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. Where do you see vaping moving in the future? Do you think that inhalation is going to be a means of delivery for other things like medications, I've seen one vape that was caffeine, right? Yeah, I spent a lot of time building this technology for pharma companies as well. All the big pharma companies, all the big tobacco companies were very interested and I've built several iterations of vaporizers using sound sonic technology.

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, when people look at you and they look at successes, they think oh, the road to success is easy and or it's not riddled with challenges or obstacles. And that's all it's riddled with and so much self-doubt. You brought it up at a perfect time so much self-doubt in the impossible all you heard was possible, but you took that on as a challenge whatever lit that fire under your butt to say, yeah I'll show them and a lot of great successes that I've had on the show were challenged that they couldn't do it, and they wanted to just show the world you're wrong, I'm right. I can do it. But you give such hope to any entrepreneur willing to hustle.

And I am a huge fan of the law. I love law um and all things related to it and when I had started my first company and we can go into the story. You know, I created a billion dollars worth of revenue in my teens, creating this legal version of an illegal drug. And I remember there was a time when lawsuits were just flying and I didn't realize I thought you would have to wrong somebody to get a lawsuit. I was wrong because there were all these vulture lawyers. And this was at a time when the employment practices laws were coming into place. So there were all these people who I never met, who I had never had any transacting with, who were suing me. And I remember. And this kind of goes into my whole philosophy about hacking life.

Great question! I think one of the best ones is trust but verify. I had another teacher of mine. This writer named Stuart Wilde, who became a mentor of mine for some time always said don't play your hunch. It'll have your lunch. I'm not sure if that was his quote but it made sense. He taught us a lot of the fundamental principles of money through playing blackjack. Believe it or not, he felt that life and business were very much like a casino and if you could learn how to master that type of interaction you'd be able to handle business. So we did a lot of work inside casinos where we went to casinos and learned how to gamble and play blackjack and I have a friend, who's still an instructor under he was understeer wild he learned how to play blackjack and poker and all those games.

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.

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.

We talk about in my book Billion, how I became king of the throw pill cult - a three-step plan, which feeds in nicely to this and it's something a friend of mine Wayne Boss taught us, which is knowledge, courage, and action. When you are faced with a problem, a challenge, a project that needs to be undertaken, you need to know. Knowledge can be bought, knowledge can be borrowed, knowledge can be stolen, knowledge can be rented. Okay, in my case, I went out there, I rented it, I talked to people. I didn't have money, but I convinced them to give me that knowledge.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on amazon I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often. This is one of the biggest mistakes that people make in life also. I think it's just going into something with some knowledge thinking that you don't need to learn the fundamentals because it's like that adage you know the one of the students who goes to the master and he and the master's pouring tea and he goes oh master will you teach me and the master has the tea kettle and he pours the tea into his cup and the tea pours over and fills the table and he goes hey what are you doing um and he says I can't teach you and he says why can't you teach me he says because your cup's already full come back when your cup's empty.

It's true. There's no participation prize in the real world. There's no participation prize on Amazon, you don't get an honorable mention for having good intentions. So you have to go out there ready to crush and if you can't handle that, get a job, go work for someone and sell or be a socialist. There are plenty of countries that would love to have you as a socialist, you know, and I know there's a whole political movement of like, oh, everybody should be free and give the money away and feed the homeless and you know what? Get three kids and start an Amazon business. See how socialist you are? You won't be that socialist once you have written your checks. Go read Ein Rand the fountain header atlas shrugged and let's see if your philosophy doesn't change a little bit.

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.

Think what's exciting about this conversation of aggregators is before this became a thing where the stock market was pushing money saying go buy companies and roll them up, you had to go find a suitor. You had to go find a similar company, a bigger company in your niche and say hey, look I got a soap your biggest soap seller. Let's buy my company.

Everything is possible. I truly believe that not just as a meme but somebody said if you believe you can or if you believe you can't you're right and so a lot of that comes down to mindset and the better question maybe is the mindset still possible and the answer is of course yes. Things change with time.

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.

But as a personality type, wealth comes in all ways. Um, there's a great great guy named Roger Hamilton. We need to have him on the show. He has a wealth dynamics test and he uses some of these archetypes to explain the wealth and what's interesting about studying Edison or Oprah or Branson is they have different personality types and me being an expert on personality mostly through handwriting and NLP is that you know I originally thought oh personality type is how I get wealthy but when you meet people that are complete introverts and they're still wealthy it makes you think oh maybe it's the strategy, not another personality type.

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.

Don’t lean in you know when you go into the world being like dude I’m gonna make a million dollars and I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna get the most beautiful girl. The guys that talk like that think like that guys and girls that talk like that think like that they never get it. It’s pushed further and further away from them.