Use Your Business Growing Pains To Discover Your Soul’s Mission | Vishen Lakhiani

You can be, you know, designing logos for $5 on 99designs. You're an entrepreneur. You can build a billion dollar company, you're an entrepreneur. It's a bullshit term. I discarded that. I discarded the word CEO. And I simply decided to live from those values. Now the shift that happened to me between 2013 and 2016 is I decided to give up all of the ideas I was chasing. I was going through struggle in business and back then I thought I just sucked. But what I realized was that all of this struggle was because I was not listening. I was doing, I was trying to fulfill a checklist. A checklist that I thought was how a CEO had to operate or how a 10 million dollar company had to operate. And what I didn't realize was that my soul was asking me to do something completely different. I had to be something else and then do from that place of being and not do to be. So what happened was the universe put a particular mentor in my life. And the funny thing is this mentor was a 29 year old kid. I was like 39 at that time. 29 year old kid who had actually once worked for me. His name is Amir Ahmad Nasser. A smart kid. He had joined Mindvalley when he was 22, went on to become a talented writer, went on to speak around the world. And Amir developed this process of identifying values. And he led me through an exercise and that is the sheet I came up with. He said, vishen, what are your values? And I read him the Mindvalley code of awesomeness. And he said, no, those are not your values. That's some dumb exercise you did to try to be democratic in the workplace, get everyone 100 employees to share what they think Mindvalley should be. No, what are your values? What are the words that best speak to who you are? So in that left column, okay, he made me write down what I did in the world. I did courses, I did events, I did challenges. Back then, that was the early name for quest. And I did community. And then he said, now what are the values and beliefs that you have in the world? We're going to zoom in, okay? So I wrote down these values. Transformation was a value. Connectedness was a value. Compassion was a value. Growth as a goal, that was something. I believed in humanism. I believed in seeing people as a unified planet earth. I believed in aesthetics. I love design and art. I love having a vision. I believe in happiness. I believe in love and change and constant change. I believe in self directed learning, like deciding how you want to learn. I Believe in questioning the rules. I believe in innovation. I believe in futurism, an optimistic view of the future of mankind. These were the values. And he said, good, but that's too much. What I want you to do is I want you to cluster them. So, as you can see, all the ones. Transformation has a one, Growth has a one. Transcendence has a one. All of these ones, I realize, fall under the idea of transformation, right? So I gave it one word. And then there were these things that were number two. Connectedness, compassion, humanism. This was sort of like seeing people as a whole, right? It was more a world of value around world. Centrism. We put that together and we called it connectedness. Today we call it unity. But then I called it connectedness. And the third one, aesthetics, vision, change, innovation, came from me being an engineer. It was about creating. So we call that vision. And then there was a fourth one, happiness. Sorry, there was a. Yeah, the fourth one, happiness is there. Love is there. That, Amir said, isn't really emerging, okay? So it's not as dominant as the other. So he said, those are your three fundamental values. Now, what happened next was really interesting. I decided to simply forget all of the rules of what it took to be an entrepreneur. I decided that entrepreneur was a bullshit term. I wanted no part in it. You can be designing logos for $5 on 99designs. You're an entrepreneur. You can build a billion dollar company. You're an entrepreneur. It's a bullshit term. I discarded that. I discarded the word CEO, and I simply decided to live from those values. So I would ask myself, okay, am I embodying connectedness in my life? Am I embodying transformation? Am I embodying personal growth, which is a key part of transformation? Am I embodying vision? Am I living my life to build and to create every single day? Those became what I lived from. And the shift that that had on Mindvalley was dramatic. All the pain and suffering stopped. Because what I had inadvertently done was I'd gone deep into my soul. And now I was listening to what my soul wanted. I was being what my soul wanted. And the result was three years of decline and chaos disappeared. And instantly mindvalley took off. It took off so fast that between January to July 2016, we were losing an average of $100,000 a month. Seven months. $700,000 gone. August, we made our first big profit in history, and we made exactly 700,000 in one month. We paid off all of that, and Mindvalley continued to grow and grow and grow. So we're going to go deeper into that later. But this is the exercise that I want you to do. So my four values that emerged from that exercise with our mirror were transformation, envisioning, unity and love. Right. Your values are going to be different, but let me share with you the outcome. So the first thing is we went from three years of pain to. To 50% growth year on year. And now we're approaching 100 million. We'll probably get there in about 18 more months. 50% growth, year on year. The authors that we published in mindvalley were clients. So I sometimes didn't have any type of relationship with the author. I didn't sometimes even like the product that we were publishing. We published a chakra healing product. It was 40% off our list. I never studied it. I never cared about chakra healing. Today. I would never publish something that I don't care about. Our people do all our products. Our authors became our close friends. Like we would party with them, we would hang out with them, our authors. And mindvalley became almost like a tribe in itself. Weird thing, my health transformed. This is me, May 2016. The end of that three years. That was actually an official profile picture. Notice I'm wearing glasses. Notice I'm hunched over. That is me. Two years later, I actually became biologically younger. Like now. I'm talking about actual biological data. My. My body, my body percentage, my fat percentage went from 22% down to 15%, 15 and 14%, which is considered excellent for a 40 year old man. But my hair stopped turning gray. So the gray hair I have right now is leftover from 2016. My hair grew back. I had an emerging bald spot. It disappeared. I actually became younger. I got ripped. All of that happened in a span of two years. By the way, this is after Wildfit. This was literally taken after WildFit. I started WildFit February 2016. So after WildFit, I was significantly slimmer. But I still. You can still see the deep contrast. You can see more hair there. Two years. So this is what I meant by vitality. I told you, when you tap into this, your vitality increases. And my energy went through the roof. Like tiredness just disappeared. Life became super easy. Like I didn't have to struggle anymore. So when you see these entrepreneurship quotes, starting a business, running a business, or even the shit that Elon Musk sometimes says, that's operating at a very base level. And Musk is brilliant, but he exaggerates on the agony and the pain. They're operating at a different level. You can run a massive business and actually not let it break you. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And one more tip. I do a lot of writing. Follow me on Instagram at Vision to get tons of new insights directly on Instagram.