Do This & You'll Never Worry About Money Again | Vishen Lakhiani

Key Takeaway

Tonight, replace judging your meditation with a six-question life review: Who did I help? What made me feel alive? What did I learn? What new vision did I see? What was my favorite part of the day? Did I feel connected to something larger than myself? This takes minutes, turns meditation into observable behavior, and helps you train compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, vision, intentional living, and connection—without needing a “perfect” session.

Episode Overview

Vishen Lakhiani describes meditation as an active tool for improving daily life and solving specific problems, not merely a practice of sitting still. He explains elements of his Six-Phase Meditation, emphasizing compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, flexible vision-setting, and cultivating positive emotional states. He also argues for designing a life around desired experiences and values rather than pursuing socially inherited career goals.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Do This & You'll Never Worry About Money Again | Vishen Lakhiani from On Purpose. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

What is your view of meditation? What use does it have in your life today? Because I feel like a lot of people tell us to meditate. And it has many benefits, but for you, what's the reason? I grew up in a Hindu family in Malaysia . Meditation was never what I was taught. The style of Hinduism I was taught was very dogmatic. There were prayers, chants, mantras, and it seemed, oh God, so boring and irritating. I hated being dragged to the temple to listen to a priest speak in Sanskrit, a language I didn't even understand.

So when I was 19, I left Hinduism. I decided that religion wasn't for me. I read a quote from Gandhi that said: "I am Hindu, I am Muslim, I am Christian, I am Jewish, and I am Buddhist ." And I thought, "That's it. I want to study and combine ideas from all these different spiritual practices." And that was my beginning. I became obsessed with spirituality. I started reading books by Esther Hicks and Neale Donald Walsch, and I was especially captivated by the spirituality that was emerging in the United States .

From Paramahansa Yogananda, who was an Indian who crossed over here, to Neale Donald Walsch, passing especially through José Silva. However, many of them spoke of spirituality. What made José Silva's work different was that he broke it down into practical steps. And that was what fascinated me the most. That's why many people talked about meditation, about sitting still, about going inward. José Silva taught the method. You are going to use this method to reduce the frequency of your brain waves to the alpha level. This method to lower it to the theta level.

This method of positioning your eyes to activate the alpha frequency in your brain. This method to reprogram your subconscious. This method for stating a goal. This method for healing. And that structured approach captivated me. Now, we call that active meditation. That's the word José Silva used. Osho used the same word, active meditation. This means that it is different from passive meditation, which was more of a Hindu or Eastern cultures' form of meditation, where you focus on your breathing or go inward . And there is a use for that, but what I loved about active meditation is that, in the words of José Silva, you use it to solve problems.

You don't get rid of your problems. You turn your problems into a project . You have a skin disease, you're going to cure it. You need to achieve a business goal, and you're going to make it happen. And you would apply different tools to solve these problems. When I was in Silicon Valley, I applied the Silva method and it completely transformed my career. I was able to hold down two jobs. I got one promotion after another. At 26, he was vice president of a flourishing dot-com company and meditated using the Silva method and other practices that he combined with it.

And one day, suddenly, I felt a calling. I realized that meditation was the most powerful thing I had ever learned in my life. It was the reason why I was successful in my career. However, my university degree, for which I paid almost a quarter of a million dollars, taught me nothing. Actually, it wasn't helping me. So I decided I wanted to do something that could help the world. I decided to quit and become a meditation teacher. Now, when I started becoming a meditation teacher, when I started compiling all these methods, I needed something for myself.

And I see meditation as a tool. OK? Many people say that meditation is a form of self-awareness, of prayer. Yes, yes, yes. But meditation is also a tool. The goal of meditation, in the words of the great teacher Emily Fletcher, is not to improve at meditation. It's about improving your life. That's why I use two different types of tools. Now, let's think about our home. We have coffee makers and electric drills. We use a coffee maker every day, or a teapot every day, to get ourselves in good condition to start the morning.

An electric drill is a power tool. It is not used every day. It's used when you have a problem, when you have to make a hole in a wall, or when you threaten someone, I suppose. Therefore, in the style of meditation that I teach, there are two types. You would use a power tool like the Silva method, now housed in Mindvalley, for a truly technical problem. For example, healing, right? The Silva Method has been demonstrated by Dr. O. Carl Simonton as a very effective form of image therapy to accelerate healing.

You're sick, you want to do it. If you suddenly feel like you have a migraine, you'll want to use it to help reduce it. The Six Phases is what I developed, not like the electric drill, but like the coffee maker. Something you use every day . Even if your life is amazing, you use it every day because it helps put you in an optimal state for work, for happiness, for human connection, and puts you in this beautiful state where you almost feel like the universe is behind you.

Like you have, you know, Tinker Bell following you everywhere, blessing everything you do and making your life magical. This is how I see meditation. It is an active approach to tackling life's most complex problems, but also a daily approach to putting yourself in peak states of humanity. All of you watching and listening at home, you used to talk about how we need to start with the circle of love and compassion. Can you tell me how you had this epiphany that compassion was a beginning when often our starting point is criticism, complaining, or comparing?

So, compassion is not something you do for other people. That's a big side effect. Compassion is something you do for yourself. It changes the way you function and present yourself to the world. So, there is a lot of science right now about compassion practices that derive from Zen Roshi Buddhism or even the HeartMath Institute. For example, the HeartMath Institute discovered that if you close your eyes and see the face of someone you love, see their eyes, see their nose, feel that love for that person, feel it in the area of ​​the heart, it changes the cardiac resonance.

And cardiac MRI is a biomarker of health. In short, giving love to another person instantly changes the heartbeat physiologically and puts it in a better state, which shows that your body is in a healthy mode. Cardiac MRI is correlated with health. And I found this fascinating. This is how we begin the sixth phase. Then we move on to a more advanced compassion practice in which we extend love throughout the world. We don't just start with our family, our neighborhood, our city , our country, and then globally.

So why is this important? Compassion is like a muscle. You can train it, and when you do, you become more loving. If you think about all the great saints, sages, and mystics, compassion and love were a key part of who they were. Whether it was Yogananda or Jesus, it was compassion and love. But that's how it manifests in your world, isn't it? I remember that, after the pandemic, I went to have breakfast with a friend. All the restaurants had been closed for 3 months and, finally, that weekend, everything opened.

We queued for 20-40 minutes to get in. We finally went in. It was very busy, so they could only seat us at the bar. And all I wanted was coffee, eggs, and some avocado. So I ordered my coffee and, 20 minutes later, the waitress hadn't brought it. The waitress was running back and forth. There were a lot of people there. He was wearing a mask and had left his coffee on the bar, and I could see it. And 20 minutes had passed. I couldn't get him to pay attention to me.

Finally, he brought me the coffee, put it on the table, didn't even say anything, and it had gotten cold . So, I have to order another coffee. That other coffee arrives 10 minutes later. Then, my tortilla arrives 40 minutes later. They forgot about the avocado. And all this chaos. Now, at the end, as I tipped the waitress, I still had a smile on my face, and I gave a tip that was worth 50% of the total bill. Then my friend looked at me and said, "What are you doing?

The service here was awful. It doesn't deserve 50%." And I said, "Really? Well, I thought so ." And I explained it to my friend yesterday. I said, "Look, it all depends on how you look at it. For me, I'm happy to be here. To be able to eat outdoors again. Never mind that we had to wait 20 minutes in line. It was nice to be able to walk into a restaurant after three months. That waitress has been running around with a mask on for, God, about 12 hours.

Look at the line. She doesn't even take a break. And she probably has n't had a job for the last three months. She's probably worried about how to get the food on the table. And that's why I gave her a 50% tip. I don't care if my coffee was cold or my avocado was late. I didn't even notice that. Rather, I was in a state of appreciation, of love , of awe at the humanity around me, even if it was a little messy. Compassion had put me in that zone.

When you see another person, even if you think what they did was wrong, you look at them with empathy, with understanding. And it's that understanding that changes and redefines your definition of the world. So, I'm not saying that Have compassion to tip better. I say have compassion because the world becomes a more beautiful, vibrant, and connected place, and your life becomes more peaceful. Now , the side effect is that you bring happiness to everyone you come into contact with. And the world needs that today. I think compassion is a superpower, and it's very underrated.

Where did we lose it? Where did we go wrong? I think we underestimated it because for a long time in society, we thought kindness was associated with weakness. Strength, power, even exerting power over someone else was a sign of strength. But today we know that's not true. A Gallup study was done with 21 million employees, and they found that the employees who loved their jobs the most, who were more engaged, and who were more productive had one of the highest correlations with income growth. They answered "yes" to the following question: "My supervisor or someone at work cared about me as a person." Wow.

And that's compassion. Now, I remember a funny story about you, Jay. So I remember... Yes, Yes, yes. That shows how compassionate you are. So , I want to share this with the public. We were having dinner at Mindvalley's A-Fest. This was the festival in Ibiza, and you disappeared to go to the bathroom. Oh, yes. And then we didn't see you again for two hours. So, imagine you're having dinner with someone. There are about six people at the table, and then that person says, "I need to go to the restroom for a moment." Two hours later, they haven't come back.

And then you think, "God, what an idiot." If my company had bought it, I should have said, "Vision , I'm going to sleep." They had to use that bathroom excuse. So, you annoyed me a bit, and then I realized what happened. Jay went to use the restroom, and while you were coming out, one by one, people came up to take pictures with you or ask for advice, and you stayed there for almost two hours talking to everyone, taking pictures, giving them the advice they needed. And then you were so tired that you went to sleep.

That It's compassion. And look, you may have done it almost naturally, but I never forget it. And that made you a hero in my mind. Compassion , kindness, is the highest expression these days. I remember 15 years ago, when people wanted to sell you things on the internet, do this to make money, do this to start a business, they'd post pictures of their Lamborghini or their car. Today, nobody cares. Today, the things we share on Instagram are usually inspiring stories of people doing acts of kindness, people saving animals, people doing great things for children.

Compassion is the expression in today's society. What's the difference between a technique and pure intention? The technique isn't compassion. The technique is the Circle of Compassion, which is the specific exercise we do, inspired by Zen Roshi Buddhism and the HeartMath Institute, to expand and open your heart. Right? Well, that's the technique. Compassion itself is a quality of being. The six phases are six techniques. Specific, overlapping techniques that unlock six different aspects of your being, which I believe are really important for you to show up in the world not just as a good human being, but to succeed at work, achieve your goals, get things done, and do it from this state of absolute bliss and equanimity.

The technique we're doing actually trains your brain to understand how deeply connected you are. If you do this, you automatically become more pleasant. So, is happiness still a goal for you? Is it a pursuit? Is it a byproduct? What is happiness? Well, happiness isn't the goal at all. In fact, happiness isn't even what we're concerned about. What we're looking at is a concept called blissipline. Blissipline isn't about being happy. It's not about forcing yourself to be happy. Look, I'm a person who can be prone to depression.

In fact, it's in my DNA. Wow. Wow, I had no idea. Now you can measure these things with DNA. And I have been depressed in my life. I'm also a person Prone to melancholy. Melancholy is when I want to, like it often does when it's raining. I want to sit by the fire, listen to sad music, and be alone, and I like that. I'm not happy. I'm not sad or depressed. I'm just melancholic, and it's a beautiful feeling, and we all feel it sometimes. If you've ever seen the Pixar movie Inside Out, it shows that sadness can be a superpower.

You can be sad when you miss someone. You can be sad when you're grieving. There's a beautiful quote from the Disney series WandaVision: "What is grief but persistent love?" The goal isn't to push sadness away. Rather, the goal is this: to remember this. When we present ourselves to people, when we present ourselves at work, what matters is the concept of blissipline, and that's having the discipline to make sure you 're nurturing your positive emotions. Now, positive emotions don't mean you pretend to be happy. Positive emotions mean that even if you're sad You can observe it.

I love that quote: "What is pain but persistent love?" "Because if you're grieving for someone, it's a beautiful emotion." You may be grieving for someone who has left your life, but you are not punishing yourself. So, in a way, you're still happy . So, why is this important? There is a study called PQ, and there is a book on the subject written by Shirzad Chamine. And PQ stands for positivity quotient. It is the proportion of good thoughts versus general thoughts. Now, what they discovered is that the higher your PQ, the better you will perform at your job, the better you will perform at your work.

We spend 70% of our waking hours at work. Therefore, if we can practice happiness and raise our PQ, we will accomplish more. We are happier while we are working. The quality of our work is better. But, you know, studies on PQ fascinate me. They discovered that the main factor determining how well a team performs is its PQ. It is the proportion of positive thoughts and emotions within the team and among the members of this team. And so, if we can train ourselves for happiness, if we can put ourselves in these states of happiness, we will simply do better .

Now, one of the most beautiful things I read was in the book Titan. It is the biography of John D. Rockefeller. He was the richest man who ever lived. And at the age of 83, John D. Rockefeller wrote a beautiful poem that illustrates this idea of ​​happiness. He said, "From a very young age, I was taught to work and to have fun. My life has been one long, happy vacation, filled with work and play, and I left worries behind, and God was good to me every day.

And that's really what we're talking about. Now, if the richest man in the world could write that, imagine what this quality, what this essence, can do for you. But what I didn't know about you was this inclination you mentioned toward depression or depressive thoughts, and I want to get to that. What has been the most depressing state you've been in that the Six-Phase Meditation method and other methods you practice today have helped you to overcome? What was that point? Yes. Well, first you have to understand phase one , compassion; phase two, gratitude; and phase three, forgiveness.

It has all been scientifically proven that these qualities reduce the risk of depression and situations where you feel anxiety or panic. But I have experienced depression in my life. I've gone through times when I was deeply sad. That hasn't happened to me much in the last decade. Wow. And part of the reason is Phase Six, but that doesn't mean I don't get sad. We're all going to go through tough times in life. I miss people. Yesterday I was sad because it was my son's birthday. He turned 15, and I couldn't be with him because I had a big event in Los Angeles, and my son lives in Estonia, in Europe.

And there's nothing wrong with being sad about that, right? Well, but through that sadness, I think I left one of the most beautiful voicemails I've ever left my son about how much I love him. So you can channel sadness into love, into compassion, into vulnerability, and help yourself connect with yourself and other people. Yes, how do you keep sadness from turning into guilt? Because I think you could have easily gone the other way . You could have said, "Well, I'm sad I wasn't with my son on my birthday." I'm a terrible father, which I know you're not, but anyway , these last four weeks I've been on a four-week book tour right now.

This is the longest time I've ever been away from my children. Oh. But the reason, I understand, is that I had never distanced myself so much from them because of that guilt, but I realized that it was silly. I know I am deeply connected to my children. Since then I've learned that it's not about being with them all the time , but about when you are with them, how you feel with them and how you make them feel? Yes. But how do I overcome that guilt?

Well, that's where phase three comes in. Guilt is one of the lowest human emotions , guilt and shame. From the point of view of the vibration of consciousness, if we look at the Hawkins scale, right at the bottom, guilt and shame. We don't want to get there. Phase three consists of healing from guilt and shame. So, when you practice forgiveness, in the sixth phase we teach you an eight-step forgiveness protocol that you simply follow. You forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made in the past.

You forgive yourself for the things you may feel ashamed or guilty about, but you also learn to heal and forgive the actions of others. It turns out that if you want to develop the brainwaves of a monk... In fact, they have measured the brainwave states of monks, and you are a monk, so I bet you fall into that category too. I used to be. Monks have high left-right brain coherence. This means that the left and right brain vibrate at the same level and have a high alpha amplitude.

They discovered this in Zen Roshi monks who have spent 20 to 40 years meditating. At the BioCybernote Institute in Vancouver, where they map the brainwave states of monks, they discovered that these were the two qualities you want to create. But how do you get them? Well, with all due respect. Forgiving and pardoning the people who have hurt you, as well as forgiving the mistakes you have made in the past, is the number one trick to reach that level. That's why forgiveness is phase three, because I have seen miracles through the practice of forgiveness.

Forgiveness has been shown not only to improve back pain, but also to improve heart health, improve sleep quality, and reduce depression and anxiety. A study showed that it improves vertical jump. Another study in Israel showed that it improves endurance. And for people who believe in manifestation, it's quite possible, because I've heard this from many spiritual teachers: increase your rate of manifestation. That's why forgiveness is phase three. Because I practice forgiveness very quickly every day; each phase takes about 2 minutes of practice. I don't feel guilty.

I feel no shame. It doesn't mean I've never made mistakes. I simply don't punish myself for it, because you understand that we are all human. The two extremes of the spectrum are narcissism, which is like letting go of all mistakes, which I know is not what you 're recommending. And then the other thing you mention is self-sabotage and punishing yourself forever. And you have these two opposite poles, and I think people get so scared of doing one or the other, that in the end they end up avoiding it altogether.

What is the process for achieving the forgiveness you speak of, in which you can allow yourself to move forward? Therefore, narcissism is self-love without love for others. That's why we start with compassion. When you begin with compassion, you are training your love for others. When we reach gratitude and forgiveness, you are actually training your love for yourself. In the gratitude phase, you don't just express gratitude for three things at work or three things in your personal life. You express gratitude for what you love about yourself.

And why shouldn't we? The world does n't tell us to love ourselves. From the time we are children, our education system and the people around us point out our flaws. Most people have no problems with self-love. They have problems with self-pity, self-loathing, and a lack of self-love. Now, when you reach the stage of forgiveness, you amplify your love for yourself even more . But remember, you are going through these phases after expressing love for everyone else. First compassion, then gratitude and forgiveness. And that's how you avoid narcissistic tendencies.

I 've heard many versions about what constitutes a good vision of the future. Some people say you need to know exactly what you want. Others say you should have an overview. What is the six-phase version of a vision? When you finish phase three and move on to phase four, you are moving towards a different essence of being. My last book was called Buddha and the Tough Guy. And that title comes from an essay by the great philosopher Ken Wilber. And that essay was called Absence of Ego.

And it begins like this. The great sages and spiritual saints of the world, from Moses to Jesus and Padmasambhava, were not weak-minded or faint- minded. They were influential people who shook the world with the force of their ego. They instigated massive social revolutions that lasted for generations, from whippings in the temple to subjugating entire continents. However, what Ken Wilber was saying is that great spiritual teachers did not only focus on the present. They were focused on the future. Jesus wanted to build a legacy. Buddha preached because he wanted to change the institutions of that time, the way of being of the rich and the poor.

Moses wanted to free his people. Muhammad wanted to conquer and spread Islam throughout the world. Paramahansa Yogananda came to America to spread the wisdom of India . All these people had a vision of the future that they wanted to create. And that's really important. Mother Teresa wanted to feed millions of people. Therefore, if you really want to practice your spirituality, you can't just sit on your meditation cushion. You need to have a vision for the future. That's what Face Forward is all about. Now, to answer your question, how specific should you be and how unspecific?

Well, it depends on what you're expressing. Now we can delve into slightly deeper spiritual ideas. My friend Marie Diamond, a brilliant spiritual teacher from Belgium and with whom I train, says that what we manifest in the world comes from three different parts of our being. There is our intention, which is what we desire, but that is only a third. Then there is our destiny, which is what our soul wants to experience. That's 1/3. And the third part is the energy of the world around us, our home.

You know, the Chinese call it feng shui, the people, the group consciousness, our culture, our society. It's all three things. So, if you're thinking about protesting, you're like a car driving on a highway. Okay, that's your life. We all have a destiny. And you know, a spiritual teacher explained it to me. He said, "Vision, you can't go off the exit ramp. You're on a highway. Your highway is spreading consciousness through education. You can't go off that exit ramp and go in a different direction. That's your highway." And I've realized this in my life.

Every adventure I've attempted outside this zone of wisdom and consciousness diffusion has failed. It simply becomes unnecessarily difficult. If I stay on my highway, I go super fast . So, that highway is the destination . Within that highway, you can change lanes. That's your intention . You can change lanes. You can go faster. You can go slower. You can go to the left. You can go to the right. And then there's the quality of the traffic. Is it stuck? Is traffic moving easily? Is it congested?

That is the group consciousness that surrounds you. So this is just an analogy to help understand this. So, when you're manifesting, these three pieces come together. Now, in the sixth phase, if you delve deeper into the wisdom of how it is designed, the protocol is designed to take these three things into account. But, in the fourth phase, what you're doing is playing with intention. The intention, but also to leave things open for the universe to bring them to you. For example, if you want to meet your soulmate, you don't want to be too specific because what if your soulmate has a different age or body type than the one you think you want?

Michael Beckwith, the spiritual teacher , calls this mature desire versus immature desire. The immature desire is: " Oh, I just want to be with someone who is tall, blond, and blue-eyed." That's perhaps what society influenced you to do, or what you read in a magazine. Mature desire is knowing that your soulmate can come to you in many different ways and that it will be an essence, an energy that will ignite that love within you. Similarly, when it comes to our mission, our vision, sometimes we don't know what the universe has in store for us.

Therefore, when practicing phase four, the important thing we ask people to keep in mind is to focus on the what and the why , but to leave aside the how, the when, and the who. That's advice from Esther Hicks. Yes. The what and the why. Don't worry about the when. When will it arrive? Who will bring it to me? Who will be my soulmate? Who will give me that job? And how. How am I going to achieve it? How am I going to meet that person?

Esther says that all of that adds resistance to what we seek to manifest. The what and the why add forward momentum. So you focus on that. I love that. Yes, I've always realized that you'll get to where you want in life, just not in the way you imagined. Yes. And the problem is that we have this projection and imagination of what the path should be like. Correct. Not because we want it or where we are going. Correct. And our paths change. We go through different circles of purpose.

You used to be a monk, then you became a storyteller, and now you have this amazing podcast and you're launching a tea company. You have gone through different circles of purpose with your purpose of helping to make the world bigger and bigger . And we're all going to go through that. We are not just one thing. How can people find the courage and strength to become something new and not feel held back by the past? One of the most powerful and widely practiced practices I have found is the Book of Life protocol.

And we talk about it in the book. Lifebook is a goal-setting protocol created by John and Missy Butcher. With the aim of owning this company, Mindvalley acquired a majority stake in it. Now we're merging it with Mindvalley because we wanted to... I thought it was the best goal-setting system in the world. And we wanted to integrate it with our educational platform. Now , in Lifebook, one of the exercises you do is to observe your life from 12 different categories, right? Your emotional life is a category.

Your financial life is different. Your character is different. And if you think about it, you'll realize that most people tend to focus on only a few limiting categories. They focus on financial goals, relationship goals, and work goals. But are we setting goals for the emotions we want to experience on a daily basis? Yes. And emotional mastery, are we setting goals for character, how we want to present ourselves as men or women to the world? Lifebook makes you go deeper. You really need to think about it.

And in the end you end up with a 100- page vision for your life. However, within that 100-page vision, there will be things that are not clear. And that's when the magic happens. I remember that when I was doing Lifebook in 2010, there was one specific category out of the 12 categories called quality of life. And this is where you really put your lifestyle, your home. So I put in some really crazy stuff because it pushes you to dream big. He wasn't a speaker at that time .

I said, "I want to give talks on stages all over the world. I want to go on vacation to five-star resorts all over the world. I want inspiring friends. I want to travel with inspiring friends." I even included some really daring things. I want to win an Emmy or a Grammy or an Academy Award. Whatever. Yes. What happened was that 10 months after I started Lifebooks, I suddenly had a strange urge. It came from my soul. At that time he was running a dot com company.

He had founded the dot com company. It had raised $2 million in venture capital. It wasn't Mindvalley. It was more like a Groupon clone for Southeast Asia. And I felt very dissatisfied. I realized that I had been pursuing an immature desire. I had been chasing all those things I read in tech publications and thinking I wanted to be one of those entrepreneurs, but it wasn't for me. So I gave up my shares. I left that dot com company. And then I had to do something. It was 2010.

And I thought: I want to learn to surf. What if I could gather 250 people on a beach in Costa Rica, organize a small festival where we could all study surfing, maybe have some personal growth talks, and perhaps organize some networking events in the evening? That random idea turned into a festival called A-Fest, A F E S T. That first festival sold out, it was a huge success and then it just kept growing and growing and growing. And in two years, everything I wrote in my life book came true.

Suddenly, he was speaking on stage. Suddenly, I had all these amazing people, Lisa Nichols, Chip Conley, all coming up and talking on stage with me. I had inspiring friends. Suddenly, I was staying at these five-star resorts all over the world. The hotels gave me the presidential suite because I brought 250 people to their properties in Costa Rica and Mexico. And the craziest thing of all was this: I wrote down that my goal was to win an Emmy Award. Well, Nick Nanton, a film producer, came to one of our A-Fests.

He turned it into a documentary called Live Your Quest, and won an Emmy. He won an Emmy. And I was the producer. And so, all those crazy goals came true. Nowhere did I write that I wanted to invent a festival. Rather , I described the life I wanted to lead, the quality of life, and the idea came to me. And here's an important lesson. Sometimes, you don't want to quit your job. Your business, your job, your career are nothing more than a vehicle for your growth and the life you want to lead.

Yes. Most people have a clearer idea of ​​what they want to do at work. I want to be a lawyer, how they want to grow and the quality of life they want to lead. Yes. Turn it over. You need to be very clear about your lifestyle. How many hours do you want to work? What do you want to do first thing in the morning? Who do you want to be with? How much time do you want to spend with your children? Who are your friends? Where do you want to live?

Be clear about quality of life. Be clear about the values you want to have. And the ideal job will come. What defines a good meditation for you now ? What is a satisfying meditation? Because I think this is a recurring challenge that all meditation and guidance guides have, that people ask themselves: "Well, did I do it right?" Did I do it right? Because we only know how... we've forgotten how to experience. We only know how to evaluate. I've realized that . The human mind has decreased its capacity to experience and increased its capacity to evaluate.

And our evaluation is: "This was good or this was bad," instead of " This was my experience." So, how do you define positive and fulfilling meditation today? Then, I observe the six qualities of the six phases. And at the end of the day, were these qualities expressed in my life? Was I kind and compassionate today? So, at the end of the night, basically before going to sleep, you can ask yourself these six questions. Who did I help today? That is related to compassion. The second question is: What was something that really made me feel alive, that made me happy today?

That is related to phase two, which is gratitude. The third question is, what have I learned? And learning is often related to forgiveness. Through forgiveness, we often learn. What is a new vision or a new desire that I saw today that I want to bring into my life ? That comes from phase four, which is the vision for the future. Now, phase five is organizing your perfect day. So, what you can ask in phase five is, what was my favorite part of the day? And then the last one, phase six, is a blessing.

This is almost like a prayer. And at the end of the day you might ask yourself: "Did I really feel connected to God, to a higher power? Did I feel that the universe was on my side today?" And if you ask yourself those six questions, you'll know you had a good six- phase meditation. So again, that's just the lens I use. I believe that many people define their destiny quite early in life. How do you test the parameters of your destination? Therefore, I think one of the things that I believe is a useful tool is understanding the difference between intermediate goals and ultimate goals, right?

Very often, your destiny, the things you wanted to do, are something you would do even if you weren't paid for it. Very often we do the opposite. Think of the standard American system, right? So, you have people, so one of the most common jobs that Americans do is law. And I'm not criticizing lawyers, I'm just using this as something really interesting because I used to work in the legal industry. I used to sell software to law firms 20 years ago. So, the United States represents 5% of the world's population, but 70% of the world's lawyers.

Because? Well, maybe it was shows like LA Law Ally McBeal in the 1990s that idealized the law. And many Americans spend insane amounts of money studying, go into insane amounts of debt to become lawyers, to pass their LSAT exams, to join a good law firm. Then they work crazy hours. But here's the thing. If you are a lawyer, you have a 50% statistical chance of suffering from clinical depression. Oh. It's crazy. Therefore, this large number of Americans are getting jobs that can depress them at an astonishing rate.

But they do it , why? Because they follow the herd. This is a classic example of immature desire. You want what everyone else wants, not what might truly resonate with your soul. Therefore, the important thing is to really consider what you would do even if you weren't paid; it's something you would do anyway, because it makes you feel alive. Yes. And that's often the stepping stone to where your dream career might be . I was meditating and I wanted to teach meditation, but I wanted to teach it because I was teaching it to my friends, I was teaching it to my cousins, because I was very enthusiastic about it.

I remember a professor telling me, "You'll never make money doing that. You have to be an engineer." And I tried to be an engineer. He was miserable. But through meditation, I built a huge, huge, huge company. I wrote, I hope, my third New York Times bestseller simply because... But I never did it for money. I did it because it brought me joy. And if we look at many of the most successful people in the world, they took what brought them joy and turned it into an incredible career.

And that would be my advice to people. If this clip has provided you with value and you want to see something else, the following video has been specially chosen for you based on your viewing habits. I hope you enjoy it. And if so, subscribe to the channel so we can continue to bring you fantastic conversations.

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