Everything You Know About Entrepreneurship is Wrong | POWERFUL Business Advice from Vishen Lakhiani
22 Sept 2024 · 10 min
Vishen Lakhiani argues the "entrepreneur" label is overused and shares what actually works: use your strongest skills, do work you love, and get paid. He says timing accounts for 40% of success, warns against copying crowded markets, and advises getting in early on new platforms like TikTok and Web3. His company Mindvalley pivoted to selling meditation online after an earlier product failed.
Questions this episode answers
September 22, 2024.
2022 to 2026.
40%.
2005.
About 60–70 employees.
Chapters
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The word entrepreneur is a bullshit term. It's one of the most overused nonsense terms out there. I can teach anybody to become an entrepreneur in two minutes flat. All you got to do is go to fiverr.com open an account and offer to make videos or images for someone. Boom. You're self employed. You're an entrepreneur. It's a bull. You have that and then you have at the end of the spectrum, probably the greatest living entrepreneur today, Elon Musk. But the spectrum is so wide, it's, it's a bad definition. So there are other definitions that you got to look at, right? You got to look at are you working in a job where you can earn the money you need to live the life you want while being fulfilled and happy doing the work you do? I think that is the definition. You don't have to be an entrepreneur for that. Many of the people creating the biggest changes in the world are not entrepreneurs. Think about the engineers at NASA. Think about the people who are inventing new technologies. Think about the people who come come up with new, with new medicines that are changing lives. Many of these people are working for companies that they are paid well, they love Their jobs, they're making a contribution to humanity. And it is enough if you're that this bullshit idea that you got to be working for yourself is so outdated. Rather, you got to look at three things. Number one, can I exercise what I'm really good at doing? Number two, do I love what I'm doing? Number three, am I making money doing this? There are lots of different opportunities, but you got to try to find these new fields, these new things which are emerging now. Here's the good news. According to futurist Peter Diamandis, between 2022 and 2026, the world will see as much change as between the year 1900 to 2000. In four years, starting next month, we're going to see as much change as between the years 1900 to 2000. New technologies, new opportunities, new things are going to emerge. The whole feel of Web3 is emerging right now. And this means there's going to be so much opportunity for disruption. But if you're an entrepreneur, aspiring entrepreneur, it's good news because there's going to be so much change and so much opportunity for you to disrupt the established players, someone who's starting a new business. The first thing is don't quit your day job. You got to make sure that you have income, that you have safety, that you have food on the table. Don't get desperate and don't put yourself under that stress. Now, when I was working on my day job, it still gave me two hours a night to work on my. On my side hustle. And of course I had the weekends. You might have to sacrifice evenings. You might have to spend less time on Instagram or Netflix. You might have less weekend time. If you can dedicate yourself and if you can ensure that you're constantly learning and learning and learning, odds are you're going to be successful. Successful. That's tip number one. Now, tip number two is this. Don't try to do what everybody else is doing, because if you do what everybody else is doing, it's going to be. It's going to be a lot more challenging. So when Instagram was just getting off the ground, right? In like 2010, you could go and start an Instagram channel on makeup and maybe you might end up like Huda Beauty, which is like 49 million fans today. But they were one of the early ones. You got to get in early. I think TikTok is still early. So I think there's an opportunity in TikTok. Instagram, I think, is later stage. It's not just about social media for Example coaching. Coaching is blowing up right now. More and more companies are looking for coaches for their employees. I have a coach. So many people I know now get a coach. It used to be a situation where if you got a coach, people were like, is something wrong with you? But now coaching is so, so, so important. So coaching is, is, is a really great way to, to make an income. I know coaches who are making millions of dollars a year. Of course they are outliers, but they love what they do, right? Even if you were making 100 grand a year as a coach, that's a really, really, really good lifestyle because you're helping people. You're helping people, you have mobility and so on. A third one, which is with the whole crypto space, there's an, I mean, don't be stupid when it comes to crypto. But definitely there are interesting opportunities emerging with NFTs with DAOs. DA DAOs. There are some great YouTube channels where you can learn about crypto and you can start to understand that marketplace. Keep in mind that you know, investing in things like Bitcoin are risky. If you bought Bitcoin one month ago, you would have lost a lot of money today. And so you got to have a really long term perspective. So here's the other tip. Don't wait to know what your company is going to be about before registering your company. I had no idea what the company was going to be about, but I knew I was going to start a company and I knew the first clue is that we were going to be selling a meditation product on AdWords. But there could be other things we were doing as well. I also had a Web 2.0 product back then. Web 2.0 was all the rage. It was new. I had a Web 2.0 software application that I was going to build and sell as well. And I needed a name. And so I got online and I found two really good names. One was called Rainbridge. And I thought, okay, I'm going to call my company Rainbridge. And the other one was Mindvalley. I am so glad I picked Mindvalley over Rainbridge. And so I created this, this company called Mindvalley. And then mindvalley launched several products. One of our early products was actually it's so painful that this product failed. It was an early version of what today would be Instagram. We called it Blink Life. It was a way to take pictures from your, from a phone and then share these pictures with your friends on a, on a particular website. And then we had created a system where you could innovate by saying, okay, this picture only my mom will see, or this picture absolutely my mom will not see, only my girlfriend will see. So we created this really cool thing for picture sharing. Interesting statistic. 40% of the success of the company is timing. Our timing was too early. Like phones didn't have cameras. Cameras were not really good. This was 2005 when we attempted to launch Blink Life. And it, it very rapidly fizzled out and died. But we kept testing and trying and testing and innovating and I kept experimenting with different ideas and eventually one idea really started exploding and that was basically selling meditation online. And that's how Mindvalley started. My executive team, they decided to skip their salary for a month so that everybody else could get paid. We had maybe 60, 70 employees at that time. Unfortunately, January came in and January is always a great month for personal growth. We had a campaign that worked. We were able to get back on our feet. But these type of moments, they are soul crushing. They keep you up at night, but you got to be prepared to go through them on your journey. But again, if you adopt the attitude that the number one thing is your growth is how much you're learning, you're better able to go through these ups and these downs. Like the ups don't go to your head and the downs don't destroy you. Sam.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Ah, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com bank capital1na member FDIC.
You know those cravings that hit you out of nowhere? Charred steak tacos, silky mushroom risotto, or a perfect summer salad. When the craving hits, cookunity delivers. Made with real ingredients and no shortcuts. Get ready to eat meals delivered directly to your door. All tailored to your lifestyle, dietary needs and cravings. Get what you're craving? Go to cookunity.com crave or enter crave before checkout for free. Premium meals for life. That's cookunity.com craven.
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