You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. And you know, I learned this, you know during the Ecstasy days, like just you got to stop giving a. Like you just can't because people will on your entrepreneurial journey, bring you down whenever they can, A - because they want to get you on their level or below and B - because it makes you more relatable to them.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Where do you see vaping moving in the future? Do you think that inhalation is going to be a means of delivery for other things like medications, I've seen one vape that was caffeine, right? Yeah, I spent a lot of time building this technology for pharma companies as well. All the big pharma companies, all the big tobacco companies were very interested and I've built several iterations of vaporizers using sound sonic technology.

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. Yeah, yeah and sometimes you've got to take people's energy and use it as fuel for your fire. And that's worked well for me. I think I see people in mixed martial arts doing that. Yes. Where they use the energy of their opponents to their advantage and business is much the same I think as martial arts where you can take that negativity, that distortion that people throw at you and utilize that as fuel.

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.

That's why most CEOs that are where they're at. We tend to think that people that are CEOs are these people that have gone to school and done you know the things by the book and they come out like this no and I teach this all the time to my students, my students in my amazon course is that those guys are the smartest in the room for a reason and that reason is not that they've played by the rules. The reason is they didn't think outside the box. They crushed the box. These are real next-level thinkers.

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.

Look, all this stuff that we're talking about is formulaic. There's a formula to persuasion, there's a formula to influence there's a formula to sales, but there's no formula for being a real person, there's no formula for authenticity. And at the end of the day, nothing sells better. I don't care what it is pills, houses, cars, than just being an authentic person.

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.

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 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.

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.

There are two major themes that I picked up. There is the adaptability theme and I love this. This is so key for negotiation as well. Um, it's really important to plan and prepare and have everything done and build your fundamental skill set and all that kind of stuff. But if you're not adaptable, it's the way that the negotiation moves and shapes, then you'll lose out on a lot of value.

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.

I think part of having a certain level of grit and stick-to-itiveness but also the quality of being relentless. Since I was a kid I was always picked on when we came to this country. It was during the Iran-contra scandal. Iran was not in favor. People did not like the Iranian people. We got called all kinds of names. I had my ass handed to me every day at school. Every day it was like going for a beating and it wasn't like now.

But rather that they've known themselves they understand themselves that they understand their strengths and they understand their weaknesses and they've come to a place of reconciliation with who they are no. They know that purity rubs off on a person. Yeah, people like if you meet somebody like that you just can't help but want to help.

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.

I was making pills for 25 cents and selling them for 20 dollars all day long but it just goes to your point of that attitude where I didn’t give a. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t chasing the money.