Why Only 2% Succeed While the Other 98% Fail with Pejman Ghadimi

Founder and Author of the Third Circle Theory – Pejman Ghadimi

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Pejman’s family was forced out of Iran where he grew up and moved to Paris with his mom. She was a business owner too, and Pejman learned at a young age how hard that really was.

He rose to the top very quickly, both in the banking industry and in business, despite all of the odds against him. Discover his theory on why only 2% succeed while the other 98% fail.

His business Secret Entourage is looking to change the way people think about entrepreneurship. Being self-employed is not entrepreneurship.

From the Secret Entourage website:

“Entrepreneurship” is about vision, creation, and innovation, it’s a way of life and a means to a living. In the past decade entrepreneurship has lost its true meaning and prestige and instead has been looked at as a synonym for being self employed.

There was a time when entrepreneurs were admired for their guts and their courage and their innovative thinking for undertaking some of life’s biggest challenges and resolving them for the benefit of those around them. This selflessness that made entrepreneurs who they are and gave them their identity in the world has been changed into nothing more than a rat race for who has or can make the most money, but more importantly the world of entrepreneurship has been invaded by false opportunities.

Entrepreneurs are not defined by how much money they have made but rather by the innovations they create and the impact they make on others around them, and while most will tell you they are entrepreneurs when they have learned to master a skill that enables them to make money, that certainly isn’t true.

A true entrepreneur sees the world for what it can be, not what it is and even though there is a significant reward for entrepreneurs who see their efforts to the end, a true entrepreneur’s drive and passion never revolves around the reward but rather the journey itself, and the birth of innovation.”

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Third Circle Theory by Pejman Ghadimi
• Secret Entourage

Check out PejmanGhadimi.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire, I'm Jaime Tardy, and today we have Pejman Ghadimi on the show. He's amazing; he's got a crazy history, I'm so excited to have him on the show. He has a company called Secret Entourage, he's written many books - one of them that I want to talk about a lot today is called Third Circle Theory. He's got some really amazing thoughts and I'm excited to dig in today. Thanks so much for coming on.
Pejman: Thank you for having me on.

Jaime: Okay, so let's sort of get into this - you started very young but the first thing that I want to get into, before your story, is that when I go onto Secret Entourage, your site, you talk about the definition of entrepreneur and I really want to clarify what you think the definition entrepreneur comparatively to what everyone else thinks it is.
Pejman: Well I think the world has changed in the past few years and entrepreneurship has taken a little bit of a different stance where it's really associated now, primarily, with self-employment and so, for me, and for everyone at Secret Entourage, we're truly about entrepreneurship from an innovation standpoint, so we're true believers that entrepreneurship has to be done to a level where it impacts those around us. So when we talk about innovation it's not just about innovation in terms of starting a business, but whether innovating in a particular category so that it truly has an impact on the way we do business for
others or, in effect, if other people are looking at, perhaps, maybe we're building an app or facilitating the way the world thinks of a way to do business.
Jaime: Awesome. And it's funny, because you're right, it seems interchangeable between self-employed and entrepreneur, like we sort of call them the same thing, and it's not really the same thing, and I've never heard it defined that way, so I
think that's an interesting way of doing it. How do we know whether or not we're an entrepreneur? Especially if we haven't created this amazing, world-changing thing yet - can we not call ourselves an entrepreneur?
Pejman: I think we can definitely call ourselves business owners, but I think until we've created innovation for those around us and, as a result of that innovation, impacted those around us, then I don't think we truly fit into the definition of what I call an entrepreneur. There's a lot of merit to people who do take on self- employed, because it's very difficult, but it does have a very different definition for me for someone who's a business owner versus someone who's an entrepreneur.

Jaime: I actually love that - it seems like the word will be bestowed on you when you've actually reached that height. When I grew up and stuff, entrepreneur seemed like it was sort of the top level and it sounds like that's sort of what you're kind of doing again, sort of trying to make it be that top level and something we actually strive for. Awesome.
Pejman: Yeah, we're trying to bring back the glamor of entrepreneurship for really what it is, rather than just losing its definition through business ownership.
Jaime: Awesome. So how did you start? Did you always know that you were going to be an entrepreneur?
Pejman: No, actually, believe it or not I still don't' consider myself a successful entrepreneur. Even myself, I mean I talk a lot about this but, no, I started very, very young and actually my story is an extension of my mother's story, partly because we came from Iran back at the brink of a revolution where people weren't really allowed to come to the States. We ended up in Paris, France, where, from having a really nice, six figure job, she ended up starting a series of businesses, similar to
Kenco's coffee stores, did really well and, again, gave that up after ten years, just to bring me to the United States, leaving everything behind once more, only to find herself here and starting a restaurant to get us some papers, and that didn't work out very well, it failed drastically, however I did get a green card out of it, so I can't complain. But at 14 I realized how my mom was quite losing her energy level and it was difficult for her to maintain that kind of drive to help us succeed and so very early on I took on a job as a telemarketer right out of, well I was in high school and
I was working a lot of hours, anywhere from like 60 to 70 hours a week, believe it or not, right after school.
Jaime: And going to school?

Pejman: Yeah, going to school. I would get up at 2 and work almost to like 9:30. Every day, including like Saturdays and Sundays, I'd work all day, just to make a few bucks, and I was making $12 an hour, but very early on, instead of taking that job as just an hourly job, I saw the opportunity of making commissions, so very early
on I started being really good at making phone calls and actually selling roof siding and everything else on the phone. I did really well with that, I actually started making a decent amount of cash at some point I was getting $2000 pay checks a week.
Jaime: You're still in high school?

Pejman: Yeah, being like 15 years old, it was like, you know, and I had just turned
15 and having that kind of cash is like great, and so I had nothing to do with it so I just kept stashing it away, saving, saving, saving and while I was so good at it, it became very easy for me to move up the ranks in that same organization and they had a bunch of offices and by the age of 18 I was managing all of their operations for DC, Maryland and Virginia, and so I was doing that when I was 18 and I had the choice to choose to go to college or not and I decided that college wasn't really for me, I didn't really love going to school when I knew that I was driving a better car

than the professors and living a better life than the professors, so I chose a different route. I started going to school but then I kind of dropped out - I chose that it wasn't for me and so instead I started working for a bank, worked as a manager for a bank right at the age of 18, that was a big change for me because that was a lot of responsibility at a very young age, and from there on I grew very quickly in corporate America, made it to the senior vice president level before the age of 23 and so kind of continually gathered up cash from all those earlier years when I worked, so I started investing in real estate very early on and so that's what kind of led to my financial freedom, in a sense, while I still worked a very good 9 to
5 job that was paying six figures, all the way until I was about 25, 26, when I kind of left that role.
Jaime: Okay, I have to go back, because you were successful at the age of 15, which is a little bit ridiculous. Was that, sales, was that innate, was that something that you strived really hard to learn or was your success just something that came naturally to you?
Pejman: Are you referring to the telemarketing job? Why I was doing so good? Jaime: Yeah.
Pejman: When I think of why I was able to be successful in that, now that I look back, and it ties into the third circle theory, which we'll kind of talk about later, but for me the success that came from that was because I almost didn't have a choice. So you know when you're hanging off a cliff you become a lot stronger than when you're, you know, at the gym, trying to bench-press? So, ultimately, just having that whole you can't fail or you're going to die' pretty much was the mentality that I had every day when I went to work, and I realized very early on that my mom wasn't going to be able to support the lifestyle that I wanted and she certainly wasn't
going to be able to buy me the cars that I wanted when I turned 16, 17 and things
of the sort, and so my goal, when I went to start working very early on, was to, first, not only not be a burden on her, but whether also be able to take the pressure off her and instead kind of focus on leading our lives forward rather than just have her always bear that pressure.
Jaime: You're willing to take over at the age of 15, that's really impressive. So then you were really good at sales and that persistence really definitely helped you, but then you switched completely over to the banking world - why didn't you just go really well with what you were doing before, what made you decide to switch to the banking industry?
Pejman: Well by 18 I was the director so it wasn't really that big of a switch over because it was really management and leadership and I had found a passion for helping people grow and teach and train people around sales so it kind of made sense to get into the next best thing. Now there were two reasons why I got into banking, I'm a huge believer of self-education and I follow a lot of different publications as well as myself, like I always get involved with knowing what's going on out there and analyzing market trends and primarily analyzing historical

financial data, even from a very early age, and so I knew that it was a good time to be in baking simply because of the economic boom that was going to happen in the real estate sector and so, for me, very early on, because I had cash, I had decided to get into banking for two reasons. One: the hours were obviously moderate than my
80 hour week role, which was getting only worse by the minute because I was no
longer in school, but then I also believe that I lacked a significant amount of knowledge into how money moves and how supply and demand works in the banking world and so I wanted to get involved with that because I wanted to take advantage of understanding the lending and the investment side of things very early on because I had cash and I didn't want to trust anyone else with it, so I wanted to learn for myself and I said "If you want to learn money, what better place than to be around money?" So I decided to be there to meet a lot of people and really get to know a lot about just the industry in general.
Jaime: Yeah, okay, I love that. I mean self-education to a T, right? You don't go to school to learn banking, you go work at a bank and then become the top level guy at the bank. Smart man, very smart man. So what did you do at the age of 23? I mean you were at a ridiculously high level at 23, so what did you do from there?
Pejman: Well I, actually, at that stage I had already started doing very well in real estate as well. I was already financially independent at that point.
Jaime: At 23? Pejman: Yeah, at 23. Jaime: Congratulations.
Pejman: I wasn't a millionaire just yet, I wasn't that far, but I was definitely on my way, and certainly I wasn't dependent on my 9 to 5, so if everything broke lose, you know, I would have been okay, I would have survived for quite a little bit of time before I needed to go back to work. I started at that point thinking about the long term plan and I started a company called VIP Motoring, so I started a car company because I had a car fetish, I love exotic cars, so I thought what better way to have a giant tax write-off than to have a company that is focused on cars.
Jaime: Again,

Pejman: So it was more a financial decision than an entrepreneurial one, which is why, again, I distinguish that I'm not really an entrepreneur just yet, but that particular decision was a very good financial one because I was able to pretty much get all my hobbies like watches, cars and everything else, make some money on the side while I supplied that to others, but at the same time, for me, it became a giant tax write-off because I was able to keep all this inventory of my own cars and watches and write them off, and so that kind of worked really well but, over time, the business started growing and people started noticing that I had very good taste in cars and customization and so I started getting projects and calls from all over the world with people wanting me to build them certain cars, etc., so I started working with dealerships and I started expanding that business fairly quickly. The

beauty of it, though, is I didn't get stuck in working at that business, what I did is I immediately hired someone else to really run it and gave them 40% of all the profits up front. The reason I did that was because the one thing I value more than money is time, and my time shouldn't have been divided between just selling cars and selling watches and so I wanted someone else who didn't have that opportunity,
that I'd trained from scratch and grew to really own that business, run it and just kind of support them, in a sense, and have them send me pay checks instead of vice versa.
Jaime: I'm just curious - so you were probably 20-something at that time, who was the person that you hired? Were they the same age as you or were they someone more experienced?
Pejman: No, well actually they were about 30, I want to say 31, I think, when I met them, and they were fairly more experienced in the sense that they had more discipline and they had more experience in the business world. Certainly not more experience in the niche that I was hiring them into, but I trained them on that. I think they had the right mind-set and they understood me as an individual really well. That person used to work for me partly before, so they knew me fairly well, you know, as a leader, and so they were excited to kind of get out of the banking world and so I gave them that opportunity to get outside.
Jaime: Nice. So what year was that, that you started that car company? Pejman: I'm sorry?
Jaime: What year was that, that you started the car company?

Pejman: I want to say it was roughly about 7 or 8 years ago, so I'd say it was probably looking at 2003, 2004.
Jaime: Okay. And does that still exist today? Do you still have that today?

Pejman: Yeah, it's evolved a lot today, like it's changed a lot, in a sense. I've owned that business since I was 18 in the sense that I started that LLC very early, but I hadn't done anything with it, in a sense. I had kind of left it and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't really start making a business until a few years later when I kind of understood what it was even like to own a business and what tax write offs were and everything, but I always wanted to in the sense that at that time I believed that's what entrepreneurship was, so I always wanted to own a business but I didn't know what to do with it, so it was kind of like a sitting duck for a few years before it became an actual real business. And today it's evolved a lot and it's changed - we primarily do project cars now, so I no longer like do business clients, I only take on like large projects and it involves usually very, very wealthy clients, so, for example, if a client calls me in the middle of the night and says "Hey, I'm flying into Italy. I need a Lamborghini delivered by the airport when I land' then they have a credit
line set up with me and we just arrange to have a car there. So we're very well connected with people across the world and different dealerships, we work with not just dealers but watch dealers, as well as yachts and jet sales and everything else.

We're like a luxury concierge today, it's changed a lot, but for very few people, we don't take on that many clients.
Jaime: That's amazing and it's neat to hear how it changed through the years, definitely. So was that exactly what you thought? Like you had been in the corporate world for so long and this was your first real business - was it everything that you thought? Was it easier, harder? Like you were really smart in the corporate world, was it different, switching over?
Pejman: It was a side business so I don't think it ever was something that I put all my heart into, in a sense, so I don't think I really switched over, because I was still, at that point, I was still in corporate America, and I still continued to run that business, which is why I hired someone else to run it, and for the next few years I did remain in the banking sector while I had that business running. It certainly didn't produce what it produces today and it took a lot more work than that it does today - it's very organized today but, nonetheless, it certainly has been a very different journey than what I expected.
Jaime: Awesome. And tell me what happened after that. That was sort of your side thing; tell me what happened after you got out of the banking world.
Pejman: Well I got out of the banking world on a very weird note, I actually was asked to resign. And I was asked to resign because I pissed off a lot of people, and I think that had to do with the ego more than anything else - I used to drive Ferraris and Porsches to work and that didn't go very well with all the executive team who drove like Nissan Maximas, etc., they didn't like that very much. So I think, over time, I also let that get to my head - I was like the golden child for that bank, I had grown much faster than everyone else had, I didn't have a degree and I was making the kinds of income that people that work for 40 years can't make, and certainly I had more money on the side from both real estate as well as from having this car business, and so driving all these cars to work, you know, flashing $30-40,000 watches to work, wasn't, perhaps, the best idea at the time. But, you know, my ego kind of let me down and I kind of continued to kind of stay on that scroll until, one day, they kind of became very suspicious and they were asking me questions like
?How do you drive these cars? What's going on?' etc. and, again, my ego kicked in and I threw my badge and kind of walked out, and then I was asked to resign. So you could say that that was definitely one of the best learning experiences of my life ? it was a career for me, and I always believed, from a very young age, that I would be a banker forever. Not necessarily at the same level, but I would keep
growing and be like this corporate banker and work with like $20-30 million clients all day, and so that changed very quickly when that happened. So it was about 2-3 years after I started my car business, I think it was about 2005, I want to say, 2006, when I was asked to resign and so that really was a shock to me, that was a big shock to me because they caught me off guard, and it wasn't really the financial element, I didn't really care, you know, I could have got a job elsewhere, I just was really hurt. I took a few months and I reflected on what happened and why did it happen and everything else and that's kind of the result when I started another company called Secret Consulting and Secret Consulting was, I created a company

almost out of anger, I created a company to make sure that other young people wouldn't go through that, and so to teach young people that loyalty is pretty much dead in corporate America and so I started all of these, you know, like blogs slash mini mentor sessions and everything else, not in the sense of making money, but I was like "Let me just do something and help all these kids', first help them get promoted through the process, because I was really good at it, I understood leadership really well so I understood what executives wanted and what people wanted when they were promoting people and so I was known for my banking career as the guy who promoted the most people and also the guy who fired the most people, so it kind of went hand to hand either I help promote people, I help grow their talent, or I get rid of them very quickly because they poisoned my teams. And I think that gave me a very good reputation and it taught me a lot in terms of growing talent and understanding how to grow and change people and so, using
that, I started Secret Consulting, which started as a blog originally, which was a very weak blog, honestly, I would rant and write all this stuff, and I'm sure at least one person was following it somewhere but after that it became more of an offline business when I realized there was a need and parents would come to me and people I knew would register their kids to talk to me about how to actually grow
and what to do outside of high school, what to do during college and things like that, so I became like a mini mentor and I did so offline, it was very fun, it was a good time, but there wasn't much money to be made in it and so a year, a year and a half, after I started that I decided to start Secret Entourage instead because I was like "This isn't really going to work'"rted Secret Entourage it was because the blog side of Secret Consulting wasn't working very well and so we decided to do something, me and the web guy that I hired to work with me - I know nothing about HTML, so if anybody asks me, I barely understand anything about computer language or anything else, but nonetheless I decided to start this blog
and so I hired this kid, who was one of my clients, actually, at the bank, he was the son of one of my clients and he was really talented, he was like 17 years old, I was like "Come on board, I'll give you a part of this company" and he was like "What are we building? Do you know anything about online marketing?" I was like "Nothing" and he was like "So why are we building this?" I was like "Because I never fail at anything that I do and I'll find a way to make this work. I genuinely don't care what happens, I'll find a way to make it work, just trust me, get on." And his dad really liked me so he was like "You should listen to him, he's a successful kid, he'll take you places" so he joined me, we started this and it didn't do too well when it was Secret Consulting - we didn't have too many followers, we kind of dropped the ball and focused on the offline side, like I said, and the offline side, when we saw that there wasn't much money in mentorship, we took two different levels ? we were Secret Consulting by one, going after people that wanted to launch franchises and launch lifestyle brands, so, you know, we helped launched a bunch of wheel companies, we helped launch a series of exhaust companies and car part
companies because they all tied in together and one of my main beliefs in business, and that's worked really, really well, is I have what you'd call the two-in-one business model, so what that is is when you use one business to fund two businesses, so what I mean is, for example, I opened the car shop, but in order to

open the car shop, instead of looking for space to lease or to actually build a bay, I used my real estate company to buy a commercial building, so I used this real estate company to buy a commercial building, I'd buy this building cheap, like underwater for like $200,000, I'd take the building and it's got five offices in it, I'd renovate the five offices and rent out the five offices to make a profit, so the real estate company is now profitable, but one of the main reasons I bought that
building is because it's got a main area where there is a bay and I can use it to work on the cars. So, in a sense, I made that the store front and the office, but it's really already a profitable business just from the real estate standpoint alone, plus the additional tax write-off and then I pay myself the rent, in a sense, which becomes
an additional write-off again. So it's like how you use one model, like pretty much one area, one thing, to fund two businesses, and they kind of pay off each other, instead of paying someone else, so the money remains in this loop, just goes back to you at the end of the day.
Jaime: Yeah, you're the guy at the end of the loop, that's awesome.

Pejman: That's been a very strong point and that's why, when we started getting into lifestyle consulting it made perfect sense because I owned a car company that was all about selling cars, parts, customization, so that meant getting cheaper parts, you know, from those people and getting the deals, at the same time it meant advertising their companies through my other sense which was this blog, so again they benefited there as well as I was able to sell them sponsorships as well, so it was like the three in one model at that point, and it kind of kept looping and all kept staying in house but it created great relationships and I think that was the main thing it did - it made me a lot of friends, getting into that route of the
consulting side, and that helped a lot with launching Secret Entourage, and so being
in that element right there, where we started that consulting, that evolved again to another level where we helped launch franchises, people that wanted to open
burger joints and it may be juice factories, similar to where they sell smoothies, etc. but they all had a franchise model, my company helped a lot with branding, etc.
and there was big money to be made there - we'd charge anywhere from $500 to
$1000 an hour and minimum anywhere from 40 to 100 hours minimum on contracts, so there was bigger money to be made, we took on more clients, ended up hiring a few consultants and today we consult between, I still head the Florida side of things, but we still have a consulting office in LA, we also have one in New York and we have one in DC and we're called Secret Consulting because we never take credit for the work, so we help owners behind closed doors and we kind of disappear, in a sense, after they're kind of set and we don't want any of their credit. So we ask for a referral letter, but we don't have something where we post up all
the companies we've done business with, etc. so we keep it all in-house, they get the help, we get paid and we move on.
Jaime: Nice. Now I want to highlight something that you said earlier - you said "I never fail at anything I do". That's something that's a huge belief and really interesting. Is that something that was innate? Especially when you had to resign - did you not see that as a failure too? Because I understand exactly what you mean.

Pejman: No. I associate failing with giving up and I watched my mom for ten years go to the embassy of the United States in France, trying to get a visa to come to America, and I watched her get rejected almost every week, if not bi-weekly, for ten years, if not get thrown out of embassies, then get thrown out of different places, different ones she tried, insulted, humiliated, and yet she still went back. Now the worst part was she actually had to take, we didn't have a car at that time, so she
had to take the bus, the metro, for an hour each way, just to get there, just knowing she would get rejected. So I think, as I say in the Third Circle Theory, where I
believe that we're all a byproduct of our observations, I think observing that at a very young age enabled me to kind of grow a thick skin for not giving up, rather than just being prone to accepting that we're not going to win every challenge, but rather as long as we don't give up we can still win at the end of the day. So very different.
Jaime: I can't imagine you watching her, ten years, oh my gosh, and she was successful, right? So she didn't give up.
Pejman: She finally got it. It was luck when she got it.

Jaime: Wow. So tell us a little bit, it's a good segue over to the Third Circle Theory. Tell me in brief, I know, well, we have some time, so I really want you to dive deep, because I started reading this and I had never really heard anything like this before, so, please share it with everybody.
Pejman: Okay, so after I started Secret Entourage, Secret Entourage was all about bringing back the entrepreneur ship to that new glamour stage of innovation rather than just self-employment and so we targeted it to gen-Y and that was really important because I wanted to change people from a very young age rather than focus on the typical 40-plus that all these self-help programs did. The other element there that was in Third Circle is that Secret Entourage was never about me
- that's why it's called Secret Entourage, like we black out all the characters which are ourselves and we only reveal one new identity each month, which is one success story each month of someone who's fairly young who's made it and then we detail break down how they've made it. One of the things that was important was to get rid of the bullshit, forgive my language, around entrepreneur, which is selling the idea that if you're rich then you're an entrepreneur and that's absolutely inaccurate, and so we took the money aspect, in a sense, out of it, but we illustrate our stories through lifestyle, so it still attracts the younger crowd, so our goal is not to attract existing people who consider themselves entrepreneurs but rather attract mentors and individuals who do not consider themselves entrepreneurs, who do not know what's going on in the world there who would rather have access to inform ion that's good and enables them to make better decisions in their life. After that, I've spent the past five years, almost now, doing that, and Secret is an organization that doesn't get paid anything, so none of us are paid, the members that actually own Secret have no money stake or are not getting anything out of Secret, so, for me, hiding behind Secret Entourage, because obviously I never revealed my identity, I
did create Secret for the sake of legacy and when I thought about this very long, after a few years, I decided that I still didn't want to make my face the forefront of

Secret, because Secret was billed for other people and it needed to remain an organization for people rather than an organization for me and so I decided how do I still kind of ingrain my legacy through this platform and I thought about all my experiences in the past through the years and I thought about, since I was 14, what is it that enabled me to do that, and I also thought about all the people that I've interviewed in my life, all the people that have been around me, all the successful millionaires I know, and I decide that there was definitely a pattern in all of us and I
couldn't understand what that pattern was, originally, because I didn't understand, I really hadn't, necessarily considered any type of failure, like we talked about earlier, and so I really couldn't gage as to what that pattern was until somebody told me they didn't want my help. After I was approaching them, this young lady said "You know what? You shouldn't help me." And I said "Well why shouldn't I help you?" and she said "Because, at the end of the day, you're helping me to help yourself, because if you help me, then there's a benefit for you." And that made me rethink my thought process around what is it that made her not the one to help, even though we would both benefit, she was absolutely accurate, by her being better, me being her employer, everything would get better. But she still didn't want it and so I thought to myself "What is it that makes that person different?" and I realized that it was her past environment that didn't allow her to trust anymore and so I realized how much more environment and observations play into who we become and so I pretty much connected the dots and created the Third Circle Theory which is a theory that explains what us, as business owners, human beings, entrepreneurs or just normal people, go through the different stages of our lives that either enable
us to become greater, we become doctors, lawyers, and what is it that enables us to take the next step and innovate the world. So if you think about success in general and I'm sure, you interview a lot of people so you know this, there are significant traits that can be associated with all successful people and I think we all can agree that just about everyone that's successful, for example, is consistent, you could say that that's a successful person. But there is always been that unexplained bride , that invisible bridge that's never been explained as to how is it that successful people become like the Steve Jobs, become the Martin Luther King. Martin Luther
King had to know before that speech he was going to get murdered, like he just had to know, and someone like Steve Jobs, like what is it that gave him the
determination to start a computer company from his garage and still punish it to that level? What was it? And what was it that made him continue after he got fired from his own business? So these, there are certain things that occur in someone's mind and through someone's life that they can't, in a sense, hasn't been explained yet, and some, with me, the Third Circle Theory is more explaining how visionaries are born and how vision and passion is created, rather than talking more about how success is created. Now, through that, of course, I identify a lot about success and how it is that people turn up successful or not, but the gist of the book is the entire concept of how we grow is more based on what we see rather than the education
we have or the places or the people we are around, but rather just the observation we have of those people, of the education or of people around us, in a sense.
Jaime: Okay, and that's huge, because like when I was asking you whether things were innate and then you tell your story about seeing your mom and doing that all

the time, that's difficult because we can't, especially when we're younger, we can't control what we see, really, most of the time, so how do we, especially you work with a lot of younger kids, how do we use that so that we can use it for good and help kids actually see better things?
Pejman: Well I mean I think actually, I talk about this a lot in the book, but the first seven years of our lives we have no control over what we see - we're only exposed to what our parents want us to see. Which, if you look on the book cover, there's three circles - the first circle is a circle with a dot in the center, that dot signifies you and the circle signifies your world. So the first circle stands for the world
revolves around you and as children the world always revolves around us and it's all about what we want, what we feel, etc. and if you look through that circle as well, there's a small little segment, a grey dot, that means that's your perspective when you're a child. So when you're born you're only given the opportunity to see what's in front of you, based on who puts you in front of whatever they want to put you in front of. So if they put you in a family that's very entrepreneurial then, from a very young age you're kind of getting ingrained with that need to go and innovate, versus if you're in a family that's very poor you're actually, from a very early age, putting a lot of emphasis on money, because obviously that's something that's brought up a lot in low to moderate income families, it's always on top of mind. So as you evolve through life you expand that perspective, so you move onto a second
circle when you're successful at something. When you're young you're only exposed to what they want you to get exposed to. When you start questioning your perspective and you start questioning your belief system, curiosity starts to come forward, when curiosity starts to come forward you start becoming an expert in things. So this is like the gen-Y phenomenon as to why everyone thinks they're an expert in everything but if you think about like, I'll give you a better example, so if you're young, right, and a lot of us don't believe in UFOs, right? So it's one of those things where you either belief in it or you don't. But if, at a young age, suddenly, let's say you're 12 years old, you're walking, and you believe you've seen a UFO or something that you can't explain, suddenly curiosity kicks in and you suddenly become this mass research person that decides to know everything about UFOs to validate your belief to what you've seen and as a result of that, that validation
you're seeking, you become an expert in that field because all you're doing is being exposed to new and new information that you're seeking. As a result, now, you
want to share that information with others and so you become almost like a dominant trait around UFOs and you're now like having a school campaign on UFOs in your head, like "I've got to tell everybody what I saw and I've got to validate all these facts and everything else," and so your vision expands - and the same can be said for business, when you're exposed to things that you believe can happen. So, if from a young age, you're exposed to people who are always with a can-do attitude and always believe they can attain the unattainable then your goals are usually set higher than those who have never attained anything and all they tell their kids is you have to go to school, you have to get an education" and, as a result, you become very limited because your goal is very simple from very early on and so your mind doesn't expand. But for those of us who get very good at something, we move on to the second circle. If you look at the second circle the dot, again, is

centered at the center of the world, meaning the world still revolves around you. However, you see more of life, you see more of people's" perspectives and as a result you become very successful in one thing - so you either become a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, a business owner, you start making money, you start understanding how the system works, and as a result you live a great life. You live a good life, you have money, you have the things you want and all the materialistic things in the world. But there is, that's the point where most people end, so they become successful and they then stay. But a few people start realizing that there's more to the world than what they see and so, if you look at the third circle, the dot is no longer in the circle, which signifies that people remove themselves from the equation and, as a result, they're able to see the world for truly what it is and instead of just innovating one field they see where they fit in and what their skills and their pretty much beliefs enables them to contribute to that entire picture rather than just to one segment of it. And so if you think about, like, it's almost like defining how someone becomes selfless versus how someone becomes, is still selfish. We're all born selfish and some of us evolve past that stage and others don't and I think a good example of that is think about love, so people fall in love all the time, right? 

And if you ask someone why they love someone, you're like "Well, they're funny, they're this, they're that." But you're like "Well, are they the only funny person in the world?" and they're like "Well no, I'm sure there are other people that are funny". "So why do you love them?" and they usually can't explain it -they can't explain why they're in love with someone, they just know or they feel that way. Well, a lot of the time they're like "Well, love is a selfless feeling because you love someone else' but the reality is that most people love very selfishly - they love only to be loved back, so the reason that they can't define why they love is because they only love for the love they receive back. If that love stops, then their love stops too. In a sense it's almost contradictory to the idea of love itself, but I always ask this question and a lot of people get mad at me and say "Well, if you really love the person you're with, then ask yourself this question', and when you ask them "Why do you love them?" and they usually say "Well because they make me laugh, they do this, do that', again, it's a feeling about you, right? It's not about them. So I always tell them "Well would you still love this person if they were waking up next to someone else every day?" and usually I get a lot of blank stares and I get people wanting to punch me.
Jaime: Like, "What?"

Pejman: But, ultimately, it's true, right? If you really love someone you love them for who they are and not necessarily what they make you feel or what they do for you, and so I think that's why a lot of marriages fail, in a sense, because people don't really understand the nature of being selfless, and so, with this book, what I've tried to do is define for people what happens in their life that enables them to become selfless and what they can also do every day, every day they live, what are the observations they can look for to help tweak not only the way they think, but also be able to change how they become tomorrow. If you think about all of these books that are out there, all of the systems on how to make money, they're all great - you know, a lot of people ask me "You're with Secret Entourage, so you know a lot about these systems?" I'm like "Yeah, absolutely" and they're like "Well are they all bogus? Are they all crap?" and I'm like "No, they're not crap. They're all fantastic, every one of them is great, like they're all quality products", right? The problem, though, is they're geared, right from the beginning, knowing you're going to fail so you're going to buy the next one. It's almost like it's not that they're not functional, they're not good, it's that you're not prepared to take them on. So it's almost like the gym video, alright? You have a gym video and it's great, you're like "I love it, Tao-bo, I'm doing it" and then like you're losing weight and you're great and then six weeks later you're like "Yeah, I'm doing it once a week now instead of three times a week" and then suddenly it disappears and now you're doing zumba instead. And people are like "Well, what, I don't understand, why do you keep hopping?" and it's because your mind, from the beginning, was never trained to be healthy and so, ultimately, what you're doing every day isn't following - you don't have consistency, for example, and certainly, like your belief system is very different, like you belief in instant gratification, which is why you're hopping from video to video hoping for results, and because what you're losing is consistency you're never seeing the results you want. So with this book, what I was trying to achieve is to create a book that creates people's foundation, or reinforces their foundation, so they understand that their belief system controls everything that happens to them tomorrow. If people read this book they're not going to learn how to make a billion dollars, instead they're going to understand so much more about
themselves and why it is that they're not able to be successful at anything they do - it doesn't matter that it's corporate America, that you undertake just being a student or you choose to do non-profit work or that you become an entrepreneur and want to innovate the world. It makes no difference as long as you, yourself are not fully in control of who you see in the mirror. So if you're not capable of seeing the right person in the mirror and you're not capable of understanding what others see of you when they look at you then you're not able to really change or become
the person that you want to be, and so as a result of that, I show you how society, if you don't become the person you want to be, society will make out of you what it wants, and then you'll pretty much be trapped in the rat race.
Jaime: Okay, I love all of this. So, first of all, Pejman: It's a lot of information.
Jaime: I know, see, and I adored the book when I started looking at it. It's not something that's really talked about very much, because it seems like you're melding a couple of things that usually doesn't get talked about in business, like usually in business we're all about "This is what we do, you take these action steps, ta-da! You're there." But the beliefs and the systems, I meant there's definitely Tony Robbins and all that sort of thing to talk about belief but I think the way you're talking about it is a little bit different. And so, actually, the question that first came up to me as you were talking is - are you religious?
Pejman: Yes and no.

Jaime: Okay. Do you mind talking about this, by the way?

Pejman: I don't mind. I believe in a greater power but I don't believe in a religion over and under.
Jaime: That makes sense.

Pejman: So I leave it at I don't believe or disbelieve that there is something out there that we don't know about. I don't know what that is and I don't necessarily try to impose that on anyone, however I don't believe in any religion, in a sense. I don't believe in any books or anything of the sort. I believe in humanity - if you're good
to others then eventually it will come back to you.

Jaime: Well that's why I ask, because it's funny, it almost sounds Buddhist, where you're trying to be less, not less of yourself, but selfless in the act. When you're talking about the love situation, it's like if you have children, you can feel that unconditional love, even if they hate you, you still love them no matter what, and so how do we bring that into other pieces of our lives, because that seems so difficult. Do you have any advice?
Pejman: Well you can think about this in the business sense too, right? The reason, I mean think about the reason why companies are born and they get to that next stage - it's because those owners put those companies before themselves. They put the good of the company before they put their own desire of what they want out of the company, right? They don't go buy themselves cars when they make money,
they put the money back in the business and they continue growing it. So it's a very different feeling when you care about something more than you care for your own being, right? Now, with that said, it's a dangerous thing, too, because there's got to be balance where you, ultimately, are the one that's driving this, so you have to survive long enough to be able to drive it and if you always put yourself last, you're ventrally going to get hurt in the sense that you're not going to be able to keep this up forever. So you just have to understand that when you make decision, regarding anything in your life, it can't always be the decision that's best for you, but rather the decision that's best for the situation. So if you think about like when we were talking about, you know when your friends give you advice about your relationship, they're usually right but you can't act on them, because you're like "No, I love this person, I want to stick in," it's usually because they're looking at it from that third perspective - they've looking at it from an emotionless, uninvolved in the relationship perspective, which, in that perspective, in doesn't matter what either one of you two feels, I'm looking at this from an outside factor, and you guys are not a fit - you're not getting along, you're not going to last very long. But you don't want to accept that. Having the ability to remove your emotions from the equation of how you feel and analyze information for what it is and not what it is to you is ultimately going to help you make better decisions, period, in life in general. As a result of that you'll certainly start training your mind to become more successful and make better decisions in every aspect of your life.
Jaime: So how can you do that? Pejman: Go buy the book.

Jaime: I know, right? Because feelings are good in their own place, right? But how do we do that? Because it seems a very difficult thing. I practice this, or I try to practice this, but it still comes up, it's still so hard to separate, so give us some advice on how we can do that.
Pejman: Well I don't think you want, you want to still keep an emotional sense, like you don't want to be entirely emotionless towards any things, and I think it goes with practice more than anything else, I don't think you're ever going to be able to just start making, overnight, wake up, even after you read this book, wake up and be like "Now I'm going to start making all these decisions about just how to be emotionless and how to be better" there's no immediate answer to that that's going to give you a one-step solution, in a sense. I think with practice in general, the
more information you have about something, the more educated your decision and the less emotional it becomes, so like when you immediately find out something, instead of immediately having a reaction, I could say the best practice is to be stop, not have any type of reaction to a situation, rather investigate the situation, gain information, and then as a result of this excessive amount of information, you'll make a better decision. I think that people often have quick reactions to things, so they show up somewhere and they're immediately emotional about something, so the main thing that people can practice where, if you want something actionable, is to stop, instead of having an emotional or non-emotional reaction, is to stop and not at all have a reaction, just whenever you encounter something, stop, don't have an emotional reaction to it, wait, get information and then make a better decision. This is no different than anything we all practice every day - sometimes we're told, when we're about to get into a fight, stop, don't just fight back, wait, understand what's at stake, and then decide whether you want to throw the punch or not. It's no different, we just have to apply this to everything in business. So when something bad happens to our business, when something bad happens to us or something good happens to us, let's not have an immediate reaction to it and engage in actions around how we feel about what just happened, but rather just wait, analyze the situation, understand what's occurred and then understand how it plays into the bigger picture and the ten year plan and then make a decision about that. Even though it may not bring you as many rewards as fast as it could if you made that emotional decision, it certainly will make you, I think, get the right reward at the right time. It's no different than the Facebook thing, right? They offered him one million and what's better than one million? A billion, right? So there's that emotional feel that goes in someone's head when they don't have money, when they're offered a large sum of money for their business, right? And they could say "Well this is the life I want, this is everything I want" but then that decision would be about you, right? But what's the core of what you're trying to do and what are you trying to create, what are you trying to innovate? And is it at the stage where this is going to really take it to that level? If you're selfless, then you're making the decision for the business - not because of the one million that's going to go in your pocket and the new Ferrari that's going to be in your garage.
Jaime: Because you can carry it better than maybe the next person, you can carry that vision on. It's funny that you're talking about this too, as far as reactions go,

because you just said at the very beginning - you had that reaction when you were at the bank, you just did something and then said something and then left so you had to resign, so you've done that and then you're sort of on the other side of it where now you can reflect and look before you actually do it. How long of a process was that for you? I mean it seems like you're much better at it now, I don't think anyone, like you said, is sort of at a peak all the time, but how long of a process
was that? To go from where you were, mostly in ego, to where you are now?

Pejman: I think, I'd say a few years, like three to four years, before I really started realizing what mattered most. Even at the beginning, part of the reason why we formulated Secret Entourage in the sense that none of us get paid is that everyone that was part of it from the beginning is all about growing Secret Entourage and not so much growing themselves in the sense of their own wallet. So, regardless of
what direction we can take and how much money Secret Entourage can make, you know, from a revenue standpoint, at no point will it benefit those that started it, in the sense of, you know, distribution or some kind of pay out of it, and so as a result we just always make the right decisions as a team and we never have this self-gain and we never have to deal with this emotional issue. So it was kind of like me creating this to kind of block us from having the weak moment, because we're human, right?
Jaime: You set up the system so you can't screw up.

Pejman: But, you know what, for now, it's a good way to think about it. Jaime: I love that.
Pejman: So a few years, to answer your question, it took me a good three or four years.
Jaime: Good. It's good to know that it's a process, too, not an event where "Ta-da! Everything's fine." Perfect. Well, thank you so much. I know we're starting to run up against time, so I wanted to ask the last question, which is what's one action, all about action, that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of one million?
Pejman: Get exposed to something new. I'd say that something that we often take for granted is we're all always very good at following routine, because routine is what we're, if we have a good routine and it works then certainly that's great for us, but it prevents us from expanding our minds and being exposed to potentially new routes and new directions in our minds. And so if you want to move closer to being wealthy or closer to success then understand that people who have a lot of
tolerance for risk get further and people who are actually willing to go out of their way and do something different, take a chance, usually get further, faster, because they're exposed to more. So if you want to do something different this week, this month or this year, get exposed to something new in your life, take a new route, meet someone new and see where that takes you.

Jaime: Thank you so much for coming on the show today, PJ, I really appreciate it. Where can we find more about you, Secret Entourage, all that stuff online?
Pejman: Well definitely visit Secret Entourage at secretentourage.com and you can pick up Third Circle Theory on all the channels like Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and everywhere else books and eBooks are sold, and you can also pick up the Secret Entourage system on thirdcirclebook.com
Jaime: Perfect. And I'll link up to all that. So thank you so much for coming, I hope you have an amazing day.
Pejman: Thank you for having me. Bye bye.

Tags: business failure, Failure, millionaire interview, Pejman Ghadimi, Secret Entourage

Categories: All, Business, Entrepreneurship, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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