Episode 61 – Vishen Lakhiani – Conquering Fear, Defying Limitations, Living your best life.

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our scent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your senior consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a gyp we are the intimate strangers thank you

for listening what’s up folks this is our episode with addition la kiani of whom you may or may not have heard of I promise you that after this episode you will remember who he is I read his book and loved it so much that we brought him onto the show best decision that I’ve made in show guests decisions in a long time because this is easily in our top 10 of the best episodes we’ve ever done you can feel the passion wisdom and sheer knowledge that vision is relating

you guys will love this one please make sure you pick up a copy of visions book the code of the extraordinary mind also get to our Facebook page subscribe to our YouTube channel follow me on Twitter all those can be done at the human XP one last thing guys we do everything we can to keep our show ad free for you if you get to our donate page help us cover what we’re doing here everything so far has been paid by me out of pocket and

it’s getting overwhelming I spend 10 hours a day working between the show and my quasi real job so help us keep this space ad free tell us that you value what we’re doing we want to keep delivering these home run level episodes for you so we can only do that with your listener support thank you guys so much for listening and without much further ado here is vision la kiani the human experience has obtained the blueprint for retraining your mind as we speak to

my guests vision la Kyani vision my good sir welcome to hxp hi Xavier this is an honor I am honoured to be here your story is remarkable I love the book but there’s some people that might not know who you are and what you do let’s let’s talk about that from you know going from being an engineer to founding MindValley give us that story I graduated from the University of Michigan way back in 1999 so you can kind of guess my age right

now I’m 40 years old now when I graduated my timing in a word kinda sucked because shortly after I graduated the dot-com bubble burst so I had moved out to the Bay Area with dreams of starting a startup you know getting funding making a massive difference in the world only to find all of those dreams completely dashed I lost my savings I lost all my money and I couldn’t get a job anywhere so sometime in about 2001 around 2 years after

graduation I had officially been fired twice I had lost to startups and I was so freakin in in depth I couldn’t even afford an apartment so I was renting a couch from a college student in Berkeley one of those to see the couches so even my legs kind of dangle docked at the end and in desperation I was sending my resume out to any company on Craigslist that would hire me finally one company offered me a job but again the economy was so bad this

was April this was around April or so 2001 back I remember that month alone 14,000 people were laid off in the Bay Area they were pink slip at least where people would go to try to network their way to some sort of salary so I got the job but the economy was so bad they were not paying any base salary so had to pick up the phone and call lawyers and sell them on technology technology to manage their law firms and if the lawyer said no if I didn’t close

a sale I did not get paid that week or that month and there were people in my company who just were not earning nothing they were earning zilch so in desperation because I couldn’t close to say like no idea what I was doing I was a computer engineer trying to hack it as a guy who knew you know business I got depressed and I got online and I was searching I can’t remember what I was searching maybe it was hope maybe it was um to to to find meaning maybe it was

why his life sucks so bad but I found a class on meditation and the class on meditation was being taught by a pharmaceutical salesperson in Los Angeles and she claimed that what she was teaching would dramatically help you with business with life with sales all of these like hyper promises but I thought look life sucks for me right now I need to try something so I flew down to LA I took the class and when I showed up you know I was the only person there

apparently she wasn’t very good at marketing itself so I took the class and what she shared with me was astonishing I learned how to control my brainwaves I learned how to channel intuition I learned how to connect with people with deep empathy I went back to work and Monday so it was a tick class over the weekend Monday I started work and by Friday I had had not just my best ever sales week but I was double my period my previous record and I thought well this

is kind of interesting so I continued applying some of these ideas in work and I continued getting better and better and better in four months I got promoted three times I was made Director of Sales I was only 26 years old and I was made Director of Sales in the company of like a hundred people sent out to New York to hit their New York office I continued experimenting with these techniques I continued attending new seminars reading

new books exploring just what my mind to do and soon I could do the Director of Sales job and the best development manager job I held two jobs simultaneously and again I was crushing it now this point you guys may be wondering well what exactly was I so I’ll show you a couple of techniques Allen one of the techniques that that blew me away was a simple technique to tap into intuition at our work everyone would go to the San Francisco Public

Library they would be assigned to a city so my city was for example San Antonio I would check out the San Antonio Yellow Pages and then I had to call every lawyer in the attorney section from A to Z in order write and hope that someone happened I happen to catch a man at a convenient time where he would just listen to my whole that’s what everyone was doing when I came back from this class I tried something different I wouldn’t randomly call the lawyers I

would go into a meditative state of mind place my finger on the phone book run my finger aims and call only people I felt a certain impulse wait so I was calling less lawyers but interestingly these lawyers were so much more likely to buy it’s as if I was guessing but these guesses seemed to be correct that was one and that boosted my sales the second thing I did that double my sales again was was a simple appetit technique Eyler

i learned to to shut my eyes go with him and set an intention with the lawyer before I called him so I was calling say Bob Jones I would see Bob Jones in my mind’s eye I would imagine what he looked like I would tell myself that this conversation was gonna go smoothly that Bob Jones would have time for me that things would close if and only if this was going to be a win-win for everyone concerned that Bob Jones would see his firm go to new heights because

of our technology that we would be able to serve him well that the would be pleasurable and meaningful for us and the simple empathy visualization technique again double my sales and so with no with no sales training I was able to just crush it now after 18 months at this company III I remember up in my final month I was 400% over quota um and I decided to quit I decided to quit because I felt that the company no longer fit by my personal mission and I wanted to

do something on my own and I decided look education according to Nelson Mandela is the greatest way to change the world Nelson Mandela has a famous quote on that and I thought I want to start an education technology company and what better thing to get out to the world and meditation so I started a simple ecommerce website I you know back then it wasn’t as easy to start an e-commerce website so I had that advantage it’s quite quite remarkable

what you were able to do you you went from this sort of rock-bottom state where you’re you’re in your your friend’s apartment living on a couch and you you take a meditation class you realize the importance of kind of altering changing your brainwaves so that you’re more tapped into your intuition and what is the inner compass that inner compass that we all have and and suddenly you’re your sales are are skyrocketing and and this is where I

mean this is where I kind of cut you off so and this is the birth of mine Valley all right this well it’s worth what I quit that job and decided to start a simple ecommerce site selling and promoting meditation that was the birth of mine Valley hmm okay and it mine Valley to was taking losses for quite a while until it turned a profit is that is that correct while it was 2003 and being a computer engineer finally I found something to apply my skills to so it

wasn’t as easy back then to start online business you did not have things such as Shopify and so on but I could code my own checkout my own customer CRM system and so on and so I built my own website I got to apply my programming skills my meditation skills and I built one of the world’s first online websites for meditation and immediately it took off I remember my first customer was a woman called Barbara from Atlanta this was

like December 22nd 2002 and it’s not about really slope but slowly and slowly the business grew today my belly is in a wide area of different fields we do everything from apps to festivals we have about 200 employees globally but it’s all focused around one thing and it’s still that one thing that one thing is spreading ideas in personal growth our vision our vision is to get these new ideas these new areas of thought new visions for health and wellness and

meditation and mindfulness and then apparently and better relationships to as many people as we can that’s amazing I mean why why Kuala Lumpur why Malaysia by oh jeez oh so Xavier do you want to know the cleaned-up story or the actual story let’s go the actual story okay so the actual story is and it’s only now you know it’s a and I’m only I’m gonna say this it’s only now that I am safe telling you guys the actual story so here’s what you got to understand after

September 11 2001 America was a very dangerous place than it is right now and because of what had happened because of that terrorism there was a bit of a paranoia towards certain groups of people now I had been born in Malay Malaysia is a country that is about a fifty sixty percent Muslim population I’m not a Muslim I’m an of Indian origin Malaysia is a very diverse country in Asia night lived in the u.s. at that point for almost ten years I had

graduated there studied there started a business there so I was living with my wife who’s European we were living in New York and so back then I had a different name my name was vision Mohan das and Mohan das is a very common Indian name you know Gandhi Gandhi’s name is Mohan das Gandhi so I was named after my father who was named after I guess Gandhi but I showed up at JFK Airport one day the guy looking at my passport called me mission Mohamed and I

said no it’s Mohan das and he goes no it’s a SMO Hamid I’m like dude read it again it’s Mohan das and he said follow me and so I mean I’m sure he was reading it superfast or whatever she took me to a back room and he told me you know there are certain things about your parents of travel and so on that looks suspicious we’re going to have to investigate you he kept me in that room for three hours and I was added to a watchlist a watchlist called special

registration now special registration essentially meant got for the next five years of my life I couldn’t use certain airports I every time I wanted to enter or exit the United States I would be I would have to go point interview at the local airport or in a place near the airport called a special registration center and I would get fingerprinted I would get photographed I’d have to answer interview questions and but it was worse than that it wasn’t just

travelling every thirty days living in the United States I had to report to the government I had to stand in a long line going sometimes four blocks to be called up to a window to have my credit cards check to make sure I don’t know to make sure I wasn’t buying fertilizer or stuff to be interviewed to be interrogated to have my picture taken it was literally like living on parole one left wheel of the United States my wife and I wanted a

kid born here but you know we decided we couldn’t live like this and so we had a choice we could move back to Europe which is where she was from or move back to Malaysia Malaysia had beautiful warm weather nice peaches and so I thought well why not Malaysia and that’s what we did now now after five years after five years the the US Embassy in Malaysia got me off the list I decided to change my name to a safe bustling name and that’s how my

name is now mission lucky Ani very interesting and you know in your in your book you you talk about struggle being this sort of launchpad to discovering new things new ideas to launching a person into you know kind of the next level of who they are and I mean one thing I wanted to kind of comment about the book about something that you said while I was doing the research for the show I think it was on Facebook that you posted this that you

said you said that that being on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list wasn’t enough I’m paraphrasing you said that you wanted this book to be a Dale Carnegie Napoleon Hill level book that that carried through the ages and is that right absolutely absolutely and and let me tell you why today any any celebrity can launch a book and instantly because they are a celebrity it will hit the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal so you know because

that book that initial press that comes out any guy with a business who has customers he buys from you know could instantly like promote the book all over his business and it’ll hit the top but those books will not have staying power within a week or two the books will fall off the list because to be a genuinely good cook book spread primarily through one one way only the most effective way and that’s word of mouth we buy books

because we hear about them from our friends you know you can get in a TV show but again unless your celebrity few people are going to buy your book I’ve had friends working on talk shows like Good Morning America and they will sell 100 books right so the celebrity power causes spikes but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a great book what I wanted to write is a book that genuinely good a book that will pass from hand to hand from parent to son from employee to

co-worker for generations and the only way to do that is to write a genuinely good book that touches people so that was one principle but that’s a second principle and the second principle is your book must get noticed which means that you gotta either arouse love or hate but not apathy and that’s why in my book I write it in such a way where it’s designed to make you really love the ideas really want to follow them really resonate with you or you will

absolutely hate the book because the book stands for something it stands for it stands for humanism and ideas around humanism it you know if you actually read the book you will see that they are anti-trump messages in the book and I’m not and it’s not blatant but it’s in there because the book is that the book stands for humanism the book talks about things that business books are not supposed to talk about such as intuition right many people would never

talk about intuition in the business becoming this focus right now on number four the New York Times business list and and I was told by my friends don’t say that you can’t say that because no one’s going to take you seriously but I’ve experienced it and I feel just because we cannot explain a phenomenon doesn’t mean it isn’t real so in that way only foreword for the book I I have this sentence I say we grow through pain or we grow through insight but never

true apathy therefore this book will be painful at times and it will be insightful at times but I didn’t want to write something that you would ignore yeah you know I’ve talked to a lot of authors a lot of bestsellers and no one as has has had the vision of of what you just stated the the long game vision of you know I want this book to reach more than just a list a special list and that people get on when they sell enough copies and I think that alone is just so

so profound to me and it’s a good segue let’s let’s dig in to kind of what the book gets into can you tell us what is what is the culture scape and how does what how does the culture scape affect the choices that we kind of are are ingrained or hardwired to to make okay so firstly I am fascinated by evolutionary biology and one of the you learn when you study evolution biology and I was talking to her to a friend of mine who’s in the field he

said the the planet got effed as soon as human beings evolved a brain with pattern recognition systems now what this means is at a certain point in that evolution we begin to see the nuance of patents right and part of this pattern recognition system allowed us to develop new ways of communicating with language so an ape and a tribe could say look tiger but a human being could say hey Bob don’t go by the river because I saw a tiger there five hours ago

so let’s chill out here and wait and go back and fish tomorrow when that beast might go away so as we develop these systems to recognize time to recognize patterns to communicate human being started living in two different worlds and I just want to acknowledge there’s a phenomenal book on this call sapiens by you while are really ok so we started living in two different worlds and one world is the world of absolute truth this is the world that says this rock is

grey and it is hard this berry is edible that’s absolute truth it’s true for everyone but there’s also a world of relative truth in this world is the world of human language that exists in our heads human language allowed us to create a mythology a culture a designation for what a man should do what a woman should do it allowed us to create rules and values and and ways of assembly not tribe and communicating and hailing the leader but the thing about these this

world of language is that it is not real it’s not absolute truth it’s relative truth meaning it’s true for some people and not true for others but the problem is all of us as human beings tend to take the world of relative truth very often as absolute truth think about how we blindly believe what our religions say or what a political leaders say or what we or what we believe in the television media we believe that you need a college degree to be successful

we believe that you need a nine-to-five job we believe that if you don’t follow this particular rule of our religion this is going to happen to you you believe that a man and the woman need to unify and have a marriage and have 2.5 kids and two cars in the garage and then you are living in a normal family the problem with the problem with the culture scape is that the culture scape evolved as a mental construct to keep us safe

because for 7,000 years we lived in an unsafe world we lived in a world where hunter-gatherers were competing with each other for food or tribes were fighting with each other for land but today we are living in the safest time in human history we’re living in a time when we are connected to the rest of the world through the internet the rules that kept us safe the culture escape which is that collection of human believes rituals habits no longer is as

relevant to us as it was before and therefore we can question that culture scape and I love this I love that you are challenging the status quo just because in my own experience I I tend to see what people are doing and I do the exact opposite and I mean but a singular question that I have for you is I mean what do you what do you say and how do you deal with a person who is kind of struggling with that you know they’re they’re being judged by their family

they’re being told that what they’re doing is the wrong thing they’re they’re being told no you should be a doctor lawyer or whatever and and yet inside themselves they they have this passion for something completely different I mean how do you how do you personally recommend a person deals with that that fight because it is it is a battle well I it is it is one of the hardest things that many people are going to go true I was blessed to have parents who were

progressive in many ways and and will open mind that many people don’t I have a friend who was exiled from her family because she married a man of the different religion but in the book in chapter 2 of the book I deal with this topic and I talk about why it is so important to stay true for your values now here’s basically what I said and I quote a friend of mine a writer and TV actress by the name of Salma Sidora right and Psalm says the people who tell

you that you need to follow a particular family or cultural belief or way of life love you essentially what they’re saying is look at me I’m better because my chains are bigger and you got to understand that it is your right to break those chains you have to you know recognize that they’re doing it because they love you because like every other human being raised in the culture escape they have an evolutionary drive to keep their

offspring safe whether it’s a teacher or it’s a parent it’s their own natural tendency to keep you safe but you have to do what is going to be right for you otherwise you’re living someone else’s life and that is the surest path to mediocrity and being miserable look I became a computer engineer because growing up in Indian culture see in the early 1990s Bill Gates visited India and Bill Gates in India was seen as one of the greatest men in the world

and it caused it actually it actually changed Indian culture in some way he was the richest man in the world India was a poor country and Indian parents started telling their kids you must be a computer engineer my grandfather told me be like Bill Gates be a computer engineer you know or at least work for Bill Gates and so I ended up studying Computer Engineering and ended up getting a job at Microsoft I went through five years of my life getting

the best grades I could trying to learn computer engineering I got that job at Microsoft I was in Bill Gates home and I decided I wanted to quit and Bill Gates is an amazing guy he was having a barbecue in his home for all the fresh new Microsoft employees but I realized I hated my job and I realized if I continued down this path I’d be working every day from 9:00 to 7:00 in misery 11 weeks after joining Microsoft I quit and I joined something that really gave me a

passion you know I and and it it led to great things in my life I joined a nonprofit basically but I did that against my parents advice and they were I’m sure they were upset for a while but it led to Who I am today no parent tells their child you know why don’t you start a meditation company that’s the Shah respond to be successful so I think it’s really important that we learn to be resilient that we learn to that these people love us that we Forge our own

paths anyway yeah I am you know I also work in the entrepreneur startup industry and a lot of my friends who went to very prestigious schools dropped you know $200,000 degrees to do their passion and seeing that is both inspiring and the most scary thing that I’ve ever witnessed because it seems like our culture now is almost moving towards that it’s almost books like yours and and others are pushing people to find their passion to look at truly

look at their passion because we we are sold this idea of immediately going into college after we move out of high school we we go to college we we pick a degree pick a major it’s the most forced saying that in our culture I think is a disease and you know you you have these rules and these rules that you you call let’s define those let’s let’s get into those I mean what are what are some of these rules so a Bruhl is a rule that we

adopt to simplify our understanding of the world and so one of the biggest rules is what you just mentioned the idea that you need a college degree to be successful even the idea that you need College itself I can tell you Xavier I don’t want to believe in college I have a eight-year-old son I don’t Jeremy goes to college or not what I care about is that he finds meaningful work that’s it meaningful work I don’t even care if all

those his passion right his passion maybe cuz passions are something you can follow as hobbies discussion maybe to play the guitar and finally place the guitar meaningful work I think is really what we should all be doing I talk about that in the book and I talk about I share an exercise quality three most important questions that any of you can Google online that will teach you how to get there but college degrees are a brew the idea that you need to get married is

a rule the idea that you need to live in the same country that you were born in is a rule there are so many things out there that we blindly accept because of convenience because everyone else is doing it human beings as I said are pattern recognition machines and one of the patterns that we tend to follow as a mental algorithm is if everyone else is doing it it must be okay and it must be safe and it must be the part to do and we do this to

simplify our decision-making matrix but it’s not often the best way to truly being successful sufficient mean you’ve been through a lot in your life and you’ve you know you’ve there’s a lot of up and up and downs with with owning your own company launching and you you happen to be incredibly successful what you’re doing mine fali is huge and I mean this book is is quite unique how important is gratitude to you know sustaining a mental health it is

probably one of the single most important things you can do so let’s put it this way right we evolved our physical systems way earlier than we evolved our conscious systems think about it this way when we get up to go to work we put on clothes we spray cologne we take a shower maybe shave or shampoo our hair get into a car looking good feeling good ready to dash off to work many of us will start today with a healthy breakfast or working out at home or at

the gym we’ve evolved as human beings to practice these things and people could do so would swear by them I don’t know anyone to tell you whom I work with who would get up and I’m not gonna take a bot today you know I’m gonna skip that brushing my teeth in yes if you go back if you go back to the 1910s in 1926 you know most Americans did not brush their teeth in the 1920s the US army issued a Health Alert because because tooth decay

was a serious issue among in the US Army even showering many people did not shower in centuries ago Queen Elizabeth claimed that she only showered twice in a lifetime the day she was born and the day she got married so a lot of things that we take for granted right now we’re not normal back then we’re evolved our physical systems so we we clean ourselves before hitting out we wash ourselves yet billions of people wake up every morning with their minds filled

with gunk with worry with fear with anxiety which stress would dread for the upcoming day and they do nothing about it we wash our buttons but we don’t wash our minds we are trained to believe that our minds that worry is normal stress is normal fears is normal jealousy or anger or hatred towards someone else oh that’s just normal you know that way to piss me off it’s not normal just like Queen Elizabeth thought that her natural body odor was normal

and that people of that time thought that it was okay for them even a rich man can bathe on it once a week and now we know better we need to realize that worries fears anxieties abnormal mental conditions there are signs that your mind isn’t in a healthy state and that you can clean them within minutes just like you can take a quick shower and the solution to that is gratitude scientists have studied gratitude and said it has the greatest correlation with well-being

over just about any other mental characteristic gratitude studies now show that gratitude make you of less prone to anxiety it improves your heart performance it makes you a more forgiving person it creates better states of kindness it improves your performance at work because it leads to happiness which in turn leads to better productivity so gratitude leads to things such as optimism other studies show that optimism say in sales people

can lead to a 55 percent better performance gratitude leads to happiness studies show that happiness leads to better performance in exams studies show that doctors who are trying to be happy a 19 percent better at diagnosis so there are so many studies right now that it’s almost a cliche to say practice gratitude but honestly it is one of the greatest things we can practice now we don’t hear about it in television commercials and so on because

you cannot market gratitude the pharma industry hasn’t yet figured out a way to bill you for gratitude they can bill you for Prozac I mean you can go on a prozac subscription plan but studies actually show that gratitude can create just as good levels of happiness without the pharmaceutical side-effects and that’s why gratitude is one of the most important and crucial things you guys can do ok so so you know we’ve built a framework

we’ve defined some of the things that limit us and we’re getting into the things that we can do to change that as as a sort of side question because I also want to learn about who you are and your life and and your process and I want to deconstruct that as much as possible you know you in your book you talk about kind of hanging out with Richard Branson and you mentioned Bill Gates earlier and but Tony Robbins in how how are you able to kind of how how

are you able to enter this sort of very elite very niche circle of human beings that are changing the world well a lot of it is because I have a simple principle in life and that is you at least some of the five people closest to you so I like connecting with people who can inspire me people who can uplift me and I I make these connections by being of value to these people I’ll give you an example Peter Diamandis runs the XPrize foundation he’s probably one of

the greatest entrepreneurs on the planet today a man who thinks incredibly big thanks to him we have the private space travel industry thanks to him we have XPrize saw the world problems he also founded singularity University he’s now started Planetary Resources which is mining for asteroids I saw Peter Diamandis peak and I told him you know you really inspired me and I asked him I I would love to be able to learn more from you

what can I do and he told me about a seminar that he runs and it’s an expensive seminars like 10 or 20 K to attend it’s called abundance 360 he told me that he runs nonprofits and if I was an entrepreneur and I had you know excess capital that I wanted to put to a good cause I could donate to his nonprofit and I thought that was a really good idea and so every year I actually donate a large sum of money to the XPrize Foundation and as a reward

for this I have Peter as a friend I got to interview him for the book I get to spend you know at least seven days or so with him on XPrize events and XPrize trips and I get to learn from him and other inspiring people true X price and you know it’s a large sum of money and some people might say it’s a ridiculous cost but the fact is I’m getting back to the world because X price is probably one of the most high-performing NGOs out there in terms

of like value for dollar donator but at the same time I get to meet with people who inspire me and never fail to remind me to dream bigger now any of us can do the same thing I had to start somewhere and I started and I started this whole idea of networking and connecting with great people in 2005 in 2005 there was a a guy I know who was an author and he me and at that point I had a blog I simply had a blog on personal growth and this

guy who was an author had a program out I can’t remember what the program was called but it was a really cool program on goal-setting and he had his team reaching out to bloggers saying asking if anybody you know would write a blog post about him and he wasn’t a really big name but I did anyway I tested out his program I wrote a blog post and I think I remember I think I helped him sell like $30,000 work to this program and she was happy and he said you know

I’m doing a networking event and maybe you can come and you can and you know he told me flat out I’m not qualified for his networking event but I could come as a volunteer and I did I went and I volunteered there I met more people and I asked them how can I add value to you is that anything I can do could I interview you could I you know could I could I share a blog post about you could I volunteer for you and I work my way up over 11 years and anyone can do

that it’s really about if you want to get if you want to network with the with great minds figure out how can you add value to them there are many people many people do it the other way around I go to conferences I have people coming up to me going hey you know I have this great business idea could I get you on a phone call for 30 minutes so you can advise me and and it’s just impractical I mean every good entrepreneur every good CEO knows that our time is worth

tens of thousands of dollars for our to our business if I get in a phone call with someone and advise someone for 30 minutes that’s actually costing me money there are many people don’t get it one in ten actually asked me how can add value to me nine out of ten asked me for stuff yeah I mean that’s that’s that’s got to be tough because I mean you you’ve done a lot people admire you and so they you know they they just don’t have they don’t have that ability

to kind of see past you know the first layer which is you know that that boundary if you’re asking me for something you’re not you’re not helping me and you know it’s it’s like you you can’t go around and help everyone that you even if you want to that you can’t go and help every single person that asks you to help like them and and and Savior if if I can share one thing I just realized I missed out on the best possible tip for your audience and the

best possible tip is snot be a connector if you want to connect with incredible people be a connector so here’s what I did in 2010 I decided to start my own festival I observed that you know many people go to entrepreneurship seminars and they would skip the lecture speaking spot but and hang out in the bars because they love connecting so I started my own festival back then it was called awesomeness fest but now it’s called a fest but I invited 250 people

entrepreneurs and people who have you know we’re doing great things in the world to come and hang out together and then in Costa Rica I put up my own money so I was gambling my own money that this was gonna take off or I was gonna lose money and actually 250 people came I went up to incredible speakers like chip Conley who started you know the George or DD hotel chain and is now part of Airbnb and I asked him if they would come speak and I put together this

incredible thing and now every year it happens every year thousands of people apply to attend a fest where they can come together and connect with each other but by putting myself as the founder of it I get access to all of these great minds today 80% of my friends are a festers and um you know it’s turned into a really really remarkable thing that anybody could do this anybody could decide that you know I want to start a a book society within

my city what people are going to come together and discuss the latest business book they’re going to read I want to start a a CrossFit movement where people who want to get better at help can come together and work out together and it’s a really really really great philosophy I started in a small way and I grew and grew and grew to now having my own festival being part of the XPrize innovation board and so on but I did it all in ten years you start with a small

group and you expand from there I love it I truly the vision and the aspect of you know really you really have this talent of seeing beyond you know you’re seeing 1012 moves ahead and it’s it’s really remarkable um let’s has their mission has there been any single moment where I mean it has this happened yet for you where you have said okay I’ve made it or or is that you know an elusive kind of thing where you’re still kind of kind of

pushing the edge nope nope y’all yes so that’s a trick question okay and it’s a trick question because of this modern goal-setting I talked about this in Chapter um chapter six of the book modern goal-setting is screwed up we teach people that they need to pursue goals but the problem is many of the goals that people are pursuing are goals from the couch escape including the goal be an entrepreneur that is a goal most entrepreneurs are miserable they

thought they wanted to do it because they wanted freedom or they wanted to build a great product or they wanted the experience of being a leader or they wanted you know the satisfaction of being looked up upon only to find that they are trapped into the equivalent of having a day job working crazy long hours but now with added risk and if you don’t believe me ask most entrepreneurs I mean it most people who listen to your podcast when they think of entrepreneurs

they think of startup entrepreneurs who got funding and so on but that’s not the case the guy who runs the local grocery store or you know opens up a restaurant is an entrepreneur as well a guy who’s an uber driver trying to earn a living on his own as a contractor is in many ways an entrepreneur most people are barely surviving now the reason for that is because we are trained to chase means rather than end goals so means goal is a

means to an end get a college degree be an entrepreneur is a moon school what we are really chasing though at the end walls the end goals are I want a life of freedom I want to live in a way where I can work 20 hours a week and spend 20 hours with my son or wife or daughter I want to write I want to run I want the experience of being able to inspire people daily now when you set end goals you open yourself up to unusual means to

get there but you don’t get trapped into the means of the culture escape one of my annual Savior was to be able to stay in a gorgeous luxury hotel every six months and have my children in my family with me and experience life and have friends with me and when I set that goal I had no freaking idea how to do it it seems so counter to being the CEO of a large company on the 200 person company but then the idea for a fest came to me and now every six months I am

staying in a luxury hotel I was just in Greece and in six months from now it’s in the Mexican Riviera and I’m there with 200 people who are attending a fest and I’m there because of the hosts and everything is paid for and because I’m bringing so much business to the hotel I get the Presidential Suite and so somehow this bizarre goal that I put down on paper when I was in when I was in my early 20s came true but I set it out as an envelope was something I

wanted for the end in itself so when you understand the difference between means goals and end goals you learn to hack life to find faster optimized routes to what truly speaks to your soul what truly makes you happy okay now back to your question right is it ever enough as long as you’re attaining your end goals it will be enough but if you’re chasing means goals it’s never going to be enough because means goals always mean there’s something next a means goal

is something you do so you can attain something so you can attain something you study hard in high school so you can get into a good college so you can do well in your LSAT so you can get that law degree so you can start your own law firm so you can be a lawyer and be a fancy fancy bigwig only to realize that 50% of lawyers I read this recently settled from depression because their jobs are miserable and they’re wondering how did I get here right here

yeah Wow it’s just such a profound idea and I love it um you know you in the book you talk about bending reality and you know you mentioned you just mentioned hacking happiness you know how do we do this so this is one of the more controversial aspects of the book this is probably the part of the book where so if you look at my book on Amazon you’ll see the reviews are really interesting it’s it’s 87 or 90 percent five-star reviews but there are also

lots of one-star reviews from people who blatantly hate the book this is one of the things they hate about the book I suggest in the book that reality is malleable that we cannot explain it but to some degree our minds influence our reality and I’m not talking about the simplistic idea of programs such as the secret I find that very simplistic I don’t know what causes it but I believe that we can bend reality I believe that luck is within our control and I believe

this because I keep seeing instances in my life and instances in the lives of other really successful people I know that shocks us we don’t know how this coincidence of synchronicity came onto our lap but we know that we wanted it to and we were focused on it in the right way and I suggest a formula for bending reality and the formula is this have amazing visions pulling you forward exciting things that you want to do but at the same time be happy now so a lot

of people think you’ve got to focus your thoughts and think and think and think and think you can think about that thing that you want often know because if you are in the wrong frame of mind your thoughts about it are thoughts of worry or fear or anxiety that it’s going to come with you you must be in the state that I call the state of pending reality where you have these bold visions of what you want to do in the world but the

second ingredient is you are not attached to those visions if they come they come if they don’t come they don’t come they are nice-to-haves rather you are happy now you have made it you don’t need anything more now it’s a tricky state to get to get in because society doesn’t train us to be in this but if you believe that you’ve made it that you’re happy now you find that the visions that you want come to you but you got to be unattached from those

visions so again it’s a it’s a it’s a big philosophy I’ve given one our speeches on it you can you can google me and you’ll find several speeches I’ve I’ve done that talk about this you know for people who learn it yep but uh but that’s the magic ingredient and I strive every single day to put myself in that state to have big goals and visions pulling me forward but to be happy now to be happy in the present is there is there a technique or is there a sort of

ritual that you use to sort of elicit these ideas these these creative inspirations that you have I mean is there any specific task or way that you come up with new fresh ideas yes so you can train the mind you can train the mind to tap into intuition and inspiration I developed a 15 to 20 minute meditation I call it the sixth phase it is unlike other meditations because it’s not about mantras or rituals or any of that other stuff that turns people off I don’t

believe in clearing your mind or any of that whether it’s six mental exercises that you do and the six phase has become very very very popular if you download mind values meditation app in Ghana its installed free you can get online and google talks IIF there’s a major conference called wisdom 2.0 in Silicon Valley and I get the second most highly watched talk ever at their conference after Eckhart Tolle so you can find that on their Channel

and it’s about the six days and I also included a chapter on it in my book and if you buy the book you get a free course that teaches you this method but I’ll summarize it basically just like a character in a video game have you ever played those old 90s video games where you got a you know where where your character is on a quest and you got an uplevel you’ve got to up level your charisma up level your endurance up level your skill you remember what I’m

talking about right so identify that in the human world there are six things that we constantly have to uplevel and this fifteen to twenty minute meditation is called a sixth phase because it takes you through two to three minute exercises in order to uplevel yourself the first is compassion if we create more compassion human-beings the world becomes a more beautiful place and up level in yourself in compassion means you see other human beings as beautiful

as amazing you’re kind to that waiter who might mess up your order you’re generous and empathetic to your family and your co-workers so compassion is the first one so we teach a simple idea for compassion second is gratitude we’ve spoken about that the third is forgiveness people don’t get this but forgiveness when you learn how to forgive it actually boosts your endurance it’s studies have shown induces things such as your ability to

do a vertical jump others have said it Bruce’s IQ so forgiveness is a really key part and it makes you a more gentle happier human being then so those three phases about happiness in the now right the first ingredient of damning reality we don’t go on to face four five and six which is the second ingredient attending reality which is about having a vision so phase four is about seeing yourself three years into the future most of us underestimate what we can do

in three years an overestimate what we can do in one year so this space helps you craft that vision for yourself phase five is picturing your perfect day unfolding and Phase six is feeling blessed it is you know if you have a religion you pray to a particular goal if you’re an atheist and you just you know want to feel supported phase six is where you you feel that feeling of support whether it’s coming from within from your family or from a higher power

so this particular meditation takes you through those six phases and it up levels you and people who do it say it’s like taking a magic pill every day if there is a pill remember that movie limitless if there is a pill that gets you there it’s this and people underestimate it because it’s free and it’s easy and we shouldn’t do that um but it’s one of those things which I think is one of the biggest changes in my life when I started doing this it

changed me and it transformed my business and it transformed how I get out there in the world and every success I’ve had is because of this one daily habit that I do every single day or at least it’s the single greatest correlation to any success I’ve had I’m blown away I truly I mean I think that this is the the next level that we I mean you have developed a blueprint for this sort of mechanism of not only reaching this sort of idea of success but also attaining a

sense of fulfillment in what you’re doing and as you mentioned earlier your there’s not it’s not this end goal it’s it’s this you know it’s this process of it and having the happiness now realizing that you’ve made it already you’ve already made it and I love that about this book and just a truly amazing there’s a chapter in your book called be unfuck with a bull I how can I not bring this up be unfuck with a bull how how how did you come up with that name for

the chapter it’s a it’s another one of those things right you know people people tell me how how can you teach meditation and use the f-word as if it’s some magic word that creates bad vibes no is an incredible word it it it is the idea you know it’s it’s what causes us to be born it’s loved making it just has a bad connotation but it’s how you use the word and I use it here as a form of power being unfuckable it means being immune to judgment to

criticism but also being immune to praise because if you give someone the ability to lift you up through praise you also give them the ability to control your emotions through criticism right unfuckable means being steady in who you are it means being able to forgive people in the past who have wronged you so it’s about healing your past true forgiveness and you control that those people may be you know they may have done you wrong and you don’t

have to wait for them to come and apology you can forgive them for giving your pass is part one the second part of I’m being unfuckable is being grounded in the present it’s having mindfulness practices at your disposal so let’s say you are someone cuts you off and flips you the finger while driving it doesn’t shake you up your cool that way so it’s being grounded in the present and third being on whatever means having being being confident about your future

and knowing that the choices you make you are making them for yourself and not because someone is pushing you in that direction not because you are following someone else’s rules so that’s really what this chapter is about it’s it’s a it’s a way of getting you strong so that you can go and chase and pursue those crazy dreams you want while being grounded and happy in the present and not being pushed around by the culture scape and other people’s expectations of

you yeah Wow so huge and envision that so okay let’s split to put it all together man I mean like we’ve created we’ve gone through the culture scape we’ve we’ve identified this idea of you know not doing not doing the things that people maybe expect of us and we move through these levels and I feel like they’re stages and it’s almost like an awakening you’re waking up to the matrix or something but you talked about living your quest you know and and how to kind

of live for a life of meaning and what I mean what is that what does that translate into for you well again you got to remember I’m a geek writing a book I’m a computer engineer I grew up being called a nerd I played computer games and hacked them all my life and living your quest actually comes from my my computer games if you if you think about great computer games there’s always this quest that someone goes on and I believe all of us are here on the

planet to find that quest and I don’t think that there is a that there is a particular quest that a higher power puts us don’t and demands that we have to do the quest is something personal but a quest is basically this it is something that you’re going to do on the planet that will leave the planet better off for the rest of humanity the problem is many people forget this when it comes to defining their life for their life vision and they end up in situations

where they are actually working on projects working for companies which are not doing good for the planet so in the book I introduced a concept called humanity + and humanity – humanity + our companies and businesses that are helping push the human race forward use a beer with your podcast that’s inspiring people is humanity Plus Elon Musk and Tesla is humanity + Apple that creates great consumer electronics and beautiful design is humanity + but

there are also companies out there that let’s be honest they need to die out because they are actually producing businesses and services that are negative to the world and I’m just going to call out one company right now because we don’t see that it is a humanity – company that’s coca-cola and Pepsi and McDonald’s coke sells high fructose corn syrup which is dangerous to the human biology but they market it as happiness in a can they repeatedly

deny and by their own scientific studies that showed that coke doesn’t really cause diabetes they are continuously trying to market it to teenagers I have a friend who’s one of the most brilliant men in Silicon Valley who was approached by coke and he told and they asked him can you help us figure out a way to get this to more teens and he said essentially off no money is going to be able to buy my soul like that but think about it right people work for

coke I have a friend recently who quit coke and he said you know when you’re working for coke in your first couple of weeks you go through this moral dilemma and you want to quit and they get you to stay by paying you 30% of birth’ any other job you could possibly get and my message in my book is don’t fall for that I mean we are facing a world right now where for the first time I believe we are handing the world to our children

that is worse off than the world we inherited you look at millennium salaries for example millenniums for the first time are worse off than the previous generation and where global warming is a serious threat and obesity is another serious threat the degradation of our food is another thing and so we need people today who are going to stop and say no to jobs for Humanity negative companies for companies that will started in a different era when the only thing that

mattered was shareholder value and we need people to join the XPrize that Tesla’s the the companies of the world that are actually helping push humanity forward now I’m not saying you need to save the world all I’m saying is don’t it up for the next generation yeah Wow Bravo man I truly truly respect everything that you’re saying and doing you know I I want to sort of you know we’ve we’ve covered a lot of material and there’s more in your book but I I

want to give you a chance to I mean for the person out there that the may be listening to the show and is struggling you know they’re they’re struggling however that struggle may be what would you what do you say to that person how would you kind of lift them up like how do you give a person hope that is trapped in a job they hate working for something that they don’t believe in feel like they have passion passion to do something great for the world what do

you what do you say to what single thing can you say to that person so so I wanted to understand the concept of kensho and Satori it’s a very important idea I talked about in Chapter ten now we grow so kensho and Satori comes from the Reverend Michael Beckwith who teaches at the agape spiritual Center in Los Angeles it’s a it’s a church for humanism that is it’s just incredible but one of the ideas he shares and I and I quote him in the book we grow a soul

will give us an opportunity to grow true can show moments of Satori moments can show is growth troupe a Satori is growth through inspiration now the problem is most people are not really into the Esso and so when we need to get steered into the right direction the solo will go you know I’m gonna make I’m gonna mess things up for a moment here so that you learn the lesson and so we fall sick we fall sick and we get hospitalized but we learn to eat better

and take better care of our bodies a business we start fails but it teaches us something and it gives us the idea for our next business we fell in love and someone breaks our heart but it helps us then later find the man or woman we are really meant to be with let’s go true kensho moments have come true so many cultural moments you know from having my health screwed up to having my heart completely cut apart to using multiple businesses each of that

is a stepping stone but after a while you got it you learn to see the patterns and I’ve now learned that kensho is simply a way to alter correct and when you see pain as a way to autocorrect you realize that you start to adopt this Eastern philosophical idea that there is no pain they only is what is and what is is often just a way to help put you in the right Park now when you start seeing this you open yourself to more Satori

your soul goes oh he’s listening he’s not wailing and whining about that illness or being stuck in hospital he knows that you know this is just part of the plan to get him to wake up and you start doing that you start moving towards Satori moments which is where you awaken you move into the right direction true inside Satori moments are beautiful I’ll be meditating and I get a Satori moment I’ll be in the shower and I get a Satori moment and that Satori

moment is something where I learned about a new way I can add value to the world a new way I can be happy recently I was in Greece right for a fest and I got invited to visit a refugee camp and I got to see these Afghan and Syrian and Iraqi refugees living in the most miserable conditions and I got to talk to the children there learn about their lifestyle and I realized that was a Satori moment I realized I wanted to do something for

this so I spoke to people in the camp and they are putting on a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds and I’m helping promote that campaign I’m helping them raise 50,000 it was it wasn’t painful it was an insight it was an insight on how I can add value to the world and when you learn to live life like that life becomes beautiful you start seeing these awakenings you start having these opportunities just show up that make you happy that give you joy that show you

how you can add value to the world and that’s when you’re really living a life that is extraordinary love the mustard fan love it I mean we’re approaching the anterior vision we I’ve got a couple more questions for you um what is something that you would say extraordinary people have in common extraordinary people have a vision for their life a vision for how they want to contribute to the world how they want to grow a vision for what experience is to

want to have in their life but here’s the thing right that vision isn’t just about them that vision involves pushing the human race forward to some degree and it doesn’t mean you have to start a huge company it could be a vision for how you want to grow a vision for the beautiful experiences you want to have of travel and a vision for your contribution because you’re just going to be the best mom or dad you can be embraced amazing kids for 18 years and

that’s good that makes you extraordinary but there is a second ingredient and that second ingredient is they have made it exactly like you said they have made it and by made it it means that while they have that vision where they are right now they are happy they are unattached to that vision so if you have to ask me for that definition that’s really in extraordinary people love life life is unfolding for them in this beautiful way it’s as if coincidences

and synchronicities fall on their lap they are happy where they are there’s nothing that they are chasing they know that to chase is to push away and they have these visions for how they want to expand their life and grow their life and these visions are coming coming to them with ease and a friend of mine recently shared with me a quote and I wanna I want to share this quote with you sure give me one any one second to just pull it up okay

yeah no problem because this quote really best explains extraordinary people and this quote actually comes from an Afghan refugee which is really interesting many people have heard of this quote but they didn’t know that the guy who shared this quote was an Afghan refugee from the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century AD the Afghan refugees name we know him in the West as Rudy and today Rooney is to probably the most I think he’s the best-selling poet

in America hmm how interesting is that right that the best selling poet in America was an Afghan refugee so Rudy said this when I run after what I think I want my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety if I sit in my own place of patience what I need close to me and without any pain from this I understand that what I want also wants me is looking for me and attracting me there’s a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it yeah

wow what a profound profound quote what this means the way I you can perceive the poems of Rumi in many different ways how I say this is to understand that if that what you want also wants you I believe that is a life force’ the ancient Greeks called Gaia a energy force around the world and if we want what is best for Humanity that thing wants it to and will cooperate with you and set in you keep it set in motion the wheels and the mechanisms the Kaizen and

the Satori moments to help you get there but you don’t have to chase it because as soon as you chase something you become in the words of Rumi a furnace of distress and anxiety and this breaks that flow and this is why it’s so important to be happy in there now to have those things that do not be attached to them to know that where you are right now is good you are complete you are you are enough you have it you have everything you need to be happy

right now and you can put yourself in this state that’s when magic happens wow what a what a beautiful note – I think close on here vision I had I really think it’s remarkable what you’ve done it actually there’s there’s one last thing and I think out of everything in your book I think this was one of my fit most favorite things that you that you kind of suggest and talk about you talk about um future dreaming and kind of daydreaming and seeing ourselves doing

things we love seeing ourselves succeeding seeing ourselves and using it as a type of affirmation in which we have already attained the things that you know we are seeking and using it in a way in which we kind of float you know with it in a daydream and it’s it’s very eloquent the way you put it right well it’s it’s an exercise I do every single day future dreaming is actually Stage four in the six phase meditation and what I do is I think

about one aspect of my life and where I want that aspect to be in three years right now for me it’s burning a really beautiful hole that I can share with my kids and my wife in California facing the sea and I see myself standing in my balcony reading a good book a sari sitting in my balcony reading a good book or gazing out at the sea listening to the crashing waves and I just experience that for a moment that’s my vision that’s my goal

I have no anxiety I’m not chasing it it’s just something I want to see and have in my life in three years and I find it as I start doing this opportunity start emerging that get me there and this is really been the story of my life I would start by thinking about where I want to be three years from now in a in a non-attached sort of way and then the opportunities would unfold as long as I was in a state of happiness in the net

so that’s future dream yeah yeah Wow I mean I don’t want to keep asking you questions vision I’m learning so much from this conversation I mean it is there it is there one thing that you have personally struggled with is there any single kind of idea or thought or just anything that was part of the grind yeah I I I struggled with self-esteem like most of my life I I thought it was unattractive I thought I was a geek I didn’t think I was I was worthwhile I’m

a guy who never actually you know had a girlfriend until I was 22 because I was just so I just have poor self-esteem and I grew up I I grew up with bad eyesight I was legally blind without my glasses until I had surgery I grew up with a skin problem so my face was just covered with acne I had chronic acne and all these things just really gave me low self-esteem for the first half of my life until I was maybe 23 24 and like many other people I knew many other

people out there even people listening right now may face this it was a Kaizen moment it was opportunities for me to grow to learn for example that skin problem exposed me to books on healing on energy healing and visualization and I learned that the skin is one of the most responsive organs to imagery therapy this taught me experimenting with meditation and visualization and after five years of chronic skin disease I healed my skin in

five weeks using a visualization and were that mom opened me up to the power of visualization which is stuff I now share in my book so if I hadn’t had that skin disease perhaps I would never have written this book because I would never have started exploring all of these different options so I really believe that everything in life happens as a you know as a way to push you forward it’s just how you choose to be with ya man Wow I mean how long did it take for this

book to get hit the bestseller um it hit it hit the list in about a week from being released yeah I mean it’s that good I highly recommend it everyone everyone who’s listening the the book is called the code of the extra-extraordinary mind the author’s fish in la la kyäni am I saying your last name right right fishing look yeah and vision where can where can people find your work get to mine Valley well you can let about mine Valley on well the first thing I

recommend this go to mind Valley Academy calm that is a main website that’s where we we bring you all of these amazing teachers and such and um you can get the book from Amazon you know just go to Amazon and search for it code of the extraordinary mind that this is a human experience vision thank you so much for being here what a wonderful amazing conversation truly remarkable to have you in my presence er it’s really an honor to to speak to you and your and

your work is really remarkable and I think it you know it’s hitting the bestseller list which you know which might not mean anything but I think it’s helping a lot of people already so yeah thank you so much this is the human experience guys thank you guys so much for listening we will see you guys next week you