You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Positive momentum and negative momentum. When things happen that are crappy, they seem to happen one after another. It affects your attitude, your mindset, everything. And when good things happen, the key is always to keep your foot on the gas and get back to basics. Always grind. Put people in your corner who support encourage you. And what you did, which I love is you were taking every situation in life, you even when you had the chip going back to what you said at the beginning of this interview, when you had the chip on your shoulder, you didn't say, what was it you said, you know what? I'm going to take what I don't have. And I'm going to make something of that. Everything you did was in your favor. Using it in your favor to drive you to do the things that would drive your success and I think that's a phenomenal lesson that everything is good and bad.

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. I discovered all the great inspirational writers during the turn of the century. People like Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie's. I read the bio, I read you know people like Og Mandino, all these great, old-time, Did you like? Did you read the thinking where rich was that instrumental or? I did read Think and Grow Rich and I think it was it was pretty inspirational for me, you know, I'm not sure I agree with all the concepts in it now but back then it was exactly what I needed and I started reading up on that stuff. I started reading up on the New Age Movement. The self-development movement reading, Tony Robbins, and all these great people. And I was like, man, you know there might be a chance for me. So I took off.

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.

Yeah, I think what was a library of Alexandria? Or it was in one of those great books. I think that one of the great philosophers who wrote about Latin is saying "nothing season". I'm probably butchering that which means know thyself and it's one of the most profound things. You think why did they put this in all these, like amazing places? Why was this such an important saying? Because ultimately success in life in my opinion comes from self-reflection. Everything is about self-reflection. When you find people that are that when you find people that have a particular trait of being successful it's not that they just fell into that and got lucky. It's because they've reflected. When you look at people that are self-realized self-realization comes through self-reflection.

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.

The only hack that works is hard work. The only hack that works is getting out there and failing. Seeking failure and getting out there and making a mess of things so that you learn and then slowly picking yourself up dusting yourself off and doing it a little better each time until you no longer fail and then what you have to do is you have to perfect it. You have to make sure that the total size of your successes outweighs the size of your failures and then you're okay and then you're winning in life.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. So if you're more experienced at selling on Amazon, you're going to spend some time helping the guy that's just coming on to the course, if you're just coming onto the course, you're going to learn. And then once you've learned a little bit, you're going to help the other guys, but you start building a network.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

That at the end of the day, what was Steve Jobs doing? What was Bill Gates did when he sat in that room creating all that code for windows? He was communicating with people. Steve Jobs was influencing people. So to bend reality you have to be unreasonable and you have to be able to have that power of influence which comes through what you very astutely observed charisma.

I think anyone that starts a movement of any significance must have been incredibly charismatic. I mean you look at the leaders around the world today, the Richard Bransons and even the Donald Trumps. Half the people were charmed by him. I mean half the united states really really got behind his version of what he thought was real and won in the election.

Whereas and I tell people this all the time. I say look, if you get an inheritance or you get divorced, this could be one or two windfalls your whole life. So don’t blow it. Like most people don’t get a 10 million dollar check every month. Like it’s once when your parents die or once when your grandma and so be very mindful if you ever get that windfall and don’t be like a lottery mentality and go buy a bunch of new cars.

So you don’t want to always be thinking that you’re poor. I think you did a great thing. When the lady is like that’s 28 so her world, in her reality was 28 dollars is a lot of money. You could tell by the emotion of her voice but you don’t want your son thinking that. You don’t want to think that because that gives you a stuckness about things. It’s like risking money in a real estate transaction or the stock market.

I mean look sometimes you can get lucky right? Sometimes you can be born into money, sometimes you can marry a rich person you know. Yeah, you can get lucky but for the majority of us that’s not gonna happen and you know there’s really you know I talk we have a podcast called hack and grow rich.