How A Bold Vision Can Flip Your Business Growth Strategy | Vishen Lakhiani

Human beings are goal driven organisms. This means that one of the things that makes us separate from animals is that we chase goals. And it seems to be healthy for us to chase these goals as long as we're not tying our happiness to the goal that the happiness is part of the journey. Japan has some of the longest living people in the world. And when I spoke to Jason Prowl, he said, you know, meaning is so key and crucial to everything. In Okinawa, which is another one of the blue zones. Now in Japan, there's this concept called ikigai. And ikigai, feel free to take a picture of that slide. It's a beautiful model of how to give people a reason for being. Ikigai translates to reason for being. The closest English word we would have to, it would be meaning. But what we find is that when you bring these elements into work, passion, mission, vocation, profession, having people do what they love, do what the world needs, do what they can be paid for, and do what they're good at, you give them meaning. So here's why this is important. Another Gallup study found that men who retire at 80, 86% kept working because they found their work fun, but 93% kept working because they found their work meaningful. Meaning directly seems to translate to longevity, to longevity at the job too. These people continued working into their 80s because they found their job meaningful. So how do you do this right? Well, Salim Ismail, in his book Exponential Organizations, coined a phrase called the Massive Transformational purpose. And it means companies that have an mtp, a massive transformational purpose, to make the world better. They attract the best minds, they create the best motivation in the job, they create the highest rates of productivity because they give people meaning. See, the problem with most people is that their problems aren't big enough. The problem with most people is they're trying to figure out, how do I lose this extra fat man? What is up with that guy who never texted me back? These are tiny problems, but they take away from people's true power and potential. So if you're running a company, what you want to do is give people bigger problems to solve. Can you solve clean water for planet Earth? Can you help improve human education? Can you help create healthier children? What problem are you trying to solve with your company? This guy does it remarkably well. Elon Musk. And in a study of Silicon Valley workers, the people who rank meaning as the highest in terms of their jobs are the people who work for SpaceX and Tesla, number one and number two, both companies run by Elon Musk. Now, if you listen to how Elon Musk talks, you can see what he's doing. He infuses everyone with a massive transformational purpose. That picture was taken by when me and Jim Kwik went to SpaceX to have a private audience with Elon Musk, There were around 30 of us over there. And we asked him, right, what is SpaceX about? Now, SpaceX is essentially a rocket company that is a trucking company for the International Space Station. They take parts to put satellites up or to deliver things to the International Space Station. And it's a trucking company that vertically sends a truck up a payload. But Elon doesn't talk about that. He doesn't talk about, oh, we send payloads to space. He says this. He said, my goal is to make mankind an interplanetary species because you never know when the next asteroid is going to hit planet Earth and wipe us out. Just like you back up your hard drive, I want to back up humanity on Mars. And he went on to say this. I don't know when it's going to happen. I'd say 10 years. In 10 years we can start a colony on Mars. It was 2015 when, when, when he said this. And he also said this. He says, but you know, I'm known to be over optimistic with time. Notice he's speaking about something so powerful, it rallies his troops. He doesn't have a clear timeline of when it's going to happen. They don't yet know how to get to Mars, but they know that they're going to figure it out. But even though he is not there yet, it's more than 10 years away. When he talks about his company, he talks 10 years in the future. And that rallies the employees. A key idea I learned from speaking to people like Peter Diamandis. Speaking to people like Elon Musk is when somebody asks you what your company does. When you're telling that story to prospective hires, don't say what you do now. Talk about what you're going to do in 10 years. It makes all the difference. I found that there was a flaw in our technology team in Mindvalley. Nine out of 10 people we gave an offer letter to rejected us because with programmers it's super competitive. They have many other offers lately. 75% acceptance rate. The difference. I asked the CTO and the engineers to let me do the final call with people. And in that final call I don't interview them. I simply tell them how Mindvalley is going to completely reboot human education for 1 billion people. And get humanity to humanity 2.0. That's it. It goes from a 10% acceptance rate, 75% acceptance rate, and I'm gonna make it 100% acceptance rate because the best people in the world want to solve the world's biggest problems. So the key idea here is don't talk about what your company does now. Listen to Elon talk about what your company is going to do 10 years in the future. What is that next level, that next evolution, and make them dream with you. Now when you do that, you also start establishing mission reminders. So a mission reminder is anything that you put on the wall to remind people of what that mission is. You can't just speak about it at that opening interview and then forget about it. So one of the things we do, for example, is we have a blog called Customer Love. And we share stories on that blog of how customers lives have been changed. When letters come in, when pictures come in, we just share it on the blog. Sometimes customers send us postcards. We stick it up on our refrigerator. But here's the thing, we share these testimonials not for other customers. They are for our employees. We want to remind our team members of the good work that they do. Okay, so that's point number two. Now point number three. And this is a really key thing when it comes to like, giving meaning. I decided to take what Elon was doing with the massive transformational purpose and ask us what happens if we could infuse this in every single team. So I found that there were certain teams in Mindvalley that were run by great managers, but the teams were not innovating. And these teams would have problems. They'd be low motivation people, high motivation people, sometimes drama. And I noticed there were other teams in Mindvalley that had no such thing. There was almost no necessary need for management. Steve Jobs said, great people don't need to be managed. So what was going on there? Why is it that certain teams were having drama and low performance and stagnation and process breaks and other teams were just crushing it? And I realized the difference was in the leader. Very often in some cases, the leader was thinking pure management. I need to make sure that everybody knows their job role. Everybody has a jd, Everybody is following process. And in other teams, the leader operated as a visionary. I want to be the best. And their whole idea on that team was, we're going to do the best work. Now if you look at the team that runs events in Mindvalley, they operate in the terms of the best. I don't know how Laura manages the team. I don't know how Kadi manages the team. I've never looked at their spreadsheet or their to do list. But I know that every year they push themselves to do something good. When they were executing one a fest, they came to me and they said, hey, we want to take a fest to Asia. Can we do two a year? When they were doing two a year, the next idea was, can we launch Mindvalley University? Let's take on university. Let's do a 30 day program. After they launched Mindvalley University a few months ago, Ola came to me. She's like, vishen. In addition to everything else I'm doing, I want to expand Mindvalley to Dubai. Because for us to be truly great, we gotta tap into the Arab market. The team doesn't quit. I have no idea how their processes work. But what I know is the DNA of the team is wired around being the best. Creating an event company that says great or better than Ted as great or better than Tony Robbins. And this rallies everyone else. And the funny thing is it doesn't cause more stress, it causes more excitement, more enthusiasm. Work disappears because people have meaning. So I went back to Mindvalley this past month and I started switching things around. I said, okay, the leader of the team cannot be the manager. The manager is going to be the process holder. The manager will ensure processes are happening. The leader has to do some management. But the ultimate definition of a leader is, is that they want to be the best. If you lead films and design at mindvalley, your job is to create the best films and design in the education industry. If you are working on apps, your job is to create the number one learning platform in the world. If you're running MindValleyU, your job is to be better than Harvard in 10 years and that changes everything. So can you take the departments in your company and and spark in them this idea to be the best? Peggy McCord, who worked with Reed Hastings in Netflix to create the Netflix culture, right? She wrote a really amazing book that came out recently. The book is called Powerful. And Peggy says this, she says all this thing about empowerment is bullshit. Your people are powerful as soon as they walk in through the door. What you gotta do is give them a way to channel this power. And the best way to get people to channel that power is to give them meaning, to give them a goal, to tell them, hey, let's be the best at what we're doing. Can you guys see how powerful this is? So make your teams give your company a massive transformational purpose, an mtp. You can learn about that in the book Exponential Organizations. Then go to every single team and say, okay, to get to that mtp, we need to be the best. We need the best design, we need the best art, we need the best filmmaking, we need the best customer support. And watch what happens to your company. Now, the fourth thing is nurture a growth mindset. As you're doing all of this, you want to remember to make your people grow. When I was young, I loved this quote on leadership. It was from Dwight Eisenhower. Leadership is getting other people to do things you want done because they want to do it. But now I realize that that is actually a kind of dumb, outdated model of leadership, because it's the kind of leadership that could get a president to get a million men to march into a dumb war. So we believe that a better definition for leadership, and this is what we use as our leadership credo at Mindvalley is this. Leadership is recognizing that we are all one, that every person you lead is as brilliant as you, as talented as you, and has the same capacity for growth and accomplishment. They simply need to be reminded of this. And so what we do then is we ensure that everyone in the company is growing and we remind them of their greatness. Now, there are many ways you can do this. The best way is helping people establish a personal vision for themselves. This author, Bill Jensen said. And Bill came to visit a company in Kuala Lumpur. And I asked him, bill, what is the future of work? And he says, the future of work is this. It's about getting employees engaged, not just about getting employees engaged in the company vision. It's about getting the company engaged in the employee's vision, getting the company to identify how does each employee want to grow, and then helping create a conducive environment where these people can grow. And yes, sometimes people will grow so fast, they will leave you. But when you create a reputation as the company that created all of these heroes, guess what? More people want to join you. Recently, we had an incredibly amazing, talented woman in Europe write to us to say that she was prepared to quit her job and come and join Mindvalley. And I asked her why. And she was an Estonian. She says, well, because I follow Cardi Oya on Facebook. Cardi is our head of Mindvalley. You. And she says, and I am shocked by how much Kadi has evolved and changed and grown in just one year. And I want a piece of that. And so many people don't grow their employees because they are afraid that it means that they're going to go start their own organization or their own company. We don't have that fear because we know that when you grow people, what happens is that you get so many other people lining up outside your door to want to be part of that company. And when you give people a massive transformational purpose, all of that growth, all of that power, they get to use it in your company. Often people leave not because of anything else other than the fact that they want a bigger challenge. When you put them in charge of a team and you say, make this the best, you give them what human beings crave in life, meaning significance, purpose. It's not just about, oh, you know, I need to leave and become an entrepreneur. That's often a bullshit excuse for something else that's happening under the surface. So how do we do this? Well, there's a formula in Mindvalley called the three most important questions. Means goals. It helps people separate means goals and end goals. Raise your hand if you've heard of the 3M IQ, right? So most of you have. Now, basically, we help people create a bucket list for experiences, for growth, for contribution, and then each connects to the other. Experiences are what experiences do you want in the world? Growth is. Well, to have these experiences, such as, say, biking across South America for one month. How do I need to grow? I need to learn how to ride a bike. I need to learn Spanish. And then the final one is contribution. If I was the guy who could afford to bike across South America for 30 days, speak Spanish, get to know cultures, how can I also contribute? Well, maybe I can spend one day every week of that month volunteering at an orphanage somewhere in a South American country. You give people this refined bucket list. So we do it with our entire team, right? But then here's what we do. When they create this bucket list, we stick this on a wall, and everybody gets to see what everyone else is doing. Now, what we find is that mysterious things happen as people start putting this on the wall and sharing it openly with the rest of the company, Their goals just seem to come true. This guy Ronan was very inspired to go into health and wellness. And what happened was. And then he also wrote that he wanted to speak at ted. You'll see that over there. What happened was, within a couple of months, he took part in this competition called the Viper Challenge. He came in number one out of 20,000 competitors. Next thing you know, he is like this incredible athlete in Kuala Lumpur. Next thing you know, he's Been invited to speak on the TEDx stage in KL. He does so well. He gets invited to speak at TEDx in Paris. Boom, boom boom. His goals get accomplished. This one is from someone many of you know. He started out as an A fester, joined our team. When he came in his first week, he did this as his three most important questions. And one of the things he wrote down is become a world class speaker, Teach entrepreneurship, sales and living. Awesome. Now what happened was this dude, Jason Campbell, he was working with audio and AV backstage at a fest in Croatia a few years back and one of our speakers fell sick. So we had 20 minutes to fill and Jason came to me and Jason said, vishen, put me on stage. I'm like, jason, I can't put you on stage. This is frickin a fest. You gotta be a world class speaker. He's like, vishen, I've been working on this speech but for a year, just give me a break, just put me on stage. So I put him on stage apprehensively and you guys voted him best speaker. Now not only has he spoken on stage at a fest, but he has his own host, his own show on Mindvalley membership where he teaches, guess what? Sales and entrepreneurship and living. Awesome. This lady Luminita was a blogger working for mindvalley. She wrote a blog post and nothing happened for a while. But on her three most important questions, she had written that she wanted to be a world class author, get a publishing deal, and lots of amazing things over here about traveling around the world, writing and so on. In six months her blog post started taking off pure randomness and it went on to become the single most viral personal growth post ever shared on Facebook with 1.2 million shares. It was called 15 Things to Give up to Be Happy. Next thing you know she gets a call from Penguin and they offer her a book deal and her book was recently published. Of course she quit mindvalley because now she's a full time author, but we are proud of her and because of her, so many people in Romania hear her story and now apply to mindvalley. This kid from Sudan at 22 wrote his three most important questions and said that someday he wants to speak at world class institutions in the United States. His blog got popular. His blog led to a book, My Islam and it's about how digitization is bringing democracy to the Arab world. The book got voted on Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 25 must read books of 2013. He was 26 years old. Next thing you know he's speaking at Google. He's invited to be on the Bill Maher show. 26 years old. It.