Episode 109 – Vishen Lakhiani on founding Mindvalley, challenging your comfort zones, awakening to your potential and MORE

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eventually that’s how mine belly started at a certain point I quit Silicon Valley and I became a meditation instructor in New York City and pretty soon I realized that if you want to go broke become a meditation instructor nationalism will die out in most parts of the developed world by 2100 that’s my prediction that’s one of the things that mine valley is really excited about we employ people from 46 different countries and when we run our major

events like mine Valley University we fly the earth flag there isn’t an official earth flag so I want to push the world to create one but that’s what we associate with and then he gave me a look I was expecting a look of pride I was proud of proud about what I did but he gave me that look that just kind of said that’s really really really small of you but it all came because this man totally kicked my ass and got me out of my comfort zone so all of these

experiments all of these new ideas that I’m studying that I have hundreds of people in the mine valley company researching adapting getting out to the world are all designed to break human beings out of these shackles that these lies put us in to awaken them to their potential and get them to start doing something about planet Earth I speak about the concept of Brule’s rules be AR ùl es is a short form for rules and I give people ways to recognize the

rules of the world today my self-esteem issue not believing I was enough cost me millions upon millions upon millions of Dallas because I gave up so much to someone else thinking I couldn’t do it

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what’s up folks Xavier ketsana here and Wow we just finished our interview with mr. vision Lackey on E which is you are about to experience and I hope you enjoy as much as I did vision is the founder of MindValley a company that has revolutionized the systems of learning and meditation and studies of consciousness the mission is working so very hard on many different things and I’ve got a grin from ear to ear on my face right now because of how

great this interview came out so hope you guys love it as much as I did please find us on Twitter at the human XP we’re the same on YouTube same on Facebook we have launched a member section the human xpcom slash members pre-register and get yourself up HSP membership because we’re going to going to be collating all of the extra content that we do all of these interviews that you hear all the stuff that we don’t air all of the learning that you’re going to

be able to experience and it helps us sustain what we’re doing here with this show we were also nominated for the Weebly award which is a podcasting award very very grateful for this nomination so everyone listening to this broadcast please put some good energy out there for this nomination for us to win this award thank you guys so much for listening here’s it my guest fishin lucky on the human experiences in session my guest for today is mr. vision Locke

eonni who is making a reappearance on the show his second time on the show Bishan welcome back to hxp sir hey Xavier it’s good to be back so vision since the last time we spoke I believe it’s been a year and a half it’s been a long time the path the podcast has grown so much I know what you have been doing is grown so much I think code of extraordinary mind went like double triple platinum or something like that right yeah you know it did

pretty well it was a New York Times bestseller but what was really cool is that about 18 months after the book came out it took off on Amazon and so this past November two months ago for about three days in November it was the number one book on Kindle globally and um that was really really really exciting I don’t know how it happened but as result I got asked to write my second book so I’m now in like deep busy planning mode for that second book which I’m hoping to

get out in 2019 okay so now we have a third interview set up already okay sounds good okay there’s such a great amount of knowledge with all of the people that you’re touching and people that you surround yourself with building MindValley what year did you start mine bellied mine Bali started in a very very very different way when we started in 2003 I was it was a venture builder it was basically just a registered company so I

could experiment with I was a programmer I was coding and and putting out different web apps I had the second biggest social bookmarking engine in the world after delicious now this was way back in 2003 so it was doing a lot of different things but mine belly as we know it today which is a personal growth Academy mine valley.com that took off November 2013 what I’ve noticed about you through the years as you know we’ve talked and

exchanged emails is you study things you look at the way things work if I can say you are obsessed with finding out the intricacies of how something works and then figuring it out for yourself like deconstructing it and then reconstructing it in your own way and would you agree with this but Lounge Li yes so tell us about that process like what does that process like for you so so to understand that process you got to understand what’s driving it right from

the age of 14 my dad would give me personal growth books to read from the age of 14 I was reading all of these classic books like psycho cybernetics the Silva method and I got obsessed with understanding the idea of human potential and when I went to school I got really jaded I did not love what I was learning in school I became a computer engineer not because so much I wanted to but because that was what was expected of an Indian kid in

the 1990s right I ended up working for Microsoft I ended up working for a non-profit I did all of these odd jobs but the idea of human potential always mesmerised me and eventually that’s how mine belly started at a certain point I quit Silicon Valley and I became a meditation instructor in New York City and pretty soon I realized that if you want to go broke become a meditation instructor and so but I was happy for five years I was really really really

happy just teaching meditation classes I was bringing in you know little bits of money and in 2008 I was running mine Bali it wasn’t making hardly any money and on the side I was teaching meditation so I had this little company building simple web apps trying to figure out how to make money we had about 15 employees and and on the side I would fly to New York and fly to London and teach meditation classes and then one day I’m going to lunch in London and

I’ve been invited to lunch by Bob Proctor so Bob Proctor was a very famous speaker and author he wrote a bunch of books on thinking big and goal-setting and I had helped Bob build a website right the previous year and so we were touch and he was kind of a mentor he was a big deal and he was doing a seminar in London and he said hey you know if you uh if you’re in town stop by um come say hi to me over lunch so I stopped by just to say hi to him in

that hotel lunchroom sure he asks me what are you doing here in London and I go well I’m here at Bob and I’m so proud about what I’ve done I’m like I’m here Bob to teach this meditation class and you know there’s gonna be about 60 students and I’m probably gonna make about 5 grand and Bob’s it did you fly business class so coach and I go well you know I can’t afford business class it’s gonna be too expensive so I flew coach and he says so wait you’re telling

me you flew coach 20 hours he left your wife you left your kid to come to London to teach a tiny little class for 60 people and this is what you’ve been doing for five years vision vision vision you’ve gotta think bigger and then he gave me a look I was expecting a look of pride I was proud of thought about what I did but he gave me that look that just kind of said that’s really really really small of you and this is what Bob Proctor says in his

books right and and I and at first I was like pissed off but then I realized what he was trying to get me to do and this quote by bob is now on my facebook page it’s been on my facebook page since that month in 2008 and the quote is the question is not are you worthy enough to reach your goals the question is are your goals worthy enough of you I heard that from him that was the last month I was teaching those tiny little meditation classes I quit I just

completely quit that month and I decided to ask myself how could I make a massive massive massive freaking gigantic impact on the world if I believe in this stuff it’s my responsibility to get it out to millions of people and that’s really where that the genesis for mind Ali started taking off and that’s when we started the books we started mine valley.com we invented the quest learning platform which is probably the most sophisticated learning platform in

the world we started festivals around the world two years after that encounter with Bob I launched a fest which is now mine Valley’s festival which had the barely three six months when you get all of these amazing speakers and it’s like the TED talk of the personal growth industry but it all came because this man totally kicked my ass and got me out of my comfort zone and so now the question I asked myself every single day is how can I make a massive global

impact to 1 billion people and awaken these billion people to pure human potential Wow I love that story so much I love that segue it’s perfect into you know these ambitions that that we all have whether we’re entrepreneurs building businesses or just simply trying to transform our own personal lives into something bigger or something better for ourselves what in your opinion is that thing which drives a person to want to change the world and

then subsequently successfully change the world there is um there’s a couple of things right now the first is waking up to the fact that we are living within a massive massive massive series of lies so I’ll tell you a funny story this week I decided to go on a public campaign to expose Nestle business practices in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia and it started because the New York Times did an expose showing how Nestle which is an 80 billion dollar Swiss company was

basically funding the Malaysian government research on health and nutrition the Malaysian government’s putting out some really really really obsolete ideas on you know how to take care of health how to control obesity and as a result Malaysia which is the country I’m born in is now the fattest country in Asia and so I started studying Nestle ingredients Nestle advertising and I could see that there is this massive lie being pushed out

where for example in Malaysia kids I encourage to drink sugary beverages sugary malt beverages in the morning loaded with sugar because Nestle puts out advertising saying you need to drink this every single day to maintain energy for school and it’s leading to one of the one of the fastest rises in childhood obesity in in decades um and so I decided I needed to expose this brought my team together and we decided to do the research and get videos out we

put out a video last week that got shared by 1.4 million people which is huge given it’s just in Malaysia I started being in 48 hours people were stopping me in the streets and the reason what drove me was actually I guess no in the in the words of Dave Logan righteous anger righteous anger that so many false ideas about what it means to be human is being put out in the world let’s make a short list okay there’s the pool idea from big food

companies about the food we eat not just Nestle but coca-cola marketing high-fructose cancer Optus happiness in a red can vitamin water which is marketing sugared water as something that contains vitamins food companies putting out this blatant amounts of of unhealthy food leading to rise a massive rise in global obesity and a massive rise in diabetes in children then there is the lies of corporate world which is basically that you know

you gotta get a good degree work hard get a job work from 9:00 to 5:00 check and check out slave away so that someday you can save up enough money retire in your 60s and then enjoy the last few years of life you have before you settle into dust again a really dumb idea of the way the world should function but an idea that gets so many college kids to go into massive amounts of debt to get university degrees for jobs that won’t be that they graduate

and you can go on and on and on there are the lies about love they’re the lies about aging there lies about longevity there lies about the potential of our mind and I found that the education system just didn’t do enough to update itself with the new research with the new studies the education system perpetrated McFly’s now where did I find the truth I found it when I went off to standard textbooks when I started looking at what scientists researchers

top well top nutritionists top experts in human potential Buddhist monks was saying and when I started experimenting with these things on myself very rapidly I was able to do some really remarkable things so for example I turned myself and the people in my company which just are around 300 people strong into guinea pigs we are obsessed about experimenting with new ways of becoming the most powerful human beings we can be so that

that’s one but at the same time experimenting with being human beings who actually give a damn about other human beings because you need both you don’t want to be a powerful asshole you want to be a human being who has the inset the cognitive abilities to help the energy to get out there and change the world that do it so that you’re creating a better world multiple generations down so all of these experiments all of these new ideas that

I’m studying that I have hundreds of people in the mine valley company researching adapting getting out to the world are all designed to break human beings out of these shackles that these lies foot is in to awaken them to their potential and get them to stop doing something about planet up yes yes yes I love efficient love it love this vibe I don’t want to spend too much time or energy on this but you know if we just look at the

world the political system here in the States or just everything that’s going on in an excuse my language here but it seems like the is now hitting the fan and we are left just kind of you know like wondering like what what should we do it everyone is talking about this everyone is just discussing this everyone is horrified at the direction that we are headed and it seems as if there is a shift in human consciousness happening as we speak

there is and it’s actually a shift that people have predicted since the 1870s so one of the things that gives me hope is Darwin and actually I’m writing a short book called Darwin’s hope let me tell you what what Darwin said right so Darwin wrote a book called sexual relation says gosh Darwin’s book titles was so complex that it was something along the lines of sexual relations in relation to man and animal species it was written in 1972 that’s what I

remember now in that book Darwin wrote about this really really really interesting concept called diffusion of sympathy now sympathy was basically you know his way of saying compassion right but what Darwin said is that man he bolts and we get more advanced ah sympathy for fellow man would extend from just our family to our truck to then all people of a nation and then eventually it would break the boundaries of nations and extend to people of

multiple nations and it would get bigger and bigger and bigger until a sympathy extended to people of all the planet Earth and he said because we would start to understand that this to our evolutionary advantage that our sympathy our care our kindness diffuses to all human beings now what Darwin was essentially talking about here is the concept of world centrism C integral theory says that 70% of the world today is trapped in an

ethnocentric way of living and no centric means these are good people they’re kind people but their goodness and kindness extends only to people of their particular type meaning country ethnicity religion and so on 30% of the world has extent has evolved to world centrism and we’ll centrist a means their sympathy extends to people across the world nowhere was this more common than in Jimmy Kimmel two days ago when Jimmy Kimmel brought up this this

Mexican family who was about to be deported they were daca recipients and you know because Trump is looking to take away daca this this did this family with a baby that was born in America were about to be torn apart and then he brought in a group of six Trump supporters and the whole point of his episode on Jimmy Kimmel it lasted about maybe 13 minutes was to see if he could convince the Trump supporters who were meeting this Mexican family holding

their baby that maybe they should be allowed to stay in the United States it was very interesting seeing that both sides were good people the Trump supporters were good people they were patriotic Americans but their kindness could not bridge this artificial border between America and non-americans they kept seeing those that family as non Americans and they’re saying that they need to leave they need to leave they need to leave as the mother was holding

the baby in her arms talking about how she was here legally their response were sorry you’re not officially a man reckon you need to leave now that’s an example of ethnocentrism now with your ethnocentric congratulations you’re the majority of people in the world today you’re not bad but there is this artificial barrier preventing your compassion your kindness from extending beyond this bubble now Darwin said that these artificial barriers will start to

dissolve not only did he say that people would expand their compassion to groups of Nations and this is true it’s what formed the European Union right but he said that once learned this model would trickle down to the children and children in the next generation would grow up seeing this as they are truth so what Darwin was effectively saying is if you look at the way the world is accelerating go for a hundred years 200 years nations will disappear we’ll see

each each other as one planetary species it will likely be an earth flag and children born in that era will never be able to think of a time when they our parents actually fought amongst Americans and not Koreans or Arabs and Christians it wouldn’t be conceivable it’s like Greeks today thinking about when Sparta and Athens and Thebes were at war with each other right so that’s something that gives me great hope yes the world is kind of messy today but human

civilization doesn’t move in a straight upward line it’s like the stock market it goes up it goes down it goes up it goes down and right now I think maybe we took a little bit of a dip but I actually believe this dip was necessary it was a massive wake-up call and I think what you’re going to see in the next 50 years or so is the slow dissolution of the idea of patriotism and nation-states nationalism will die out in most parts

of the developed world by 2100 that’s my prediction that’s one of the things that mine Valley is really excited about we employ people from 46 different countries and when we run our major events like mine Valley University we fly the earth flag there isn’t an official flag so I want to push the world to create one but that’s what we associate with Wow Wow missionary I love it man love that you’re you’re you know deconstructing Darwin there and you know

talking about the shifts in human consciousness it’s it’s so important for us to be aware of what’s going on in the world but you know that old saying being in the world but not of the world I agree with you I think the world is moving into this higher consciousness and we did hit a sort of dip a type of dip so what I wanted to ask you is you know how do we have that strength in consciousness in health how do we protect ourselves against you know this

aspect of the world that is that is harming us that is harmful well that’s that’s essentially what I wrote about in my book the code of the extraordinary mind I speak about the concept for Brule’s rules B R ul s is a short form for rules and I give people ways to recognize the rules of the world today basically we got to understand that we like a fish who is swimming in water cannot see water cannot recognize that there’s water

around him we as human beings are swimming in what I call the conscious cape and the conscious cape is this massive collection of beliefs rules habits rituals that come to us from religion from media from a government from our culture and we blindly follow these rules not realizing that some of these rules are absolute some of these rules actually make sense now to understand the difference you got to understand the difference between

absolute truth and relative truth absolute truth is this right we know that if I take a rock and knock it against my head it’s gonna be painful that’s absolute truth right rocks are hard they are painful you don’t bang your head against rocks send us relative truth relative truth is everything else about human society you have to work hard to make money socialism is a bad form of government because it makes people lazy we have one God and if you

pray X number of times per day this God will maybe reap a blessings upon you you have to get married to a member of the opposite gender these are forms of relative troop and the problem is people don’t get that these are made up even Darwin in his in his 1872 book wrote about how once parents stopped once parents basically start changing the way they perceive the world and move to a world a form of world centrism the kids just pick it up because almost

everything that we think is a problem with the world comes from habits beliefs rituals that came to us from our parent here I found the the exact text from Darwin as soon as this book she was honored and practiced by some few men it spreads through instruction and example to the young and eventually through public opinion right so we spread these lies generation to generation to generation to generation to generation and it’s up to us to cut the cord before

it gets to our children now let me give you an example of what I mean by cutting the cord so my kid I’ve educated him when we watch television and we see Kellogg’s breakfast cereal commercials I’ve educated him on what those commercials are actually doing based on psychology so I’m like hey Haven you know so Hayden’s ten he’s a really smart kid and I tell him Hayden hey you gotta learn about this thing called a trigger of influence it’s something that

marketers use to get kids like you to buy their their stuff let me tell you what’s going on I’m here and then we might talk about Sheldon these triggers of influence um when he was seven years old and we were driving back from an event and it was Easter and he asked me what is Easter about right I don’t tell him what it’s about I tell him the interpretation human beings have so I say well a lot of human beings believe in Jesus Christ Hayden you know who

Jesus Christ is from a historical perspective they believed that this was this celebrates the day he was resurrected and when you speak to a child like that and you don’t boss relative truth as absolute truth the child starts to question and we make their own decision so headon replied by saying but Dad you know in he said two things that surprised me I wrote about this in my book he said dad you know I don’t think Jesus really came

back from the dead I think maybe they just mistook another bearded guy for him and I was whoa that that’s pretty bold hidden that I was proud of it but then he went on you see once you teach a child to think like that you give them freedom to start questioning everything he went on and he said this and I don’t know if I believe in God maybe we just make him up so we can feel good about ourselves and I was thinking that’s exactly how I want my

seven-year-old to to to Google because nobody can brainwash him advertising can’t brainwash and religion can’t brainwash him he can make up his own decisions and so I would test him like I asked him Kaden do you think the people who illegally crossed the border from Mexico to the United States should be deported and his response was of course not the human beings we gotta treat them with kindness who cares about borders it’s all

imaginary anyway right now he’s making that up he’s not if he’s not watching Fox News and having Fox News tell him what is right he’s learned to question everything but at the core there’s one thing I teach hated there’s one thing which I tell him is possibly absolute truth and is something that you you want to adopt as your core guide in principle and that is Darwin’s diffusion of sympathy I taught him about world centrism about how human society evolves

from egocentrism to ed no centrism to world centrism and that there’s a level above that called cosmos centrism which is where you care about all life and you think multiple generation it’s down so he uses that as his moral compass everything else everything else he’s allowed to question hmm Wow Wow such a powerful story there with Hayden and I love everything that you’re saying man and this is this is why you know we invited you back on the

show is because you and I have seem to have this flow or we just riff off of each other and we just it results in something amazing and magical fish and I I want to change gears a little bit and I want to talk about vulnerability this is something that I I’d like to test my where my comfort zones are where my barriers are if I feel uncomfortable by something I want to know why why am I having this reaction to something so how do you respond to Varner ability comfort

zones how do you challenge that within yourself see vulnerability the whole idea of vulnerability is nothing more than an idea in the culture escape now let me tell you what what I mean by that some scientists say that there are only four basic human emotions right so there’s this term I remember listening to this in another really fantastic podcast they were talking about this term called interception I believe it’s interception don’t quote

me on that but imagine if you could listen to the sounds coming from inside your body right you can because if you could it would drown out everything else I mean they’ll be the sounds of blood flowing that your heart beating um your kidneys your stomachs all of these would make some sounds within your body so you don’t pick these up through your traditional five senses but you do pick them up through a concept called interception all listening within the

body and what you pick them up as our emotions and there are only four basic emotions in other words all emotions are caused organically from what’s happening inside your body now this is a very scientific way of looking at it but we’ll play with this for a moment and they’re only four basic emotions there is pleasant unpleasant arousal and calm pleasant unpleasant arousal and calm everything that we give a label to from feeling authentic to feeling confident

to feeling jealous is really you can think of these as as as little Venn diagrams the intersection of pleasant unpleasant arousal and calm and then the label that we were trained to slap on to it as a child I’m just ordinarily vulnerable I have a habit of not being in my comfort zone but again we all process these things differently I have Asperger’s so because of that there are certain things that normal people can deal with which I

can’t deal with – well it’s it’s um in a way you could say I’m on the autism spectrum right and so for example I can’t read nonverbal communication I’m very literal right and so a lot of communication they say seven feet of communication is nonverbal I can’t see that bit so I tend to be very literal in terms of the words that someone says so because of that right I tend to be naturally very authentic because I can’t play with emotion or give hidden

messages now there’s a hard part too that I never dated until I was like 22 because I couldn’t understand that whole concept so this is where it’s hard for me because I’m not neurotypical to even answer your question in that way we got to understand that we all have different neurological diversity and many of us process the world in different ways to ask me a big tough question that’s what we do here man is we ask the tough questions and you know I love the

honesty and I love that that you are authentic and you you do give you know all of yourself to whatever you’re doing right but but did you see what I just did there I just became really authentic and for the first time in a podcast mentioned that I have Asperger’s and that I’m on the autism spectrum yeah right so that’s what I mean when I was using your question to actually push myself and see if I wanted to say this publicly yes yes there’s no way your

question challenge me but the bet again when you have Asperger’s you do process human of the human beings in a different way it doesn’t make you bad or good it’s just that you see the world differently so I hope that for your listeners that was that gave them some value I’m absolutely certain that that will reach our listeners and thank you for sharing that that is such a vulnerable moment and thing to share very personal thing

to share on air here with us sufficient you know I want to talk about our thinking in our models of reality and when I’m speaking to my clients or when I’m when I’m on a coaching call or when I’m speaking to a friend and they’re in a negative cycle of thought they’re in a negative worldview negative reality it’s difficult for them to escape out of that loop because they’re still trapped in it is it’s a cycle it’s a devastating cycle when you are

struggling the most when you vision are having the hardest moment I want you to think back to something recent where you were struggling hard and you know you’ve worked hard you generated all the success for yourself and your business is thriving and but you’re just having a hard day it just seems like everything is working against you what do you go to in that situation in that moment do you go to a perception of God do you go to a perception of

something higher than yourself or do you go to an inner power within yourself and say well I created this how do you perceive that how do you react to that well firstly I am undecided on God I believe that is the higher power my best bet right now is that this higher power is the mass collective consciousness of all life on planet Earth and so every decision I make takes that into consideration and and I have a personal belief that as long as the decisions I

make are supporting the help of this life I’m gonna be taken care of so for example I would never ever ever ever ever start a company that was selling junk food right I would never work for coca-cola I would never take any money from coke or Nestle or any company which I feel is humanity plus and so that is my religious practice I honor all life now every now and then I will have shitty days and when I have such shitty days there are two things I do for

I remember the concept of kensho versus Satori so Ken sure was a Satori’s is a concept that Reverend Michael Beckwith introduced to me Michael Beckwith is the the Reverend at the agape spiritual Center in Los Angeles it’s sort of a universal Church for all religions and it’s a really an amazing place to be so he said there are two ways we grow we grow true moments of awakening or we go through moments of pain pain and awakening they are both however simply

ways for us to grow so a Satori moment is groped by awakening you have a sudden insight and aha moment and you’re never the same again in a Satori moment you there is no pain you have an awakening it’s the turning moment may come in the shower it may come after a vacation it may come during the vacation it becomes during meditation it’s a sudden awakening but we also go grow through kensho ken show is groped by pain you fall into a bout

of bad help you’re checked into a hospital and you come out realizing that you got to take better care of your hell it’s pain that led to growth that’s Ken show or someone breaks up with you but you realize what type of relationship you really need to pursue that’s Ken show Ken show is grow true pain so what backwards said is this we grow through life sometimes we’ll grow through Satori and you can believe in whatever higher power you want you can say that these

Satori moments are coming as a gift from this higher power but by that definition you can also say that Ken show moments are a gift by this higher power it’s this higher power kicking our butt like a good parents night sometimes you know be hard on a child to make that child grow that’s what Ken show is now when you understand this model even when you’re going through a bad moment I ask myself wow I wonder what I’m gonna learn

from this and so there are no bad moments everything is a part to grow so I found that Satori versus kensho that simple framework of understanding life is a really effective way to giving you a means to jump out of negative moments to jump out of these darker days that might occasionally enter your life and when I’m having a shitty moment I simply go wow I cannot wait to see what’s at the end of this and how I’m gonna grow yeah yeah hundred percent I was thinking

about this last night I was thinking about exactly what you just talked about not kensho but the growth that we experienced through pain and suffering I’m a little bit younger than you and I so I have set rituals and I’m a very strategic person I look at things and it’s a very it’s very much a methodical plan for me so I have set rituals when I encounter these moments where I’m I feel that I’m suffering so my go-to things are either the gym exercise or

meditation those two things if I can’t sit still if I can’t calm myself down and just breathe and meditate then I go to the gym what I’ve found is that through that release of that aggression through that pain that we’re experiencing can be this Eureka enlightening moment that is explosive that is so wondrous is such an all moment I was thinking about this yesterday it’s amazing that you just brought this up so I want to wrap this

all Ben tie it with a bow and bring it all back together so I want to talk about we’re talking about a lot of big things big ideas let’s bring it back down to the smaller things something that I notice is when I am volunteering or when I am giving my time to others when I am in service to others I feel a sense of fulfillment with that that is important to me what is something that you do on you know a micro level that gives you that same sense of fulfillment

or you know expression of joy well well to me it is it’s working at man Valley cuz what I did was I structured a company to to to be a place where people walk in and they say gosh this is the happiest place on planet everyone is lit up people are excited everyone is crazy passionate about health and wellness and meditation the team is from 46 different country countries the office space kind of looks like Google but I designed this I wanted

to to make work my art my joy the thing that drives me and keeps me happy all day and so there’s nothing I love more other than of course my kids and my wife and everything nothing I love more than just being in mine valley HQ and working on these personal development programs and experiments that we continuously do yeah that’s a fair answer you know I think there is an aspect of your methodology which I respect sincerely which is you know you seem to just take

something and you you look at it as objective as you possibly can and there’s nothing wrong with you know going to work and building you know what your passion is I want to bring up you know someone listening to this conversation they might look at admission and say oh fishing you know you have so much success I can never accomplish that I could never do what mine Bali has done this is too high of a reach for me there’s no way I can ever

do that there’s no way I could ever accomplish that what is happening with that statement when someone makes that steep one of the things that I teach it’s a it’s a very well-known mind value framework that I designed it’s called the three most important questions it’s about going deep into yourself asking yourself three questions that get you to set goals and visions for your life that are independent of what the culture scape pushes you to do so what I say is

that many people confuse means goals and end goals for example two kids can be in law school competing to see who would get better grades so because you know there’s a limited number of partnership a law firm partnership jobs available they want to see who’s gonna get the job in that dream company but that’s actually competing on a goal that isn’t really a goal it’s a mean skull now what you really want to do is identify the end goals now end goals are goals that

truly lead to human happiness if you ask people why do you want to be a lawyer they’ll often say well you know law being a lawyer means I’m gonna get one of the highest entry-level salaries like upon graduation and the next question is well why do you want that high entry-level salary and then you go well because that way I can save up and someday I can maybe travel the world and buy this dream home and on the beachfront in California

and now you’ve got into the end goals they won’t travel and then you can ask them about the home why do you want to hold on a beachfront in California because I want to wake up every day next to the sea well that’s an end goal they won’t travel they want to wake up next to the sea and then the next question is so why do you freaking wanna waste time in law school why not just move to Hawaii and find out but you can wake up every day next to the sea because here’s

the thing when people chase mean schools they are often blindly following rules that society says they have to follow but if they aren’t careful that it leads to misery now I pick lawyer for a specific reason America has 5% of the world population 70% of the world’s lawyers and 50% of I believe in a recent study 50% of female lawyers in America are clinically depressed clinically depressed you have all of these people who have spent all

of this money getting a law degree slaved away for almost a decade in terms of work and study and that they now live a life where they are clinically depressed it’s because they were chasing a mean school and not an end goal so when we compare ourselves to others it is often because we’re comparing mean schools but when we do the three most important questions which is designed to get you to identify your end goals you become your own work of art let me tell

you what this means okay so first the three most important questions are what experiences do I want in my life how do I want to grow and the third question is how do I want to contribute experiences are things such as I want to create great art and see people be lit up because of my art own experience might be I want to have the experience of being able to hold a baby in my arm an experienced plant you I want to wake up every day next to this man a woman

actually love an experience might be I want to live by the ocean and be able to meditate listening to the ocean every morning those are experiences those are goals a law degree not a goal or any type of degree unless getting the degree itself is the experience but that’s rare so that’s the first thing experiences now the second list that you want to make is how do I want to grow people forget that growth is a goal in itself right we gain in

credible satisfaction and happiness from growing learning a new language for the sake of learning a new language not to pass some exam studying something new learning how to create art learning even learning entrepreneurship for the sake of learning how to think like an entrepreneur if you enjoyed that learning that’s an end goal now the final bucket is contribution and this is very important it’s to you know the Dalai Lama said if you want to be happy

make other people happy so contribution means you set goals for how you want to give back to the world now when you do this exercise when you bypass the means goals you go straight for the end goals you ask yourself what experiences do I want how do I want to grow how do I want to contribute and you make these three bucket lists you stop comparing yourself to others see most people live life like they are a piece of paper and a

photocopy machine they’re not original they are photocopy and a photocopy and a photocopy and a photocopy and a photocopy of every other life out there but when you start forgetting the means goals and going straight to the end goal you become a painting you become an original work Hawk your life becomes a work of art I was talking to Don Miguel Ruiz once you know the famous writer of Mars free of love it’s or agreements and he said I asked him what does toltec

mean because all his books are based on this thing called Toltec wisdom and he says to be at Alltech is to be an artist and you want to live life like your life is your work of art and art is never photocopy Wow what is what a powerful powerful way to begin to wrap this up and in the process of you know building MindValley all the things that you’ve had to crossed all the hurdles was there a single defining moment for you that you

can say this decision changed the course of mine valley and what I was doing and and I know you shared this story earlier but was it was there another time or moment where you had to make a choice and that choice resulted in either a large amount of success or even a large amount of regret work well well you know when I first started I didn’t think I was smart enough I didn’t think I could do it on my own so I had the company for

a year and I gave up a large chunk of the company to a friend from college who was like top student in my university and you know I had a lot of respect from him he was a really smart guy Stanford MBA and after around 5 or 7 years of working together I realized that we couldn’t work together but the problem is he won’t half the company so I had to buy him out I had to go in debt of all years my self-esteem issue not believing I was enough cost me

millions upon millions upon millions of dollars because I gave up so much to someone else thinking I couldn’t do it and you know the year after I bought him out and I took over the reins of the company that was a fastest growing year we drew 70% that year and I realize how much that feeling that that feeling of low self-esteem had cost me in life and I think that was really my most painful point and my biggest realization Wow that is a very big one man I really

appreciate that if there is anyone listening to this and and there’s anything that you would like to share anything that maybe comes up to you in your mind or anything that you think that our listeners might want to hear or something something that someone knows your work and has found your work and has studied your work for a while if there was one thing that you could share with them what would be that one share that you would would tell them well the

one thing I would say which which I think would be of great use to people is Google Google the three most important questions I think there’s tons of videos and stuff on it out out there on the web I bet there’s even a video from me that that’s on YouTube that explains the process and I really recommend that if there’s one thing you do after this podcast if you like the content I shed try that exercise it’s changed a lot of lives it’s being used in schools in

India it’s being used in corporations across the United States a lot of teachers have adapted it and the beautiful thing about it is it really works and I even put up a course on it free online Bally’s quest app so if you download mine Valli quest which is our app you can take a 17-day course just five minutes a day where you answer these questions and it kind of goes a little bit deeper but that course is called extraordinary by design

completely free it’s just something I wanted to give out because a lot of teachers use this to help train teenagers to think about their life in a right way but really this was designed for myself it was something I designed for myself that just took off and I hope you get a chance to experience it Bishan I love having you on the show man I love the the conversations that we have it gets bigger and better and I just I love it vision where can people go to find mine

valleys just mind valley calm where do people go to find your work well just go to mind Valley Kong and I I think all my courses so I used to have a lot of personal growth classes online I actually made my two biggest courses free just because I wanted to get it out to people go to mine really calm there’s a lot of information out there but also download the mind valley quest app mine Valley West qu est s click on discover a lot of a lot of my programs up there and

they’re completely free free to go true and quest is just a really beautiful learning experience perfect and are there any events cuz I know mine Valley has a lot of different events that are coming up are there any events coming up that you want to plug so I’m looking to reinvent University so I have a new model called mine Valley University which is a university model which is not four years in a bubble it’s one month every year of 48 years and you can learn

about it on mine valley.com /u us in the letter U it’s happening in Tallinn Estonia this July and I think some of you guys who are listening might find it really interesting go check it out on the web mind alie you guys this is such an amazing interview I hope you get as much as I got out of bringing vishen back on we’re definitely gonna have him back on again when his next book releases please get to mine valley.com to find more visions work and

I think you’ll get a lot out of it we are going to get out of here thank you guys so much for listening this is the human experience my name is Xavier katana you will hear from us next week