Attract What You Want by Shifting Your Values | Vishen Lakhiani

I once started a company that I had to quit in eight months. This was 2010, and back then, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was going through a massive round of startup culture. Investment funds were coming in, entrepreneurial like accelerators were being established, and everyone was starting a startup. In America, Groupon had become the fastest growing company in the world. And in Kuala Lumpur, in Asia, startup after startup was racing to create the Asian version of Groupon. And I decided, wow, everyone else is doing this. I want to do it too. So I jumped in. We got $2 million from Intel Capital Ventures and I created one of the seven different Groupon clones in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We were neck and neck with the leading guy, waiting to see who was going to be acquired for millions of dollars by the massive group owners spread its tentacles all around the world. Six months into that, I realized how miserable I was. I had everything that I thought I wanted. I had venture capital. I was in the press, I was in the media. I was a startup entrepreneur. But I was miserable. I disliked my job, I disliked the work I had to do. I disliked the things I had to fulfill for that investment. And I decided to give up all my shares and do something that really made my heart sing. That something was a fest, which eventually led to Mindvalley University. And my friends couldn't understand, like, you just gave up that whole startup. But what really happened was I awoke. I wasn't setting goals that came from my soul. I was looking at the world around me and going, oh, to be successful, you need venture capital. To be successful, you got to get raise at least 2 million. To be successful, you got to get a quiet. That's a bullshit model, but that is what so much of the world relies on. And that's why I was so miserable. And so in 2010, I literally, in 2011, I gave up my shares in this company. Turned out to be a blessing, a fest. And when I did a fest, one of my investors was like, what the hell are you doing, Vishen? Intel has given you 2 million and you're putting on a fucking festival. A fest led to MindValleyU and a fest actually led to the emergence of a whole new mindvalley brand and culture that elevated us. The company that I gave up ended up going public, right? But it failed. The whole Groupon thing collapsed within two years. The world got fed up of online coupons and the entire industry went to hell. So I didn't end up like losing a massive opportunity, but what I gained was this. What I gained was a tribe. What I gained was the ability to actually have this life where I get to travel and speak and do what I really craved. But it came from avoiding the brules of the culturescape. So Sri Kumar Rao said this, right? He said, business schools don't teach us what we really need to know to be successful. What they need to teach us is that the number one lesson in life has to be growth. And everything about your life has to be about growth. If your business fails, it doesn't matter. Did you grow? If your business succeeds, it doesn't matter. Did you grow? He said, we have to train ourselves to shut out all of the brules, all of the voices that tell us that you need this check mark and this check mark and this check mark to be successful. And instead we need to look at the world from the lens of is this helping me grow? So during that 2013-2016 when I was going through a lot of stress, I happened to get on a call, a coaching call with Sri Kumar Rao. So many of us have coaches and Rao was my coach. And it was really interesting because he said, vishen, I can tell that things are not going good. Would you allow me to read you a poem? So I said, rao, a poem? Seriously, tell me how to fix this. People are fucking stealing from me like I'm on the verge of bankruptcy. You want to impress me with your poetry skills? Fine, go on. That was not what I actually said, but that was in my head. And this is what Rao read to me. He said this poem was written by a 13th century Afghan refugee called Rumi. He said, when I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety. If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me and without any pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There's a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it. So let's go back and look at that, right? When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety. When I was running after the VC money, when I was running after the media, when I was running after figuring out how to get acquired by Groupon, my days were a furnace of distress and anxiety. If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me and without any pain. What he's talking about there, when he says about place of patience is tapping into the soul which knows where you are meant to be and what you're meant to do. From this I understand that what I want also wants me is looking for me and attracting me. But here he's talking about a different type of want. He's talking about a want from the soul, a want from the intuitive aspect of yourself. Not a want because you are trying to follow the checklist of the culturescape. The intuitive want also wants you. There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it. So this was from Jalal Al Din Rumi, who today is America's most quoted poet, actually. But another way to think about this idea is another great poet, Frank Sinatra. He said, do you remember this? Strangest in the night, there's this line there which I think is the best line. It's do be, do be do. So most of us do to be, right? I had to hustle to get the VC money from intel to build a company do to be because I thought that will make me someone. But if you listen to do be, do be do. It's hard to say whether he's saying do be or be do. What Rao was saying is be and then do be what it is that you want and then do from that place. It is similar to Michael Beckwith's idea of the law of resonance. Michael Beckwith, who wasn't the secret, he was one of the teachers that says the secret is incomplete. It's not about the law of attraction. You do not attract what you want. You attract who you are. In other words, you be and then you do be do. Now the shift that happened to me between 2013 and 2016 is I decided to give up all of the ideas I was chasing. I was going through struggle in business and back then I thought I just sucked. But what I realized was that all of this struggle was because I was not listening. I was doing, I was trying to fulfill a checklist. A checklist that I thought was how a CEO had to operate or how a $10 million company had to operate. And what I didn't realize was that my soul was asking me to do something completely different. I had to be something else and then do from that place of being and not do to be. So what happened was the universe put a particular mentor in my life. And the funny thing is this mentor was a 29 year old kid. I was like 39 at that time. 29 year old kid who had actually once worked for me. His name is Amir Ahmad Nasser. A smart kid. He had joined Mindvalley when he was 22, went on to become a talented writer, went on to speak around the world. And Amir developed this process of Identifying values. It. And he led me through an exercise, and that is the sheet I came up with. He said, vishen, what are your values? And I read him the mindvalley Code of Awesomeness. And he said, no, those are not your values. That's some dumb exercise you did to try to be democratic in the workplace, get everyone 100 employees to share what they think mindvalley should be. No, what are your values? What are the words that best speak to who you are? So in that left column, okay, he made me write down what I did in the world. I did courses, I did events, I did challenges. Back then, that was the early name for quest. And I did community. And then he said, now what are the values and beliefs that you have in the world? We're going to zoom in, okay? So I wrote down these values. Transformation was a value. Connectedness was a value. Compassion was a value. Growth as a goal, that was something I believed in humanism. I believed in seeing people as a unified planet earth. I believed in aesthetics. I love design and art. I love having a vision. I believe in happiness. I believe in love and change and constant change. I believe in self directed learning, like deciding how you want to learn. I believe in questioning the rules. I believe in innovation. I believe in futurism, an optimistic view of the future of mankind. These were the values. And he said, good, but that's too much. What I want you to do is I want you to cluster them. So as you can see, all the ones, Transformation has a one, growth has a one, transcendence has a one. All of these ones, I realize, fall under the idea of transformation, right? So I gave it one word. And then there were these things that were number two. Connectedness, compassion, humanism. This was sort of like seeing people as a whole, right? It was more a world of value around world. Centrism, we put that together and we called it connectedness. Today we call it unity. But then I called it connectedness. And the third one, aesthetics, vision, change, innovation, came from me being an engineer. It was about creating. So we call that vision. And then there was a fourth one, happiness. Sorry, there was a. Yeah, the fourth one, happiness is there. Love is there. That Amir said isn't really emerging, okay? So it's not as dominant as the other. So he said, those are your three fundamental values. Now, what happened next was really interesting. I decided to simply forget all of the rules of what it took to be an entrepreneur. I decided that entrepreneur was a bullshit term. I wanted no part in it. You can be designing logos for $5 on 99designs. You're an entrepreneur. You can build a billion dollar company. You're an entrepreneur. It's a bullshit term. I discarded that. I discarded the word CEO. And I simply decided to live from those values. So I would ask myself, okay, am I embodying connectedness in my life? Am I embodying transformation? Am I embodying personal growth, which is a key part of transformation? Am I embodying vision? Am I living my life to build and to create every single day? Those became what I lived from. And the shift that that had on mindvalley was dramatic. All the pain and suffering stopped. Because what I had inadvertently done was I'd gone deep into my soul. And now I was listening to what my soul wanted. I was being what my soul wanted. And the result was three years of decline and chaos disappeared. And instantly Mindvalley took off. It took off so fast that between January to July 2016, we were losing an average of $100,000 a month. Seven months, $700,000 gone. August, we made our first big profit in history, and we made exactly 700,000 in one month. We paid off all of that, and mindvalley continued to grow and grow and grow. Sam.