7 Keys To Transforming Your Company Culture | Vishen Lakhiani

Hi, everyone, and thank you for having me. I had no idea what CEO Network was about, except for a couple of emails I got from Alison. I was talking to Alison backstage, and I was blown away by you guys and the group and the network. I've been a member of various groups for coaches, for authors, because that's what I do. But it never occurred to me to join a Group for CEOs. I'm primarily a CEO, just like you. It's what I spend 80% of my time. The other 10% is being an author. But the was never a group, and I wish I had one, because over the last six years, I've made so many mistakes, so many mistakes I want to kick myself for. And what I want to talk about here is one of the things that I did not suck at, which is basically company culture. And I was excited to hear this morning, as Alison was addressing you, that today was going to be a day where you were going to talk about hiring, retention, engagement, and scaling your teams. So a funny story about culture. Sometime around, say, four years ago, I happened to go to Necker island with a group of entrepreneurs, and there we got to hang out with this dude, Richard Branson. And when you're hanging out with Richard Branson, right, it's toga parties and nip slips. It's weird, it's bizarre, but it's so much fun. And my wife and I managed to corner Branson and ask him a question. The question was this, Richard, you run 300 different companies. How do you do it? If you could summarize it into, say, like, one paragraph, what would you say? Would you like to know what he said? He said this. And this is a direct quote. I'm paraphrasing because I didn't have a notebook that would be too weird if I was writing down what he was saying. So I tried to recall it from memory, and it was roughly this. It's all about finding and hiring people smarter than you, getting them to join your business and giving them good work, then getting out of the way and trusting them. You have to get out of the way so you can focus on the bigger vision. And that really is what this presentation is going to be about. It wasn't inspired by Richard's quote. I was doing some of this stuff before, but it was great to hear Richard reaffirm that. So what we're going to talk about today is how to attract and build teams of committed individuals who will rally around the vision that you've created as a CEO and thus make your Business thrive. But before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about how I became a CEO. So back in 2002, I borrowed 30 grand from my dad. I had just graduated from the University of Michigan and I moved to Silicon Valley with dreams of starting a software company. Now, my timing, in a word, sucked. The dot com bubble had burst. I lost everything. And I soon found myself renting a two seater couch for. From a college student in Berkeley who found a way to optimize his finances by leasing out his least favorite piece of furniture. So basically my bed was this. It was a two seater couch. My legs dangled at the end and that was my life. And I had this computer engineering degree from this great school and I was wondering, how did I get here? So I was sending out my resume to every company on Craigslist, hiring, and finally I got a job. It was a dialing for dollars job. So I had to pick up the phone, call lawyers in Texas and sell them on technology. So here's this kid. Oh, and I forgot to add, I was born in Malaysia, so I had a Malaysian accent, right? It's taken me years to get rid of that. So there's. So I'm this Malaysian kid called Vishen Lakhiani calling up lawyers in Texas, trying to convince them to buy technology. I pick up the phone, I'd go, hi, can I. Sir, can I tell you about this? Fuck you. Hi, I'm busy, go away. And then none of them could pronounce my name. And I found that we'd spent like two minutes just trying to get them to pronounce my name. Is it like vision? So I changed my name to Vincent. So I became Vincent Liciani. I pretended to be Italian and it was miserable. Now the worst thing was because the dot com bubble had burst and there were so many unemployed people. In April 2001, 14,000 pink slips were given out in Silicon Valley. There were so many unemployed people, the company wasn't paying a base salary. If you did not close a sale, you did not get paid. And so there were months when I would earn nothing. So in desperation, I flew to LA to take a meditation class that I read about online. I don't remember how I found it. I think I was googling something such as how to make life suck less. And I found this class on meditation and it promised you all of these amazing benefits. So I took the class, I came back to work and something strange happened. I started developing new skills, new levels of empathy, new levels of connection. It was phenomenal. What was going on. For example, I'm going to ask you guys, have an open mind on this. Back then we would go to the San Francisco Public Library, check out the yellow pages. I would pick my territory, say San Antonio, call every lawyer on the list. After this class I learned about this thing called human intuition. I would no longer call the lawyers from A to Z. I would call, go into a meditative state, run my finger down the yellow pages and listen for an impulse. And the impulse wasn't always right. But I found that overnight I would end up calling the right lawyers. And in one week I double my sales. One month later, I doubled my sales again. Three months later it doubled again. In four months I'd been promoted three times. And as a 26 year old Malaysian kid, I was made director of sales of the company, sent out to New York and and asked to lead the company's office. And I was thinking to myself, wow, this meditation thing, it really works. But I couldn't get one thought out of my head. When I flew to that class in la, I was the only student there. No one else had turned up. That school just didn't know how to market itself. So I stayed with my company for 18 months and I continued using meditation. And I was getting so good at what I do. But this question kept bugging me, why aren't more people doing this? Now remember, this was back in 2003. So I decided to quit my job, this was sometime around 2003, and become a meditation teacher in New York. And I soon realized that if you want to be broke again in New York, become a meditation teacher. So the next thing I had to do was figure out how to build a website, how to get people into my class. And it worked. And I ended up filling out my classes. Then other teachers would approach me and say, hey, can you help sell my CDs? They that worked. I ended up selling moving a lot of meditation CDs. And that is what evolved into Mindvalley. And I kept asking myself, how could I reach more lives and more lives and more lives. And of course, as you want to reach more lives, you got to bring more lives around you. And that's how the company grew. Today, our mission is to touch a billion lives. Our mission is to have the best technology when it comes to transformational learning. We have already developed what is one of the best platforms for transformational learning called Mindvalley Quest. And now we're going into events. And our goal is to develop the greatest events, transformational learning, the one we have right now is called a fest. It's a cross between TED Talks and Burning Man. It's really interesting. And part of my vision is also to always live in bliss. So the office spaces, the places that we create, tend to win awards for beauty and aesthetics and design. I love being surrounded by things that inspire me. Now I feel blessed by what we've been able to pull off with mindvalley and to go from, like, sleeping on that couch to now working in an office like that. But the fact is, none of this would be possible without the 240 people that make up the Mindvalley team. Roughly 140 are employees who work from our head office in Kuala Lumpur, and then the rest are employees who work in Estonia, which is where we have a second office. In Costa Rica, we have an experiment where we employ single moms and they do our customer support while staying at home taking care of their kids. We have 20 moms in Costa Rica, and they won an award. Best customer support in the world. Sorry, top 10 customer support in the world. It's amazing what moms can do. So we have this group scattered around Costa Rica, Estonia and Malaysia, and then freelancers around the world. They number 240 people. And what I want to share is seven keys. Just seven keys that got me from that couch to leading a company like that and being able to take all my crazy visions and dreams as you probably want to do as well, and get it out there and touch as many people as possible. Now, these ideas are going to work whether you are building a team or if you are, they're going to work in your communities. They can work in schools, they can work in companies, they can work for small businesses. It applies if you have a larger company, a small team, if you're solo and want to make your first hire, or if you're building any sort of tribe, including tribes of coaches, tribes of for your mastermind, and so on. Are you guys excited to hear them? So the first thing I need to teach you is a simple word that we use in our company. It's a word I coined in my book. It's called brule. Now, a brule is a bullshit rule that we adopt to simplify our understanding of the world. Our world is surrounded by rules that we follow. Human beings are. Are socially wired creatures. We live in what is called the culturescape. It's a mesh of different ideas, rules, beliefs, rituals that come from everything from the MBA programs we go to, to the countries we are born, to our religions, to what our parents told us. Some of These rules are great, but many of these rules become outdated. But we don't realize they are outdated, so we blindly follow them. Certain things which I consider brules, and we'll go deeper as we go through this long conversation, are perks. The idea of employees themselves, I believe, is a brule culture. There are many brules about company culture, what is acceptable behavior in the workplace. And we're going to be questioning some of these. And I want to give you certain tools that might help you create companies based on a new evolution of where work and entrepreneurship is going. Before we get there, I want to tell you how I ended up in the United States and going back to Malaysia, which is where mindvalley is based right now. See, kind of a nightmare led to this dream. So after I started Mindvalley in New York as a meditation Instructor, it was 2003, and that's what my office looked like. I was just starting out, so my wife and I lived in a little apartment somewhere near Times Square. That chair, that table, we actually salvaged it from the street. Wonderful thing about New York, people discard used furniture all the time. You don't even have to go to Ikea. You just walk a couple of blocks, you'll see furniture. I could barely afford pants. I don't know what the hell I was wearing back then. And the funny thing is, that's the apartment where we started mindvalley. It's on top of the the Playwright's Tavern in Times Square. And two years before, I moved into the department to start this spiritual meditation company, it was actually a Thai massage parlor. And if you live in New York, you know what Thai massage parlor is code word for. So, yes, yes, one of the world's biggest personal growth and spirituality companies actually did start in the former whorehouse. That's the exact window where we started. Now, what happened is that in 2003, I showed up in JFK. I'd just come back from Christmas in Estonia, my wife is from Estonia. Showed up in jfk and the guy behind the counter said, sir, come with me. And he took me to a back room. And I found out that I'd been added to a watch list called Special Registration. It was a watch list for Muslim people. And what this meant is that I could no longer use certain airports in America. And before boarding any flight or getting off a flight, I had to go for a two hour interview. And not only that, but even living In America, every 30 days, I had to report to the government, wait in a long line into the government administration building. In lower Manhattan and go there to be fingerprinted, to be photographed, and to give them my credit card so they could check all my purchases, you know, in case I bought fertilizer or something. I had bad memories of that period. I remember waiting in that line and there'd be all sorts of other, you know, suspicious looking brown people in a row. And I'd lived in America for nine years. I'd started a company. I was American educated. I wanted my kids born in America. And I'd come to those that, that the immigration guy. And they were always super nice and super friendly and they almost always felt guilty about what they were doing as well. I tried to be as American as I could. I turned my baseball cap backwards and go, yo, this is whack, dude. And it didn't work. I was on that list for almost six months. And I loved America. But at that point I realized I could not stay here. Now, the funny thing is, I'm not even a Muslim because, you see, you can't really segregate people based on religious ideas. I actually grew up in a Hindu family. I'm baptized, my wife is Christian. I just happen to be brown and unshaven. But that's the funny thing about such watch lists. So I moved back to Malaysia and I decided to take my company with me. Now I was on that list. It was called the NCRS program. Obama killed it in 2008, ruling it unconstitutional. I don't blame anyone for putting me in the program. Thank you. I don't blame any politician or anyone for putting me in the program. After all, September 11 had happened in the past, in the years before that, and it was a different world. So that was what caused me to go back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and start my life. And by the way, this program is the same program that Trump wants to bring back. But fortunately, due to protests and stuff, it was shot down. So I'm relieved that my wife and I have halted our plans to move back to the US until we know for sure we're not going to be on a parole list again. So in Kuala Lumpur, I had to restart my business. And immediately I faced two big problems. First, all our clients, all our partners, all our customers were US based. Secondly, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was the country I was trying to leave. That's where I was born. See the problem in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, back then, it's no longer the case. But back then, there was a brain drain. 1% of the population was leaving every year to seek better opportunities in places like Canada or the US or Hong Kong. And it was the smartest 1%. So when I went back, my friends were telling me, why didn't you come back? You should have just stuck with that parole thing, just built your company over there. But to me, it was a matter of principle. And so I was there in Malaysia. There was not that much talent there at that time. It got lonely. And so I went online and I ordered a labradoodle. I named him Ozzy because I had him shipped over from Australia. And I made Ozzy my first employee. That was a screenshot of our website from 2004. I made Ozzy the director of public relations. That actually got us some press in Wired magazine. So it was that lonely. It was just me and Ozzy. And he didn't speak much. He could barely type. He wasn't very useful. So soon I realized I needed real employees. Now, one thing that always motivated me, a lot of people were saying, get out of the country. There's nothing you can do here. But I always remember and love this quote from Buckminster. Bucky said, you never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes that existing model obsolete. So I decided, okay. Everyone is saying this country sucks. Everyone is saying, I cannot build a Silicon Valley company here. I want to see if I can prove them wrong. So what I'm going to do is set a vision to build the world's greatest workplace by 2020. I'm going to do it in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And I'm going to do it and show the world that the greatest place to work as a private company may no longer need to be in London or Silicon Valley or New York or Sydney, but can be in a developing country. And so, starting in 2005, that became my mission. And I set out to create the company that would be mindvalley. Very rapidly, things started coming together. It's funny how when you set a goal, synchronicities start emerging. Have you guys experienced that? That move you towards it? Offices started developing. The right opportunities came in, the right connections. We built offices that ended up winning an award for having the best office design in Kuala Lumpur. We started attracting talent from all around the world. Even though we couldn't get talent in Malaysia, what happened is we became such an attractive place to work that people from all around the world would apply to move to Malaysia and work for mindvalley. In fact, we got so many resumes, we had to stop receiving resumes. We had to say, look, if you want to get a job at this company, you have to create a video cover letter. So if you get on YouTube right now, you type in mindvalley video cover letter, you'll see thousands of COVID letters from people all around the world hoping to leave their countries, including the United States, UK, places in Europe to move to Malaysia, even though the salary there is one third of what you'd earn over here and work for mindvalley. And over the next couple of years, we proved the naysayers wrong. We proved the idea of brain drain wrong rather than brain drain. We were draining brains from other countries and bringing them into Malaysia. And we got this incredible team all rallied around a shared vision. One month ago, my HR director informed me that we hit a new record in our office in Kuala Lumpur. We now have 140 people. But here's the crazy thing. They hold collectively 46 different nationalities on their passports. And it's because we're no longer limited by the talent in one area. We've become a company that people dream of working for. And so we can get talent globally. And all the crazy ideas I have, I can now execute them really fast. Now, the other funny thing about this story is when I started Mindvalley because I was a broke meditation instructor, all I could do was start it with about $700. Every investor I approached turned me down. There was no way to get any loans from the bank because nobody understood what meditation combined with the Internet would create. So the banks turned me down, the investors turned me down. So I had to find another way to scale this. And with no other options, I figured if I just build a great company culture and attract the greatest minds, get the right people on the bus, we'll go in the right direction. And from $700, with no funding, with no VCs today, we have hit 100 million in valuation plus plus. Thank you. So I share that only to prove that what I did was nothing exceptional. And if I can do it in Malaysia, you guys can certainly do it here in San Diego. So what I first want to share are some of the myths, okay? Myths that maybe might hold you back if any of you here are sitting in the audience going, sounds good. I don't know if I can do that. This is our team right now. Amazing group of people, 46 different countries. This is just a team in one office. But that's our team in 2005, trying to look all professional and shit. I don't know why we are posing with books. I think it made us look educated because some of us didn't have college degrees. We were like, yeah, I read that is the. We have our own auditorium in our office where we have meetings and trainings. And that's what the auditorium looks like today. It's called the hall of Awesomeness. It's where new employees come and take what is called an oath of awesomeness as they join the team. But that's what that auditorium looked like in 2008. You can see there's a plant behind me with seven leaves. Today, our offices have different themes. That is our steampunk office. It's stunningly beautiful. But that's what our office looked like in 2005. Used furniture. We didn't even have nails to hang up the pictures. That's why they are just randomly sitting on a desk. That's our Christmas card from maybe four years ago. Beautiful Christmas card at a Christmas party in the office that we sent to our clients. This was my Christmas card in 2003. That's Ozzy the Labradoodle and Kitty the cat. That was my cat from New York that I had shipped over to Malaysia. Kitty has still not forgiven me for that picture. That's the diner where our employees eat today. But that's the diner. Back then, we didn't even have a coffee machine. We couldn't afford that. So we had these Nescafe 3 in 1 coffee packs. I'm not even sure if that's real coffee, but it kept us awake. So what I want to share are seven keys to attracting amazing talent and building powerful culture. And remember, we started when we were there. That was when we started this. That was when the dream came in. That is when we said we were going to build one of the greatest places to work. You have to start somewhere. But don't let your present circumstances tell you that you cannot do this. In fact, the more dumpy your present circumstances, the bigger a fire under your ass. You're going to have to ensure that you set a goal to get you to that next level. So I'm going to share these seven keys and I'm going to go really fast. So you want to take these down and I hope you have a notebook. But look, there's going to be so many ideas here. If you don't capture everything, it's absolutely okay. If you come away with three or four ideas that you can execute immediately into your business, you're already going to see some results. Now, the first step is to create attraction. How do you get people into your company? Well, here's the first thing that people do wrong. This is the typical job Ad. I went on Craigslist last night and I pulled up the first job ad in San Diego. It says, medical assistant, plastic surgery. Then it goes on to list knowledge, skills and abilities required. That sucks. And the reason it sucks is this. Simon Sinjac said, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. You see, job ads should not list skills primarily first. It should first talk about the business you have and appeal to the why. Why do you have this business? Now, I want to show you how we write our job ad. And there's a lesson here. Start with the why. All of you know why you started your company. And I hope you didn't just start your company because you thought, well, you know, I need to make some money. Let me figure out what I can do so I can buy that car. I doubt there's anyone here like that. Almost all of you started this company because you, you wanted to build a product or get a service out to help people to change the world. That's what you want to put in the first paragraph of your job at. So I want to show you our job website so you can replicate this model. It starts like this. It starts with saying, shape the future of humanity by working on the future of education. That is the why. And then it asks you, it asks the prospective viewer to identify a number of steps. The first step is this. It asks them, does our mission excite you? It has a quote by Mandela and it talks about our mission. That's the first thing. We want to make sure that the mission resonates with people, because you want people who want your mission. They're going to be the best, most loyal employees you have. Now, the second thing we do is something called the manifesto technique. We then write down our beliefs. Now, when I started this tactic in 2005 to attract talent, that's what our website looked like. So you can see it's a very simple site. But there's Something there called 10 Reasons to Join Mindvalley. So even if you have a basic website, it's easy to go home today and write down maybe 5 or 7 or 10 reasons why someone might join your company. Now, today our website looks a little bit more sophisticated, but I want to show you what we say in our manifesto. Now, a manifesto starts with the line, we believe work is a dirty four letter word. What we want instead is to give people careers that get them excited to jump out of bed every morning and allow them to do meaningful work, to shift the nature of humanity. And then we list things that we primarily believe in. The first line in the manifesto is, we are not an American nor Malaysian company, but an Earth company. And we talk about our value of world centrism. Thank you. The second thing is we innovate. And I wish the American government believed that as well, because we still have to pay American taxes. The third thing is we innovate rapidly to stay on the leading edge of exponential change. This is one of our values. We state it in the manifesto. We write about how we believe happiness, the single most powerful tool for productivity. We write about how we believe in standing up for what we believe in, that our company will take certain choices for certain causes as activists. And we go on and on and on. We have about 10 different items. Now think about what would you write in your manifesto? What would be the manifesto for your company? And this becomes one of the most powerful tools you can use to attract talent. The manifesto technique. So your job ad, your job website actually should stay your why, and then write down what you believe and then list the positions. And then for each position, you can list the qualifications and the skills. You make that change. You see the number of applicants coming to you, soaring. They go up massively. It's amazing how many people care more about why a company does what it does than the actual description of the job. Now, remember when we started that, that is what our office looked like, but this is how we were able to get such great talent to help us scale. Now, another idea here, which is really important when it comes to writing that job ad, is seek the underlying emotion. What do people really want in a job? Well, it turns out that if you're speaking to millennials, you're speaking to people under 35 and many people over 35. I've interviewed 2,000 people, and I found that there are four things that people want. People want to grow. In other words, they want a job that will help them become better versions of themselves. They want happiness. They want co workers that they love hanging out with. They want a boss whom they can actually joke around with. They want to do productive work, but to be happy doing it. You don't have to be serious to get great work done. Third, they want meaning they want to feel that their work contributes to something that's pushing the human race forward. And fourth, they want abundance. Abundance simply means they're, after all, in this job so that they're earning a certain amount of money so that they can have the apartment they've always wanted, travel to the places they've always wanted, have beautiful vacations. Everybody Desires that. But most people focus primarily on number four. So job ads simply talk about salary. This is what you're going to get. That doesn't give you an edge because you're forgetting the first three items. Now, what I do when I'm interviewing someone is I take out my iPad and. And I draw this diagram. Happiness, abundance, growth. Meaning, and I say, pretend you have 10 chips. Where would you put your 10 chips? Now, every company offers something different. If you're Wall street, you can probably pay people really, really, really well. You're high in abundance, meaning not so much. You're probably fucking up the economy. Happiness, maybe, right? Growth, maybe, maybe not. If you're working for an ngo, abundance probably not very high. Happiness, yes. Growth, yes. Meaning way high. So you see, different companies have different patterns, and this is where this matrix becomes so important. When I'm interviewing someone and I ask them where they're going to put their 10 chips, I immediately know if they're going to be a fit for the company, if they're going to stay. If they say abundance is number one, I honestly tell them, look, you're not going to get that. This is not. This is not. We're not a large corporation, we're not a bank. But if they say growth is their number one thing or happiness is their number one thing, we know they're going to be a fit, because those are things that our company has an edge for. So you identify what your matrix would look like. Where would you stand for each of these levels? And as you interview people, you seek that match. And when you can get that match, you now know that the candidate and the job are going to be aligned. Right? And now these four things are what you put in your manifesto. In your manifesto, you don't blatantly write, we create a happy workplace. No, you write about your philosophy of happiness as a form of productivity or how your employees are friends with each other. But by writing that, you instantly appeal to the people who resonate with that. And this makes your company more attractive. So you write the manifesto. And your manifesto must fulfill these four things, especially the things that your company has an edge in. Make sense? Okay, so that was idea number one. I have six more to go. How many of you can see how that would be useful to you right now? Fantastic. Now let's go on to step two. Now, when people come to you, how would you actually know if they're going to be a right fit? Fit. So Zig Ziglar had this really famous story. Zig was doing a management consulting Once. And he went to a company and he brought all their managers together and he said, I want you to tell me all the attributes of your best employees. And he started writing down a list of attributes. Now, I want to do this test with you right now. I want people to shout out, think about your best employees. Tell me the attributes of these best employees. Anyone? Okay, guys, not all at once. We'll go one by one. Let's start with around that side of the room. Loyalty. What else? Integrity. What else? Reliability. Speed. Compassion. Trust. Efficiency. Honesty. Commitment. Passion. Creativity. Say that again. Self. Starter. Personable. Motivated. Motivated. Okay, so that's 13. Now, Zig pushed the managers to keep shouting out attributes, and in the end, they hit 107. He said, no, we need to press on. We're going to go on for another hour. The managers were like, oh, God. But they kept doing it. They hit 114. And then zig went to each and he added an A for attitude or an S for skill. Now, what he found was that 107 were attitudes exactly like what you guys said, 7 were skills. Now, his main point was this. If we're saying that our best employees are responsible, are trustworthy, are productive, are compassionate, why is it that when we're interviewing or putting up a job ad, all we write about are the skills? And his main message was hire for attitude first and trained for skills. This was one of the most important lessons I learned. When I hired for skills but didn't check for attitude, I would get skillful assholes and they would disrupt the entire company culture. Now, we occasionally get really wonderful people who are incompetent, but we can still train them. And really wonderful people learn fast. As long as you're screening for the ability to learn, for intelligence, for commitment, for hard working. So we always hire for attitude first. Now you want to seek the best people you can find. So that's the first aspect of that. Now, the second rule to that is to know your bar of awesomeness. Every company has a bar that represents the awesomeness of the team, including you. Now, here's the tricky part, right? You want to always hire above the bar. Laszlo Bok, Google's hiring chief, said, Google has an incredibly high bar for talent and never compromises. If you think about the bar like that, every person you interview, you must do a gut check. Are they below the bar? Are they going to lower the bar of awesomeness for my company, or are they going to raise the bar? And it's so tempting that when you're busy or going through A high season, you bring in someone who's going to lower the bar. But here's the problem. B players hire C players, C players hire D players. But if you're above the bar and you get A players, A players are pickier. A players only hire A players. That comes from Jim Collins. So you got to be very careful about this bar. So often, even when we're going through really stressful moments and my team is overworked and we have applicants coming in, we never, ever, ever hire below the bar. And so the bar is always rising because you're always hiring people above that bar. And every year that bar gets higher. But guess what? Your team gets better, your company gets better, your brand gets better. And so you start attracting more people. And this is the recipe for really creating a great culture. So you always want to ask yourself this question, will this person raise the overall bar of awesomeness within my company? Now, at a certain point, you might end up getting a lot of resumes. This is when you start asking for video cover letters. In fact, even if you're getting a few resumes, you still might want to do this. It's very normal right now, especially for millennials, to just go to YouTube, record a video cover letter. So we ask people to submit a video cover letter simply saying three reasons why they want to join mindvalley. Three reasons why they are awesome. And some people do that. It's simply webcam. Three reasons. Some people who really want to join the company, what happens is they create mini commercials. I'm going to show you one. And we get like hundreds of these. It's incredible. I'm Tanya Lopez and this is my video submission for the world's most awesome job. Where are you shooting from? I can see it in your camera.

I think that this position is a great fit for me for so many different reasons. One of them being.

That was one. We hired Tanja. Tanja started our festival, a fest. She's been with us now for five years. Brilliant woman. This is another one from a Polish filmmaker who wanted to join our team. She spent 300 man hours creating a pencil drawn animated film about why she wanted to be part of mindvalley. So through these video cover letters, you find people who are directly passionate about your mission who want to join your company. Now, when you bring them in, do you think they're going to have the right attitude? This becomes part of their life. Your vision becomes their vision. So the video cover letter and the time they put into it becomes a self screening mechanism. So when we put Up a job ad, we find that we end up getting say 2000 resumes. But we ask for a video cover letter. We make it compulsory for certain teams such as the customer support team. From 2000 we go down to around 20, so it's about 100 to 1 ratio. But from that 20 I save time and I end up getting incredible people. Here's an example, right? This is my customer support team in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Unique thing about this team. Now this is just a team that does customer support. It's the entry level team at Mindvalley. Unique thing about this team. And they all came in through the video cover letter. Fifteen people, 15 different countries. And this was by accident. But here's the other cool thing. That team won best in Asia on Nice reply. They won an award for being the best best customer support team in Asia based on customer ratings of their agent effectiveness. 79% of people who get an email from my team rate that agent five stars. So you can see the video cover letter is bringing in incredible talent. Incredible talent are serving your customers in an incredible way. That simple nuance going from resume where everybody bullshits to video cover letter where you can actually see and genuinely feel what people are like. Gauge the ability to communicate. See their commitment to your company. Change us a ton. Now step three, this is really interesting. Establish a common code of values. So in our company we have a three part code. The first value is unity, which is world centrism, seeing the world as one. The second is transformation that we are in this company to also become the greatest versions of ourselves. And the third value is envisioning, which is a word I coined because I like the sound of it, which is about constantly thinking of new models to push our role and our business division further. And then what we do with these values because they are so hardwired, these values firstly help us bring in the right people. And then we actually take these values, we turn them into comic art. We hire artists to create art that represents this value. That's one of transformation. The other is of envisioning. We even break down these values, create more art, stick it on our office wall. And the reason we do this is because our values help us speed up decision making. One of our code says turn customers into raving fans. And so when we're having a meeting and we're debating whether we should launch a particular product and it's not quite ready and we know we want to get it out there because we need to meet a financial deadline, but we know it's going to Maybe turn off some customers. What does our code tell us to do? Turn customers into raving fans? Nope, we're going to hold on this product. Now, it doesn't mean that you need that particular code, but what it means is that when you establish this code, your team can operate better. And when you know the code, you know who to hire. Now, the funny thing is, as a CEO, how do you find your values? The values should always start with the founder and the CEO. And if you're both, even better. Now, here's a simple tip I learned. I was always wondering, how do I find my values? And I met a guy who kind of pioneered the system. And what he actually explained to me is that your values often come from your past pain that you want no one else to suffer. Tom Bilyeu of Quest Nutrition has built a billion dollar company based on healthy eating. You know why? Because he came from a family in California that was clinically obese. He had fathers and siblings who weighed 300 pounds. And he felt that the food industry in America was corrupt. So he decided to take on the food industry. His pain was something he wanted other people in the future to no longer suffer. Why is my value Unity? Because I was put on a damn watch list. And I don't want other people being identified and put on list because of their ethnicity or color. That's why Unity is Mindvalley's dominating value. And you can see how that value shapes the company. We have 140 employees from 46 different nationalities, perhaps making us one of the most diverse workplaces in the world, because Unity guides what we do. That Unity is a deciding factor that says, okay, we're not just going to hire locally. We're going to hire any talented person from anywhere in the world. So what you want to figure out is what are your values? And sometimes you got to go back to your past, identify your pain, and see what is it that you want to ensure that future generations no longer suffer. Now, the beautiful thing about this exercise is for many people, it ends up being healing. They start to see meaning in their pain. It may be an abuse, it may be something terrible, but you start seeing how the pain that you experience can be a gift so that you can go forth and bring a healing to the world. And it's a beautiful side effect of this exercise. So let's summarize the first three ideas. Right, you create attraction by creating job ads that appeal to the heart. You find the right fit, hire for attitude and seek the best. Third, you establish a code. You define Your values and. And lived by them. And now we go on to the next phase. How am I doing so far? You guys getting good stuff. So actually, every single idea here could be a chapter in a book. And in fact, there is a book coming out on this and every single idea is a chapter. So I'm basically taking you through an entire book in 75 minutes. So I know I'm going fast. I know some of you guys are going, God, will he just take a breath and pass out or something so I can write stuff down. But my philosophy is this, right? I want to give a lot of information because I believe information overload, sometimes when it's explained in an elegant way, actually gives each person over here at least a few items personalized to them that they know they can act on. So as you go through all of these ideas, there's going to be maybe 20 ideas over here. Feel free to discard 2/3 of them. Pick the one third that would be unique and applicable to your business. Cool. So we're going to continue going fast now. We're going to move from attraction to culture. And now we go on to step four. So you remember this diagram which you use on your iPad when you're hiring someone and you ask them where to put the chips? Well, it turns out the next four really come from this diagram. So we're going to start with happiness. Happiness is not one of the other items that is so important when you're establishing a company culture. So you've learned the attraction part. Now let's go to how do we make the people we've just attracted? How do we make them more productive? How do we make them generate more revenue? How do we make them stay? How do we make them people that we so love working with that our life becomes a joy? That's what the next four are going to be about. And we'll start with happiness. Now, the funny thing about happiness is science is discovering that happiness is a cause for productivity. And so Shawn Acher wrote this incredible book called the Happiness Advantage. Here are a couple of quotes from his book. Right. Optimistic salespeople outsell pessimists by 56%. Studied by Harvard students prime to be happy outperform their neutral peers. Doctors make diagnoses 19% faster when they are happy. But the question remains, how do you hack happiness? What is the number one thing that makes you happy? Well, it turns out it's social connections. So another study from Harvard by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman found they studied all of these different variables to see what made people happy. Was it warm clothes? Was it being healthy? Turned out only one thing, and it had a 0.7 correlation with happiness. And it's the strength of your social connections. And this was a big awakening for me. So we asked ourselves what would happen if our company would not just provide work to people, but also provide people a social life. So we started ensuring that events, parties, trips were all key. And we actually decided that we were going to break the taboo that you shouldn't be friends at work, that you shouldn't have relationships at work. We wanted people to see their workmates as part of their family. We even turn the blind eye to dating in the office. So right now, one in three people in my office are dating someone else in the office. It's kind of awkward, but it's perfectly okay. These are some of the authors we publish. We have toga parties with our customers. They are our biggest customers. We insist they dress up and party with us in exotic locations. And we take our people on team retreats, sometimes renting out an entire plane and flying everyone to an exotic island. By the way, in that photo, the people who are the ones not smiling are the ones who don't work for us. In Good to great, Jim Collins said, the people we interviewed from Good to Great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with. That was a big revelation. And the second thing is, Gallup did a study on friends at work, and it found that if you have a best friend at work, get this, you are seven times more engaged in your job. So we talked about rules, right? Somehow in the last 20 years, Brules started breaking down. We used to believe that you shouldn't have friends at work. You should keep your work life and your personal life separate. We believe you shouldn't date someone from work. You should keep that separate. All of those are bullshit rules we found. Say that again. Well, not all the rules. There are certain things you don't want to break, right? You don't want to, like, violate your fire code. It was the book from what?

From the Gallup organization.

Yes, it was the book from Gallup. First Break all the rules. Yes, that's a good point. Gallup's book was also called first break all the rules. Now, here are a couple of ways we do it. Other than just organizing parties and social events and having a budget for socials, we form positive contagions. Shawn Acher found that when leaders are in a positive mood, their employees are more likely to be in a positive mood. Themselves in such positivity, smiles, optimism, they are contagious. They spread just like yawning. Now you can engineer that. One of the things we do because we have people from so many different cultures, is that every two weeks we celebrate a different culture. We give the people in the team from that culture a budget and they organize a culture day and they're allowed to bring their food, bring their flag, have little games. After 5pm they can even serve liquor. And that's Estonia Culture Day. That's Malaysia Culture Day. That's India Culture Day, where the people from India on our team brought saris and had everybody dress up in sarees. Everyone had such an incredible time. Latin Culture Day, American Culture Day, and so on. And these culture days help create that social network within the company, this social cohesion. And the beautiful thing about this is it puts people in these positive states. Yes, it does interrupt work. On an average culture day, if a working day is nine hours, maybe only seven hours of actual work gets done. Two hours, you could say, are wasted on culture days. Except it's not wasted. Those two hours, even though they go to employee connection and bonding and fun, they add back to higher retention rates, better engagement, employees loving their job more and telling people about their company. And that's why we do it. So what Shawn Acha found. Sorry, what Sigal Basad from Yale found is that when you put people in these positive states from culture days, this positivity, it stays with them. And when people go into a meeting with this positivity, group performance goes up, group conflict goes down. It creates more cooperation and greater performance for the team at hand. Now, maybe you don't have people from many different cultures. You can still celebrate the 4th of July we. Or you can make up your own culture day. We once, I don't know what we were smoking, but we came up with Tash and Heels Day. And so every guy came to the office with a full grown mustache. Every woman just wore high heels. And that's what it looked like, just random rubbish. Tash and heels. Now there's another strategy you can do, and that is about infusing love into your workplace. This was a. A culture hack that mindvalley started that has now been picked up by thousands of companies worldwide. And we call it Love Week. And this is what happens. We observed that during Valentine's week, people who were single would sometimes start feeling depressed. So we thought, well, how about we simply pair up everyone in the office so everybody has a secret Valentine. So everyone would draw names out of a hat and they had to, over the course of that day, give a little token of appreciation or a gift, but in secret. And they could rope in other co workers to make that happen. That day was so successful, my team begged me to extend it into a week. So we made it into a week. That week was so successful, people would come to me with tears in their eyes going, this was the greatest week of my life. I wish my boyfriend did this for me. It was amazing. Now I want to show you. And then we put up the code of how we did this, and a thousand companies started emulating it, from small businesses to larger companies to government institutions. Now check out this short two minute video that kind of shows you what's going on behind the scenes. This was part of the video that we put out to help companies understand how they could replicate. So here at Mindvalley five years ago, we decided to try an experiment called Love Week, where for one week, love becomes part of everyone's job description. Employees are secretly paired up with other employees, and for one whole week, they have to be a secret angel. For one week, they lavish, they are human with appreciation, pamper them with gifts, fill their working days with love, all secretly. This is what happens on Love Week. So I think a lot of people derive happiness by seeing other people happy. And I think my favorite part about this week was seeing people discover their presence and their experiences and gifts from their angels and having that translate to their work. And. And it also affected me and my team because witnessing it really just makes us feel much better about what we do and being in an environment that's so loving and giving. It seems like for most of the world, you want to focus on receiving. How can I get more things? However, in Love Week, something special goes on where actually the greatest joy that I've gotten and also the greatest joy that I know other people get is actually not in the getting, but it's in the thinking about how to give in. And so what, what that last guy Yongho said was the most significant, what we found about Love Week was that the people who were the givers would get the most benefits. It's as if people wanted an excuse to be kind, to be generous. It really helped reaffirm your faith in the human race. It was remarkable. And Love Week created beautiful connections between people. And remember, according to Gallup, when you have a best friend at work, you are seven times more engaged in your job. And so we do Love Week. You kind of know the code right now. It's super simple. But we do love Week, every week during Valentine's Day week. And if you are on our newsletter, we send out the instructions on how to bring this into your company. It's beautiful to see. Remember, anything you can do to create friendships at work, contribute to engagement and productivity, and do not take away from it. Now, the other idea in this aspect of happiness is something which I firmly believe more entrepreneurs should do. I believe that one of the bad rules in the culturescape is that when you start making money as a CEO and entrepreneur, you go out there and you buy a fancy car for yourself and that's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you buy that car because you justify it to yourself that that Lamborghini or that Ferrari or that Mercedes that is going to make you look better with your clients and your partners and give you more confidence. Well, I thought about that when I was starting out this company and I made my first big cash in the bank. But I thought, what if I took that money instead and put it in my workplace? So I started putting that money in the workplace instead of and building up a really beautiful workplace. Now, here's what happened. Firstly, I was still driving a lousy Nissan March. But what happened is that that money that went into the workplace gave me the satisfaction and the significance that I as a CEO would have gotten if I had a fancy car anyway. And it even had a better effect on the partners and the people I thought a fancy car would help me impress because they could now come to our office and go, wow. They this is crazy. This guy must really know his stuff. But the best of all, it rewarded my employees. It didn't just reward me. It didn't just allow me to prove significance to my clientele, but it showed my employees that I was willing to invest in them. And I'm shocked at how many companies create dumpy environments for their employees under the idea of saving money. That shouldn't be the case. All workplaces should look like this. And it's not expensive. My advice to many CEOs is you do not need a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. That's bullshit advertising. Take that money and spend it on your office space so that your entire team can be rewarded and your business will take off like crazy. So summary, social support, positive contagions infuse love in the workplace and invest in your environment that's under happiness. Now, we're gonna go on very quickly to growth. And I'm gonna speed up a little bit over here because I have 22 minutes and one second left. Okay, so growth. So that's a group of employees. They took a photo of themselves doing yoga. It's really funny when you take up yoga. You need to take photos of yourself. So when I was first starting out, I loved this quote by Eisenhower. It said, leadership is getting other people to do things you want done because they want to do it. That was a quote I loved when I was a student council president when I was in college in Michigan. But now when I think about that in this day and age, that quote seems off. I mean, that's the kind of quote that would also allow a president to march a million men into war through coercion and persuasion. And so we decided to write our own definition for leadership in Mindvalley. And after thinking about it, this is what we came up with. Leadership is recognizing that we are all one. That every person you lead is as brilliant as you, as talented as you, and has the same capacity for growth and accomplishment. They simply need to be reminded of this fact. And so every. Thank you. Every leader in Mindvalley is a leader because they help the people they lead become the grandest, greatest, most spectacular versions of themselves. Now, there are many ways you can do this, but one of the ways we use is a methodology that I created called the three most Important Questions. And it's based on the idea that most people, when they come out of college, and in fact, most people in life confuse two different things. They confuse a means goal, and they confuse an end goal. So they think they want that car. They think they want that next salary raise. But the problem with these goals is these are means goals. There's always a soul after them. I want that salary raise so I and my wife could have that apartment, so we could live in this beautiful environment so we can wake up happy every day. Well, the end goal is actually wake up in a beautiful environment, happy every day. So we would teach people how to go straight to their end goals. And we would. And we identified that there are three different types of end goals. The first end goal is all about experiences. Experiences such as, I want to someday be a mom and have the experience of holding my baby in my arms. I want the experience of waking up next to a man or woman I truly love. I want the experience of being able to travel to 50 countries before I die. I want the experience of. Of having. Being physically fit and being able to compete in a marathon. This is the first column. There's nothing about money. There's nothing about title. There's nothing about position, because all of those are means goals. Money is nothing More than a cultural understanding to help you get something you want, we go straight for that thing that you want. Now, having a beautiful car and driving it can fit this list because you have an experience of being in a beautiful, well sculpted machine. But you got to make sure that you want that car for that, not that you want that car to prove something to yourself, such as, I made it. Because then you go straight for that experience. I want to feel confident and accomplished. And the universe might bless you with another way more practical to feel confident and accomplished. You see how this works? So that's the first pillar. So we bring all our employees together in induction, all our new employees, and we have them write down their experiences. Then we ask them this. Now, write down all the ways you want to grow to be the man or woman who could have those experiences. Great. You want to backpack across South America. How you want to grow is you want to learn Spanish. Great. You want to have that beautiful luxury apartment. Well, you got to rise up in your career. You need to read this book and this book and this book. Then we ask them to make a third column. And that third column is the magical one. After you've had all these experiences, after you've had all of this growth, after you've become that man and woman, how will you now give back to the world? Because, you see, the Dalai Lama said, you want to make someone happy, you want to be happy, make someone else happy. And this is where our employees write down how they want to contribute to humanity. It may be volunteer work, it may be true. The work they do within our company, it may be true writing a blog that inspires people, but they come up with a list of their contribution. See, each connects to each other. And it looks something like this. Now, this is from one of our employees, Jason Campbell from Canada. And something really beautiful happens when our employees start making this list. Crazy coincidences happen. Jason wrote down how he wanted to build a team of employees, manage them, do epic shit, become a world class speaker, teach entrepreneurship, sales, and living. Awesome. He happened to be at a conference doing backstage management, right? He was managing the lights and the sound, and one of the speakers fell sick. And he had prepared this speech, and it was my event, and he begged me. His admission just put me on stage. I have this prepared speech. Just let me talk. And I'm like, jason, I don't know. You've never done this before. But he begged me and I put him on stage and he won best speaker. This lady, Luminita Sobiak from Romania, wrote all These things about how she wanted to be a talented author, she wanted to inspire people, she wanted to be a talented photographer. Well, while working at Mindvalley, she wrote a blog post called 15 Things to Give up to be happy. I bet you half the people in this room read that post because it became the single most viral personal growth post in the history of Facebook. And she got a book deal, 15 things you should give up to be happy from Penguin Books. She went back to Romania and she's now a published author. She's made the front page of the Romanian newspapers. This guy from Sudan joined us at 22 on his three most important questions. He wrote down that he wanted to someday speak at mit. He wanted to share the stage with global leaders. He was a 22 year old kid from Sudan. What the hell did he know? Well, at 24, he had a blog called the Sudanese Thinker. And he started writing about the democratic movements in the Middle east and how they were going to overthrow dictatorships and fundamentalist Islamic. And he wrote a book, My how fundamentalism stole my soul and doubt freed my mind. That book made it to Foreign Policy Magazine 201325 must read books of the year. He made it to a list with US Presidents, former CIA members and American politicians. And Amir Ahmad Nasser today has spoken at Ivy League universities, spoken with world leaders at the Oslo Freedom Summit, and is a recognized speaker. Like he just spoke at Google's headquarters in New York. He's only 29 now. Everybody takes their three most important questions and they stick it on a giant wall. And this is where it gets really interesting. Each employee can see each other's three most important questions. You see each question, each list is a blueprint into someone's soul. You understand people at a deep level. As a CEO, I keep everybody's three most important questions on my iPhone. If I end up going for lunch with someone, I know what their operating system is, I know who they aspire to be, and I know what I can do to help them. Employees can go onto this list and collaborate on visions. This group of four employees all had written down they wanted to hike in the Himalayas. One of them decided to go scan the board, see who else had Himalayas or Nepal on the list. They got together. They did a shared trip. Bill Jensen, author of Hacking Work, said it's not just about getting employees engaged with a company's vision anymore. Future work will be about being engaged in an employee's vision. I want you to think about that for a second. That's powerful stuff, but that's where Bill Jensen predicts work is going to go. Now, I love, because I love this practice so much, I created a program on it completely free that we put on mindvalley Quest app so that you guys can run it on yourself or bring it to your companies. It's called Extraordinary by Design. And I'm going to give it to you free. Just download mindvalley Quest from the App Store or the Android Store and then click on Discover. You will see Extraordinary by Design over there and you can go through the entire course. And we break down right under experiences, growth, contribution. They are subcategories. We break it down so you can go through this entire deep dive on thinking about your life in a really powerful way. And if you like the exercise, you're free to bring it into your company. There's no licensing, there's nothing you need to pay us. We just want to get this out to more people because we think work needs to help individuals develop into the greatest version of themselves. Thanks. Thank you. So let's quickly summarize. Under growth, there's experiences, growth, contribution. You have people put that in their three most important questions. And now we go on to meaning. Okay, and so we've covered five points. We have the sixth point now, and the sixth point is meaning. Human beings are goal driven organisms. And there's something mysterious about the human mind when it's given a goal. It's as if we are motivated, we're inspired, we live more to attain this goal. You see, when Branson shared his quote with me, there was something I didn't share with you. I didn't share the last line. I was saving it for this moment in the presentation. That last line was this after he said, you have to get out of the way so you can focus on the bigger vision. That's important. He said, and here's the main thing. You must make them see their work as a mission. Now, Gallup verified this in a study on men who retire late in their lives at 80. 86% kept working because they found it fun. But 93% kept working because they found it meaningful. See, the problem with most people is that their problems aren't big enough. The problem with most people is they're worried about that little bit of fat they have to lose or that guy who didn't text them back. But what if you could give your employees bigger problems? Problems to solve in the world, how to get a particular better type of software out, how to change some aspect of education, how to change America's obsession with unhealthy food. There are so many problems waiting for us to solve. It's so exciting. What if you can give your employees big problems? What problems are you solving with your company? If you can position this right, you create incredibly motivated employees. Elon Musk is a champion of this. In surveys of employees in Silicon Valley, when they're asked about meaning, SpaceX and Tesla are the number one and number two companies that people say give them the greatest sense of meaning. But think about SpaceX. I mean, really, it's a trucking company to get objects up to suborbit. But when Elon talks about it, it's colonizing Mars. Now. That's correct. But you see, he's speaking about his future vision. When I talk about Mindvalley and I talk about touching a billion lives, of course I haven't done it yet. I'm talking about the future vision. The mistake most CEOs make is they talk about what they're going to do in the next three years. Imagine if Elon said, in the next three years we're going to figure out how to shoot a rocket up to space to deliver parts to the International Space Station. It's cool, but There are like 20 other companies doing it. But he doesn't. He talks about his vision 10 years into the future, and he's obsessed by that. And that's what makes him such a powerful leader. He's able to take meaning and gift it to his employees. Now you may be wondering, well, that sounds tough. How do I be an inspiring leader? I want to share with you another simple idea. And this comes from Sri Kumar Rao, who's an MBA professor and a mindvalley author from Columbia University. Sri Kumar Rao says, don't try to be inspiring. You want to be inspiring. Instead, be inspired. Now, what he meant by that is that find the cause, find a mission. Find something that inspires you and make that part of your company. Now, let's say your company manufactures T shirts. Right? Now, it's not colonizing Mars, but as a company, you could get aligned with a cause that would be inspiring. Here's an example. You guys might remember this story. It was a story of a guy who ran a simple dry cleaning business. And during the recession of 2008, he put up that sign. If you're unemployed and need an outfit clean for an interview, we will clean it for free. People fell in love with him. He was written up all over the press, probably a billion impressions. Because of that simple sign. He was inspired to do something about people who were homeless or out of work during the 2008 recession. That simple act of being inspired changed the course of his life and his business. What can you be inspired about now when you have that? And maybe your business already is doing such a great job to its employees? Well, think about mission reminders. So we maintain a blog called Mindvalley Love. And on that blog, we share stories that we get from customers all around the world who write to us about how our programs and our products change their lives. We have photographs of postcards that we get, gifts that we get. But here's the thing. That blog is not for the public. That blog is for our employees. Do you have a reservoir, a blog where you share all the positive things your customers are saying? And how do you remind your employees about that? Every time we have a weekly meeting, we share notes of thanks from our customers to our team because we are continuously reaffirming that sense of meaning. And this is why it's so important to do that. So the first rule of meaning is be inspired. The second rule is establishment mission reminders. Now, with that, we finish point six. So your hands, which I know are so tired by now, are finally going to get a break. But first, I want to go on to the final point. Abundance. So abundance. Let's talk about this. Now, the funny thing is, abundance is actually a means goal. It's not an end goal. We really want abundance so we can afford something else. Now, you cannot compete on salary alone. So instead, give employees what they seek from abundance, and that is significance. So abundance, I thought it was a thing. It isn't a thing. What you really want to do is give people significance. Why we want money, why we want that bigger house, is after our basic needs are met. It's really so we can feel that we play an important role in the world. We can feel significant. And you want to go straight for that. Because if you can give significance to your employees, they want to stay with you. Now, the question is how? Well, the first rule is frequent appreciation. Richard Branson said, like flowers flourish on water, people flourish on praise. You got to praise frequently, and there was an incredible study on this that is going to blow your mind. It's called the two minute appreciation. So basically, this is what happened. Shawn Achor found that if you could establish this rule in your company, where for the first two minutes before anybody starts work, they open up their email, they set 2 minutes countdown on their timer, they put down their phone, and then they spend two minutes and no more than two minutes writing a note of appreciation to another employee who did something good the previous day, he found that everything in your company changes. Now, don't take it from me. I'm going to play a little video of me interviewing Sean and him explaining this idea to you.

Happiness may be a choice, but it requires some effort on our part. And I think it requires effort both at the individual level, but also I think for those of us that own companies, those of us that lead other people, I think that we have not just a moral obligation, but a business obligation to make sure that the people on our team are in a positive state. I think at the individual level, one of the things we found huge success with is we started having individuals each day. The managers oftentimes would lead this, but what we'd have people do at Facebook, we had people do a nationwide insurance in the US we had them every morning when they got into work. The very first task they had to do for 21 days in a row was to write a single two minute positive email praising or thanking one person that they know. Simple two minute positive email. So it could be something as simple as thank you so much for helping me with my work yesterday, or it could be something meaningful like, you're the reason why I come into work each day, you're my best friend here. Or it could be, you know, thank you so much for covering for me when I had so much work going on the other day. But in each one of those moments, what that person is doing is they're actually becoming. They're providing praise to somebody else. And if they do it for three days in a row, they get addicted to it. They think how amazing they are for writing that email each morning. But the real value. And people start writing emails back about how grateful that they are to that person. But the real value is 21 days later, if we come back in and test the group that does it, if somebody did it for 21 days in a row, it turns out that their social connection score is in the top quartile of social connection. So a simple two minute habit each day moved them exactly where people wanted them to be within these studies, which leads to not only levels of happiness, but promotion, productive energy, sales, all the things every business outcome we know how to test for. So we did this in Nationwide Insurance. We were working with the president of Nationwide Brokerage Solutions, Gary Baker, who said he was a numbers guy. And he said, you know, I thought happiness research was fluff, you know, until we showed him the numbers and what we've been doing at these organizations. So he allowed us to do this intervention with this team. We did a couple interventions, but they think that this was the most powerful one. Over the next 18 months, they had a 50% rise in their revenue, which is crazy. 237% increase. That's the incredible part. 237% increase in their application rates. Google flew out to see what they were doing. Their pharmaceutical company client came out to see how they're running their call centers. They started taking people off of their phones each day for 10 minutes so that they could actually have an opportunity to praise one another.

Isn't that incredible? Nationwide Insurance did this 50% rise in their revenue. They went from around 650 million a year to 950 million a year. Google flew down to see what they were doing. 237% increase in people applying to join Nationwide Insurance. All from this two minute appreciation exercise. Now think about what this can do for your company. Sometimes we over we make simple stuff, overly complicated. Two minutes, iPhone, timer, email. Try it out at your business. I would love to know the results. Write to me, let me know what happens. Now here's how you now take that to the next level, right? So you have your three most important questions for your employees. What we do is a practice called unexpected gifts. And guys, this is the single most powerful single idea here. So I know your arm is tired, but write this down, even if it's like the last thing you ever write. So you have the three most important questions. You can look at this for your employees. They've all stuck it on a wall. Now what you do is this, right? I go through the three most important questions and I look for little things I can help people with. Maybe someone said they want to be a public speaker. Great. I go to Amazon and I buy a book, how to speak like Ted. And then I write down a message in the book. Greg, I notice that you someday dream of being a public speaker. This is my favorite book on speaking. I would love for you to have it as a gift with hugs vision. And I give it to Greg. What did that cost me? 20 bucks and maybe about five minutes of writing something down. But to Greg, it just changed his life. Because someone bothered to understand what he truly aspires to be and hand him a personalized gift. And I observe that every employee I did this with, their relationship with me would change. They would become incredibly loyal. They would love the company, they would sing praises about me and the company. This simple idea permanently changed the dynamic between me and every employee. Even when we were in a heated Situation where they'd done something wrong, and I'm speaking to them sternly. They don't freak out because they know I care about them. They know it's the job, it's the task at hand. It's not them. You see, the biggest problem we have in our companies is when you try to be strict or stern as a CEO, people get defensive because they think it's them. They don't separate their individuality from the task at hand. But if they know that you care about them, you can be stern, you can have a strict protocol, but people don't get hurt because they know that you care. And that's how this particular idea changed my CEO in my management style completely. But there's something else interesting about it. Gallup did a study that showed of 10 million employees, and it showed that people who answer yes to this question, my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person. They were more productive, they contributed more to profits, and they were more likely to stay with the company. So this is something I would love to see you guys do. Do the three most important questions. I've given you a whole course on how to do it on Mindvalley Quest. Apply and then buy the secret gifts. If you have hundreds of employees, send out your personal assistant to go and get the books. But you read the list. The important thing is you must authentically read each list. And it only takes you about five minutes. And then figure out what simple book or gift can I buy. It's magic. Now, the final idea before we wrap up is how do you change your all hands meeting? So we have an all hands meeting, and it used to be called the all hands meeting, which is boring. So we changed the name to the awesomeness report, which is way cooler. And we have it in our auditorium, but again, it didn't always look like that. Now, there are a couple of things about this meeting which is very important. Everything that I showed you, we bring into our all hands meeting. We bring in the happiness. We bring in the joy. The first thing we do is we celebrate victories. So one of the things we do is every employee shares their KPI, right? And if they've hit a high score, there's a bell mounted on the wall and they get to go ring the bell. And it's called the Bell of Awesomeness. That is only to be rung in moments of true and utter awesomeness. And you cannot just refer to it as the bell. That's sacrilegious. It's called the Bell of Awesomeness. That is only to be rung in moments of true and utter awesomeness. And the average employee may only ring the bell, like, once during their entire tenure, but it's such a glorious moment for them. It's like winning a marathon. And that's the reason why it establishes this beautiful sense of significance within them. Second thing we do is gratitude. We show slide after slide after slide acknowledging people for what they've done. Great work, new projects, new releases of our code. Then we share customer love. And we not just share customer customer love about our products, but customers writing appreciation for our customer agents. Those faces over there are our customer agents and what customers said about their work. So now we make our agents feel good. See, Paul Marsden, the evolutionary psychologist, said there's this thing called mimetics and social contagion. When people don't know how to behave, they look at their peers for guidance and unconsciously imitate their peers. Now, when you have an all hands meeting where you're bringing up your best performers, having them ring a bell, showing appreciation, all the new hires, they get to see what it's like to be a star. And so you have now tweaked their brain in terms of what behaviors they need to imitate. That's why it's so powerful. Plus, it's fun. And you're establishing gratitude in everything else. Now, the second thing we do over there is we envision the future. As a CEO, every two weeks or so, when I do this all hands meeting, I simply talk about the vision and the vision and the vision. And they say that you should speak about your vision so much that your employees go, oh, God, he's talking about the vision again. If your employees are not going, oh, God, he's talking about the vision again. You're not talking about your vision enough. That's what you want to do. So finally, awesomeness reports create happiness through celebration. They create growth through trainings, because you can train on any topic. Opportunities to reinforce meaning and a feeling of significance by being recognized and celebrated. And so, significance again. Appreciation, unexpected gifts, and the rethinking of the all hands meeting. And now let's summarize the seven points. Right. Create attraction. Find the right fit. Create a common code. Establish happiness. Establish growth. Establish meaning. Establish significance. Our job and our goal is to create the world's. Oh, you want. You really want that? Okay, fine. Okay, guys. Whoops. There we go again. I'm just teasing you. Get your cameras ready. So our goal is to create the world's greatest workplace by 2020. We still have a long way to go. We have two and a half years left, so we'll see what happens. But the reason we do it is because 70% of our waking hours are spent at work. And why shouldn't that, why shouldn't work be the happiest, most joyous, most beautiful times of our lives? But the other reason is that the impact on employees is amazing. When you do this, you create a ripple effect of goodness and growth in the world. Our employees, they make it to local television shows. They end up starting massive networking groups in the city, they make it to the newspapers. Many of our employees have become famous in their own right or taken the stage. There was one particular month when 18. Back then we had about 90 employees. And 18 out of 90 employees were speaking on a TEDx talk, or had a book offer, or were on television or had been written about in the magazine. And the reason for that is because when you can create superstars in your work and make it not just about your ego, your entire company, which should be a team effort, starts rising to the top. And that's all I wanted to share with you guys today. Thank you. Thank you guys. And thank you, Alison, for having me.

He's incredible. That was so great. I was like taking notes backstage.

Sorry, I went a little bit over time.

Oh no, it was great. It was wonderful. You guys didn't mind that he went a little over, did you? Wasn't it fantastic?

I'm just curious to know who had the most Pages of notes. 10 pages. Omo, anyone? 10 pages. Fantastic. 12. Do I get a 12? A 12, a 12, a 12? 12. 12. 12, 12, 10, 12. That's fantastic. Anyone higher than 12? Awesome.

Well, it was so content rich. And really what's so fantastic is that you're sharing from your experience. Experience. And that's what I love. I love when people are sharing from their experience what you're actually doing. You're walking the talk. It's not something that you're just teaching. You've seen this and you've done it and lived it. So I mean, from starting out with $700 to what you've created now is so much about the vision that's carried you forward. And you know, I. What I know is that for very successful entrepreneurs, what I find is that they have such a big mission and they're so connected to that. But I feel that entrepreneurs oftentimes think way too small. And so this is kind of a two part question. What do you feel is the best way for someone to break through that Small thinking and think much bigger. Bigger and understanding that they have the capacity to change the world.

Well, I think it's three things. The first is to remember this simple hack when it comes to goal setting, right? And I think it was Bill Gates who said it, but it's been attributed to different people over the years. And one is that we always overestimate what we can do in one year, but we underestimate what we can do in three years. And so you always want to think three years ahead. So all our business planning, all my personal goal setting is always three years ahead. It's never one year. And know that you're naturally going to underestimate. So when I write down my goals for three years, I then think, well, what happens if I could double this? And then I double that? So that's one. Now the second thing is do the three most important questions exercise. Because when you do the three most important questions exercise, you make sure those goals are goals that really speak to your heart. The worst thing you can do is set a goal that's taking you actually in the complete wrong direction. And I've done that while I was running Mindvalley, I once set a goal to start a small startup and take an ipo. And that happened. And it was the worst job of my life. And I quit after six months because it just didn't make me happy. And so if I had done the three most important questions exercise and I hadn't created it back then, I would have known why I wanted that ipo. And it had nothing to do with what truly made me happy. So you want to make sure you do the three most important questions exercise. Now, the third thing is you want to make sure that you have a strong sense of your personal mission. What is that pain that you experienced in the past that you do not want other human beings to experience now? If you can take that mission and tie it to your goal, you will always want to go big, because that pain will drive you forward. I'm so glad I got on that damn watch list, because unity is such a big goal of mine. I want to unite a billion people and change the way the world works and get rid of racism and ethnocentrism in global politics. And that goal is so massive, it seems near insurmountable, especially with current world events like Brexit, that it pushes me forward. I cannot help but want to dream big to make sure that my pain other people don't experience it. Those three things would be my advice to help you think beyond Anything you've thought of before.

So a couple things that I gleaned from that one is I can feel your passion there. You know what I mean? Like you can tell that comes from a deep core inside, and so it's tapping into that. And then the other thing too is you took something that was a painful experience and you turned it into something really positive. You know, it's interesting how life works that way. So you, and with the work you do with mindvalley and your other projects, you're so innovative, you're always on the cusp of innovation. What are some practices that you do or with your teams for brainstorming for new ideas to move your company forward?

Well, I don't know if we have any practices that we do with the team for new ideas, but what I found is that meditation is an incredible source for generating ideas. See, a lot of people think that inspiration just, boom, hits you at random. It isn't. And intuition also doesn't just hit you at random. Often they are spurred by having a goal. So if you have a goal, and especially if I believe, if that goal is a goal that serves greater humanity and not just yourself, I believe the universe or nature or whatever you want to call it will guide you with inspiration. And then you got to be a good receiver. That's where meditation or relaxation techniques come in. So you need two things. You need a goal that's serving the world, and second, you need a practice that makes you a good receiver. Which would be mindfulness meditation or even just. Just soaking in the shower and being in a really relaxed state. I find that. Sorry, soaking in the bath. I find that those relaxed states are when the best ideas come to me.

Right? Because your mind is open, right? Not when you're just kind of working away. And so you know, with thinking big and when you really put yourself out there, you expose yourself to criticism, right? And people that have different points of view. And I do think that a lot of times just in human nature, when people are afraid of being criticized, that is something that keeps them small. And we know from social media there's all the haters out there and things like that. So how do you personally deal with that?

So in my book, chapter nine is called Be Unfuck withable. And I love that word. I love that word. I even have a T shirt that says Unfuck withable. And unfuck withable basically means that, right? It means that you have enough self love and belief in yourself that you are immune to other people's praise. And Other people's criticism. And of course, criticism is the obvious one, Right? But why should you be immune to praise? Well, the thing is, if you're not immune to praise, you start doing things for praise. So if someone says, hey, you're awesome, you could go, thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. But deep inside you're going, I know. Because that way you don't do things for praise. You do things for yourself. You do things because they matter to you. Now, there is a path to becoming unfuck with able. Unfortunately, it's not an easy path. In my book, I advocate a number of different practices, right? From establishing high degrees of self love to doing certain forms of therapy to help you get rid of inner guilt, to self forgiveness rituals so you can forgive yourself for mistakes in the past. But when you can put these together, the forgiveness, getting rid of guilt, and loving yourself better, you start developing that unfuckwithable core within you. And that changes everything. So be unfuckwithable.

Okay. I love it.

Right? Sorry. And I know it may be bad nanas to walk around with unfuckwithable. I mean, they're kids with eyes walking around.

Yeah, I think that's the best advice you got all day long, isn't it?

Put it on your panties, on your underwear. But know that you're wearing your un fuck withable panties and that you're gonna be immune.

That's.

In fact, I should start selling those. That would be my.

No, here.

See? New business idea, guys.

Right from here, we will all buy them. So you probably just answered this question through meditation. But how do you use visualization to create your desired reality? You've talked about that before. But is there a process you go through or do you just see it in your mind?

Yes, it's interesting you said that. So remember when I told you about how I was teaching meditation in New York? Well, the style I was teaching was called the Silva Method. Anyone heard of it? It's the Silva Method. Yeah. It's a meditation technique that originated, believe it or not, I kid you not. But in Texas, the founder, Jose Silva, was born in Laredo, Texas, and it grew in San Antonio and Laredo. Now, the thing about the Silver Method is this is the technique they teach. So go into a relaxed state, and then it's called the three scenes technique. And technically, I think I'm not supposed to share it because it's in the book. But the founder died in 1999, so he can't sue me. So right in front of you, you imagine you Have a giant television screen, right? And on that television screen, you project the current reality. So let's say your company's at a quarter million and you're losing money. And you need to be at half a million to make money. So you project the current reality. You see it. You feel the pain. You see yourself losing money. You think about what might happen next. You might be losing employees. You feel that pain, but you don't do it for more than two minutes. Now, you take that screen and you move it 15 degrees to the left. You see, in your subconscious mind, 15 degrees and left means future. So you're telling your subconscious mind this is the near future. That's why it's only 15 degrees. And again, your eyes are closed. You're in your meditative state. Now, you project onto the screen something you're doing to change that. It doesn't matter if you don't know the right action. You're going to show yourself maybe making a good hire, maybe reading some books on marketing, maybe changing some strategy, maybe bringing some of my ideas into your office. You see yourself doing something. Now you move the screen again 15 degrees to the left. And now you see the end result. And that end result is, boom, you've made 500,000. You feel the pride. You bring the feelings into yourself. You try to see the champagne bottles popping, you getting unfuck withable panties printed for your entire staff. You see all of that. And then you end the meditation on that happy note. And you don't have to do this every single day. You know that analogy of the car, the child at the back of the car going, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? You don't want to be that annoying little bitch to the universe. Can I get that now? Can I get that now? You just do it once. You forget about it. You do it at least once a week.

That is so great. Don't be the bitch to the universe.

Sorry. Yeah. Am I going too far?

No, no, this is just great. I mean, you know, I said it a little bit more eloquently, but you're to the point, and I just think that that's better. So thank you for that.

I meant to say brat, not bitch.

It came out wrong. That's all right. That's all right. All right. So you. I mean, we were talking backstage. You are. You're living in, like, three different countries. You've got two beautiful children, young children, and you have a very demanding career that you love. But I always want to know, how is it that you keep the balance so that you have a lot of people counting on you, your family, your employees. And you have this big vision. What do you do to make sure that vision is taken care of and so that you can sustain all this that you want to do?

Well, I wish I could say I was consistent, but I wasn't. And three months ago, I had a horrible breakdown. I was launching Mindvalleys University in Barcelona. We were understaffed. The project took off and I forgot to keep that balance. And I realized how important it was. In one month, my entire health broke down. I developed sciatica. I could barely walk straight. I developed back problems. My eyesight started going off. I had to wear my glasses again. I developed a headache. All of a sudden I started getting low self esteem. It's like everything was hitting me at once. And I realized how dangerous stress was. So I went to neurofeedback training and they mapped my brain and they found that I was actually showing signs of burnout. And that was a sign that I had to do something about it. So unfortunately, I still had to finish the project. And it was painful. In the midst of it, I developed bronchitis that lasted four weeks. I was admitted to hospital and I really messed up. And so what happened was one week ago, I decided to just take a week off from work. And I went for five days of meditation. I went for energy healing. I went to a spa in Tucson and I just got myself back on track. And I feel so good after that. And I wish I hadn't let myself go. But, you know, if any of you experience that, know that we do our best work when we're in a state of flow, when we are happy. And you got to be really conscious of that. I know I'm never letting that happen to me again because the impact on my body was so devastating.

You know, thank you for sharing that and being so honest because, you know, I've had that happen to me at least a couple of times. And it sneaks up on you. You know, you don't even realize it. You can get so into a project that you're doing. We're so passionate about what we're doing and we're so into it that, you know, like I said, I just now started drinking more water. And I've been trying to do that forever. But I believe that it is something you have to be conscious of all of the time. So. Yeah, so that you learn the hard way. Right.

And you know, when I was at this meditation practice and this was really, just a week ago, it was in Seattle. The trainer asked me to come. They taught us this technique, which I'd love to share, because I think it really helped me. And it was to just create, like, three or four statements to remind you of the state you want to be. See, a lot of us set goals for our life, but we don't set goals for how we want to feel on a consistent basis. So the idea here was to think about what feelings do I want to have on a consistent basis and make that a goal. And so I wrote down, I want to consistently feel blissfully present. I want to consistently ignite joy and love in people. I want to consistently be in flow. I want to consistently feel that I'm uniting humanity by setting those as goals. Those feelings that you want to have become the goals. The mistake, again, we sometimes make is that we say, I want to have a massage. I want to make sure I'm having a massage every week. I want to make sure I'm meditating. But why are you doing that? What's the so? The so is because you want to have that feeling, so you set a goal for the feeling you want to have. And reminding myself every day to be blissfully present is reminding myself to take mind off work and be present in what I'm doing, whether it's with my kid or it's while I'm taking a walk, so I can be in a balanced state again. And I hope that idea works for you guys too.

Well, I love it, and I think ending on bliss is really an awesome thing. So this was so fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for having me, guys.