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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. People are afraid of success. People are afraid of failure and sometimes with good reason. It doesn't mean that you are tied to that fate. I know you're in the business of coaching and success coaching and hypnosis. It doesn't mean that anybody's tied to that faith but until they realize how bad they suck, they're never going to get better.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahiin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Seriousness is a disease. It is not a quality to be admired. Whenever you look at people that are like super tight and they're sphincter as wound up, super tight and they're just very serious about things. There's something else in their life that's imbalanced. You look at the great people in history. I guarantee you they had rip-roaring laughs. You look at Albert Einstein, you look at John Rockefeller, you look at any of these people throughout history. They reach these incredible heights of success and you'll find antidotes of them being funny. Mark Twain is a great example of it. Oscar Wilde is another example of it. Alan Watts, you look at any of these great people throughout history. They didn't take themselves seriously. It's only the that take themselves seriously.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So by the time I was 15, I was like, man, I got to get out of here. I can't. If I stay here, you know, What's the path for me? And my folks would say, hey, you know, go to school five years ten years to get a degree. Become a doctor. You become a doctor young man, and I'd be like all right. Well, let me look at the doctor. I'd be like, look at Mr. so-and-so out the street and I'd look at the guy and he was bald and fat and the whole family was bald and fat. And you just look at the guy and I'd be like, wow. Yeah, he's got a Benz, but that's not him, the bank owns it, right? And that could be you, right? Yeah, you look at his car and you're like, man, you know, like his house. You're like the bank owns that and the guy leaves at 5 a.m. He comes back at like 8 or 9 p.m. and now he looks miserable. I don't want to be that.

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.

started as an adolescent in Iran at five. I was born in Iran. We moved to Los Angeles eventually as refugees. We were political refugees when we moved here and solidly poor here. In Iran, we were well to do. Here, we were poor and we managed somehow to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood an Enclave of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, which at the time was more hippie than up-and-coming. And my folks managed to buy a house that was an absolute disaster of a house in those days. And pretty soon around us, I saw huge houses going up. I saw great wealth coming in. It was the Reaganomics era trickle-down economics wall street wealth. Hollywood was at an all-time high. All this money was coming in but I was still the poor son of a dry cleaner. The kids growing up around me their folks had Mercedes Benzes. They would go out to restaurants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because we have grit that’s the thing. If you look at Iranians, Armenians, Koreans you know Chinese and anybody that comes to this country as an immigrant, you know life is very different outside of the united states and where I came from Iran even though I was very young when I left there we would leave home as a five-year-old and I’d be running with a little five-year-old gang of kids and we’d be doing all kinds of stuff.