You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I know that there's, you know, there's a lot of people probably listening to the story with besides the fact that it's completely entertaining and they're going okay, George like what's the point here? And here's the point and the reason. I want you guys to start listening more is that success leaves clues. Look, I could go on and on about Shaahin, how like you had nothing, you know you hustled, you did whatever you had to do. I mean we're obviously, we're not promoting drugs and things. But that's not the point here. You guys got to listen to the fact that he was determined. He was recognizing certain things. He was persistent. But one of the questions I was going to ask you is what gave you this sense of, you know, from moving to the United States, right? And everything this constant sense of what looking for success and why that didn't appeal to you being a doctor, but why doing this did or being on your own, like, what were you when you grew up? Were your parents instilling in you this idea that you wanted to be successful or do you think you just because I mean, I'm not a big believer that people are just born wanting to be successful? It's usually a product of their environment. What is it that gave you that drive? What do you think?

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 and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, I tried other jobs selling, buying a pizza franchise, selling real estate, and selling vacuums door-to-door. So I was doing all that, but I hadn't started a product and built a business and so this was eventually, when I started, it was the first shot but I kind of knew deep down. It was the right shot to take. But yeah, so but so I'm thinking of the idea or excuse me I graduate from college and move in with some buddies and it's 1982. I'm 22 years old and we start sketching words out of the dictionary. That was it. I mean there was no grand plan. There was no game. We're just having fun. Well, we get home late. Now there are three guys, six guys were just playing this silly game. We were having a ball every night. And so the entrepreneurial spirit started kicking in. I'm going you know this is going to be a good board game because in 82 there were no video games. Everybody played board games. So that was the vernacular of the day. And then, of course, I procrastinated for three years. Are you ready to go, man? I'm good. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm gonna be, you know, I went to Europe. I kept waiting tables. I wasn't ready and I just couldn't get out of my way.

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I love business. I love making money. I love the journey and the path of creating excellence in the world and creating cool products. I've been doing it for a good part of 30 years now I feel old. But since I was 15, I've been creating products that people take and enjoy and at the end of the day, I realized the commonality between myself and a lot of my friends that are also successful and the fact is that at the end of the day they don't take themselves so seriously.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, one of the interesting things that I think most people don't understand is that you don't have to be a graphic designer to have great art. Similarly, with technology, you just need to be able to hire specialized knowledge. There are lots of people smarter than me who know how to do engineering, who know how to build the parts of the device, and one of the things now I'm looking at this, which is super interesting, which I don't know if they're doing now is that I made sure that none of the parts of this device that we built came in touch with the plastic components of it because I didn't believe in heating the plastic. So if you look inside the device this is all-ceramic. So we built ceramic. There's glass, there's steel inside here. I'm going through this, so I'm looking at this. I'm like dude, I did a great job building this thing. It was a nice device to build but you can hire people, so anytime you want to build anything there are people out there nerds who live on that technology kind of thing and they'd love to do that without burning yet.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So you have been known to lose your mind at times, have you? I try to lose my mind a little bit every day and it's more important than, you know, okay, so I'll give you my dirty little secret, which I don't live on air a lot. I like to make prank calls. It's one of my favorite things. I do multiple characters. I can do a Persian guy that speaks like these. How are you? I'm Mr. Irani. I can do a Russian guy who Panama Chiba is rusky.

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.

At that time, Richard, there was a drug called Ecstasy or MDMA, one of the most popular drugs. It was outlawed in the United States. It was scheduled, I believe sometime in 1983- 1985, sometime in the 80s. Ecstasy was banned. It went underground, was made illegal and what happened was that this particular drug was very difficult to synthesize. So the supply mostly came from outside the US, Europe and because of the whole Reagan say no to drugs era, you know, the Nancy Reagan say no to drugs period. They were cracking down and the supply had dried up. They had put a stop to drugs coming into the United States. The drug dealers were out of drugs and the people who wanted them couldn't get them. So there was a huge demand but very little supply.

How do I get that? They laughed and they said, well, you know son, what all immigrant families want for their kids is the pinnacle height of success than we could ever reach. To be a doctor. Dad thought for a minute. And he said the only way is to become a doctor. You have to go become a doctor. Look at Mr. Rafsanjani down the street. He is a doctor. He has beans, he has a house, be like him. All right, cool. Let's do that. I want to be a doctor. How do you be a doctor? It's nice. You have to cut people up. You get money, you get all that. And then I looked at the dude, and I was like, man, that dude is bald, that dude is fat. He is a bundle of nerves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think one of the things that we teach that's so important is that you have to have four pillars, four legs to any table and one of those legs has to be something that brings you stability. You have to have stability. Eventually, you want to get out of selling your hours, but it's okay to sell your hours for some time until you can get the other three pillars situated. So one thing's going to be your career, your job, whatever you're doing it doesn't matter.

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.

So you don’t want to always be thinking that you’re poor. I think you did a great thing. When the lady is like that’s 28 so her world, in her reality was 28 dollars is a lot of money. You could tell by the emotion of her voice but you don’t want your son thinking that. You don’t want to think that because that gives you a stuckness about things. It’s like risking money in a real estate transaction or the stock market.

But we’re making micro moves to get ourselves in a better position or in a less shitty position depending on where you’re at. Until you can you can achieve freedom and at the end of the day, you’ve got to have an unshakable self-belief as Richard Koch talks about in his book Unreasonable Success and how to achieve it.

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.

And I do a lot of difficult things. I solve a lot of tricky problems but when I look at my life and I look at my work, I never think to myself that it’s hard and I don’t think that life in general really was ever meant to be a struggle. People that are struggling usually aren’t the same people that are succeeding so if you can let go of struggle and get into the flow and there’s a lot of great tactics for doing that you’ll be in a far better place in life.