You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. I discovered all the great inspirational writers during the turn of the century. People like Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie's. I read the bio, I read you know people like Og Mandino, all these great, old-time, Did you like? Did you read the thinking where rich was that instrumental or? I did read Think and Grow Rich and I think it was it was pretty inspirational for me, you know, I'm not sure I agree with all the concepts in it now but back then it was exactly what I needed and I started reading up on that stuff. I started reading up on the New Age Movement. The self-development movement reading, Tony Robbins, and all these great people. And I was like, man, you know there might be a chance for me. So I took off.

You look at somebody one of my all-time heroes of all time. Is this guy Alan Watts? Alan Watts was a philosopher. Are you familiar with Alan Watts at all? Yeah, Alan Watts was a philosopher in the 1950s and 1960s up until I think the 70s when he passed away in I think close to 73 who was responsible for bringing the wisdom of the east Zen philosophy to the west and he did it in such a digestible way that even today, people are remixing his words, his spoken word along with electronic dance music. But Watts was one of the most self-realized people of his time because he took that opportunity to self-reflect not only on his strengths but also on his weaknesses. And similarly, I learned early on that it's not as important to learn what you're good at. Because like we said you can hire people that are good at the things that you are not good at. But it is important to know what things you suck at, what things you are horrible at, what things you will never be great at. Not because you put yourself down, not because you are down on yourself, but because then you have a true knowledge of yourself and you can act closer to the truth.

Most CEOs that are where they're at, we tend to think that people that are CEOs are these people that have gone to school and done you know the things by the book and they come out like this no and I teach this all the time to my students, my students in my amazon course is that those guys are the smartest in the room for a reason and that reason is not that they've played by the rules. The reason is they didn't think outside the box. They crushed the box. These are real next-level thinkers.

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?

So the people who are seeking to start a business to sell it, generally don't succeed. The people who never think about selling a business will have a rude awakening when it comes time to sell their business and what they can get for it. With that said, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

The most important thing is being visible. So to be visible what we call ranking, you show up on that first page. When you search for I don't know uh pie cutters and go on to that first page of amazon when you click through, there are about 10 or 20 items on that page. That is golden real estate. There might be 2000 products, there might be 20000 products, but whoever is on that first page has it. Whoever's got the number one listing that's gold. So amazon discovered hey, I know how we're going to get up there. It's going to catch 21 catch 22 English not so good. Um, so whichever catch it is and what they did was they designed their algorithm so that the more sales you have the higher you rank.

There are two major themes that I picked up. There is the adaptability theme and I love this. This is so key for negotiation as well. Um, it's really important to plan and prepare and have everything done and build your fundamental skill set and all that kind of stuff. But if you're not adaptable, it's the way that the negotiation moves and shapes, then you'll lose out on a lot of value.

Like there is a risk. There's risk involved in each person has a different scale of the risk that they're willing to take and whether it's fighting, whether it's Covid, whether it's business, life, whatever risk is inherent and as a former fighter I went into it knowing I'm risking my health. Okay, I could have brain damage, I could get knocked out, could break a limb, could get stitches, could fracture my eye socket.

You have to be willing to go the road alone if you have to. The first thing I learned is that people are very quick to tell you that things are impossible and when I started herbal ecstasy back in the early 90s, I remember all I heard was that it was impossible but I had a flaw and that was I didn't listen to anybody and not only that I didn't know that it was impossible. Just because they're saying it's impossible, I didn't want it to be impossible.

I was making pills for 25 cents and selling them for 20 dollars all day long but it just goes to your point of that attitude where I didn’t give a. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t chasing the money.