The code of the extraordinary mind

The Code of the Extraordinary Mind — Vishen Lakhiani

In 2008, the man who would later sell hundreds of millions of dollars in personal growth content was losing fifteen thousand dollars a month and could not remember how to be happy. His company, Mindvalley, was pulling in a quarter million dollars in revenue every month and bleeding cash. He had stopped sleeping properly. He had stopped laughing properly. And then one ordinary afternoon, with no warning, he made a switch so small and so internal that nobody around him noticed it for weeks. He stopped attaching his happiness to his goals. Within eight months, revenue grew four hundred percent.

That switch — and the way an engineer from Malaysia who had been fired twice, lost two businesses, and failed at twelve startup ideas managed to find it — is the spine of this book. Vishen Lakhiani is not promising a productivity hack. He is making a larger claim: that nearly every rule you are living by was made up by people no smarter than you, and that the small group of human beings who appear to bend reality around them have simply learned to see those rules clearly enough to choose which ones to keep. He calls the ten principles they share the Code of the Extraordinary Mind, and he organizes the book around four movements — seeing the world clearly, awakening to your power to choose, recoding your inner life, and finally building something that outlives you.

Living in the Culturescape

The book opens with a Steve Jobs line that Lakhiani treats as the founding insight of the entire project. Everything around you that you call life, Jobs said, was made up by people no smarter than you. Once you understand that, you will never be the same again. Most adults walk through their entire lives without ever metabolizing that sentence. We absorb the world we are born into the way a fish absorbs water — completely, invisibly, with no awareness that there is anything else.