You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. What I've learned from getting and being around seven, eight, nine-figure mentors and individuals I've been around, is that they think differently. And they see and they recognize. I know one of your strong suits has been recognizing trends and movements. Because the key is not jumping on a trend. The key is identifying behavior and when you look at things like that story there or even you know, your discussion of Amazon in general or the internet, I think what's more important than the lessons of what happened, is identifying the movements and the keys to success and the clues that are now moving at light speed, right? Now they're moving at a whole different level with NFTs and crypto and forex and things like that. So I love that that's how your brain works. Because I pointed out because I found that most super successful people that's the way they think.

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. How do you deal with other people's views of you? What do other people think of you? Sometimes not well. Sometimes I let it get to me and I take on exactly what you said. You mean they've got their insecurities, their problems and they just want you to be miserable too. And so, when they come up, I just try to look at it as an observer, right? As opposed to taking it personally because people are going to do it all the time and they do it all the time, but you don't take on their baggage, you process it. Take two seconds to go. This is not something I need to do or take on and then I put it away because man, it just gets after and after and after you. So it's a process.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Is it true that you cut the cards in your living room for the first thousand games? Is that a true story? Yes close. So we did a thousand games was our test market and we had some assembled them by hand. Well, the one problem we had was just before our launch, the printer screwed up and sent us the wrong cards. And they were 500 cards per game at a thousand games. With 500000 cards when they were supposed to come sorted game a game of 500 cards, they came completely wrong. So we had to hand sort.... you're laughing man. It was like oh! I thought it was I have admitted. It's the only tantrum I ever threw. I mean, the printer calls me up. Can't get it done. I launched the phone but we had to figure it out and it would be like and the math is 9580 playing card decks of playing cards.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Mindfulness for me in my life is presented. It's the ability to, as the great author, Ramdas Richard Albert would say be here now, be able to be a real person, an authentic person, which is the first and foremost component to it. Just be real be who you are. And that brings about the ability to be present. To be present for your family, to be present for your friends, and to take a moment to realize that. It all came and it'll all go.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahiin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Seriousness is a disease. It is not a quality to be admired. Whenever you look at people that are like super tight and they're sphincter as wound up, super tight and they're just very serious about things. There's something else in their life that's imbalanced. You look at the great people in history. I guarantee you they had rip-roaring laughs. You look at Albert Einstein, you look at John Rockefeller, you look at any of these people throughout history. They reach these incredible heights of success and you'll find antidotes of them being funny. Mark Twain is a great example of it. Oscar Wilde is another example of it. Alan Watts, you look at any of these great people throughout history. They didn't take themselves seriously. It's only the that take themselves seriously.

I think, in general, this is an unpopular view. Not everybody is meant to be entrepreneurial. Some people are better off working for other people. Yeah, the fact is, when you ask people, you know, you ask wealthy people, successful people. Why are you successful? They will invariably come back to say I'm passionate about what I do. Ask Mark Zuckerberg. Why why? Why did you succeed and all these other people? I'm passionate about social media. I'm passionate about this. It's really. This Scott Adams says in his book, how to fail at almost everything and still win big. It's something. Yeah, I love that book. I love it. It's a great book. And I, you know, he talks about this and the fact is most people are going to fail.

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.

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.

But the fact is you have to use every tool in your arsenal and you have to find out what tools the competition isn't using and you have to jump on it. Like I don't know, but you gotta jump on it like it was a gazelle and you're a lion in savannah.

The world is predatory. All you got to do is look at nature. Things don't work the way that we always want them to. So making money and I make a lot more now that I get to keep than I did back then because I was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, is mainly because I don't publicize everything that I do. That I'm quieter about the things that I do and the real people the guys that are making the billions and billions of dollars don't always end up on the Forbes top 10 top 100 list.

Buddy look, you can take your shots, call yourself a victim and fall into that victim mentality or you can reach down, grab your balls, get up and fight. You can do that. You can do that. You have a set of balls for a reason, so you can get up and you can fight. You can swing. You might get knocked down again and I did over and over again until one day I didn't anymore but you learn. You become tougher. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger and it's that grit, that resilience, that ability to create this thick skin that makes you invincible. It's what made our ancestors invincible.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on amazon I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often. This 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 the one of the students who goes to the master and he and the master's pouring tea and he goes oh master will you teach me and 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 um and he says I can't teach you and he says why can't you teach me he says because your cup's already full come back when your cup's empty.

It's always So much easier when you sit with friends and laugh about them. Yeah, you know, it all seems so serious when you're alone, and it's just you, but when you with people who you love people who you trust, it's different, it's different, it's a different feeling. So, you know, I know, you know, as being a man, it's great to be around other men that are doing great things.

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.

So I was looking through these and so there's a lot of brokers around the country you get on their email list and I'm just like which one of these can we take on amazon because most of these are crap businesses that I wouldn't want to own. I'm sorry that they built them for 20 years and they're going to go down the tubes but it's good because I was able to look at the earnings, look at the language, start understanding how people buy and sell businesses and that's not an area that I was familiar with more than three years ago. So that's something very interesting which helps you understand you're building an asset whether it's a house or whether it's a product and you make it sell that asset and walk away That to me is exciting about the amazon platform.

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.

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.

Yeah, distribution first is a key. One that we talked about. We had great distribution with vape here. The other one was if you can help it don’t take investors. I was all excited about people wanting to invest in my company and putting money in my company and then I realized that oh dude I’ve got like 14. I’ve got to answer to now and that really was a difficult time for me and then when it came time to sell the company and have a nice exit and sell to another firm I realized that I was being held back by investors that couldn’t agree.

Time. Time is the new luxury. It’s not money. It’s time. It’s freedom and being able to do what you want, when you want, where you want, and with who you want. That’s what we’re all chasing. That’s what we’re all after and there’s a few different ways now to make that possible. But creating these recurring revenue streams it’s not randy getting rich quick, it’s not. Hey guys, check out my Lambo, check out my Ferrari, check out my Porsche. I mean I have all that.