Vishen Lakhiani shares three lessons with his children: question inherited identities and think globally, make personal growth your main priority over money, and build a career around helping humanity rather than following generational labels.
Chapters
My generation have really fucked things up for you. If I were to die tomorrow knowing everything I've learned in life thus far, building up mindvalley, putting a quarter million people a year through our transformational programs, what would be the most important thing for me to say to you? Hayden, my 11 year old and to Eve, my 5 year old. I don't want you to follow a lot of the rules from my current generation and, and I want you to question everything. But as you question everything, I want you to embrace the idea of unity. Stop seeing yourself, Hayden Eve, as citizens of Malaysia or Estonia. See yourself as a citizen of the world. Don't you dare take on my religion because I took that from my family and I never questioned it. And I want you to question. We've celebrated Christmas together. I've spoken to you about Jesus and about other religious figures I believed in. But you don't have to buy that. Create your own religion. If you want to embrace bits from all the global religion, marry someone from a different culture or a different tradition. See yourself as belonging to the entire planet and not to that tiny bit of humanity that I belong to or that your mother belonged to. That would be number one. Number two would be make personal growth your number one thing. Your success is not about your career. It's not about your money. It's not about the car you drive or your damn bank balance. Your success is about are you growing and becoming a better human being every single day. I was blessed because I had a father who from the age of 14 introduced me to personal growth. He enrolled me in martial arts class. He introduced me to books by Jose Silva and Wayne Dyer and Bob Proctor when I was 14. And I hope that you fall in love with personal growth. Hayden Eve, make sure that whatever you do, you dedicate yourself to growing in all dimensions of being human and not just the two things that our education system is going to tell you is important. Career and money. Life is so much more. Life is about love, it's about discovery, it's about spirituality, it's about consciousness. It's about health and wellness. It's about having healthy self esteem, it's about confidence, it's about doing good in the world. Study personal growth because that's the only form of learning and education that's going to matter in the future. Grow first and everything else will grow with you. And the third thing is as you embrace the world, as you study personal growth, don't get obsessed with finding your career. Don't ask yourself do I want to be a doctor? Or an engineer or do I want to be an entrepreneur? All of those are more bullshit labels from my generation. Instead ask yourself this what do I want to do to better the world for other human beings? And you may decide that you want to clean the air or you may decide that you want to reform education and then figure out how to do that and create your own career identity or create your own company or create your own product. But make sure that when you die, as I will and all of us will, that you've contributed in some way to making humanity better off and not just making yourself better off, richer or more successful, whatever that bullshit term means. I hope this Father's Day message means something and those would be the three ideas that I would want to see you guys take on. I'm proud of you guys and who you're becoming and I can't wait to see where you're going to go from.
