14. Vishen Lakhiani: Author of The Buddha and The Badass

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to episode number 14 of our brand new podcast, Book Thinkers: Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview some of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can now use to achieve more and live better. In this episode, I have the pleasure to interview the author Vishen Lakhiani. Vishen is the founder and CEO of Mindvalley, a personal growth education empire. Mindvalley has over 2 million students and it's dedicated to teaching revolutionary success systems for mastering your life. Our conversation touches on his new bestselling book, The Buddha and the Badass. This book deals with the secret spiritual art of succeeding at work. We also talk about how he started Mindvalley and some of his favorite books. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Vishen Lakhiani. Vishen, thank you so much for joining the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books podcast today. For those in the audience that don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself to everybody?

I'm the author of The Buddha and the Badass, the book you have so beautifully positioned on your table, Nick. And I'm the founder of Mindvalley. Mindvalley is an edtech company that's looking at rebuilding global education from the ground up.

And I've read consistently that Mindvalley is one of the best companies to work for in the entire world. I mean, that's pretty amazing to have started a company that can achieve that.

Not anymore. I think there was a time when we were very much focused on culture, but now we're not focused on being the best place to work. I don't think we've nailed that. But we are probably one of the healthiest places to work because we are so about fitness, meditation, spirituality. And when you work at Mindvalley, you get exposed to all of these amazing ideas. So I wouldn't say it's the best place to work. That might be, I don't know, Google, some venture-funded company. But at Mindvalley, you get really healthy, really fit, really spiritual because that's what we focus our education on.

I did see in the book that you had mentioned the Oura Ring, which is something that I wear all the time, and it fits with that healthy mind, you know, the healthy distinction that you just made about Mindvalley. And so why is it so important for you to be— to run a business that is focused on providing health to their employees or focusing on health.

So, Nick, when I was 25 years old, I moved to— well, first let me get some perspective. How old are you?

I'm 26.

26. Okay. So when I was around your age, I moved to Silicon Valley with a degree from a top engineering university, and I had dreams that I was going to change the world and I was going to build an app and get funded. And what happened was the dot-com bubble burst and I lost my job and I lost $30,000 I borrowed from my father, and it sucked. And I couldn't afford rent, and I was sleeping on a couch. But it got worse. I finally got a job, and just when I thought my life was going to be okay again, September 11th hit. And all of a sudden, I lost that job. And not only did I get laid off, but the company went so bust they couldn't afford to pay me my last month's salary. This means I couldn't afford to fix my car. And I couldn't have, and I had these brake pads that were not working, and I crashed into another car. And now I owed a lot of money for my car, for the car I almost hit. But the worst part was this, the car I crashed into, 'cause I couldn't afford to fix my brake pads, was carrying 2 little girls. And they were okay, but I felt so fucking guilty because I was such a loser. I lost my business, I lost my job, I was sleeping on a friend's couch. And in desperation, and I almost like, I feel really awful when I think about those times, but I speak about them now because today people of 25 and 26 are going through similar chaos. They're coming into a job market with jobs being devastated. They're growing up in America with COVID cases on the rise. The world is fucked up right now, and it was fucked up in 2001. And if you're going through pain, if you're listening and you're going through that, I, I resonate with you. Now what I did is, as a result of that pain, I ended up taking a class in meditation and it changed my life. And I was— back then I was working in a dialing for dollars job because that was the only other job I could get. I had to pick up the phone and sell software to lawyers, and it was miserable and I hated it. But after I took that class on meditation, something remarkable happened. I got really good at everything I was doing. I became a top salesman. And then I worked at— I stayed at that company and decided to start my own business. And life just became easy. And it didn't mean I didn't fail, but things would click more often than they would go bust. And I started getting obsessed with why, why I came from such chaos into such bliss. And I realized the secret was meditation. I was meditating maybe 30 minutes every single day. I was visualizing my goals. I was listening to my intuition. I'd been trained to operate with the physical world, the world that we see, the world that we can touch, but nowhere in my education system was I trained to operate with the inner world. The education system never even touched that. And so as I started building up my career, I asked myself, what do I want to do as an entrepreneurial venture? And I remember Nelson Mandela said, if you want to change the world, change education. And I thought, well, that's a clue. I want to bring meditation to education. And that's how Mindvalley started. My pain, my suffering led to me starting a company that today serves 12 million students in all areas of personal growth. But now it's not just meditation, it's health, wellness, biohacking, sleep, parenting. It's all the things that our regular college system forgets to teach us. And I shared that message, and I wanted to talk about the suffering I went through because when I look back at that right now, I realize that there was a beautiful meaning and pattern in that suffering. It's as if I was meant to go through that suffering to discover what I was really meant to do. And I remember Steve Jobs in 2005 when he gave the Stanford commencement address, he said, You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. And now when I connect the dots looking backwards, I see that there was so much elegance in the suffering I went through because it's led me to the life I have right now, which I feel is really beautiful. It's like the Rumi said, the wound is the place through which the light enters. And if you're watching this and if you're going through suffering right now because maybe you got your— you, you lost your job, Maybe you're sick. Maybe you're worried about COVID Maybe you are fed up about quarantine. Think about where these dots are going to take you. Your suffering is often the breadcrumbs towards discovering who you are truly meant to be.

I love that. And I resonate with it in a big way because I was at a place in my early 20s, like very early 20s, 20, 21, where I was operating from a place of ego and insecurity, which is a very dangerous place operate from. And I was below average, I think, in every area of my life, including from a spiritual perspective, but also from a professional perspective. And that's when I discovered meditation as well. And that's also around the same time that I started reading great books like your first book. Once I just started, once I discovered meditation, I started to meditate. I did about 10 minutes a day for well over a year. You know, I missed a couple of days here and there, but I started to discover myself and I started to, you know, block by block, rip down the pyramid of ego that I had created for myself. And then I started to operate from a place of courage instead of, instead of, uh, insecurity. And so we both have a very similar path in that. And now I'm trying to help other people connect to some of the same books that helped me to make some of those decisions, just like you're trying to connect people to all of the areas of personal development and life optimization and biohacking that helped do it for you. So that's fantastic. And I think The Buddha and the Badass is a great place to start with this conversation specifically because you're trying to merge the best of both worlds. And so my audience is full of a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners, or intrapreneurs within businesses. And so can you talk about why marrying those 2, the spiritual master and the changemaker, is very important?

Well, I think everyone listening would agree that human beings are more than just flesh and bone, right? There's a duality towards us. We're not just flesh and bone, but we are our thoughts, we are the ideas in our head, we are our visions, we are our goals, we are our inner yearnings, we are our desires. In short, we have a soul. C.S. Lewis said, you do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body. Yet if you look at the way we organize our work, it's all based on the body. It's based on hustle, on hard work, on productivity tools. But what if we truly are souls? And what if we can bring this soul into our work? The Buddha and the Badass looks at how to bring the archetype of the Buddha and merge it with the archetype of the badass. The badass is the entrepreneur, the hustler, the person who wants to succeed in their career, change their world. But often the badass believes that the way to do that is by putting in more hours, by hustling, by, by, by, by going through stress, by breaking yourself. What if that was not true? What if there's an inner Buddha, and when you merge the two, that's when your true gifts fully emerge? So the Buddha and the Badass is about reconciling those 2 archetypes. It's about changing the world by embracing your spiritual core. Now, there are people out there who are badasses, they need to activate their Buddha, but there are also people who are Buddhas and they need to activate their badass. When I say people who are Buddhas, what I meant is these are people who love meditation, they love health, they take care of their wellness, but they're not really doing anything to shift the world. They are— I call it kumbaya personal growth. They believe that sitting around in a circle holding hands and screaming, singing kumbaya is going to make the world better. But that's not right either. You need to integrate the badass into that. The world today needs people who are willing to not just focus on their spiritual growth, but to step forward and look at how can they channel that inner ideas, channel that into making the world better for everyone else. This is what the book really explores.

Well, I've noticed in the personal development book space, you know, you, you said the personal development— everybody's sitting around singing Kumbaya. I call them self-help junkies. It's people who read these books and they think that simply by reading these books, they're actually taking action. And so they forget the behavior change piece of it.

Right.

And, uh, I'm a really big fan of that. And some of the qualities that you list are that the expected outcomes you could have when you marry those 2 and merge them. One of the ones that I really love is bending reality. So can you talk about what that means? I've seen you wear some shirts that say bend reality. Like, what does that mean to the average person?

So I believe— so when I talk to great spiritual teachers of whatever tradition, whether it's American traditions or Chinese traditions or Hindu traditions, they say That to these spiritual means, life becomes easy. It's as if you're at the right place at the right time. It's as if even suffering is nothing more than a reorientation of where you are meant to be. When you pursue a goal, things seem to line up. They call it coincidence, they call it synchronicity, but things line up to get you towards that goal. That is bending reality. It's making life easy, as if the world's an illusion. And you can shift that illusion towards the direction you want it to go. Now, I believe that that is a skill that anyone can learn, and the book covers that. It's a key part of the book, but it has to do with integrating your Buddha with your badass, integrating your visions for how you want to shift the world with that inner spiritual core. And when you do that, you move into this state called bending reality. Mm-hmm.

And I've experienced it. So personal question here. What happens when you're in that state and you fall out of that state and you're not really sure why? And I'll give you a little bit more context to the question. I've been, I think, balancing both and falling on both ends of the spectrum back and forth for the last couple of years. Like I'll ride in the middle, but then I'll get too involved in my professional work and I'll forget about the Buddha as an example. So is there a specific quality or checkpoint or way that you can help manage the balance between the two?

Well, you— well, one of the biggest things I think you need to do is to meditate every single day. But the other thing you need to do is to be really clear on your goals. So I put out 2 methodologies into the world which I think are really powerful and they're completely free. The first is called the 6-Phase Meditation. The 6-Phase Meditation is a powerful form of meditation that orients your Buddha and your badass, and it takes you through 6 phases of fine-tuning your mind. The first phase is compassion. The second phase is gratitude, and the third phase is forgiveness. All of these are around inner peace. That's really what this is about. It's about inner peace and your emotions in the present. That's the Buddha. But the second aspect of you is the badass. The badass is looking at the future. The badass wants to shift the world towards a future outcome. Phase 4, 5, and 6 do that. Phase 4 is about visualizing where you want to be 3 years ahead. Phase 5 is about using a thought process to plan your day-to-day perfectly based on that 3-year vision. And Phase 6 is about connecting with a higher power to ask for support on that journey. When you merge these 6 phases together, you have a meditation protocol that's designed to activate the Buddha and the badass. So the 6-Phase Meditation is free. You can Google it. And what started to happen is that a lot of celebrities have come forward to say they do it. Miguel, the R&B star, mentioned in Billboard magazine that he does this before his concerts. The NFL footballer, Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez, mentioned in the New York Times that he does this. So it's just— it's more and more people are now doing it. And so it's a really cool meditation process, and again, it's completely free. Google it and you will find it. Now, I said there's a second procedure. The second procedure is called the 3 Most Important Questions. This is a protocol. It takes only about 13 to 14 minutes to do, but it gets you really clear on the future you want to create for yourself. It's 3 questions you answer. Google that, you'll find information on that. Do that exercise. So that exercise is about badassery. It's about knowing what you want to change about the world and your life to truly be a badass. When you combine that with the 6-phase meditation, you have 2 different techniques that help you bring the Buddha and the badass into your life.

I love it. And so for people that are struggling with what sort of professional value they can bring to the world, which is the second piece of what you were just mentioning, you ask or you, you write a question in the beginning of the book that says, given my values, given what fulfills me, And how I want to grow? What can I uniquely offer to the world? And so why is it important to build your business on your story, which is what you did? And it's what I'm in the process of doing. But it's one of the most popular questions I get in my DMs all the time.

Why is it important to build your business on your story? Well, what, what is it? So when I say so, I wouldn't use the word your story. Rather, I'd say, why is it important to build your business based on your soul print?

Your soul print.

In the book, I put forth an idea, and again, remember, we started out talking about the soul, right? In my book, I put out the idea that every soul chooses the body, your body, for a reason. There's a reason why you were born, and when you identify that reason, I call it a soul print, and when you act on that reason, You start bending reality. Too many people are going through an uphill climb because they are not aligned with why their soul wants— why their soul choose this incarnation. When you can align with that, and there's an exercise I've prescribed in the book in chapter 1 called the Soulprint Exercise, that's when life suddenly becomes easy. That's, that's what this is about.

I think that's very valuable. Yeah. Well, I'm definitely going to think a little bit harder on that one. Another sort of question that I had for you was about that Harvard study that lasted 80 years. And I've been telling everybody about that one. They were looking for the different factors that led to the highest levels of fulfillment for people.

Mm-hmm.

And the one factor that stuck out was strength of social connections. And so oftentimes entrepreneurs, like now that we're in the badass side of this conversation, they try to do it by themselves. And so why does becoming a magnet for other people, bringing other people into your business, communicating that soul print to them, and then kind of leveraging social connection, like why is that important? And why don't we do that, especially in the US with business?

Well, I think if you look at the history of the US, it was based on the idea of rugged individuality.

Mm-hmm.

Right? If you go back 200 years ago, when the pioneers were settling across the United States, it was often them and their family against the elements, against the wind, against drought. And rugged individuality served a purpose in that era. when you might have to ride on a horse for days to meet another human being outside your family. But today, that's not the case. Today, the world is far too complex for us to try to do things on our own. I mean, you look at people like Elon Musk, right, and what he's achieving. But Elon Musk is also achieving what he's achieving because of the team around him. Do you know SpaceX and Tesla are the 2 most desirable companies for engineers to join in Silicon Valley? It's not like Elon Musk is building the rockets himself. He's attracting profound teams around him. The world is simply too complex these days for anyone to truly succeed. I have a team of 350 people right now supporting Mindvalley and all of my dreams. Rocket individuality doesn't work. It's a myth. But when we take it too far and we believe the myth, that can be dangerous. So The sooner we understand that the shortest distance between you and your goals are the people that you're connected to, the sooner you understand that, the faster you're going to move towards your goals. So I'm a big believer in that. I maintain a database of all my connections, all my friends, everyone I'm connected to, and I constantly stay in touch with people. I— whenever I travel, I bring people together. I'm a big believer in the power of effective networking.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I am too. That's amazing. And then let's— I know that we only have a few minutes left, so let's wrap up with a topic that I think you're very passionate about right now, which is vulnerability and having the hard conversations. And in the book, you give a Virginia Woolf quote that says, what I value is the naked contact of a mind. And so, you know, again, in the United States specifically, but I think all over the world, especially with social media where people are just showing their, their best selves, we often forget to be vulnerable and to open up. And by sort of hiding the vulnerability, hiding the bad stuff, or hiding the hard conversations, we can also endanger other people, which is something that you talk about.

Mm-hmm.

And so why is it important to be vulnerable?

Well, I think vulnerability is one of the clearest ways you can, you can connect with someone else because it shows that you have nothing to hide. Do you know how the handshake originated?

No.

Like, the handshake originated, you know, several hundred years ago because it was a way to show that you were not carrying any weapons in your right hand, right? That was vulnerability for that era. Today, vulnerability means being a— being fearless in bearing your soul to someone. And it is a proven way of getting people to connect truly deeply. And as we spoke about earlier, the strength of your human connections will improve your happiness level beyond anything else. A Harvard study we're talking about showed a 0.7 correlation, higher than any other factor. And the second thing is being able— the more connected you are to people in a highly complex world, the better your odds of success.

It's brilliant. And we're missing that in a big way. Yeah, we are. I love to ask guests before they jump off about some of the books that have impacted their life in the biggest way. And so when you think back on anything that you've read, is there something that sticks out that you'd like to recommend to people?

books. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. That's an amazing book. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch and the Silva Mind Control Method by Jose Silva.

Fantastic. And for people that are looking to learn a little bit more about you and your 2 books, where do they go? What should they do?

Well, the best place is to, is to Google Vishen Lakhiani books. I'm sure you'll find it somewhere, but, um, uh, you'll find it on M-I-N-D-B-A-L-L-E-Y. Go check out Mindvalley.

All right. Well, Vishen, thank you so much for joining the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I appreciate your time today.

Thank you, Nicholas.

And that's a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Vishen. As with every valuable book I read, I organize my biggest takeaways with the Book Thinkers Smart Retention mobile app. Once my notes are organized in the system, I can revisit them whenever I want. And with my favorite books like The Buddha and the Badass, I turn on my systematic reminders so that the system can optimize my retention. It's not enough just to read your favorite books and then move on in one ear and out the other. You should intentionally extend your experience with each book using spaced repetition and make sure that you're flexing those neural pathways more often. So to learn more about the app and how it can help you retain and implement more from the books you love, check out www.bookthinkers.com or go subscribe to the app on Android or iOS. If you're already a subscriber, send us a note. Let us know how you like the app. Tell us what you think we could improve. We love all of the feedback that we can get. As always, remember that real learning requires education and behavior change. You can't forget about the behavior change. I'm signing off and I can't wait for you to listen to another episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.