The Most Important Thing In Life - A Revelation From My Yoda | Vishen Lakhiani

There's this guy I know whom I call my Yoda with an Indian accent. Now you may find that funny, right? This guy, Sri Kumar Rao, he is this brilliant teacher who teaches at many of the world's best business schools. Columbia, London business school, Kellogg. And what's fascinating about him is he's changing the way MBAs see business. Sri Kumar Rao and I became friends when I first had him speak at a fest some seven years ago. And since then, he will mysteriously pop into my life. I will bump into him in like the weirdest situations. And he will always come to me and say something really, really, really profound. I feel like Luke learning from Yoda whenever I'm in his presence. So recently this is what happened, right? We were at Mindvalley reunion. Sri Kumar was one of our speakers. Massive audience, like 800 people. I was at the back of the room working on my slides for my upcoming speech. Sri Kumar was about to get on stage. But before he was going on stage, he. He came to me and he said, vishen, I need to talk to you. Now you got to imagine him saying this like in a thick Indian accent, right? And I said, srikumar, anything wrong? And he goes, vishen, we have to change the way business schools are teaching their students. You guys have to help me change the way we are training our MBAs. And I say, what do you mean? We can't compete with Stanford, we can't compete with Harvard. And. And he goes, but they are missing the point. So I ask him, what is the point? And he says, this is the point. We lose ourselves in our business. We think that we are our job. We are the manager, we are the CEO, we are the entrepreneur. We make our business, we make our career the most important thing in our life. That is not the point. And I said, so what is the most important, the most in your life? And he says, let me explain it this way. See, we are all living in a matrix. And this matrix isn't a matrix created by some alien civilization. This matrix is created by our human rule book, by the models of life. The rules that are indoctrinated in us. But all of this is artificial. It's rubbish. It isn't real. But we lose ourselves so much that we think we are the CEO, we are the manager, we are the worker in company X. That is what defined us. That is not our natural state. I asked him, what is our natural state? He said, remember when you first fall in love and everything in life seems more lit up, everything is more colorful. That is the natural state. We forget that. Now. Here's the thing. He says, we have to understand that the most important thing in life is one thing. I ask him, what is that one thing? And he says, that one thing is not your business. You can be the owner of a billion dollar company. That is not the most important thing in your life, nor is it your children, nor is it your family. These are not the most important thing. The most important thing, the one thing is your personal growth. It's how you're evolving as a human being, how you're evolving as a soul. And he goes on to say, and the most important part of that personal growth is your spiritual growth. Everything else is nothing more than a vehicle for your personal growth. Your business is not the most important thing. Focus on your personal growth. Your business is the best vehicle to facilitate that growth. Your business takes off. If you're growing, that's good. Your business fails if you're growing, that's good. Your marriage is a vehicle for your personal growth. Your family is a vehicle for your personal growth. Everything should be about that one thing. Your personal growth. And he said, this is what schools need to teach people. Because we are teaching people to forget who they are, to forget their spiritual identity. We're making them believe that they are an MBA or they are a business owner or they are going to be an executive in a company. All of this is, is trapping people in a matrix. Focus on the one thing. This was a really, really, really interesting idea for me. I've always kind of subtly believed that, that Raoul drilled it in me in a really powerful way. Today, the way I think about my business, the way I think about my life is very, very, very different. I'm a CEO second. I'm a father second. I'm a husband second. The number one thing to me is my rate of personal growth. Everything else I know is gonna be okay as long as I'm constantly growing myself. If Srikumar Rao's ideas resonate with you, I invite you to join me on a master class. Sri Kumar Rao has a beautiful program with mindvalley. It's called the Quest for Personal Mastery. It's one of those remarkable programs on our Quest app. And why I brought Sri Kumar onto mindvalley is because when he teaches at all of these business schools, his classes have become so popular. There is a line to get in. And not only that, he gave a talk once on happiness and ted. The TED organization was so blown away with his talk, even though the talk was not in a TED stage, that they took that talk and they put it on Ted.com. how cool is that? And for those of you who are interested in learning more for Sri Kumar, I'm inviting you to join me on a special one hour masterclass that I filmed in New York City where I came together with Srikumar Rao and I asked him to go deep and his philosophy for helping us gain personal mastery. We're going to focus on a very interesting idea in this masterclass, and that is the idea of being absolutely resilient to everything that life is going to toss at you. Because when you can develop the skill, life becomes so much easier and you're ready for it, no matter what happens. And you'll also get a taste of Sri Kumar Rao's incredible wisdom, his wit, and maybe you'll see why I call him my Yoda with an Indian accent. The link to enroll in this masterclass is above this video.