What does knowledge do? Knowledge gives you courage. Knowledge, Courage, Action. Once you know how to jump out of a plane with a parachute, it's not as scary as if you're just jumping out and you have no idea what thing to pull or what to do. That takes us to the third pillar - action. You could have knowledge and courage, but if you do not take action, nothing happens. You have to be able to fail to succeed.

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.

Most CEOs that are where they're at, we tend to think that people that are CEOs are these people that have gone to school and done you know the things by the book and they come out like this no and I teach this all the time to my students, my students in my amazon course is that those guys are the smartest in the room for a reason and that reason is not that they've played by the rules. The reason is they didn't think outside the box. They crushed the box. These are real next-level thinkers.

I don't think there's any key ingredient. I don't think there's anyone thing, you got to have grit, you got to have resilience, you got to be able, the one thing I would say that's key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches, you got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my amazon fba seller course, the people who come through my amazon mastery course. The ones that come in with the attitude of hey, I'm going to throw my chips on the table and I'm gonna see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it'll land on one of my numbers, those are the ones that fail. I haven't had anybody fail yet by the way.

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.

The problem is a lot of the stuff has become highly marketed by a lot of the self-help gurus that are out now. So they want you to think that having a passion drive and mindset is what you need. No, that's not what you need. You need to do the work, you need to roll up your sleeves, and do the work. That's what you do. That's what works, what works is doing the work getting out there. And you know, if you're a real estate agent, knocking on doors, and you know, meeting people in your neighborhood, and building your network, and calling the banks and doing whatever those things are that agents and brokers do, but it's just doing the work. There's nothing more effective than doing that.

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.

A friend of mine used to say wealth is better made quietly and I learned that the second and third time around, believe me, I learned that after making hundreds of millions of dollars and losing hundreds of millions of dollars and having to reinvent myself several times over. I learned that it's better that way. And, you know, the people that have the real wealth, you might not ever even hear about them. They're not out there, you know, shining the shiny things or chasing the shiny things because they're too busy making money.

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.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. So if you're more experienced at selling on Amazon, you're going to spend some time helping the guy that's just coming on to the course, if you're just coming onto the course, you're going to learn. And then once you've learned a little bit, you're going to help the other guys, but you start building a network.

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.

So now you're going to go buy $1,000 worth of product from distributor A This MLM. And for those of you guys who don't know, it's multi-level marketing effectively. And I hope I'm not offending anybody involved in multi-level marketing, but many people do believe that it is very similar to a Ponzi scheme. Because the people at the top of the pyramid, make money, every time product is sold down the line.

You can own your store with inventory, but you own 100%, if you become a distributor for $5,000, to some Amway, or Herbalife, you have a bunch of stuff that you didn't have before in your garage. But you just don't know if that's going to sell if you it's your thing, it's at your bag, all of a sudden, your front-loaded these products, and I have found more people than not can't sell those things. You're not buying a business, you're buying permission to be a salesperson. So you're paying money to have a job. So tread lightly on those business opportunities. But when you're putting your own money in your brand, now you're a real business owner.

I don't think electric cars should be categorized in the same category as cars. I think they are an appliance. When you drive a Tesla, that thing is so scary fast and so perfect and so smooth you go into the compartment but what it lacks in my opinion I'm probably gonna get hate mail. A lot of people hate me for this. But it lacks soul, it lacks the soul of having that clutch, it lacks that imperfection that comes from years of like up engineering from like Italian guys and Germany that are like you know they're greasing the things. These are appliances made by tech companies that are perfect at doing what they do. They are surgical. Their speed is you know uncomparable. So what you're facing now is an industry that is facing a crisis and being disrupted by an appliance and I think that's

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.

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.

I always tell people to look, if you can take cash off the table as much cash as you can get, my recommendation for amazon sellers is, if you get aggregators or if you get into a position where you can create a bidding war bidding frenzy like happens with a lot of our companies and brands that we sell.

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.

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.