You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We fled Iran in fear of persecution and came to the United States, eventually landed in the U.S. I was about five and King of the Heap in Iran. Like you know, had my little gang, very safe place, you know. I would leave during the days. I would come back as a five-year-old. No problem. Dinner was when I came home. It was great, but coming to this country I realized it was during Iran-contra and I was no longer top of the heap. I was a second-class citizen, wow and that gave me a chip on my shoulder, gave me a lot of grit, you know, getting the crap kicked out of me every day at school built character, but I decided that, hey, you know, this is one of the greatest countries in the world from an economic standpoint. There is opportunity there. I see people with wealth.

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.

Life is about luck but it's not what you think. Luck can be created and it's about being in the flow. Uh, a great author uh Chikset Mihai who recently passed away just a few days ago wrote the great book Flow and he talks about the amazing synchronicities that could potentially happen when you're in the flow. I've been lucky my whole life, but I believe that I have created my luck.

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.

When you are in a flow state like Stephen Cutler talks about in his book The Art of the Impossible or The Rise of Superman. If you can get yourself into this optimal performance state, into this optimal state where you are in the flow, opportunities start coming to you. You find yourself becoming more in sync with things that are going on around you and that's called synchronicity. You want something and the person who can provide that thing to you appears sitting next to you on a park bench or he's the guy at a restaurant that you don't drop something and you pick it up and you're there. It's the way the world works. I don't know why it works that way. Some people say oh the art of it the law of attraction, the art of manifestation all that is. I'll tell you what it is. It's hard work. No substitute for it. No hack for hard work.

You can't cultivate that in a very safe comfy thing. If somebody calls you something and your word for yourself is something different and all of a sudden you melt because you thought you were special like a snowflake. The world doesn't work that way. You can create bubbles that work that way but it's not going to make you stronger. It's not going to make you more resilient and we're not going to change the world, change the planet, impact people around us, create great stuff and great stories by falling into that narrative. What you do is you pick yourself up you say good shot let's go again or you pick yourself up and you say is that all you have? Really?

Look, all this stuff that we're talking about is formulaic. There's a formula to persuasion, there's a formula to influence there's a formula to sales, but there's no formula for being a real person, there's no formula for authenticity. And at the end of the day, nothing sells better. I don't care what it is pills, houses, cars, than just being an authentic person.

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.

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.

If the risk is diversified you're selling in brick and mortar, you're selling on eBay, Etsy, Walmart you're you've got your distribution, people are buying directly from you on your website excuse me if those things are happening, then the risk is more diversified and the value of your company is generally higher.

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.

The most important thing is being visible. So to be visible what we call ranking, you show up on that first page. When you search for I don't know uh pie cutters and go on to that first page of amazon when you click through, there are about 10 or 20 items on that page. That is golden real estate. There might be 2000 products, there might be 20000 products, but whoever is on that first page has it. Whoever's got the number one listing that's gold. So amazon discovered hey, I know how we're going to get up there. It's going to catch 21 catch 22 English not so good. Um, so whichever catch it is and what they did was they designed their algorithm so that the more sales you have the higher you rank.

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.

So learning the subtleties and nuances and the cultural differences wherever you're at is super important. Similarly, you know if you're going to be negotiating with gangbangers there's a culture there. If you're going to be negotiating with corporate business people, there's a culture there.

And that's the mindset you want to be in. You want to be like you know what I'm I don't know what it's going to take but I'm adaptable. I know that the world is changing and I know that everything changes. Combat is a changeable environment. As Bruce Lee said, be like water. Why did he say be like water? Well, because water takes the shape of whatever it's in. It's unclear what water is going to be poured in, but if it gets poured in a vase then it takes the shape of the vase. If it gets spilled on the rock it goes around the rock. If it hits the soil, it gets absorbed in the soil, and if you can master that the world's your oyster.

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.

People who do impossible things, people that are leaders are generally broad-stroke guys and what 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 the reason why rocket scientists aren't the wealthiest people in the world.

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.

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.