I appreciate it Derek.

Sure, I’ll try to make it as quick as I can because even that might take like fifteen minutes.

I’ve been through a lot, man.

Long story short I was born in Iran and actually migrated to France as a result of the revolution.

I came from a mom and a father were pretty affluent in that country and when I actually fled Iran to go to France with my mom, we were left with nothing, so we had to start all over due to revolution. No money, no nothing and skills for her that didn’t matter anymore being in a new country with a new roadmap to how the economy worked.

She established herself in France for about 10 years just on hopes to come to the United States one day. Once again 10 years later is granted a visa and we end up in the States after a good 10 year attempt of getting here.

Once we get here, once again no money, no cash, nothing, because we had to leave it all behind in order to come here illegally. Meaning that we came on a visa but that we’re not really allowed to stay, so we can’t take everything with us.

We make it here only to once again be faced with more adversity with the idea that now we’re trying to set up a restaurant just to get a green card and it fails miserably. All of our last of money is gone, I’m fourteen years old, we’re very poor.

I decide to start working, but yet again I have no green card so I can’t do any work. It was a time where I always said I would’ve begged for a job at McDonald’s.

I couldn’t do anything until one day I was in high school and I found two people were offering customer service jobs. Seemed like a very black and white thing, I didn’t speak English very very well but still was able to hold a conversation.

I decided you know what, I can answer phones, why not? I’m going to try it and hopefully this company’s small enough they’re not going to question the fact that I don’t have a green card because I had a social but it wasn’t valid for work. If there’s immigrants listening to this, I feel your struggle.

That became a really lucky thing that I was able to get a school permit and work at that one organization that was a telemarketing organization but I quickly learned the art of sale at the age of fourteen and went from making $12 an hour to $2500 a week selling siding, roofing and all types of remodeling gigs for homes.

It took about a year or so of practicing but I actually got the gist of it pretty well and made myself all the way up to director of that company by the age of 18. I was managing sale staff. I was managing service calls and just about everything in between. I was a small company, like moderately a $5 million under company a year. It was a good experience very very young.

I decided to go to school after but I always sucked in high school and I decided to go to college and so I needed a new job. I decided to let my job go even though I was making great money by the age of 18 and going into banking.

First was because I wanted to learn finance. Secondly because I thought it was more flexible with hours. My other job required me to work late nights and so in this particular case the bank would close at 4. It just made sense and so I went and applied for a bank manager position at the age of 18.

Through a very interesting interview, I was actually granted this privilege. I became the youngest bank manager of any fortune 500 bank in the United States at the age of 18 and then through my career in banking by the age of 23, I was an executive vice president for that same bank.

By the age of 25 I found myself fired because I was a very cocky and unique individual that didn’t fit very well with other people. I was kind of forced into small business ownership.

I then founded Secret Consulting which at the time was selling sales and service models and training models for banks. Sold it to 3 of the larger competitors of my bank, once I got fired. It was a year of challenge and struggle and I grew that company after 3 years to revolving between 4 to 4 1/2 million in revenue each year.

Now very early on when I was 14 when I was working at the telemarketing job, I also had created like side income for myself by creating a very small mobile car wash business. What that was, was I just had a few friends who were also not legal to work at the time and they were all like, “Oh we want jobs too where you’re getting jobs.”

The big problem was I didn’t want them to get a job there because I didn’t want anyone to know I was illegal. I was like that’s going to look really bad if I’m bringing in all these like little Latino friends and even though I wasn’t Latino this doesn’t look good. You don’t want them to know that you don’t have papers.

I was like, you know what that’s not going to work so I came up with this idea, I said why don’t I just go to Kinko’s, make some flyers and I’ll put them up because we’re in a big building and so I’ll put them up in the building.

I’m working phones all day so I had a cell phone, I had one of those giant cell phones, you know the ones that were first coming out by Nokia. I had one of those and I told people, I was like, “Well they’ll call me and I’ll book you and since you’re already in the building because we’ll drive here together. Then we’ll just have you guys wait and like whoever wants to wash your car, we’ll have you guys wash the car.”

We worked out something with the landlord, we say, “Can we use your hose and we’ll just move the cars inside and wash them?” so all day these guys are washing like $5-$10 car wash jobs and they were making something which is better than nothing. We used to split the money.

Years later I kind of gave up on that because I was a banker and I had a lot of prestige in my job, I didn’t want to be seen as a car wash guy. I kind of left it to my friend to do that until I got fired.

When I got fired I went back and re-visited this business and said … well at that time they had expanded to doing some custom work on cars. Repairing cars and also still detailing, etc.

I decided to kind of get back in the business and offered them a very unique alternative which was, I would literally own the entire business, even though they had been the ones building it, but I would take it to a completely new angle of offering people more of a high-end tuning ground rather than fixing up basically random people’s cars and mustangs and stuff.

We would be fixing up Porsches, Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

I had a lot of success in banking very early. I had a great salary and so I was able to afford these cars myself which gave me a unique angle in marketing at the time because not a lot of young people were.

I would be able to walk up to people and as an owner, offer suggestions on who should do the work. Someone who actually owns one rather than someone who doesn’t. That became a business that became like a car shop, nothing more than a tuning shop

In 2005 was when that business took a very interesting turn when I decided to sell watches. I started deciding to sell high-end watches to the same people and I grew that business.

At the time I was doing nothing more than $200-$300k in revenue and we grow it to over $7 million just because of our watch presence. That became a huge deal and I decided that why just watches? Why stop there? Why not just be a full concierge and give people access to exotic cars and everything in between that we’re already in the world of.

It took an interesting turn because I used my finance background to do something rather unique. I didn’t want to be a car salesmen. I never really enjoyed the industry even though I knew how to sell a car.

I decided that what I would do instead is I would offer the world’s first opportunity for people to make an investment in an exotic car without the burden. They would buy a car except they would really be investing in my company.

I would own the car that they’re investing in. I would hold it, keep it, and then re-sell it for them knowing what the trends of the market were doing.

To give you a very brief overview, someone would buy or want to buy a car that brand new is $200k but because it’s unavailable and in high demand or it’s brand new on the market and people can’t get it, it would be retailing for $400-$500k in it’s first year.

Knowing that and having connections in the industry, I was able to get such a car for $200. I would sell it to an investor for $300, make a hundred off the car immediately. This is even before the car even exists. Are you following …

Making $100k, right? Then immediately taking in that investment and saying I can sell this car for $400 so you’re going to make $100k the minute the car comes out but I just have to hold your $300k the whole time being. Get it?

We would hold that money for about a year or so before the car came out. Sell the car. Client made a hundred, we make a hundred on a car we never funded.

I started doing that and all we became was really a giant storage facility with massive security and watches and everything in between. That business later became VIP Motoring. It became my biggest business to date in terms of revenue and when I say revenue, not necessarily net profit but revenue.

It became a really interesting business because I started creating a lot of connections and lifestyle industries.

I had clients all over from Dubai to Europe who wanted cars that didn’t exist or didn’t come out yet and that we had access to. We started becoming a really well known source, not only to get really exclusive cars but also to create an investment opportune for everybody that was willing to partake in that before others bought those exclusive cars.

That business kind of grew and that was the one at its peak actually, that business reached over $55 million in revenue but actually fell back down a few years later when we restructured once more.

I had Secret Consulting, which after the bank, it became more of a digital branding agency where we build websites and apps and then furthermore I had VIP Motoring which today I still own both businesses but appointed a CEO in 2011 to both companies and ended up focusing all my time on secretentourage.com.

This was my first digital kind of “get in the space” business. That business is really where I’ve decided to leverage all my past resources of IT and web so I had a team that would build that.

Then I also had this other opportunity to have these 10’s of thousands of clients that are all into luxury lifestyle and decided to create a website about entrepreneurship and business which originally focused on bringing forward the stories of those who live a very lavish lifestyle, if they were self-made.

We started that way and eventually grew as a blog and publication into a giant academy which today features 200+ of some of the best known entrepreneurs out there. As well as a platform, it has become a publishing platform for books, which has also published my own book, “Third Circle Theory” through it.

It has just been an incredible journey of discovering the online space of how to market, how to bring the brand to life. Today that has expanded into multiple other online digital properties which I own around the exotic car space as well as the finance and credit repair space and a lot of legion around banks as well.

That’s kind of like the brief of the journey and here we are today with you, having the conversation we’re having about Third Circle Theory.

Third Circle Theory itself is very unique like you said. It actually came about when I had already written 8 previous books, 9 to be exact. One of them was an e-book only, so I had written 9 books total.

I just couldn’t figure out why my books weren’t super successful. I was like, “There’s really good content in these books. I don’t know why that people are not buying them,” as much as I’d want them to anyway.

I came to the conclusion that perhaps there’s so many books out there talking about how to do things and what is good to be done, you know like for your life, you should do this if you want to be financially successful. If you want to be an entrepreneur follow these principles, kind of thing.

I really thought to myself, I said, “There’s so many books about stuff, but what has been the one thing that has allowed me to be extremely successful regardless of whatever I do?”

I’ve come to realize that that is about my deeper understanding of people and how to get them to uncover and unlock their potential.

During my corporate career I took many chances where I hired people off the streets with no experience.

A perfect example would be a certain gentlemen who has just come to my office with a t-shirt for an interview. He was a park-o-meter maid and he wanted to become a bank teller. Over 3 years I was able to coach him and mold him into becoming the executive vice president for the business banking team of that same bank I used to run, with no education or anything further.

I myself never had an education either, past high school. One of the key things was, what was it about that process that just allowed that person to bind to it and really push it while so many others are hungry for success but do nothing about it?

Correlating all this through all these patterns, and just all of these people I’ve helped through all the years in corporate America, small business, or even just you know working with them as peers, not necessarily as their supervisor or as someone above them or as a coach.

I kind of looked back at that and I’ve asked myself, I said, “My mom made all these sacrifices to bring us to the U.S. That had to mean something bigger and better than just making more money for me than she was making back then.” I said all of that has to meet somewhere.

I started analyzing my life and came up that I guess my talents are what made me really successful, is just that.

Now you see, most people confuse awareness with self-awareness. They believe that if you’re very aware then that means that you’re very self-aware, which is completely untrue.

You see I define awareness as someone’s ability to be alert and understanding of their environments.

I define self-awareness as someone who’s very alert and capable of understanding not only what their environment is but how their environment responds to them and as a result is able to manipulate their environment to create outcomes they wish for.

It’s a very unique perspective on awareness but it’s also one that when you understand the 3 circles and Third Circle Theory behind how circumstance is born, how society is mastered, and how or where people feel fulfillment, passion and these things come from, you’re able to gauge in your life.

Third Circle Theory is almost like a road map, where do you fit in what are you missing that enables you to graduate into that next circle. Into that next phase of your life and ultimately allows you to continuously pursue a greater version of yourself.

This may sound a little philosophical or may sound almost boring to a lot of young people at first but when you read Third Circle Theory, I’ve written it in a way using the same principles that have helped all of these people previous to people listening today.

That is able to come together in a manner that is self-reflective and so in Third Circle Theory you won’t find a lot of things about my life or bragging about my life or telling you how I’ve done this or that.

In reality there’s actually only one page about my life and there’s only five pages about the idea of money in Third Circle Theory.

People believe money is so important in the quest of business but really money is the byproduct of who you are and so I teach people how to become a better person so that they have a better understanding of the world they live in and the environment they live in and the society they live in so that they can learn to actually control all their actions instead of be a byproduct of their environment.

I will give you the simplest thing that’s actually in Third Circle Theory. It’s a paragraph in the book that hopefully will resonate with listeners today.

Most people consider … because most people aren’t successful, that’s their problem so we’ve got to fix that. What I mean by that is most people look at their lives as focused on they’ve made a choice and that choice had an outcome.

Meaning, everything they do in life they look backwards on and they determine like, “Oh I chose to get married, well I got divorced 6 years later, that was a bad choice.” What they do is they try to look back at choices in order to identify why outcomes happen so they can make better choices in the future.

That’s the best way to shift the blame away from yourself and blame your past for it. I’ll tell you what I mean by that.

If most unsuccessful people feel that way, most successful people will add one word to that same equation. Instead of saying choices equal outcomes, they’ll say choices plus actions equal outcomes.

Now the blame goes back to the action part which took place on you, which allows you to actually identify which actions you’ve taken in your life that have actually led to that outcome. Meaning the same choice could actually lead to a positive outcome, if the right actions are in place.

An unsuccessful person would say, “I started a business, it failed, I’m not starting a business again. That was a waste of time.” A successful person would say, “I started a business. I took the wrong steps, I made the wrong moves during the business. It failed. The choice of starting a business had no negative quotation, my actions were wrong. Allow me to make the same choice with better actions, create an alternative outcome.”

A human being can then understand that the idea of choice is only as valid as the actions of the individual themselves and therefore puts the blame back in their control.

Hopefully that’s kind of explain the idea of the difference.

I think the main thing that I’ve always questioned has always been myself. I’ve always questioned purpose. I’ve always wanted money. I was very poor, like personally.

You know my mom did well but then got poor. I never really got a taste of that affluent lifestyle until I earned it for myself. One of the thing that kind of caught me or kept catching up with me is that, I kept buying nice stuff, like very young I had a Lamborghini, Ferrari, and you know I had my houses very young and I did well in many things and it always led to more money.

There was a time where more money didn’t lead to more happiness and there was a time where more money didn’t even lead to better stuff because I was like, “A Ferrari is not better than a Lamborghini, it’s just different.”

You know I was like it’s not like necessarily just increasing, you know and I was like my house has like five bedrooms and I don’t really need eight bedrooms, I’m a single guy. It didn’t make sense so I was like what’s point of upgrading everything, every time just because you’re trying to do what? Show your neighbor you got more money?

What’s the point? You have reached a level of satisfaction monetarily but then the impression is, is life about just satisfaction?

That’s when I started thinking about the idea of purpose and fulfillment. I started thinking that if this idea holds true that society and life are two different things and they’re related but they’re not the same exact thing. Third Circle Theory was born from there.

You can be very successful in society and not successful in life. We’ve seen this from people make a lot of money and never find personal happiness and we find people who find a lot of personal happiness and never find a lot of great success in money.

In creating Third Circle Theory I started relating the patterns as to what happens in those individuals. I started thinking to myself and I said, “Therefore if money is the measure of success in society, because that’s how society perceives success, is the more money you make, it’s a man-made currency, you know for success. Then what is the currency for life?”

I started kind of analyzing people that I knew, people that I looked up to, that I felt were great entrepreneurs and not just entrepreneurs, very successful in their life both on the side of society and as well as on the other side which was … you know I saw this difference in entrepreneurs versus very successful businessmen.

I started putting 2 and 2 together and I realized that perhaps the idea of success in life has to do with entrepreneurship but isn’t about entrepreneurship. Perhaps entrepreneurship is a tool to create resourcefulness within an individual that leads them to a higher level of control in their environments, because they learn to build something from nothing.

Therefore the key to fulfillment with Third Circle Theory has to be somewhat interrelated to the idea of entrepreneurship.

I started looking into the idea of purpose, where passion comes from. How people make a big mistake to confuse love for passion. You know like love being just something you care about and passion being something you chose to do something about that you actually care about.

The action piece was always the element that differentiated success from failure. This is key to Third Circle Theory.

I kind of categorized action in the terms of circumstance, society and life and how it evolves based on age and based on circumstance and based on previous monetary record and based on previous family backgrounds and all of these things and was able to systemize it to just 200 pages.

Originally Third Circle Theory was actually 500 plus pages and I trimmed it to a level that would not necessarily talk about all of these things because that’s like information overload but rather systemize it in a way that would allow people to peak on each of these core principles that make a person successful and allow them time to self-reflect.

Many people who have actually read Third Circle Theory tell me, “I read 2/3 of it and I stopped.” I said, “Why’d you stop?” They’re like, “Well I stopped because once I realize how effective just the first circle part was, I knew that I didn’t even need to know about the second circle to know what I needed to correct about myself before reading on.”

They went back and decided to take action even before reading Third Circle Theory in full. Which was great and I attribute a lot of the success of Third Circle Theory to just that core idea as well.

I don’t think that was my purpose though.

I think that was … what I wanted more than anything was not to be poor because I had tried being poor, I never knew what it was to be rich and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

I didn’t want to be a banker. I didn’t want to be a telemarketer. I didn’t want to be in the car business and I didn’t want to be in the consulting gig. What I did know, that drove me all through these changes was the fact that I knew I didn’t want to be poor and this is something that a lot of listeners can perhaps you know relate with is they may not have an idea.

They may not have a concept of what their career should look like, what job they should want, or what they want to do in the next 10 years but if they know they don’t want to be poor then not doing shit is going to make them poor. You know what I mean?

You know you don’t want that, then do the opposite of not doing shit. Do other stuff, you know?

No, that’s been done since I was 23 years old.

When I was 27, my purpose shifted from making money to creating change, so today with Third Circle Theory, I’m a big believer that that book is going to change the way younger generations think and affect a shift in the self-education space by people having more awareness and self-awareness.

They’re able to make better decisions for their lives and follow with better action. I’m a big believer that Third Circle Theory holds a significant part of my purpose in life.

The other segment is I’m also a believer that, in my age I did not have access to a wide variety of mentors.

I was fortunate enough to have incredible guidance from a wonderful mother who genuinely gave up everything in her life to make sure that I was well … you know I was someone who had a high level of capacity to be able to undertake life and I also had a lot of great people in my banking career who made sure that they took an extra second to explain how things work or help me as I was very ambitious, very young.

I’ve always said what would be greater than to be able to help others experience life the way I had? Which was where I believe a lot of my skills in both having had my resources in IT and a luxury lifestyle and something really unique that I had through all these years is every time I shared with people why they should be better.

I just had this charismatic way of doing it and this lifestyle that kind of inspired them to do it.

I believe that all of these things didn’t happen at random. You know I believe that even though I wasn’t a car fanatic and having Lamborghinis that still evoked that personal inspiration can happen for others.

Also, I kind of understood that perhaps linking back all the dots in my life, my life was meant for more than just doing one thing and doing it really well forever.

I decided the best way to reach the masses was to get online and with no online skills, you know no online marketing skills and no idea on how to monetize a website, a conversion or some of these things that I’m sure you talk a lot about with guests on your show.

I was just able to kind of get in the space and allow just my resourcefulness, my relationships and the great network of people I had around me to allow this platform called Secret Entourage to bring back a lot of that value to young people.

By not only providing them education, self-education on entrepreneurship, bringing them incredible mentors, giving them the gift of the idea of Third Circle Theory, and then also the best part about it, is my passion to shift it to enabling other people who were in my situation back then who did not have money who would have loved to learn, the opportunity to learn by allowing Secret Entourage to fund a very special project.

Which me and you talked about before this call, helping bring entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial values to low to moderate income schools across the country.

Certainly. I have to somehow kind of keep certain borderlines because we are still expanding that model but I’ll give a much better view to your audience.

I’ve always believed that schools that are low to moderate income in areas that don’t have funding and don’t have opportunity have a huge gap between the time the student leaves the school and the time they go home.

I believe that a big piece to people who are successful and don’t sway away into drugs, gangs, or other things of the sort comes from this huge idea that they have something to do. Therefore they’re not bored.

When you’re bored and you have nothing to do and you are not making money so you don’t have fun things to do at home, you tend to look for other things to do which is why gangs, drugs, and things seem interesting at a young age. They give you a feel of social belonging to something when you’re home by yourself and you don’t belong to anything.

This has been something that I’ve always wanted to kind of fix. My belief was that with this gift of Third Circle Theory and Secret Entourage, we’re able to go into these low to moderate income schools and apply after school programs that will enable people to have something to do after school, between that time when typically parents get home and the time people leave high school at an early age.

It gives us a unique opportunity to keep not only people entertained but also to a level educate them on principles that they typically would not be exposed to until 5 to 10 years later and give them this knowledge early to enhance their awareness and also prevent them from looking for these other opportunities like drugs, gangs, and other things.

This has kind of become a program we’ve piloted and we work on since ’09. We launched Secret Entourage in ’07 and ’09 we started piloting this program. It didn’t really take shape until later in ’11 and ’12 but now it’s well underway.

By next year it will give birth to yet another entity that we believe to be a great change in the way  America’s education system works.

Self-education is selective education. Meaning it’s what you choose to learn. It’s what you choose to go after. What you seek to learn rather than what’s given to you to, or forced down your throat to learn.

I think one of the core principles I share in Third Circle Theory again is one of the problems with society is, we teach everybody very young, forced learning. We don’t teach them self-education, we teach them formal education.

The point of the education system is to give people a baseline on how to survive within its system, so a lot of people when they say, “Well I went to school but that didn’t do anything for me.” It’s because you misunderstood the idea of home school. That’s why you actually didn’t do anything the right way to actually make it count.

When we’re forced very young to learn over a time, we’re always given what to learn, what to learn, what to learn. Now that’s not the problem, the more learning the better, the more people need to know things and the more diverse the learning even the better the ability to seek out opportunities later.

Here’s the problem, early on we are given a reward structure to the learning. Meaning that every time we’re given this idea of graduating, we’re given this idea of getting a diploma, getting a job, making money as a result of the learn.

How many people learn the stock market just to learn it? Almost none. Everybody learns it, wants to apply it immediately, go make money.

The idea of learning and reward goes hand to hand. The problem is that as a result of that, we create this narrow vision that prevents us from actually identifying new opportunities because every time we learn something, we’re in this quest for an instant reward based on the learning.

The idea of changing your mind to how you learn is that you should learn for the sake of just learning because learning when you’re self-learning, when you’re seeking education, you’re taking the content then seriously.

You’re learning the process. You’re not just learning what you’re told to learn for the sake of earning that reward. You’re caring about what you’re learning. What that does is it enhances your awareness because it now makes you capable of identifying things within what you learned.

Meaning that if you don’t understand the stock market, at no given time will you be able to identify a missing opportunity within the stock market. Let alone be very successful in playing the stocks.

Even if you don’t want to play stocks or don’t like playing stocks, it’s fine. Not everybody should be an investment banker. Everybody should at least understand how the stock market works. Why? Because the stock market is a very important part of how society works.

If you do not understand how these concepts work, how can you identify opportunities within them? Same for the education system, same for everything around new businesses and new ventures.

This is the whole idea of Secret Entourage when we created it was to give people a glimpse of self-education in various industries so that they’re able to maybe peak their interests enough to want to further their knowledge on the industry.

We believe that if the knowledge comes from a person that is accredited, who have had a high level of success in that industry, then it is what we call practical knowledge. Meaning it is real knowledge. Not knowledge that has been forced down someone’s throat.

The education is once again coming from a place where someone else self-educated themselves. I think the core of everything I’m about is always instead of looking at what’s in front of us, let’s identify where the problem was before us and take a step back and correct that problem so it can lead to a better future tomorrow.

Obviously my website is www.pejmanghadimi.com. Search just by my first and last name. There you can find all the information about all my companies and links to different things I do.

For people that were listening to this, if you’re interested in learning more about entrepreneurship and getting into this idea of Third Circle Theory, and what it can do for you, you can visit us at www.secretentourage.com and there you can visit our academy by just clicking the academy link which also includes Third Circle Theory.
Or just pick up the Third Circle Theory book by itself at thirdcirclebook.com.

You know if anybody wants to send me an email, I’m very easily accessible. I read every email, unfortunately I get a lot them so I do my best to answer, I would say 90% of the emails I receive, even if the answer is short.

I do recommend that people reach out to me via my website. I have a contact form on there, and so they can directly get in touch with me if they have a question, I’ll be glad to answer it.

No, my actual pleasure Derek.