The Four Rules of Life that Change Your View of Everything | Vishen Lakhiani

but the real law of attraction is really about resonance you evolve yourself and as you evolve yourself whatever resonates with that new you comes to hi everyone in this closing presentation in a fess I want to share with you initially I was thinking I was gonna share with you how mine valley built a 2 million person email list but then I thought look you guys will figure that out there are tons of other people who talk about that sort of thing instead I want to share with you something a little bit more personal I want to share with you how there was a particular period recently where it felt like the entire universe was caving in on me and almost three times in a row over three years I almost lost the entire business I've never shared the story publicly but it was a period of like incredible pain for me between 2013 and 2016 I think there's a value in sharing it here because it makes you understand that all of us are gonna go through a lot of as we try to build our influence but secondly there were some interesting lessons I learned from this period and I think there's a value in these lessons as well to help you overcome the hurdles so I'd like to share this story instead are you guys cool with that so we all know what mine valley does we bring together the world's best minds we I'm really proud of the fact that we employ people from 54 different countries right now that we put on this incredible festivals that we work from one of the most beautiful office spaces in the world but that's not what I want to talk about what I want to talk about is the breakdown and the interesting thing is this breakdown didn't happen in the early years of mine Valley it happened 10 years into running the company and that is what I find most interesting about it ten years into being a CEO I was failing miserably and I want to share what happened because it was so dramatic how disaster after disaster after disaster struck I thought the universe was literally against me so the story is I started mine belly in 2003 in that little apartment in New York City so back then I was teaching meditation in New York and funny story about that little apartment is this is Times Square 2003 before Disney moved into Times Square and you know when created all of the Disney Broadway shows so this was a Disney Time Square this was like crack and hookers Times Square literally you would get propositioned walking home almost every single night by a lady on the streets before I moved into the department I found out from the landlord that it was a thigh massage parlor which had been refurbished and if you lived in Times Square in New York you know what thigh massage parlor is code word for so yes mine Valley did start in a whorehouse form a whorehouse now that is me in 2003 in that apartment I like this photo because the table in the chair I'm in I actually salvaged from the streets my neighbor's discarded it beautiful thing about New York it's a very friendly society every year when the new IKEA catalog comes out the wealthiest citizens go and buy the latest IKEA furniture the older IKEA furniture gets left out in the street for people like me to pick up and use both of those for furniture I literally found on the street in fact that table I love that table I used to work on that table you could see a valley could afford pants back then but on that table that table in the IKEA catalog is actually called the Lac table it's funny the Swedes at IKEA actually named a table for the mental state of lack you need to work on that 1495 desk so that was 2003 now flash-forward 2013 10 years ahead you would think that after a decade I would have everything figured out right now mine daddy was doing at East was doing decent back then in 2013 a fest was running we had just done a first AFS and Thailand but this is when I'd say the most difficult years of my life suddenly started popping into existence so the first thing that happened is that just before Thanksgiving 2013 I found out that my accountant who had been working with me for four and a half years had been stealing from me for four years and she was someone that I completely trusted she had stolen about a quarter million dollars and all of a sudden I found that my right-hand person had been cheating on me for four and a for four years to the tune of a quarter million dollars that was devastating it violated my trust in so many things but that wasn't the end of it just six months after that incident that completely shattered my illusion of life how awesome I was as a CEO and I had everything under control my daddy was working with several different authors and our biggest client was was I won't state the name but it was responsible for about 20% of our business it was a meditation company and we were in partnership with them and we were their official promoters and they brought in a CEO and that CEO knew that a partnership which had lasted seven years was done in a handshake handshake agreement and he saw the amount of revenue and sales we were bringing into them and he thought you know I want the entire thing so I got sued by the CEO and it was a completely frivolous lawsuit but what had happened was because I didn't have my in order I hadn't actually signed a contract so the CEO knew that I didn't have a contract she knew it wasn't a handshake agreement and she decided to sue me in the court of Loretto Texas now Laredo Texas is a Mexican border town between Texas and Mexico it has the most corrupt court district in the world and I knew that she had bribed the judges I knew because her own family members had leaked that to me I did not want to get into a frivolous lawsuit and have to travel to Laredo and you know face these judges whom I knew were were were dishonest and so I gave up a five million dollar business I literally signed it off we had to lay off 12 employees in Argentina who ran that business that was devastating these employees had kids and I entire MindValley Spanish operations which relied on that business disappeared lost everything Argentinian office had to be shut down that was incident number two now to get myself out of that I decided to go to Burning Man with the guy who at that point was my best friend went to Burning Man had a lot of incredible experiences together really bonded as men and we then he then convinced me that he could help me with my web operations and the way to do that was to he was going to take over my merchant account and to do this I made another stupid mistake because I trusted him so much because we had done so much drugs together at Burning Man I gave him access to my bank account six months later he fled with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars so now my best friend had betrayed me this actually hurt I didn't care about the money I had difficulty trusting male business partners four years after that I was horrible now we come to December 2014 it's now been one year of total chaos and I get a call on December 26 just after Christmas I'm in Estonia and the call is a vision we can't make payroll can we you know what do we do we can't afford to pay salaries so I'm like I'll sell my car so now I'm looking at selling my murse so that I could have some money come in so that I could actually pay my team and I felt like I was a failure I never told the team to this day most people in mind but he never knew this happened at the last minute my executive team they agreed to just not get paid that month so that everybody else could get paid and God blessed them like in January we certainly had a cash infusion it was the start of the year and we were able to like pull ourselves out again I thought that was the end but then in February my CEO all who is now running the company I find out that he's stealing from us he saw that the accountant from one year ago you know she basically just got a slap on the wrist white-collar crime so he thought well I want a piece of that and before he gets caught he's stolen away a hundred thousand dollars another huge freaking light like bit of chaos it gets worse at this point we're thinking okay we're gonna move mine Valley to a new email marketing platform it was called an exact target incredible platform but we were basically back then like the company was reliant mostly on email we had close to a 1 million person list and we moved everyone to exact target and it took us months make that transfer right but as we were making that transfer ExactTarget got acquired by a larger company whose name I'm not allowed to mention because I'm not about to mention them kindly and I had to sign a contract you can figure it out and they as a larger company and their salespeople basically lied to us we signed a very strict contract and when they acquired ExactTarget they didn't get the pipes fitting well so over the next one year we couldn't understand why our revenue had plummeted turned out 40% of our emails were not being delivered so now every month we are losing $100,000 month after month after month and we had to go through a whole painful process of one year wondering why no one is buying from us why our customers are not there turns out 40% of our customers were not just not getting our emails only when we figured it out we were able to recover this was three years of like chaos three years where I couldn't understand why I was struggling so much in 2015 I actually gave up being a CEO I'm like I can't do this so I stepped down and someone else to take over it didn't save things mind while he continued bleeding money now I just want to do a quick check and check in with you how many of you here have had someone steal from you in the company good I'm so glad I'm not alone how many of you here have had a massive technological glitch that almost cost you a business thank you for not making me feel alone and how many of you here have had difficulty missed making payroll for yourself or your team this happens to all of us and you know the funny thing is it kind of makes us like cockroaches I think if you want to be a good entrepreneur you got to be like a cockroach you got to be comfortable crawling through a lot of and not getting killed but there's that so I call this the cockroach theory of entrepreneurship but there's another thing that's really cool about this in Google Google Illustrated is Google did a study and I found this in a page of a book called exponential organizations by Salim Ismail and Google found that it's best people were not Ivy League graduates but rather people who had experienced a big loss in their lives and had emerged from it transformed according to Google deep personal loss has resulted in employees who were more humble and open to listening and learning and I think this actually applies to all of us not just the people we hire but when we go through something shifts within us I believe that the universe is benevolent and I believe that what we often see as pain or struggle is often the universe's way of waking us up to something that is our true potential or a part that we really need to go on so let's come back to Michael Beckwith cause he was one of our speakers here at a fest one of the biggest ideas I learned from Beckwith is this concept called kensho versus Satori kensho says Michael Beckwith is growth through pain Satori says Michael Beckwith is growth through insight so if you accept the mental model that you are a soul having a human experience and that to make it fun the soul forgets that it is truly a soul and puts you in this playground called planet Earth then every now and then the soul might need to autocorrect you and it's gonna autocorrect you in one of two ways kensho is auto correction through pain you're not listening you're stubborn so the soul is like okay I'm gonna smack you at the back of your head till you wake up that is growth through pain but there's also growth through insight and insight is when you are listening inside this when you go through introspection inside is when you meditate inside is when you learn to listen to your heart or intuition and inside is what you call a Satori moment it's grow true awakening so I want about this idea in my book cause it was so insightful and I drew this little diagram to illustrate what Michael Beckwith said okay you can see can show moment's growth through temporary pain they cause your life to dip and and the depth is painful but there is a light at the end of the tunnel and then there's grow true Satori or grow true insight so I found this idea fascinating the question is how can we overcome the dips how can we actually listen to our soul so it doesn't have to take us on a button and instead allow us to grow through prospection through insight through awakenings through Eureka moments true aha moments that is the question I want to talk about because this is a much more comfortable way of growth wouldn't you agree it doesn't require someone to steal from you it doesn't require a business failure it doesn't require ExactTarget as a email marketing software to collapse on you and it allows you to to grow in a more peaceful way now to understand how to develop these Satori moments I realized that one of the best ways to avoid kensho is to understand the culture escape the culture escape is a word I coined in my book and it means the tangled web of beliefs rituals ideas that permeate the world the culture escape is designed for human beings to make sense of a complex world it tells us how to act what to do how to live our lives it tells us what value systems to have and it comes from fathers mothers teachers preachers organized religion the media politicians the funny thing though about the culture escape is that while there are rules which are useful for example look two ways before crossing the street or do a background check on your accountant before you hire her it also comes with a lot of rules orb rules as I refer to them rules are rules that we adopt to simplify our understanding of the world but these are rules which are not necessarily true now the question I want to pose for you is what if very often the pain that we experience is us all telling us that we are following a rule and that was my insight I think I believe the more you separate yourself from the culture skip now the culture scape has its purposes right you don't want to walk into a conference hall naked because you're a rule breaker you were thinking about that weren't you but but they are rules in the culture escape that make no sense for example I recently dropped the title CEO because I found that that was a rule but the problem with that rule is it required me to operate in a certain way that I thought was out of alignment and it caused a rift between me and the people I lead but I felt was out of alignment I decided to remove CEO from my title and just be found her so brutes often hold us back and one of the big things I've been exploring in my life over the last one year is how many rules could I drop how many rules no longer make sense to me and so you know I changed the way we ran mine Bali I'm shifting the way a fast functions me and Christina had a conscious uncoupling I'm trying to live life based on my own terms rather than what society says is an acceptable way so in 2016 during this moment of great stress I received an important phone call and it was from this man sreekumar oh he's actually gonna be one of our lecturers at mine Valley University but what's cool about sreekumar is that he is an mba professor in america he teaches at Cornell a Kellogg Business School at London Business School but he brings in wisdom from the east into his teachings so he called me up he's like vision I noticed you've been really really really under a lot of stress right how can I serve you and I said and I spill my heart out to him I told him everything I was dealing with and he said wait wait wait wait wait I want to read you a poem and I'm like wow I don't have time to listen to poetry like I'm drowning here and he goes just listen to this poem okay now I want you to listen to this poem the beautiful thing about poetry is that great poetry is a really unique form of art there's the scene from Bohemian Rhapsody where somebody asks us for the mercury what do the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody mean and he goes it means anything the listener wants it to mean that is the essence of poetry what you're about to hear is a poem by Rumi a 13th century Afghan refugee who was fleeing the Mongol invasion and Rumi wrote some of the most profound works of poetry in the world this is what Rao shriek morale read to me over the phone that day when I run after what I think I my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety but if I sit in my own place of patience what I need flows to me without any pain from this I understand that what I want also wants me is looking for me and attracting me there's a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it let's go back to the first verse when I run after what I think I want what is it that you think you want often these are elements of the culture scape elements of human society that have told you you need to do this you need the garage with two cars the two kids you need the title on your business card you need the bank account with a hundred grand in cash but if you sit in your own place of patience what I need flows to me and without any pain or in other words without the kensho moment that is growth through pain now when you can learn to get in this state there's a great secret for anyone who can grasp it now I didn't understand what the hell this poem was about because I was in a different state of mind when shriek morale read it to me but I want you to to just reflect on that poem so if we could just dim the lights and play some Rumi reflection meditation music I like to give our AV boys a challenge because they are so good at what they do so I want 13th century Rumi Sufi reflection music now meditate on that poem close your eyes remember each of you might interpret this in a different way as you do I'm gonna read it out to you one more time when I run after what I think I want my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety if I sit in my own place of patience what I need flows to me and without any pain from this I understand that what I want also wants me is looking for me and attracting me there is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it and you may open your eyes I didn't understand what this poem meant back then but today I think I do and again as your awareness grows you're gonna see more and more and more things into the wisdom of Rumi or any other piece of inspirational poetry you read what I understood then was what I was operating from the do be mechanism the culture escape says do this to be this do the college degree to be that do the job promotion to be this do the work as the engineer or the doctor even if it doesn't light you up to be this it's the doobie paradigm what I realize is that you got to flip it around what Rumi was talking about when he said sit in my own place of patience is that what I want comes to me and I understand that what I want wants me to that is the bedo paradigm you be and you do when I believe Rumi was saying and again I can't get into the mind of a 13th century Afghan poet so I only have to assume here but my interpretation is that what Rumi was really saying is that what you really want wants you to because what you really want versus what you think you want what you really want comes from the soul and what you really want because your soul is part of this larger universe it wants you to and so don't tune in to the rules of the world that tell you who to be or what to want or what to do instead be who you really are listen to that soul and know that what the soul wants the universe wants you to have and this is when the magic happens this was what really shifted my life so how do you get there well you go deep into identifying your values I'm gonna teach you how to do that in a moment so what happened was I happen to get a good teacher he was a guy by the name of Amir a monk he was actually supposed to be at the safest but he couldn't come he was supposed to climb from the Oslo Freedom Forum along with Adam Roja I was gonna bring an emeriti to this exercise to have you establish your values but because America did make it I'm gonna run it with you now I did this exercise with Amir at the tail end of 2016 and I understood that I had four values like four things that really drove me the first was very easy transformation I believe in personal growth I believe that personal growth should be the number one thing the second was envisioning I like to create so whether you're an artist or an engineer like me envisioning means you see the world as a canvas and you want to build you want to create you want to invent you want to inspire it's a beautiful value to have the third value though is unity now all of these fit together you can be incredible with personal growth you can be an incredible creator but if you don't have the value of unity you can be an right we've seen politicians who are who are incredible at envisioning ideas but their ideas are about waltz rather than compassion and so you got to have that value of unity as well and there is a fourth value and that fourth value was love and I'll come to what that means so what happened was I decided to discard all of the things that I was told to do and I decided to just operate from the core and live by these four values now the beautiful thing about the values I picked is they are fairly generic how many of you here resonate with the value of transformation that means you believe that personal growth is really powerful awesome what about envisioning you believe in creation great what about unity you see the world as a single unit as Homo sapiens rather than nations or me or religion so mythology's okay and love you believe in being kind and compassionate to everyone you meet great but are we really living that because I thought I lived those values but I was not so what I want to share with you is how I shifted from doing to being and being that meant that everything else in my life had to become secondary to these values that is when you're really living your value now this is what happened when I made that shift the first thing that happened is between 2016 and 2019 the company that was stagnating and going through these ridiculous like dips all of a sudden started exploding like 50 percent year-on-year I couldn't even explain it we just seemed blessed to get the right people to get the right opportunities and then the energy of the company change we started becoming before that mine Valley would publish products because it felt that you know this is a good market fit now we published products that we really care about we do our own products we are friends with our teachers there was a picture taken at a fest one year ago and you know what's really cool about it is that the people who come the teachers who come to AFS become part of a tribe jay shetty who wasn't that picture said you speak once in a mine Valley stage and you are friends with them for life it was incredible how the whole nature of what we were doing shifted but one of the most curious things is that my physical body shifted I'm gonna show you two pictures one was an actual profile photo of me taken by the same photographers here but taken at a fest 2016 in Greece and the second picture was taken two years later okay and the picture on the the first picture is actually me in the second picture my body had completely changed I had gone from maybe 22 percent body fat to 14 percent body fat I had a stigmatism in my left eye my astigmatism disappeared I couldn't understand that my help was actually changing now I know why it was going on and I'm gonna show you but when you practice these ideas your physical appearance will change your physical body will change you can reverse aging and it was incredible not only did the outside world change but the inner world did Michael Beckwith mentioned something really interesting I was interviewing him just before he got on stage and he said a lot of people misunderstand this concept called the law of attraction they think it's about you know thinking the thoughts that you want the love the car that money and attracting that to you he says that's a kindergarten level of understanding it's useful to some people but the real law of attraction is really about resonance you evolve yourself and as you evolve yourself whatever resonates with that new you comes to you but ultimately it's not about acquiring things it's about becoming the best and grandest and greatest version of yourself does anyone relate so let's do this if I say something and you agree and you feel that you know you agreed an inner level just snap your fingers we're not gonna be talking about science here we're gonna be talking about philosophy the funny thing about philosophy is I can't back this up with data or evidence but I can but we can understand how true it feels by listening to the snapping sound of people who agree do you agree awesome one more thing that happened is it almost seemed as if life became magical there were magical moments and coincidences and synchronicities in short I was in flow and all of these changes happen when I started living from these four values and made them the core of who I was and all of that that was happening from 2013 to 2016 disappeared I no longer had to be a cockroach so I want to share the four values and how to implement them in your life now you don't have to take all four you could take one or two or three you might develop your own value but the important here is the philosophical understanding and then the application if you don't apply then the understanding is nothing more that then fuzz at the back of your mind now the first value actually came from Rao himself Rao was speaking at mine Valley live in Los Angeles and after he got off stage he came and approached me and he said vision we gotta take these ideas bigger and I'm like what do you mean he's like I teach at the best MBA schools in America and I can tell you that they are teaching the wrong thing so I'm like to tell he says they teach you that your life is about your career and your money and that's wrong so I'm like um what should they teach and he goes what they should teach is this I now call this rule number one and it says your work is not about your work rather your work is nothing more than the greatest vehicle for your personal evolution he said personal growth perpetual growth should be your ultimate identity and you must put your personal growth before everything else now this part may get a little bit controversial before your work before the title of CEO before your billion-dollar company before your marriage and before your children if you agree feel to the snap if you don't agree don't do anything I'm not saying you have to agree like I said these are just for lost philosophies right I'm simply stating what Rao said he says if you make personal growth first everything else grows so it doesn't make you selfish but everything else grows but what happens is you escape from the rules that tell you how to be and what to do and that is when you're truly operating from your soul so this becomes rule one in fact what Rao said is that if your business fails it doesn't matter did you grow if your business succeeds it doesn't matter did you grow and I found that really liberating because I was feeling like a failure for failing consistently but when Rao changed my mental model and he he uses the word mental model I started seeing failure as simply a means to growth so when you see failure as a means to growth you become immune to failure and that is the real beauty here so Rao's rule is also best illustrated in this this this really cool quote I had I saw a friend share on Instagram and it says this grow so fast you're all friends have to get to know you all over again so I want to introduce you to a term right I call it Rose rate of self evolution your rate of self evolution your rate of South evolution or your rose must be the ultimate thing in your life in other words your life needs to be about personal growth many of us forget that we make our life about our children that's wrong if you look at the concept of conscious parenting which Shefali sabari teaches your children are nothing more than the vehicle for your greatest evolution she Shefali who has been on Oprah seven times says you are not there to teach your children your children are souls to teach you likewise your work and your business it's not there for the title of the money oh those are constructs from the culture scape you will get that if you make your business about making you grow so personal growth becomes everything now I want to introduce another right here which are like this comes from the book atomic habits so in the book the author says that we often approach personal growth wrong we want to lose weight so we say it's gonna be about the process I am going to do this particular exercise or it becomes about the outcome I am gonna go from 30 percent body fat to 20 percent body fat and the book says that's actually wrong don't think about outcome don't think about process you really want to shift shift identity think I am born with this incredible body which is gonna stay young and athletic forever or I am a Spartan or I am always healthy fit and muscular when you make it about the identity you get the outcome and the process becomes effortless you don't have to use willpower so one of the first things we did at MindValley was we started changing the identity of everyone in our team that's actually a picture of mine valley people at the gym in the morning everyone in that picture works at mine Valley cheering each other on like people are going through a fitness test over here and the cool thing about when you ship your identity you put the phrase right you were the sum of the five people closest to you everyone around you you infect their identity as well it's one of the reasons why you know this tribe is so powerful when you get on wild fit or when you get into shape it ripples Jason Campbell Jason could you run on stage please and do you mind taking off your shirt as you do soon no okay you don't have to but Jason come on stage just for kicks just for kicks Jason so no I'm serious would you mind taking off your shirt what no your your golf what okay so so the reason the reason the cut it was a legit question so Jason was the chubby Canadian guy like I remember I literally remember a conversation with him he had come back from December back with his parents in Canada he's like vision they fed me so much cheese and and Jason was interviewing a tribe member right who was the tribe member you interviewing I don't know about the tribe member but I do just remind me of a memory when I came back a team retreat and the first thing he said after not seeing me for a few weeks ago Jason you look so big thanks fishing so so so you interviewing a Jimmy you interviewing a tribe member Jimmy so Jimmy is an a Jimmy Naren you guys know Jimmy right okay so given arranged an AFS that he's been to multiple a fest jason was interviewing Jimmy and Jimmy is really fit and Jason said how do you do that and Jimmy says well I have this identity that I am a Spartan and that struck something in Jason's mind the very next day within 24 hours Jason implemented that identity he signed up for Spartan Race he ran his first part and race and took four people from mine valley with him it was the middle of a typhoon in the Philippines and 5,000 people ran in the middle of a typhoon now that was so exciting the next part and raised 27 people ran and the next part and raised 40 people ran and today when you join mine Valley if you are a guy we don't measure this for a woman that only men you lose 10 kilograms in your first year and typically by year 2 you're running a Spartan Race so we have more like abs visible ABS per mailed and probably any other company out there so all I'll say is how we're all gonna be wearing costumes tonight so you might have a chance to see the ABS then right so but Jason bet my point is Jason infected an entire culture with that attitude so every morning people are working out together people are training for the Spartan Race and that's what identity shift does okay so thank you Jason thank you although I'm so disappointed you kept your damn shirt on so the tool kit is identity shape how do you how do you engineer identity ships I learned this really powerful technique from Christy Murray Sheldon she's one of our mind valley teachers now she calls it lofty questions so first you decide the areas of your life that you want to create anew and now in the morning during your meditation you do not say an affirmation you raise a question to your subconscious you see affirmations don't work Jose Silva the great mind science pioneer established that in the 1980s if you say if you are not in a healthy state and you say why am I so ripped and muscular in the back of your mind there's gonna be a little voice that says no you aren't ripped and muscular you liar you ate that pizza last night and if you're going what voice I don't have that voice that's the voice so you guys got so lofty questions are different you trick your subconscious you don't give a statement that your subconscious is going to inevitably make you deny you actually create a statement like that why do I wake up every day feeling connected to sauce why am i such a powerful learner why am i running a hundred million dollar company why do I have such a loving and exciting relationship why do I have to fit muscular body of an athlete these are all lofty statements that I do right now the beautiful thing about lofty statements and you can you can design your own the beautiful thing about lofty statements is your mind cannot deny them rather you are posing a question to your subconscious and if you're in the right state of flow I believe that it activates your subconscious to find you the answers so let's look at that last one right why do I have to fit muscular body of an athlete I started saying that in January 2016 January 2016 and I was not fit I mean I was I was okay right but you know what I was at maybe twenty-two percent body fat I met Eric ed needs two weeks later is Eric in the room there he is I met Eric ed needs two weeks later he was he was teaching people the wild fit diet I got on wild fit ninety days later I'd gone down to fourteen percent body fat it was amazing how fast it worked I tried to lose weight for ten years I couldn't I tried to have a discipline gym practice for ten years I couldn't within weeks of stating this using this statement my body shifted I was disciplined I was only attracted to good food and then weird synchronicities like meeting Eric came into my life I got on well fit now he didn't stop six months after while fit I'd lost weight but I wasn't still atletic I bumped into a guy who works at mine Valley and it turns out he's like a workout genius Lorenzo he developed the 10x protocol and now he starts training me and then you know from that the ripple start happening a hundred people from my team went into a wild fit and then into 10x and now that statement for me is true now I stay I stayed it to maintain it so it's crazy how when you ship your identity at a subconscious level the world shifts but remember what Michael Beckwith said the law of attraction is incomplete it's really the law of resonance when change who you are the world will shift to make to ensure that who you are is true so it starts inside don't think attraction think resonance so that was value number one but you get there when you embrace personal growth as the number one thing so I want to encourage you to try the lofty questions exercise if you want to go deeper get on Google just search for lofty questions MindValley you'll find a free five minute video on it now the second thing is envisioning 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're not contributing to the world especially true with many spiritual people I believe the point of spirituality is not just to go within its 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 Buddha's who are badasses ken Wilber and his famous essay egolessness said the great spiritual saints and sages of the world from Moses to partner Sam bhava to Jesus were not feeble-minded Moto's 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 that you use the inside the Satori moments the intuition from that to get out there and 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 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 were 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 has always tried to dream bigger and bigger and bigger so after AFS became successful we decided to try mine value University for example you got to keep your mind focus on bigger and bigger things so you got to be happy and grateful all of that is great but you got to 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 cojones 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 one dollar 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 had irrational fears that come from evolution as pre humans in 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 abandon 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 homelessness 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 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 the big goals starts with the little goals and when you know that the little things the self your 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 that there are also big goals but the little goals they are the foundation you gotta 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 bold goals now for the ball goals what we implemented in mind Valley 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 goal 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 10 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 and 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 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 gave 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 it MindValley every every department has that the company has that and soon every individual is going to have that ok so that is idea number two now the third one really simple unity so again you can be a creator you can be incredibly self transformed but unity is the one that ensures that UI healthy cell for the human race and you're not manipulating or cheating or taking advantage of other people right you're doing it for the good of the world this brings us to rule number three your life is not about you rather your life is about the lives of everyone you touch now this rule came in a really interesting way we were at mine Valley University in Barcelona Neale Donald Walsch who wrote conversations with God had come down because what many people don't know is that mine Val universe key was inspired partially by the future societies that Neil wrote about in his conversations with God books so I brought him down to teach the class there were about 300 of you in a room and one of you she may even be in this room raised a hand and said Neil what do I do in those situations when I wake up in the morning and I feel sad or depressed or unworthy and Neil said remember your life is not about you rather your life is about the lives of everyone you touch when you remember this and when you make your life about service you will never wake up feeling depressed or lonely or afraid or worried again he went on to say when you walk in a room set an intention to heal the room even if you're one out of 400 people coming in make your life about service so the whole crowd was really really really like taken in by this idea and really resonated with it if you give us a snap so how do you do that well you got to identify what is called your North Star your not star is that part of you that you want to use to surf the world Elon Musk really simple he's not stars colonizing Mars and the fact is you don't have to know how to get to your North Star I am got to have an audience with Elon Musk once and I remember he told our group when we asked him so you know what what's the big picture this was like 2015 before you know he was as famous as yesterday and he says I want to call a nice Mars and he also said this he said it's probably gonna happen in around 10 years I've I don't know yet how to get there I'm thinking around 10 years I sometimes miss my deadlines he was really humble about it but when you think about how Elon Musk talks he doesn't talk about how he runs a rocket company he talks about how he's gonna call a nice Mars and that's what excites his employees do you know SpaceX is the number one company great engineers want to join but there are 19 other companies that do the same thing Jeff Bezos has Blue Horizons but why SpaceX gets all the attention even though all SpaceX is is a vertical trucking company regular trucking company moves goods did this way SpaceX moves Goods this way vertical trucking but it's the most desirable company to join for the world's greatest engineers because musk doesn't talk about vertical trucking he talks about colonizing that red planet you see the secret here is to always have a frame of reference where you imagine your life 10 years ahead for your business for your craft so I started something really interesting when people would ask me what did mine value do I actually would not talk about what we were doing now I will talk about what we were doing in the future if you look at our website from 2016 when I started embracing this and you can go back on archive.org you will see I spoke about starting a university I spoke about going in to help all of that happen while fit MindValley University I spoke about what want to happen 10 years in the future what's funny about this is when you speak about the future as if it's now people want to follow you customers want to buy from you people want to be part of this future and okay if you fail because remember 50% of your goals are supposed to have a 50% chance of failure anyway and I state that I'm like alright this is the future I'm gonna build but I'm half but it's not going to happen do you want in and people want in so this is one of the most amazing things it is the power of speaking about your life and what you're doing 10 years into the future try it tonight when somebody asks you you know that awkward question what do you do pretend so now how do you how do you embrace this future thinking and how do you bring this into your company now there is a trick to it right the future that you want to build has to be a future that supports unity Elon Musk doesn't want to colonize Mars so he can be the first man on Mars he wants to colonize Mars so he can back up the human race and make us an interplanetary species that is thinking about the other 8 billion cells that make up the human Colossus that's how you want to talk about the future now maybe you run a company that is not working on something that bold and ambitious sreekumar once told me about a story where he was teaching a class and the CEO in the class ran a company that manufactured window glass and the CEO said sreekumar how do I speak about 10 years in the future all I do is provide a commodity that's glass and Rao said but isn't it true that for one week every year in your community where you employ 200 people you take all your employees and you allow them to go and work for nonprofits like an orphanage or a soup kitchen and you pay their salaries for a week that is how you contribute you're helping contribute to a more compassionate world so speak about that you he told the CEO are taking a stand for service speak about that it doesn't matter that you manufacture glass if people know that that is the core and the soul of your company they will want to join you and you will inspire people so Raanana in other words said don't try to be inspirational instead be inspired the CEO wasn't inspirational that he was inspired by the people who worked in soup kitchens by the people who clothed the homeless and he wanted to give his employees that experience so how do you do it the toolkit is take a stand like - Luther King spoke a lot about this he said power without love is reckless and abusive love without power is sentimental and anemic power and its best is love implementing the demands of justice and justice at its best his power correcting everything that stands against love so you take a stand for example when me and Eric um did a while fit campaign last year we took a stand against Nestle it became the biggest news story in Malaysia and what we want to do was expose how Nestle was getting kids addicted to sugary drinks and and putting it up as energy drinks and it was huge it became the biggest story in the country for seven days and Nestle lost their health ratings for the a mile which is a crappy product in Australia New Zealand and they introduced zero sugar Milo and Singapore partially because we took a stand against this eighty billion dollar company another thing I wanted to share and marcia wieder who's in the audience asked me to share this video today cause she said it really touched her when mine Valley was going through this shift in 2016 right when Trump won the election we felt that while we hope he does well there were certain things he said that were very much against our value of unity we're a country that employs people from 54 countries Ola Abbas who runs our big events in the US happens to be from Sudan a country whose Nationals Trump wanted to completely ban from entering the US so I'm like no way Trump is gonna affect you know my Sudanese friend here we need to speak out so my team and I created this video and I remember back then we weren't as big as we were but we took a stand and it's very important that if you absorb the value of unity you act on it and you stand up for what really matters so this is a video that we created [Music] we are going to build the wall [Music] [Music] I stand for love I stand for peace I stand for unity education the environment equality I stand for Refugees [Music] in an age of dangerous politics don't let bullies force you to sit down to tell you you're being too political or unpatriotic when you speak true to tell you you can't stand tall or that you don't belong here speak up rise up unite into those who dare to stand [Music] [Applause] [Music] our team is really proud of that video and and the funny thing is when we did that people are like why would you release this you'll just turn off you know some of your customers but actually what happened is when we released this video within six months like it was insane how much mine belly grew because people realized that we weren't just in it for the buck that we actually wanted to make a change in the world and we still embody a lot of these values for example like I'm really big on refugees so at mine Val University I'm sponsoring through Syrian refugee teenagers to come and attend the classes because I want our children who are going to be at mine Valley University to understand what a Syrian refugee went through I think that's one of the most incredible things to learn from and hopefully befriend the refugee and open up their minds to the plight of a hundred million displaced people in the world regular education doesn't teach you that so this stand is something that's so important that all of it comes from the value of unity of ensuring that your compassion your love extends outside just the borders of your nation or your gender or your industry to all people everywhere and that brings us to the fourth value which is love so Khalil Gibran said all work is empty safe when there is love and when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself and to one another and to God so that's really what this one is about and this one too became a value that I wanted to anchor in with a rule and the rule is we do our best work when we care for each other and we are cared for so this became one of the underlying values of mine Valley it can also be a really good value for this particular tribe now this value is actually really powerful just a few months ago Stanford released one of its top programs to the world and 95 percent of Stanford MBAs have taken this course and they started offering the course online three for the first time now what's really interesting is um the course is $5,500 you can take you know a week-long one for $16,000 it's expensive but you know what the cost is about Stanford graduates actually refer to this as the touchy-feely costs that's the nickname that they call it and it's really about understanding that true unicorn employees are those two the two strong seemingly unrelated skills one left-brain logic analytic reasoning and one right brain intuition and creativity but the intuition and creativity are fueled when we are kind and compassionate to each other in other words in the workplace if you want to succeed you basically compete on one thing and that is kindness and so what we try to do is is to is to figure out how can we make love part of everything we do um I love seeing comments like this about 9 Valley I went from I only care about myself and my family the rest can go and figure it out on their own - I love all humans and entities in the universe and I have a responsibility to protect them so that is the value that we try to put into everything we do if you agree so toolkits really interesting new ideas right now the first idea is the concept of rules versus feelings so I've always found that no one I ever met could really tell me the true difference between masculine leadership and feminine leadership we hear these words tossed around I've looked at many different leadership people talk about it no one I felt could really explain it until I met this man Ken Wilber so Ken Wilber wrote a book called integral vision and in that book he cites the feminist philosopher by the name of Carol Gilligan and when I when can explain this to me it changed a lot of things Carol Gilligan said that even if males take on the ideas of unity and love or masculine rather they express it in a way which is ruled dominant so even if you look at Martin Luther King who is very well centric very loving it's about justice it's about rights it's about rules first but he says that with women or Carol Gilligan says that with women with the feminine it's about feelings first feelings beyond the rules with male its rules beyond the feelings so for example Carol Gilligan says that if you look at a group of boys playing baseball and one guy strikes out and he has to go on the bench he goes on the bench but let's say that boy was crying the other guys are like oh come on you strike out just soak it up like be a man but woman would say he's crying their tears streaming down his face forget the rules just give him another chance at that so masculine and feminine operate in a different way now this is reflected in the company as well so what it means is that you care for rules and feelings recently about a year ago we had a person who was fired from our company and you know we followed the rules HR followed the rules she was not performing well the manager didn't want to rehire her she had gone an extended leave and she hadn't checked in as much and so she was let go following the rules straight up termination however the other part of the story is she was gone an extended leave because her mother had died and she wanted to be by her mom on her deathbed but what HR did was operate completely from the masculine perspective I'm sorry but the performance isn't there we need this job filled we can't give you your role back now the feminine leadership as for Carol Gilligan would be different so this person ended up writing to me and same mission I think mine Valley has no values because how the hell could you treat me like this and I agreed with her what had happened through HR was wrong and so we decided that we still followed the rules we couldn't let her you know we couldn't give her the job because her manager didn't want her but we had to take into account the feeling she was going through so we decided to give her the biggest severance package we'd ever given anyone we gave her five months full salary so she could get back on her feet recover heal start a new business or get a new job and as soon as we did that the masculine side of HR came up again and said but you can't do that because now everyone is gonna ask for five months severance but both sides came together and we said okay we're going to establish a simple bylaw that says we will care for people and create a compassionate leave policy if someone is going through a lot of struggle a lot of pain no worries we will ensure that we give them five months severance so you see you can merge both and when you merge both this is when you really create like the healthy dynamic does everyone get that so we started merging boat when we bring our teachers or speakers into AFS we care about how they we care about how they feel when they walk up we care about the experience at the costume parties on the final day like tonight I'm actually body painting several about speakers because we don't want em to just comes no that's not just like a weird kink I have we don't to just come like get on a stage and leave we want to make sure that they truly feel part of this tribe and you can do this in many different ways you can infuse love into the workplace many of you have seen how mine Valley incorporates love week there's a really great video on this online if you get a chance to check it out it's just called love week MindValley it's one week during Valentine's Day when everyone in the company just like appreciates each other okay so those are the four things now those are the four values that completely shifted it for me so what happened is I stopped thinking okay CEOs do this I stop getting obsessed with the PNL I simply decided to to be the values to be transformation to be envisioning to be unity to be love and when that happens what's going on is that you're truly listening to your soul you're truly listening to what your soul wants and everything else starts falling into place you move from kensho or growth through pain to Satori or grow to insight now now you can exhort any of those four values you want my values are pretty generic but do you have unique values to yourself I bet you do and the clue lies in your wounding Rumi was insightful in many ways but another great Rumi quote is this the wound is the place where the light enters and what this means is that when you get wounded light will go through that wound and this light might be your best your most incredible gift of insight remember Adam Rawat took the stage this morning and spoke about being molested at the age of five and Adam has gone on to become the love poet because he had to find all the ways he could to forgive and love back the man who cruelly violated him and today his YouTube channel is all about truly understanding love his wound was the place where the light enters think back to a moment where you went through deep and you'll find your values came from pain the most compassionate people who want to inject compassion in their workplaces were acted cruelly upon the people who were abused are the people who stand for the opposite of abuse for love and forgiveness your values come from your pain and that is one of the great secrets of life your pain is often not your pain your suffering doesn't have to be suffering Victor Frankel said suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds its meaning and so the great exercise that I want you guys to do as you go home after this a fest is to actually think back on the times that you went through that big kensho moment it may be something painful but what was your soul trying to give to you in terms of meaning and when that meaning comes it ceases to become suffering it just becomes an incident in your life that sparked the greatness in you so now when we go back to this poem think about what it means when I run when I run after what I think I want my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety don't follow the status quo as Beckwith said you are not here to fill the status quo you're here to take a hammer to it and smash it but if you sit in your own place of patience what you need flows to you without any pain you're listening within from this you understand that what you want also wants you is looking for you and attracting you and there's a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it so the exercise looks like this this was the actual sheet of paper that Amir Ahmad took me through when I did this values exercise and I want to explain what's going on over here so we're gonna break it down because you should when you get a chance do this as well it'll take you around two to three hours but I promise you it's one of the greatest things you can do so first the first question is Amir told me to write down what are the things that I offer to the world so back then in 2016 we offered courses events we offered challenges or quest and we offered community as in the fs tribe then he said what is the value so believes that most resonate with you like what are words that you hear in a song that make you make your heart skip a beat what are ideas that inspire you what's the poetry or the movies that enlighten you and I made this long list ok transformation connectedness compassion growth as a gold humanism aesthetics vision happiness it took me around 1 to 2 hours to really make this list and then you go through every item in the list and you add a number to it to cluster it so all the ones see transformation growth as a goal transcendence all relate to transformation you give it one word it's all really the same thing all the number two is compassion connectedness humanism are all related to unity so I gathered the word unity or connectedness all the number trees aesthetics vision all relate to like this one vision and then you'll notice that they are there's a couple of others futurism questioning all of these like rely dos dos with two too little so you discarded them you want to arrive at around three or four now my number four was happiness love that became the value of love so initially I wrote down connectedness transformation vision a Myrtle told me to start with three later on I added love but these evolved connectedness became unity transformation became transformation growth as a goal vision became envisioning and love became default value so that's really where it came from this piece of paper changed my life this piece of paper caught me to unplug from the rules of the modern world to really listen to my soul to understand what is it that made me come to earth and to truly listen within and when I did that everything in mind Ally shifted it was and the ship was so remarkable like it almost sounds magical I went from three years of pain and suffering and feeling like the universe was like against me the three years of the most incredible growth where I wake up every day going holy my life is magical but everyone has access to this but to get there you got to go really deep with it and the answer is all within and so I want to encourage you to do this exercise to really embody this and to bring it back into your life and as you go fought to try to scale your influence remember don't fall prey to the rules of the modern world everything you need to know the insight comes from sitting in your space of patience and going within and that was really the lesson I wanted to share thank you all [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mindvalley Talks

Views: 729,572

Rating: 4.8543086 out of 5

Keywords: Self-improvement, Paradigm shift, Bob proctor paradigm shift, Self development, Personal growth, Meaning of life, The meaning of life, Storytelling, Entrepreneurship, Law of attraction, Leadership, Ted talks leadership, Leadership skills, Feminism vs logic, Inspiration, Vishen Lakhiani, Michael Beckwith, 8 Simple Self Improvement Principles, Why I Started My Self-Improvement Journey, 3 Habits That Will Change Your Life, 12 Ways to Expand Yourself personal growth ideas & resources

Id: a-3CB4_a33o

Length: 68min 4sec (4084 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019