Where Mindvalley Began Vs. Where We Are Now | Vishen Lakhiani

So I want you to know that there are a couple of myths that we first have to discard. And the myth is, it's not going to work for me. My business is too small, or my country is different, or the culture, you know, in my office, it's just never going to shift. Everything can shift with time. So what I thought I'd show you, because many of you have seen the glossy aspects of Mindvalley, I'm going to show you what those aspects look like. 3, 4, 5, sometimes 10 years before the shift happen. So that idea, it's not going to work for me. Just put that aside for a moment. So when you think about Mindvalley, firstly, we have a remarkable team. That's the team. That's our team photo yesterday. That's the team that puts on a fest. Right? Remarkable team. We put on these massive conferences. Amazing people come from all around the world. Five star resort, Incredible speakers like Jay Shetty and Ben Greenfield. But if you go back 15 years ago, in 2003, that was me running my seminar business. I was in New York. You can see I could barely afford pants. The table and chair that I'm working on, I basically salvaged from the street because, you know, beautiful thing about New York neighborhoods, I lived in Hell's Kitchen. From that name itself, you can tell what the neighborhood is like. Hell's Kitchen people, when they were done with furniture, they'd just put them out on the street side. And then other friendly neighbors would adopt that furniture. So that is an IKEA table. It's called the Lack table. L, A, C, K. Even the name of the table symbolizes a lack of abundance. I kid you not. That table is actually called the Lack. L, A, C, K. Go Sweden. The chair, likewise. I found it on the street. And what I was doing back then is I was teaching meditation classes. So I would teach one class every month to around 20 to 30 people. That was it. I did that for five years. Five years. There was no idea of what a fest would eventually be, but that's where it started. And it was just me and Christina, right? Five years teaching these meditation classes, and in a good weekend, I'll make three grand. That's it. Three grand is nothing in New York. But I loved it. It was passion. And that's the first step. When you love what you do, it's easier to stay with it and continue growing it. Now that is how a fest really started. That is how I actually started becoming a teacher. Now here's another picture. That's our Mindvalley Team today. Remarkable team. 49 different countries represented. And that's just our team in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. By the way, Kuala Lumpur is a developing country. So any of you from the developing country. No damn excuse. You can do this too. That is our team though, in 2005. You can tell how old that picture is from the imac on the desk. You can see. I don't know why we are posing with books and binders. I think maybe it's to make us look more intelligent. This is the hall of Awesomeness. We have our own auditorium in the hottest neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. When a new employee joins, they take what is called an oath of awesomeness on a statue of Wonder Woman. That's the auditorium now. It seats 150 people. We have had world leaders come and visit, but that's the auditorium 10 years ago. You can see that guy is taking an oath of awesomeness on a. It's not even a real wonder. Now we have a custom designed Wonder Woman statue that's basically a souvenir product I brought from a market in Greece and I painted to look like Wonder Woman. You can see our whiteboard and our projector are basically the same thing. And the plant behind my butt has precisely eight leaves. We couldn't afford a plant with more than eight leaves. So again, you gotta start somewhere, right? That is our office. Our offices win awards. They are beautiful pieces of interior design. That's our office that we opened up in 2012, inspired by Jules Verne and Steampunk. But that's our office in 2005, just seven years earlier. It's like you can see that poor lady is using a couch as her chair and her chair as her table. I don't know what was going on there. Maybe lack of tables, lack of chairs. Maybe we just didn't know the proper way. It worked then. That's a Christmas card we sent our authors in 2012. That was the Christmas card in 2003. I had no one on the team, so I adopted a dog from Australia and a cat that we got from a shelter in New York dressed them up. My cat still hasn't forgiven me. And that was the Christmas card. That's our kitchen and our diner, right? Beautiful space where people come and cook together and make healthy Alka Geyser shakes together. Our diner back in 2005 was basically that table with the best three in one coffee in packets that you can buy from Nestle. Amazing stuff. So what I'm trying to get at is that we all start somewhere and being sucky and being small is okay, because as long as you have a mind that's focused on where you want to get to, you will start evolving. And the problem with most businesses and most entrepreneurs is that they are so obsessed with the current reality that they forget to dream, they forget to think, they forget to create these visions that pull them and their team forward.