Wealth Is a State of Mind with John Shin

In this Episode

• [00:22] – Stephan introduces John Shin, a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, movie producer, author, motivational speaker, and critically acclaimed business coach.
• [05:49] – John points out that you have to be hungry in life and desire more than where you are right now if you want to be successful.
• [10:53] – John tells us what inspired him to write his book, How Rich Asians Think and Grow Rich: A Napoleon Hill Foundation Publication.
• [16:44] – John describes how money is like a hammer; it can destroy and build things.
• [22:03] – John shares an interesting story of how the concept of the documentary film, Think and Grow Rich: The Legacy, was formulated.
• [27:34] – John talks about his fascinating experience as a professional speaker on a world tour to promote his book and movie.
• [35:03] – John shares detailed information on the structure of the Think & Grow Rich: The Legacy World Tour speaking events.
• [41:16] – John’s motivating, next action takeaway for you to apply in making a difference in your life.
• [47:11] – John talks about reading something different, almost every day and how he learns something new every time.
• [50:00] – Follow John Shin on his social media accounts and check out his website, johncshin.com to learn more with him.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

John, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

I’m excited to be here. 

Let’s talk about Think and Grow Rich because it’s been a life-changing book for you. You’ve done all these amazing things with the Napoleon Hill Foundation after reading the book and applying the principles and getting amazing results in your life. Maybe we start with your experience with the book and how that has shaped your destiny.

My wife started a business in 1994 and she read this book a couple of years after she started her business. She said, “I’m reading the first chapter. It looks good. We should read it together.” We started reading it together and the next day, I ordered my own copy and then we started reading this book together. Every night we read it and it was like watching a movie. When I first saw a movie called The Matrix with Keanu Reeves. It was a great movie, but it was such a weird and bizarre movie with some cool action. Even there was a movie by Leonardo DiCaprio called Inception. It was also weird because you had to watch it two or three times just to understand what the movie is about. 

That’s the way Think and Grow Rich is. You can’t read it one time all the way through and say, “I read the book,” because almost every paragraph has something in there that you can take away and apply to your life and to your business. We said, “This is the holy grail of business. Everyone needs this.” We came back and we gave the book to all our friends and family during the holidays, their birthdays, then the following year we gave them another copy. It was just a different version, but it was another copy. They were like, “John, I already got this,” and I was like, “This one’s a different version. You’ve got to see this.” We started doing that, and we applied it and my lawyers and my CPAs, everybody had to read it. Magically, some people would say, “Lucky John and Arlene are successful entrepreneurs.” It all happened because of this book called Think and Grow Rich. I am very passionate about that book.

It shows and it’s funny I ask audiences sometimes, “Raise your hand if Think and Grow Rich has been a book that you’ve read and gotten value out of.” A lot of people will raise their hands, but then how many people can cite the thirteen principles by heart without referencing the book? If you got the book and internalized it and applied it in your life, you’d be rattling off those thirteen principles as easy as your loved one’s names. That’s definitely a perspective shift because I can’t remember all thirteen. I remember some of them more than others but I don’t remember all thirteen. What would be a principle out of the thirteen that have been surprisingly game-changing for you?

I don’t know if it was a surprise but for me, I would have to say exactly what Napoleon Hill refers to in chapter one, where he says that the starting point of all achievement begins with desire. It’s not just having any desire. It has to be a burning desire. That we have this inner candle that’s born inside when we’re born. This light goes on and that candle cannot be extinguished by anybody other than yourself. The question is, “How hungry are you for whatever you’re trying to achieve?” Most people are pretty full. Most people are content with where they’re at. They make a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and they say, “I’ve got a house, a couple of kids. We go on a couple of vacations. I’m good.”

Most people aren’t hungry. If I had invited some people over to my house and they get to my house and then I said, “Have you guys eaten yet?” They said, “Before we came to your house, we stopped off at a restaurant. We just ate at the Cheesecake Factory. We’re full. We had cheesecake and the Tex Mex egg rolls. We’re good.” I said, “That’s such a shame because in my kitchen right now, I’ve got a five-star chef, a celebrity’s chef cooking up a nine-course meal for all of us.” They wouldn’t even enjoy it because they’re full. You’ve got to get really hungry in life and want more than where you’re at.

How you amp up that desire or hunger is by associating with different people. There’s a saying that if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re not in the right room. It’s the same thing. If you’re the richest guy in the room, you’re also in the wrong room. If I’m making let’s say $1 million a year and I’m hanging out with a bunch of people making $60,000, I’m King Kong. If I go start hanging out with people who make that every month, suddenly now I’m going to get pretty hungry because I’m at the lowest of the food chain. 

A lot of that is also driven by your personal competitiveness and everything else. Us as a family, my mom and my father were immigrants from South Korea. They came to this country looking for that American dream. They did whatever they had to do because that was their burning desire and it was not easy for them to come here. They landed right there at LAX international airport, hopped in a taxi, drove down the street and saw a rent sign. We moved into our little apartment with bars and five locks on our doors. 

That’s where I grew up right there in Southern California. We have this hamburger place called the Original Tommy’s Burger. It’s a great burger and it’s very famous and we grew up a few blocks away from there. One thing my mother always reminded me of was having that burning desire. Also, we as a family did not come to this country to screw up the opportunity. Some people take for granted what they have here in this country. The opportunities they have that you could pretty much be who you want to be and do what you want to do, unlike certain countries because of the way the government is structured. 

We have this inner candle that's inside us when we're born. That candle cannot be extinguished by anyone but yourself. Share on X

We have the ultimate freedom. Most people are living in their own prisons with doors that are wide open and that’s where they want to be stuck at. This is what I love about Dr. Martin Luther King. He said that most people die at the age of 25 and we just don’t bury them until they’re 85 because most people have surrendered or allowed other people to hijack their dreams. Those dreams are that inner candle that cannot be extinguished other than the fact that you would allow someone to do that. As long as you’re hungry and you’ve got that burning desire, that becomes the fuel to do all the other things.

I’ve learned that principle in Kabbalah. I take Kabbalah classes and they talk about that desire being the fuel or the engine for all the light that you reveal, all the things that you create in life. If you pray, then try praying not for all your wishes to be granted, your good health and the money and all that. Pray for more desire and pray for more certainty so that you can go out there with absolute certainty that you’re going to create, God willing, all this abundance and everything. You’ll have that desire and you’ll have what’s certainly needed to manifest everything. Share a bit more about your story of how you took these principles and applied them into your business and your life. You made quite a lot of money and created a lot of success for yourself and your family. You don’t have to be traveling on this world tour and writing books and so forth. As far as money is concerned, you’re good. You have lots of money to last your lifetime. Yet, you’re hungry to go out there and share this message of Think and Grow Rich with the world. You didn’t even write the book. It’s a book from the 1930s and it’s still as valid and valuable now as it was when it was written.

We wrote a modern day version of it. In the ‘80s, a guy by the name of Dr. Dennis Kimbro wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice, which was a manuscript that was written by Napoleon Hill and Dr. Dennis Kimbro put his name on there and printed and published the book with the foundation. A few years later, Lionel Sosa wrote Think and Grow Rich: A Latino Choice. We had an amazing lady named Sharon Lechter who wrote many of the Rich Dad Poor Dad books, and she wrote a book called Outwitting The Devil.

That’s a transcript that was locked away and that Napoleon Hill had written many years ago. It was never published, then Sharon Lechter edited it and it was published maybe a decade ago.

That’s what happened and she wrote a book on Think and Grow Rich for Women. Amazon is the master of suggestive selling because they always say, “People who bought this, also bought this book and this book.” We’re like little kids. We love clicking those things and we have a little box that shows up at our front door. I started clicking all the different versions of Think and Grow Rich, but there was not one called Think and Grow Rich: An Asian Choice or Asian Pacific, Asian Chinese, Japanese, oriental, whatever. There wasn’t one book that had something to do with Asian people. I called the Napoleon Hill Foundation and I spoke to Don Green about it. I said, “I would love to write this book if you give me the rights to do it.”

I got the rights and we started writing it in February of 2018 and finished it in September of 2018. I got the manuscript over to them and they got it into a few publishers. The publishers jumped on it. My book is coming out and it’s called How Rich Asians Think and Grow Rich: A Napoleon Hill Foundation Publication. It was interesting to take an Asian twist to it. We had some amazing people like Steve Aoki. I don’t know if you know who Steve Aoki is. He’s a huge DJ. His father was the founder of Benihana restaurants. They’re all over the place. They started the whole tip on where they cook it in the table for you. 

When you look at the book and you read the book, Napoleon Hill talks about the different types of fear that people have. One of the fears is the fear of poverty. That was a big motivator for me because I didn’t want to be poor. I had been poor and it sucks being poor. I wanted to make money. Eventually, we started getting money and I didn’t know how to even spend the money because I was so scared of being poor that I was just hoarding cash. Not the hard cash. It wasn’t like I had the green stuff, but at least I knew that money was sitting in an account somewhere that was accessible. I liked seeing the numbers grow. Finally, my wife said, “Should we buy a house?” I was like, “Let’s wait a little bit.” She said, “What are we waiting for?” I was like, “I want to make sure that this business is going to still continue and generate more money.”

I was scared to spend it. Eventually, we started to have enough of it where I felt comfortable to buy a home and then we started buying all the cars. We bought one car after another. It just never ended. I was buying these things and I thought that a Ferrari would make me happy. It was cool for two weeks where the boys would come over and go, “This is so cool. Let’s go for a ride.” I gave them a little spin around the block. After that, it was like, “Next car.” I bought all the cars. I got the Rolls, Bentleys, McLarens, big old monster trucks, you name it. We’ve got sixteen cars now. I’m like, “Am I going to go get a warehouse?” We went and bought homes, we’ve got boats and all that stuff. Some people call them boats, but you would call them yacht or whatever. I still was not fulfilled. I was asked by a friend of mine to go to a country called Nicaragua. Nicaragua is a third world country and now I’ve been politically corrected that we call them a developing country, but it was bad.

We went out there and we saw all these children. Half of them didn’t have clothes on. They’re malnourished. They have book covers, but they don’t have the pages inside the books. I asked them, “Where did all the pages go?” They said, to be truthfully honest, they use that for the bathroom. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” They don’t even have toilet paper. Those are little things that we take for granted. We can just go to Costco and buy a year’s supply or a week or a month’s supply of toilet paper and come right home and buy a case of bottled water. They didn’t have things like that. My friend and I, we felt so bad that we’re sitting in our own castles and our high horses and there are people that aren’t in a place where we’re at. We started our charity and we started going out there. We have the child prosperity centers. We’re in six countries. We’ve got ten locations. Each place has about 150 kids. We’ve adopted about 1,500 children around the world. 

Talk about fulfillment. Until someone had actually gone there and seen that, you don’t know how good you feel when you did something. All of a sudden, I was happy. I was fired up to go. A lot of these kids call me Jackie because they thought I was Jackie Chan. A lot of people do call me Jackie. It’s my nickname now. It’s hilarious. I just love these kids around the world. Now we’re doing things here domestically in the US and that is fulfilling. I hear a lot of people say, “John, I want to do that.” The thing is a lot of these people could donate some of their time, but they don’t have all the resources and some people who are trying to help are struggling to do it. I thought, “What if I can help them make money?” If I can help them make money, then they can have the money, which is a tool. Money can be used in a good way or a bad way. It’s like a drug. You can use drugs to help people, heal people, fix people, relieve the pain or whatever it is.

There are other people who take the money and buy drugs and do other things with it. It’s like a hammer. You can destroy things with a hammer or you can build things with a hammer. Money is the same way. You can destroy things, people and your life with money if the character isn’t there. In other words, as you have $1 million, hopefully, that character is bigger than $1 million. If the character is at the bottom and your money is here, what happens is you lose your money over time. If you make $1 million and the character goes up higher than that, what happens is even if you lose the money, the money always comes back because the character is always there. 

Another way to think of it is money accentuates what you already are and it amplifies it. If you have a poor character, it’s going to amplify that poor character. If you’re a very giving and forgiving person, that character will get amplified as well.

I thought, “Now we’re going to show people how to make money.” We got into the financial industry, which is what our core business is. From there, we’re helping people financially. What was interesting and how this whole journey started was the fact that a lot of people were saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” They would say things like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. Save your money for the rainy days.” We’re like, “Where is this thinking coming from?” We had to go and figure out what’s causing this. Arlene, my wife and I, we both believe that we’re all wired for success, but we’re programmed to fail.

The way you think will influence the way you feel

That programming, verbal programming and social programming, all those things have affected the way people think. A lot of the things that’s been stuck into these six inches up between the ears are things as to what are you watching on TV? What are you listening to the radio? What are you reading on a daily basis? All of those things get programmed up the way we think. I always say to people, “Do you ever think about what you think about?” That’s like the Inception. It’s like a dream inside of a dream. Did you ever think about what you’re thinking about? The way we think will, in my opinion, influence the way you feel. 

The way you feel every day will influence the way you act, then the way you act will determine the results. Those results are directly correlated to the way you thought because you were thinking about that before. If someone can’t even think about buying a big house, how can you achieve it when you can’t even think about it? This is where Napoleon Hill talks about whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it will achieve. Whatever you think about will be the result. If we think about these things that we want and then we feel that way, then we act on it. That’s a key component of this formula, is that you act. 

The word ACT is an acronym. A stands for Appropriate. You have to take appropriate action. Doing all the right things that are congruent with what you were thinking about and the results that you wanted to have. An easy example would be if somebody says, “John, I want to lose weight.” They’re eating burgers and pizza and drinking soda and go, “These are just our genes. I’m never going to lose weight. I’m never going to get fit.” Look at what you’re eating. They’re not appropriate for the results that you’re seeking. C for the word ACT stands for Consistent. Whatever you’re trying to do is be consistent and stay on it. A lot of people start a business and three months later they’re not making money. They’re like, “This wasn’t for me. Bob, Sally, Tommy, David, and everybody said I wasn’t going to make it. Maybe they were right.” That’s the programming.

ACT: Appropriate, Consistent, Tenacious

If you stay consistent over a long period of time, those efforts will begin to compound. All the results will manifest themselves in due time. Finally, T stands for Tenacious. Your tenacity has everything to do with your actions. It goes to actions, get the results, then you start to live your life. We’re going on this tour so that we can share with people. They go, “I know what the thirteen principles are. I googled them.” I know what they are. You can know what it is, but do you internalize it? Do you know how to apply it? Do you know how to do those things? That’s what we want to teach on the tours: the how. We tell people, “Dream big.” How? The keyword there is how. It’s what every speaker will address on that stage. We’ve got some of the most renowned speakers from around the world flying into these cities to share these wonderful nuggets with everybody.

You’re going to be one of those.

I am, yes. I decided to do so.

Speaking of dreaming big, the Napoleon Hill Foundation was trying to dream big about what they were going to do to take the teachings and the principles into the next number of decades. They had some meetings and you as a big donor were in on some of those meetings. You challenged those folks who were trying to dream big with dreaming way bigger. That’s how the documentary came to be. Could you share that story because it’s quite instructive? Even those people who can rattle off the thirteen principles by heart and embody them can still get trapped in a smaller mindset of what’s possible. You open them up to something that became amazing. You pretty much spearheaded that from my understanding.

The starting point of all achievement begins with desire. Share on X

I don’t want to take all the credit because we do have an amazing guy named Scott Cervine who is the director and we had some producers and everyone collectively. We have a new partner, a guy named Andrew Graham, who is the CEO and running the show on a daily basis. Collectively, Scott Cervine and his wife Brooke March worked for me years ago. As they came into my leadership boot camp, I told them that and they had to read this book. Scott leans over to me and says, “John, this is such a great book. We should make a movie out of this thing.” I was like, “Let’s do it someday.” 

We had this opportunity and we wanted to make this movie because of the younger generation now. I don’t mean to insult the younger generation in any way. I say this respectfully to the younger generation because I think they’re enormously intelligent, but there are certain things they don’t understand. I’ve done this several times where I meet a younger generation or Millennial and I’ll say, “Do you know a guy by the name of Henry Ford?” They’ll say like, “Was he the former president or something?” I’ll say, “Not quite. There was a Ford, you got that part right but it wasn’t Henry Ford. Henry Ford was the one who had this desire to build a carriage without a horse. He built the car.” 

The assembly line process too. Millennials don’t even know who Henry Ford is or was. 

They don’t or even a Thomas Edison. I said, “Did you ever heard of a guy named Thomas Edison?” They’re like, “Is he a YouTuber?” I’ll go, “Not quite a YouTuber, but he’s the guy who invented electricity. You get a bill from him right now every month, it’s called Edison.” Unfortunately, the younger generations don’t know people from a hundred years ago. Let’s get real. They know the modern-day names like The Rock or Will Smith or Rockefeller. How do we get the younger generation to read a book? They’re not going to. Some will and some won’t. We have to make a movie because what do they want to do? They want to go on Netflix. They want to see it streaming on their phone. They go to podcast. They go to YouTube. That’s what we do or what they do. 

We felt it was essential to make this movie. The Foundation saw the vision of it. They gave us the rights to do it. Scott Cervine, the director, did a phenomenal job on it. Most people thought it was going to be like some documentary. They thought it was going to be something similar to The Secret that came out years ago. There was nothing wrong with The Secret. The Secret came out in the perfect time. It was well done. The way they did the marketing of it was phenomenal. Even if you look at what the book was, The Secret, which was the Law of Attraction, that whole concept is in the book Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill addresses that in the book. We did the movie. It came out and we went directly into theaters. I thought it would be so cached to be in a theater. 

I wanted my friends and family to see Think and Grow Rich on the top of the screen outside as they were promoting the movie. We went to the theaters and we did not make any money, just like what everybody said. Movie theaters won’t make you any money. They’re very expensive unless you’re a Star Wars or Marvel or DC movie. We came out of the theaters and then we went straight to digital. Our partner here, Andrew Graham, did a phenomenal job with his team and joined all the digital marketing and we killed it on digital marketing. We started doing licensing rights around the world. We’re in all these different countries around the world. We started doing these little private screenings for different organizations. 

That’s how the whole speaking came out. I had a lady who asked me to come to a conference and speak at it. I was going to go there to promote my book and my movie. She said, “We’d love to cover all your expenses.” I was like, “That’s very generous of you.” I didn’t say that out loud, but I said that on the inside. She said, “I’m sure you probably get $50,000 to $100,000 for your speaking events.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. She was like, “We can pay you $10,000 to come out and speak.” That $10,000 was the first $10,000 I ever made in speaking outside in the real world. 

You’re now officially a professional speaker. 

I’m a professional speaker. Who would have thought? Never in my wildest dream would I have ever thought that what I would be doing is becoming a professional speaker. I did 200 speaking events in 2018. Some weren’t as financially rewarding but I did it anyway. It’s not even so much the money. It’s just I wanted to get in front of the audience and say, “Read the book.” I loved it. People started buying DVDs of the movie. When my book came out, I finished my book, I told the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Don Green and all the board members are so incredibly generous to me that they allowed me to go on a tour to promote my book and the movie. I was going to go on a world tour and one after another, the word got out and different speakers started calling and asking if they can be a part of the faculty to go on a tour. I said, “You realize I can’t pay you any money. There’s no budget for it. You’re a volunteer.”

Every one of these speakers that came on the tour with me said, “We’re not looking to get paid. We want to be servant leaders/speaker and provide real content for the audiences who are going to be coming to our event.” It’s amazing. Many people came up to me and said, “I was going to call the Napoleon Hill Foundation and make a movie.” I must have heard that a thousand times from different people and I said, “Why didn’t you?” The thing is that most people talk and talk, but they never take action. It’s about execution. You can think and dream all you want, but you have to act on your dreams. One way or another, take that journey and have all the hits, obstacles, challenges and do it. Just do it. Whatever you’re going to do, don’t let anybody else try to hijack your dreams. You don’t need anybody’s approval. You don’t need their validation. Napoleon Hill talks about you having that sixth sense and then he talks about having that creative imagination coupled with all the other twelve principles. You can do it. There’s nothing you can’t do.

The movie has become successful in streaming, digital, and DVD. It didn’t do great at the box office, but that’s okay because that wasn’t the end game. What have you gotten in terms of reaching the metrics that you’re gauging the success of the movie on?

The thing is it’s based on the total revenues. We see the profit margins now on the movie and social media changes everything when it comes to distribution. Anybody ever wants to make a movie in this day and age, unless you’re one of those big Hollywood Blockbuster hits and you’ve got $200 million, $300 million budget, then you’re going to make those. There’s always going to be a one-off. There were different movies that were low budget and the way they did the marketing piqued everybody’s curiosity. They got us all and we went to a theater to watch it. Most movies don’t make any money in movie theaters. Digital is the way to go. You don’t need the big theater or the Hollywood producers anymore to make movies. You can make a movie and even go to Netflix and be pretty profitable there. If you understand, you need to go and find somebody that can share with you what digital marketing is. If you understand digital marketing, click funnels, and all that stuff, you can go out there and crush it in the digital world.

I know a few things about that. I have three books on digital marketing: Art of SEO, Google Power Search, and Social eCommerce. I have a whole other podcast dedicated to digital marketing called Marketing Speak. I’ll have you back on that show at some point to talk about all the funnels and marketing that you did to blow out that movie, your book launch, the world tour that you’re doing and everything. That will be for another day. What were the costs and the timeframe that the movie took to produce? Are we talking six months’ timeframe and a few hundred thousand dollars? Are we talking about many millions of dollars and multiple years to produce? What was involved there? 

At first, it was trying to figure out what was the budget. When we first sat down and talked about the budget, Scott Cervine said, “We’re going to do it this way.” He had a budget and he was so amazing. He was doing the work of five or ten people. We were like, “$300,000 or $400,000. That’s reasonable.” We don’t have all these crazy special effects, but we didn’t want it to be just a documentary. When Scott brought in all the costume designers and the different sets and started saying, “Maybe we could do this and we can do that.” I’m like, “That’s cool. I like that idea.” The next thing you know, we started spending and $3 million later, here we are and it’s no longer a $300,000 movie. 

You’ve just got to be prepared for the unknown. Even during the filming process, we would go out to a place and we were ready to shoot and all the cast is ready. All the camera people were all ready and out of nowhere came a massive storm. Nobody even saw it on the weather forecast. We got all this gear. We’re out there in the middle of nowhere shooting the scene. We’re now all sitting there in our cars, our trailers and our hotel rooms. All those little things were unexpected and that’s why a lot of times we went over budget and what have you. It was also the changing things up along the way. 

You've got to get real hungry in life and want more than where you're at. Share on X

Most movies could probably be filmed maybe six, seven, eight, nine months. It took us almost two years to get all the filming done because we had course corrections along the way and that’s okay. You adapt and you change. You’d come over hurdles and obstacles. We also knew that there’s a great quote that says that an obstacle or challenge is something that you see when you take your eyes off your goals. We were very goal-driven and so all these little obstacles or challenges, we said, “We’re going to make another movie just on the making of the Think and Grow Rich movie and all the craziness that went beyond behind the scenes.” 

We then had to work with certain kinds of personalities, which was always quite interesting to deal with personality types. We did that and we’re breaking or shattering records. We’re going to probably do $15 million on digital campaigns. If anybody wants to know about click funnels, they need to talk to you about this stuff because that’s your expertise. It’s not even my expertise. I just know it sounds good, let’s do it. When you have the systems in place, then it works. That’s the way to go. We made more money on digital than most people do with theaters.

My expertise isn’t so much with funnels. I do know a fair bit about funnels, but it’s more SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I know everything you could imagine about how Google works, that’s pretty fun. Let’s talk about how the world tour is set up and how that reinforces the Think and Grow Rich thirteen principles. As a speaker, you have all these guest speakers who are volunteering their time, but you don’t have the same speakers going to every single city. You have dozens of cities that you’re covering over a several month time period. Give us a little more detail on how this is all structured and what the end game is.

We’re doing fifteen cities in the US and we’re going from California to almost every major city. It starts off on May 3rd and 4th at the Anaheim Convention Center in Southern California. From there, we go directly to Chicago. We come back down to San Diego and then we go up to Washington up to Northern California or in Seattle. We had Dallas, we do Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, New York. We were hitting all the major cities. After that, we stop. We begin May 3rd and we end in the second week of November, just domestically here. We all take a two-month little hiatus to enjoy time with our family during the holidays. We resume back in the second week or the third week of January where we begin starting to go to all these different countries.

We’re going from London to Malaysia, Singapore, India, South Africa, Germany, Sweden. It’s just everywhere. It’s interesting because our campaign on Facebook has now penetrated some of these countries and they’re calling us from these other countries and saying, “Are you guys coming to our city in our town or our providence or our country?” “We weren’t going to, but now we’re going because there’s a huge following of Think and Grow Rich people there.” All of a sudden it became 35 more cities around the world. I was shocked to see how many speakers said, “I want to go with you to each one of these countries as well.” We’re going there and one of the things in terms of content, why I encourage people to come to this event and my concern is that there are so many events. In 2018, I did all of these different events. People were charging money, and they went to these events and it felt like it was a live infomercial. 

It was like a pitch festival after a pitch festival. For me, people gave just a little bit, like a fifteen-minute TED Talk. They said, “If you liked what you heard, go to the back of the room and sign up for this other thing that costs $10,000.” It was like one person after another was pitching. That concerns me because it’s hurting this industry. It’s hurting them in my opinion. Others who are doing the pitch festivals will argue and obviously have a different opinion than what I think. It’s hurting because more and more people are less inclined to go to an event. One thing I definitely want to stress to people is that it will not be a pitch festival. These speakers are coming in and teaching you content and things that are very relevant and practical that you can apply to your life the moment you walk away from the event. I’m hoping that everybody walks away will embrace the principles that we teach there to their life. They’ll start to see the difference and then the word will get out. I think we’ll be the biggest movement around this globe here over the next couple of months.

What’s the URL for the world tour? How would people get tickets?

It would be www.TGRWorldTour.com and when they go in there, there are different packages. If somebody wants to come with a group, there is a group package for 50 tickets at $2,500. That comes out to $50 a person. For $50 for a two-day event to have people like Kevin Harrington, one of the original Sharks there. Marshall Faulk, a Hall of Famer in the NFL and also a wonderful entrepreneur is there. We got former basketball players, actors, celebrities. We’ve got Mario Lopez coming in. Dr. Bill Dorfman, who invented the Zoom and the Brite Smile, the big celebrity dentist. There are so many amazing people that are coming in to speak and share from their heart what they can do with their lives.

There’s a concept from another book of Napoleon Hill that we briefly alluded to. The concept is called the drift and the book is Outwitting The Devil. Have you gotten much out of Outwitting The Devil in comparison with Think and Grow Rich or is all of your focus have been on Think and Grow Rich?

It has mostly been Think and Grow Rich. I’m ashamed to admit it but in 2018, I almost had no time to read a book other than writing my book and meeting with all the different people and the year before, with the movie release and the making of. In the last few years, my whole life has been consumed with Think and Grow Rich. Every day I get a book sent to us from some authors. Some speakers say, “Please add me to your faculty. Here’s my book. This is what I teach. This is my expertise and area of influence.” I’m getting all these books. I got lots of books to read. I just haven’t had the chance to read anything from the last few years. I was on Sharon Lechter’s podcast and I’m so grateful she didn’t call me out on that book and say, “John, what do you think about my book, Outwitting The Devil?” I honestly do have the book and I own the book. I haven’t had the chance to read it.

I’ve had Sharon Lechter on this show and it’s such an amazing episode. It’s definitely worth listening to, so check that out. We do talk quite a bit about Outwitting The Devil and the concept of the drift. We talk about Rich Dad, Poor Dad because she was a co-author on that book as well. It’s a great episode. Could you share some next action takeaways for our audience that they can apply right away that will make a difference in their lives?

The first thing that people should do is to know where they’re going. People say, “What’s my purpose? I don’t know what’s my purpose. I hear all these speakers saying, ‘You’ve got to have a purpose,’ and I don’t know what my purpose is.” For me, my purpose is what I would want to do for the rest of my life, even if I didn’t get paid. Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, would they stop playing basketball or would they still play basketball whether they’re making money or not? That’s a dream, to play basketball their whole life and get paid to do what they love to do. 

My whole thing is I love helping people. I love to be able to instruct somebody in business and in life and how to avoid the mines on the minefields. How do you avoid that? What I want to do is I want to leave behind my footprints where people can put their feet into the footprint of where I stepped to get to the other side. One way I can do that is to go on tour and share those things with everybody. Everybody needs to know, if you’re going to go somewhere, even in your car, if you don’t know how to get there, you’re going to go to your navigation system or your GPS system. It’s the same thing in life. What’s your GPS? 

GPS in itself is an acronym. G stands for your Goals, it’s your plan. What is it that you want? It’s amazing how many people don’t even know what they want in life. Write it down. You’ve got to put it down on paper. Napoleon Hill talks about that. When you write it down, write it down with specificity. You’ve got to be detailed as to what you want. It’s crazy what begins to happen in your life. Others will call, “That’s the Law of Attraction.” It’s not just the Law of Attraction. You can’t sit there and go, “Attract 15,000 square foot home, come to me.” All of a sudden, you look outside and there’s a 15,000 square foot home waiting for you to go walk into the outside. 

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That’s not the Law of Attraction. What Napoleon Hill talks about is with absolute specificity and definiteness. Know what it is that you want. If you want a house, don’t just say you want a house. Say you want a 12,000 square foot home, with a six-car garage, with twelve bathrooms and be very specific. That’s absolutely what Arlene and I did. We said, “We want a home that’s 15,000 square feet. We want a house that’s nine bedrooms. We want twelve bathrooms. We want a big room for entertainment. We want a big backyard. We want one acre in our backyard. That’s for our guests to hang out and have parties. 

You can have a good party on an acre of land. You’re going to have a whole concert going on it. That’s what we did when we wrote it down. What we did is we met with our architect and we said, “This is how we want to build out our house.” They started applying it. We want underground tunnels and they built underground tunnels through our property. It’s pretty crazy. People say, “Why?” I go, “Why not?” I went to the Hearst Castle in Northern California and I saw the way this guy lived. My house is even smaller than that. Know exactly what you want. That’s your goals. 

The P is the Plans. It’s how are you going to get it done? When you do that, when you have your plans, look at it daily. When you wake up in the morning, look at it before you go to bed. I wish you could see my house right now. Maybe I should even go down there. I should show you the walls of everything that’s up there so that you can visualize it and plan it out. I can get up and show you. The S is to Schedule. Schedule it and absolutely do it. Get it done. People always say, “When’s a good time to have a baby?” Never. You just have a baby and you deal with it. You don’t plan like, “Next week we’re going to have a baby.” It doesn’t work like that. 

Don’t mind my kitchen, everyone. Everything is written. These are all the speaker rosters. These are all the live tour dates. It’s all written down. These are all the speakers at which cities they can come to. Look at all the different cities. We’re going to all these different cities. Yes, no, etc. I’m looking at every speaker. What days they can speak all these different speakers, then we continue. We’ve got more stuff posted. I’ve got the whole digital team sitting over here. These are all our VIP, movie screenings that are going on. This is our cities and where we’re going, who’s helping me over here, with all the facilitators. This is how we’re getting it all done, the TGR World Tour in terms of our marketing and how it’s all happening: ticket prices, masterminds and all that stuff.

You might want to consider painting your entire house with that special whiteboard paint. You can write on all the walls everywhere instead of using the big Post-it on the windows. That’s a beautiful house you’ve got there. 

Thank you very much. 

I know you’ve got to go. That was quite a lot of fun and it gives us a good glimpse into the power of Think and Grow Rich. We didn’t have time to go through all the thirteen principles, but that’s what the book is for. Take the book from the library or order it from Amazon and read it and apply it. How many times would you say that you’ve read Think and Grow Rich?

I would say that I read it probably daily right now. Almost every day, I’m reading something different. I kid you not, almost every day, I read it religiously because every time I read it, I learn something new. Just when you think you know it, you learn something new.

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Thank you so much, John. The website for the World Tour is TGRWorldTour.com. For the movie and the book, where should they go to get those?

For the book, they can go to TGRAsianChoice.com and they can pre-order. Hopefully, as the book comes out, they will be able to order online at Amazon.com. If they come to any of the tour events, they can have the book there as well. I also want to offer everybody a coupon code, for your audience, so that we can give them a coupon code to get savings. Whatever the packages are, they can get $200 off. Think of a word that we can create a coupon code for. What do you think? What should we give your audience? 

How about optimize? 

Optimize. Done. I’ll let me get my programmers to get it up and running so that your audience can get a $200 discount on every ticket that they buy. There are different packages and they are pretty much applicable to all. We did a ticket price for students as well. We want students to go and learn and the ticket price for students is $69 for two days. For $35 a day to go listen to multimillionaires and billionaires, it’s almost negligent for them not to go. 

Thank you so much. That was a great and generous offer. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your journey with my audience. If they wanted to follow you or learn more about you besides picking up your book, do you have a website or a social channel that you want to direct them to?

I’m on Instagram. I have a lot of stuff on Instagram. It’s @JohnShinOfficial on Instagram and then my website is JohnCShin.com. They can go in there and a bunch of stuff they can get for free.

Thank you again, John. I appreciate your time. To our audience, take some action and apply what you’ve learned and hopefully, you’ll also go to the event and get tons of value there. We’ll catch you on the next episode of Get Yourself Optimized. 

Thank you so much for having me.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Be hungry for success. When I let that fuel my motivation, I can do everything in my power to achieve my goals. 
Support causes and charities. Don’t forget to share my blessings by helping those who need it the most.
Be mindful of my thoughts. The way I think will influence the way I act. The way I act will determine the results.
Get the results I want by internalizing and applying the ACT formula. It stands for appropriate action, consistency, and tenacity.
Act on my dreams and don’t let anybody try to hijack them. Remind myself I don’t need anyone’s approval or validation.
Know my purpose so I can make a difference in my life. That purpose is something that I would want to do for the rest of my life even if I wasn’t paid.
Read or revisit Napoleon Hill’s book, “Think and Grow Rich,” and learn something new every time.
Participate in John’s world tour which is a two-day event with speakers like Kevin Harrington, Mario Lopez, and Dr. Bill Dorfman, among others. Get tickets by going to www.TGRWorldTour.com.
Get a hold of John’s book, “How Rich Asians Think and Grow Rich: A Napoleon Hill Foundation Publication” by visiting TGRAsianChoice.com or ordering online at Amazon.com or at any of the tour events.
Check out John’s Instagram @JohnShinOfficial or visit his website, JohnCShin.com, for some free resources

About John Shin

John is the Founder and CEO of AXIANTA Financial Partners, LLC. (AFP) and has created his own progressive sales and personal growth training company made up of professional mentors and business builders who work one-on-one with individuals, businesses, and major corporations to help them achieve growth in any economy. He is also the Founder of a non-profit organization called “ALL FOR ONE” which provides child prosperity centers for children around the world. Together with the organization, they have built and created 9 orphanages in 6 countries like Uganda, Philippines, Nicaragua, Vietnam, China, and India and have helped over 1,000 kids live within their orphanages.