PDF Summary:The Buddha and the Badass, by Vishen Lakhiani

Most people push themselves to work long, grueling hours, thinking this is what’s needed to achieve professional success. In The Buddha and the Badass, entrepreneur Vishen Lakhiani sets the record straight: “Hustling” won’t make you or your business successful. Instead, you need to be both spiritually enlightened (like a Buddha) and disruptive (like a badass). When you merge these qualities as a leader, you create an environment in which everyone learns, grows, gets along, and—most importantly—where work becomes play.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get in touch with your true identity to live an enlightened life according to your values. You’ll also learn how to disruptively transform your workplace from mundane and unexceptional to growth- and connection-oriented. We’ll supplement this information with outside perspectives on creating a successful company and culture, and with comparisons between Lakhiani’s self-improvement advice and that of other thinkers.

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What’s more, Lakhiani doesn’t specify a time to wake up, though he does provide some ways to get better sleep so you can get up earlier than you did before and still feel refreshed. Sharma on the other hand recommends a strict 5 a.m. wake-up time and provides a nightly schedule to follow to ensure you get the best sleep and can wake up by five.

Finally, the authors advocate different routines each morning. Lakhiani’s routine is looser and has no end time, while Sharma’s routine is strictly prescribed and should only take an hour. He says to exercise for 20 minutes, reflect or meditate for 20 minutes, and expand your knowledge by reading for 20 minutes. While there is some overlap, each routine will probably find greater appeal with different people.

How to Become Disruptive

Now that you know how to move toward spiritual enlightenment, let’s look at the other side of the coin: how to be disruptive. Again, this means building a revolutionary workplace in which people can grow, feel important and valued, develop friendships, and contribute to meaningful work. This type of workplace stands in stark contrast to most other modern work environments, states Lakhiani. There are three parts to being a disruptive leader.

Set Your Company’s Values and Use Them to Attract the Right Team

The first step of setting up a disruptive business is to define the company’s values, which are based on your personal values. You must do this because when your company has clearly defined values, applicants who have the same values and the ability to bring them to life will want to work for you. And when your company is composed of people with shared values, it’s far more likely to succeed.

(Shortform note: Some disagree with Lakhiani’s belief in the power of value statements. While corporate value statements may paint a pleasant picture of the company, often, the pressure to maximize profit wins out over adherence to nice-sounding values like “teamwork” and “empowerment.” And it looks like employees are actually leaving companies for this reason, not wanting to be part of a corporate system that exists only to maximize shareholder value. So even if a company truly means to act on its values, employees may be so disillusioned that they don’t take that promise seriously and don’t apply.)

Define and share your values in two ways:

Manifesto: Create a manifesto outlining what your company stands for and what values it has. Be aware that some people will dislike your manifesto, and that’s OK. The main point is that your manifesto takes a strong stance so that it attracts the people who do share your values.

Your Reason for Existing: In addition to a manifesto, communicate why you exist. You must communicate this because your “why” is what candidates connect to emotionally, and emotions drive human decisions far more than logic does.

(Shortform note: With these two value declarations, Lakhiani is in a way trying to help you speak both to the minds and hearts of job applicants. A manifesto is akin to a thesis statement about your business, and it aims to logically persuade someone that what you’re doing is valuable. It thus makes sense that not every manifesto will appeal to the logic of every person. A reason for existing, on the other hand, is a deeper expression of core values that are meant to resonate emotionally—comparable to a story.)

Define Bold, Forward-Thinking Goals

To lead a disruptive company, you must develop big, bold goals for it, insists Lakhiani. Unfortunately, most people and leaders are conditioned to aspire to modest goals. But to accomplish something great, you must set audacious goals and constantly update them to be even more audacious. If you don’t, your company will languish in mediocrity.

(Shortform note: Some feel that mediocrity isn’t such a bad thing. Being content to perform at an average level frees you from the uncomfortable pressure to always be the best. Being average also means you get to enjoy life’s pleasures because you’re not always straining to become better. You enjoy better mental health because you don’t always see yourself as falling short of big goals.)

Ironically, the bolder your goals are, Lakhiani argues, the easier they are to achieve. This is because when your goals are inspiring and audacious, people with the right skills and enthusiasm will be excited by your cause and want to join it. To have such big, bold goals, Lakhiani warns that you must not be too rational. Otherwise, you’ll start hedging and reducing the scope of your goal to something more manageable.

(Shortform note: While pursuing audacious goals may seem risky, in Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio seeks to assuage your fears about going after lofty goals. He writes that when you set a lofty goal and start pursuing it, new avenues and actions will become clear to you, but you’ll only see those avenues and actions if you set the goal in the first place. This argument may appeal to the more rational goal-setters who don’t want to throw themselves into the pursuit of a highly ambitious and uncertain goal.)

Lakhiani provides two tips on attaining goals:

Tip 1: Always speak of your project 10 years down the road to indicate the goal you believe it will achieve in 10 years. Express this goal as if it were already a reality—doing this makes it more likely to happen.

(Shortform note: If you’re not sure of where you want to be in 10 years, consider asking first how much money you want your company to be making at that time. Once you know this, you can think of other, related goals. And others agree you should talk about them as if you know you’ll meet them: Doing this forces you to become more self-aware and thus more specific about how you’ll achieve your goal.)

Tip 2: Don’t be afraid to fail at achieving your goal. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t think expansively enough to create a bold vision. Lahkiani specifically recommends that 50% of your goals should have a 50% chance of failing. Within your company, you should also strive to set goals that succeed only 60 to 80% of the time. If you have a success rate higher than that, it means your goals aren’t big enough.

(Shortform note: A different take on this advice is to set goals that are 10 times bigger than what you initially think is feasible. Grant Cardone proposes this goal-setting method, but, unlike Lakhiani, doesn’t account for the possibility of failure. He believes that if you set huge goals and invest great effort into accomplishing them, you will. Perhaps a compromise between the two takes would be to set 10x bigger goals and assume that 50% of them have a 50% chance of failing.)

Foster In-Sync Thinking

Once you’ve hired people who believe in your goals and values, you should then foster an environment where they can easily experience what Lakhiani calls brain coupling: being totally mentally in sync on an idea or project. This improves the efficiency of your organization because people can make decisions faster, and it makes employees happier because they feel connected to and understood by co-workers.

As a leader, you can foster in-sync thinking by getting rid of hierarchical communication structures within the company. Let every employee approach any superior, no matter how senior they are. This allows ideas to travel freely between everyone.

(Shortform note: Lakhiani uses the term “brain coupling” to indicate a general sense of being on the same page as someone else. But it’s also a scientific phenomenon in which the brain activity of two people will align when they’re speaking with each other—such that if one person is describing an event she witnessed, the brain of the person listening will respond neurologically as if he witnessed it also. In other words, through speech, two peoples’ brain patterns sync up. This means speech is the main way people can brain couple, making Lakhiani’s recommendation to improve communication by removing hierarchies scientifically valid.)

Lakhianai also recommends encouraging in-sync thinking using the OODA model of decision-making, created by John Boyd, an airforce military strategist. This decision-making model emphasizes speed over accuracy and encourages team members to quickly make decisions without over-analyzing or fully weighing the pros and cons. Though this might allow for more bad decisions, the team will make more net good decisions (in its original use, OODA led air force pilots to fire more bullets overall. This meant a higher percentage of misses, but an even higher percentage of hits than when not using OODA).

In OODA, you don’t wait for perfect information, but quickly forge ahead with the information you do have to make a decision. Once you’ve made a decision, you restart the OODA process to determine if it led to a desirable outcome and change your approach if necessary. When an organization uses OODA, it gets more done faster, which allows the team to move forward in-sync as a whole.

OODA stands for:

• Observe (Identify a problem or opportunity. For example, if you own a fitness center, you might observe that your older clients don’t sign up for classes.)
• Orient (Consider what you know and how you might solve the problem. You might determine that hiring older fitness instructors could encourage older clients to attend classes.)
• Decide (Collectively agree on a solution. You’d bring this proposal to your team and quickly get their input and assent.)
• Act (Carry out the solution. You’d hire the older fitness instructors. Then, you’d start OODA over again: Observe if this approach worked and re-orient if necessary. For example, if this doesn’t bring in older clients, you’d scrap the idea. Or if older clients only sign up for yoga classes, you’d hire older fitness instructors to teach only yoga classes.)

Alternative Approaches to Decision-Making

OODA helps you make a decision quickly as a group and then pivot or adjust based on the decision’s outcome. But what if you have to make a decision that doesn’t allow you to pivot or adjust afterward? What if it’s more important to be accurate than to be fast? This could be the personal decision to have kids or a business decision to sell your company—once you’ve made these decisions, you can’t go back on them.

For such big decisions, it might be better to follow Peter Drucker’s five-step decision-making process. Drucker’s approach is geared toward high-level executives, whose decisions have broad ramifications and generally need to be good rather than expedient. In general, he encourages such executives to make only a few critical decisions and to standardize the less significant choices (perhaps even using OODA). Additionally, he recommends making decisions slowly and deeply considering the requirements it must meet. Use conceptual and strategic thinking when reflecting on the problem, not practical problem-solving. That serves you in OODA-appropriate decisions but not in personally significant decisions.

Let’s now look at Drucker’s approach and see how it differs from OODA:

Step 1: Assess if the decision is common or special. If it’s a common decision, you can use a standard approach (again, this could be OODA). This isn’t a part of OODA because that process assumes the decision is standard.

Step 2: Decide what the goal of the decision should be and what the constraints on it are. This is arguably similar to “Orient” in OODA—though orienting should likely take less time.

Step 3: When considering what to do, always try to do the right thing, rather than simply make an agreeable compromise. Drucker asserts that you often will have to compromise, but if you start from the ideal outcome and make concessions from there, you’ll end up with a better decision than if you don’t even try to attain the best outcome. In OODA, there’s less emphasis on making the right decision and more emphasis on making a decision. You figure out if that decision was right after having made it.

Step 4: To implement the decision, decide who you need to tell about it, who and what are the next steps, what powers the people implementing those steps must have, and how to measure your success. OODA doesn’t elaborate on this step to this degree, though conceivably, you should also think through these next considerations in the “Decide” phase.

Step 5: Decide how you’ll collect feedback to know if your decision worked. This corresponds to starting OODA over again: Once you’ve made your decision, you “Observe” if it worked.

How to Merge Spiritual Enlightenment With Disruption

Now that you know how to separately be enlightened and disruptive, let’s look at how to merge enlightenment and disruptiveness in the workplace to turn work into an enjoyable and fulfilling pursuit for you and your employees.

Develop a Mission and Rally Employees Behind It

To merge enlightenment with disruption, Lakhiani advises that you develop a mission to improve the world that will keep employees motivated. People naturally need missions to fuel their efforts. Without a mission, they have no reason to care about what they’re doing.

This mission should specifically be aimed at positively impacting others. Ask yourself how you can help humanity through what you’re doing—perhaps by providing affordable, sustainable clothing to people around the world. State your mission clearly so both applicants and consumers see what you stand for. Lakhiani notes consumers also expect companies to develop social and political perspectives and to act on those perspectives, so stating your mission is important commercially, as well.

Encouraging Different Interpretations of Your Mission

Others agree that every company should have a mission to motivate employees, but in The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge adds that different workers might interpret or approach the mission in different ways, which can be good: It can present you with ways of harnessing your mission you may not have otherwise thought of. For example, if your mission is initially to “Offer sustainable, affordable clothing to people around the world,” one employee might interpret this as selling clothes that have minor flaws at a high discount to reach low-income demographics. You could then incorporate that effort into your mission.

Senge says it might even be advantageous to note publicly that you solicit input from employees in this way. If consumers read that you not only care about the greater good, but also care about what your employees think, they might be more inclined to spend their money on your products.

Make Personal Growth a Top Company Priority

Lakhiani stresses that to make work so enjoyable and fulfilling that it feels like play, you must create a work environment that’s completely geared toward helping employees grow as people. Humans only feel happy when they’re improving themselves, so as a leader, make it your top priority to help them do this at work. Not only are your employees happier and more effective, but your business will reap the benefits of your employees’ self-improvement.

To encourage growth, let your team have their mornings to do what they want. This might be to invest in self-improvement projects, catch up on sleep, spend time with family, or go into work, if they choose. Lakhiani writes that at his company, meetings don’t start until 11:30 a.m., and it doesn’t matter to him when employees work, as long as they attend meetings and perform well. When employees have this time for themselves, they tend to be more engaged when they do work.

(Shortform note: To help employees grow at work, you might have to first instill a growth mindset in them. A growth mindset is the belief that you can improve your abilities, and it’s critical in order to achieve any long-term growth in life. In addition to giving your employees mornings to grow on their own, you can also create a growth work culture that lets employees know you believe they have the capacity to improve. You can do this by being open to employees contradicting or challenging you. Doing this indicates you’re OK with being wrong and learning from mistakes and that employees can do this, too. A growth work culture also makes employees more committed and trusting, which compounds their happiness at improving.)

Ask Employees to State Their Life Goals, and Support These

In the same way you must stay true to your values (which we discussed in the first part of this guide), you also want your employees to stay true to theirs so they can be their happiest and most effective selves, writes Lakhiani. To encourage your whole team to stick to their values, have them publicly write out three life goals: the experiences they want to have, the ways they’d like to grow, and how they’d like to give back to the world. Knowing this helps everyone at the company support each other in achieving those goals.

(Shortform note: Being asked to openly share personal aspirations may seem like an overstep for some employees. Not everyone wants to bare their souls to co-workers. Lakhiani writes his advice based on his experience running his company Mindvalley, which has fostered a unique and intimate culture where such sharing is the norm. But if your company doesn’t have a highly open culture, making goal-setting exercises—and workplace social events in general—optional may be the best way to keep employees happy and effective.)

Encourage Deep Personal Connections

Next, encourage strong personal connections between employees, writes Lakhiani. This is important to do because personal connection is an evolutionary necessity for all humans, and we’re happier when we’re surrounded by people we like and who care for us. Connectedness also makes us more capable and confident because we can be authentically ourselves and have the support of others.

To foster such connections, Lakhiani proposes making friendships at work a priority. You can do this by hiring according to your values: People who share values are more likely to get along. You can also do this by hosting social events and initiating rituals—like daily gratitude sessions—during which employees can share intimately with each other.

Building Connections as an Employee

Lakhiani’s advice is for leaders who have a hand in shaping company culture. But individual employees can also take steps to be more connected at work and thus increase their confidence and competence. This may be especially important if your company doesn’t explicitly hire according to its values and you may not have obvious common ground with co-workers.

For instance, you can eat lunch in a communal area, where you’re likely to run into new people. And you can even start your own interest group if your company doesn’t organize social events or rituals.

You can also become more connected by resisting the urge to overwork. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor says that many employees feel it’s better to avoid social interactions, both at work and after work, when they have a big project due. But while this may seem responsible, working during lunch and canceling after-work social events just makes you unhappy and thus less likely to succeed on the project.

Decide How You Want Your Life to Look Like Based on Your Identity

The final step Lakhiani recommends concerns your personal merging of enlightenment and disruption. He writes that to realize your ideal life based on your identity, values, and purpose, you must disrupt how you think about yourself to establish new, constructive patterns of thought. He provides a three-step process for doing this.

Step 1: Describe your ideal day if you were exactly the person you wanted to be. Consider what you’d do in the mornings, what you’d look like, what your work would look like, who your friends are, and so on. Be as detailed as possible.

(Shortform note: What’s the distinction between visualizing your ideal day, as Lakhiani recommends, and fantasizing about it? You visualize when you believe an event can happen in the future, and you fantasize when you don’t believe that event can actually happen. Steer clear of fantasies in this exercise, as they won’t help you achieve a realistic future life.)

Step 2: Ask what sort of person you’d have to become to live this ideal day. Reflect on four dimensions and secondary factors of this person:

• Well-being: Describe your physical health, mental health, and emotional health. Do you feel energetic? What emotions do you feel over the course of the day?
• Creativity: How well can you access a state of concentration and enjoyment when working? How easy is it for you to focus on your goals? How clearly have you defined your purpose?
• Material well-being and life control: Are you financially comfortable? Can you handle your work and personal projects? Do solutions to problems come easily to you?
• Relationships: Do you have mutually beneficial relationships with friends and co-workers? Are there people who care about you? Can you be authentically yourself?

(Shortform note: This step seems as if it would elicit the same answers from all humans. For instance, when asked to think about future physical health, everyone would say they want to be in good health. No one wants to be in poor or average health. Similarly, everyone wants to be able to focus well, be financially well-off, and have good relationships. The key to making this a valuable exercise step is perhaps to consider each category more globally and neutrally, asking yourself to simply describe your well-being, creative life, material well-being, and relationships. This makes room for more individualized reflection and avoids simple binary answers.)

Step 3: Now, assume the identity of this person by asking yourself questions as if you already possess the above-listed traits. For example, if you wrote in step 2 that the ideal version of yourself has many caring friends, you might ask yourself: “Why do I have such deep, loving relationships?” Asking such questions forces your subconscious to answer them—this is an automatic reaction. In this example, your subconscious might answer: “Because I’m a compassionate, thoughtful friend and invest heavily into my friendships.”

When your subconscious answers such questions, you’ll notice more opportunities to live out those answers. For instance, you might meet someone new and have the chance to become a compassionate, thoughtful friend to them. Lakhiani admits he’s not sure how this happens—if the Universe presents you with opportunities or if your brain simply becomes more attuned to such opportunities—but he’s confident that either way, this process works.~~ ~~

For each of the dimensions you listed in step two, write five to 10 such “why” questions.

Asking the Universe to Give Back: Comparing Lakhiani’s Approach to The Secret

The third step of this exercise contains echoes of ideas in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, in which she discusses how to use the “Law of Attraction” to invite good things into your life. Both approaches place heavy emphasis on asking as a step toward self-actualization, but they differ in the specifics of where to direct your questions.

In The Secret, you ask the Universe for what you want (“I want to be able to travel half the year”) and in Lakhiani’s exercise, you ask yourself questions (“Why can I travel half the year?”). For Byrne then, you can place complete faith in the Universe and its ability to respond to your request. Conversely, for Lakhiani, you place faith in yourself: Your subconscious must provide your own response to your question.

However, once this is done, the two approaches may converge. Byrne believes the Universe conspires to fulfill your request, and Lakhiani believes this might be the case, too (though he writes that he’s not sure if it’s the Universe intervening or your brain becoming more attuned to opportunities). In essence, these two approaches are similar, save that Lakhiani has an intermediate stage in which you force yourself to explain how and why you’ll achieve your ideal life.