How to Make the Universe Bend in Your Favor | Vishen Lakhiani

Initially, I was thinking I was going to share with you how mindvalley built a 2 million person email list. But then I thought, look, you guys will figure that out. There are tons of other people who talk about that sort of thing. Instead, I want to share with you something a little bit more personal. I want to share with you how there was a particular period recently where it felt like the entire universe was caving in on me. And almost three times in a row over three years, I almost lost the entire business. I've never shared the story publicly, but it was a period of incredible pain for me between 2013 and 2016. I think there's a value in sharing it here because it makes you understand that all of us are going to go through a lot of shit as we try to build our influence. But secondly, there were some interesting lessons I learned from this period, and I think there's a value in these lessons as well to help you overcome the hurdles. So I'd like to share this story instead. Are you guys cool with that? So we all know what mindvalley does. We bring together the world's best minds. I'm really proud of the fact that we employ people from 54 different countries right now, that we put on this incredible festival that we work from one of the most beautiful office spaces in the world. But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the breakdown. And the interesting thing is this breakdown didn't happen in the early years of mindvalley. It happened 10 years into running the company. And that is what I find most interesting about it. Ten years into being a CEO, I was fucking failing miserably. And I want to share what happened because it was so dramatic how disaster after disaster after disaster struck. I thought the universe was literally against me. So the story is, I started Mindvalley in 2003 in that little apartment in New York City. So back then, I was teaching meditation in New York. And funny story about that little apartment is this is Times Square 2003, before Disney moved into Times Square and, you know, and created all of the Disney Broadway shows. So this wasn't Disney Times Square. This was like Crack and Hooker's Times Square. Literally, you would get propositioned walking home almost every single night by a lady on the streets. Before I moved into the department, I found out from the landlord that it was a Thai massage parlor which had been refurbished. And if you lived in Times Square in New York, you know what Thai massage parlor is code word for. So, yes, mindvalley did start in a whorehouse. Former whorehouse. Now that is me in 2003 in that apartment. I like this photo because the table and the chair I'm in, I actually salvaged from the streets. My neighbors discarded it. Beautiful thing about New York, it's a very friendly society. Every, every year when the new IKEA catalog comes out, the wealthier citizens go and buy the latest IKEA furniture. The older IKEA furniture gets left out on the street for people like me to pick up and use both of those for furniture I literally found on the street. In fact, that table, I love that table. I used to work on that table. You could see I barely could afford pants back then. But on that table in the IKEA catalog is actually called the Lack table. It's funny, the Swedes at IKEA actually named a table for the mental state of lack. You need to work on that 1495 desk. So that was 2003. Now, flash forward 2013, 10 years ahead. You would think that after a decade, I would have everything figured out right now. Mindvalley was doing decent back then. In 2013, AFES was running. We had just done our first AFES in Thailand. But this is when I'd say the most difficult years of my life suddenly started popping into existence. So the first thing that happened is that just before Thanksgiving 2013, I found out that my accountant, who had been working with me for four and a half years, had been stealing from me for four years. And she was someone that I completely trusted. She had stolen about a quarter million dollars. And all of a sudden I found that my right hand person had been cheating on me for four and a half. For four years, to the tune of a quarter million dollars. That was devastating. It violated my trust in so many things. But that wasn't the end of it. Just six months after that incident, that completely shattered my illusion of, like, how awesome I was as a CEO and I had everything under control. Mindvalley was working with several different authors, and our biggest client was. I won't state the name, but it was responsible for about 20% of our business. It was a meditation company, and we were in partnership with them, and we were the official promoters, and they brought in a CEO. And that CEO knew that our partnership, which had lasted seven years, was done in a handshake, handshake agreement. And he saw the amount of revenue and sales we were bringing into them, and he thought, you know, I want the entire thing. So I got sued by the CEO, and it was a completely frivolous lawsuit. But what had happened was because I didn't have my shit in order. I hadn't actually signed a contract. So the CEO knew that I didn't have a contract. She knew it was a handshake agreement, and she decided to sue me in the court of Laredo, Texas. Now, Laredo, Texas, is a Mexican border town between Texas and Mexico. It has the most corrupt court district in the world. And I knew that she had bribed the judges. I knew because her own family members had leaked that to me. I did not want to get into a frivolous lawsuit and have to travel to Laredo and, you know, face these judges whom I knew were dishonest. And so I gave up a $5 million business. I literally signed it off. We had to lay off 12 employees in Argentina who ran that business. That was devastating. These employees had kids. And our entire MineValley Spanish operations, which relied on that business, disappeared, lost everything. Our Argentinian office had to be shut down. That was incident number two. Now, to get myself out of that shit, I decided to go to Burning man with the guy who at that point, was my best friend. Went to Burning man, had a lot of incredible experiences together, really bonded as men. And he then convinced me that he could help me with my web operations. And the way to do that was to he was going to take over my merchant account. And to do this, I made another stupid mistake because I trusted him so much. Because we had done so much drugs together at Burning Man. I gave him access to my bank account. Six months later, he fled with $150,000. So now my best friend had betrayed me. This actually fucking hurt. I didn't care about the money. I had difficulty trusting male business partners for years after that, and it was horrible. Now we come to December 2014. It's now been one year of total chaos. And I get a call on December 26, just after Christmas. I'm in Estonia, and the call is, hey, Vishen, welcome. We can't make payroll, can we? You know, what do we do? We can't afford to pay salaries. So I'm like, I'll sell my car. So now I'm looking at selling my Merce so that I could have some money come in so that I could actually pay my team. And I felt like I was a failure. I never told the team. To this day, most people in Mindvalley never knew this happened. At the last minute, my executive team, they agreed to just not get paid that month so that everybody else could get paid. And God bless them, like, in January, we certainly Had a cash infusion. It was the start of the year and we were able to like pull ourselves out again. I thought that was the end. But then in February, my COO who is now running the company, I find out that he's stealing from us. He saw that the accountant from one year ago, you know, she basically just got a slap on the wrist, white collar crime. So he thought, well, I want a piece of that. And before he gets caught, he's stolen away $100,000. Another huge frickin like bit of chaos. It gets worse. At this point we are thinking, okay, we're going to move Mindvalley to a new email marketing platform. It was called Exact Target. Incredible platform. We were basically, back then, the company was reliant mostly on email. We had close to a 1 million person list and we moved everyone to Exact Target and it took us months to make that transfer. Right. But as we were making that transfer, Exact Target got acquired by a larger company whose name I'm not allowed to mention because I'm not about to mention them kindly. And I had to sign a contract, but you can figure it out. And they, as a larger company and their salespeople basically lied to us. We signed a very strict contract and when they acquired Exact Target, they didn't get the pipes fitting well. So over the next one year, we couldn't understand why our revenue had plummeted. Turned out 40% of our emails were not being delivered. So now every month we are losing $100,000 month after month after month. And we had to go through a whole painful process of one year wondering why no one is buying from us, why our customers are not there. Turns out 40% of our customers were just not getting our emails. Only when we figured it out, we were able to recover. This was three years of like chaos. Three years where I couldn't understand why I was struggling so much. In 2015, I actually gave up being a CEO. I'm like, I can't do this. So I stepped down and asked someone else to take over. It didn't save things. Mindvalley continued bleeding money. Now I just want to do a quick check, check in with you. How many of you here have had someone steal from you in the company? Good. I'm so glad I'm not alone. How many of you here have had a massive technological glitch that almost cost you a business? Thank you for not making me feel alone. And how many of you here have had difficulty making payroll for yourself or your team? This happens to all of us. And you know, the funny thing is it kind of makes us like cockroaches. I think if you want to be a good entrepreneur, you got to be like a cockroach. You got to be comfortable crawling through a lot of shit and not getting killed. But there's. So I call this the cockroach theory of entrepreneurship. But there's another thing that's really cool about this, and Google. Google illustrated this. Google did a study, and I found this in a page of a book called Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail. And Google found that its best people were not Ivy League graduates, but rather people who had experienced a big loss in their lives and had emerged from it transformed. According to Google, deep personal loss has resulted in employees who are more humble and open to listening and learning. And I think this actually applies to all of us, not just the people we hire. But when we go through shit, something shifts within us. I believe that the universe is benevolent, and I believe that what we often see as pain or struggle is often the universe's way of waking us up to something that is our true potential or a path that we really need to go on. Sam.