As Co-Founder and Chief Legal Officer of My Green Network (MyGN), James Shih plays a key role in developing the company’s direction and ensuring that every aspect of the business serves the needs of creative cannabis entrepreneurs. An experienced attorney specializing in investment, compliance, and business law, James has advised high-net-worth individuals, private equity firms, developers, and executives in investments valuing over $1 Billion. He has also served as a trusted legal expert for Fortune 500 and global companies, including OLAM, One World Properties, and Extell Capital Group. As a cannabis specialist, James has proudly helped countless start-ups understand how to run the business successfully from start to finish, assisting with licensing, acquisition, operations, and more. Sharing in the frustration of entrepreneurial clients and friends enduring the tedious, months-long process of taking a cannabis start-up from idea to successful enterprise, James co-founded MyGN as a visionary solution to make the process easier and open to everyone – not just the elite 1% who could afford it.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Steve Jobs
- James’s Brother
- James’s Mother
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I will break it down to three, there is a lot more for sure. The first is going to be a think cultural. I am an Asian. So, one of the things in the Asian community in almost every Asian country drugs and cannabis has always been treated as almost like a death sentence drug… Everywhere around the world in Asia specifically I think that the penalties for drug use has always been very harsh. And that kind of lead into my family at the very least when I indicated that I wanted to step into this field, and this was in about 2011, they were just not on board, they were saying this is too risky, there is nothing you can do about this, get out of there, we will not help you or we will not be supportive of you…”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! Book by Robert T. KiyosakiFavourite Quote:
- “it’s easy to do the things that you can do right now, but it’s also easy not to do the things you can do right now”
Bruce [Lee] had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”
“He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So, we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run anymore,” — and we’re still running — “if I run any more, I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.”
“It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.” From the The Art of Expressing the Human Body Book by John Little
Also mentioned
- “What Is Easy to Do Is Easy Not to Do” Jim Rohn
Recommended Online Resources:
The Entrepreneur Way – Learn from successful Entrepreneurs with Free Daily podcast interviews that reveal their business success secrets
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“to create your own luck. Every successful person that I have spoken to a tribute a lot of their success to luck. But luck is such an intangible concept and it really isn’t explained well I think in many ways… You can create your own luck by creating the environment that allows that luck to come forth. So you create that environment by talking to people, by changing the people that you want around you, by going to events, by building relationships, surrounding yourselves, being in the environments that you can actually have the opportunity for these lucky things to come by“…[Listen for More]
More About James Shih:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others.” Hasidic Proverb
Other Quotes From the Chat with James Shih:
- “there is a lot of setbacks you are going to face, there is a lot of hardships on this way on this entire path and you are not going to have an easy way but take the opportunities that come and you will be okay at the end of the day”
- “finding out that people will generally put themselves first and then being able to lead those people from different backgrounds between everything that they are doing. And recognising that when problems arise it’s not necessarily because it’s work related or something along those lines. And one of the most powerful tools that I kind of learned asking someone when something goes wrong, ‘how is your day going?’ And really getting them to respond to you in a meaningful way because most people don’t… If you can get positive real answers emotionally from the people that you work with that is one of the secrets that I have…”
- “Things can be bad let’s try and fix them and move forward and be stronger”
- “I had to overcome my preconceived notion that everything had to be 80, 90 percent accurate and available in order to get things to work and instead just jumping into it and making to that 80 to 90 percent. And that’s a huge thing”
- “Where can you push? Where can you pull? Where can you be a little bit more strict and be able to actually negotiate with people firmly versus backing down and knowing where that point of time is. That is going to be a important point of business”
- “I was not reaching out to people for help, I was just thinking I can do everything on my own, I am smart enough I can do it all… I was too prideful if I had known now I would have reached out for help a lot earlier, I would have asked the people around me to see what they can offer and obviously still do your own verification of whether that makes sense to you but at the very least people are generally more willing to help than they let on. And that would have helped me cut the learning curve a lot if I had reached out to me be more people”
- “every time that I feel that I am not actively doing something that I can do right now I feel that I am not being as efficient as I could be”
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