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. 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. 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.

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. And the first portable digital vaporizer. What year are we talking about? This one was probably late 90s early 2000, I think maybe 2000. I came out with this maybe somewhere around there and you'll notice that our patent is this drawer that pulls out and you would put your herbs in a disc. The disc goes in there, that was another one of my patents was herbs on disk and then you put it in here. And I mean this one, yeah, clearly it doesn't work. This is, you know, 20 years old or something but yeah, and then there's a digital readout. The first of its kind and you would inhale through here or through a tube that you put in there and then I remember, yeah, I mean we used all kinds of fancy things like LEDs were not a thing. We used them. There are cobwebs in here. How funny. When I was very big on building this and this feels like, it feels like a nice device. But the point is that we had two parts to our patents, one was being able to remove the plant matter from the heat source to prevent it from getting burned manually and the second was a digital temperature readout that allowed us to control the temperature with a thermoregulator so that the plants it was all around. You don't want to burn these plants. So you want to do it at a low temperature.

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 Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Every day I'm in mindfulness mode except for the days that I'm in mindlessness mode. As Alan Watts would carefully observe that sometimes we need to lose our minds to find ourselves. So, I'm a big fan of that as I'm a big fan of Alan Watts.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think there's any key ingredient. I don't think there's anyone thing, you got to have grit, you got to have resilience, you got to be able, the one thing I would say that's key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches, you got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my amazon fba seller course, the people who come through my amazon mastery course. The ones that come in with the attitude of hey, I'm going to throw my chips on the table and I'm gonna see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it'll land on one of my numbers, those are the ones that fail. I haven't had anybody fail yet by the way.

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.

You can own your store with inventory, but you own 100%, if you become a distributor for $5,000, to some Amway, or Herbalife, you have a bunch of stuff that you didn't have before in your garage. But you just don't know if that's going to sell if you it's your thing, it's at your bag, all of a sudden, your front-loaded these products, and I have found more people than not can't sell those things. You're not buying a business, you're buying permission to be a salesperson. So you're paying money to have a job. So tread lightly on those business opportunities. But when you're putting your own money in your brand, now you're a real business owner.

The real estate's an asset. If you can't touch it and feel it, it's not an asset, but I'm hearing you say it's 2021. Real estate is one great asset, but internet real estate is a website domain a book, an audiobook, an amazon store that's real estate. The only difference is amazon can fire you and um you know in real real estate you could get usurped by the government but it's unlikely you know I mean to just get it taken away.

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.

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.

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.