A short talk by Vishen Lakhiani explaining how founders’ personal pain often determines a company’s core values. He gives personal examples—unity, transformation, envisioning—rooted in his experience leaving his country and meditating, and argues that agreed values speed decision-making and build a tribe.
Chapters
You find your values by looking at your life and identifying your past pain. Your values often come from your past pain that you want no one else to suffer. My value of unity came because I was on a fucking watch list and had to leave the country I loved after living there for nine years. That's where unity comes from. That's why mindvalley. When Trump launched a Muslim watch list, we released a whole ton of videos to encourage people to stand up against that. Even though we lost some of our customers, we. You don't mess with our value for unity. It's why we want to help. It's why we want to help create cosmocentrism across the planet. And unity is in every program we do, every author. We bring on mindvalley right now. We look at the author's work, we look at the author's writing, and we ensure that they have that drive for unity. Unity with the planet, unity with the ecology, unity with nations all around the world. Right? We are anti nationalism. That unity drive came from my pain. Why transformation? Because when I was at the lowest point in my life, it was transformation, it was meditation that helped me. Why envisioning? Because I found that I could go from having a small, crappy little office in Kuala Lumpur to mindvalley by constantly holding in my head a vision of what I wanted to experience in the world. And. And I wanted to give that concept of envisioning to everyone who works at mindvalley. Your values come often from the founder's pain. So if you are founding this company, right, identify what is that pain that you went through that you want nobody else in the world to experience if you could protect them and turn those into your values, Maybe you were abused as a child, and so you decide that your value is compassion. You want to create the most compassionate workplace make. Maybe at one point you really wanted to do something you loved, something artistic, something creative. But you were held back by a teacher, by a principal, and you couldn't do that thing that you love. Maybe your value now becomes work that you love. And you ensure that everybody in the company is assigned a task or a job that they truly love. So it doesn't matter what your values are. There is no magic about unity. There's no magic about transformation or envisioning. All that matters is the agreement on the value. Start somewhere. See, it's not the value itself. It's what the value does. And what the value does is it speeds up decision making and it helps create a tribe of people with shared beliefs.
