Vishen Lakhiani — Mindvalley Founder, NYT Bestseller, Modern Personal Growth Pioneer | Self Growth Videos

Vishen Lakhiani was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and trained as a computer engineer in the United States. By his mid-twenties he was working as a tech executive in Silicon Valley with a daily meditation practice he had picked up almost by accident — a forty-minute Silva Method class he had walked into to fix his sales-call performance. The meditation worked. So did the curiosity it opened up.

In 2003, with $700 in seed money and no investors, he started a small online operation in Kuala Lumpur selling guided meditation downloads. He named it Mindvalley. The mission, he later wrote, was to build the kind of education system that 99% of the world’s universities were failing to deliver — one that taught the inner game of being human alongside the outer game of getting ahead.

Two decades later, Mindvalley is a 400-person company with more than 20 million students across nearly every country on earth. It runs online quests, in-person retreats, and a flagship app that turns its top teachers into structured, coachable programs. Vishen calls it “the world’s biggest personal growth company.” The numbers don’t argue.

His first book, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind (Rodale, 2016), introduced what he calls consciousness engineering — a set of ten “unconventional laws” for spotting the inherited rules and limiting beliefs (he calls them brules — bullshit rules) that govern most adult lives, and replacing them on purpose. The book hit #1 on Amazon for most popular book in the world five separate times in the fall of 2017. It has since been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

His second, The Buddha and the Badass (Rodale, 2020), made the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Its thesis is that the two archetypes Western culture treats as opposites — the spiritual master who sits in stillness and the changemaker who builds the future — are actually the same person, and that the integration of the two is the only stable path to creating anything that lasts.

His third, The 6 Phase Meditation Method (Rodale, 2022), is the codification of the meditation he had been teaching at Mindvalley for years — six short mental moves, fifteen minutes a day, designed for people who do not have the time or inclination to spend a decade on a cushion. Athletes, executives, and Hollywood actors use it. The phases are Compassion, Gratitude, Forgiveness, Future Vision, Daily Intention, and Blessing. It became a national bestseller in its first year.

Beyond the books he is the founder of A-Fest, the transformational festival, and sits on the Innovation Board of XPRIZE. His goal, he says publicly, is to bring Mindvalley’s curriculum into every Fortune 500 company and into 100 national school systems — to put consciousness work and emotional skills on the same shelf as math and chemistry.

What makes Vishen worth listening to is not the catalog of accomplishments — it is the bridge he keeps building. He takes Western entrepreneurial language (KPIs, hacking, scale, system design) and uses it to translate Eastern contemplative practice (meditation, intention, archetype, compassion) into something a CEO can act on Monday morning without flinching. Most of the personal growth space picks one tribe and writes only for it. Vishen writes for both — and the size of the audience he has built is the proof that both tribes were always asking the same questions.