You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Well, I started studying this when I was like 15 years old through cognitive psychology. And of course, the handwriting analysis, which I'm famous for and one of the first things that I learned was that being sensitive to criticism, caring too much, what people thought was a flaw and it was a physical pain in your chest of like someone not approving of you. And I had that as a kid. I remember having the members-only jacket and I'm dating myself. But like I cared, whether I had a certain jacket. And when I made these changes to my brain, I just didn't give anymore. And I think I probably overcompensated by not giving a. Quote-Unquote like all the best-selling books, these days and I kind of became an a-hole but I was an aggressive successful, and I got what I wanted a lot.

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 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.

Great question! I think one of the best ones is trust but verify. I had another teacher of mine. This writer named Stuart Wilde, who became a mentor of mine for some time always said don't play your hunch. It'll have your lunch. I'm not sure if that was his quote but it made sense. He taught us a lot of the fundamental principles of money through playing blackjack. Believe it or not, he felt that life and business were very much like a casino and if you could learn how to master that type of interaction you'd be able to handle business. So we did a lot of work inside casinos where we went to casinos and learned how to gamble and play blackjack and I have a friend, who's still an instructor under he was understeer wild he learned how to play blackjack and poker and all those games.

Resilience. People are going to try to knock you down. People will put you down but it's how many times you get up when that failure happens and also there is an element to it of not giving an about what people think of you. You cannot care what other people think. Other people's opinions only matter if they coincide with your belief structure and your reality distortion field.

Do not work in a vacuum. What I mean by that is that there are people out there in the world, who have done what you want to do and you can find these people and incentivize them to work with you. Incentivize them to help you, to coach you, to train you, to get what they want. I think your podcast is about fitness yeah? So if you want to become fit, very interesting. So I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm a student beginner um but I've been training for some years now and my philosophy with martial arts and I've done martial arts for a lot of years is if you want to learn, you find somebody who's at a much higher level and is where you want to be and once you learn how that person got where they are, ask them to mentor you. Ask them to coach you and get at that level with them. Train at their level.

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.

People who do impossible things and leaders are generally broad-stroke guys, and I mean by that part is that they don't tend to get overwhelmed by the details. The people who are generally not hugely successful are far more concerned about the specialization and the this and the that and the little details of things, which is why rocket scientists aren't the wealthiest people in the world.

I don't think there's any key ingredient. I don't think there's anyone thing, you got to have grit, you got to have resilience, you got to be able, the one thing I would say that's key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches, you got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my amazon fba seller course, the people who come through my amazon mastery course. The ones that come in with the attitude of hey, I'm going to throw my chips on the table and I'm gonna see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it'll land on one of my numbers, those are the ones that fail. I haven't had anybody fail yet by the way.

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.

We talk about how to think not just outside the box but how to crush the box and create a lifestyle that you can be happy with by having more money, having more time, and knowing it's funny because I often tell people time is a new luxury. It doesn't matter if you have all the money in the world and you don't own your time, if you can't travel where you want, with who you want, doing what you want. If you can't stop what you're doing right now and go play football with your kid, hang out with your wife or your husband, or do whatever you want, you don't have freedom.

I always tell people to look, if you can take cash off the table as much cash as you can get, my recommendation for amazon sellers is, if you get aggregators or if you get into a position where you can create a bidding war bidding frenzy like happens with a lot of our companies and brands that we sell.

So whatever service business you're in or product business those reviews show up and they're probably not on your platform. I have hundreds of reviews on Shaheen, on my computer but they're not necessarily on amazon, on google maps, or each website because I don't own all those platforms. I have to go dig them up, put them in a graphic, put a photograph on them, put them in an email like we're talking about 20 years worth of reviews.

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.

Time. Time is the new luxury. It’s not money. It’s time. It’s freedom and being able to do what you want, when you want, where you want, and with who you want. That’s what we’re all chasing. That’s what we’re all after and there’s a few different ways now to make that possible. But creating these recurring revenue streams it’s not randy getting rich quick, it’s not. Hey guys, check out my Lambo, check out my Ferrari, check out my Porsche. I mean I have all that.

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.