You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. And you know, I learned this, you know during the Ecstasy days, like just you got to stop giving a. Like you just can't because people will on your entrepreneurial journey, bring you down whenever they can, A - because they want to get you on their level or below and B - because it makes you more relatable to them.

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 & 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.

started as an adolescent in Iran at five. I was born in Iran. We moved to Los Angeles eventually as refugees. We were political refugees when we moved here and solidly poor here. In Iran, we were well to do. Here, we were poor and we managed somehow to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood an Enclave of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, which at the time was more hippie than up-and-coming. And my folks managed to buy a house that was an absolute disaster of a house in those days. And pretty soon around us, I saw huge houses going up. I saw great wealth coming in. It was the Reaganomics era trickle-down economics wall street wealth. Hollywood was at an all-time high. All this money was coming in but I was still the poor son of a dry cleaner. The kids growing up around me their folks had Mercedes Benzes. They would go out to restaurants.

Sure, I talk about one in my book, where uh mysterious man shows up at my office mind you. I was in the maybe early 20s, maybe late teens. He's got an uh a duffel bag with a million dollars in cash and an invitation to go to Japan, to Tokyo on a private plane. What do you do? I went turns out that the mob was interested in taking over my company, maybe not the best move. Maybe maybe it was an okay movie. And there were several moments of self-doubt. I mean I could have potentially been killed. So there was a lot of that.

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.

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.

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.

It's always So much easier when you sit with friends and laugh about them. Yeah, you know, it all seems so serious when you're alone, and it's just you, but when you with people who you love people who you trust, it's different, it's different, it's a different feeling. So, you know, I know, you know, as being a man, it's great to be around other men that are doing great things.

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.

I was making pills for 25 cents and selling them for 20 dollars all day long but it just goes to your point of that attitude where I didn’t give a. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t chasing the money.