This YouTube conversation (Vishen Lakhiani with another speaker) recounts personal stories of financial collapse (2001 dot-com bust, impact of 9/11), discovery of meditation, and how meditation practices led to rapid career advancement, a five-year period teaching meditation, and building Mindvalley into a business with about $100 million in revenue without external investors. The speakers emphasize meditation skills (equanimity, focus, creativity, visualization) as instrumental in surviving repeated near-failures.
Questions this video answers
2001.
September 11th (9/11).
Four months.
Five years.
An additional 18 months.
Chapters
Being able to go within, being able to train your brain to even go through that level of chaos helped me as an entrepreneur. It started out this way.
I was a former Silicon Valley exec.
I discovered meditation and it completely changed the course of my career.
I was in Silicon Valley during a really horrible time. 2001, the dot com bubble burst.
And then September 11th hit.
I lost my job. I lost all my money. I lost the money I'd borrowed from.
My father to start my company.
I was sleeping on a friend's couch. And I remember I was so broke, I couldn't even fix the brakes on my car.
And I crashed into a minivan carrying two kids. Right? Unfortunately, nothing happened that I was. It was a horrible time. I had to pay for all of that.
And as a result, I couldn't even afford rent.
So it was during this time that.
I stumbled upon meditation. I was googling online for answers. I was trying to figure out why.
My life sucks so bad.
And that practice of meditation that I.
Learned completely shifted me.
I had a job at that point, really low level.
In four months, I went from low level entry level to vice president of sales because I was just so good at my job. As I started bringing in these protocols that I was learning from meditation protocols such as being able to be really peaceful. In Zen, it's called equanimity during stress. So you can focus better, being able to increase your levels of creativity so you have better ideation, being able to visualize your goals and then move towards them.
And so I stayed with the company.
For 18 more months. And then I was thinking, man, this.
Stuff, all the stuff I learned at.
My electrical engineering and computer science degree from the University of Michigan, which I paid maybe a quarter million dollars for in that time's money, was nowhere as useful as this weekend meditation class. So I decided to quit and become a meditation instructor. So I did that for five years.
During that time, I built Mindvalley. Mindvalley became a massive company with about.
100 million in revenue, with no VC funding, no investors, no bank loans. And I attribute it to this practice of meditation, being able to go within, building up mindvalley. There were at least three times I almost lost it all. But being able to go within, being able to train your brain to even go through that level of chaos, help me as an entrepreneur.
