How to Create a Vision for Your Life So Bold, It Makes You Shine | Vishen Lakhiani

[Music] now as we go into AFS I want to introduce you to the idea of envisioning why this concept this word means so much to me many of you might know my story I was working in Silicon Valley I had a computer engineering degree the dot-com bubble had burst and the only job I could get was and wasn't sales and I went into meditation so I could simply pull myself out of that misery right at that horrible sales job I was at but what I didn't realize is that meditation would cause me to just accelerate in my career and soon I became VP in the company I was only 26 years old and I'd they moved me to New York and asked me to run their division in New York and I got stuck in that I got stuck in corporate in the corporate world for about 18 months and then as I continued meditating as I continued going deep within I realized that this was not me that something was off I was crushing it at my job but my life felt like there was so much more I needed to do than just pick up the phone and be selling technology to lawyers and in the in the US and so I quit my job and I became a meditation instructor and that's where I certainly had to rebuild everything when I first started out I was so embarrassed at like what I was going through that I didn't tell my friends that I was teaching meditation remember this was like 2003 in New York meditation wasn't hip and cool as it is right now where you have like super stars and celebrities talking about it back then it was like whoo right it was it was this this thing that weird people did so that's where mine Valley actually started manga we started in that particular window above this this restaurant called the playwrights Tavern in New York City and the funny thing about that window is before I moved in there before I moved into that apartment in Times Square it was a thigh massage parlor right this was Times Square in 2003 before Disney took over and put up a lot and in the Little Mermaid and in the Lion King this was not like Disney Time Square this was like crack and hookers Times Square so it's a sobering thought that mine Valley really started in a former whorehouse but we all have to start somewhere right and this was the first official nine Valley seminar that is the actual seminar room where it took place right it was just me there was no team there was hardly any budget the budget was maybe like 600 bucks it was 19 people and that's what I did for about five years of my life that little seminar room this was at the Hilton on 59th Street in New York it was it was nothing compared to where we are right now this was my office in 2003 that's the beat-up Toshiba laptop the table I'm working on this is really interesting right in New York me and Christina we were so broke we couldn't afford proper furniture so we would just go out to the streets and salvage what our neighbors tossed out every year IKEA would release their new catalog all the Oh likea would go to the street and then in New York you just pick up what you need and it's funny because that table I'm working on on the IKEA catalog is actually called the Lac and it's it's $7.99 this is brilliant IKEA named a table this is the cheapest table in the world IKEA named a table lack I guess to signify the lack of abundance and vision you lead to want to work in a table like that right it's brilliant marketing so anyway the funny thing is I was pleased with what was going on I like my job I continued doing this for five years five years and from year one to year two I'd grown the business by maybe 50% I'd gone from maybe 20 students to an average of 40 students per class once a month I was making very meager income right but I was satisfied see what was going on is I didn't have the vision in my head I didn't have the vision for this I didn't know how small I was playing I was deluding myself now what happened during that time was I got a job because I was a computer engineer I was I was the geeky guy in the personal growth industry I got a job building a website for this incredible dude by the name of Bob Proctor the movie the secret had come out people like Bob Proctor Lisa Nichols now I get to call them friends but back then they were like heroes to me they were like on the single most watched DVD in the world so Bob Proctor I was the guy who built one of his early websites and he meant at me a bit now one day I was flying to London to do my tiny little meditation seminar they were like maybe 30 people in that room and bought Proctor at the same time was in London speaking to thousands of people at a nearby hotel so he said hey vision I have a break for lunch come come hang out join me for lunch so I show up for lunch with Bob Proctor and remember that's Bob Proctor right like I'm gonna t-shirt and jeans bob is in his like his crisp suit his tie his expensive glasses and his roll axe and he's like so what brings you to London Bob's got that's really really really deep voice right now I'm like Bob you're gonna be so proud of me I'm teaching meditation now I don't just build websites I have 30 people in this room attending the seminar Bob goes wait wait wait 30 people and I go yes 30 people I'm so excited he goes how much are they paying and I go it's like 200 bucks that's it and Bob goes hang on you flew you flew from Malaysia to London what's that like 22 hours I go yeah he goes you left your wife behind you you have a one-year-old son right I go yeah he goes you left your son behind to come to London to teach 30 people meditation I hope your flying business at least then he looks at me you are flying coach aren't you and I go yeah and I could feel that pain welling up and he goes vision vision vision and he closes his eye so I know something deep is coming right I would not be doing what you're doing you're wasting your time and I go no but Bob I really enjoyed this like this isn't work for me I really enjoyed this I love teaching like I'm adding value to these students lives I'm trying to justify and justify and justify and then Bob touches his face and he takes this deep breath he makes like the sniffling sounds and I know again something deep is coming any goes vision you're so much bigger than this you're playing way too small and inside me now I'm angry I'm like I'm a personal growth teacher I'm actually teaching people goal-setting like and in my mind that this conversation has happened like you mr. Bob Proctor with your fancy suit and your tie and your your fantastic hello nice mail I don't need you to tell me what to do and so that lunch ended very abruptly and I went and I thought this seminar and on Monday I woke up and I decided it he's right and I quit and I quit my job teaching that seminar which I was doing for five years because I realized as painful as it was to hear I was lying to myself and I was lying to my students I was telling them to write down their goals I was telling them to meditate to dream big I wasn't playing big I was teaching thirty people flying 22 hours coach because I couldn't afford business class leaving my wife and kid for like five days at a time to influence 30 lives and so I quit after five years I stopped teaching that seminar and I went to Facebook and I added Facebook as an as a little thing on Facebook where you can add a quote and I added this quote it's a quote from Bob Proctor it's now been 10 years so this was 2008 it's now been 10 years I have the same quote and the quote is this the question is not are you worthy to reach your goals the question is are your goals worthy enough of you and so I went from this this room and two years later the vision of a fest emerged for two years I was in a space where I was trying to figure out the next big thing but I went from that room to a fest and then seven years after a fest after that first day fest we evolved to the next level where it went from that room to mine Valley University which in a 15-minute clip looks like this [Music] [Music] and I have to show us a video because about just show images it wouldn't do it justice but again it went from that tiny little room to that and that is what envisioning is about are you guys ready to play at that level so at this FS I'm gonna play ball Proctor to you I'm gonna spray on some fancy Cologne I won't wear the jacket it's too hot in Bali but our job is to disrupt you to the point where you feel uncomfortable because remember transformation comes from a distressing dilemma it comes when our worldview is shaken up and part of that shake up has to be to help you see that could it be that you are living a tiny slice of your potential so let's talk about the power of vision why do we want to dream big why do we want a vision anybody know that man Elon Musk right so I was in am i I was part of a group I was once on the board at the XPrize Foundation and we got to go to SpaceX and visit Elon Musk you recognize many a fastest in that picture like Jim quake myself and so on and so we got to actually sit down with musk visit SpaceX asked him a couple of questions and it is amazing how big this guy thinks now this is what I noticed about musk right he said when we asked him so what's the grand vision here for SpaceX now think about this SpaceX is nothing more than a vertical trucking company horizontal trucks move goods this way SpaceX moves Goods this way no big deal vertical trucking it's basically taking parts to the International Space Station they are 19 other companies at least that do the same thing but in a survey of employees in Silicon Valley the number one place for engineers to work is SpaceX Y because Elon Musk doesn't talk about it like it's a trucking company he talks about it 10 years in the future I remember that day right here meeting must this was around five years ago and when he described what he was doing he described it like this right he described how all his companies connected from SpaceX to Tesla to Solar City and he spoke about this he's look at SpaceX we're looking to back up the human race because think about it when you have important things on your hard drive you back up your hard drive the human species is important but a single asteroid could wipe us out in fact by the way get this there's a 1 in 30,000 chance we will be wiped out in our lifetime one in thirty thousand isn't big but that chance they'll exist and what Elon said he wants to do is within 10 years colonize Mars he has no idea how to get there but it doesn't matter he said on that day and there was no press or journalists there so he was very raw and open he said look I don't know how I'm gonna get there and I'm aiming and I think 10 years is about right but I'm known to be over up as over-optimistic on these targets and so when he speaks about the vision about the role he's playing in the world he's not a guy who runs a vertical trucking company that's for the other 19 space companies to describe themselves no he's saving the human race and that's the first key idea about vision and I noticed this when I spoke to many great minds in Silicon Valley they would not describe what their companies do now they always think 10 years ahead and speak as it's as if it's happening now when I started speaking about mine valley in the same way we started growing we started being able to attract great talent so that's the first thing I want you to write down think about where you could be in ten years you don't have to know how to get there Elon Musk hasn't solved all the problems to get to Mars but when he talks about why he's here when he talks about that vision he's talking ten years ahead it's the same with Peter Diamandis right Peter Diamandis a few years ago launched a company to mine asteroids he has no idea how to mine asteroids but when he speaks about how he's launched Planetary Resources to mine asteroids people get so excited he got mentioned on The Daily Show job applications flood in now I was listening to this guy Naveen Jain he's the founder of another big Silicon Valley company write volume and I was in a mastermind recently and Naveen had a really interesting whoa that I want to read out to you because it explains how many of these big minds are literally applying envisioning to build their businesses and that the envisioning concept is more important than talent or venture capital or ideas or execution it starts with envisioning everything else flows from there this is the quote from Naveen Jain when you do something audacious it actually becomes easier because you get the best people to join you the problem you're solving is worth solving you have the magnets now and you get the money because the investors call and then you tell them you don't need the money now like a bull they charge so sell the benefit to humanity notice that's what Elon was doing cult leaders say loyalty lies with me entrepreneurs say loyalty lies with the cause take a snapshot of that if that resonates with you what Naveen was saying was essentially this when you dream big your problems become small because when you dream big when you talk about your vision as if it's ten years ahead it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy the investors want to start talking to you Talyn wants to work with you because smart people don't want to waste their lives on jobs they want to make an impact and what happens is you actually start fuelling your company with so much more excitement this is why the number one company to work for for engineers in Silicon Valley is not Google it is SpaceX because how cool is it to say that you're working on colonizing Mars so bold missions are actually the ultimate business advantage but so many of us play small so many of us think that we have to be realistic that in our business plans we have to write down what is practical what is real what's executable there's a way around this so tomorrow I'm gonna teach you a technique called ok ours to go beyond realism in your business plans it's a technique that Larry Page from Google users that that John dower from Intel popularized but I want you to remember this quote by Tim Johnson he's a famous blogger realism is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of pessimism the people with the most consistent track records of success don't think in terms of what is they think in terms of what could be realism tomorrow I'm gonna teach you how to go beyond it so you craft business plans that are actually proper business plans but we use certain mathematical models which you will learn tomorrow to overwrite realism and to make your company in your vision so much more attractive to investors to people but more internally to your soul so you really really really excited about getting out of bed every morning but remember there's a dark side to vision right so we spoke about Elon Musk let's look at the dark side of Elon Musk Arianna Huffington spoke about this she wrote a book called thrive and she spoke about how at one point in her life she was working so hard Arianna had built a hundred million dollar valuation company The Huffington Post but she spoke about how one day she was walking back into her apartment in New York and she just collapsed from exhaustion hit her head and passed out her daughter had to call a doctor and she realized that she was missing the point that she was sacrificing her health sacrificing her have functioning her productivity because she had bought into the lie of overwork and this lie I call it the lie of hustle the lie of hard work permeates so many people who are driven Elon Musk two months ago gave a series of interviews in the New York Times and he was very raw in honest that's something I I like about him but he said brakes are for cars not CEOs and he also spoke about how he is going through excruciating pain right now a CEO of two companies in fact he had to step down as CEO as chairman of one company he can't sleep without the drug ambien he sometimes has to work till 3:00 a.m. he has already gone through two divorces and it's taking a toll on him and so he were accusing him last month of actually being unfit to leave these companies this is the dark side of vision it's when you have a singular obsession and everything else you'll love relationships your help your sleep all starts falling apart it is downright unhealthy folks Arianna Huffington wrote a letter to Elon Musk an open letter and this is what she advised him she said because she had learned the lesson as you told the New York Times you've exhausted yourself working a hundred and twenty hour weeks at the expense of seeing your children and your friends you've had day long stretches where you shut yourself inside the Tesla factory and don't even go outside you don't take vacations there's no way you can connect with your amazing vision and creativity when you don't give yourself time to reconnect not just with those you love but also with yourself and your wisdom that is the dark side what's really cool to see Arianna like Slap Elon like that um now now he said he said look I don't have time he's wrong he's a genius but he is so freakin wrong on this one right so this singular obsession can destroy us and I've gone through it ten years ago as I as I had my wake-up call from Bob Proctor and I started building mine Valley you know that was the team I had look at look at me in that picture okay so Nika you'll see Nika she's also at a fest but observed me and Nika and notice how I'm sitting I'm hunched do you notice the belly on me okay now now most this was ten years ago so most the people in that picture no longer work for mine Valley a lot of them are still friends they are they're doing great in other companies but that's but the two people who are here me and Nika observe what we look like in that picture Nick is probably gonna kill me for putting this up and this is ten years later right we so this is when you are obsessed if you could look at that previous picture that's when you are obsessed with just a singular focus I was working hard at the expense of my health at the expense of my my friendships at the expense of so many different things and it wasn't just me because people will follow the CEO so if I'm doing these unhealthy practices so are people on my team right but when you wake up when you have this transformation when you go from Elon Musk the Elon plus the wisdom of Arianna in that metaphor you start opening yourself up to so much more now the first aspect of the dark side of vision is this imbalance but I want to tell you about another aspect and that second aspect is cultural programming the visions that we are pursuing don't come from us they come from outside us I became an engineer not because I wanted to be an engineer it's because I'm an Indian male and if you're an Indian immigrant you learn very early in your family that your parents value education you're going to come back with is all a is not one B or one C and that there are only four options in your life you become a doctor an engineer a lawyer or a family embarrassment so so this picture this picture is is a picture which I'd sent my team this again was maybe seven seven years or so we are celebrating hitting a 2 million month right but that's actually the wrong motivation who gives a if we hit two million it's just a number today what we celebrate in our team is is the number of students that we touch the quality of our events the quality of the products we get out there having the highest engagement rate learning platform in the world creating revolutionary new things like mine Valley University but if I go back seven years cultural programming it was causing me to add an over emphasis on money and career more than anything else so my breakdown happen and and I went through a breakdown my breakdown happened in 2010 in 2010 my business partner at that time and myself so there were a couple of things we did wrong and I want to share with you what I did wrong so they you can avoid some of the Spain the first thing that we did wrong is that my business partner and myself his name was Mike and we went to college together we were friends in Michigan for many years but we had different visions and so the company had no vision when two partners have different visions whether it's in a marriage or a business there is no vision for that family there is no vision for that business so mine Valley became nothing more than a machine to just generate enough cash flow so that we could live our lives and do what really gave us meaning so I actually had pretty much stepped out of mine valley now what was I doing that was giving me more meaning I was experimenting with a different company a vest right so the first mistake was we didn't have an aligned vision ask yourself honestly do you have an aligned vision with your business partner do you have a line vision with your life partner and if you don't that is a big warning sign you need to have that conversation we'll teach you during the safe that's how to bring up that conversation and the method right that you can use now the second thing is as I started like moving away from mine valley cultural programming again infused me and this time the cultural programming was that in 2010 ish in Malaysia there was a big like startup boom so people were starting companies raising money and I decided I wanted a piece of that I wanted to start a startup I wanted to raise money so I came up with an idea it was for a Groupon clone remember Groupon that stupid little company that collapsed it was designed to make you buy crap you don't need anybody remember Groupon so so imagine that's what I did I started the Groupon clone a useless craptastic product in Malaysia um Groupon ultimately collapsed right it turned out that it didn't provide any useful benefit to society merchants ended up hating it restauranteurs ended up hating it but I saw that Groupon had become the fastest growing company in the world at that time I decided to clone it in Malaysia found a business partner found developers got two million dollars investment from Intel venture capital I was written about in the press I'm like yes I'm now a start-up entrepreneur six months into it I realized my life was miserable I I didn't like the team I was not clicking with my partner I hated my job there was so much competition because seven other Groupon clones had started and I started reading what I was doing so six months into it I sold most of my shares and backed out now why did I go into it down that stupid thing in the first place it's because cultural programming I didn't have a vision for how I wanted to leave my life I did not have what John butcher calls a life vision so I was just following what the other guy was doing raise money start a startup try to sell it to an investors and boom you are that label that we define as successful I want you to ask yourself this are you in that trap are you running a business that you took on because everybody else is doing it are you in the business that you took on because you inherited it from your family do you secretly hate your job like I did I'm so glad I quit that stupid idea in six months I lost a lot of money on it I lost the respect of investors I lost respect of some of my business partners that's okay because what happened was I started discovering a new way to set vision now how that happened was this I bumped into this guy John butcher so a friend of mine told me I should really take this program called life book so I took life book and that's where another piece entered you see Bob Proctor had given me that first piece big like don'ts play small go big right but I was going big in one-dimension career & Finance and that's a tiny slice of what it means to be human what John butcher told me as showed me is that there are 10 additional dimensions that you look at right and he and his wife Missy and they're sitting right there with their beautiful daughter Jay say hi John Missy so so what John showed me through life book is that you got to look at your life from 12 different dimensions and you'll go deep in this as well we're gonna bring John on stage in the final day to help you see these other dimensions but in the life book seminar I had to create like a I created a 75-page vision of my life 75 pages one of those pages talked about my life vision how I wanted to lead my life now I made this video to show you what I wrote down this was six months before AFS so this is a concept I called vision stacking right when you start creating a vision for how you want your life to look like all of a sudden the right opportunity start coming true and sometimes you don't know even know these opportunities exist but the right opportunity start coming true to make these visions possible and it's often something so out there so wild that people think you're crazy and this is how life book actually led to a fez check this out this is how eerie this is this is something I wrote down in life book in 2010 before the very first a fest that I created now when I wrote this down I had no idea I was gonna retain this I will visit a hundred countries around the world APIs of course gets me to travel every six months to a different country I will have access to the most influential and fascinating people in the world these people now come to me at AFS I will be one of the world's top speakers I was barely speaking back then and now with 80s I have my own stage I will own five-star resorts office by the beach where work gets done I don't own a resort but I get to work from one this I grow an amazing adventure trips with brilliant people at least once a year now with AFS this automatically happens twice a year and I could go on and on and on when I created this there was no way I knew how these were gonna go in a manifest look I even wrote tallying in the Mediterranean the Caribbean and more and of course with AFS our team organized some of the most elaborate beautiful parties in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and all of this just emerged into my life I had no idea where they were gonna come from as I created life book I never set a goal as a you're a kid to start a festival a personal growth festival it just came to me and when I explained it to my friends in business they told me it was the dumbest idea they ever heard but infested a six years later has become a phenomenon it's become it's and it's and it's allowed me to create a life where all of those crazy things I put down in my life book and I had no idea how to get there I now get there frequently I get to true FS create festivals in beautiful locations around the world thousands of people apply to come in attendance events and I get to curate a tribe of remarkable individuals who are there with me some of the world's greatest speakers come and speak on our stage for free because they want to be there and I suddenly found myself living this life where the friendships were there that traveled the adventure I'm taking my family with me I'm learning from all of these remarkable speakers but if s itself defies any business plan it's a fully profitable business but it never emerged as a desire to be a business it simply emerged as this weird little eruption in life that came from me getting really specific about what I wanted and the type of life I wanted to live John butcher and I I wanted to show you yes ladies I'll give you a moment so so you can see how that right how writing that down I had no idea what's gonna happen but if s emotionally this the second thing was was this one I saw this picture of John and frankly I got turned on but this said another vision for me right so I realized that health longevity I didn't have goals for that so I started doing that and that was my health transformation in just two years so I actually reversed my biological age by maybe between five and seven years you can actually measure biological age so I want you to know that this is a very important part of the process this is not about becoming Elon Musk Elon Musk is Elon Musk you are you you are who you are and your vision has to be unique to you and this is about getting you to think boldly but not to stop the next startup because you want to stop the next startup because everybody else is doing it or become the next best-selling author because everybody else is doing it it's to figure out what is that unique vision that's emerging from you what is that life that you want to lead and then making that as bold and magnificent and 360 as you can it's about really having a 360 life vision looking at 12 different dimensions so thank you John and Missy for that insight and we're gonna take you through this process on day four so now that you understand what envisioning is about are you guys ready to go forward [Applause]

Channel: Mindvalley Talks

Views: 313,755

Rating: 4.8816242 out of 5

Keywords: mindvalley, tedx talk, ted talk, How to Find Fulfillment - The Secret to Happiness | Karen McGregor | TEDxStanleyPark, john butcher lifebook, life visioning, envisioning your future, bob proctor paradigm shift, naveen jain, how to set goals and achieve them, biological age, envisioning method, change your life, how to set goals, vishen lakhiani bending reality, vishen lakhiani, vishen lakhiani ted talk, create the perfect life, how to have a dream life, goal setting motivation

Id: -WKhP6A6j_E

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019