Vishen Lakhiani: The Buddha and the Badass
Vishen Lakhiani is a Malaysian-born entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker, of Indian descent He is the CEO of Mindvalley, the largest online personal growth platform in the world, and the author of two books: The Code of the Extraordinary Mind and The Buddha and the Badass.
An Interview with Vishen Lakhiani: The Buddha and the Badass
Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Lakhiani attended a Malaysian government school. After graduating from high school, he moved to the United States and attended the University of Michigan where he received a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1999, he moved to Silicon Valley.
OMTimes was delighted to have this exclusive opportunity to interview one of the most impressive Visionary Leader, Changemaker, and spiritual activist from the conscious Community worldwide: Vishen Lakhiani.
OMTimes: It is truly my pleasure and such an honor to speak with you today! Just to dive into this interview, can you tell us how you first started on the Spiritual path. What was that specific situation?
Vishen Lakhiani: After attending college at the University of Michigan, I decided to move to Silicon Valley in 2001 to be an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, my timing was terrible because I was in the heart of the dot com bubble burst, where thousands of people were laid off. I remember reading the local San Francisco news in April 2001 and hearing about how 14,000 people lost their jobs that same month. The only job I could find was a miserable position in technology sales with no base salary. I essentially had to close a deal to earn enough to eat. The stress and anxiety were overwhelming. In desperation for something different, I took a class on intuition and meditation. I fell in love with the practice, eventually learning to listen to my inner voice. I applied meditation practices to my job and saw my sales skyrocket. I got deeper into meditation and personal growth, completely impressed at how the practice of meditation transformed my career. I ended up being promoted 4 times in three months. And eventually was made a VP in the company while I was just 27. But after 18 months at that job, I felt jaded. I felt something more that I needed to do – a higher purpose that was calling me. And I remembered Nelson Mandela’s famous quote, “if you want to change the world, change education.” My calling became to elevate global consciousness through personal growth education, and so Mindvalley was born.
OMTimes: Why the Buddha and the Badass? Tell us a little bit about your book, the spiritual art of success, and the inspiration behind its creation.
Vishen Lakhiani: I wrote this book to create a new map, a new guideline, and a new compass for future generations. Human happiness is at its lowest, and we need to disrupt deeply held beliefs about work, success, and how we choose to live our lives. We have recently been hit with job losses, a looming recession, and overall low morale. I could not have predicted that this book would have launched during such a sad time in human history. This is one of the first books that brings hardcore business principles and merges them with hardcore spirituality. When it comes together, you become the Buddha Badass. According to a global poll conducted by Gallup, 85% of workers hate their job. Most people live their lives doing work they don’t enjoy earning enough money to afford to live lives they don’t love. It’s all about making a monumental shift in the workplace. What would Buddha look like in the workforce? How would Buddha be as a CEO? The Buddha is the spiritual core within all of us. When this spiritual nature combines with the Badass, the changemaker— Merging these two superpowers is how we change the World.
OMTimes: How do you conciliate (and ground) the Spiritual Leader, The Buddha, and the Business Changemaker, The Badass, in one heart, simultaneously?
Vishen Lakhiani: The secret ingredient in this book is teaching people how to rewire how we look at work by combining both archetypes – it is the recipe for changing the workplace’s future. I bring you spiritual tools to help you worship the Buddha-nature of yourself and go into deep introspection, becoming a spiritual master. You must take care of your mind, body, and health and find a flow that emanates from inner awareness and alignment. But you must also tap into your Badass nature – the individual making a difference by creating, developing, and leading. By practicing and implementing all of the tools and methods in this book, you can merge both together and become a human being that lives up to great revolutionaries and teachers of the World who sought change. The World needs now more than ever, Buddha Badasses that can build this change. This internal alignment allows you to follow your soul’s path to reach your divine purpose. Hence, no matter what job you are in, you are contributing to a better human future.
OMTimes: In the East, the secret and the flow of prosperity is related to the Goddess Lakshmi. But the element that I believe people miss when asking for abundance and prosperity is that Lakshmi forms communities because this is the most significant wealth in our lives. Do you share the same idea?
Vishen Lakhiani: Yes, and no. Firstly, I am not very familiar with the goddess Lakshmi. I was raised in a Hindu family, but I gave up religion when I was 19, so I can’t comment on Lakshmi and the community. Still, it is actually one of the most powerful things we can do to elevate our souls if we talk about the community. Science is starting to prove this. Suppose you read about the Blue Zone studies, which look at areas in the World like Okinawa, Japan, and Sardinia, Italy, where an unnaturally high number of people live to 100 years or over. In that case, there are ten times the number of centenarians in these areas than in the United States. Researchers identified what was going on there, and a big reason was the community. These places are community-rich areas. At first, the scientists thought it was red wine; they thought that wine had an effect. I messaged the guy who did the study. I asked, ‘Are you sure that it’s wine, or was it the fact that people engaged in social discussions and bonding and community over wine?’ He confirmed that wine is a social act; most of us don’t drink wine alone unless we’re alcoholics. So, community, in short, is the most significant correlation to longevity. There is also a famous study from Harvard that explores the factors that contribute to human happiness. Was it the warm weather? Was it wealth? Was it money? It turns out; there was only one thing—it had a point seven correlation with happiness; point seven, by the way, means a high correlation, and it was this one thing — the strength of your social connections. So once again, we go back to the community – it increases your happiness and your lifespan. Community is almost a source of life itself because what is more important in life than your health and happiness levels?
OMTimes: Do you believe that people are the best assets to cultivate in life and business as a changemaker?
Vishen Lakhiani: Yes, 100%! I take the community extremely seriously. Mindvalley takes the community very seriously. Do you know the one thing that separates Mindvalley from every other technology company out there? It is the fact that all of our learning is designed with the community. For example, we invite all of our students to move to a city together for one month every year for a learning experience called Mindvalley University. Next year, in 2021, it’s happening in Tallinn, Estonia. For one month, we will put on 300 different events in Estonia for the community. People move for a month with their families. There are events for kids as young as three, and our oldest participant is 83. Why do we do this? It’s because people want more than just learning online. They want to feel like part of something bigger and what we are doing here is we are creating the village concept and bringing that into everyone’s life. You make a thousand new friends when you’re there. Now that’s just one example.
The next thing we’re doing is we’re building a better social network. I am a big believer that we’ve got to get off Facebook. Studies have shown that it is destructive to our self-esteem, harmful to our health, and detrimental to our societal bonds. We’re building a better social network that focuses on raising consciousness and community. We’ve already deployed it to our Mindvalley audience and slowly will be opening this up to the entire World. The reason is that the World needs a better social network that’s not about getting you hooked on an app but rather getting you connected to another person through the app and getting you to shut off the app to go out into the real World and engage with that individual over coffee or brunch. Our app, our social network, is about creating introductions and helping users identify potential best friends in the city you live in, possible lovers, or perhaps your soulmate, by getting you off the app and into a real-world connection with that person. Why do we do this when we’re an education company? Why do we care about helping people find their best friend or soulmate? Because Mindvalley is about raising health, it’s about raising happiness. It’s about raising your success in life, and it turns out that for these three things, the number one predictor of your success is the strength of your bonds to the people around you. Next week, people who go to Mindvalley.com will see that we are no longer a streaming media service. We have launched new services to bring people together.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Vishen Lakhiani
