How do I get that? They laughed and they said, well, you know son, what all immigrant families want for their kids is the pinnacle height of success than we could ever reach. To be a doctor. Dad thought for a minute. And he said the only way is to become a doctor. You have to go become a doctor. Look at Mr. Rafsanjani down the street. He is a doctor. He has beans, he has a house, be like him. All right, cool. Let's do that. I want to be a doctor. How do you be a doctor? It's nice. You have to cut people up. You get money, you get all that. And then I looked at the dude, and I was like, man, that dude is bald, that dude is fat. He is a bundle of nerves.

Yeah, I think what was a library of Alexandria? Or it was in one of those great books. I think that one of the great philosophers who wrote about Latin is saying "nothing season". I'm probably butchering that which means know thyself and it's one of the most profound things. You think why did they put this in all these, like amazing places? Why was this such an important saying? Because ultimately success in life in my opinion comes from self-reflection. Everything is about self-reflection. When you find people that are that when you find people that have a particular trait of being successful it's not that they just fell into that and got lucky. It's because they've reflected. When you look at people that are self-realized self-realization comes through self-reflection.

That's why 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.

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.

Yeah, I'm an absolute failure at the majority of things. I do in life bad at 99.9 of things that I do. There's point one percent that I'm really good, probably better than most people on the planet, but the rest of the stuff - absolute failure. The wife makes fun of me. I can't drive a nail through a piece of wood. I'm good at hiring people and your example of engineering is a really good example of that. You can buy engineers, you can buy a guy that's been MIT-trained that's picked of. What do you get to pay the guy, 300 grand a year, 500 grand a year, even a million dollars a year for a rocket scientist. You find.

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.

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.

You've gotta have swiftness. You have to have efficiency. You have to be able to be okay with confrontation. You have to be okay having thick skin. You have to be okay in your case having trolls. Some people are going to hate you. Some people are not going to like you. It doesn't matter. You have to be on rails moving towards the destination and the best way to do that is as you've very well discovered my friend is by not taking it seriously.

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.

And what we teach is that nobody wins by playing the game the way they tell you to play it. Big resellers, e-commerce giants like Amazon, I teach this course called amazon mastery where I teach people how to make predictable recurring revenue on the amazon platform. I teach people how to find products, sell them on the Amazon platform and what they want you to believe is they want you to believe that if you are a good little boy Joseph Jaffe and you follow their rules you are going to be just fine.

Life is about luck but it's not what you think. Luck can be created and it's about being in the flow. Uh, a great author uh Chikset Mihai who recently passed away just a few days ago wrote the great book Flow and he talks about the amazing synchronicities that could potentially happen when you're in the flow. I've been lucky my whole life, but I believe that I have created my luck.

But if you go to a restaurant and you're not happy, ask for the manager. You will be amazed at how far they will go out of their way to help you out. Smile. Always smile. Don't be aggressive. People are uncomfortable with tension. So it's not going to be to your advantage in these situations to create tension most of the time. So don't have tension. Just smile. Maybe start with a compliment. You know what, I know that the waiter is working their butt off tonight, I can see how busy you guys are and I just got to tell you those bread rolls that you brought us were spectacular, but we've been waiting 45 minutes for our food and I just wanted to know if there's anything you might be able to do for us.

Resilience. People are going to try to knock you down. People will put you down but it's how many times you get up when that failure happens and also there is an element to it of not giving an about what people think of you. You cannot care what other people think. Other people's opinions only matter if they coincide with your belief structure and your reality distortion field.

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.

Do not work in a vacuum. What I mean by that is that there are people out there in the world, who have done what you want to do and you can find these people and incentivize them to work with you. Incentivize them to help you, to coach you, to train you, to get what they want. I think your podcast is about fitness yeah? So if you want to become fit, very interesting. So I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm a student beginner um but I've been training for some years now and my philosophy with martial arts and I've done martial arts for a lot of years is if you want to learn, you find somebody who's at a much higher level and is where you want to be and once you learn how that person got where they are, ask them to mentor you. Ask them to coach you and get at that level with them. Train at their level.

Uh, Walter Isaacson, who wrote the great uh autobiography, sorry not autobiography, the great biography of Steve Jobs talks about how Steve Jobs would walk into a room and he would say, all right guys, uh we're going to need and this was in the early 90s. We're going to need a phone and you're going to be able to touch the screen. Before this, all phones had buttons and there'll be no buttons on this phone and it'll do all these things. It'll have an iPod on it, it'll play music, it'll do all these things. It didn't exist and the engineers would say okay cool, Steve Jobs awesome. Okay, amazing. We could have this for you in the next three to five years. He'd be very cute. 30 days I'm going on stage to announce it. Make it work and he would leave and they would all be sitting there going oh my god what an and what just happened. We just agreed to do this and they would do it and he would make it happen.

People who do impossible things and leaders are generally broad-stroke guys, and I mean by that part is that they don't tend to get overwhelmed by the details. The people who are generally not hugely successful are far more concerned about the specialization and the this and the that and the little details of things, which is why rocket scientists aren't the wealthiest people in the world.

The only hack that works is hard work. The only hack that works is getting out there and failing. Seeking failure and getting out there and making a mess of things so that you learn and then slowly picking yourself up dusting yourself off and doing it a little better each time until you no longer fail and then what you have to do is you have to perfect it. You have to make sure that the total size of your successes outweighs the size of your failures and then you're okay and then you're winning in life.

The world is predatory. All you got to do is look at nature. Things don't work the way that we always want them to. So making money and I make a lot more now that I get to keep than I did back then because I was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, is mainly because I don't publicize everything that I do. That I'm quieter about the things that I do and the real people the guys that are making the billions and billions of dollars don't always end up on the Forbes top 10 top 100 list.

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?