You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We fled Iran in fear of persecution and came to the United States, eventually landed in the U.S. I was about five and King of the Heap in Iran. Like you know, had my little gang, very safe place, you know. I would leave during the days. I would come back as a five-year-old. No problem. Dinner was when I came home. It was great, but coming to this country I realized it was during Iran-contra and I was no longer top of the heap. I was a second-class citizen, wow and that gave me a chip on my shoulder, gave me a lot of grit, you know, getting the crap kicked out of me every day at school built character, but I decided that, hey, you know, this is one of the greatest countries in the world from an economic standpoint. There is opportunity there. I see people with wealth.

The greatest human disease, the greatest thing I think that can hold you back not only in life but particularly in business is seriousness. Seriousness is a disease. You gotta relax. You got to be able to enjoy things and not take things so seriously, not lean into things so much. Let things come to you. It's what professor Caldini talks about in his book Persuasion. Caldini being the great professor that wrote the Canon on Influence also talks about pre-suede, talks about the greatest sales are made before the guy before the prospect ever comes to you and it's all part of this process.

Sure, I talk about one in my book, where uh mysterious man shows up at my office mind you. I was in the maybe early 20s, maybe late teens. He's got an uh a duffel bag with a million dollars in cash and an invitation to go to Japan, to Tokyo on a private plane. What do you do? I went turns out that the mob was interested in taking over my company, maybe not the best move. Maybe maybe it was an okay movie. And there were several moments of self-doubt. I mean I could have potentially been killed. So there was a lot of that.

Yeah, I'm an absolute failure at the majority of things. I do in life bad at 99.9 of things that I do. There's point one percent that I'm really good, probably better than most people on the planet, but the rest of the stuff - absolute failure. The wife makes fun of me. I can't drive a nail through a piece of wood. I'm good at hiring people and your example of engineering is a really good example of that. You can buy engineers, you can buy a guy that's been MIT-trained that's picked of. What do you get to pay the guy, 300 grand a year, 500 grand a year, even a million dollars a year for a rocket scientist. You find.

It's true. There's no participation prize in the real world. There's no participation prize on Amazon, you don't get an honorable mention for having good intentions. So you have to go out there ready to crush and if you can't handle that, get a job, go work for someone and sell or be a socialist. There are plenty of countries that would love to have you as a socialist, you know, and I know there's a whole political movement of like, oh, everybody should be free and give the money away and feed the homeless and you know what? Get three kids and start an Amazon business. See how socialist you are? You won't be that socialist once you have written your checks. Go read Ein Rand the fountain header atlas shrugged and let's see if your philosophy doesn't change a little bit.

The real estate's an asset. If you can't touch it and feel it, it's not an asset, but I'm hearing you say it's 2021. Real estate is one great asset, but internet real estate is a website domain a book, an audiobook, an amazon store that's real estate. The only difference is amazon can fire you and um you know in real real estate you could get usurped by the government but it's unlikely you know I mean to just get it taken away.

If the risk is diversified you're selling in brick and mortar, you're selling on eBay, Etsy, Walmart you're you've got your distribution, people are buying directly from you on your website excuse me if those things are happening, then the risk is more diversified and the value of your company is generally higher.

I was strategic if I was Procter & Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. I'd be like hey, why do I want to wait for these aggregators to pick up these companies. For me to just come in and either A has another big behemoth come and compete with me that's got more brands and more successful than us. Why don't we go in and instead of offering them 10, I know the aggregators are offering a 10 time earning multiple why don't we just offer 15 and take any significant brands off the table now. What if that were to happen, wouldn't that be interesting? Where would that take the market?

Everything is possible. I truly believe that not just as a meme but somebody said if you believe you can or if you believe you can't you're right and so a lot of that comes down to mindset and the better question maybe is the mindset still possible and the answer is of course yes. Things change with time.

You know what I would tell anyone and what I do. I speak a lot to students and what I tell them on the front end is you know regardless of how well you do, how good you are. How successful you are. It's a million percent. There are going to be losses along the way. So I think going into fighting, going into any sort of life or business, just that awareness of all right, I'm going to do the work, I'm going to train, going to prepare, I'm going to develop the confidence, but I do know that I could lose.

I think part of having a certain level of grit and stick-to-itiveness but also the quality of being relentless. Since I was a kid I was always picked on when we came to this country. It was during the Iran-contra scandal. Iran was not in favor. People did not like the Iranian people. We got called all kinds of names. I had my ass handed to me every day at school. Every day it was like going for a beating and it wasn't like now.