How Mindvalley is Helping a Billion People Unlock Their Potential @vishenlakhiani @CBSNews

Well, there are dreamers, thinkers and doers. Then there are people who embody all three. Up next, we are joined by Vishen Lakhiani, who is an inspirational speaker and accomplished author. Among other things, we're going to hear from him. Vishen Lakhiani is one of the leading minds in self improvement and human consciousness. His first book, Code of the Extraordinary Mind, was the number one book in the world for five days on Amazon back in 2017 and was actually translated into 25 languages. And Vishen joins us live in studio. So good to have you here.

Thank you, Amy. I'm so delighted to be here.

Absolutely. Now, you know, we talk about people being dreamers, thinkers or doers and I'm just curious, it seems like, well, we all want to be one of those, but what do you think is holding most of us back?

Well, I think the biggest thing that holds most of us back is we are afraid to disappoint the people that we love. Right. We are afraid to go against the grain. We are afraid to go against our parents wishes and the people that we love. We have such a strong connection to them that very often their opinions will influence our own intuition, our own heart. You know, Steve Jobs, when he gave his famous Stanford commencement address, said, always listen to your heart and intuition. Somehow they already know who you are to become interesting.

Now you are very successful. So hopefully you understand why I say this, but you took your own failure and really turned it into a huge success. Let's talk about how you failed and turned it around.

Yeah. So I moved to Silicon Valley and the dot com bubble burst. I lost everything. I lost 30 grand that I borrowed from my dad. I was so broke, I was sleeping on a friend's couch, Amy. Like I had nothing. And I decided one of the things I got into because when you're going through such stress, meditation helps. So this was 2003. I started dabbling in meditation and I was like, oh my God. This is really, really helping me get my messed up mind in order. I became obsessed with it and I built a simple website. I was simply following my passion. My friends, my family said, you're not going to make money selling meditation. But today we have an app that's been featured in Apple stores all around the world on iPhone 16 devices. And we have built a massive company just focused on mental health, meditation and helping people calm the heck down.

And that's what this app is all about. Explain to me more.

So the MindValley app, what we are is we're designed to be the education that school forgot to teach us. So on the app, you can learn everything from speed reading to better relationships, to empathy, to muscle building to losing weight, to meditation, a large meditation hypnotherapy collection. There's a lot of knowledge that we need to become better humans day by day by day. Right. And the world is constantly tossing us challenges. But school doesn't prepare us. So what we do is we've built an app that is designed to give you access to all the education and wisdom that school forgot.

But it's like all of that in one app.

Yes, it's a massive app. And a lot of this content we also put out for free. We have a YouTube channel, Mindvalley Talks. All our talks from all of the events we do around the world are free. A billion people, a billion watchers have watched these talks. Completely free. All we want to do is get wisdom out. Wisdom helps us become better humans. When we focus on ourselves becoming a better human, we create a better, better society.

Wow. That's amazing. So people need to get the books and get the app, especially because we're going to learn a lot in that app. Wow. Thank you so much for joining us. Certainly appreciate your time. And for more information on Vishen and his company, Mindvalley, just check out our website, kconnews.com and click seen on TV.