Vishen Lakhiani: ...The Secret Spiritual Art Of Success

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Welcome to no Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

And we are so very excited to welcome author and entrepreneur Vishen Lakhiani to our show today. He's the founder and CEO of mindvalley, a personal growth education empire, which is the world's leading online personal growth education company with over 2 million students.

Vishen is also a New York Times best selling author whose latest book is called the Buddha and the Badass the Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work. Vishen, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

You say we all have a Buddha and a badass within ourselves and we need to awaken them, tell us more about what they are and why we need to wake them up.

Well, firstly, really good question. Now let me first explain what I mean by that. So the book is called the Buddha and the Badass. It's a follow up to my first book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. Now when you ask most people, do you believe in a soul? Everyone goes, yes. I've yet to meet someone who says, I do not believe that we have a soul. There's a famous quote by C.S. lewis which I think most people agree with and it says, you do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body. Okay, now almost everyone I ask agrees with that. And Mindvalley has not 2 million now, but 12 million students in every area from biohack to mind, to performance to work. And no matter in what area I speak to our students, everybody believes that we are primarily a soul having a human experience. Yet when we show up at work, we completely choose to ignore that. We choose to fall back to an industrial age era model of work which suggests that we are simply meat and flesh bodies getting a job done, cogs in the wheels of industry to produce a product or a service. Now what if that is completely untrue? What if you can bring your soul to work? What would happen if you hired the Buddha as an engineer or a doctor or an entrepreneur? What if Siddhartha Gautama Buddha or Paramahansa Yogananda were actual entrepreneurs? What would they build? How would they show up at work? That's what I'M attempting to answer here because here's the thing. We're all made of the same stuff. The consciousness that flow through mystics like Buddha or Yogananda or St Francis of Assisi, it flows through us, too. We simply have to learn how to tap into it. Now, the book looks at how to bring these abilities out into the modern world of work. And I want to add a caveat here. I don't talk about meditation. I don't talk about mantras or spirituality or any of that stuff. It's actually really practical. What I'm looking at are actual practices in business, in work, that acknowledge the existence of souls and invite you to gently bring your soul into your 9 to 5.

I feel like that must be different right now with everything going on with COVID 19 and people being thrown into this remote workplace and not really being in their regular routine. Talk a little bit about that.

Absolutely. So one of the biggest things that's happening in the world right now is that we've gone through a massive disruption in our way of life, and the world is never going to be the same again. Even if we do magically find a vaccine for COVID 19 in the next 12 months, people's behaviors are going to change, people's attitudes are going to change, the way of work is going to change. And there are people who are merely trying to survive during this time, and there are people who are deciding, okay, look, I know it really freaking sucks, but I want to use this moment to grow, to learn, to transform, to see what lessons I can get from this disaster. So now we come to one of the first lessons from the Buddha and the Badass. And it's the lesson of Kensho versus Satori. I like to credit the authors who provided these lessons, and this one comes from the Reverend Michael Beckwith of the Agape Spiritual center in Los Angeles. Michael Beckwith and I were having a conversation once, and he said that, look, we can grow through insight or we can grow through suffering. Most people choose to grow through suffering. So you end up sick, you end up in hospital, and you decide, you know what? I'm going to change my eating habits, I'm going to start exercising more. Or you have someone break your heart and you decide, you know, I'm going to be more conscious and aware of who I choose to fall in love with. Or you fail at a business and you decide, you know, I'm going to learn actual business skills before I attempt to launch my next startup, that is Kensho, or Growth through suffering. But you can also Grow through satori. This is the way the Buddha grows. Satori is, in essence, growth through insight. This is where you are listening to your intuition. You have a contemplative or a meditative practice where you are listening, analyzing, journaling, and you are seeing insights flow through you. And these insights are guiding you into growth. Now, these insights actually come not from your brain. I mean, they sometimes come from your brain, but often I believe they are coming from your soul itself. It's an intuitive impulse. It's a gut feeling. It's something prodding, pushing, moving you along, almost like an internal compass helping point you in the direction of your growth. Now, the Buddha chooses to grow through satori. The ordinary person is stubborn and chooses to grind and continue running on the hamster wheel until they get so complacent that their soul is forced to cause them pain or cause them a form of suffering. So they wake up and grow. And so very often, your suffering is not really there because it needs to be. It's there because your soul is so fed up with you not listening to it, it chooses to break something. Your suffering can be the breadcrumbs that lead you to your mission, that lead you to the next greatest unfolding of who you want to be. So again, key lesson from the Buddha and the badass is learn to grow through satori, through insight, through reflection, through meditation, through listening to your soul. Now, that brings us to where we are today. Now, I believe in the concept of a benevolent universe. The benevolent universe idea comes from Professor Sri Kumar Rao. He's another mindvalley author. Sri Kumar Rao says the healthiest belief we can have is that we are in a benevolent universe, that the universe has our back, that it's phenomenally good and blessed, and every lesson that we go through is merely meant to make us a better version of ourselves. When you unify both these ideas together, the benevolent universe, the idea of pain being a facilitator of growth, you got to ask yourself, with COVID 19, is there a lesson here? What am I going to learn from this? What is the human species going to learn from this? And I think this is going to transform the world forever, but I think it's going to transform the world for good. Now the question is, is it going to transform you for good? What changes are you going to make in your life? What are you going to do differently? And that's why I'm actually not dreading what's going on right now. I'm embracing it. And again, it's horrible what many people are going through. People are losing their jobs and so on, and that's definitely a bad thing. But even then, even in the midst of losing your job, and I've lost my job five times in the last 20 years, there's the seed of possibility. But it's all on how you choose to see and act in a situation in which you have no other form of control.

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So the first thing I want you to understand is I want you to adopt the model, the mental model, that you are living in a benevolent universe, that this is happening for your own good. You see, the first time I lost my job was in 1998. I was fired from Microsoft. I got a job at Microsoft after studying computer engineering and deciding that I wanted to work at what was then the greatest technology company in the world. This was the late 90s. I worked my butt off for five, five years to fulfill what I later realized was not really my goal. It was a societal goal. It was a cultural goal. It was a goal that many immigrant, young immigrants have, which is be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. And so I ended up working for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. And 11 weeks into the job, I realized I hated it. It just wasn't my thing. Microsoft was a great company, but it wasn't for me. And so I got myself fired. And when I got myself fired, that led me to find. It was painful, it was fearful. I had no idea what my life was going to be. True. I ended up working for below poverty wages for a nonprofit in New York, living in a crummy apartment. Nothing compared to the gorgeous apartment Microsoft provided me in Seattle. But through that crummy job, I discovered the seeds that would later become mind value, the seeds that would later make me a New York Times bestselling writer. I met the woman who I would later marry. You see, suffering led to this great discovery. And so when you go through suffering, even if you've lost your job, yes, it fucking sucks. That can open up there. And your job is to embrace it and not beat yourself up over it, but stay open to what can happen next and to know that you're safe and you're protected. That's the first thing. Now, the second thing is to understand this. So the first thing is to know that a door has just opened. The second thing is to understand this. You're safe. There was a famous interview that Elon Musk gave to Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Neil's podcast, right? And Elon Musk shared this story. And it's a beautiful story. Elon Musk said this. He said there was a time when he was a college kid and he decided to see if he could survive on a dollar a day. And he did. Right? He was living in the dormitory, so that was fine. And he could go to Walmart or Myers and buy for a dollar, ramen noodles and water. And he could survive in ramen noodles and water for 30 days. Now, I'm not saying it's a healthy way to live. But he could survive on a dollar a day. And he said in that interview something really, really powerful. He said, when I learned that I was safe, that gave me the boldness and courage to do all the other things I did. Now think about what that says about you. Yes, losing your job can suck. Losing your company can suck. Being in this unpredictable time can suck. Having to walk around wearing a mask can suck. But you're safe. You are not a Syrian refugee in a bombed out city of Homs with a military out to kill you. You are safe. We can survive on a dollar or two dollars a day. And now that you know that you're safe, when you calm your mind, when you understand that the universe is watching out for you, when you understand that you're safe, now you got to go to step three. And step three is to decide how you're going to unfold and what are you going to create next in your life. And step three can further be broken down into multiple steps.

Let's break it down a little bit more because you're going to have a lot of people who have ideas during this, but they're going to have no idea where to start. Especially because funding isn't readily available. So many people are struggling.

So the first thing is this, right? I realized in my entrepreneurial career, after multiple companies I started failed and failed and failed. And yet everyone thought that was crazy. So I never got any funding. To this day, Mindvalley, we're approaching 100 million in revenue with zero funding. Wow. It took us 16 years, but I had to bootstrap everything because everyone thought I was fucking insane when I said I wanted to build a company that was going to be an engine for human consciousness. So firstly, know this, if people think you're insane, that could actually be an advantage. So don't worry about what other people think. But this is what you got to do. This is what you have to do. You must first identify your soul print. And this is the opening chapter of the Buddha and the badass know your soul print. Let me explain to you what a soul print is. I believe that all of us, just like we have a unique fingerprint, we have a soul print. A soul print is the reason that your soul choose to be born in your body to your parents on this planet. It's the reason your soul choose to have any sucky or horrible experiences you had. It's the reason your soul choose to be in your city, to go to the university you went to, to be with the man or woman that you are with or were once with. All of these define the unique elements of you. But that soul print I believe. I believe that all our souls are here for three reasons. The first reason is for experiences. The second reason is to grow. The third reason is to contribute. You want to think about your life and try to look for patterns in your soul print that might give you a nuance, an idea of how you are meant to contribute to the planet. And when you figure this out, what will happen is that you will be blessed by remarkable luck because you are building a business, finding a job, doing a craft, coding an app that is aligned with what your soul sought to do. Now, in my case, I noticed something really odd about my entrepreneurial journey. In 2003, when I first started Mindvalley. Mindvalley wasn't a personal growth company. We were actually a venture builder. I had a really smart business partner. I started hiring great engineers and we started building many different products. We built a social bookmarking engine that we later sold for a lot of money. We built an early version of Instagram. I built an intelligent blog where you could decide who would be able to read what post so you could write posts on your blog just for your mom or just for your girlfriend. I built all of these different technologies. And the funny thing is, all of them would fail. They were all genius ideas, but they would fail. But every time I did something in personal growth, it would be a ridiculous success. I remember one of my engineers coming to me and going, how the hell are we making money? No one is buying our great technology, but everyone is buying our personal growth stuff. The meditation CDs on that random meditation site that you built as a hobby. And after eight years of stubbornly trying to build technology, I realized, what am I doing? My soul is telling me something. I need to be in personal growth. So I decided to start focusing on personal growth and everything, guys, everything started clicking. The business started booming. My book became the number one book in the world on Amazon. My company BMW up to 200 employees. I became wealthy beyond my wildest dreams when I focused on my soul print. And I begin as I put everything together, to see why I went through the things I went through in life. They were all guiding me towards this soul print. For example, when I was a kid, I suffered from skin disease. I had a really bad case of acne in school. The other kids would make fun of me. Never had a girlfriend. I grew up believing I was ugly because my skin was so, so bad. But when I was 17. I picked up a book on creative visualization. And I taught myself how to apply creative visualization to heal my skin, right? To actually heal my skin. Now, that book was called the Silva Method. And I didn't know it back then, but that book would play a major impact in my life. So I healed my skin. In five weeks, my skin transformed. And this gave me faith on how much my mind could be applied to shift the world. I realized today that five years of bad skin was part of my soul print. It was my soul putting me on the right path to discover personal growth, to discover creative visualization in 2016. Now, the author of that book, Jose Silva, he passed away in 1999. In 2016, his children asked me to be the new face of the Silva Method. And actually, officially yesterday, Yesterday, as in May 4, 2020, I launched the new Silva Method program with me as the teacher. Now think about that, right? The story between me as a 14 year old with bad skin, to me now as a 44 year old, that is 30 years, 30 years in the making. But that bad skin led to me being the new face of the Silva Method. It led to me discovering the powers of the mind. It led to me now teaching this to millions of people. Would I go back and change my timeline and never have bad skin? No. That bad skin was a gift. That bad skin was a kensho moment that led me to my soul print. Now, the lesson here is this. Your pain, your suffering can be breadcrumbs towards you finding your mission. You need to embrace that. You could have gone through ridiculous abuse as a kid. What if part of your mission is to. Is to flip that around to help create a kinder, more compassionate world. So you form or you create a company on parenting, or you create a software company, but you create a protocol in that company or a culture in that company around human support and kindness. So the thing is, and this is the nuance of step three, you need to analyze your life. You need to understand why you went through the experiences you got through. And this will point you in the right direction. Now you can break down the soul print model into a really detailed process. It's in the book. And we wouldn't have time to go through it over here, but when I did the soul print exercise, it shone a light on the projects I should be working on. It shone a light on what I need to be focused on and how I need to show up in the world. And that is step three. Identify your soul print. Know the values that came to you through the suffering of your past.

How important is it for us to surround ourselves with people who inspire us when we're on this journey?

Well, there's a common saying that says that you are the sum of the five people closest to you, right? So I don't think you need to be with people who inspire you. You need to be with people who are. People who, you know, they have some element that you want to emulate. They don't have to always inspire you. I think that's a false idea because you could be with someone right now who's going through some pain. They're not inspiring you, but they can still provide you a gift. In you being able to soothe or heal that pain, you might inspire yourself. You might discover something new about you. So I don't want to say that we need to always be with people who inspire us. We need to be with people who we love, people who we care about, people who have something where they can serve to help us grow. And that something, again, could be the actual of us serving them.

But what about the dangers of surrounding ourselves with people who are negative or who are pulling us down?

That's not a danger. Look, if you are fully well formed, if you have good boundaries, being with someone who's negative or pulling you down is like getting in a boxing ring and learning to toughen up and learning to basically become a stronger version of yourself. So that's a really important nuance. Our job. When you show up as the Buddha at work, you don't shy away from the negative. You heal the negative. Professor Sri Kumar Rao. And I'm mentioning his name for the second time right now because he's a mentor. He's probably one of the guys that I quote a lot in the book. And he's a mindvalley author. He's also an MBA professor. He says one of the best, best practices we can have in life is when we show up in the world. Let's say we go to a restaurant and the waiter is rude to us. We turn it into a game. We tell ourselves, this guy is rude. He's probably had a bad day. Maybe he had a fight with his wife. Maybe. Maybe, you know, his boss just yelled at him. But let's not blame him. Let's play a game. How can I make him smile? Now? When you flip that around, you give yourself incredible power. And so, no, I don't shy away from negative people. I want to brighten up their day. And I encourage everyone to be able to do the same.

You recently talked about using the 1% rule to improve ourselves every day. And I mean, it's always needed, but especially right now. So can you share that with people?

The 1% rule is not my idea. It comes from James Clear. So my gift folks, I do create a lot of my own principles and ideas, but because I run the leading personal growth company in the world and I publish some 200 authors, I'm the great integrator. I integrate ideas from everyone and I always make sure that person is credited and cited. Which is why it's so important for me to say that the 1% rule comes from James Clear, who wrote a remarkable book called Atomic Habits. And what he said is that if you just get 1% better every day and at whatever you do, at the end of one year, you've basically, here, I got to do something.

I mean, amazing what you can do in one year.

At the end of one year, you've just completely transformed your life. So don't think that you have to grow by leaps and bounds. Just get 1% better every day. And 1% better in wisdom could be reading three pages of a really good spiritual book. 1% better as an entrepreneur could be every single day learning a new skill in just 15 or 20 minutes. But 1% better over time really adds up.

I feel like so many times we devote ourselves to learning, whether It's Mindvalley or YouTube videos, and we're really studying and we're trying to get 1% better every day. But say we aren't growing our business or our bank account. Why doesn't time spent educating ourselves if we're really working hard? Why doesn't that always translate into a bigger bottom line here?

I'm going to say something that is not directly proven by science, right? But I believe it because I've noticed this as an entrepreneur and many great mentors of mine have said the same thing. If you are looking to grow in your career or start a business, the limiting factor is not marketing, it is not strategy, it is not your product. All of that will come if you fix your mindset. The limiting factor is your mindset. Your beliefs about yourself, your beliefs about growth, your beliefs about money and wealth and impact and making a contribution to the planet. Fix your mindset first. So personal growth. Personal growth is the most important thing. And obviously I'm biased, right? Like, I run the world's leading personal growth company, so I'm obviously biased. But the reason I decided to go in this field is because mindset matters. When you fix that mindset, everything can transform for you. In 2008, I found myself in a situation where Mindvalley, which again back then was dabbling in a lot of different things. We were making a quarter million dollars a month, but we were losing $20,000 a month. And our bank balance was getting lower and lower and lower. I had 18 employees, and I knew that if I didn't do something about it, I was going to have to lay people off. And it was a crazy, bad time. And to make matters worse, I just become a father. So my son Hayden was like a year old, and I felt like a failure. Part of me wanted to spend more time with Hayden. Part of me knew that I needed to also dedicate time to the business because we were failing miserably. Now, what happened was really interesting. I sank into a depression. So this is classic, classic Kensho moment. Sank into a depression. And I knew that one of the ways to get me out of depression was to just read, study, go into spirituality. So I remember flying to San Diego. I took a class by a spiritual teacher called Esther Hicks. I poured myself into books by Neale Donald Walsh, who wrote the Conversations with God book series. I attended a seminar by T. Harf Ecker called the Millionaire Mind Intensive. I embraced myself in personal growth, and something really curious happened. Within one month, I came out of that funk, and I started realizing that it was my belief system towards money that I had to shift. I realized that I had developed really bad beliefs around money. Now, the world back then, just like today 2008, was going through a recession, right? Jobs were being cut, people were being laid off. And I realized that from my family, from my culture, I'd come to believe that you must work hard for money. And that if you did not work hard, money would not come. Now I just become a father. So I cut back a little bit on working hours. And in my mind, this belief had started to take hold. You stop working hard, you're working an hour less today, you will not be successful. And that translated to the company just not growing and bleeding money. Now, I remember being in that seminar room with Harv Eker when he was talking about mindsets and beliefs around money and how they impact our reality. And he said something that made me cry. He said, how many of you here believe that hard work correlates with money? And I raised my hand, and then he went on to completely dismantle that belief. And I realized he was correct. I went back to work and I realized, you know, fuck it, I'm working an hour less. But hard work has nothing to do with the success of my company or the money I make, I'm going to set goals, I'm going to work smarter. I'm going to eliminate this belief from my life. And I did. I started practicing bringing in more spirituality into my business. I became very conscious of my beliefs. Now, in eight months, the company grew 400% in eight months. And that was how the mindvalley that we have today emerged. It was eight months in the middle of a recession in 2008. And it was a remarkable ride. But it all started because I flipped the belief switch in my head. So it's really important to understand this. Back then there was also a recession. Back then I was losing money. Back then I was in the fear of losing my entire company. But if you shift that belief to how am I going to grow? What am I going to embrace? What do I believe about the world? You will find that you have an incredible power over your reality.

Vishen. Our show is called Nobody Told Me. And we always ask our guests, what is your nobody told me lesson? So what is it that nobody told you about life or spirituality or business that you had to learn the hard way and you kind of wish somebody had told you about?

Well, it's really the essence of my book, the Buddha and the Badass. What Nobody told you is that human is not your primary nature, it's your secondary nature. You are a spiritual being playing a game. And when you wake up and you understand the rules, you can really, really, really win at this game. Most of us never bother to read the rule book. We are blindly playing the game. What I seek to do is to make the rulebook apparent to everyone. Love that.

And how can people learn more about you and learn more about the new book?

Well, go to, go to mindvalley.com I'm sure when the book comes out, it'll be on the main page of our.

Website, mindvalley.com and you also have another website, vision.com.

Yeah, that's my personal website. That's where you can learn a little bit more about me. The book is called the Buddha and the Badass. The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work.

And we love it. We absolutely love it and can't wait to see how it transforms lives.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Our sincere thanks again to Vishen Lakhiani, whose latest book is called the Buddha and the the Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work. And again, his website is vishen.com I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens.

You're listening to Nobody told me. Thank you so much for joining us.

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