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. We mustn't take ourselves too seriously. That's the problem with most people. Seriousness is a disease. Most people have a pole up there. You know what, and they're walking around with all these levels of seriousness and all this projection of themselves. And that's why I do stuff like that. I try to do some silly thing, make a prank, call a friend and make them laugh. Do something silly and unexpected every day because it breaks me out of that thing. It breaks you out of the traps of the ego of the belief that all this is is real that all this is all there is.

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.

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.

So I had another quote for you, um but then when I saw this quote uh I was like well let's make this the quote of the episode - While you are sleeping, your enemies are planning your demise. So what does this mean to you? Everyone's too fragile. Everybody has thin skin. Everybody's thinking man maybe I won't get first place. I'll win a consolation prize. I'll win second place. All you know I don't I can just take it easy. Whatever you're thinking right now, google it. 50,000 people are thinking it. Whatever you want to do, there are a million people out there better than you who could do it and if you close your eyes in the time it takes you to blink, there are 50 other guys who were just waiting for that opportunity to take over your share of the market.

When the decision is made, the doing becomes effortless. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that once you become resigned to achieving the results that you want to achieve and you decide that you are willing, you don't might not have to do it but that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, very little can stop you. Sure, if you die, get hit by a truck or something, maybe. Outside of that, I wasn't willing to take no for an answer and there was zero indication if you saw it in my face that I wasn't willing able or interested in doing the impossible.

A friend of mine used to say wealth is better made quietly and I learned that the second and third time around, believe me, I learned that after making hundreds of millions of dollars and losing hundreds of millions of dollars and having to reinvent myself several times over. I learned that it's better that way. And, you know, the people that have the real wealth, you might not ever even hear about them. They're not out there, you know, shining the shiny things or chasing the shiny things because they're too busy making money.

It's true. There's no participation prize in the real world. There's no participation prize on Amazon, you don't get an honorable mention for having good intentions. So you have to go out there ready to crush and if you can't handle that, get a job, go work for someone and sell or be a socialist. There are plenty of countries that would love to have you as a socialist, you know, and I know there's a whole political movement of like, oh, everybody should be free and give the money away and feed the homeless and you know what? Get three kids and start an Amazon business. See how socialist you are? You won't be that socialist once you have written your checks. Go read Ein Rand the fountain header atlas shrugged and let's see if your philosophy doesn't change a little bit.

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.

You have to be willing to go the road alone if you have to. The first thing I learned is that people are very quick to tell you that things are impossible and when I started herbal ecstasy back in the early 90s, I remember all I heard was that it was impossible but I had a flaw and that was I didn't listen to anybody and not only that I didn't know that it was impossible. Just because they're saying it's impossible, I didn't want it to be impossible.

Is don't be an idiot. Don't go jump out of a window and be like I see I'm ben. Because gravity will win. There are certain natural laws that you can never go against and come out better for but intelligently there are little things that you can do.

If you're able to influence somebody, money is just one way to influence people. It's the easiest way. If I want something that you have, I give you money. You give me that thing. Great, but he would point around wherever we were at a meeting he says everything around you has been sold, transferred from one person to the next, and not always with money in hand. So there are lots of different ways to be able to influence people so I learned at a very early age through his mentorship the art of influence.

It's I know exactly that burn the ship's mentality, the focus, the clarity and the like you said purity you know what I mean. It creates like there's like um I think I think what it is is you know when you have that there's no safety net, there's no plan B and it just becomes like right.