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. We mustn't take ourselves too seriously. That's the problem with most people. Seriousness is a disease. Most people have a pole up there. You know what, and they're walking around with all these levels of seriousness and all this projection of themselves. And that's why I do stuff like that. I try to do some silly thing, make a prank, call a friend and make them laugh. Do something silly and unexpected every day because it breaks me out of that thing. It breaks you out of the traps of the ego of the belief that all this is is real that all this is all there is.

But the fact is you have to use every tool in your arsenal and you have to find out what tools the competition isn't using and you have to jump on it. Like I don't know, but you gotta jump on it like it was a gazelle and you're a lion in savannah.

But if you go to a restaurant and you're not happy, ask for the manager. You will be amazed at how far they will go out of their way to help you out. Smile. Always smile. Don't be aggressive. People are uncomfortable with tension. So it's not going to be to your advantage in these situations to create tension most of the time. So don't have tension. Just smile. Maybe start with a compliment. You know what, I know that the waiter is working their butt off tonight, I can see how busy you guys are and I just got to tell you those bread rolls that you brought us were spectacular, but we've been waiting 45 minutes for our food and I just wanted to know if there's anything you might be able to do for us.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on Amazon? And I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often 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, one of the students who go to the master, and the Masters pouring tea, and he goes all Master, will you teach me in 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? What are you doing? And he says, I can't teach you. And he says Why? Why can't you teach me? He says because your cups are already full. Come back when your cup is empty.

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.

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 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.

Are you planning on going out there and making it be like a casino like hey, I'm gonna throw you know chips on these numbers, and if it hits my number's great, if not then I guess this wasn't meant for me, or are you gonna go out there and no matter what it takes, get that win? You're going to make that nail go through that piece of wood. If you're going to use a hammer, a sledgehammer, a shotgun, your wrist whatever it is, don't use your wrist but a rock whatever it is that nail is going to go through.

You know it is as it goes from blue ocean to red ocean right one of the terms we use to kind of describe things you have to constantly be refining and a lot of people I mean think like much like yourself feel alone going at it. Alone because they’re in there and they’re like man amazon’s not answering my calls. I just get some dude in India you know. The phone keeps getting disconnected because Amazon doesn’t really care about you as a seller is the first dirty secret of amazon.

So there’s mixed messages and there’s vulnerabilities and if you know how to exploit those vulnerabilities you can win, which is why I oftentimes you know I get asked to talk about black hat tactics and grey hat tactics yeah you know white hat tactics and the fact is there’s nobody who is successful that just does everything strictly by uh TOS, you know terms of service you know we follow what they tell us to do.

So there are lots of ways, lots of hacks to do that but you know no one there’s no one thing that you’re gonna do that’s gonna make your thing pop. You got to think again, yeah you got to think foundational. You got to do all of that stuff and then truly you know I’m going to give a disclaimer that I don’t recommend anybody do anything black hat against terms of service but again you know most people do a little white hat greyhound little black hat stuff you know and that’s the way the world goes around.

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.

Now we have a tendency to think of the Russians differently but I’ll tell you something. They have less resources than we do in a lot of ways and you and I have talked about this before. It gives them more grit. They can do things that we can’t do. When you hear about Russian hacking and Russian hackers. I see it all the time on amazon. I talk to Russian hackers all the time that have amazon accounts up and are making millions of dollars selling on amazon.

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 I think getting wealthy is the same thing if you don’t have the discipline to earn it or to save or to live miserly. We had a whole episode on how miserly you are and I thought it was hilarious how you still use coupons and so does my dad you know very very wealthy people but they have discipline.

You want to make sure that you are on top of your game when you go into battle in any type and that applies to the business part and that’s so so brilliant that you say that because that’s really true because some days we’re off and if you off take the day off back off don’t go into battle unless you are on and it’s an on the day for you.

You can’t start with a product or a business that’s gonna feel to you like a steel wall. You need to go for low-hanging fruit, something that’s a little bit easier. Why? Because it’s gonna constantly be bringing feedback to you. So it’s gonna close that loop for you and open up the opportunity for you to start taking harder and harder challenges and that’s really the trick to this is that you need to find something that will feed your feedback loop and you can close that loop.