You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. And the first portable digital vaporizer. What year are we talking about? This one was probably late 90s early 2000, I think maybe 2000. I came out with this maybe somewhere around there and you'll notice that our patent is this drawer that pulls out and you would put your herbs in a disc. The disc goes in there, that was another one of my patents was herbs on disk and then you put it in here. And I mean this one, yeah, clearly it doesn't work. This is, you know, 20 years old or something but yeah, and then there's a digital readout. The first of its kind and you would inhale through here or through a tube that you put in there and then I remember, yeah, I mean we used all kinds of fancy things like LEDs were not a thing. We used them. There are cobwebs in here. How funny. When I was very big on building this and this feels like, it feels like a nice device. But the point is that we had two parts to our patents, one was being able to remove the plant matter from the heat source to prevent it from getting burned manually and the second was a digital temperature readout that allowed us to control the temperature with a thermoregulator so that the plants it was all around. You don't want to burn these plants. So you want to do it at a low temperature.

Yeah, I'm an absolute failure at the majority of things. I do in life bad at 99.9 of things that I do. There's point one percent that I'm really good, probably better than most people on the planet, but the rest of the stuff - absolute failure. The wife makes fun of me. I can't drive a nail through a piece of wood. I'm good at hiring people and your example of engineering is a really good example of that. You can buy engineers, you can buy a guy that's been MIT-trained that's picked of. What do you get to pay the guy, 300 grand a year, 500 grand a year, even a million dollars a year for a rocket scientist. You find.

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.

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.

The world is predatory. All you got to do is look at nature. Things don't work the way that we always want them to. So making money and I make a lot more now that I get to keep than I did back then because I was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, is mainly because I don't publicize everything that I do. That I'm quieter about the things that I do and the real people the guys that are making the billions and billions of dollars don't always end up on the Forbes top 10 top 100 list.

What does knowledge do? Knowledge gives you courage. Knowledge, Courage, Action. Once you know how to jump out of a plane with a parachute, it's not as scary as if you're just jumping out and you have no idea what thing to pull or what to do. That takes us to the third pillar - action. You could have knowledge and courage, but if you do not take action, nothing happens. You have to be able to fail to succeed.

If you want to get somebody to become endeared to you or to endear yourself to someone isn't to offer them something because what happens when we offer something that someone immediately one of Cal Dini professional Cal Dinis principles of influence comes into play the sixth principle of influence, which is reciprocity. We think, oh, shit, this guy's giving me something he's gonna want something back. He's gonna have expectations. All my guards go up and boom, instead, this is a great life hack.

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.

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.

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?

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.

So the people who are seeking to start a business to sell it, generally don't succeed. The people who never think about selling a business will have a rude awakening when it comes time to sell their business and what they can get for it. With that said, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

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.