Vishen Lakhiani argues for combining deep spirituality with bold action to fuel real-world impact. He describes two techniques: self-fueled goals you could meet even homeless, and "bowl goals" where half your targets have a 50/50 shot at failure to encourage moonshots like Elon Musk's $1/day college experiment.
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By making it a stated goal to have goals that have a 50% chance of failure, you unlock yourself to really dream big. Being dedicated to your personal growth is amazing. But how many people do we know who have great bodies or who spend so much time meditating, but they are broke, they are not contributing to the world. And especially true with many spiritual people. I believe the point of spirituality is not just to go within, it's to go into introspection so we can emerge and actually shake up the world. I call it the unification of the Buddha and the badass. You want to merge both. The world doesn't need more Buddhas. The world needs Buddhas who are badasses. Ken Wilbur in his famous essay Egolessness, said, the great spiritual saints and sages of the world, from Moses to Padmasambhava to Jesus, were not feeble minded milk toes. They were movers and shakers. From bullwhips in the temple to subduing entire continents, they rattled the world with the force of their ego. So as you embrace personal growth, it doesn't remove you from the world. If you do that is not personal growth. That's probably a cult. You want to embrace personal growth where you worship the Buddha, you go within, but you use the insight, the satori moments, the intuition from that to get out there and fucking shake up the world. Agree? So this gives us rule number two. Dream big. And when you dream big, the problems become small. Too many people in the world are worried about stupid small shit. The guy who didn't text them back, for example. But when you dream big, what happens is the little stuff doesn't matter because you have something far, far, far greater. Michael Beckwith said this is the difference between needing motivation, needing to be pushed towards a vision, or having a vision for your life that's so big that it pulls you. He says when you get it right, motivation is bunk. You do not need to attend motivational seminars because you are pulled by a vision. You do not need to be pushed to get there. Agree? So when you dream big, your problems become small. Which is why what I try to do in my life is always try to dream bigger and bigger. And after a fest became successful, we decided to try Mindvalley University, for example. You gotta keep your mind focused on bigger and bigger things, so you gotta be happy and grateful. All of that is great, but you gotta keep envisioning a better vision for yourself. So here's the toolkit. Now, interestingly enough, the toolkit to being able to take on bold goals starts with having small goals. Elon Musk gave a really famous interview to Neil Degrasse Tyson, the famous physicist. And Neil asked Elon, how do you have the cajones to go out there and start Tesla and SpaceX and PayPal and tackle all of these big things? And Elon Musk said, when I was a college kid in America, I decided to do an experiment. I decided to see if I could live on $1 a day. And he found out he could. He could go to Walmart, buy Ramen noodles for like 50 cents a package in bulk and live on a dollar a day. He was living in a student dorm so he didn't have to pay rent. And he said that gave me the sense of safety that I could do bigger things. When I knew my survival was guaranteed, I was able to think really big. So many of us have irrational fears that come from evolution as pre humans and the savannas. But when we understand that the world is ultimately safe, we give ourselves liberty to do big things. So the technique here, and this is what I implemented, is something called self fueled goals. So you have big goals? Yes. But as a baseline you have goals so simple that you can activate them instantly. The definition of a self fuel goal is this. If everyone you knew in your life abandoned you and you had no one and you were homeless in the streets of New York with no money, could you still hit these goals? Let's look at them. Why am I always surrounded by love? Notice these goals are worded as lofty questions. When you truly understand love, you find that love comes from within. The ultimate love is love of yourself. Agree. Now you can be homeless. You can have no one around you. But if you know that you can activate love within, that goal is activated. The second thing is, why am I always learning and growing? Learning is free. These days you can be homeless in the streets of New York. You can still go to the public library and check out a book. It's free now. The third one is why is the universe always unfolding for me in the most amazing way? If you're homeless in the streets of New York, take a walk down Central Park. You can still do that. It's free. And you will be gifted with the most amazing nature and scenery you can imagine. That is the universe unfolding for you. So when you understand. When I started to understand that I could be homeless on the streets of New York, all neediness disappeared. All fears disappeared. The idea that I might lose my company disappeared. It just didn't matter anymore because I knew I was safe on planet Earth. And so the Trick to big goals starts with the little goals. And when you know that the little things, the self fuel goals are there, you can think big. But that's just step one. So in my three most important questions under experiences, growth and contribution, there are little goals, but they're also big goals. But the little goals, they're the foundation. You got to have both. Too many people forget these little goals. Write them down. Think about what are the little things you want in life. Maybe it's to always love yourself. Maybe it's to always feel connected to source, maybe it's to always appreciate your body. You can start on these immediately. But now you need what I call the bowl goals. Now for the bowl goals. What we implemented in Mindvalley was actually a secret we learned from Google and it's called the Google Goals technique. Larry Page invented this really simple. This is a great thing to do in your business. 50% of your goals should have a 50% chance of failure. So literally it means if you're using okrs, if you have four or five goals for the year, one to two of your goals should have a 50% chance of failure. If you have ten, if you have say eight goals, four of them or two should have a 50% chance of Failure. That means it's a coin flip. Now when you do this, two things happen. Number one, you truly dream big. And number two, when failure happens, it's okay. That was the whole point. So In Google's culture, 40% of all their corporate goals they fail at their failure rate is 40%. Google failed on Google Buzz. Google failed on Google, but it also gaffed the world. YouTube and Gmail and the Android phone. But by making it a stated goal to have goals that have a 50% chance of failure, you unlock yourself to really dream big and to have moonshots. So this became a really important rule. So at Mindvalley, every department has that, the company has that, and soon every individual is going to have that. 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.
