The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Terms

by Vishen Lakhiani

It’s because we grow through discomfort or insight. But never through apathy.

If I had to summarize this skill, it’s this—I’m a sponge when it comes to learning from others and connecting the dots. I am fortunate to have the ability to soak up knowledge and wisdom easily from all sorts of people—from billionaires to monks—and then “codify” these ideas, connect those bits of knowledge, and construct unique new models for understanding the world.

Human beings operate within a syntax of beliefs, cultural conditionings, rituals, and shared mythologies. All of this creates a “code” in how we communicate with each other. To many, the code is hidden. We operate within this realm on autopilot.

Just as a programmer can program a computer to do specific tasks by understanding its code, you can program your life and the world around you to improve, enhance the way you live and the experiences you have in this lifetime.

The Himba had no word for blue and thus could not easily identify a blue square from a collection of green squares—a task simple enough for most of us.

The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based. Yet even though it exists solely in our heads, it is very, very real.

Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it safe is more likely just holding us back from the thrills of a life filled with meaning and discovery.

The dips contain amazing learnings and wisdom that lead to sharper rises in the quality of life afterward.

Life has a way of taking care of you no matter how dark it can sometimes feel—I promise.

I love this quote by American football player and actor Terry Crews: “I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Once you push yourself into something new, a whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt. But amazingly when you heal—you are somewhere you’ve never been.”

My friend Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, famously said: If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.

The evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviours, emotions, beliefs, and religions not through rational choice but contagion.

Our two kids, far from being “confused,” are learning multiple languages and happily becoming citizens of the world (my son, Hayden, had traveled to eighteen countries by the time he was eighteen months old). My children participate in Russian Orthodox, Lutheran, and Hindu traditions with their grandparents. But they aren’t limited to any one religion. They get to experience all the beauty of human religions without being locked into any one path. Which

I believe that religion was necessary for human evolution, helping us develop guidelines for good moral conduct and cooperation within the tribe hundreds and thousands of years ago. But today, as humanity is more connected than ever and many of us have access to the various wisdom and spiritual traditions of the world, the idea of adhering to a singular religion might be obsolete.

A better alternative, in my opinion, is not to subscribe to one religion but to pick and choose beliefs from the entire pantheon of global religions and spiritual practices.

I was born in a Hindu family, but over the years, I’ve created my own set of beliefs derived from the best of every religion and spiritual book I’ve been exposed to. We don’t pick one food to eat every day. Why must we pick one religion? Why can’t we believe in Jesus’ model of love and kindness, donate 10 percent of our income to charity like a good Muslim, and also think that reincarnation is awesome?

There is much beauty in the teachings of Christ, the Sufism of Islam, the Kabbalah from Judaism, the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, or the Buddhist teachings of the Dalai Lama. Yet humanity has widely decided that religion should be absolutist: In short, pick one and stick to it for the rest of your life. And worse—pass it on to your children through early indoctrination, so they...

Ever notice how often a child asks why? The typical parent’s response to the steady barrage of why, why, why is usually something along the lines of: “Because I said so.” “Because that’s the way it is.” “Because God wanted it this way.” “Because Dad says you need to do it.” Statements like these cause children to get trapped in a thicket of Brules they may not even realize are open to question. Those children grow up to become adults trapped by restrictions and rules that they have taken to be “truth.”

Thus we absorb the rules transmitted by culture and act in the world based on these beliefs. Much of this conditioning is in place before the age of nine, and we may carry many of these beliefs until we die—until or unless we learn to challenge them.

During our evolution as a sentient species, we needed leaders and authority figures to help us organize and survive. With the advent of literacy and other skills for acquiring, retaining, and sharing information, knowledge is now far more evenly distributed and widely available. It’s time we stopped behaving like submissive prehistoric tribe members and started questioning some of the things our leaders say.

You can take on the beliefs of your tribe, but you don’t have to take on all of their beliefs, especially if their beliefs are unscientific, unhelpful, or untrue.

Law 2: Question the Brules. Extraordinary minds question the Brules when they feel those Brules are out of alignment with their dreams and desires. They recognize that much of the way the world works is due to people blindly following Brules that have long passed their expiration date.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Every year, we’d strive to perfect our moves so we could achieve the next belt level. I started as a white belt and slowly ascended to yellow, green, blue, brown, and eventually the much-coveted black belt. The belts were an elegant system dating back centuries that allowed students to rise to mastery level in attainable stages. It made growth easier and motivated students far more than a vague goal such as “become a master.” Each belt was a treasured validation of our hard work and progress.

The researchers had successfully swapped out an old model of reality and implanted a new one. They made the maids view their work as “exercise.” And the results caused actual physical changes in the bodies of the maids.

I’ve decided I’m going to live to be one hundred. I’ve chosen a model where seven minutes of early morning exercise gets me the same results as hours in a gym. As a result, I’ve been able to get fitter and develop a better body in my forties than I had in my twenties.

We had journeyed into the jungle with the celebrated philanthropist and aid worker Lynne Twist. Lynne told me how she had come in contact with the Achuar. She had repeated dreams of indigenous people with distinctive red markings on their faces. They seemed to be calling to her for help. When she described these visions to friends, one remarked that the faces she described looked much like the Achuar. That’s how Lynne came to Ecuador to meet the tribe. The Achuar are facing eviction from their centuries-old home due to logging and oil and gas companies cutting large swaths of the Amazon. Lynne, working with the Ecuadorian government and the Achuar, has helped create laws to protect as much as four million acres of rainforest.

Elon Musk was once asked in a Reddit.com Q&A: “How do you learn so fast?” He replied: “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Ready to start your adventure in consciousness engineering? Here goes: When you think of your life and where you want to grow, think holistically. Too many people live lives lacking in balance.

An extraordinary life is balanced on all levels. Thinking holistically will help you make sure you don’t end up winning in one area but losing in another.

Our models of reality lie below the surface. Often we do not realize we have them until some intervention or contemplative practice makes us aware.

Thanks to Mary, my dating life took off. Nothing about my appearance had changed. But armed with a new model of reality about my attractiveness, I suddenly seemed to be a magnet for female attention. It was amazing how a belief, when shifted, could create such a dramatic turnaround in my world.

We often carry disempowering models of reality that we inherited as far back as childhood.

When you replace disempowering models of reality with empowering ones, tremendous changes can occur in your life at a very rapid pace.

We add meanings to every situation we see and then carry these meanings around as simplistic and often distorted and dangerous models of reality about our world. We then act as if these models are laws.

Our beliefs about our bodies seem to have an uncanny impact on how we experience our bodies—for good or bad.

Your beliefs can influence both you and the people around you. What you expect, you get.

We create models of reality about the behaviors of our spouses, lovers, bosses, employees, children—but as the research shows, our beliefs influence how others respond to us. How much of the irritating or negative characteristics you see in others is really a belief you’re projecting onto them?

“No matter what you do, in any situation with your child, ask yourself, What beliefs is my child going to take away from this encounter? Will your child walk away thinking: I just made a mistake and I learned something great or I’m insignificant?”

Shelly’s advice is, at the end of any situation like that, ask your child, “Billy, what happened? What was the consequence? What can you learn from this?” Shelly makes it very clear. Don’t ask Billy, “Why did you do that?” Why questions corner a child and put the child on the defensive. For one thing, the child is emotional, and even many adults can’t answer why in the grip of emotion. For another, it’s not appropriate to expect a young child to be psychologically savvy enough to dive into his own mind and accurately answer why he did what he did. Instead, ask what questions: “Billy, what happened that made you drop that spoon?” This allows him to look within and think. He might answer, “I dropped it because I thought you weren’t listening to me.”

Every evening after work, I try to spend some time with my son, Hayden. We call this Dad and Hayden time. After playing with Legos or reading books, I tuck Hayden into bed. As I do so, I ask him two simple questions that I hope will end his day with positivity. First, I ask him to think of one thing he was grateful for that day. It could be the soft sheets he’s sleeping on, a friend he played with, a conversation we had, or a book he read. I show him that he can

be grateful for anything. Second, I ask, “Hayden, what did you love about yourself today?” I ask him to talk about something he did. Maybe it was an act of kindness—he helped another kid at school. Or a demonstration of intelligence—something he figured out or something smart that he said. Maybe it was being helpful—the way he took care of his baby sister. If he can’t think of anything, then I tell him something I love about him.

Think about a quality or an action of yours that made you proud today. Maybe nobody else told you that they appreciated it, but it’s time that you affirmed it for yourself. Think about what it is about you as a human being that you can love. Is it your unique style? Did you solve a complex problem at work? Is it

your way with animals? Your dance moves? Your jump shot? That awesome meal you cooked last night? The fact that you know the lyrics to every Disney song since The Little Mermaid? You can identify qualities that are big or small, but you must pinpoint three to five things every day that make you proud to be who you are. You can practice this simple self-affirmation in the morning when waking up or just before going to sleep.

Marisa Peer suggests that all of us have a child within who never received all the love and appreciation we deserved. We can’t go back and fix the past. But we can take responsibility to heal ourselves now by giving ourselves the love and appreciation we once craved. You can help heal your own inner child.

According to the book Good without God by Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, the fourth biggest life adherence in the world today after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism is now humanism. Humanism is the idea that we do not need religion in order to be good. It differs from atheism in the sense that humanists believe that there is a “God,” but He’s certainly not the judgmental, angry being that many religious texts make Him out to be. Instead, to a humanist, “God” might be the universe, or the connectedness of life on Earth, or spirit. Humanism is opening up a new spiritual path for people who want to reject the Brules of religion but who don’t embrace atheism. One billion humanists now exist on the planet, and their numbers are growing.

Morty and Shelly Lefkoe have an interesting model for hacking beliefs that has to do with turning off your mind’s meaning-making machine. According to Morty, we can manufacture as many as 500 different “meanings” a week. But as we learn to ask ourselves, Is this really true? Am 1100 percent sure that this is what’s really going on?—we start to reduce the number of meanings.

Morty says it’s easy to get from 500 to 200 a week if you just do an internal inventory at regular intervals to check whether you’re creating meaning where none should exist. Then it’s just about practice. Eventually you stop adding meaning to events. You will become less reactive to stress and less upset with others in your life. It helps your marriage, and I can tell you it will help your relationships with your boss and coworkers. As a CEO leading a team of 200 people, I’ve consistently found that those who had their meaning-making machines under control at work were more effective leaders.

Good software is constantly being updated. It would be ridiculous to still be running Windows 95 when you could be running the latest version. Yet when it comes to our systems for living—our internal software—we run systems that are highly suboptimal. But what if you start viewing your systems for living in much the same way you view the apps you download on your smartphone? When you swap outdated models of reality for empowering ones and pair them with new systems for applying your new models day to day, your life will improve exponentially—and fast.

When you optimize your systems for living, you can experience exponential growth in areas that truly matter to you.