Success is The Best Form of Revenge

You’re now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. There was a point in time where you probably transitioned into kind of where you are now this entrepreneurial CEO business you know, entrepreneur sense and kind of 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?

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’re in 32000 retail stores franchises. We’re 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 was outside wanting me to be on nightline. I did that show. It’s on YouTube. I was on Montel Williams, two Newsweek covers, LA Times, London Observer, all that stuff. I had an exotic car collection. A collection Lamborghinis, Ferraris. I got the brand new NSX, one of the best ones I bought at that time you know, 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 back seat 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 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. Ferrari’s racing color. Don’t call it red. 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 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 in like 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 it’s the Ecstasy kid. They’re taking pictures. Now six months before, I had a shitty job at a coffee shop. These places called Kinko’s. We have to do a little bit of explaining George, because people don’t know exactly 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 because 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.