Vishen Lakhiani spent a decade failing as an entrepreneur, facing homelessness and a car accident, before finding success around age 38. He argues that stepping outside cultural expectations, surviving hard experience, and years of experimentation are what eventually create an edge.
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Elon Musk once said, entrepreneurship is like crawling into a dark abyss and chewing glass. I don't think it was that bad, but it still was. Ten years of insecurity, of self doubt, of seeing your first company fail, then your second company fail, of being in a car accident, not having enough insurance, of being literally homeless because I couldn't pay rent, of so many. So much shit. Yeah, I remember things start taking off, but you got to go through that sometimes, right? Success. Not everyone is going to be Mark Zuckerberg. Not everyone is going to find success at 25. You know, a study showed that most people finally figure it out. Can you guess at what age? 38. I was going to say 40. 38. 38 is when it starts making sense. Wow. Why is that? Do you believe that a lot of it does? Because I know you talk about the culturescape, but it's a lot of this conditioning. So I believe that it's all a plot. I believe that all the shit we go through in life, every. Everything that breaks us down, everything that abuses us, every damn failure is there to instill in us a value. For that 10 years. I always felt like I was behind all my other friends who had the successful jobs, who were climbing up the corporate ladder. Now what tends to happen is when you are able to step away from what I call the culturescape, which is the preset notion of rules and society's beliefs and rituals on how we need to function in life. What often happens is that your acceleration may be a little bit slower, but in that time, in that journey in the wilderness, you might find that thing that clicks. And when you find that thing that clicks and you find the thing that's different from everyone else, you now have an edge because you're different. And that edge could take you really, really, really far. So for that 10 years, from 1998 to 2008, I was way behind almost everyone I graduated with in 2008, because I'd had 10 years of experimenting as an entrepreneur. First company failed. Second company failed. Third company failed. In 2008, something clicked, and then, boom, everything took off. But it took 10 years for that rocket ship to take off. It didn't happen overnight. And I think that's the main lesson over here, right, Sam?
