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 Shaahiin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Seriousness is a disease. It is not a quality to be admired. Whenever you look at people that are like super tight and they're sphincter as wound up, super tight and they're just very serious about things. There's something else in their life that's imbalanced. You look at the great people in history. I guarantee you they had rip-roaring laughs. You look at Albert Einstein, you look at John Rockefeller, you look at any of these people throughout history. They reach these incredible heights of success and you'll find antidotes of them being funny. Mark Twain is a great example of it. Oscar Wilde is another example of it. Alan Watts, you look at any of these great people throughout history. They didn't take themselves seriously. It's only the that take themselves seriously.

The greatest human disease, the greatest thing I think that can hold you back not only in life but particularly in business is seriousness. Seriousness is a disease. You gotta relax. You got to be able to enjoy things and not take things so seriously, not lean into things so much. Let things come to you. It's what professor Caldini talks about in his book Persuasion. Caldini being the great professor that wrote the Canon on Influence also talks about pre-suede, talks about the greatest sales are made before the guy before the prospect ever comes to you and it's all part of this process.

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.

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?

Buddy look, you can take your shots, call yourself a victim and fall into that victim mentality or you can reach down, grab your balls, get up and fight. You can do that. You can do that. You have a set of balls for a reason, so you can get up and you can fight. You can swing. You might get knocked down again and I did over and over again until one day I didn't anymore but you learn. You become tougher. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger and it's that grit, that resilience, that ability to create this thick skin that makes you invincible. It's what made our ancestors invincible.

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.

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.

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.

And the one thing that I learned Bart from all of this and I think this is going to answer your question is that the markets are not based on much more than one thing and that element is human emotion. The markets are moved by emotion and they are not reasonable or logical. If they were reasonable or logical we would all figure it out. We would be like Jim Simmons who runs renaissance funds, who's one of the most intelligent guys I've ever heard of, who's got a fund that allegedly you know has never failed and made money year after year and you know he's one of the masters of quant trading. If you're not one of those guys and there's maybe a handful of those guys on the planet.

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.

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.

They could fail because they get pulled off the platform for violating service. There's a lot of great stories of 10-20000 a day and they just get canceled, just like what happened 15 years ago with the search engines. I knew people getting checks for five and ten thousand dollars from AdSense and all of a sudden they changed the algorithms panda slap in SEO terms and those checks stopped. So so I mean one small change or one small violation could end the business. That's probably how most of them lose because it doesn't cost anything to stay there. You just may not be number one and your sales will decrease.

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.

I mean look sometimes you can get lucky right? Sometimes you can be born into money, sometimes you can marry a rich person you know. Yeah, you can get lucky but for the majority of us that’s not gonna happen and you know there’s really you know I talk we have a podcast called hack and grow rich.