You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We just don't give about what other people think. Yeah, sure. We're polite. We're empathetic. We're kind people but at the end of the day when it comes to our lifestyle and the way that we live, we don't live our lives for what other people will think of us. And I think that's super interesting. I know you, you certainly don't live that way and you know, for any of you guys who know me or any of the stuff that I've done, I certainly don't live that way and it's even more ironic the ironic thing about that is that I'm married to a publicist whose entire job is to worry about what people think.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, I tried other jobs selling, buying a pizza franchise, selling real estate, and selling vacuums door-to-door. So I was doing all that, but I hadn't started a product and built a business and so this was eventually, when I started, it was the first shot but I kind of knew deep down. It was the right shot to take. But yeah, so but so I'm thinking of the idea or excuse me I graduate from college and move in with some buddies and it's 1982. I'm 22 years old and we start sketching words out of the dictionary. That was it. I mean there was no grand plan. There was no game. We're just having fun. Well, we get home late. Now there are three guys, six guys were just playing this silly game. We were having a ball every night. And so the entrepreneurial spirit started kicking in. I'm going you know this is going to be a good board game because in 82 there were no video games. Everybody played board games. So that was the vernacular of the day. And then, of course, I procrastinated for three years. Are you ready to go, man? I'm good. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm gonna be, you know, I went to Europe. I kept waiting tables. I wasn't ready and I just couldn't get out of my way.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I love business. I love making money. I love the journey and the path of creating excellence in the world and creating cool products. I've been doing it for a good part of 30 years now I feel old. But since I was 15, I've been creating products that people take and enjoy and at the end of the day, I realized the commonality between myself and a lot of my friends that are also successful and the fact is that at the end of the day they don't take themselves so seriously.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Ultimately I think you know, the beautiful thing that the beauty is when somebody can develop a small enough device that's a true vaporizer, a true digital vaporizer where you don't have to buy the liquids and you can just use plant, real green herb or real tobacco and that's when something nice is going to happen. I've seen devices that are the size of like a small cigarette pack that does that but, I'm yet to see what we were in the end phases of building, which is something that's the size of like an actual cigarette where you could put a small amount of plant matter and that's another great advantage of vaporization over smoking. When you smoke you burn it and you're done with vaporization that same tiny amount of plant matter can last you weeks and weeks and weeks so it's much more efficient on your materials as well it feels cleaner.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Cash flow positive real estate. I know you're in Canada. Canada is in a boom right now with real estate. Yeah, but you need to learn about real estate and get some involvement, some exposure. To real estate, that's producing cash flow. People will always need shelter, always need shelters like food and water. People will always need shelter and you in the long term will create wealth doing that.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. You talk to wealthy people. They're going to tell you they're lucky. They're going to tell you, hey man, I just got lucky and I'm passionate about this thing. They don't want to tell you that you know what, I'm smarter than you. There are people smarter than you and not only that, I'm more ruthless than you, I'm more aggressive than you. I know how to manipulate people more. I know how to exert influence in the right ways. These are things that people will not tell you. These are things that people will not share with you. You have to be more aggressive. You have to be relentless. You have to have enemies. You have to go out there and fail. You have to be able to take risks and you can't do that if you're broke.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Treat everyone right and nice regardless of where they're at in their life, because of this guy and the agent, there could have been opportunities there. But you know what? Regardless of whether it's a guy parking your car or anyone else in your life. They're there for a reason and a season. And you treat everyone with respect and dignity. You never know where they're going to be, or what they're going to be. And certainly, he probably regretted by the way. I was in the copier business so I know the hum and I know the warmth. That was my first business. So I get that and I fell asleep a few times also good. That was working the 12 hour days but what an amazing story.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. My dad worked at a pizza shop and then he worked at a dry cleaner for nearly 30 years. And we never bought new clothes. I hadn't been to a restaurant until I was 15. And you know, then one of the rich kids at school invited me over and I remember going, wait for a second, explain to me how this works again. This guy is going to come and give me a piece of paper and I can pick a hamburger and he will bring it to me. Like, I was like, yeah, get whatever you want. I got my dad's card. I said what? What do you mean? Did you get your dad's? I go, wait. He's like just get anything you want. I'm like, "so I can get a hamburger and the pasta. I can get both of those and he's going to bring them to me." I was like you must be bullshitting. I don't believe you. And you know, that was my level of sophistication. At that time. I had no, we didn't buy new clothes. It was when customers would come and somebody would look cool, we would just cross our fingers and hope they would skip out on their bill. So my dad would keep their clothes and somehow it would trickle down to us. All our clothes were like two-three sizes too big for us.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, when people look at you and they look at successes, they think oh, the road to success is easy and or it's not riddled with challenges or obstacles. And that's all it's riddled with and so much self-doubt. You brought it up at a perfect time so much self-doubt in the impossible all you heard was possible, but you took that on as a challenge whatever lit that fire under your butt to say, yeah I'll show them and a lot of great successes that I've had on the show were challenged that they couldn't do it, and they wanted to just show the world you're wrong, I'm right. I can do it. But you give such hope to any entrepreneur willing to hustle.

started as an adolescent in Iran at five. I was born in Iran. We moved to Los Angeles eventually as refugees. We were political refugees when we moved here and solidly poor here. In Iran, we were well to do. Here, we were poor and we managed somehow to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood an Enclave of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, which at the time was more hippie than up-and-coming. And my folks managed to buy a house that was an absolute disaster of a house in those days. And pretty soon around us, I saw huge houses going up. I saw great wealth coming in. It was the Reaganomics era trickle-down economics wall street wealth. Hollywood was at an all-time high. All this money was coming in but I was still the poor son of a dry cleaner. The kids growing up around me their folks had Mercedes Benzes. They would go out to restaurants.

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.

We talk about in my book Billion, how I became king of the throw pill cult - a three-step plan, which feeds in nicely to this and it's something a friend of mine Wayne Boss taught us, which is knowledge, courage, and action. When you are faced with a problem, a challenge, a project that needs to be undertaken, you need to know. Knowledge can be bought, knowledge can be borrowed, knowledge can be stolen, knowledge can be rented. Okay, in my case, I went out there, I rented it, I talked to people. I didn't have money, but I convinced them to give me that knowledge.

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.

So now you're going to go buy $1,000 worth of product from distributor A This MLM. And for those of you guys who don't know, it's multi-level marketing effectively. And I hope I'm not offending anybody involved in multi-level marketing, but many people do believe that it is very similar to a Ponzi scheme. Because the people at the top of the pyramid, make money, every time product is sold down the line.

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.

I think one of the things that we teach that's so important is that you have to have four pillars, four legs to any table and one of those legs has to be something that brings you stability. You have to have stability. Eventually, you want to get out of selling your hours, but it's okay to sell your hours for some time until you can get the other three pillars situated. So one thing's going to be your career, your job, whatever you're doing it doesn't matter.

Think what's exciting about this conversation of aggregators is before this became a thing where the stock market was pushing money saying go buy companies and roll them up, you had to go find a suitor. You had to go find a similar company, a bigger company in your niche and say hey, look I got a soap your biggest soap seller. Let's buy my company.

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.

And if you are equipped to move with that change you will do well but if you are not then the world will pass you by. So you have to be ready and willing to move with the changes, move with the flow you know. I am a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I've been taking Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for almost five years now and it's one of the interesting things when you get on the map. It's a grappling art Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for anybody who hasn't heard of it. Once you get on the map you might have a plan. Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to get the guy in this position, I'm going to do that but your opponent might be doing something completely different. You have no control over what the opponent's going to do and that changes the entire game.