A Lesson from Bob Proctor for Every Entrepreneur Stuck in a Rut

In 2008, Mindvalley was nothing more than a company that built websites. And I was nothing more than a guy who thought small groups of people, meditation, maybe 20 people at a time. And then something happened. This man right here, Bob Proctor, I ended up getting into a conversation with him and he really pissed me off.

He kicked my butt.

And the story behind that conversation is hilarious. What you're about to see is almost a stand up comedy act where I talk about what happened in my encounter with Bob Proctor and how this man and his brilliant mind did me one of the biggest, biggest favors of my life. He kicked my ass and pissed me off so badly that I knew I had to quit my job and think bigger. Watch.

Because in this video not only will you probably get a good laugh, but.

You will gain an insight on whether.

You are doing a project or a.

Goal or a company that is truly worthy of you or whether you're playing too small. This was filmed in San Diego in 2018.

2003, I moved to Silicon Valley. My whole goal was to make it big and in the dot com industry. And I realized how tough it was. Actually I moved there in 2001. The.com bubble burst that year. I was completely broke. I was sleeping on a couch was the only thing I could rent and I was sending out my resume to every company that would potentially hire someone. Now the only job I got was a dialing for dollars job. I had to pick up the phone and sell technology to lawyers like day in and day out. But the economy in San Fran was so bad that there was no base salary. Basically you only got paid if you closed the sale. Now if you're a 25 year old Malaysian kid with an unusual accent and a name like Vishen Lakhiani, calling up lawyers in Texas, interrupting them in the middle of the day and trying to sell them technology. You hear more fuck off kid than you would ever expect in any career. So one day after the ninth lawyer told me to fuck off, I basically went home depressed and I decided to Google for help. So I googled why does life suck so bad? Why are lawyers such dicks? And I'm kidding. I love lawyers. Please don't sue me. And what I found and what I discovered was a meditation class happening. Now that class was actually from a very early meditation program. It was called the Silva Method. Some of you might remember it was big in the 70s and 80s and class was happening in LA. So I flew to LA to attend the class and I was the only student who showed up. It was really interesting. So it was a two day class. The instructor just worked with me in one day and taught me all of these different tools for building up intuition, for creative visualization, for connecting with people, true energy. And then I started applying that to my calls, and something very interesting happened. So now I want to ask you to just open your mind to what I'm about to say next. Okay. So back then, we would go to the San Francisco Public Library, check out the Yellow Pages, and then I would have a territory. My territory was San Antonio, and then Portland, Oregon. And I had to call all the lawyers in San Antonio from A to Z. And you had to go one by one by one and scratch off the names on the yellow pages, hoping that someone will take your call, right? Someone who was very bored and lonely that day. And I decided to try a different technique. So I used what I learned to go into what is the meditative level of mind. Sometimes they call it the alpha level of mind. And I would tap into my intuition, and then I would just run my finger down the yellow pages and I would get an impulse. It would feel like I was guessing on who to call. And what happened was really interesting. My sales doubled instantly. In one week, I doubled my closing rate. And then one month later, I started applying additional tools, this time using connection rituals and seeing the lawyer in my mind's eye before picking up the phone, blessing them, connecting to them the way you guys just connected to each other, and asking that if this is in the best interest of everyone concerned, then let it happen. Right? Just setting that intention. Once again, my sales doubled. A month later, it doubled again. Before I knew it, in four months, I was promoted three times, shipped to New York, and made director of sales of the company. I was 26. And I was 26. Now I was all of a sudden running a team of men and women much older than me because I was able to do so much more because of what I had learned, how to use my mind. Now, after 18 months in that company, I decided to quit because I wanted to do more. So I quit and I became a meditation instructor. And very soon I realized that if you have a fancy job as director of marketing in a dot com and you quit and become a meditation instructor, firstly, you should really check with your wife first, because I was married at that point. And secondly, it's one of the fastest ways to go completely broke. And soon, and soon I had only $7,000 in my bank account. And my wife, she was European. She's here in the audience, but she told Me not to make her stand. And so because we were living in America, she didn't have a green card, she couldn't get a job. So we had to do something. So I started figuring out how I could use my degree in computer engineering to help my meditation business. I built a website. I started selling CDs. I started building autoresponders and fancy web pages. And all of a sudden, I was selling out my classes. Then other instructors came and said, can you help me? Then other organizations came and said, can you help us sell our CDs? And so I thought, okay, there's the potential for a business here. So I need to register a name. So I decided I gotta be fancy about this. It has to look professional. It has to look serious. So I got online and I found two domain names. One was called mindvalley Mind, because the program I was selling was the Silva mind control method. Right? But then I thought, that sounds so cheesy. I found another domain name I really liked. It was called rainbridge consulting.com. fortunately, like, 24 hours later, I decided Rainbridge Consulting sounds really depressing, which is why you are not officially here attending the Rainbridge Consulting reunion, but the mindvalley reunion. So that's how that happened. Now, I want to show you this picture. I want to show you this picture because this is me in 2003. You can see I've just quit my job. I can barely afford pants. And the furniture I'm sitting on, this was furniture we salvaged from the street in New York. New York, very friendly city. If you need furniture, just walk out to the street. People put out. Every year, IKEA comes up with a new line, and then the previous line is left out on the street. So this is the IKEA 2002 collection. I'm serious. You can look that up. This is called the Lack L A C K table. Even the naming of it Lac signifies the lack of abundance. You need to sit on it.

And I'm serious.

It's actually called the lack l a c k. Go Sweden. So that was me, 2003. And then I started teaching meditation. I started teaching meditation. And this was the apartment that the first mindvalley website went off. If you live in New York, you might recognize this. This is the Playwrights tavern. It's on 8 Avenue and 46th Street. And I had this apartment above the Playwrights Tavern. This is in Times Square, not Disney. Times Square, like today. I'm talking about strippers and crack. Times Square of 2003, before Disney took over. Two years before I moved into that apartment. That was my window. It was behind that window that the first Mindvalley website was being built. Two years before I moved into it, it was a Thai massage parlor. Now, if you live in New York, you know what Thai massage parlor is code word for? So, yes, yes, the School for Humanity did stop in a former whorehouse. I love the fact that you guys are excited about that. That's incredible. Okay, so what happens is, for the next five years, I'm teaching meditation. Now I've had to move back to Malaysia, right? Because in America, it's kind of hard to be an immigrant. It's very hard to get a visa, so had to move back to Malaysia. So now we were building up Mindvalley in Malaysia, but we still stayed an American company, even though I couldn't get a visa. And I moved to Malaysia because I registered the company in America. America's been making me pay taxes for the last 15 years. So now we're in Malaysia, and every three months, I'm flying to New York and flying to London to teach meditation classes for small groups of people. Sometimes there'll only be 15 people in a room, but I would fly 24 hours to teach that group of 15 people. And I was proud of that. I loved it. I love seeing my students livestream. There wasn't much money. Imagine flying all the way from Malaysia to New York, teaching a class for a weekend, flying back, and at the end of it, you've made a grand total of $3,000, right? It's not much, but, you know, it gave me a chance to travel, and 3,000 bucks could go far in Malaysia. Now, one day, this was after the Secret had become really big, and Bob Proctor, who was on the Secret, had become a superstar. Someone introduced me to Bob Proctor and told him that I was really good at building websites. So Bob Proctor contracted me to to build his website. So I got to know Bob Proctor. He became an inspiration. And what happened was in 2008, now remember, I'd now been teaching meditation for five years. Not much money. I was further in debt than I would be if I'd never started Mindvalley and just stuck to a regular job. How many of you guys know that struggle, right? As a teacher, as a healer, as a coach. So, 2008, I'm in London, and Bob is finishing a big seminar, and it's lunchtime, and he's having lunch, and he knows. And then he's like, hey, Vishen, come over, let's say. And just say hi. During my lunch break, So I show up and Bob Proctor asks me, he says, so, what brings you here? So I'm really proud of myself. I'm like, well, Bob, I teach this class in meditation. I'm going to have 40 students in a room today. I flew all the way from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, going to be teaching, going to be facilitating the Silver Method class. And Bob Proctor asks me, that's fantastic. How much are you earning from this class? And I go, well, I can tell you, Bob, I'm going to go home with $5,000 profit. From $5,000 now, to me, that was a big deal. $5,000 goes really far in Malaysia. That's like three months salary. And Bob said, are you kidding me? And Bob Proctor's got this really stern face and this really, really like intense voice. It was more like, are you kidding me? Then he does the Bob Proctor scowl. And I'm like, no, seriously, Bob, that's what I'm doing. I teach meditation now. I don't just build websites. I can teach. And Bob says, wait, you're telling me that you left your wife, you left your one year old baby boy to hop on a flight for 22 hours from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to London just so you could touch the lives of 40 people on a weekend and then travel all the way back? I hope you're going business class. Then he looks at me and he goes, you're traveling coach, aren't you? And he does that face again. And then I'm like, yeah, I'm traveling coach. If I travel business class, I would make no money at all. And Bob goes, vision, vision, vision. And now he touches his face. So I knew something is coming. He says, you really think small. I would never do what you're doing. You gotta dream bigger, son. And he looked at me with complete disappointment. And I was pissed off. I'm like, screw you, Mr. I'm the big deal guy in the Secret. With your fancy suits and your awesome voice and your great smell, whatever cologne you're using. I like what I do. I like what I do. But then I went and I did that class. And the next day I woke up depressed. And I realized Bob was right. For five years I'd been doing the same thing. Touching 20 people, 40 people at a time. And I was doing one class every two months, right? And I realized I had to think bigger. Now I went to my Facebook and I changed the quote on my Facebook. Facebook has a category where you put your favorite quote. And that's what I put down. It's a quote from Bob Proctor, the question is not are you worthy enough to reach your goals? The question is, are your goals worthy enough of you? It's now been 10 years, right? I haven't touched it. That is still the quote you will see on Vishen Lakhiani's Facebook. But I put it up and I did something else. I quit. That was the last time I taught a meditation class. I just quit. I gave it up completely, 100%. I never did it again because Bob Proctor was right. I started dreaming bigger and, and bigger and bigger. And every time I would hit one of those big dreams, I would do the next thing. And that's how mindvalley became a company obsessed with touching a billion lives, shifting the course of history. It's why we set a goal to create the best learning technology in the world. It's why we started deciding that we were going to be so much bigger than just me teaching 20 people in a room meditation. We wanted to assemble all the greatest teachers on earth. It's why we decided to invest in technology and build really cool learning applications like Quest. It's why we launched a fest. After I quit teaching that meditation class, it took me two years to do my next seminar. But two years later, that next seminar was a fest which is now one of the hottest tickets in personal growth. We had 250 people and this time it was in Costa Rica. And we had incredible speakers come and share the stage with me. That was how Bob Proctor's kick in the butt shifted my life. We went from working from a run down house to building what won an Award in Inc magazine for one of the top 10 coolest workplaces in the world. And we assembled a team of now some 250people from 46 countries who moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to build everything that Mindvalley develops. It's actually now 47 because we just hired someone from Iraq. All of that because as a teacher, somebody kicked my butt and made me dream bigger. So I went from building this up in a former whorehouse in Times square to an Inc magazine, one of the world's top 10 coolest workplaces in the world. And all of that was in it was between 2003 and 2012. Right? My math is failing me right now. Seven years. And I believe that that's something that all of us should aspire to because the world needs teachers, the world needs people to spread these enlightened ideas, which I hope there's a lesson there for anyone here who's gone through that same struggle I've experienced. If you know what I'm talking about? Raise your hand and make some sounds.

So if you enjoyed that video, there's an important lesson here, and that is the right mentor can change the trajectory of our wealth. And I wish I'd had great mentors throughout my life. I was lucky to bump into Bob Proctor. That was accidental. Over the course of the subsequent decade or so, I started meeting other mentors, people who shifted me, who helped me think about money in a different way. And eventually, that little meditation practice I had grew into a company that's now about to hit 200 million in annual sales and will be going IPO probably within the next four to five years. Now, I don't know at what stage of your business building empire you're at, but I know that no matter what stage you're at, with the right tools and the right lessons, you can get bigger too. And that's why this November, mindvalley is launching for the first time a new type of seminar experience. It's called mindvalley's Financial Freedom Summit, and I brought together some incredible speakers to teach you the following three methods to 10x your income, increase your wealth and step into a more business, abundant, wealthier, and, let's face it, richer future for you and your family. We'll be talking about real estate investing and how to make money through property. You'll be learning concepts of trading and investing in stocks, and you'll be learning how to create businesses that produce passive streams of income, which, incidentally, is how I got started. So if you're interested in learning about this, know that you can attend Live in London November 17th to 19th, or you can tune in on Zoom and experience the entire event from the comfort of your home. All the Information is on mindvalley.com for forward slash wealth. Go check it out because I think you are really, really, really going to love this event.