It's Never Too Late with Shaahin Cheyenne TB 2022

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Okay, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I'll tell you what, I am really excited today. We've got a special guest. I'm gonna intro him here in a minute, but. The goal here is I wanna give you some cutting edge stuff, man.

I wanna give you some stuff to really help you take it to the next level. And so let me do a quick introduction for those of you that do not know. Shahin Cheyenne. He's an award-winning entrepreneur, writer, filmmaker. We're gonna get into some cool stuff with him because he's currently the founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence, which is a, it's a major Amazon, FBA seller, millions of dollars in sales.

He does mentoring for entrepreneurs on how to crush it with the Amazon platform, but he is also an active YouTuber. If you've seen him there before he is considered one of the leading minds when it comes to e-commerce and Amazon in fact. The London Observer. I thought it was interesting.

The London Observer and Newsweek have described Shahin as the Willy Wonka of Generation X and one of the most forward thinkers in business. But for me, what was most impressive about your background?

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Shahin Cheyenne's Early Life and Struggles

You know that during the Iranian revolution of 78, your family had to escape to survive, and you ended up in LA and at 15 left home with nothing but the clothes on your back to and ultimately created by 20 a billion dollars in revenue in in sales with this smart drug you invented the herbal ecstasy deal.

And, I know that you've said that these childhood experiences and major things in your life have impacted your entrepreneurial journey, but that is his background and I'm super excited to, to be able to talk to you today. So Shahin, welcome to the show, George. It's my honor. Thank you for having me on.

Well, listen, man I think sometimes I'll get, 'cause I've met a lot of thought leaders over the years and celebrities, experts and things, and I get some pretty crazy stories. But your story started out just out there, and I, myself, I got right outta high school at 17, had twins, got married, so I went right into the workforce.

So it was a couple of years lagging behind you, but. I would love to just start with you elaborating a little bit on your background and how that kind of all went down. Because obviously there was a big jump from, leaving home with nothing but the clothes on your back at 15 to inventing something that would turn into a billion dollars in revenue.

Talk to me about your background and that we can get into some strategies here in a minute. Yeah, so refugees, immigrants, we came from Iran during a time when Iran was in turmoil. And we came through Germany to the United States, and my folks were solid middle class, upper middle class in Tehran, Iran.

When we moved to the United States, all of a sudden we were poor. My dad worked at Pizza, pizza Place. He worked at a dry cleaners. Wow. And they managed to work hard enough for enough years to buy a house, a fixer in an area that was down on its luck at the time. Turns out that area became quickly gentrified during Reaganomics in the 1980s.

Wow. Trickle down economics. People start moving to Los Angeles and we're hanging around this neighborhood. Still very poor. But I'm starting to notice, and mind you, I did not speak very much English at all. Oh, I was gonna ask you. Okay. I didn't speak very much English, and I'm starting to notice Farsi is my mother tongue.

I'm starting to look around and see all this wealth and I remember asking my folks, Hey, how do I get to that level of success? I want the Ferrari, I want the beautiful blonde next to me. I want, the big houses and all that stuff. How do I get that? And my parents being immigrants only knew one way.

Be a doctor, go talk to Mr. Teron down the street, he's doctor. And I thought okay, let me go check that guy out. And then when I looked at that guy, I was like, that fucker's fat. He's old, he's bald. The kids are old, fat and bald. The wife is old, fat and bald. Everyone's fucking miserable. And like the bank owns his house, he's got no free time.

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The Birth of an Entrepreneur

If that's like what happens, I'm fucking out and I packed my bags and I left. Now I had some success in grade school. Grade school was not without its merits for me. I ran a very lucrative criminal enterprise. In grade school where I managed to gather up all the kids that had something wrong with them, all the kids that didn't belong, all the misfits.

And I started a little gang where we would walk into the liquor stores and we were just kids. And one of the kids was a little Greek kid. He would slide under the metal detectors. We had metal detectors in those days. Wow. And he would grab all the little bottles of liquor, the cigarettes, the Nudie magazines, penthouse, Playboy, hustler, whatever we could sell.

And we would sell it at school. I quickly realized to myself that I was really good at sales. I was really good at marketing. I was really good at making money. I was terrible at being a fucking criminal. I was really bad at crime because we would get caught 110% of the time. I would get caught for stuff I didn't do, and I remember being in detention.

Which by the way, was very profitable. 'cause who's in detention? Oh, of course. All the ones, your clients, all your clients are sitting there thinking to myself, man, like this crime thing really should not be for me. There's probably people that are good at crime. I am not one of them.

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From Raves to Herbal Ecstasy

Fast forward, I am now 15.

I left home. I'm involved in the electronic music scene. I get involved in the rave scene. Yeah. I'm sleeping in the backseat of a abandoned car. I'm sleeping in abandoned buildings. I learned that you can make friends with brokers and get the lock keys before the buildings are finished building, and you can slide in and sleep in 'em and then slide out before they catch you in those days.

So that was where I would say I would go to the community college where they would have free food sampling during the week, and that's what I would eat. And I found a mentor. I got in the electronic music scene and I realized that the only people making money in that scene in those days were not the DJs.

Nobody cared about people who played other people's music. Even though DJs had popularity, they were broke, wasn't the landowners. Most of those warehouses were broken into or borrowed and. People didn't really drink that much in those days in the rave scene. So it was the drug dealers. I thought, perfect.

That's exactly what I want. It's quick. Those guys have money. They got the girls, they got the cars. That's exactly what I need to do. And then I looked back at my life of adolescent crime and thought to myself, think again, dude. I'll never make it. Yeah, you definitely don't wanna be in the business of crime, not you.

And then it occurred to me what's the biggest drug right now? It's ecstasy. MDMA, Molly. Methyl dioxide, methamphetamine. And I thought what if there was a natural way? What if I created a natural version of this? And that's what I did. And I remember finding myself in a club with the first batch that I made, basically in the kitchen of a girlfriend that I had to let me sneak in.

To her house when her dad left and cook the stuff up, cook up my prototypes in her kitchen, and I was at the club. I had these baggies filled with these goof filled balls. I didn't have the machine to buy the, I didn't have enough money to buy the machine that put 'em into capsules. And I remember walking into the club, there was this, nowadays if you have tattoos on your face, you become TikTok famous back.

Yeah. Tattoos are a norm now. They're the norm. Back then in the eighties, if you had tattoos on your face, you'd be clinically insane. People would not allow you in indoors if you had tattoos on your face. So I remember the guy, the drug dealer he was the biggest XC dealer at the time. He had the whole grill teeth thing.

He had these kind of rough but good looking girls behind him. He had bodyguards and he had tattoos on his face, down his neck. And I came forward and he said, look, kid, fuck off. I don't have any drugs. The supply and demand huge demand for ecstasy. The supply had dried out because of the Reaganomics, the just saying no, all that stuff.

Most of it was being made in the UK and Holland, and the supply had stopped coming into the United States. And I said I don't wanna buy any drugs. He said, are you a cop? I said no, not a cop. I'm just a kid. He said, what the fuck do you want? I said, sell my stuff. And my feet. I could feel them being glued to the ground.

I wasn't gonna move. And I remember thinking to myself, this is probably one of the stupidest things you've ever done, and you likely are going to get killed. And I remember waiting the two hours it took for when, once he finally accepted to sell my stuff that evening. And it was very fortuitous.

Two people walked up to him. They were trying to give him money, he was throwing it back at them. He finally got pissed, grabbed my entire backpack and gave him a pack of mine, told me to come back in a couple hours. I was sweating bullets. I was now thinking, what are all the excuses I could use for this guy not to kill me?

And in two hours I came back. Sweating bullets, nervous as all Hell, he was just looking at me. I don't think he had very many expressions. Yeah. So I couldn't tell if he wanted to kill me or if he was happy and then he just leans over and says, kid, when can you get me more? And it went from one guy to a thousand guys to 10,000 guys.

We became, we legitimized a lot of these drug dealers who had, this is like 15 to 20 years old, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was, and I have a question for you and, but I'm gonna, but I. Before I ask my question, I'm gonna pause. 'cause I know that there's, there's a lot of people probably listening to the story with, besides the fact that it's completely entertaining and they're going, okay, George what?

What's the point here? And here's the point. And the reason I want you guys to start listening more is that success leaves clues. Look, I could go on and on about, I. Shaheen how? Like you had nothing, you hustled, you did whatever you had to do. We're obviously, we're not promoting drugs and things, but that's not the point here.

You guys gotta listen to the fact that he was determined, he was recognizing certain things, he was persistent. But one of the questions I was gonna ask you is I. What gave you this sense of, from moving to the United States right, and everything, this constant sense of what looking for success and why that didn't appeal to you being a doctor but why doing this did or being on your own, what were you when you grew up, were your parents like instilling in you this idea that you wanted to be successful?

Or do you think you just 'cause I'm not a big believer that people are just born wanting to be successful. It's usually a product of their environment. What is it that really gave you that drive, do you think? Yeah, so that's two parts. That's a great question. George, so the first part to that question is I came up in the third world.

Where we are not entitled to anything. Nothing is guaranteed and you have to fight to survive where I came from. So things were a little different and things were different when I grew up, when we came to this country. I didn't speak a lick of English and I got my ass kicked twice. One for being a little Jewish kid, and two for being a little Iranian kid.

And it was the worst time to be either of those things. So grown, grown up in school. I had my ass handed to me daily. I thought that's what happened at school. You would get your ass kicked. That's what you go for. You go to get an ass kick. And you'd tell the teachers and they'd be like, what did you do?

That would be the, that would be the answer. That's what it was like in the eighties. We didn't have anti-bullying. We didn't have any of that stuff, and I really believe to this day that built grit. I'm thankful for those experiences. Yeah, because it built thick skin. It built grit, it built resilience, which now I feel, yeah, now I feel is a really a foundation for who I am.

The second part was I started reading early, after I got my ass kicked daily on the playgrounds. I decided I'm gonna take to books and I read Napoleon Hill, I read the early Tony Robbins books, Wayne Dyer. I was deep, deep into personal development. I read Manino, I read, yeah, Richard Bach and.

And all these great writers, those old timey writers that wrote about success. And I don't know how much of those guys, what they said was bullshit and how much of it was real. And there's all this controversy around Napoleon Hill and those guys and that's fine, but it created your frame of mind for sure.

That's right. It created a mindset for me that was possible. So later in life, as I approached more and more success, I started reaching out to writers. I started reaching out to personal development writers, business writers, and making 'em my friends and started working with them on some of these concepts of success, which I, to this day carry with me.

It's great that you say it that way too, because I wanted to point out, like I said earlier success leaves clues. And here I've noticed, and Gary V talks about it a lot as well, but, individuals that have had to immigrate or come from Third world they recognize opportunities that many people are just, so when, not only don't see the opportunity, but they certainly don't take advantage of opportunity right now.

And then that other point you made, which I really loved, is. That you early on started this process of personal development, reading mentors. 'cause you mentioned earlier you got a mentor, this mentoring and going right for it. And especially with millennials now, I think one of the reasons success comes seemingly easier for a lot of 'em is because they don't have the baggage.

They have creativity and resilience and. Optimism, and that's the, so not recognizing opportunities and optimism, those are huge, criteria for being successful. So I really love that's happened with you. And so lead me into what, as you kind of transition, I. Obviously you were a young entrepreneur.

I, I was the same way, man. I was like, I was slinging like I would go, I get into a lot of detail, but I would get stuff, I would sell it at school right outta my duffle bag and from the lemonade stands to the slinging at school to whatever. But there was a point in time where you probably transitioned into.

Kind of where you are now, this entrepreneurial CEO business entrepreneur sense and bridge me into what you're doing now. What, was there a pivot or did it gradually just go into the realm of Amazon and some of the amazing things you do now? Or was there a story or a point in time that transitioned you?

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The Billion Dollar Success Story

Yeah, I'll tell you a great story. So now. All these drug dealers became legitimized. They had official businesses, they bought territories, they got distributorships. We are in 32,000 retail stores franchises. Wow. We were in Urban Outfitters, warehouse Music. Larry Flint got us through all the sex stores and all the hustler stores.

So our product was in 30, 32,000 doors. Retail. This is pre-internet. I get the news that we broke a billion dollars in revenue. Sam Donaldson wanted was outside wanting me to be on Nightline. I did that show, it's on YouTube. I was on Monte Williams, two Newsweek covers LA Times, London Observer, all that stuff.

I had an exotic car collection, a collection, Lamborghini's, Ferrari. I got the brand new NSX, one of the best ones I bought at that time. Boats, planes, all that stuff. Flying, hanging around with celebrities, big parties, all that stuff. And I remember six months before this happened very fast. I was sleeping in the backseat of an abandoned Lincoln Continental with the pages of Think and Grow Rich taped to the ceiling with as much tape as I could afford.

Wow. With a flashlight reading them every single night until I fell asleep. Now. Fast forward. Six months later, I decided I always wanted a red Ferrari. They're not Red George. It's Rosa Corso. Rosa Corso, Ferrari's racing color. Don't call it red. Of course. The salesman made it very clear that if I said red, he was not going to sell it to me.

And to buy a Ferrari, you must have had a Ferrari. So I went through all those loops. They don't just sell you one oh G, and it was red. And I can smell the leather. It's that soft Italian lambskin leather. And I'm driving now with a beautiful model supermodel next to me, to one of the fanciest restaurants in Los Angeles.

It was unlike West Hollywood Beverly Hills area. And we pull up, the paparazzi come out. Who is it? Is it an actor, a football player? Oh, no it's the Ecstasy kid. They're taking pictures now. Six months before I had a shitty job at a copy shop. These places called Kinko's. We have to do a little bit of de young explaining George.

'cause people don't know exactly what shops are, don't. But these were shops where you went to get photocopies made. And I remember that because I didn't have a place to live and the guy knew that I didn't have a place to live, I would catch two hours of sleep on my breaks behind the copy machine 'cause it was warm.

You'd hear the buzz and the sound of the machine making the copies of put me to sleep for a couple hours and I'd get back and go to work on my own time. The boss who was like this cartoon villain of a human being, I swear to God most he was monopoly guy, ring incarnated with a mustache and he always smelled and he had this cane comes, catches me in the back, starts hitting me with the cane, kicks me out of the store.

I never got paid for the week for him. It was nothing for me that was eating that week. I never got paid. I'm in this brand new Ferrari, just like movie cliche. Throw the keys to the valley. The guy catches it with a smile, says, living the dream. I'll park, dream, I'll park it right out front. The beautiful girl gets out 12 inch high heels, gorgeous, short skirt, all that stuff to my right, like everybody staring at her.

Everybody's staring at me. I look out the corner of my eye. Who do you think I see George, that boss. It's the cartoon villain boss. Yeah. And he does a take and he does another take, and he starts turning red. I've never seen a human being turn red like that, like red. And I tell the girl, hang on a sec, I walk up and he can't get a word out of his mouth, can get a word out of his mouth.

He can't believe what he's seen. And then I mentioned my name. Remember me? It's Shahin and I mentioned his name. I'm not gonna say it on the show. And he starts getting increasingly more mad and I shake my hand and he's got all these questions, but he can't get words out. He's so furious. And I say, excuse me, I have to go.

I walk back in the restaurant, girl comes on my hand, the valet smiles and points at me, people taking pictures, and I turn my head and I remember success leaves clues. But success is also the best revenge. Oh yeah. Success is the greatest revenge and the feeling that I had in that moment, knowing that we had broken a billion dollars in sales, knowing that this little guy that had kicked me and hit me with a cane six months earlier and neglected to pay me my few hundred bucks, now is witnessing me at the pinnacle of my success was the moment that I knew I arrived.

Yeah, it's interesting because it goes to show that, at the same token I've known people that have had success happen so quickly that didn't do the growth behind it. And everything just fell apart. But it really shows that I. Things can happen. You had a pretty wild ride.

Pretty crazy story, but I think that probably because it happened so fast that cemented for you this whole idea of arriving, but yet it seems like it really pushed you then further into.

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Transition to E-commerce and Amazon

That world of entrepreneurship because from there on, you just, you have just dominated things and so what kind of pushed you the direction of e-commerce and is that your primary focus that you have right now as the e-commerce world?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Herbal XC was a whirlwind and by the way, anybody that's. Interested in the story. The book is out now. You can get the audible book or the hardcover paperback Kindle on Amazon, so check it out. It's called Billion. How I Became King of the Thrill Pill Cult Would love it if you guys That's awesome, me, great.

Review or lead Me, we'll put a link in the show notes as well. Yeah, interesting. Yeah and probably a, a crazy wild story too, so I'll have to check that out. But. Yeah. Wow. We just got a film deal for it that I'm very excited to see realized. Wow. From there, I went on to creating all the technology for digital vaporization, all the vapes, all the e-cigs, all that stuff evolved from technology that I built, design patented that company went public.

I sold it a little bit before. And I started looking at this little guy, this little kind of like bald, nerdy guy with a funny laugh. You might have heard of him. His name was Jeff Bezos. Still is Jeff Bezos. Yep. And Bezos had launched this platform that was squeaking along. It was okay. It was losing money.

And I remember thinking to myself what's up with this? And back in those days, you could get Jeff Bezos on the phone. You could email him jeff@amazon.com. He would respond. I remember thinking maybe there's more to this guy than meets the eye. We heard through the grapevine that Jeff was opening up the Amazon platform to third party sellers.

That means anybody like me and you could sell anything virtually. Now this was when what? When was this? Do you remember? Like the years? This was like 2009. 2009 ish. Ish. Around then. So I thought to myself, man, cool. Meanwhile, I had a crazy party at one of my houses in Venice Beach, California.

If you guys haven't been, come visit us. And Bradley Cooper was there. The famed actor. And we were having a great time with him, a great conversation. He later went on to make that movie Limitless. Limitless, which just great. If you guys haven't seen it, go check it out. Love that. Yeah. And I remember thinking to myself, huh, what was the, what's the link between that?

Me talking to Bradley Cooper, him making that film makes you wonder me, the pill business. And then I thought, you know what? I'm gonna make the fucking limitless pill. That's what I'm gonna do. And I was working with one of the big pharma companies at the time who hired me from time to do some work for them.

And I came up with a pill that I thought would work really fucking well, but it was expensive. Making supplements is very expensive to make 'em work. Yeah. Yeah, usually what in supplements, when you buy them is there's a million ingredients, and they do that for SEO by search engine optimization.

Much more than they do for your benefit. So everybody, you're al almost always better off buying single ingredient supplements because they can't put a bunch of random shit in there. Anyway, that's another story. So I. I came up with a supplement called Excel Roll, another one called Focus Plus.

They're still available on Amazon, but they were super expensive in that, in those days it was $120 a month for your supply of this stuff. So I thought to myself, man, lemme just throw this up on Amazon. Took 15 minutes to open a seller account and put it up. Bezos was brilliant. It's setting up the platform.

Very few barriers to entry. In the early days, we were one of the first sellers on there. Went to sleep, didn't think much. Woke up the next morning. Looked at the sales and I thought, man, there must be an error here.

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Recognizing Opportunity: The Bezos Story

Those are thousands of orders at $120, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I said, what the fuck?

And I looked at it, I was like, no, it's not a mistake. And then I looked a little bit more into this bezo sky and I realized this was not a chump. This was not a guy who was like this giggly Silicon Valley nerd that everybody was looking at. This is a disruptor. Yeah. Also is somebody that everybody underestimated.

With the exception of a few. Nobody recognizes it until it happens, but opportunity happens by recognizing it. Yeah, you absolutely did. Yeah. Yeah. And what Bezos did was he took cheap money from Wall Street, put it into Silicon Valley, and was going to build this platform that was going to be a game changer or disruptor.

So turn of the century. Yeah.

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The Piggly Wiggly Revolution

George, you got Piggly Wiggly. Do you know the Piggly Wiggly story? Yeah. So this guy comes out and, turn of the century, you wanna buy some stuff. You walk up to the general store, there's your guy, he says, cash or credit, sir. If he knows you, he might give you some credit.

You say, I want bread, a loaf of bread. Gimme some sandwich meats, a soda and some stuff. You wouldn't have a fricking, fricking choice. He puts it in a bag, he hands it to you. The price is what it is, and you're done. No competition, nothing. So Piggly Wiggly comes around and goes, we're gonna revolutionize, we're gonna disrupt.

What are you gonna do? We're gonna build these things. Whoa. What are those things? They're called aisles. We're gonna have the products out there more than one, and customers can come and pick anything they want. Said, really? Yeah. And then I'm gonna revolutionize this other way. What? What the hell's that?

That's a cart. It's got four wheels on it. They're gonna be able to take it through the aisle and take as much stuff as they want. And then one final thing. I'm gonna have that thing. What the heck's that? That's a register. Three things simple. It changed the way we shop forever. Yeah. People look at that.

People, besides the fact, half people don't know that story, people see that or they'll hear that. They'll say it's a good story.

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Identifying Trends and Movements

But the people, what I've learned from getting and being around 7, 8, 9 figure, I. Mentors and individuals I've been around is that they think differently and they see and they recognize.

I know one of your strong suits has been recognizing trends and movement because the key is not jumping on a trend. The key is identifying behavior. And when you look at things like that story there, or even, your discussion of Amazon in general or the internet. I think it, what's more important than the lessons of what happened is identifying the movements and the keys to success and the clues that are now moving at light speed.

Right now, they're moving at a whole different level with NFTs and crypto and Forex and things like that. So I love that's how your brain works, because I pointed out, because I. I've found that most super successful people, that's the way they think. They're seeing, they're not seeing stories and opportunity, they're seeing trends and movement and things like that.

And I think that's what I think helps like my audience, for example the most is identifying ways to recognize the trends, capitalize on the trends. And obviously, you went from, you went in different industries and trends in your environment, but also in general. Success is gonna have to be dependent on what's going on in the marketplace.

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Keys to Success in Today's Market

And right now it's a freaking shit show. It's all over the place, yeah. What do you see happening right now? What's the keys that you see as being successful and helping people to be successful right now with everything that's changed?

Yeah, so now what I teach by the way, I've got a course where I teach people how to sell on the AMA Amazon platform.

How do you find a product? How do you speak the language of conversion on Amazon? How do you get reviews? How do you even find a product that's gonna sell on there? And we teach a unique system that is primarily don't build a product and go out there and find a market for it. Instead, what you should do is look at the market for what it needs.

Then go in and give it what it already needs and learn to tell a better story. So we teach this in our Amazon Mastery course. By the way, it's $200 for a one hour course beginning to end for anybody that's listening to Daily Mastermind. If you use the Code Daily Mastermind and you email me directly, I answer all emails personally.

If you email me directly, I will give that to you for free. No obligation, no credit card. You'll never hear from us if you don't want to. And so I'll give out my email and we'll share it in the show notes as well is D-A-R-K-Z-E-S s@gmail.com. That's dark zes@gmail.com. D-A-R-K-Z-E-S s@gmail.com.

And if you're interested in our larger program is fba seller course.com. That's fulfillment by amazon seller course.com. Reach out to us if I can help support you in any way I can. And that's. First of all, that's awesome that you did that. I didn't know we were gonna be able to do that. So that's great for anyone that wants to learn.

But I will point out, and one of the things that I would recognize is that being an early adopter in Amazon, you had to go through and not only just understand what works best, how it works best, the products, the marketing, the positioning, but you also had to adapt. And because of that. It qualifies you to be one of the best, mentors in that area.

So that's awesome. I know that you I knew that you did have a course, and so that's really great that you offer that for free. I think everybody should take advantage of that because whether you are involved directly in Amazon or not, you are going to be affected by it. And I do think that there are things that you can learn.

I've already picked up from some of the things you've said. Just in doing business in general because the Amazon is one of those companies that really makes the market move in general. So understanding, you hit a real key point that I talk about a lot with my background in marketing and that is a lot of times people just get so, sold on a product or things they have and they don't dive into the market itself and the buyers and the marketplace.

So I love that. I love that. Your course would cover that as well. Do, would you identify that as really one of the secrets to success is. Being able to not necessarily just position your product in someone else's mind, but understand the mind and the market to position products to. Yeah, great question.

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Foundational Thinking for Success

So look, what I was saying before is that we teach foundational thinking.

I think that, especially now in the day of shiny things in the day where you've got these TikTok influencers shining, look at my jacuzzi with the 50 million bikini girls and my Lamborghinis, and everybody's chasing the shiny thing. The first rule is there is no hack to hard work. We do a show called Hack and Grow Rich.

I invite you guys to check us out. We're on Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, Google Podcast. Anywhere you can find podcasts, subscribe to us. We talk about, I. The hacks to success. There is no hack to hard work, first and foremost. Secondly, you have to think foundationally. You can't just have one hustle.

You can't just have a career. You can't just have a job that doesn't work anymore. When you say foundationally, you're talking about having a core principles and things of ways of thinking. Correct. So take a table in general. You got a four legged table. Very strong. Three legged table, eh, you'll probably still stand.

Two legs, not good. One leg, you're in tripod territory.

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The Four Pillars of Financial Stability

The first leg of your foundation has to be something that keeps diapers on your twin babies. Diapers on your triplets. Keeps food on the table, brings the bacon home. Make sure that you are stable and have stability. If you're a trust fund kid, great, your trust fund will do that.

You don't need that pillar. But for the rest of us that are not. You need to have a foundation that keeps you comfortable and keeps your life stable. Because when we are stable, our minds are clear. And when we're clear, we do our best thinking. And when we do our best thinking, it leads to the second pillar.

The second pillar, I. Is that you should have some of your money invested in cashflow positive real estate. We talk about this, I teach this to my students as well. Something that's generating cashflow income for you. Even if you don't have any money, you can start learning about that. There's multiple ways to invest in real estate with little or no money.

You can do Airbnb. There's all kinds of ways that you can do it eventually until you can start buying some real estate that's bringing cash flow. Somebody else is paying for dirt that you own. The third pillar. Would be having investments that gain you compound interest, stocks, bonds, like you were talking about Crypto, NFT.

Yeah. I don't do that. But there are people like yourself and others that are expert at that. And the fourth pillar.

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The Power of E-commerce

Which arguably I think is one of the strongest ones, is e-commerce. We have reached a new era. We are still in day one. As Jeff Bezos says, with Amazon, we are on the fucking ground floor of this great opportunity.

People look at Jeff Bezos and they're like, oh, look, he's a trillionaire billionaire. Look at all these things that he has, and he bought this house. Look at all the wealth this guy has, and I say, you're missing the fucking point, man. Look at all the wealth that he's created for others. That's why he's wealthy there.

And that's what some people are thinking. They're thinking you got started early on and how am I gonna be able to do that now? How would you address that with somebody that says, is it too late? Is the timing not there? He caught it early. What do you, what would you say to them?

That's what I'm saying. It's day one. There are so many opportunities now. Ground floor in Amazon. Sure. If you want to go sell something, popular toys or spinner toys or some shit that people have been selling for the last five years, you miss the boat on that stuff, but. People always need things. No matter how many NFTs they put out there.

You still gotta eat something. You still got to wash your body. People need soaps. People need cosmetics. People need all kinds of things. And Amazon being the great disruptor that it is, has taken the power out of these mega companies who have no clue what they're doing. They hire us, me, and my agencies to help them because they have no idea what Amazon's doing.

Yeah. Taking the power out of their hands and put it into the hands of people like you and me and all you have to do. And let me teach you. I teach it on the course, dark zest@gmail.com. Email me, I'll give you the course for free. It costs little or nothing to start an Amazon company. We teach you where to incorporate.

But now is the time to get involved. There's no better time than now to start building it. And then when you do, now you're foundational. You can never have a bad day if you've got those four pillars. Real estate's up. Great real estate's down. No problem. You've got your Amazon business. Oh slow time for Amazon.

Great. You've got your cash flowing real estate or maybe you've got your compounding interest. And if all of those go bad, you always have whatever your security is your career or your savings or whatever you have going. So you have those pillars. You never have a bad day. And that's where I want to get people to.

I want to get people. That's my goal. To the point where they can comfortably walk into their job and look at their boss and say, Hey man, these are my terms. Take it or leave it. And if they say leave it, they say F off they leave. Yeah. That's comfortably get the middle finger. That's everybody's, that's everybody's like side hustle, entrepreneur dream to be able to do I, I'll tell you, I do wanna highlight 'cause I love that you gave those four pillars because we talk a lot about active and passive income and diversification and synergy with what you're doing, your unique talents.

But I love how you said create stability. Investing in real estate. I'm a big believer in that investing in something that has compound interest in e-commerce. But I also love that when you said e-commerce, I. Some of you might be listening to this and might be thinking, that's Amazon e-commerce.

That's a platform that I can't just, that I won't just learn a skill, master, a skill. It's a platform that I can build my whole foundation around in all these areas, not just because of the income. But the stuff you're talking about, because I think Shahan I love how you, when you talk about things, you're not just talking about a moneymaking opportunity.

You're talking about the way you think, the foundation you need to build. And I tell you that those things, they translate to every area of your life, man. I'm a big believer that whether it is personal development, professional development, financial education, they're gonna extend your job to your business, to your opportunity, to your investments, to your wealth.

And getting to think that way is huge. And the way, that's what people have to realize when you talk when we have the opportunity to talk with individual like him, you've got to, you gotta think more about how they think and why they think this way, not just what they're saying. You're missing the point if you're just listening to the detail without understanding how they do it.

And so I love how you do that, man. I just give you some some kudos there as well because. I've been around a lot of individuals and it's the ones that are the most successful that, that orchestrate and have also, I can tell you're interested in. Building foundation for people, not just helping them to create an opportunity.

And that's big for me and for my listeners, yeah. Look, George I'm at a place in my life where I've got a few money. I don't as Scott Adams says, great, the founder, Joe, he wrote a bunch of great books. I've got f few money, I've got my cars, I've got the Porsches, I've got the Ferraris, I've got the houses, I've got all that stuff.

I don't need to be doing anything I don't need to be doing. I say no. To more deals than deals that I say yes. And a lot of them are money makers. I just don't need to do it, and I certainly don't need to deal with assholes. So I'm at a privileged place in my life where I don't need to do that. What I do need to do is to share my story, which is why I wrote my book and secondly, by the way, billion, how I became King of the Throw Pill Cult, if you guys wanna check it out.

And secondly the name is, I'm sorry, the title of the book is Billion. The subtitle, how I Became King of the Throw Pill. Okay, yeah. I became King of the Throw Pill Cult, and. To inspire people is really my goal. Nothing makes me happier. When somebody calls me and says, Shaheen, I took your course.

I started an Amazon company, and now I can do whatever the fuck I wanna do. I get to travel with my family. And that's the most important thing. For me, the most important thing is freedom, is being able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, how you want, and not having anybody else tell you what you're doing.

I say this often, I feel that. One of the biggest crimes against the working class person is this notion that you have to sell your hours for money, right? Yeah. It's a crime man. Yeah. If you're selling your hours for money. You are doing the greatest injustice to yourself and to your family, and your first priority has to be, how do I get out of that?

And there's great ways to create predictable recurring revenue. One of 'em is Amazon. If you come on board, I'll teach you how to do it. If not, there's lots of ways to do it. But ultimately, if you want to have freedom, if freedom is something that's important for you, you're gonna need money. Anybody that argues with you is a broke motherfucker.

Yeah, the guy that said, I raised it right up there with oxygen, for the most part, there it is. I tell this usually when I'm on stage, the guy that said money is the root of all evil, was a broke ass motherfucker. That guy didn't have any, that's why he said that money's great. It's glorious, it's fun and you need it.

And in order to get it, you gotta figure out a way where you're not selling your hours. We all, last time I checked, had 24. Nobody's got more, nobody's got less. So you gotta figure out a way to multiply the power of your time. And you do that by creating businesses that create. Positive recurring revenue and that you and that create leverage, right?

That are not a transactional business, but a scalable business. I think that's a huge benefit of e-commerce. And the two messages we try to commonly, I. Hit over and over on this podcast with the Daily Mastermind is number one. It's never too late to start living the life that you are meant to live because we were meant to live success, prosperity, and also you can create your ultimate destiny.

And never been easier than now. It's never been easier than now to get access. Just the fact that, people can listen to you and get your story and all your details and things without having to know someone. It just shows the power of that. And I'm a big believer in that as well.

That's our purpose and passion, is to be able to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs. So what would you say I, I wanna, before we leave here I wanna do a couple things, but I wanted to just ask you, if someone's out there listening to this and they're like, look, I got a job, or I've got a business, or I'm doing something I don't love and I wanna make, I wanna pivot, I really wanna make a change.

What would you recommend? Is the next step or what would be a key success principle, because I didn't get into, and we probably have to do it on another show, but what your daily routine is, because your daily routine probably indicates where you prioritize things, but what would you recommend to the average entrepreneur hustler right now?

If they wanted to make a change, what? Where should they start?

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Taking Action Towards Your Goals

If you want to make a change? Once you're done watching this or listening to it, if you're listening to us on a podcast, you should take one action forward towards your goals. Be that. Email me at Dark zest@gmail.com, D-A-R-K-Z-E-S s@gmail.com.

Mention the Daily Mastermind and get the course for free, or whatever. Whatever your plan is. You should take one action immediately. That does a couple things. One of them is that it will solidify in your mind that you have a plan of action. The second thing is that it will positively reinforce that you are willing to do whatever it takes in order to achieve what you've set out to achieve.

My suggestion for you is take one positive action towards what you want to do. Now if you're just like the average guy and you got a job and you're, trying to make sense of the world, but it's really become the hamster wheel, you went out there to find success and instead you found that hamster wheel that so many of us have found themselves in, you gotta do something to break out of it.

Be it, join a mastermind. Be it find a mentor, be it, join a group like my course, which we've got a mastermind, we've got all that. But you have to do something to break the pattern. Yeah. You have to do something as what we call an NLP pattern interrupt. You have to do something different to get something different.

So you have to start asking yourself what is that thing? And the second thing is you need to start modeling people who. Have achieved the things that you want to achieve. If you're hanging out with the same five losers and sorry about this, but you guys watching this, you know who those are. If you're hanging out with those same five losers who you are afraid to tell about, tell to your goals and dreams because they will just laugh at you and then move back to smoking their joint and drink in their beer.

You need to find some new fucking friends. You need to find. Yeah, you're the average of the five people you hang out with. Even if you're at a success level and you're not where you want to be. You gotta level up. I totally agree with that. You need to find people who will inspire you. Yeah. You need to find people that are looking out for you.

People that will look at you and tell you, dude, you're a fucking asshole. And if you keep going at the rate that you're going, you're gonna of love fail in a bad way. You need truthful people around you, honest people around you, but people that are also out there conspiring for your success. There's a path to that.

We teach it in the course, but reach out to us. I'm happy to share that, but there's other ways to do it too. You can, no I think that's a great I'll real highlight, I'll really highlight one point where you said pattern interrupt. I noticed that some people have specific steps they recommend to our audience, but you said something that I believe a hundred percent and that is take a step.

Take the next step. Take the next step because that is the pattern interrupt you need in your life. That's all it takes. It doesn't take a plan, a path, everything. It only starts with the next step that you need. And that is absolutely the best suggestion we could have possibly made for people today. I love that.

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Final Thoughts and Contact Information

Okay, shaheen, what, where can people follow you, get ahold of you? 'cause I loved your Facebook page. You're talking about creating influence and overcoming limiting beliefs, all kinds of things. Where's the best place for people to find you? And as we get leaving here with the episode, I.

Yeah, so there's actually three different places you can get ahold of me. So the first one, check out my book Billion, how I Became King of the Thrill Pill called Amazon Audible. Anywhere books are found. Secondly, join us on our podcast. We're up to about 65,000 subscribers. Hack You, grow Rich, maybe more called Hack and Grow Rich.

Okay, third. If you're interested in the Amazon course, if you're interested in breaking free, reach out to me, dark Ze, D-A-R-K-Z-E-S s@gmail.com. You will get a personal response from me. And if I can coach you, mentor you, help you achieve the levels of success that you know you're capable of. Reach out.

And thirdly, our master course is fba seller course.com. That's FBA for Fulfillment by Amazon. So fba a seller course.com. Reach out to us if I can support your success. That's what it's all about. I. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. Listen I appreciate your time. I know you're a busy guy. It's actually been it's taken a long time for us to get this line the planets here.

So I've really enjoyed spending some time. I know we got some other things that we wanna do together and whatnot, so I'll put those things, show notes. We'll be there for you guys. Make sure you follow him. Make sure that you take the next step and build a foundation. Become a 7, 8, 9 figure. Thinker, because if you can become that as a thinker, you're gonna create the success.

The success will follow you no matter what, and it'll reinforce all of the necessary things you need so that you can maintain and keep and grow that success. So that's our message for today. Share the show, hit me up. Make sure that you DM me and tag me in the story so that I can see what it is you're struggling with.

What can we do to help you at The Daily Mastermind on Facebook or Instagram? Look forward to talking with you soon. This is George Wright I third. We have spent some amazing time. With Shaheen Shahan and I appreciate his time today. Have a great day guys, and we'll talk with you soon. Thanks buddy. Honored to be on.

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