You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I know that there's, you know, there's a lot of people probably listening to the story with besides the fact that it's completely entertaining and they're going okay, George like what's the point here? And here's the point and the reason. I want you guys to start listening more is that success leaves clues. Look, I could go on and on about Shaahin, how like you had nothing, you know you hustled, you did whatever you had to do. I mean we're obviously, we're not promoting drugs and things. But that's not the point here. You guys got to listen to the fact that he was determined. He was recognizing certain things. He was persistent. But one of the questions I was going to ask you is what gave you this sense of, you know, from moving to the United States, right? And everything this constant sense of what looking for success and why that didn't appeal to you being a doctor, but why doing this did or being on your own, like, what were you when you grew up? Were your parents instilling in you this idea that you wanted to be successful or do you think you just because I mean, I'm not a big believer that people are just born wanting to be successful? It's usually a product of their environment. What is it that gave you that drive? What do you think?

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Well, I started studying this when I was like 15 years old through cognitive psychology. And of course, the handwriting analysis, which I'm famous for and one of the first things that I learned was that being sensitive to criticism, caring too much, what people thought was a flaw and it was a physical pain in your chest of like someone not approving of you. And I had that as a kid. I remember having the members-only jacket and I'm dating myself. But like I cared, whether I had a certain jacket. And when I made these changes to my brain, I just didn't give anymore. And I think I probably overcompensated by not giving a. Quote-Unquote like all the best-selling books, these days and I kind of became an a-hole but I was an aggressive successful, and I got what I wanted a lot.

So I'll tell you one of the first things that I did. So once I made the pills and we got it into the hands of a few of these dealers. I decided that I was going to become a multi-million dollar company. I never thought we would break a billion dollars, but I thought hey, you know what, we're going to become huge and I thought one of the ways to do that was to license a picture of a famous person. So I walked in, I made a phone call. They said, what's the name of your company? I said, I just made it up on the spot. I said Global something or other and loved it. I got an appointment and I walked into this big Beverly Hills office. And it was a fancy office in those days and beginning of the 90s and it was, you know, the attorney that was representing this state of so-and-so. And the receptionist was this cute little Japanese girl in her cute little outfit. She brought me this little espresso with a little twist of something. Never had those before and put them on and I was like, this is amazing. And then the guy makes me wait about an hour right he calls me in and he's you know, the old school like, you know the agent guy. Yeah. Tell him it's what I could do for less than entire thousands.

And I am a huge fan of the law. I love law um and all things related to it and when I had started my first company and we can go into the story. You know, I created a billion dollars worth of revenue in my teens, creating this legal version of an illegal drug. And I remember there was a time when lawsuits were just flying and I didn't realize I thought you would have to wrong somebody to get a lawsuit. I was wrong because there were all these vulture lawyers. And this was at a time when the employment practices laws were coming into place. So there were all these people who I never met, who I had never had any transacting with, who were suing me. And I remember. And this kind of goes into my whole philosophy about hacking life.

At that time, Richard, there was a drug called Ecstasy or MDMA, one of the most popular drugs. It was outlawed in the United States. It was scheduled, I believe sometime in 1983- 1985, sometime in the 80s. Ecstasy was banned. It went underground, was made illegal and what happened was that this particular drug was very difficult to synthesize. So the supply mostly came from outside the US, Europe and because of the whole Reagan say no to drugs era, you know, the Nancy Reagan say no to drugs period. They were cracking down and the supply had dried up. They had put a stop to drugs coming into the United States. The drug dealers were out of drugs and the people who wanted them couldn't get them. So there was a huge demand but very little supply.

And what we teach is that nobody wins by playing the game the way they tell you to play it. Big resellers, e-commerce giants like Amazon, I teach this course called amazon mastery where I teach people how to make predictable recurring revenue on the amazon platform. I teach people how to find products, sell them on the Amazon platform and what they want you to believe is they want you to believe that if you are a good little boy Joseph Jaffe and you follow their rules you are going to be just fine.

Life is about luck but it's not what you think. Luck can be created and it's about being in the flow. Uh, a great author uh Chikset Mihai who recently passed away just a few days ago wrote the great book Flow and he talks about the amazing synchronicities that could potentially happen when you're in the flow. I've been lucky my whole life, but I believe that I have created my luck.

Resilience. People are going to try to knock you down. People will put you down but it's how many times you get up when that failure happens and also there is an element to it of not giving an about what people think of you. You cannot care what other people think. Other people's opinions only matter if they coincide with your belief structure and your reality distortion field.

Uh, Walter Isaacson, who wrote the great uh autobiography, sorry not autobiography, the great biography of Steve Jobs talks about how Steve Jobs would walk into a room and he would say, all right guys, uh we're going to need and this was in the early 90s. We're going to need a phone and you're going to be able to touch the screen. Before this, all phones had buttons and there'll be no buttons on this phone and it'll do all these things. It'll have an iPod on it, it'll play music, it'll do all these things. It didn't exist and the engineers would say okay cool, Steve Jobs awesome. Okay, amazing. We could have this for you in the next three to five years. He'd be very cute. 30 days I'm going on stage to announce it. Make it work and he would leave and they would all be sitting there going oh my god what an and what just happened. We just agreed to do this and they would do it and he would make it happen.

The problem is a lot of the stuff has become highly marketed by a lot of the self-help gurus that are out now. So they want you to think that having a passion drive and mindset is what you need. No, that's not what you need. You need to do the work, you need to roll up your sleeves, and do the work. That's what you do. That's what works, what works is doing the work getting out there. And you know, if you're a real estate agent, knocking on doors, and you know, meeting people in your neighborhood, and building your network, and calling the banks and doing whatever those things are that agents and brokers do, but it's just doing the work. There's nothing more effective than doing that.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on Amazon? And I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often is one of the biggest mistakes that people make in life. Also, I think it's just going into something with some knowledge, thinking that you don't need to learn the fundamentals. Because it's like that adage, you know, one of the students who go to the master, and the Masters pouring tea, and he goes all Master, will you teach me in the master has the tea kettle, and he pours the tea into his cup and the tea pours over and fills the table and he goes, Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he says, I can't teach you. And he says Why? Why can't you teach me? He says because your cups are already full. Come back when your cup is empty.

We talk about how to think not just outside the box but how to crush the box and create a lifestyle that you can be happy with by having more money, having more time, and knowing it's funny because I often tell people time is a new luxury. It doesn't matter if you have all the money in the world and you don't own your time, if you can't travel where you want, with who you want, doing what you want. If you can't stop what you're doing right now and go play football with your kid, hang out with your wife or your husband, or do whatever you want, you don't have freedom.

I don't think electric cars should be categorized in the same category as cars. I think they are an appliance. When you drive a Tesla, that thing is so scary fast and so perfect and so smooth you go into the compartment but what it lacks in my opinion I'm probably gonna get hate mail. A lot of people hate me for this. But it lacks soul, it lacks the soul of having that clutch, it lacks that imperfection that comes from years of like up engineering from like Italian guys and Germany that are like you know they're greasing the things. These are appliances made by tech companies that are perfect at doing what they do. They are surgical. Their speed is you know uncomparable. So what you're facing now is an industry that is facing a crisis and being disrupted by an appliance and I think that's

So you have this money being pumped in from wall street billions of dollars that need to be deployed. I learned from the many companies that I've had and from raising several rounds of investment and various companies that I've had that investors don't like money sitting around. Once they invest in you, they want that money to go to work like little soldiers marching off to war. They want to deploy.

I always tell people to look, if you can take cash off the table as much cash as you can get, my recommendation for amazon sellers is, if you get aggregators or if you get into a position where you can create a bidding war bidding frenzy like happens with a lot of our companies and brands that we sell.

Are you planning on going out there and making it be like a casino like hey, I'm gonna throw you know chips on these numbers, and if it hits my number's great, if not then I guess this wasn't meant for me, or are you gonna go out there and no matter what it takes, get that win? You're going to make that nail go through that piece of wood. If you're going to use a hammer, a sledgehammer, a shotgun, your wrist whatever it is, don't use your wrist but a rock whatever it is that nail is going to go through.