When “fake-it-till-you-make-it” Blows Up In Your Face with Dhar Mann

How one man learned the true meaning of success – the hardest way imaginable.

Picture this. On a campus like any other, there’s a room with rows of college students. They’re dialing phone numbers, trying to get people to re-mortgage their houses. After all, it’s 2006, and there’s lots of money in real estate, right? 

An early-twenties college student walks into the room. He’s dressed in a suit and carries a briefcase. He owns this scrappy mortgage business, along with another marketing company, and he’s making more money than his college professors. Little does he know, it’s all about to come crashing down.

It sounds like the plot of a blockbuster movie. Yet it was only part of Dhar Mann’s life. Now he owns Live Glam, a beauty subscription business, but before that, he owned a string of businesses that saw wild success – and devastating, life-changing failures – more than once. We’re talking going from nine exotic cars and living in a mansion to sharing a 300 square-foot apartment and owing his friends and family hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Buckle up. In this rollercoaster of an episode, Dhar takes us through the story of his life. How his scrappy but short-term mindset earned him millions of dollars, why he kept losing it all, and how he managed to make a lasting change. Listen now.

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“To me, entrepreneurship is a way of looking at problems.”

When the real estate market crashed, Dhar was living a lavish lifestyle. Multiple fancy cars. Partying on weekends. When the money stopped rolling in and he found himself deep in debt because of his lifestyle, he didn’t think, “I should probably sell my cars.” He thought, “I’ll start a luxury car rental business.”

“I was attracting all these people into my life, because of the person I thought I wanted to be.”

At one point, Dhar was making six figures of passive income off a seemingly legitimate investment. He cultivated a baller image in person and on Instagram and accrued over a million followers before Instagram is what it is today. Four-story mansion, luxury cars, reality star fiancé, he had it all – or so he thought. But when he lost everything, that’s when he discovered who his real friends were, and ultimately, who he wanted to be.

“When you nail it, that’s when you scale it.”

During his medical marijuana business phase, he attempted to roll out a national franchise for a hydroponics store specifically for home growers – before the first store had even made money. Dhar learned the hard way that you have to nail it before you scale it, even when you have national media attention and massive demand.

Dhar’s wild story is simultaneously a cautionary tale of the allure of wealth and fame and the dangers of a “fake it till you make it” attitude. It’s also proof that you can make a one-eighty shift in your life with no money, a scrappy mindset, and the desire to change for the better.