The $1 BILLION Vision Note: How Vishen Lakhiani Created Mindvalley from His Couch

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Welcome to Empire Builders, the place for entrepreneurs, business owners and experts who want to build an epic empire. I'm Nick James and thanks for joining me here today.

Hey.

Hey, how you doing? Nick James. Here today I'm excited to be joined by founder of Mind Valley and headline speaker for expert empires 2025 vision, Lakani. How you doing?

Thank you, Nick. I'm doing good.

Good. I'm so excited. I know our community is super excited. Tickets are nearly sold out. This is going to be. I always say this, but it's going to be the biggest and best Expert Empires event we've ever run. And I. I'm just. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm really excited about diving in and. And getting to know a little bit more about you and about Mind Valley. So I got a question to start off with. When you started Mind Valley, did you ever envision that it'd be this big?

Yes, absolutely. But. But I didn't know it was going to be Mind Valley. So can I tell you a really funny story? Are you a Jim Carrey fan?

A Jim Carrey fan? Of course. Everyone is.

Everyone's a Jim Carrey fan, right? The guy is an absolute like, like, comedic genius. But in 1995, so I was still in high school back then. I see this video of Jim Carrey and he's on Oprah, I think it was Oprah. And he does this. This exercise where he writes a check to himself and it's a check for $20 million. And he's a broke comedian at that point. He's sleeping in cars. But that check becomes his forward vision. So I decided to do that exercise. So that same year, I'm leaving to go study in America. So it's my first year of being a freshman in America. And what I do is I write the check to myself. Except I. I twisted the idea a little bit. Rather than write 20 million to myself, I put down, I want to be able to give a billion dollars worth of value to the world. So I put that check in my wallet and I had it there for many, many, many years until my wallet got stolen. But that drive is. But I was so sure this was going to happen. I was convinced that I will not die. Like, I'm not going down in any burning plane or whatever. I'm not going to let myself die until I've given a billion dollars in value to the world. And so I didn't know how I was going to do that. But I believe that Mind Valley is going to deliver on that promise. And so I knew since 1995 that I was going to be up to something that would make a difference. Wow.

You know, what's fascinating to me is I think a lot of people, a lot of people that I meet, a lot of people that come to our events, you know, that they've got the vision, which, right. Was they've got this vision of, you know, helping millions of people making a big impact in the world. And maybe what they've not discovered yet is what the vehicle is to do that.

Yeah.

And so you had that vision in 1995 and then mind Valley became the vehicle. So how did mindvalley become the vehicle for that?

Luck. And, and honestly, just luckily, I think so there's this idea, right, that, that you gotta start a business, go all in, quit everything else and then really dedicate your life to that business. That's not what I did. Mindvalley was a side project. It wasn't even meant to be successful. I was just really into meditation and I built a meditation website selling CDs as an affiliate marketer. But what I found was that doing that outside my day job. So I had a regular day job paying me like, like a decent wage. But doing that outside my day job was really fun because my day job, I, I had one role. I was getting bored of it, I was good at it, but I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. Owning a website. And Again, this was 2002, so it was the era of CDs. I had to teach myself all of these different skills. Copywriting, web design, PHP programming. I. Back then there was no, you know, stripe, so I had to write my own checkout. So I had to teach myself JavaScript coding. And I was loving all of that. And slowly by slowly, I was getting better and better and better. You see, the business, we have this concept of a gym. We go to a gym, we, we. We basically create micro tears in our muscles and we come out stronger. Your vehicle for your greatest growth is your business. Having that little side hustle grew me as a person. The money came as a side effect of that. I got so good at marketing, so good at copywriting, so good at coding that I could take that business for the first years, I know employees and just scale it. And nine months after starting that project, I was able to quit my day job. I was able to quit my day job because I was making enough from my side hustle that I didn't need the safety of that salary. And as soon as I quit and I Went all in my business, guess what? In one month we doubled it. We dubbed, then we doubled it again. And by say we, I meant me and my girlfriend back then. So it was a really, really exciting thing. But the point is this. We all think it's about that direct goal. I didn't set a goal for the business. My goal was what am I going to learn today? And then I would dive in and just teach myself new concepts, new marketing ideas, new aspects of coding. It became a playground for knowled. And I think if you take that approach, whether your business rises, whether your business fails, it doesn't matter. There's a quote by the great MBA professor Sri Kumarao. He said, every MBA needs to understand this, okay? Your business is not your business. Rather your business is the, the greatest vehicle for your growth. If your business succeeds, it doesn't matter. If your business fails, it doesn't matter. The question is, did you grow? When you adopt that idea, what's going to happen is that stress isn't going to touch you because maybe you're not making any money, you're still growing. As long as you put growth first, the money becomes inevitable. The issue is most people flip it around, they put money first. And money is one of the biggest sources of stress, worry and divorce. So you must get your priorities right. Put growth first. Yeah.

What I absolutely love about what you just said is so many people, of course in our community, they're, they're experts, they're coaches, consultants, speakers, authors. They, they have an expertise and often they start the business, they want to help a load of people.

Yeah.

And they're passionate about their methodology, what they're an expert in. But you, you speak about just then, some of the skills that of course I had to learn as well. When I started my business writing copy, I remember trying to painfully trying to learn PHP coding and, and I build a website before it was, before it was as easy as it is now. Drag and drop builders and, and but these skills, you can be the best coach or speaker or you could write the most amazing book, but unless you've got those core business skills, marketing skills, I suppose they are, then it's going to be very difficult to get that out to the world. So for me it's not just about being amazing at what you do, of course that's important, but it's about then learning, developing the business skill skills to be able to take that expertise to the world.

Exactly, exactly. Developing the best and developing those business skills is part of the learning journey. The point is this. We Measure our success as entrepreneurs in terms of our business failing or succeeding. The problem is you can get addicted to a bad idea and you're. Why do you think 19 out of 20 businesses fail in the first five years? The entrepreneur got emotionally attached to a bad idea. Mindvalley wasn't my first idea. My first idea bombed. My second idea died. My third idea was just stupid as heck. Mindvalley was just something I stumbled upon. Never even intended it to be a business. But mindvalley was allowing me to grow, to grow and learn. And your income, your impact in the world will grow to the extent you grow. So find something that can be a playground, that can help you grow. And again, it's you. It's not about the business. The business you can swap it in, you can try many different things, but as long as you're growing, you're going to be good.

What were, what were some of the first benches? I'm fascinated. What were the first venture that bombed? I want to know.

So I, I invented a concept called distributed online communities. It was a way where, you know, if you had a blog on a very niche subject. So back then, blogs were all the rage. This was. Facebook wasn't even around back then. Let's say you had a blog on heavy metal music, right? And you were getting a limited number of users, so there were just a few comments. And there was 10 other blogs on heavy metal music. All those blogs could share a similar community. So these 10 blogs could form a distributed community on that concept, heavy metal music. So I was building this idea and then the dot com bubble burst and I lost everything. I lost the 30 grand I borrowed from my father. It was, it was bad. Really, really, really bad. I was sleeping in a couch for a really long time. I couldn't pay rent, couldn't get the brakes in my car fixed. It was a tough time. But that was one example of an idea that really failed.

And sometimes it's. It can be the right idea at the wrong time, sometimes it's the wrong idea at the right time and it can't kind of work. Even though in theory it shouldn't or logically it shouldn't. I always think that, like, membership businesses are notoriously difficult. There's so many people. You wouldn't believe the amount of people that come to my events or come to me and they're like, hey, I've got this idea for a membership. Build a community where people will pay monthly to subscribe. And like 99 times out of 100, I don't see People making that model work. So, like, how's Mind Valley different? Why has that worked, do you think? What's the secret?

Well, the secret is value is value, right? Like, I mean, you can see. You can go up there and you'll see a lot of authors have membership sites, and you're paying 49 bucks a month for one author. One product. On Mindvalley, it's 49 bucks a month for a hundred authors. And in every category, like, our speed reading program is the best in the world. It's Jim Quick. Right. Our programs on spirituality are the best in the world. And then we buy Legendary. We get the rights to legendary American personal growth programs like WildFit Silver Method. We bring them into the membership. Recently, we added WildFit. WildFit is an $800 product. When you buy it as part of Mindvalley membership, it's just included. Free. Free. Wildfit is one of the best weight loss programs in the world. So there's so much value. That said, there's so much value, sometimes people feel overwhelmed. So right now, a big project is. We're building an AI that guides you. That guides you through it.

Yeah, I. I think it's. It's interesting, and I completely agree with what you said about. It's about value, and I think really, it's about perceived value of the customer rather than what you think is valuable. And a lot of times, you know, I meet people all the time who are going, oh, you know what? What I do is amazing. It can really change people's lives, and it's really valuable. I get it.

But if.

If the customer doesn't, then you're never gonna exactly grow the membership. You're never gonna make the sales. You're never gonna. And I mean your membership, like you've just said, you talk about an $800 course that's included. And I know that's not the only loads. It's almost like the. The value they get is so. It's. It's huge.

It's huge. And everything is world class. I mean, if you go to stories.mindvalley.com we're about to hit 25,000 case studies of students from our app whose lives have completely transformed.

Yeah, I mean, it's phenomenal what you've built. I'm really excited about you coming to Expert Empires, of course, to share some of, you know, some of your thoughts and ideas when it comes to. To mindset and spirituality.

But.

But really about, like, how has this thing called Mind Value so. So amazing, so huge every Time I've said to anyone since we announced you a headliner that I've got vision for mind. Valley people are, oh my God, that's an amazing headliner. They're so excited about it because.

Thank you.

There's just so few people in the world that have been able to build anything like what you've built and a lot of people talk about it and then can't do it. And I think you come in to share how you've done it is, is going to be for the people in the room. It's going to be a life changing experience. So I'm really excited. Yeah.

Thank you.

So 21st, 22nd of May. Access all areas. Tickets sold out. VIP tickets sold out. We've got some general and some elite tickets available. So get yourself over to the expert empires.com website. You can see all the different ticket options there. There'll be a link somewhere around this video, wherever you're watching it, where you can click through. What I will tell you is the, the sooner you buy your ticket, the better deal you're going to get. The more additional bonuses you get, the bigger discount you get on your ticket, the later you leave it. First of all, they'll be sold out anyway and second of all, those bonuses, those discounts are removed. So Vision's also going to be running a private Mastermind session as well for a select group of our clients. There's information about that as well on the website. So get yourself over there and get your ticket booked if you haven't already. If you have, congratulations, you are in for a treat. This is going to be, as I said, it's going to be the best Expert Empires event we've ever run. And I'm really excited Vision to have you.

Thank you, Nick. I love your energy. Can't wait to be there.

Yeah, thank you. I'm really excited to meet you in person. It's someone that virtually so meeting you in person in the room in London. Really excited. Thanks again and see you soon.

Thank you. Take care. Bye.

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