Vishen: So what I'm gonna talk about next
is one of the underlying ideas behind Awesomeness Fest and the whole idea of mind hacking, hacking
someone's mind so that you really get to grow. It's called the theory of awesomeness. This is a speech that I actually created about
in 2009, in October, 2009. Some of you who were in Bali have already
heard this presentation. You don't have to stay if you wanna go out
and enjoy the beach, you totally can. Some of you who were here last year will already
have heard 50% of this stuff. I modify things every year. I adapt it, I refine it. So if you wanna stay, I would strongly recommend
that. Okay, so anyway, if you need to go out and
enjoy the beach, if you work here at Bali, it's not a problem. Just go on ahead. It's not impolite at all. Let's get started. Now, let's go with the start and how things
started out for me. It was 2003. I mentioned a while ago that I was working
for a dot-com and it grew really massively from 0 to 20 million in two years, but it
went through the craziest stress of my life. I was living in New York. I had a girlfriend who was living in Europe
and it was crazy stressful. I was literally putting on weight. My health was a complete mess. I wasn't exercising. I wasn't meditating and I was making decent
money, but I was just an employee at that time. That is me 10 years ago. Now, you can see I could barely afford to
wear pants. I'm a lot chubbier than I am right now. The chair and the table that I'm working on
was actually stuff that I salvaged from the street. I literally went out a winter stay in New
York. My neighbor had tossed out that chair and
that table and it wasn't even like a fancy table. It was a lack from Ikea, brought that in. I was really, really, really broke. See, what had happened was, I'd taken some
time off to go to Europe to get married, marry my girlfriend. When I came back, my boss in New York said,
"You know, kid, you were gone way too long. I had you replaced." And I said, "What? But I came all the way back." And see, I wasn't an American citizen. If I lost that job, I couldn't stay in the
U.S. He said, "Don't worry, you can keep the visa,
but I'm gonna cut your salary in half." So now I had a wife who was a European, she
couldn't work in New York. I'd just come back and now had a family and
my salary had been cut in half. That was how I started. But as we all know, when shit happens, right,
it kind of gives you a kick in the butt to do something bigger. So I decided I can't work for this company
anymore. Need to start my own thing. Now, I decided to start a little online business
selling meditation CDs. It wasn't even my own stuff. It was simply other stuff that I found on
the internet. I was doing what we now know as affiliate
marketing. That business grew, that business is what
became Mindvalley. It's what spawned Awesomeness Fest. But I want you to know that 10 years ago,
that business, Mindvalley, was founded in that little apartment in Times Square, New
York. That's the Playwright Tavern. It's on 8th Avenue in New York. That is Times Square and I don't mean Disneyland
Times Square like what it is right now. That was hookers and crack Time Square from
10 years ago. See, before I founded Mindvalley, this great
personal development company in that little apartment, that place, two years before I
moved in was a Thai massage parlor, which means Mindvalley was actually founded in a
former whore house, but that's just amongst friends. Now my background, okay, I want you to know
it gets sadder. My background, I was a C+ student. I did study computer engineering at the University
of Michigan. Great school. Unfortunately, I wasn't as great as most of
the other students. My GPA was 2.5. I almost dropped out. When I graduated. The only company that would hire me was a
nonprofit in New York, and I was working for below the poverty line. I tried to start a business. I completely failed, lost everything I had,
and I was $30,000 in the hole. At that point, I was living in Berkeley and
I was so broke, I couldn't afford an apartment, so I was renting a couch from a college student
and it wasn't even a three-seater couch. It was a two-seater couch. So I slept every night with my legs dangling
off the edge. The only job I could get it, it was April,
2001, the bubble in Silicon Valley had just burst. I came to Silicon Valley with big dreams. I thought I was gonna start a dot-com, build
it up, get VC money. Nothing happened. April, 2001 the bubble burst, 14,000 people
were laid off in Silicon Valley, and a lot of those people who were laid off were hell
of a lot smarter and more qualified than I am. So I had no luck at all in getting a job. The only job I could get was a commission
only sales gig. There was a little tech company that was hiring
and they said, "Hey, listen, we'll hire you but we aren't gonna pay you nothing. You close a deal, a technology deal, you get
paid.You don't close a deal, you starve." That's how I started my career. One of the guys I joined the company with,
Jamie Schiller is in the room. Jamie are you here? We are friends from like 10 years ago. That's Jamie. We both joined this company together. I proceeded to then work for that company
and did well until I got married, came back and got demoted and had my salary cut in half. Then I tried to start a business, ended up
30 grand in the hole and that's kind of how things started out for me. But wait, it gets worse. This was shortly after September 11. Somehow I ended up on a terrorism watch list. I don't know how that happened. Maybe it's because I'm brown and unshaven. But technically, what happened was I was put
on a watch list called special registration, which means that I could only leave and enter
the U.S. through certain airports. Now that was fine. I couldn't go through certain airports. So my trips were obviously longer than normal. When I arrived I had to be escorted to a private
room for an interrogation and an interview. And so it always took me like three hours
to come out of an airport. Sometimes my bags would go missing in that
process. But the worst part was this. Every four weeks, I had to report to the U.S.
government. I lived like I was on parole. Every four weeks, I had to go down to the
city center in New York City, wait in this long line, even during winter, a long line
that stretched four blocks to go and get fingerprinted and interviewed and get them my credit card
so they can track all my purchases and see if I bought, you know, anything suspicious
like fertilizer. So, I remember I was standing in this long
line, it was cold, it was approaching winter, it was cold, it was a long line. The guy in front of me was some North Korean
organ smuggler. The guy behind me was some shady looking dude
from Iran. They were nice folks though, but, you know,
I felt I didn't really belong there. And as the line got shorter and shorter and
I came closer and closer and closer to that immigration official, I did everything I could
to be and act American. You know, I wore my Michigan College t-shirt. I had a baseball cap. And I would time it. So just when, like, the North Korean's turn
was about to end so it was my turn, I would turn to the Iranian behind me, put my baseball
cap backwards and go, "Yo, this is wack, dude." It didn't work. I was on that list for five years and that's
when I decided I had to leave America. So, I wanted to settle in the U.S., I wanted
to start Mind Valley in the U.S. We couldn't because of the paranoia that happened
after September 11. As a result, I moved back to Malaysia. Now again, I do believe bad things happen
for good reasons and I'm glad it happened because we ended up starting Mindvalley in
there. But I want you to know that it wasn't an easy
ride. And I started down from like crazy, crazy,
crazy debts. I'm sharing this with you, not because I want
you to think I was some sort of loser, but because I know many of you have probably been
there. You've been beaten down, you've been in shitty
situations. And I wanna know that when things click, massive
rapid transformation happens. Now, five years later, Mindvalley was fully
formed in Malaysia, things were going okay. Today though, let's step forward 10 years. As I said, we're celebrating our 10th birthday
on November 22nd. Today we have a beautiful company. We have tons of amazing products. We are highly profitable. I have an amazing team that comes from all
around the world, over 100 people now work in our office in Kuala Lumpur, 130 if you
count our officers all around the world. And we have an office that according to "Inc
Magazine" was one of the top 10 coolest workplaces in the world in 2012. We have our own auditorium in the city of
Kuala Lumpur which we give free to NGOs in Kuala Lumpur which are sharing entrepreneurship. I have you guys at Awesomeness Fest whom I
get to hang out with every single year. I get to share the stage with inspiring people
like Lisa Nichols, my wife and I get to take beautiful vacations and I have as of 10 days
ago, two kids, Hayden is 6 and Eve is 10 days old. I just got that photo today actually from
my wife who's in Europe. A photographer friend of ours took it. So I feel really blessed right now. But 10 years ago, my life was an absolute
mess. 10 years ago, that was who I was and if any
of you were on a terrorism watch list and had to salvage used furniture from the streets
and had a boss who cut your salary in half, I can totally relate. So the fact is, how did I bounce back so fast? Right? One of the things about me is I am a really
analytical person, maybe it's my computer engineering training. I like to analyze, to tear apart, to put pieces
together, to try to figure out what makes things work the way they work. And so I tried to figure out what was it that
I went through in life that caused that shift. I think I got it. And I think I understand it and I think it's
replicable and it's a model that anyone can learn. I call it the theory of awesomeness and it
starts with a simple observation. It has to do with Starbucks, coffee, and Subway
sandwiches. See, my first year starting my business, right? I started Mindvalley for about $700 and it
took me about $700 before we made our first profit. That first profit was a grand total of $4.50
a day and I remember how psyched I was about that. I remember going out to the bars with my friends
in New York and going, "Dude, I have got this crazy online business. I make $.50 a day. That's a free grande Starbucks Mochaccino." I was proud of that and that continued for
about a month. In month four, the business grew. Now, I was making $5.50 a day. You guys get that means. That means I'm now upgraded to a venti with
whipped cream and hazelnut syrup. That was epic, but it continued growing. By month seven, I was making $12 bucks a day. Now I could get my Starbucks coffee and a
subway sandwich and I was happy. I was ecstatic. My life was wonderful. I would come back from my day job and spend
one to two hours every night building up this little online business and seeing just how
much free junk breakfast food I could score for about a year. But then one day, it got so big, I found out
I could quit my day job. I remember that day I realized that I'd made
$20,000 in profit in my first year running this little business called Mindvalley. And so I called my boss and I said, "I'm gonna
quit. I'm gonna figure out how I wanna be an entrepreneur. And I think I have enough right now to make
a safe leap." And I did that and Mindvalley was born. Now we moved back to Malaysia at that point. That's me and my wife and some of our early
team that's working from little... It looks nice, but really it was a decently
furnished room in the back area of a really grungy warehouse in a downtrodden neighborhood
in Kuala Lumpur. But that's how we started. And the thing is, things didn't go well. The first year was wonderful. The Starbucks and Subway. Yes, absolutely amazing. The business was like a game. Every single day I was trying to see how much
food I could score, but in year two, three, four and five, oh, my God, the stress started
really grinding into me. All of a sudden I have to worry about office
space, and rent, and salaries, and taxes, and growth, and business plans, and all these
other things and work stopped being fun. and as a result, Mindvalley was growing like this
and then it just started kind of stagnating. We went through four years of struggle, year
two to year five, four years of struggle until that month I mentioned earlier, May, 2008
when I calculated, we'd done a quarter million in revenue, but were making a loss of 15,000
and I knew that if something didn't change, within a few months, we were gonna have to
fold. What I didn't tell you is that in May, 2008
I'd had my business for five years, but guess what? I was poorer than I was when I started. I was earning a salary. So as a business entrepreneur, I was paying
myself a salary, but it was less than what I was making in New York five years before. I was still ridiculously in debt. My business partner at that time had a Stanford
MBA and he was in debt. He still had to pay his college loans. We were not making money. A lot of people think if you're an entrepreneur,
you're making money. Not True. You can be an entrepreneur and you can be
flat broke and making less than decently paid employees. That's where we were in year five. If Mindvalley had folded them, I'd go actually
wasted five years of my life building up absolutely nothing and being poorer than if I'd never
started. That was how bad it was. That was what caused me to dive into self-exploration
and personal growth and try to figure out what was this shit going on in my head that
was slowing things down so much. I poured myself into books. I studied with many amazing mentors. Neale Donald Walsch, Esther Hicks, Bob Proctor,
Tony Robbins, Harv Eker. Make some sounds if you guys have studied
these legends, pretty awesome guys, and that's when things started clicking. I started to realize that the fundamental
attribute of being a successful entrepreneur had nothing to do with the right marketing
or strategy or business plans. It all had to do with your models of the world,
your belief systems. In April, 2008 I wrote this. That's the actual piece of paper I photographed. So remember, I was losing money May, April,
and I wrote this in a piece of paper, by June, 2008, Mindvalley does $300K in sales. I knew that that was the magic number. If we could hit that, we could be profitable,
wouldn't have to lay off any staff. It didn't happen in June, but in July, 2008
it happened. We surpassed that magic number $300K but then
things got crazy. It started accelerating. By December, as I invested more in my personal
growth, the company started to grow. It was really weird. It was as if the company and me were inextricably
linked and as I grew, the business grew. In eight months, we grew 400% from a quarter
million a month to a million a month, and that is the Mindvalley that we have today. It only took eight months. The point I'm trying to make is not that I
was some sort of like entrepreneurial genius. The point I'm trying to make is that I fricking
failed for five years until something shifted and when that shift happened, everything changed. And that shift, once you get it, it changes
your life really fast. In fact, the biggest surprise I had was how
rapidly things fell into place once I changed my mindset. That's an actual chart of our growth rate. You can see the first five years very slow
and then boom, we just started exploding. And, in fact, we went from $700 of my own
money, which I used to start the business to $20 million in revenue and a valuation
of over $40 million in the last 10 years, with no investors or VCs or angel money. We took $700 we turned it into $40 million. That's over 65,000 times ROI in 10 years. And to this day, I still own 100% of the company
because when that shift happens, it happened in a dramatic scale. Question is, what changed? What was it? And as I said earlier, I really believe this
shift is replicable and that's what I'd like to share with you guys. So here's the theory I had, right? And again, this is just a theory. As I said, with all belief systems, with all
models, you don't have to accept them. You choose and decide, is this going to serve
you? If you believe this model that I'm about to
share serves you, by all means, accept it, take it into your own life. If you think it's absolute bollocks, you're
free to discard it. But this is what I think happened. Now, I believe that there's a delicate balance
in human existence and if you can find a way to live in this balance, really cool things
happen in your life. The balance is this. It's a balance between being happy in the
now and having a vision of a good future. Happiness right now and a vision for the future. Two things, happiness in the now, a vision
for the future. Sounds simple, right? But actually it's not because based on these
two variables, there are four different states of mind that any of you could be in. You could have no happiness and no vision
for the future. In that case, you are in what we call a negative
spiral. In short, somewhat of a depression. If you're on this case, you probably need
psychological help. It's really, really, really hard to come out
without having support. But there's another state and that's where
you don't have a vision for the future. You don't really know how you're gonna grow
or what you wanna build, but you are happy right now. This should be great, but I don't think it
is. I call it the current reality trap because
it is a trap. Happiness and fulfillment are two completely
different things. Happiness is something you can get from a
good joint. Fulfillment comes from something different. So if you're just happy right now, but you
have no vision of how you wanna grow and how you want to develop and how you wanna serve
the world, or what do you wanna build, you're not really fulfilled are you? If you aren't growing, you're doing a disservice
to your mission and to the world. You've got to dream big, play big, push your
boundaries. In the words of Marianne Williamson, by letting
your light shine, you grant permission for others to do the same and that's why purely
being happy but having no vision for the future isn't the best state to be in. But there is a third state and this is the
state most entrepreneurs are in. We call it stress and anxiety. This is where, watch my hands, you have a
vision for the future, but you're just not happy yet. You have that vision for that new grand office
space you wanna build, that new revenue target you wanna hit, that new product you wanna
get up to market, but your happiness, you've decided happiness will come when I get there. In other words, right now I'm gonna toil and
struggle and stress out, but when I get to those goals, then I'll be happy. Problem is that isn't the optimal state and
most entrepreneurs who are in that state never actually hit happiness. Think about it this way, right? This is where you are. This is where you want to be to be happy,
but if you're like any entrepreneur, as soon as you get there, what happens? You extend that line. There's another vision of your future that
you need to get to to be happy. So happiness becomes this elusive thing that
is always ahead of you and never with you right now. Then there's the final state, which is what
we call the state of flow. Now I'm not using the word flow the way Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi uses the word flow, which means engagement. I'm using it to describe something else and
I'll tell you how I describe the state. The state of flow is when you have a vision
pulling you forward, but you're happy right now. In other words, your happiness and your vision
are completely separate. Your happiness is not tied to your vision. Your happiness comes from the journey, not
the destination. I define the flow state like this, a mental
state of mind in which you are pulled forward by big goals, yet happy where you are now. It creates a feeling of growth, a feeling
of being lucky. The weirdest thing about the flow state is
that when you are in this state, it almost feels as if the universe has your back. It kind of feels like there's this wind blowing
you and you seem to move in the right direction, that everything you touch seems to turn to
gold, that the right coincidences, synchronicities, opportunities fall on your lap, that even
if you do have downtime, you bounce back really quickly. It almost feels as if you can bend reality. It feels as if you have conscious control
of luck. Can anyone relate to this? Have you ever felt like that? Isn't it funny that it's almost 80% of the
room that would raise their hand because you know what I'm talking about? Now, I'd like to be very scientific, but the
fact is there is this state that we often fall into and whether it's mythical or it's
real, it doesn't matter. I believe that if you believe that this state
exists, you're more likely to want yourself to be there and more likely to reap the benefits. Now, this doesn't mean that I'm always in
the flow state. All of us are gonna have our ups and our downs,
our ups and downs, our ups and our downs. The goal though is to expand the amount of
time you're having an up and to reduce the amount of time you're having a down. So you expand the ups, you reduce the downs. So you're more up and when you go down, you
bounce back really quickly. So based on this model, you can exist in any
of these four places. Current reality trap, depression, stress,
flow. Where do you wanna be? Together: Flow Vishen: Let me ask it again. Where do you wanna be? Together: Flow. Vishen: Okay. Here's a very important paradox, though, which
holds many of us back from flow. It comes from a book called "Quantum Success." You must have goals, but your happiness cannot
be tied to your goals. You must be happy before you attain them. So how do you disentangle happiness from goals? The beautiful thing though is, is that there's
a ton of like research that shows that this is truly possible. But before we get there, let's talk about
a few hyper successful people who I believe existed in this state. There's Steve Jobs. If you read the book "Jobs" by Walter Isaacson,
it's really interesting because in that book they mention the Word "bending reality" three
times in reference to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs as you know had a rather strong
interest in mysticism. He spent some time in India, he meditated. He believed in experiential wisdom or Prana
or the art of using intuition rather than simply always being purely logical. This is another quote which I really like. I go into every situation expecting to win. Thinking like this often turns into a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Does this sound like a man who is in flow? I go into every situation expecting to win. Thinking like this often turns into a self-fulfilling
prophecy. That was Sam Walton. Before Apple became the most highly valued
company in the world, Wal-Mart had attained that goal in the 1980s thanks to Sam Walton
and his wisdom. Then there was this poem that was written
about 100 years ago. I was early thought to work as well as play. My life has been one long happy holiday, full
of work, full of play. I dropped the worry on the way and God was
good to me every day. That was written by John D. Rockefeller of
Standard Oil 100 years ago when he was 86. Again, if you look at the words in that poem
really sounds like John D. Rockefeller believed in this idea of being in flow. He was one of the most ambitious man who ever
lived, but he said, I dropped the worry along the way. Then, of course, there's Richard Branson whom
I think is perpetually in flow. So, me and a few other entrepreneurs, some
of whom are in this room, were in Necker Island about sometime in 2009. And we got to actually interview Branson and
ask him a couple of questions. One of the questions we asked him is, "How
do you stay productive? You have 300 different companies. How do you stay productive?" And he goes, "you know, I don't really use
any productivity tools. I just make lots of lists. Every morning when I wake up, I make a list
of the things I have to do." This is one of Branson's actual list from
his book. And you'll see it's not small stuff. It's not pick up milk on the way home from
work today. It's ring Steve Fossett . It's start an airline. He wrote the word Nigeria, probably starting
a business there. It's really epic stuff. In short, it's a list of visions, of goals. Now we also remember that we asked Branson,
"What do you do when you're sad? Surely your life isn't always happy." And this is what he said. "I can't remember the bad times. I only remember the good things that happened
in my life." He's a guy who always had big visions, but
is always happy. I remember one particular situation where
a whole group of us were sitting at a dinner table and Branson came and joined us. And as soon as Branson came and joined at
dinner table, all these other entrepreneurs that had bombarding him with boring business
questions. So Branson, what do you do about in this situation? Branson, I'm thinking about getting investment
in this. What do you think I should do? And Branson simply dismissed all of them. He got on the table, he gently moved plates
out of the way with his foot. Then he grabbed my wife by her hand, pulled
her on the table and started dancing with her. And that's the kind of guy that he is, always
in flow, always happiness. I love that about him. So we've talked about the theory, right? And we've seen that a lot of successful entrepreneurs
seem to abide by this theory. Big goals, but happiness in the now. But how do we take the theory and put it into
practice? These are systems that I'd like to teach you. So we've now been talking about the model
of flow, the belief system. Let's talk about systems that we can put into
your life to put you in flow. Let's start with the first ingredient of flow,
which is happiness in the now. Science is telling us that happiness does
not come from within. Sorry, that happiness does not come from outside
us, it comes from within us. And happiness is actually something that's
easily malleable. It's easily adjustable once you learn the
right ways. I wish we were teaching these to our kids
in school. There would be so many less cases of depression
and hardship in the world. Schools haven't caught up yet, but here's
a couple of things that we know really, really, really boost happiness. But before that, before I go there, why happiness,
right? Here's some scientific evidence that talks
about happiness and how it changes the way we function and work. Doctors who are happy make 19% better diagnosis. And you know, the scientist who did this study,
it was described in Shawn Achor's book, "The Happiness Advantage." You know how they make the doctors happy,
they gave the doctors a lollipop before the doctors went in to see the patient. And the funny thing is the doctors were not
even allowed to actually eat the lollipop because that might mess up their sugar content
and they wanted to keep the tests like really empirical so they couldn't ingest any sugar. Which according to Shawn Achor begs the question,
should the doctor be giving us the lollipop or should we be giving the doctor the lollipop? And then you have salespeople, optimistic
salespeople outsell pessimists by a whopping 56%. In terms of students, students prime to be
happy outperform their neutral peers. We see this evidence almost everywhere we
look in terms of happiness according to Achor. It turns out our brains are literally hard
wired to perform at their best, not when they are negative or even neutral. but when the a positive. One of the craziest studies though, is happiness
on lifespan. So they did this study with nuns. They took a bunch of nuns who were approaching
90 years old. And they divided these nuns into four different
segments. These nuns had been journaling. So, in this particular nunnery, it was normal
for nuns to write a journal. So they went back through all the journals
and they divided these journals into four categories, most negative, happiest, and then
the category in between. Now, they looked at the bottom 25%, the most
negative and the top 25%. And this is what they found. By age 85, those in the top 25%, 90% of these
nuns were alive. Those in the bottom, 34% were alive. Happiness can literally increase your lifespan
and lack of it can kill you. So how do you inject happiness in your life? I love the word embodiment practice because
it talks about stuff that we can do to embody into our lives. These are some beautiful systems you can bring
in almost instantaneously to level up your happiness. The first is meditation, you will be learning
that here at Awesomeness Fest. Studies are showing remarkable things about
the power of meditation. From "Time Magazine," not only the study show
that meditation is boosting their immune system but brain scans suggested it maybe we wiring
their brains to reduce stress. Meanwhile, the nonbelievers are becoming the
minority. Ten million American adults now say they practice
some form of meditation regularly, twice as much as a decade before. Now, this was written in 2003. Right now, I believe it's now 2013, it's probably
20 million. How many of you here meditate every single
day? Now, here's the crazy thing, right? That's 15% of the room. Science is saying that if you meditate every
single day, even though it may take you 15 minutes, you more than make up for that time
in the span of your day by better levels of happiness, better health, more focus, more
productivity. It shifts your entire life. Yet only 15% of you meditate on a daily basis. How many of you here brush your teeth every
single day? How many of you have your shower every single
day? So here's the funny thing, and this shows
how human beings often follow trends, but do not operate rationally. Meditation will probably have a bigger impact
on your life than showering. It will. I'm not saying I skip my shower every day. I do both. But the fact is it probably will have a bigger
impact on your life because of how powerful it is. Yet only 15% of you meditate. We all shower, we all brush our teeth, we
all use soap. And this is where sometimes our current culture
trains us to do certain beliefs but doesn't reinforce others, which are equally important. It's surely important that you do at least
try to meditate every single day. If there's one thing I hope you can get out
of Awesomeness Fest, it's this practice. We'll be teaching you specific meditation
techniques that you can take home with you. And one of the ways you can do that, by the
way, it's through Mindvalley's meditation app, Omvana. Many free meditations are available on Omvana
for iPhone. Now, the second thing which can dramatically
elevate levels of happiness is creative visualization, so really, really, really powerful tool. You can do this while meditating. You can do it while in commute. You can do it while sitting in the tub. And all it's about is really visualizing how
you want your life to unfold. What does science say about creative visualization? Some pretty amazing things happen. There's a study called the finger abduction
experiment. I want all of you to raise your finger. You cannot do this with your finger. Okay. So the study basically involve that. You can put your fingers down right now. Thank you. The study found this, in the finger abduction
experiment, they found that actual practice, if they took a controlled group and they made
the controlled group do that for 15 minutes every day, after about a month there was a
53% increase in finger strength. That's pretty cool. But the other group they used was a group
that did nothing more than visualization. Their fingers were down. They just visualized themselves moving their
finger up and down. That led to a 35% strength increase. Visualization alone cause physical changes
in the body. It's pretty amazing stuff. And if you study the work of doctors such
as O. Carl Simonton. O. Carl Simonton runs the Simonton Cancer
Research Institute. He's had incredible success teaching people
to put their cancers into spontaneous remission by visualizing these cancers disappear. Visualization does amazing things for you. I do it every single day. Then there's intention setting. This was kind of popularized by Esther Hicks. She called it segment intending. Intention setting is simple. It's simply the act of telling yourself how
you want your day to unfold. Every single day, I tell myself exactly how
I want my day to unfold. I pretend, delusionally or not, that I have
control over how reality works, so I'll tell myself when I go in and get breakfast today
at the hotel, they're gonna be serving the healthy choices that I like. I'm gonna have an incredible workout. I'm gonna have an incredible lunch conversation. The waiters are gonna be super friendly. I'm gonna come here, get on stage, do my speech. Everything is gonna go flawlessly. I pretend I can command reality. Funny thing is, it starts to feel that way. I love segment intending or intention setting. Number four, inspirational reads. One of the things I do if I don't get a chance
to meditate is if I'm in commute or on a plane, I read something inspirational. I love biographies. I love philosopher's notes. Inspirational reads also prime you for happiness
because it's almost as if you're borrowing the wisdom of an unofficial mentor, someone
who may not be there to sit down with you, but through reading about their goals, their
life, the epic things they have done, whether it's Steve Jobs, or Benjamin Franklin, or
Akio Morito of Sony, it sparks you to think in a different way. Then there's mookie, which is morning nookie. Science has shown that this has remarkable
benefits as well. There's gratitude . Studies in gratitude show
some amazing results. Martin Seligman did a study on gratitude and
he showed that people who journal for seven days straight, writing down the things they
were grateful for, after seven days, they were 2% happier. Now, 2% doesn't sound like much, right? But here's the crazy thing. After six months, they were 9% happier. That seven days of journaling was causing
changes in their happiness level six months down the road. Six months down the road, 9% happier. They were not 9% happier because they got
a 9% higher salary check or they had 9% more mookie. They were 9% happier because of something
they did six months before. Science shows that gratitude causes more energy,
higher emotional intelligence, more forgiving attitudes, less depression, less anxiousness,
more feelings of being socially connected and better sleep. My question is, how many of you here practice
gratitude every single morning? That's good. Slightly better than meditation, 20%. Awesome. Now, what if you're doing all of these things
every single day? We're gonna teach you a technique where you
can and all of it in less than 15 minutes. You'll be learning that at Awesomeness Fest,
the results of doing this on your life are going to be crazy amazing. This particular thing I do, I call it the
six phase meditation. It goes through all of these things in 15
minutes flat, is the single most important thing I do every single day. I'd rather skip breakfast than skip my six
phase meditation. The act of doing this every single day is
what we call blisscipline, the discipline of bliss. The most important discipline, I believe,
is the discipline of making sure that you can put yourself in a happy state every single
day because what else could be more important than being happy and being able to know that
you can consciously control your happiness. Are you guys with me? Paulo Coelho, any Paulo Coelho fans here,
make some noise? Paulo Coelho said this. There's one great truth on this planet. Whoever you are, whatever it is that you do,
when you really want something, it's because the desire originated in the soul of the universe. The soul of the world is nourished by people's
happiness. When you want something, all the universe
conspires in helping you to achieve it. Beautiful quote, isn't it? But let's try reading that quote backwards. Look at the last line. When you want something, all the universe
conspires in helping you achieve it. We get that, but the line before that, the
soul of the world is nourished by people's happiness. Nourish the world with your happiness and
then watch it conspire helping you get what you truly seek. So we've talked about happiness. Let's go onto the second big ingredient, vision
for the future, because to purely be happy is great and you will have amazing health
benefits, but there's a certain amazing feeling that we call fulfillment that comes from having
big visions for the future. The problem with most people is that their
problems aren't big enough. Here's what I mean by this. You're worried about that guy who won't call
you back, or that blemish on your skin, or paying a little bit extra for groceries because
the supermarket hiked its prices, or getting a decent flight for that business trip, or
getting that PowerPoint done on time. All of those are silly, stupid little problems. The happiest most amazing people in the world
have bigger problems. They're worried about cleaning up ocean oil
spills, or saving endangered animals, or building an orphanage, or teaching a group of kids
in a school so that these kids can grow up to be truly amazing individuals, or writing
a book, or creating a successful company. Those are the problems you wanna have and
when you find that you pick bigger problems, the little shit doesn't really bug you anymore
and you create more resiliency, more bounce back. Perhaps, the guy I know who has demonstrated
this most is Elon Musk. That's a couple of us from the XPRIZE foundation. We are visiting SpaceX where Elon Musk is
based. Elon as you know, runs a number of different
companies. That's him. So we were in that group. There are a couple, a lot of A-Festers were
in there as well. Elon has three major companies, SpaceX, which
is building rocket ships that are now taking cargo to space. Tesla, which is the electric car company that's
on fricking fire. Tesla stock has soared and Tesla is changing
the face of electric vehicles and then Solar City, the most successful solar panel installation
company in America. So we were at this event and we got to ask
Elon questions. So I asked Elon this question. I said, "Elon, if we could take you and, you
know, put you in a test tube and boil you and distill you until your pure essence, what
makes you Elon Musk?" And after he laughed at the fact that I just
talked about boiling him alive, he said, and I'm gonna paraphrase this, right? This is what Elon told us. He said, so when I was a kid, I moved from
South Africa to the U.S. and he was an engineer. And so he decided he wanted to go work for
one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley at that time. He went straight to Silicon Valley because
he felt that was where all the energy was. That company was Netscape. So he went to Netscape with his resume in
hand. He sat in the reception area and he waited
for someone to come up to him and say, "Would you like to interview?" But again, Elon was slightly shy. He was an engineer. He didn't have the best people skills. And after waiting there for hours, not a single
person came up to him and said, "Would you like to interview?" So he sat there, he got frustrated and then
he said, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna start my own company." And he went on and he started a company. He started a little company that brought the
yellow pages online and he and his brothers proceeded to sell this to major American newspapers. They ended up selling it for a lot of money. Elon pocketed close to $20 million from the
sale of that business. He went on to start his second business, PayPal,
which all of you have probably heard of. When PayPal was finally sold to Ebay, he pocketed
$200 million. Now, he was in his late 20s or early 30s at
that time. And he said at that point, you know, I could
have just decided to retire somewhere on a pretty big island, but I wanted to do something
bigger. So I decided wouldn't it be cool if mankind
could be an interplanetary species? You've got to be kind of a crazy person to
pick a problem that big. Right? But that was the big problem Elon picked. He could have retired to an island, he could
have had all the cars and women and luxury he wanted. He decided, screw that. I wanna solve a really major problem. How can I make mankind an interplanetary species? How can we put men on Mars? And so he proceeded to get on the website
for NASA to research everything he could about the red planet. And he said there was nothing there. So Elon told me, he said at first I thought
the website was just not updated, but then I realized it wasn't the website. NASA hadn't been updated. There'd been no progress on the space program
since Apollo. So he decided, well, if NASA can't do it,
I'm gonna do it. So he had $200 million in the bank and he
decided he was gonna start his own rocket ship company. Now, while starting SpaceX, he decided there's
another massive problem that humanity is facing right now and that's our reliance on fossil
fuels. And yes, people say global warming isn't real,
but that's bullshit. It's real. We got to do something about it. So he said, if Detroit isn't gonna do something
about it, I will have to start an electric car company. So he decided to also simultaneously while
building rocket ships so that he could eventually take men to Mars, he was gonna solve our dependency
on fossil fuel by creating the world's first successful electric car and doing it in Silicon
Valley and not Detroit because he felt the auto makers in Detroit had failed to do it
before and they were not vested in it. But he didn't stop there. His cousins came up to him and said, "Elon,
you know, we wanna save the world, right? We wanna make people more, less dependent
on fuels. What if we could tap into the power of the
sun? Maybe we could start a really successful solar
panel installation company." So the third company he started was Solar
City. He became the chairman of Solar City. So simultaneously now he had a rocket ship
company, he had an electric car and he had a solar panel company, and everyone thought
he was crazy. Even some of his biggest supporters in Silicon
Valley refused to invest in those businesses. He was a guy doing all three things simultaneously
trying to change the world. But the crazy thing is when you dream big,
your problem becomes small and problems he did have, and the problems were massive. So with SpaceX, he built his first rocket
and he put in a ton of money to build that first rocket. Guess what? It was launch time. The rocket shot up to space and it exploded
before it could get out of the atmosphere, but he still had some money left. So he redesigned the rocket, they launched
rocket number two, shot up to space, boom, exploded again. Then there was rocket number three. This time he was lucky. He got someone to invest in it and pay him
to put a satellite on the top of that rocket. That's a pretty major deal to get that money,
to launch that satellite to space, the rocket went up and promptly exploded. Now he was down to his final $20 million and
it wasn't just exploding rockets. Tesla models. He had hired amazing designer, an amazing
designer to come and design the new Tesla car. That designer stole the design and launched
a competing car company and then the CEO of Tesla at that point, he had some major issues
with the CEO. He had to discard the CEO. The CEO sued him. Then Elon had five kids with his wife. They went into a divorce. He had to pay millions of dollars to his ex-wife
and be the father of five children and Solar City wasn't doing very good either. Elon said that there was this one day in December,
2008 where he felt everything was collapsing. He did not have enough money to pay rent and
he had to borrow money for rent. It was December, 2008. There was one bet left, the fort rocket. He persuaded a couple of investors to invest
in the rocket. He took his final, the last dollars he had
put it into SpaceX and they had one more bet with that final rocket. If this rocket failed, Elon would fail. There would be no SpaceX. There would be no electric car. Solar panel installations would not be at
the level they are right now. That rocket succeeded and it went up to space
and it delivered that payload and within a few months, NASA signed a contract worth over
$1 billion with SpaceX. In 2009, NASA decommissioned the space shuttle. Today, Elon Musk and SpaceX sends America's
payloads to space. It wasn't just SpaceX. Tesla models took off like wildfire. Today, Elon Musk and Tesla models makes electric
car batteries, not just for Tesla but for Daimler Chrysler and other aspiring automotive
companies who wanna go in that direction. And third, Solar City grew and grew and grew,
and now is the biggest installation of solar panels in America. One man decided that the world had too many
massive problems and he was gonna gamble everything so that we could be an interplanetary species. We could end our dependency on fossil fuel
and we could embrace solar power because it's good for the earth and he pulled it off. When you dream big, your problems become small. Think about the stress and the challenges
that he went through. The divorce, custody of five kids. Having all this success and selling PayPal
for $200 million, then being reduced to have to borrow money for rent. But again, when you dream big, your problems
become small. And if there's one thing I can leave you with,
it's this, realism is just a socially acceptable form of pessimism. We all owe it to ourselves to dream big, and
when you do, you start to find if you can put yourself in that flow state, those crazy
big dreams often start coming true because of this bizarre shift in your reality where
it seems as if the universe is watching over you and the universe has your back. Now, there is a contradiction here, right? Science says this, good goals are realistic,
meaningful and possible in the new future. Realistic, meaningful, and possible in the
new future. This is when people tend to have the best
success of attaining goals, but there's a problem with this. I have an issue with the word realistic. I believe that there was a flaw in this study. Now, again, this is my personal belief. The flaw in the study was this. The scientists are suggesting the goals are
realistic because they have forgotten the other ingredient and that is happiness and
in the flow. If you can untangle your happiness from your
goals, your goals do not have to be realistic. The people who were setting realistic goals
were people who had gotten that idea mixed up. They had to set realistic goals because their
happiness was not yet untangled. Their happiness was tied to that goal, so
they knew they were gonna attain it because it was realistic. They would stay happy, they would be in flow. But if you can learn to untangle it, to be
happy now through the embodiment practices we just show you, you can go crazy big and
trust that the right answer, synchronicities, inspiration, ideas will come to get you there
because you are in that state of flow. So don't be realistic. Screw this study. Now, what is a framework for balance goals? Here's what I'd like to share. While it's important to set really big goals,
right? The other issue that many of us have is that
we have an imbalance in terms of our goals. So we might be looking to build a massive
company, but our health is going to heck. Or we are looking to get a great body but
we have forgotten to have a solid relationship with our children. One of the guys I know with the best balance
in life is this man, Jon Butcher. Now, take a look at that picture of Jon Butcher. How old would you guess he is? Forty? Jon's about 50 right now if I calculate right. He's a grandfather. He's a grandfather. He's about 50. He was telling me he has a six pack. He dresses really well. Once a week he runs 10 miles just to keep
an in shape. He has lived a beautiful life. I've visited Bill Gates's home and Branson's
home, his home is way better. And the other cool thing he does is he just
doesn't believe in living life the way we're trained to live life. For example, three months every year, he plucks
out his entire family, grandkids, and all and moves to a foreign country and just lives
there for three months. He said he believes his kids can learn more
from the bazaars of Egypt than they can from the regular schooling system. That's how Jon lives. But what truly makes Jon successful and he's
got amazing children, an amazing marriage, an amazing home, an amazing business. His business is precious moments. You know, they make those little porcelain
dolls. They do about $600 million a year, so it's
a massive business, but John's side project is Lifebook. See, his friends would ask him, how is it
that you're so successful, John? And he would show them this leather bound
journal he had, which he filled with beautiful pictures, quotes and ideas on the kind of
life he wanted to build. And he didn't just stop at business or health
or relationship, he went deep. He went into 12 different areas. I want you to take out a pen or an iPhone
if you don't have a pen and take these down. These are the 12 areas of balance. If you can, think about your life in these
12 areas, this is when you truly start living beautiful lives like Jon Butcher and you don't
leave gaps. You don't end up the guy with the billion
dollars, but whose body is completely frail? So the first area is health and fitness. If you are thinking about goals for health
and fitness, what you wanna think about is how many pushups do you wanna be able to do
when you're 50? Do you want a six pack? What type of waste size do you want? How far do you wanna be able to run? Then there's your intellectual life. A lot of people forget this. How many books do you wanna read every single
month? What new languages do you wanna pick up? What new skills do you want to have? How do you wanna grow yourself and your skills
professionally? Then there's your emotional life. Another area that many people forget. How do you deal with stress? With anger? How do you maintain happiness in the now? What embodiment practices do you live with? Then there's your character. What are your values? What do you believe in? What type of person do you want to be? Do you wanna be the kind of person that people
know always stand by your word. That's your spiritual life. How often do you meditate? How often do you go to church or synagogue
or temple or mosque? There's your love relationships. Who do you wanna wake up with every morning? What does that relationship look like? What do you do together? How do you spend time together? There's your parenting vision. How many kids do you wanna create? How would you be a parent? What values would you imbue our children with? How do you spend time with your kids? There's your social life. Who are your friends? Who do you hang out with? When do you hang out with them? How do you guys support each other? Your financial life? How much cash do you have in the bank? What can you afford? What are your financial goals for the next
5 years, 10 years? Saving, retirement plan, business, investments. Your career, what do you wanna create, build,
grow? What's the next promotion you're aiming for,
or the next company you wanna build, or the next blog or book you want to produce? Then there's your quality of life. It's amazing how many people forget this. What type of hotels do you wanna stay in? How often can you travel business class? What would your house look like? What does your apartment and your office look
like? How do you dress? How often can you take paradise beach vacations? How many times a year do you wanna attend
Awesomeness Fest? Then there's your life vision. On the day you die, what do people say about
you? What mark do you wanna leave on the world? So those are 12 areas. Now, if you can think of your goals in those
12 areas, you really start going deep and this is when you truly become a well-balanced
individual. The problem isn't just setting big goals. The problem is setting the right big goals
in the right areas so that you don't leave anything out. I love this matrix of these 12 areas because
of how, how holistic it is, but Jon goes a little bit deeper. So if you're doing Lifebook, right, or if
you're just writing this down, it's not just about the vision of what you want in these
12 areas. Jon also teach us certain things. Now, for each of these areas, we're gonna
take financial just as an example, okay? Reformatting your money beliefs. The first thing is he has you write down your
premise behind your financial life. Your premise is your beliefs or as we used
the word here at Awesomeness Fest, your models of reality. What are your models of reality around money? Do you believe that money is the root of all
evil or that money's an incredible force for good? Do you believe that you are entitled to all
the money you want? Do you believe that money is even important
or not? After beliefs, you go on to your vision for
money and these were the things that we talked about earlier. How much money would you have in the bank? What would your investment plans look like? What would your net worth be like? But you don't stop there. Then you go on to your action items. What are you going to do now to make that
vision of money come true to you? How much are you gonna start saving every
single day? What new passive streams of income are you
gonna create? So your premise, your vision, your strategy,
what you're gonna do, and then finally, your purpose. Why is money important to you? What do you plan on doing with this money? So for each of these 12 areas, you go deep
and you ask yourself, what are my beliefs on this? What do I wanna create? What's my strategy to get there? And why do I wanna get there in the first
place? Now, let's talk about one of the biggest schools
that many of you may have written down. Entrepreneurship. Here's something I want you to realize. Entrepreneurship is not a goal. It's too vague. It's too fluffy to be a goal. Entrepreneurship is the side effect of having
the right goals. Nowhere on my list did I ever say I wanna
be an entrepreneur because what exactly does that mean? What I want though is a gorgeous office, a
beautiful business that's changing the world. Employees I love coming to work with every
single day. I want a great body. I wanna be amazingly fit. I wanna be a good speaker. I wanna write four books. The entrepreneurship is never a goal. It's the side effect of having the right goal. You'll learn more about this later on when
we talk about the difference between means goals and end goals, is one of the ultimate
hacks in goal setting. But now as we wrap up and you understand this,
I wanna put you in flow, but first let's recap. Okay? So the secret, the grand secret of awesomeness
or the existing or being able to do massive things, the secret that I feel I accidentally
stumbled upon when I went from accidental threat to the United States and broke and
living on a couch in Berkeley to the kind of life I can build today is getting in that
state of flow. And to get in that state of flow, what I shifted
about myself was continuing to dream big but not accepting stress as being part of that
reality and disciplining myself to the art of blisscipline to have the right embodiment
practices, the write systems of living, to make sure my happiness was in check, to make
sure I continuously visualize great futures for myself, to make sure I was motivated,
excited the practice intention setting, create a visualization and all those other systems
we talked about. When I could do that, massive shifts could
happen. I could go from that and miserable existence
I had 10 years ago to the kind of life I have right now where I kind of have my own cool
little awesome festival and I can come hang out with you guys. All expenses paid in a paradise island and
make new friends. And do this twice a year and raise hundreds
of thousands of dollars and give it all away because I'm fricking rich anyway, all because
of this process of being in flow. What's gonna happen in Awesomeness Fest, people,
is that we are gonna try to put you in flow every hour of this entire event. But more than that, we're gonna teach you
the formula for being in this flow. So as I said earlier, your ups stay and last
longer, and your downs are really, really, really narrow. And as you can see, a lot of this is scientifically
proven. I don't like teaching the woo, woo. Almost all of this is scientifically proven. And once you accept this model, if you so
choose, you start living life at a whole different level. My greatest wish for you is that you can continue
doing epic shit while being happy right now and knowing that, you know, even if you failed,
it doesn't affect your happiness, but you'll continue aiming big even though you know you
can feel, because that's just how you roll. Thank you.
