You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, but again, you know, that's another quality of successful guys. I'm sure you are too, Rob, is you know that we're all fiercely competitive, right? So it's kind of one of the marks of being, you know, and alpha and being successful in business, you know, all the guys, I know who are successful in business are incredibly competitive human beings.

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. There's another story where while I was you know, living in these abandoned buildings and on the beach and all these places, I managed to get myself a job at a copy place, at a Kinkos copy. It was at the time and I remember we were in the back. I was making photocopies for Scientology because that's it was right next to the Scientology building. Yeah, they would have these like, billionaire contracts that they made. People sign and like there was all this paperwork and I'd be like send the copy machines. I was a kid and I remember that I had this boss who was like this evil man like he was like the monopoly guy. He was like you know, he had this like a cat and a cane and a mustache and all this stuff and I would sleep behind the copy machine because it had a nice droning hum. It was warm back there and I could sleep for a few hours so during my shift. I would set the papers, the contracts to print and I would fall asleep behind the copy machine. Didn't think much of it, but one day I woke up and like to a kick in my side and like his like cane and he's like standing on something beating me behind the machine and me looking going hey, what the man and you know, him like kicking me out. I didn't get my paycheck, right? Mind you, I was sleeping in wherever I could sleep. I didn't have money for food. He wouldn't give me my paycheck.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, when people look at you and they look at successes, they think oh, the road to success is easy and or it's not riddled with challenges or obstacles. And that's all it's riddled with and so much self-doubt. You brought it up at a perfect time so much self-doubt in the impossible all you heard was possible, but you took that on as a challenge whatever lit that fire under your butt to say, yeah I'll show them and a lot of great successes that I've had on the show were challenged that they couldn't do it, and they wanted to just show the world you're wrong, I'm right. I can do it. But you give such hope to any entrepreneur willing to hustle.

I was 15 years old thinking I want to find wealth, fortune all the great things that America offers. Books were my friends. I read books by Napoleon Hill, books by Og Mandino, all the great old-time writers of that time. I read Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer and all the personal development guys. This other guy is named Stuart Wilde. I read his books and I thought, man, you know what? I'm gonna leave home and I left home. I left and I was sleeping at that time in abandoned buildings or buildings that were under construction. Los Angeles was in a huge building boom at that time. So I realized that I could get into these buildings late at night when the brokers weren't in there, wake up in the morning before they got there and I'd be out and I'd be living in luxury houses, maybe there wasn't electricity or water in those days in some of the places because they weren't built yet but it was a safe place to lay my head and after that, I realized that there was a big electronic music scene.

You've gotta have swiftness. You have to have efficiency. You have to be able to be okay with confrontation. You have to be okay having thick skin. You have to be okay in your case having trolls. Some people are going to hate you. Some people are not going to like you. It doesn't matter. You have to be on rails moving towards the destination and the best way to do that is as you've very well discovered my friend is by not taking it seriously.

And what we teach is that nobody wins by playing the game the way they tell you to play it. Big resellers, e-commerce giants like Amazon, I teach this course called amazon mastery where I teach people how to make predictable recurring revenue on the amazon platform. I teach people how to find products, sell them on the Amazon platform and what they want you to believe is they want you to believe that if you are a good little boy Joseph Jaffe and you follow their rules you are going to be just fine.

Uh, Walter Isaacson, who wrote the great uh autobiography, sorry not autobiography, the great biography of Steve Jobs talks about how Steve Jobs would walk into a room and he would say, all right guys, uh we're going to need and this was in the early 90s. We're going to need a phone and you're going to be able to touch the screen. Before this, all phones had buttons and there'll be no buttons on this phone and it'll do all these things. It'll have an iPod on it, it'll play music, it'll do all these things. It didn't exist and the engineers would say okay cool, Steve Jobs awesome. Okay, amazing. We could have this for you in the next three to five years. He'd be very cute. 30 days I'm going on stage to announce it. Make it work and he would leave and they would all be sitting there going oh my god what an and what just happened. We just agreed to do this and they would do it and he would make it happen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on amazon I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often. This 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 the one of the students who goes to the master and he and the master's pouring tea and he goes oh master will you teach me and 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 um and he says I can't teach you and he says why can't you teach me he says because your cup's already full come back when your cup's empty.

Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business. To launch your business on amazon we teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product rank, how to find a product. The number one problem that people have on amazon, they're like dude I want to sell on amazon. I see everyone's making money. I hear the stories. I watch the videos but I just don't have a product and I tell people that's the best place to be. Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business, to launch your business on Amazon. We teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product ranked how to.

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.

I was strategic if I was Procter & Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. I'd be like hey, why do I want to wait for these aggregators to pick up these companies. For me to just come in and either A has another big behemoth come and compete with me that's got more brands and more successful than us. Why don't we go in and instead of offering them 10, I know the aggregators are offering a 10 time earning multiple why don't we just offer 15 and take any significant brands off the table now. What if that were to happen, wouldn't that be interesting? Where would that take the market?

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.

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.

And the students that I have the ones that I can tell are going to succeed are the ones who don’t look at it like it’s a roulette table right. They don’t think like hey, I threw the little ball in the thing and it went around and landed on my number right. They look at it as I’m gonna hit this nail in the head until it goes in and if the hammer doesn’t work, I’m gonna use a sledgehammer. If that doesn’t work I’m gonna use a rock. Whatever it takes, I’m gonna get it done. Those are the guys that that make it.