The Code of the Extraordinary Mind

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle with some of the coolest people in the world. And I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health so you can go out there and live the big life you're meant to live.

Go.

And today. Oh man, this is going to be so cool. So last year I went to something called 40 years of Zen with my bestie bestie Dave Asprey of Bulletproof and Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley and Joe Polish of Genius Network. Us four, me and the boys. And it's really where you biohack your brain. It's like 40 years of meditation in a week. Since I've been procrastinating, learning to meditate, I thought, cool, sign me up. I'm always, I'm always in for the fastest shortcut to something. But what happened during that week is I'd met Vishen, he'd come to my mindshare event and spoken to our group the year before. But I got to spend some real quality time with him and wow, what an amazing, super cool, awesome human being he is. And he shared with me then a little bit about his book. I got some sneak peeks on it, but I got the bigger download on it now. And I am so excited to share this with you today because honestly, this is disruptive, this is mind blowing and this is life changing for you because it will shift you to be able to be free to figure out what it is in life that you really want, not held back by what you think you should be doing, what other people think you should be doing, what society thinks should be doing, all that kind of stuff. And I'm going to share some of the things that have happened to me through my life because of these misguided brules. And you're going to learn what a brule is and then how to get into Blissipline. There's so many good things in this, I can't wait to share it with you. So I'm going to dive right in. But first let me tell you a little bit about Vishen. Vishen is an Author and entrepreneur in education technology, as well as a speaker and investor. And he created, founded and is now CEO of mindvalley. Mindvalley is an amazing company. They do some of my nutrition programs. They are the biggest provider of medicine, meditation. He was actually in Silicon Valley and saw the power of meditation firsthand and decided he was going to bring meditation to the world. And that's what mindvalley started with. It is in Malaysia. He's done talks for my group. We're also in a group together called the Transformation Leadership Council where he talks about how he set up the culture that is just incredible. And he also sits on the board of the XPRIZE Foundation. But he's just done some amazing stuff with workplace culture, which is the thing that he spoke about at my conference. So this book is called the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. He's done this book with Rodale and this is going to sound like woo, but you're going to see. This is just so cool. But he blends evolutionary biology and computational thinking. Okay, that sounds like wow. But honestly, these are just like rules to live by. It's like the new rules to live by is what I look at this and just how to break through like these crazy limiting beliefs and outdated rules. I want my kids to have this. This is one that I want everybody to have. I'm excited to have you listen to this. The book also has cool people interviewed in it and including Richard Branson and Peter Diamandis and Arianna Huffington. So I am super excited to share my buddy Vishen with you. Let's do it. Vishen, welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here with me today.

Jj, I'm so honored. You are one of my favorite people in the world.

I feel the same way too. And this book is fantastic. I'm honestly most excited to get it into the hands of my super brilliant, amazing 19. He's actually 18. He's about to turn 19 year old boy. Because this, you know, this is one that all of us older adults need to get into our heads. But boy, if you had this stuff growing up, what a shift. So I'm going to dive right in so people will know what the heck we're talking about. And what we're talking about is your book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. What made you write this amazing book, Vishen?

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that you want to get this into the hands of your 19 year old, right? That's one of the first things that many people who read this book say. Now the book isn't written for teenagers, it's written for adults. But many people keep asking themselves, if I read this when I was a teenager, boy, would I have made different decisions in my life. What sparked this book was basically a situation in my life where I had pretty much had it all. I had a successful business. I had a second company that had gotten venture funded. I had over a hundred employees. I was. I had more money than I knew what to do with. But I was depressed. I was genuinely sad and depressed. And I couldn't understand why I was waking up every day dreading going to work, why my relationship with my business partner had fallen into a hole to the point where we just couldn't get along, why I just wasn't happy, even though I'd achieved all the goals in my life. Now, when I started looking back at my goals, I realized that all the goals I had set from 10 years ago, from the time I graduated college in Michigan, were all goals that I had taken on. Not because they really spoke to my heart, but because the culturescape. The culturescape is a word I coined to describe that tangled web of human beliefs, practices, cultures, ideologies. I had taken on goals from the culturescape rather than goals that really came from within. So I decided that success meant I had to own my own business. I decided that then when I owned my own business, there was a certain threshold of employees I had to have, a certain amount of paycheck I had to get every month, a certain like level of customer base or revenue or working hours or office space or type of marriage or number of kids I have to be successful. But all of these I realized I was borrowing from the culture scape. In other words, I wasn't defining what truly made me happy. And when I started doing that, my life started transforming at a very rapid pace. I ended up selling off one of my business. I ended up starting businesses and ideas and writing and going into creativity. I started my own festival, which today is called a fest. And it's one of the most pleasurable things I do. But it was all because rather than set goals that really mattered to me, goals that led to my own end, happiness that spoke to my heart, that make my soul sing. I was setting goals that were essentially means goals. And all of us do this, all of us make the mistake of setting these goals which where we are blindly following what society says we need to do. So in the book I talk about means goals and end goals. I talk about how to hack the culturescape and a key inside of this book is how to question the dogma of the cultures, the societies, the spirituality, the nations, the attitudes that you're growing up in. It's about breaking the generational memes that come from father to son, generation after generation, and creating a life that is untied to the way previous generations did things. So it's a book about renewal, about hacking the way you've been trained to be.

I think of it as a book about freedom. My gosh, right, like ultimate freedom. But then you have to sit there and even as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking about all the times my life I've done things because it was expected, like my first marriage. And then you have to sit back and go. You have to allow yourself to try to even figure out what's going to make you really happy because you're still focused on what you think should make you happy. So there's so much to this. I mean it's. As I started to go through this, I'm like, oh my gosh, you really, this is really masterminded. So what, like what's behind this? If you were going to explain the principle behind this code, what would it be?

Well, the code is actually 10 different laws. So what I did was. Now maybe some of you listeners may not notice about me, but what I've been doing for the last 10 years is building up a whole series of companies in personal growth. From apps to meditation companies to festivals. I'm just fascinated by the human mind, the human consciousness and what we can do to take it to the next level. What can get into people that they are schooling, never bothered to teach them. And this started because in 2002 I was a, I was a, I was in Silicon Valley and I had, and I had two startups and both these startups had failed and I was just struggling in my regular day to day job and I ended up googling online and discovering meditation. So I went to my first meditation class and it was mind blowing. Within one week, using some of the techniques I learned in that class, I double my sales. A week later I doubled it again. And I got so good at my job as I started practicing not the regular sales skills, the regular business skills, but studying personal growth, understanding how my mind works, that this became a fascination. Now within one year I was made director of sales for the company and I did an incredible job that I continuously started training myself in these different holistic arts. So much so that while I was director sales of a technology company at that point I'd Moved to New York at night. I was moonlighting and teaching meditation. Now, about a year later, I decided to just quit my regular Silicon Valley, New York corporate job. And I decided instead, what I wanted to do was dedicate my life to getting these ideas out to humanity. And that's when I started building up mindvalley plus other companies in the. In the personal growth space. Now, this book tells that journey. It talks about the two pivots in my life. First was discovering personal growth. Second was building these massive personal growth companies, but then still being unhappy, and then discovering how goals and how the visions that you have for your life also need to come from a different place. So this book talks about both of those elements and brings them together. It's about identifying the right visions for you and then putting yourself in an accelerated state of personal growth to help you get there faster.

So I just gotta ask you the obvious question I'm sure that everybody's thinking about is, okay, so what were the. And you've gotta first explain the brules. Because I was reading your 10 rules. I'm like, oh my gosh, I love the brules. I love the brules. So first, what the heck's up, brule? And then what are the brules that you tossed out? A couple of them.

Okay. So we spoke about this concept called the culturescape, right? Which I said is that tangled web of human ideas, beliefs, rituals. All of us live in the culturescape. And the culturescape is very much influenced by the nation we are born into, the religion we are born into, the culture. Whether we are a man or a woman, Society over the years has established rules on how to function. These are rules to keep us safe. But as we are moving into this new world, when, you know the average Maasai warrior today with a smartphone has access to more information than Bill Clinton did in the 1990s, we have to establish a different world. Safety is no longer the number one priority. We've evolved beyond that. So right now we live in a world where we can actually question the culturescape. So I teach that within the culturescape, there are rules that make sense, and then there are rules which are absolute bullshit. Bull rules are what we call brules. So again, in your teachings, you would probably agree that many of the bull rules of the culturescape are about how to exercise, how to eat ideas such as calories or that, you know, you have to. That losing weight means a one hour long aerobics class. You can see how these ideas start unraveling.

You know, Vishen, it's Funny. We actually looked back at why we did these hour long workout sessions, like the hour long car, because you were always told you have to do an hour of cardio. We realized that the studies were done because I was doing studies in graduate school and my class was an hour. And so we have students come in to be part of the study and we had an hour. So we did the studies based on an hour. Right. So you kind of look back and you go, where'd that one come from? And I'm like, oh my gosh. So it is so classic. So many of things that you just gotta question because they don't make so many. Especially in health and fitness. My gosh, talk about a place where there's a lot of brules, right?

Absolutely. I mean the whole fat versus the whole fat thing.

Oh yeah. Eating low fat thing. That's so ridiculous.

Yeah, so. So that's where brules come from. So brules are simply bullshit rules. Now the interesting, interesting thing about language is when you, when, when language gives you new things to see, you actually start to see them. And there are studies on this, you know, like for example, Russians, people who speak Russian can see more shades of blue than people who speak English because Russian has more words for the color blue. And so in the book I coin different words. Brules are one of them to help you see patterns of the world that may no longer be serving you.

Yeah, And I loved. There's another one in here that I love. Blissipline.

Absolutely. Blissipline is the practice of daily bliss. So just like we have fitness routines, we have eating routines, there are increasing studies that show that happiness is one of the most incredible rocket fuels you can put into your body. Salespeople who are happy do 55% better. Doctors who are primed to be happy perform 19% better at diagnoses. School students who are happy do better in exams. Happiness is freaking rocket fuel. Yet again, society has trained us that happiness comes when we achieve certain goals. Happiness is an if then statement. If I obtain this, then I become happy. So this book shows you ways to hack your happiness and that process of hacking it so you are happy on a daily basis. You truly understand what happiness is as an emotional state and you can bring it up on demand. Is that practice we call Blissipline the discipline really bliss?

Love it. You know, I look at a lot of these 10 rules and I think that you and I are in the same community. And I think when you're in a more entrepreneurial community, we tend to be a little bit More rebel like, and do some of these things intuitively. Although I love the framework of this because some of these I've never even thought of and some of them, like, you know, take out there and really push. But again, I looked at it and went, I really want to make sure my son who's now in college, isn't getting trapped by all the ridiculousness of, you know, school and rules and all that. So I saw it for him. But who is this book for?

This book is for anyone who believes that non conforming is the way forward. I mean, if you believe in playing it safe, if you believe that life is about slow, steady growth until you hit college and then you're going to get a steady career and kind of stay that way for the next 50 years. Don't read this book because this is not a personal growth book. This is a personal disruption book. This book is meant to make people uncomfortable. If you read this book, the book comes with a warning. If you read this book, you will question your relationships. You will question your diet, you will question your notions of exercise and health. You will question many, many of your goals. You may question the fact that you're an entrepreneur or the fact that you aren't. You will question the way you've been planning your life and question your spirituality and possibly your religion. This book is disruptive. It's designed to make people uncomfortable in some ways because we're going to point out the ridiculousness of how the world has asked us to live. And so people will either love this book or hate this book. But there's hardly anyone who's going to be in between. And the reason, because we grow, we grow from insight or we grow from someone kicking our butt. And so this book is meant to have to generate love or hate, but not apathy.

And that's why I love that. I love polarizing and I love you being courageous and taking this out there. And it feels like, I know with Mind Valley you have this mission to impact a billion lives. How does this book tie into that?

Well, books are one of the best ways to get a powerful message out to the world. Because books are so accessible. Right. That's one of the reasons why I decided to write it.

Yeah, this just feels like it can be your small soldier going out into the world, disrupting things. And, you know, there's going to be the obvious. People like, you know, we all read this and Dave Asprey, our buddy Dave, was like, oh my gosh, this book is amazing. He told me this a couple days ago. And then I got this, the first part of it, and I went, oh, my gosh, this is incredible. And. And I know I read pieces of it as you were writing it. And I just think even those people that at first blush look at it and are annoyed by it are probably the ones that will be impacted the most and the ones who need it the most. Right?

Perhaps. Perhaps, Yes. I hope so. Certainly.

Well, I think you've done an amazing, amazing job with this and the title says it all. The code of the extraordinary mind. 10 unconventional laws to redefine your life and succeed on your own terms. And I know you've got a lot of great stuff to give away with the book at this website. So the website is www.thecodexmind.com and that's the Codex, just xmind.com. so be sure you go check that out because this is just having those 10 rules vishen that I'm gonna put up on the refrigerator I think is key for people to have. They're just amazing. And we've teased you with a couple of them here. And you want them all. Trust me on this one. You want them all. And this will be one of my presents this year. This book I think that you have just created.

Thank you.

Honestly. And I'm not blowing some sunshine vision. You know it. This. You have nailed it with this book. This book is amazing. I am so, like, proud to know you, my friend. It's super cool. So.

And you may not know this, jj, but you are basically mentioned in the book.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Several times.

Thank you. Thank you. And I look forward to going to your festival this year. Very excited about a fest. So thank you so much, Vishen, for joining me today. And again, I want to remind everybody, go over to TheCodexMind.com and grab this book. You want this book? And grab some of the other stuff that he's got to go along with the book. And then be sure you stay with me right now because after the break I'm going to be answering a listener's question. So stay with me.

Ready to lose fat fast and keep it off forever. Discover the number one resource for fast and lasting fat loss by visiting JJVirgin.com Access exclusive videos, content, rich blog posts and lots of free resources to help you lose weight and feel better fast and be part of a community. Get ready to transform your life one simple shift at a time by visiting www.jjvirgin.com.

Welcome back. Now this is the time when I answer a listener's question and this is a good one for today because it's I'm going to shake up some convect thinking a little bit here. So today's question comes from Jill. Listen up.

Hey jj, I have a question for you. I was just listening to your podcast and you were talking about, you know, having like 25 grams of carbs in the morning and lunch and going heavier in the evening. What do you recommend for somebody who likes to work out in the morning? I usually work out after my kids go to school.

School.

So it's like mid morning and I'm usually okay if I have a lower carb breakfast. But what about replenishing right after that or do you recommend not doing that? I tend to do some strength training, like 45 minutes to an hour and then maybe like 15 to 20 minutes of HIIT cardio. And I'm not trying to lose weight. I've maintained my weight. I'm pretty healthy. I eat really healthy. I feel really good about where I am. I'm just wondering about how that all balances out with working out and eating and having the energy to do all that.

Thanks.

Okay, so Jill, you don't want to lose weight and you just want to make sure you have enough energy. And here's what I would tell you is the number one thing is all of these things are ranges and it's really about listening to your body and what feels best to you. Because I find that I'm hungrier during the morning and not so hungry and afternoon and evening. So a lot of times I'll eat breakfast. Sometimes I'll even have a mid morning snack, lunch and dinner or I'll eat breakfast workout and then have an early lunch. And so what I would tell you is try this, have a breakfast and this is where a shake is fantastic. Or you could have a little bit of a lunch or dinner for breakfast. And then when you do your workout mid morning, I would follow up with another shake. And you want to get when you work out, ideally within 30 to 60 minutes. After you work out, you want to hit protein and carbs. That's your ideal thing because the carbohydrates help with the proteins, get absorbed better and you need the carbohydrates to refuel your muscle stores of energy so you have energy for your next workout. You need the protein for muscle protein, resynthesis. So you need them both super important. And how much should you have in watching that 25 to 50 grams of carbohydrates? Here's the deal. We're going to get somewhere between 100 and 150 grams of carbohydrates a day. You're going to want to get between 25 and 50 grams of fiber a day, ideally more. Go higher. 50 is better. And so when you subtract the fiber from the total carbs, you're sitting somewhere in the 50 to 100 grams of carbs. See how you feel, how's your energy level? You need the carbohydrates for the energy for the next workout because you're going to do high intensity interval training and resistance training. You're depleting Glyca stores, which are carbs. See how you feel and monitor your body fat. If you find that you're not doing well with holding onto your lean muscle, if it's starting to drop, then you're going to need to increase your calories a bit. If you find your protein, possibly and maybe your carbs. If you find that your energy is not quite there, you might need to up your carbs a little bit. So this is where it's important to get really in tune with your body. Listen to your body and write it down. Now my favorite thing to do is to have breakfast around 7 and then go to the gym around 10, 30, 11 and then have a lunch after that. So what you might find is, you know, maybe a smaller protein shake in the morning or a breakfast in the morning and then a protein shake after your workout at lunch. And quite often when I'm home, I just do two shakes a day because it's easier and I can get everything I need in there. My prep fat, protein and fiber. My trifecta. So that's how I'd work it. But that's where writing down what you eat and managing your workouts and make sure you're having good recovery too. Not working out every day and making sure that you're getting adequate sleep and recovery and then managing your body fat will really give you all the answers. So I'm glad that you actually mentioned that and you're looking at it that way. It's awesome. Now, if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com ask ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I love hearing from you. And one more way, I'd love to hear from you. I would so appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy. Dare to live a life that matters.

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