It was close to 11 PM in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was done. I’d woken up at 7, worked non-stop for ten hours, and I was burned out in the way only founders understand — that bone-deep kind of tired where the only thing you want in the world is the pillow.
But I had one more call on my calendar. It was with Srikumar Rao — an MBA professor and, at the time, just one of the many American authors Mindvalley was publishing. Back then, these late-night calls with US-based authors were normal for me.
I was dreading this one. My only job was to run through the items on the agenda, be polite, and get off the phone so I could sleep.
What I wasn’t expecting was that the man on the other end of the line was about to become one of the most profound influences in my life. And it would begin with a poem.
A few minutes into the call, Rao paused and said, “Hey Vishen, is everything okay? You sound stressed.”
I wasn’t about to admit it. “No, no, it’s all good. It’s just kind of late over here, but I’m happy to talk.”
He paused again. “Hang on. Let’s stop for a second. May I read you a poem?”
My first thought, honestly: I do not have time for this. It was the last thing in the world I wanted. But Rao was an important connection, and I didn’t want to be rude.
So I asked, trying to hide my frustration, “How long is it?”
“Just listen,” he said.
And then he read me these words. I’m going to share them in full. Read them once. Then read them again. Notice what happens in your body:
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.
— Rumi
When he finished, I didn’t say anything for a moment. I don’t think I could.
Then Rao explained what the poem was really about. He said: Vishen, if you were truly doing what is in your dharma — what your soul came here to do — you wouldn’t be experiencing this level of stress.
Dharma
Dharma is a Sanskrit word that doesn’t really translate cleanly into English. It’s something like your soul’s duty. Your cosmic role. The path your life is meant to move along if nothing is interfering with it. In the Indian traditions, it’s the quiet understanding that you came here to do something specific, and when you’re doing it, the universe seems to open doors for you. When you’re not, doors close. Things get heavy. The work that used to energize you starts to feel like dragging a boulder uphill.
Here’s what Rao was really telling me that night, hidden inside a thirteenth-century poem: the stress I was feeling wasn’t a time management problem. It wasn’t a productivity problem. It wasn’t even a business problem.
It was a signal.
A signal that somewhere in my life, I was chasing something that wasn’t actually mine. Running after what I thought I wanted. And as Rumi said — when you do that, your days become a furnace of distress and anxiety. Not because you’re lazy. Not because you’re not working hard enough. But because you’re pouring your finite, precious life force into a goal your soul never actually signed up for.
It took me two years to really understand what Rao had handed me on that call. But when I finally did, it rearranged my entire life.
I know this painfully, because I got it catastrophically wrong
Years before that call with Rao, I had what on paper was one of the greatest experiences of my young life.
I was a computer science major at the University of Michigan, and I had been selected for the Microsoft internship. This was the mid-nineties. Working for Microsoft back then was like working for Apple or Google today. I was one of about 1% of applicants who’d made it in. I was part of a gifted cohort. And during that internship, I was invited — along with the other interns — to Bill Gates’ home.
It was the most beautiful home I had ever seen in my life.
I remember standing there, in Bill’s house, thinking about my grandfather, who had believed in me so deeply. My parents, who had sacrificed so much to put me through an American education. Everything had worked. Everything. The Malaysian kid had made it to the top of the mountain the world had told him to climb.
And I felt nothing.
Not nothing exactly. I felt impressed with myself. I felt proud. I felt validated. But underneath all of that — in the quiet place Rumi was pointing at — there was an unmistakable feeling of: this isn’t mine.
I lasted eleven weeks at Microsoft before I got myself fired.
As I boarded the taxi out of Sea-Tac Airport, part of me felt like a complete failure. But another part of me was quietly, almost embarrassingly, elated. Because for the first time in years, I could feel what my own soul actually wanted. And it wasn’t that.
I just didn’t have the language for it yet. I wouldn’t get that language until Rao read me Rumi, years later.
The two kinds of wanting
Here’s the distinction Rumi was pointing at, and what it’s taken me two decades of building Mindvalley to fully metabolize:
There are two completely different kinds of wanting, and most of us can’t tell them apart.
The first comes from ego. It arrives with urgency. It says: I need this so I’ll finally have enough. I need this to prove something. I need this before someone else gets there first. Ego desire carries the signature of who you’re trying to become for other people. When you sit with it quietly — no phone, no distractions — it feels like tension. Like performance. Like rehearsing a version of yourself for an audience.
The second comes from soul. It doesn’t feel like hunger. It feels like recognition. Like remembering something you already knew. It carries the signature of who you already are. When you sit with it, it feels like relief. Like exhaling. Like coming home to a house you didn’t know you’d left.
Same outward behavior — a person working hard, building, striving. Completely different engine underneath.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the manifesting industry has spent forty years teaching us to visualize harder, affirm louder, and vision-board bigger — without ever asking whether the thing we’re trying to pull into our lives is actually ours in the first place.
You cannot manifest your way out of a life that isn’t yours.
What the science says
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert spent his career studying something called affective forecasting — the way we predict how future achievements will make us feel. His landmark research, laid out in his book Stumbling on Happiness, shows that we overestimate the emotional payoff of our goals by 200 to 300%.
Our “psychological immune system” levels us out far faster than we expect.
Translation: if you’re chasing a goal because of how you think it will make you feel when you get there, you are almost certainly wrong about the feeling. And you’re burning years of your finite life to find out.
This is what standing in Bill Gates’ house at twenty-one taught me in my body — years before I had the research to name it. I had achieved the thing. And the thing did not deliver the feeling I’d been promised it would deliver.
Because the goal wasn’t mine.
How to tell them apart in your body
Here’s what I’ve learned to feel for, and what I now teach people in our work at Mindvalley.
Ego desire arrives with urgency and tightness. Your jaw clenches. Your shoulders creep up. There’s a constant hum of not enough underneath the ambition. You check metrics obsessively. You compare yourself to peers and feel either superior or crushed — never at peace. You fantasize about the announcement of the achievement more than the achievement itself. When you finally get it, there’s relief for about 11 days. Then the goalposts move.
Soul desire shows up differently. It’s warm and expansive. It lives in your chest, not your jaw. You think about it and feel energy, not anxiety. You’d do the work even if nobody watched. It doesn’t need external validation to feel real — though validation may come. And when you achieve it, there’s a quiet yes that doesn’t fade. Not euphoria. Something deeper. Alignment.
Try this right now. Pick a goal you’re currently pursuing. Close your eyes for ten seconds. Feel into it.
Does it feel like reaching or remembering?
That’s your answer.
The voice you’re running on
Read this slowly and be honest. No judgment.
| Ego desires feel like: | Soul desires feel like: |
|---|---|
| “What will they think of me?” | “This is who I’m here to become.” |
| “I just need to prove I can do it.” | “This feels light, easeful, right.” |
| “More. Bigger. Faster.” | “Peace and ambition? Yes, please.” |
| “Once I get this, I’ll finally have enough.” | “I am already enough. This is just expression.” |
| “I need to catch up.” | “I am exactly where I need to be.” |
| “I’ll rest when I’ve made it.” | “Rest is part of how I create.” |
| “If I slow down, someone takes my place.” | “What’s meant for me cannot miss me.” |
| “I need to be the best.” | “I need to be the most honest.” |
| “Why isn’t it happening faster?” | “It’s already happening — I can feel it.” |
Now notice what those voices produce in real life. Actual goals. Actual sentences you say to yourself or post on Instagram:
| Ego desire (sounds like): | Soul desire (sounds like): |
|---|---|
| “I need to hit $1M in the next 6 months.” | “I want to build something that outlives me.” |
| “I need to become a doctor so my parents are proud.” | “I want to heal people because it lights me up.” |
| “I need a bigger house than my neighbor.” | “I want a home where my family feels safe and creative.” |
| “I need 100K followers to be taken seriously.” | “I want to share ideas that help people think differently.” |
| “I need to prove I’m successful before my reunion.” | “I want to wake up excited about my work every day.” |
| “I need to be the best in my industry.” | “I want to do work that feels honest and alive.” |
Notice the pattern.
Ego desires are about proving, comparing, and arriving. Soul desires are about expressing, contributing, and becoming.
One is driven by not enough. The other is driven by who I am.
Why this is the real reason manifesting stops working
When you try to manifest from ego, your visualization gets contaminated.
The vision board says freedom and abundance. But the nervous system underneath is broadcasting: I’m not enough, please validate me, I need this to prove I matter.
The universe — or your reticular activating system, if you prefer the neuroscience frame — responds to the signal, not the words. And the signal of ego desire is fear, dressed up as ambition.
This is why so many high-performing, spiritually-curious, smart people I meet are stuck. They’ve read the books, done the vision boards, listened to the podcasts. And the manifestation engine keeps sputtering.
They assume they’re doing the technique wrong.
They’re not. The technique is fine.
The goal is the problem.
The shift isn’t about wanting less. It’s about wanting clean. Wanting from wholeness instead of lack. Creating from alignment with your dharma instead of from anxiety about your image.
When you do that — when the want is actually yours — Rumi’s second stanza kicks in. “What you need starts to flow to you. Without any pain. Because what you want also wants you.”
Someone who gets this at a level that startled me
The first time I met Regan Hillyer, she was one of the few CEOs I’d met who was genuinely, from-the-bones calm. Not performed calm. Not “I meditate so I’m zen” calm. The kind of calm that comes from knowing exactly which of her desires are hers, and which ones she’s quietly released.
She calls her method Energetic Architecture — aligning your internal state so precisely with your actual desires that the external results become almost inevitable.
What I love about her work is that she skips the usual visualization theater and goes straight to the body. She’ll ask you to name your biggest goal, then ask where in your body you’re holding it. Chest, warm, expansive? That’s the soul. Jaw, shoulders, clenched fists? That’s ego dressed up.
Her program, The Art of Manifesting, won Mindvalley’s Most Popular Program in 2024 — which tells me a lot about how hungry people are for this exact conversation right now.
The field where soul-led creation actually happens
There’s something that shifts when you put hundreds of people in the same space, all of them doing the real work of stripping away the goals that aren’t theirs and reconnecting with the ones that are.
The noise quiets. The field shifts. And the desires that emerge in that room come from a completely different place than the ones you’d write down alone in your journal with Instagram open in the next tab.
That’s what we’re creating with the Manifesting Summit. May 15–17, 2026. Free. Live.
This isn’t another “visualize your dream life” workshop. It’s the environment where soul-led creation actually happens, surrounded by teachers and seekers who know the difference between grasping and genuine desire, and can help you feel the difference in your body, not just understand it in your head.
Regan will be there. So will some of the deepest thinkers on conscious creation I’ve ever shared a stage with. And we’ll be going places most personal growth events are too polished to go.
If you read that table and recognized your own voice in soul desires more than you’d like to admit, this is the field you need to be in.
With love,
P.S. If this news stirred something in you — Leave your comment. I read every single one.
78 Responses
I’ve been registered to Mindvalley for some time now and taken a course here and there. I find myself more and more connected and I’ve been using a lot of meditations from different programs lately and I do feel a difference in the calmness about me. I’ve registered to the next 3 days event and I hope it will unlock something in me. It has always been complicated for me to express my wants and needs because I don’t feel them. I always feel like I do not know what I want. Each time I find a job where I perform and everyone is happy about my work, I become an over performer and I fall sick. I’m just out of my 3rd burn-out from 3 differents careers. Each time I get up, go study and get a better position where it all starts back. I love what I do, then I overdo and I crash. I cannot wait for the upcoming event because this time, if I change career again, I want to be sure that it will be my path. And if not, then I want to feel that I am in the right place. Thank you for all this insight you share with us.
“I want to wake up excited about my work every day.”
This sentences resonate with me and I will give thanks for it, I am reading about your work since the 2008, staying up at night listen to your free resources on an computer that this year will have his 20th birthday and it’s still running, not fast but hold the memories and gives me smiles looking at them, with my than poor English that I learn from music and nobody knew, what I was talking about when I was sharing my experience from you webinars.
I bought your first book when finely arrived to my country and in the mean time, your business is growing, I met so many wonderful teachers through your emails, my favourites are, Ken Honda and Jeffrey Allen, their energy work melts my heart every time.
In bought a course from Ken, now I am looking forward to book a course from Jeffrey,
I become a Tai Chi student, my girl is all grown up, because time waits for no one :), my English improved and I am happy to read your emails again.
I watch your transformation quietly and I am happy for you, in the mean time you have met also people from my country and probably some are working in the Mindvalley and this makes me proud.
I smile thinking, that I knew your work before so many people discover it and watched your mind and body and spirit align so beautifully with your dharma through your company. Congratulations and keep doing what your friend Ken say is the most gentle way to live, your Ikigay way.
Thank you for everything.
Dear Mr Vishen Lakhiani,
Thank you for a very resonant article. Rumi’s poems are some of the most stunning and deeply moving. It does take a lot of willpower to transcend into a soul-centric being. I loved the poem that Mr Rao forwarded to you, and I can see how it has changed you. Since poetry can change perceptions, I would like to humbly ask you to read my new Earth Day 2026, Nature Poems just published on Shobana Gomes’ Bookstore: https://shobanagomesbookstore.blogspot.com. In conjunction with Earth Day, I have written two poems: “I Want to Imagine” and “A Place to Dream.” I know the poignant poems will resonate with you, Sir. Thank you – shobana
Vishen, I’m so overwhelmed with emotions and the timeliness of your writing right now,I’m not sure if words will do justice to express how this blog stirred and moved something in me !I’m at crossroads of deciphering EXACTLY what you wrote in here !What’s mine and what’s not ?Every word you wrote in this piece spoke to me.Every ! What was simmering inside of me for past 4-6 weeks ,you very neatly and clearly put in words while showing the path one would feel “peace and ambition”at.To be honest, I don’t get a chance to read every newsletter ,but this found me!Your words brought me many answers and for that I truly thank you !I appreciate the work you are doing and am grateful that you felt inspired to write this piece!Thank You.Thank You.
Vishen, your message about clarification of goals (from ego or soul), was exactly what I needed.
Many months of realizing that I am missing something that felt like a whisper away and struggling to understand the what and why finally clicked today.
Grateful for you as the gift that you are. Thank you
I rarely check my emails in this gmail account. I do a really quick overview and delete most. Today was different. I mindfully scanned each one today after doing a major overall email re-org a few days ago. I saw your subject line, and I opened it. I was shocked at how closely it lands where I’m at right now. I’ve manifested many things in my life, and the one thing I can’t seem to make happen isn’t. It’s not procrastination; it’s trying to make something happen that isn’t coming from the heart space. It’s about proving, which I’ve spent almost 40 years trying to do, after one failure in high school. Over the last week, I’ve gone to a pretty low place, and it needed to happen, so that I could meet this wound that is still here. What I’ve realized is this. Proving my capabilities will never be enough. Where it can get tricky is the work “I thought I was here to do” is still very meaningful work. It had a bigger mission and purpose, which made it seem like was every ounce of my soul’s calling, but it wasn’t happening. I know now that I’m supposed to be speaking on stages about living with self-doubt for 40 years and how that began with a story I made up after failing my 10th grade year of high school. I feel led to speak to younger people about this. I want them to know they don’t have to carry self-doubt through their lives because of one small event. Failure is just information. I practice this now with all things I fail at. It’s part of life, and it’s how we know what we want most. Your blog really landed right at the perfect time — bc that’s what happens when we are living in alignment. All things are showing up for me now. I love the chart in the article. It was so clear how much I have lived in the left column. I’m starting to notice what shows up in my body now. The other work made me feel anxious bc I wasn’t launching it. The work I feel called to do feels less about resistance and more about responsibility. I’ve let go of the details, and I’m just focused on delivering. I’m still pretty green at the moment, but it certainly feels like I’m owning my wisdom fully, for the first time. Thank you!
This is brilliant. I usually scroll mails to see if there’s anything important or interesting. This made me pause and think about where I am now and how or why. I’ve struggled with this some: I never knew what I wanted to do when I grow up. I was curious about a lot of things and learned easily, but I had no ambition. I choose to study something that is somewhat challenging, but is not the highest level in that business. I am not after the money nor the position, those are not that important to me, never have been. I always wanted my work to be interesting enough, but I did not want to loose myself in that path. I wanted to have life outside work, the famous “work-life balance”. As time went on, at times I wanted to do more challenging things, learn new things, grow professionally. Those often included a “better” title and more money, which was ok, until it meant that my company became a priority and had a say in my free time, when it wanted it, and that was not okay for me.
So soul desires have always been important to me, but sometimes it’s a struggle to separate from ego desires. Another thing is: how to explain my path to friends or colleagues or superiors, why I don’t do this or do that to become something they would expect me to. I hope you have a way of making soul desires as a target become more understandable and more popular.
Mindvalley using LLMs to write its blogs now. All respect lost. Unsubscribed.
Vishan,
I feel silly telling you that I cried while reading this. I have wanted to join mindvalley for years now but then my ego says I can’t afford to get lost in learning when I have a business to run. Literally financially and emotionally I would be hooked but it is too expensive right now, blah blah blah. Reading several comments above made my heart hurt for their loss and hopelessness and yet I was grateful I am doing better than that with my life That could be me in 5 years my ego said. Please keep writing these blogs I truly need them. Thank you for all you do.
There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you made
You’re so awesome! I don’t believe I have read a single thing like that before. So great to find someone with some original thoughts on this topic. Really.. thank you for starting this up. This website is something that is needed on the internet, someone with a little originality!
I really like reading through a post that can make men and women think. Also, thank you for allowing me to comment!
Grateful for the ability to react!
Wow. Every newsletter & email from Mindvalley is worth it. It makes me emotional that the end of this truly value-giving article had no sales-pitch at the end of it: just an invite to a free e-summit next month??
Thank you for enriching my life, keeping me on track, and helping screen time yield personal growth.
Big Gratitude!
Hi Vishen, I’m at the point you described but I’m too old and not 21 years old anymore. I’m CEO of a company and I don’t want all this anymore but I cannot do anything else – I’m 59 I have no other way to ‘recycle myself’ – What can I do when I’m so old… I have a nice house in Switzerland I live confortably but I’m so tired…and no way out. Thank you for your story.
There are days when a very specific feeling — actually, two — simply arrived in me. From within. The first was the feeling of needing a new place, a journey, far away, for a while. Not just any journey, but one in which I would finally stand by a version of Giulia that — I don’t know why — I have always felt I was meant to be. I have always imagined myself that way, living in those places, with that kind of lifestyle, those particular landscapes, that kind of energy on me and around me, that sense of community. Always having only felt and imagined it, never actually lived it. Fantasy? I don’t think fantasies last this long or appear so “randomly.” The second feeling, perhaps even more important, was serenity. The serenity with which both how I feel now and how I imagine I would feel have no extreme highs or lows. They include no forecasts, no margin for error, no thoughts of failure, no fear of wasting an attempt, no rigid questions born from old systems. Serenity. If it is so, then it is. And then this email arrives — and no, I’m not subscribed to the newsletter. So I only get a few, and I don’t read all of them. This one, I did. And I find myself standing in front of a beautiful mirror. The shivers come, and as often happens, I feel it: I am here, I am myself. Nothing else matters. Thank you, Vishen.
This came at the right time. I felt like I needed to listen to something to inspire me because there’s something pressing in my life now. I then reach out to my phone and boom you were there and wow, now I have a homework. I don’t normally read long staff like this but this one I read it all. Thank you for giving me clarity.
OMG, No Vishen, this can’t be true. I feel like you got into my brain and sitting there and reading it. Ego vs soul desires, every single one of them gives me goose bumps. I can’t stop thinking like – who is this guy and why I got to read this blog at exactly the time of cross-road moment in my career and life. I get your emails regularly in my inbox and today I scrolled thru it and just randomly clicked it to glance what’s in this. I started reading and couldn’t take my eyes off it until finishing it without even blinking. Next thing I did is subscribing to both your blogs and weekly newsletters. I can never thank you enough Vishen. Just like your moment at Bill Gate’s home, I too might have experienced a similar moment, but my Ego would have won and blindfolded me to pursue its own desires. Now I am going to relax, wait in silence and see how Rumi’s words coming true in my own life.
With love, gratitude and lots of hope
Kannan
Dear Vishen,
I love your work and read it all the time.
One thing that I struggle with is that I believe I have already completed my Dharma. I think my Dharma was the 34 years spent with my lovely husband who I adored. I looked after him in 2020 when he passed away aged 55 from an aggressive cancer.
I am keeping busy following my ‘passion’ of building a business but it isn’t really a passion it’s a substitute.
I find all forms of manifesting difficult now because I had what I always wanted and although I’m not happy now I don’t know what would make me happy. Any suggestions of how to move forward with that?
„To nie był problem produktywności. To był sygnał.”
This feels deeply profound and resonates strongly with me. I had been feeling stuck when, without any effort on my part, an opportunity to move appeared right at my doorstep. It felt like a calling—like finally setting down the heavy stones I’ve been carrying on my back. Over the past two years, I’ve felt a renewed motivation to rediscover myself and reconnect with a higher sense of purpose, and this opportunity may be exactly what I needed to begin walking that new path. look forwrad to more posts.