, on your level of perseverance. So, Ed, what could you say in sort of final sort of summation about that?

Well, I think you said it pretty well. I don't know what other territory I could cover, but, yeah, it's about never giving up. You know, don't give up no matter what. And, yeah, there have been tough times. There have been times when I thought maybe I should give it up. Who's going to notice me? I'm getting older. People are, at least in the United States, more into the young and. But I felt that I had something to say, something important to say, and through these characters gave me the ability to do that. And I'd like to thank Adam for having me on. I'm no teenager's dream anymore, but I still have the passion, I still have the ability I feel to write, and I'm going to continue writing. I've got another book that I'm working on right now, and God willing, I'll keep writing. That's what I do. That's what I do best. Thank you, Adam. By having me.

I love you, Dad.

I love you.

Okay, that's the lesson for today, everybody. Ciao for now.

All right. Bye. Bye.