You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. People are afraid of success. People are afraid of failure and sometimes with good reason. It doesn't mean that you are tied to that fate. I know you're in the business of coaching and success coaching and hypnosis. It doesn't mean that anybody's tied to that faith but until they realize how bad they suck, they're never going to get better.

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So by the time I was 15, I was like, man, I got to get out of here. I can't. If I stay here, you know, What's the path for me? And my folks would say, hey, you know, go to school five years ten years to get a degree. Become a doctor. You become a doctor young man, and I'd be like all right. Well, let me look at the doctor. I'd be like, look at Mr. so-and-so out the street and I'd look at the guy and he was bald and fat and the whole family was bald and fat. And you just look at the guy and I'd be like, wow. Yeah, he's got a Benz, but that's not him, the bank owns it, right? And that could be you, right? Yeah, you look at his car and you're like, man, you know, like his house. You're like the bank owns that and the guy leaves at 5 a.m. He comes back at like 8 or 9 p.m. and now he looks miserable. I don't want to be that.

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 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.

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.

Great question! I think one of the best ones is trust but verify. I had another teacher of mine. This writer named Stuart Wilde, who became a mentor of mine for some time always said don't play your hunch. It'll have your lunch. I'm not sure if that was his quote but it made sense. He taught us a lot of the fundamental principles of money through playing blackjack. Believe it or not, he felt that life and business were very much like a casino and if you could learn how to master that type of interaction you'd be able to handle business. So we did a lot of work inside casinos where we went to casinos and learned how to gamble and play blackjack and I have a friend, who's still an instructor under he was understeer wild he learned how to play blackjack and poker and all those games.

Do not work in a vacuum. What I mean by that is that there are people out there in the world, who have done what you want to do and you can find these people and incentivize them to work with you. Incentivize them to help you, to coach you, to train you, to get what they want. I think your podcast is about fitness yeah? So if you want to become fit, very interesting. So I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm a student beginner um but I've been training for some years now and my philosophy with martial arts and I've done martial arts for a lot of years is if you want to learn, you find somebody who's at a much higher level and is where you want to be and once you learn how that person got where they are, ask them to mentor you. Ask them to coach you and get at that level with them. Train at their level.

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.

I always tell people to see what you can do for them. See what you can do for others first when you're trying to enter into that kind of relationship. Don't come at it with what can this person do for me? Right? What do you do? Oh, okay. Yeah, yes, I'm not interested in that and you're gone. See what you can bring them, see what you can help them and what they can do for you will come naturally.

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.

In the article we read yes, they may have a little more experience in creative or SEO or branding than we do, and then yes you're probably better customer service but they run you know 500 checklists of things to cover within a company. So in many cases mom and pop, you can do it better you know. My dad's an entrepreneur and I always saw him struggle with once he had four or five employees. He just didn't do it. He never grew past that like he wanted mass control versus delegation and systems and being able to scale a company which is what it takes to go from 1 to 10 million and then 10 million to 100 and a lot of these companies they're looking at the minimum of a million dollars in revenue, you know. Minimum because otherwise, it's not worth all the paperwork to try and do it. So you're right, a lot of companies don't make a million dollars a year and I know if you don't own a company that sounds like a heck of a lot of money.

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 fact is that on amazon they want you to know very carefully very, keenly that you are playing in the big boy sandbox. That sandbox is not yours, it is theirs and they will not hesitate to slap you with a suspension if you violate their terms of service or even if you don't. Maybe you have a competitor that doesn't like you, maybe somebody wants to take up your market share, this happens all the time on Amazon and they will slap you with a fake copyright infringement.

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.

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.

And that's the mindset you want to be in. You want to be like you know what I'm I don't know what it's going to take but I'm adaptable. I know that the world is changing and I know that everything changes. Combat is a changeable environment. As Bruce Lee said, be like water. Why did he say be like water? Well, because water takes the shape of whatever it's in. It's unclear what water is going to be poured in, but if it gets poured in a vase then it takes the shape of the vase. If it gets spilled on the rock it goes around the rock. If it hits the soil, it gets absorbed in the soil, and if you can master that the world's your oyster.

The only reason why those dudes are interesting is that they're defying death by being around these killing machines. Those animals are killers and the reason why it's interesting, why there is a purity to that interaction is because it's dangerous.

Don’t lean in you know when you go into the world being like dude I’m gonna make a million dollars and I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna get the most beautiful girl. The guys that talk like that think like that guys and girls that talk like that think like that they never get it. It’s pushed further and further away from them.