Driven

The Never-Give-Up Roadmap to Massive Success

Manny Khoshbin, Rich Mintzer

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613083840
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Live Your Life Full Throttle
Behind every entrepreneur's success story, there's a never-ending list of gut-wrenching failures, missed opportunities, and jaw-dropping setbacks. Real estate mogul and serial entrepreneur Manny Khoshbin is one of those entrepreneurs with a story of perseverance that will make you believe in the American Dream all over again.
Driven: The Never-Give-Up Roadmap to Massive Success goes beyond Manny's personal ride through the entrepreneurial journey to deliver the habits, mindset, and insights aspiring entrepreneurs need to turn dreams into reality. Buckle up and join Manny as he shares his experiences and teaches you how to:

• Beat the odds and become a successful entrepreneur in your own right
• Challenge yourself, study your failures, and pivot your plans
• Double down on projects, ideas, and investments you're passionate about
• Spot and surround yourself with positive, successful, and like-minded people
• Change your mindset to achieve what you think is impossible

It's imporant to remember that on your journey, you can navigate around obstacles and overcome them—just never give up. Dream big, stay ambitious, and remember that anything you really want deserves your 100 percent effort. Got it? Good. Now, let's ride.

PART I

DRIVE!

The best way to get started on a journey is to simply start. Start your engine, rev it up, and start driving.

That’s what we’re going to do here in Part I: Drive! I’d like to start by telling you a bit about my own journey to success. As with any road trip, there have been plans, goals, distractions, and detours. But they all worked together to get me to a place where I’m not only successful in business but also content in my life. That’s my hope for you, too—that you will find some of my stories from the road of life that resonate with your own experience and help you map out your own adventure.

chapter

1

this is my story

M journey began as many American ones do—in another country. A proud immigrant, I was born on January 14, 1971, in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. I was the second child after my sister Mahi, who was just one year old when I came along. My father was 22 and my mother 21. My father worked for a public accounting company as an auditor, while my mom took care of my sister and me. When I was two, a brother Mazi entered our lives, and we all moved to a smaller city in northern Iran called Sarab, which is where my dad served in the military. By the time I was seven, we had moved again—this time to another small city called Saveh, where my father’s family resided. The city is still well-known for their pomegranate fruits. My parents bought a home, my dad opened a hardware store, and my brother, sister, and I started school. Our home was in a tract of about 30 homes surrounded by the forest. In the winter, we could see wolves coming out of the forest at night and as kids we were scared of the forest, the wolves, and the darkness.

My grandfather had a small market in Saveh where he would save the wooden boxes that the tomatoes were delivered in for me to play with when we visited on the weekends. I used to go into his backyard and build things with those boxes—it was the highlight of my weekends.

Growing up, I had two friends: Reza and Ali. We often walked to school together, which was a couple of miles from our home. Reza and I used to make slingshots and find targets to shoot at. We also enjoyed riding our bikes. We were typical kids, living out our dreams through play.

We had a happy life. It was modest and nothing fancy, but we enjoyed the peaceful serenity of living in a small town among our relatives. This was life until 1979, when everything changed. That was the year the revolution began and Khomeini, the religious leader, gained influence over the nation of Iran. He overthrew the Shah, the King of Iran, shortly after the prolonged military conflict between Iran and Iraq had begun. Open warfare started on Sept. 22, 1980, when Iraqi armed forces invaded Southern Iran along the joint border of the two nations. The war started over a conflict regarding the ownership of a river on the southern border of Iran.

I was nine at the time the war began, and I remember going up to the roof of the house with my dad and protesting. I didn’t know what was really going on, but I felt good supporting my dad. I felt like a man, knowing that I could do something. Protesting was then, and still remains, a way to actively participate as a citizen.

Khomeini created the Basij Mostazafan, a mass movement of young people. Once in power, Khomeini issued a fatwa, an Islamic law, and a promise of paradise. The Iranian clergy took over command from the military leaders in the late 1970s through early 1980s. Then, in July, Iran launched Operation Ramadan near Basra. The clergy used “human-wave” attacks calling for young people from 14 years old and up to advance into the fields ahead of the adults to see if the minefields were clear so the army could follow. Thousands of children were killed in this horrific exercise.

This was a life-changing event for me and for all the people of Iran. My father had six brothers, but during the war, three were permanently injured and one later died from the effects of the chemical bombs Iraq used in the war. Having seen so much devastation, my father made a sudden decision to leave Iran two weeks before my 14th birthday, at which time I would likely have been forced to join the Iranian Army. He did not want to lose his son to war.

I should mention that a few months earlier my mom had given birth to a girl, Massy. I don’t know how many fathers would have had the courage to make such a gutsy move, but my father wanted his family to be safe and have a better future. I still look back at this as a very heroic action on his part. We don’t often realize how significant certain events are when we’re young, but it’s important to recognize and never forget the people (family or others) who did things that had a positive impact on our lives.

Welcome to America

It was March of 1985 when all six of us—my mom, dad, my brother (who was now 12), my sister (who was 15), and my little sister, who was only 11 months old, went to Turkey to get our visas to come to America.

Because of the urgency of this matter, my father didn’t have time to liquidate anything back home, so he brought less than $2,000 with him from Iran. He had planned to start a business with a friend whom he had helped get a visa to the U.S. However, once we arrived in the United States, the plan changed as my father’s so-called friend no longer wanted to do business with him, and instead decided to go work with his older brother who owned a gas station.

My father had previously visited the United States in 1984 and had bought himself a 1972 Datsun station wagon. We spent the first couple of weeks in a motel in the city of Costa Mesa, California. I remember one morning I woke up and went outside to sit by the pool. There was a little boy walking out of the pool who held up his middle finger to me as he walked past me. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, so I just waved at him and patted him on the back. I did not speak a word of English. I would soon learn that gestures like that one, and many of the words being said to me by other children, were not at all welcoming.

After a while, we started running out of money, so we had no choice but to leave the motel and sleep in the car. This went on for a few months. I now sometimes drive by the Stater Brothers store where we used to park the car and realize how far life has taken us. My dad managed to get in touch with an old friend in Los Angeles. We drove up there and ended up living in their garage. We had to be quiet because if the homeowners’ association found out there were people living in a garage, they would have complained and caused a lot of trouble for our friends. I remember that even though they were “friends,” we were not welcome in their home and were treated with discrimination. Now, every time I meet a new immigrant from any country who has come to America and is trying to make it here, I have so much respect for them. I know how hard it is. I recognize that this nation was founded by immigrants, and if you are an immigrant in America, you need to be strong, and you may need to work even harder to achieve your goals. But you can achieve them.

After a couple of weeks, my father found a job with a company named Cla-Val in the city of Costa Mesa. He went for an interview and they gave him the job. At the time, the pay was only $8.00 an hour (which didn’t go far in Orange County), but he had no choice because he had no work permit at the time. After a few weeks of saving money, we were ready to place a deposit on an apartment, and we moved in that August. But our financial problems were far from over. My father’s paycheck would barely cover the rent and some food. So, I did what I had to do—I went to work at a very early age.

Job 1: Diving into Entrepreneurship . . . Literally

It was 1985, and my first “job,” so to speak, was with my brother. We would wake up at about 4:00 A.M. and go by all the trash bins in the apartment complexes before the disposal pickup trucks would arrive.

We would pick up any junk we thought we could sell at the Orange County Swap Meet on the weekends. After a few months, we were going to other apartment complexes in the area and dumpster diving became our full-time jobs. I remember one early morning I saw a whole bunch of electronics in a trash bin. So, I grabbed the wire and pulled on it, but there was another guy in the trash bin and we started fighting over this dirty, broken radio and a toaster. Then, a few weeks later, I went to my friend’s house and realized that the man was my friend’s dad. I felt so embarrassed, but I think he was even more embarrassed considering he was an adult, and I was only 14.

In 1986, Mahi (my older sister) got a job at Wendy’s, a fast food restaurant, to help my dad support the family. We both enrolled at Costa Mesa High School and had three hours a week of ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Slowly, life was starting to become normal again.

Job 2: Hitting Paydirt with a Real Paycheck

In late 1986, I started working at Kmart as a stock boy for $3.25 an hour. They basically gave me all the dirty work: cleaning bathrooms, pushing shopping carts, and moving all the heavy boxes in the storage rooms. At first, I was humiliated because the other employees would make fun of my English. I even stopped walking by the cafeteria because I would hear other employees on their lunch breaks saying stuff like, “Hey, camel rider,” or making other comments that I didn’t understand but knew were not flattering. Some of the other employees would just laugh at me, so I avoided most of them. No matter how they made me feel, I needed the job and the money to help my family, so I showed up 15 minutes early every day and worked as hard as I could. If I was called on the PA system to help with something, I would try to run as soon as they called me, and I always stayed late if they needed me. After six months, I was promoted to assistant manager of sporting goods. I was selected as employee of the month for three months in a row and got a raise. I’ll never forget, every Friday was pay day—they would pay us in cash in envelopes with our employee number written on it. And every Friday I would take $100 out of my paycheck and place it in an envelope under my bed. I was earning $3.75 an hour, saving most of it and using whatever was necessary to help my family. By February of 1988, I had saved $4,000. I went to an auto auction with a friend and bought my first car, a 1983 Honda Accord.

This was the first time that I truly realized how hard work could pay off. I dreamt of buying a car and it happened. For a teenager, dreaming of buying a car and making it happen is a success story. So, if you have kids, as much as you may want to buy things for them, let them achieve some of those things for themselves. It’s also important to remember and appreciate the value of doing it yourself. Many people forget those early successes once they get rich. But I never did forget. Buying that Honda was the first of many car purchases for me, but it remains one of the most special cars I ever owned.

Job 3: Occupational Hazards

In June of 1988, I quit my Kmart job and went to work for the Los Angeles Times for $5 an hour. I would meet up with a group of people at a Burger King in Anaheim where we would get picked up by a company van that would drop us off in one of the local residential neighborhoods with a map of the area. Each of us would be responsible for soliciting every homeowner or renter to subscribe to the L.A. Times with a special promotion called “The Front Pages.” This was a big book that they were giving away if you signed up for a year-long subscription. It featured the front covers of the last hundred years of the newspaper.

The job was OK except for one little occupational hazard. I was always scared of dogs, especially the big dogs, because I got bit by a German Shepherd when I was seven. So, when I came to a house that had a BEWARE OF DOG sign or was fence...