Hack & Grow Rich Episode 4: Control and Perspective

 SUMMARY KEYWORDS

failure, japan, perspective, give, ecstasy, producing, thought, facilities, huge success, batch, control, product, pills, manufacturing facility, fail, millions, talk, letter, huge setback, yakuza

SPEAKERS

Shaahin Cheyene

Shaahin Cheyene  00:00

Failure is absolutely one of my favorite topics to talk about. Why because we live in a society where everybody is chasing, they're chasing money. They're chasing things. They're chasing material objects. But what they're not chasing is discomfort. And it's really discomfort that brings us to discipline and the discipline is what makes us succeed, even when we fail. And I'll give you an example of something really interesting. When I was in my 20s, during the herbal ecstasy days, there would be huge success all around. And we talked about this about being in the flow and kind of when you're in that buzz, and in that moment, you kind of find your your flow state, in life in your career, you're in the flow state, and people are attracted to you, deals come to you, you're in an amazing space, it doesn't mean that you won't fail. And in every step of the way, there's lots of failures. What happens is people that are extremely successful, they will forget the failures. But they will remember the lessons from those failures. So I'm sure you've heard, if you lose, don't lose the lesson, if you fail, don't fail on the learning. These things are self evident. But when you're in it, a failure could seem like a huge setback. And I'm going to give you this example, during the ecstasy days. So we had every three letter agency in the world after us, I wasn't playing ball, they wanted us to pay a fine and to sign a settlement agreement and to agree that we're going to behave. But I refused, I did not want to play their games. And in retrospect, I should have been more cooperative, because it would have made things easier on the governing agencies and the people governing and they would have cut me some slack. And I would have made even more money. But I was a rebellious spirit, as most people in their teens and early 20s are. And I had a lot of power, and a lot of ego at that time and a lot of money. So I just did not give a you know what? So one time, we got to notice that we were actually putting real drugs in our products, which was absolutely false. We produce the products at major facilities. But I got concerned, I got concerned that maybe somebody in the facilities was setting us up, maybe somebody in the government was setting us up who knows, everybody was after me, or it seemed like everybody was after me at the time. Big Pharma was after me government was after me. Politicians wanted me gone. Even the people in the supplement industry, were not delighted with the fact that we exist in and we're bringing attention to an industry that was largely unregulated, for the last 50 plus years. So we hire an independent lab and some people to investigate. And they investigate this one manufacturer now mind you, at this time, or Flexi was being produced at five or six different facilities, we were making millions, maybe hundreds of millions of pills. And we were producing them on a daily basis daily, millions of pills would be coming out of these manufacturing facilities and being

 03:30

we had to have multiple areas. And I was also thinking, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket, spread it out. So we were producing the stuff all over the world and a different manufacturing facility. So our attention came to one new facility that we were using, whose price was lower than all the other ones high cost of low price. And we had that batch analyze I thought oh my god, what if they actually put real drugs in there because the official letter from the government said hey, you know, we suspect that you know, there might be real drugs in there. And as it turns out, there were no real drugs in there. Quite to the contrary, what had actually happened was that they had not put any ingredients in there. They had used carrot powder, no ephedra and no caffeine, none of the active ingredients that gave it that ecstasy like quality, just carrot powder. And we were foolish enough to not test it because it was such a good deal and the guy was so nice and everything was so great and we were so happy that we just accepted it at face value. Now we pulled the product and through most of it away and made them give us a refund. Our attorneys wrote them a letter, but a huge batch of that product. In animal shapes, by the way, got shipped to Japan. Now here's the crazy part about that. We got a call from our distributor that we need to talk. And this was my distributor in Japan at the time. And we were mortified because this is millions of dollars of business, this stuff had swept through Japan, we were at all the concerts and parties and raves, and in every vending machine and store and we were big business in Japan, oh, my God, what are we going to do? So we thought up some strategies, we got the man on the phone. And he was very calm and very polite, but also a little bit excited. And I thought, okay, here it goes. And he let us know that this was the single best batch he had ever received. He doesn't know what we did differently. But can we please make all the batches the exact same way because people are having the most amazing experience. Now think about it. I thought this was a huge failure, I thought we were going to lose the business in Japan. I was absolutely devastated. But that was just my perspective. in any situation, one of my mentors taught me that you got to have two things, control and perspective. And in this particular situation, I had lost control because the pills had left and people were already buying them. But I had also lost my perspective, I had no idea what this man was going to say on the other end of the phone, nor that I could spin it to a positive nor that any other wide range of things that could have happened at that time happened. I just naturally assumed that this was a failure. But it wasn't. And we turned it into huge success. We said, Yeah, look, we're really sorry. Unfortunately, we can't make that formula. But we'll make one better for you. And we just rolled with it. And he rolled with it. And people loved it. And the product did really well over the years. And there's a great story that will share about the Yakuza or Japanese mafia at that time. And some of our dealings with them. That's a great episode. So make sure you listen to that one as well.

 Shaahin Cheyene  07:36

But it leads me to really contemplate the meaning of failure. And oftentimes, it's not as impactful on our world, on the physical world that we operate in, as it is on our perspective. So when you find yourself in a situation where it seems like failure, the two things you want to do immediately is seek a way of getting control and a way of changing your perspective. So in lieu of control, you can gain perspective. And when you do that, when you gain perspective, and you gain control and control can be very simple. It could be writing in a journal, it could be calling a friend, that could also give you perspective, it could be taking one action to making sure that thing does not ever happen again. But once you have that, you will notice your entire mind frame changing, your entire mindset will change. In the absence of control, perspective alone will make a huge difference. But ultimately, you want control and perspective in any of these situations. Okay, we'll see on the next episode.

Links, audio podcast, and more:

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/ShaahinCheyene

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shaahincheyene/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/shaahincheyene

Twitter - https://twitter.com/shaahincheyene