You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Is it true that you cut the cards in your living room for the first thousand games? Is that a true story? Yes close. So we did a thousand games was our test market and we had some assembled them by hand. Well, the one problem we had was just before our launch, the printer screwed up and sent us the wrong cards. And they were 500 cards per game at a thousand games. With 500000 cards when they were supposed to come sorted game a game of 500 cards, they came completely wrong. So we had to hand sort.... you're laughing man. It was like oh! I thought it was I have admitted. It's the only tantrum I ever threw. I mean, the printer calls me up. Can't get it done. I launched the phone but we had to figure it out and it would be like and the math is 9580 playing card decks of playing cards.

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. 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.

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.

When the decision is made, the doing becomes effortless. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that once you become resigned to achieving the results that you want to achieve and you decide that you are willing, you don't might not have to do it but that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, very little can stop you. Sure, if you die, get hit by a truck or something, maybe. Outside of that, I wasn't willing to take no for an answer and there was zero indication if you saw it in my face that I wasn't willing able or interested in doing the impossible.

I always tell people to see what you can do for them. See what you can do for others first when you're trying to enter into that kind of relationship. Don't come at it with what can this person do for me? Right? What do you do? Oh, okay. Yeah, yes, I'm not interested in that and you're gone. See what you can bring them, see what you can help them and what they can do for you will come naturally.

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.

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 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.

I think part of having a certain level of grit and stick-to-itiveness but also the quality of being relentless. Since I was a kid I was always picked on when we came to this country. It was during the Iran-contra scandal. Iran was not in favor. People did not like the Iranian people. We got called all kinds of names. I had my ass handed to me every day at school. Every day it was like going for a beating and it wasn't like now.

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.

Is that you always need people to captain the trains and to ride the boats and someone’s always got to drive the train and what that means is that the people that really want to build their lifestyle of freedom and with recurring revenue and using these algorithms and finding good mentorship and mentorship programs that they can be involved in to invest in their well-being but also invest in their personal development.

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.

We just have a different mindset than say someone's growing up here in a more comfortable life. It's like we our parents came here to make a better life for their kids not for themselves. They knew that hopefully being in America would present more opportunities and for your parents it was hey go be a doctor, go be the Jewish person out there with the nine to five working all day.

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.