"Are Your Goals Worthy Enough Of You?" (Part 2) | Vishen Lakhiani

So let's talk about the power of vision. Why do we want to dream big? Why do we want a vision? Anybody know that man? Elon Musk, Right? So I was in a, I was part of a group, I was once on the board of the XPRIZE foundation. And we got to go to SpaceX and visit Elon Musk. You recognize many a Festus in that picture, like Jim Kwik, myself and so on. And so we got to actually sit down with Musk, visit SpaceX, ask him a couple of questions, and it is amazing how big this guy thinks. Now this is what I noticed about Musk, right? He said when we asked him, so what's the grand vision here for SpaceX? Now think about this. SpaceX is nothing more than a vertical trucking company. Horizontal trucks move Goods this way, SpaceX moves goods this way. No big deal. Vertical trucking, it's basically taking parts to the International Space station. There are 19 other companies, at least that do the same thing. But in a survey of employees in Silicon Valley, the number one place for engineers to work is SpaceX. Why? Because Elon Musk doesn't talk about it like it's a trucking company. He talks about it 10 years in the future. I remember that day right here, meeting Musk. This was around five years ago. And when he described what he was doing, he described it like this, right? He described how all his companies connected from SpaceX to Tesla to SolarCity. And he spoke about this, he said, look at SpaceX, we're looking to back up the human race. Because think about it, when you have important things on your hard drive, you back up your hard drive. The human species is important, but a single asteroid could wipe us out. In fact, by the way, get this, there's a 1 in 30,000 chance we will be wiped out in our lifetime. 1 in 30,000 isn't big, but that chance still exists. And what Elon said he wants to do is within 10 years colonize Mars. He has no idea how to get there, but it doesn't matter, he said on that day. And there was no press or journalist there. So he was very raw and open. He said, look, I don't know how I'm going to get there. And I'm aiming And I think 10 years is about right. But I'm known to be over optimistic on these targets. And so when he speaks about the vision, about the role he's playing in the world, he's not a guy who runs a vertical trucking company. That's for the other 19 space companies to describe themselves. No, he's saving the human race. And that's the first key idea about vision. And I noticed this when I spoke to many great minds in Silicon Valley. They would not describe what their companies do now. They always think 10 years ahead and speak as if it's happening now. When I started speaking about mindvalley in the same way, we started growing, we started being able to attract great talent. So that's the first thing I want you to write down. Think about where you could be in 10 years. You don't have to know how to get there. Elon Musk hasn't solved all the problems to get to Mars. But when he talks about why he's here, when he talks about that vision, vision, he's talking 10 years ahead. It's the same with Peter Diamandis, right? Peter Diamandis a few years ago launched a company to mine asteroids. He has no idea how to mine asteroids. But when he speaks about how he's launched Planetary Resources to mine asteroids, people get so excited. He got mentioned on the Daily Show. Job applications flood in. Now I was listening to this guy, Naveen Jain, he's the founder of another big Silicon Valley company. Right? Right. Viome. And I was in a mastermind recently and Naveen had a really interesting quote that I want to read out to you because it explains how many of these big minds are literally applying envisioning to build their businesses. And that the envisioning concept is more important than talent or venture capital or ideas or execution. It starts with envisioning. Everything else flows from there. This is the quote from Naveen Jain. When you do something audacious, it actually becomes easier because you get the best people to join you. The problem you are solving is worth solving. You have the magnets now and you get the money because the investors call and then you tell them you don't need the money now like a bull, they charge, so sell the benefit to humanity. Notice that's what Elon was doing. Cult leaders say loyalty lies with me. Entrepreneurs say loyalty lies with the cause. Take a snapshot of that if that resonates with you. What Naveen was saying was essentially when you dream big, your problems become small. Because when you dream big, when you talk about your vision as if it's 10 years ahead, it almost becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The investors want to start talking to you. Talent wants to work with you. Because smart people don't want to waste their lives on jobs. They want to make an impact. And what happens is you actually start fueling Your company with so much more excitement. This is why the number one company to work for, for engineers in Silicon Valley is not Google, it is SpaceX. Because how cool is it to say that you're working on colonizing Mars? So bold missions are actually the ultimate business advantage. But so many of us play small. So many of us think that we have to be realistic, that in our business plans we have to write down what is practical, what is real, what's executable. There's a way around this. So tomorrow I'm going to teach you a technique called OKRs to go beyond realism in your business plans. It's a technique that Larry Page from Google uses, that John Dower from Intel popularized. But I want you to remember this quote by Tim Johnson, he's a famous blogger. Realism is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of pessimism. The people with the most consistent track records of success don't think in terms of what is, they think in terms of what could be. Fuck realism. Tomorrow I'm going to teach you how to go beyond it. So you craft business plans that are actually proper business plans. But we use certain mathematical models, which you'll learn tomorrow, to overwrite realism and to make your company and your vision so much more attractive to investors, to people, but more internally to your soul. So you really, really, really are excited about getting out of bed every morning. But remember, there's a dark side to vision, right? So we spoke about Elon Musk. Let's look at the dark side of Elon Musk. Arianna Huffington spoke about this. She wrote a book called Thrive. And she spoke about how at one point in her life, she was working so hard. Ariana had built a hundred million dollar valuation company, the Huffington Post. But she spoke about how one day she was walking back into her apartment in New York and she just collapsed from exhaustion, hit her head and passed out. Her daughter had to call a doctor and she realized that she was missing the point, that she was sacrificing her health, sacrificing her functioning, her productivity, because she had bought into the lie of overwork. And this lie, I call it the lie of hustle. The lie of hard work permeates so many people who are driven. Elon Musk two months ago gave a series of interviews in the New York Times. And he was very raw and honest. That's something I like about him. But he said brakes are for cars, not CEOs. And he also spoke about how he is going through excruciating pain right now as CEO of two Companies. In fact, he had to step down as CEO. As chairman of one company. He can't sleep without the drug Ambien. He sometimes has to work till 3am he has already gone through two divorces and it's taking a toll on him. And so people were accusing him last month of actually being unfit to lead these companies. This is the dark side of vision. It's when you have a singular obsession and everything else, your love, relationships, your health, your sleep all starts falling apart. It is downright unhealthy, folks. Arianna Huffington wrote a letter to Elon Musk, an open letter, and this is what she advised him. She said, because she had learned the lesson. As you told the New York Times, you've exhausted yourself working 120 hour weeks at the expense of seeing your children and, and your friends. You've had day long stretches where you shut yourself inside the Tesla factory and don't even go outside. You don't take vacations. There's no way you can connect with your amazing vision and creativity when you don't give yourself time to reconnect, not just with those you love, but also with yourself and your wisdom. That is the dark side. What's really cool to see Ariana, like slap Elon like that. Now he said, look, I don't have time. He's wrong. He's a fucking genius. But he is so freaking wrong on this one, right? So this singular obsession can destroy us. And I've gone through it. Ten years ago as I had my wake up call from Bob Proctor and I started building Mindvalley, you know, that was the team I had look at me in that picture. Okay, so Nika, you'll see Nika, she's also at a fest. But observe me and Nika and notice how I'm sitting, I'm hunched. Do you notice the belly on me? Okay, now Most, this was 10 years ago. So most of the people in that picture no longer work for Mindvalley. A lot of them are still friends, they're doing great in other companies. But the two people who are here, me and Nika, observe what we look like in that picture. Nika's probably going to kill me for putting this up. And this is 10 years later, right? We. So this is when you are obsessed. If you look at that previous picture, that's when you are obsessed with just a singular focus. I was working hard at the expense of my health, at the expense of my friendships, at the expense of so many different things. And it wasn't just me, because people will follow the CEO. So if I'm doing these unhealthy practices, so are people on my team, right? But when you wake up, when you have this transformation, when you go from Elon Musk to Elon plus the wisdom of Ariana in that metaphor, you start opening yourself up to so much more. Now, the first aspect of the dark side of vision is this imbalance. But I want to tell you about another aspect. And that second aspect is cultural programming. The visions that we are pursuing don't come from from us, they come from outside us. I became an engineer not because I wanted to be an engineer, it's because I'm an Indian male. And if you're an Indian immigrant, you learn very early in your family that your parents value education. You're going to come back with as all as, not 1B or 1C, and that there are only four options in your life. You become a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, or a family embarrassment. So this picture, this picture is a picture which I sent my team. This again was maybe seven years or so. We are celebrating hitting our 2 million month, right? But that's actually the wrong motivation. Who gives a fuck if we hit 2 million? It's just a number. Today what we celebrate in our team is the number of students that we touch, the quality of our events, the quality of the products we get out there. Having the highest engagement rate learning platform in the world, creating revolutionary new things like mindvalley University.

But if I go back seven years.

Cultural programming, it was causing me to add an overemphasis on money and career more than anything else. So my breakdown happened and I went through a breakdown. My breakdown happened in 2010. In 2010, my business partner at that time and myself. So there were a couple of things we did wrong. And I want to share with you what I did wrong so that you can avoid some of this pain. The first thing that we did wrong is that my business partner and myself, his name was Mike and we went to college together. We were friends in Michigan for many years, but we had different visions. And so the company had no vision. When two partners have different visions, whether it's in a marriage or a business, there is no vision for that family. There is no vision for that business. So mindvalley became nothing more than a machine to just generate enough cash flow so that we could live our lives and do what really gave us meaning. So I actually had pretty much stepped out of mindvalley. Now what was I doing that was giving me more meaning? I was experimenting with a different company, a Fest right? So the first mistake was we didn't have an aligned vision. Ask yourself honestly, do you have an aligned vision with your business partner? Do you have aligned vision with your life partner? And if you don't, that is a big warning sign. You need to have that conversation. We'll teach you during the safe s how to bring up that conversation and the method. Right. That you can use. Now the second thing is, as I started moving away from mindvalley, cultural programming again infused me. And this time the cultural programming was that in 2010ish in Malaysia, there was a big, like, startup boom. So people were starting companies, raising money, and I decided I wanted a piece of that. I wanted to start a startup, I wanted to raise money. So I came up with an idea. It was for a Groupon clone. Remember Groupon? That stupid little company that collapsed? It was designed to make you buy crap. You don't need anybody. Remember Groupon? So imagine that's what I did. I started the Groupon clone, a useless scraptastic product in Malaysia. Groupon ultimately collapsed, right? It turned out that it didn't provide any useful benefit to society. Merchants ended up hating it, restaurateurs ended up hating it. But I saw that Groupon had become the fastest growing company in the world at that time, I decided to clone it in Malaysia, found a business partner, found developers, got $2 million investment from Intel Venture Capital. I was written about in the press. I'm like, yes, I'm now a startup entrepreneur. Six months into it, I realized my life was miserable. I didn't like the team, I was not clicking with my partner. I hated my job. There was so much competition because seven other Groupon clones had started and I started dreading what I was doing. So six months into it, I sold most of my shares and backed out. Now, why did I go down that stupid thing in the first place? It's because cultural programming. I didn't have a vision for how I wanted to lead my life. I did not have what John Butcher calls a life vision. So I was just following what the other guy was doing. Raise money, start a startup, try to sell it to an investor, and boom, you are that label that we define as successful. I want you to ask yourself this. Are you in that trap? Are you running a business that you took on because everybody else is doing it? Are you in the business that you took on because you inherited it from your family? Do you secretly hate your job like I did? I'm so glad I quit that stupid idea. In six months, I lost A lot of money on it. I lost the respect of investors. I lost respect of some of my business partners. That's okay, because what happened was I started discovering a new way to set vision. Now, how that happened was this. I bumped into this guy, John Butcher. So a friend of mine told me I should really take this program called Lifebook. So I took Lifebook and that's where another piece entered. You see, Bob Proctor had given me that first piece. Big, like, don't play small, go big, right? But I was going big in one dimension, career and finance. And that's a tiny slice of what it means to be human. What John Butcher showed me is that there are 10 additional dimensions that you look at, right? And he and his wife Missy, and they're sitting right there with their beautiful daughter Jade. Say hi, John, Missy. So what John showed me through Lifebook is that you got to look at your life from 12 different dimensions. And we'll go deep in this as well. We're going to bring John on stage in the final day to help you see these other dimensions. But. But in the Lifebook seminar, I had to create like I created a 75 page vision of my life. 75 pages. One of those pages talked about my life vision, how I wanted to lead my life. Now I made this video to show you what I wrote down. This was six months before a fest. So this is the concept I call vision stacking. Right? When you start creating a vision for how you want your life to look like, all of a sudden the right opportunities start coming true. And sometimes you don't even know these opportunities exist, but the right opportunities start coming true to make these visions possible. And it's often something so out there, so wild, that people think you're crazy. And this is how Lifebook actually led to a fest. Check this out.

This is how eerie this is.

This is something I wrote down in Lifebook in 2010 before the very first a festival that I created.

Now, when I wrote this down, I had no idea how I was going to attain this.

I will visit a hundred countries around the world. Apest, of course, gets me to travel every six months to a different country.

I will have access to the most influential and fascinating people in the world. These people now come to me at a fest. I will be one of the world's top speakers. I was barely speaking back then. And now with a fest, I have my own stage.

I will own five star resorts, office by the beach where work gets done.

I don't own a resort, but I.

Get to work from one this, I.

Go on amazing adventure trips with brilliant.

People at least once a year.

Now with a fest, this automatically happens twice a year. And I could go on and on and on.

When I created this, there was no.

Way I knew how these were going to.

Going to manifest.

Look, I even wrote Partying in the.

Mediterranean, the Caribbean and more.

And of course, with afes, our team organizes some of the most elaborate, beautiful parties in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. And all of this just emerged into my life. I had no idea where they were.

Going to come from. As I created Lifebook, I never set a goal as a teenager or kid.

To start a festival, a personal growth festival. It just came to me. And when I explained it to my friends in business, they told me it was the dumbest idea they ever heard. But a fest today, six years later, has become a phenomenon. And it's allowed me to create a life where all of those crazy things I put down in my lifebook and I had no idea how to get there. I now get there frequently. I get to true a fest, create festivals in beautiful locations around the world. Thousands of people apply to come and attend these events. And I get to curate a tribe of remarkable individuals who are there with me. Some of the world's greatest speakers come and speak on our stage for free because they want to be there. And I certainly found myself living this life where the friendships were there, the travel, the adventure. I'm taking my family with me. I'm learning from all of these remarkable speakers. But apes itself defies any business plan. It's a fully profitable business, but it never emerged as a desire to be a business.

It.

It simply emerged as this weird little eruption in life that came from me getting really specific about what I wanted and the type of life I wanted to live.

That's John Butcher, and I wanted to show you. Yes, ladies, I'll give you a moment so you can see how that. Right, how writing that down, I had no idea how it was going to happen, but aphas emerged. Now, the second thing was, was this one. I saw this picture of John and frankly, I got turned on. But this set another vision for me, right? So I realized that health, longevity, I didn't have goals for that, so I started doing that. And that was my health transformation in just two years. So I actually reversed my biological age by maybe between five and seven years. You can actually measure biological age. So I want you to know that this is a very important part of the process. This is not about becoming Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. You are you. You are who you are. And your vision has to be unique to you. And this is about getting you to think boldly, but not to start the next startup because you want to start the next startup because everybody else is doing it, or become the next best selling author because everybody else is doing it, is to figure out what is that unique vision that's emerging from you, what is that life that you want to lead, and then making that as bold and magnificent and 360 as you can. It's about really having a 360 life vision, looking at 12 different dimensions. So thank you, John and Missy, for that insight. And we're going to take you through this process on day four. So now that you understand what envisioning is about, are you guys ready to go forward?