So there's this t-shirt I wear, it's called "Bend Reality."
It's a Mindvalley t-shirt. It's become one of the most popular
t-shirts within Mindvalley. Like all over Instagram,
you see people wearing this t-shirt, hashtagging it bendreality.
But I want to tell you where this phrase came from, because this phrase means
something a lot to me. So it started around 2008-ish.
2008-ish, me and my friends at that time, we started experimenting with ways
of applying different tools of consciousness to building
a business, right? And we noticed that as we started playing with some
of these tools, it would almost seem as if we would accelerate our progress in this
business. And it almost felt as if we were lucky, that we were going downhill rather
than uphill and so we coined this term, "bend reality," and we thought it was just
our silly, little nonsense. We had, of course, watched movies
like 'The Secret' and that Law of Attraction stuff which we always felt was
kindergarten and way too simplistic and not necessarily complete, right?
But playing around with different tools that allowed you to access altered states,
that allowed you to merge with different elements of consciousness,
we found that as entrepreneurs, we could accelerate that flow but we
thought it was just us, and we thought this bend reality phrase just
belonged to us until October 2011 when a man by the name of Walter Isaacson
released a book called 'Steve Jobs'. In that book, three times,
he uses the phrase "bend reality." So check this out, right,
because this is fascinating. You know, the first time he mentioned it in the book
had to do in a conversation between Steve and another entrepreneur by the name
of Bushnell. Bushnell was the founder of Atari. If you grew up in the '80s like me,
you remember Atari games. And Bushnell said this of Jobs.
"We used to discuss free will versus determinism. I tended to believe that
things were much more determined, that we were programmed.
If we had perfect information, we could predict people's actions."
Steve felt the opposite. That outlook accorded with his faith
in the power of the will to bend reality. Okay, now, let's go further.
Isn't that really cool? Steve Jobs felt differently.
He felt in the power of the will to bend reality. Now, Isaacson goes deeper.
He explains it like this. At the root of his reality distortion was
Jobs's belief that the rules didn't apply to him. He had some evidence for this.
In his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires.
Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character.
He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one.
He thinks there are few people who are special, people like Einstein and Gandhi
and the gurus he met in India, and he's one of them.
So I found this fascinating. You have this guy called Steve Jobs who
believes that he can bend reality. He's a guy who grew up in California,
but traveled to India to meditate, to meet with gurus. In fact,
when Mark Zuckerberg asked Steve Jobs for advice in building up Facebook,
one of the first things Steve told Mark is to go to India and seek
a particular ashram, a medication school and spend some time there.
What was going on?
Was Steve really a modern-day mystic? Now, as you read more about Steve Jobs,
you start noticing that he had this incredible ability to make bold
declarations and then make it happen. So there was a discussion recently
on Quora. Quora is a Q&A board of the internet where you can ask any question
and people come to answer. Someone asked this: What are the best
stories about people randomly meeting Steve Jobs? So an engineer by the name
of Tomas Higbey shares this story. In 1994, Higbey worked at NeXT.
NeXT was a company that Jobs was running when he was kicked out of Apple and
before he went back to Apple, right? So Higbey says he was in the break room
with two colleagues, they were making a bagel and Steve walks in
to make his bagel and then Steve, out of the blue, turns to them and goes,
"Who is the most powerful person in the world?" And Higbey says, "Mandela?"
Because Higbey had actually worked in South Africa as an international observer
during the elections. And Steve replies, according to Higbey, "No,
you are all wrong. The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.
The storyteller," says Steve, "sets the vision, values and agenda
of an entire generation that is to come and Disney has a monopoly on the
storyteller business. You know what?" says Steve, "I am tired of this bullshit.
I am going to be the next storyteller." Now, this was in 1994, and again,
Steve seemed to bend reality. What happened next is that in a short span
of just a few years, Steve unleashes 'Toy Story' though his
company Pixar. It becomes one of the most celebrated movies of its time.
Pixar becomes one of the most remarkable companies of its time.
Disney acquires Pixar and Steve Jobs becomes the number 1 shareholder
at Disney. Steve Jobs owns more of Disney than anybody else. And while he pulled
that off, he uses storytelling to create Apple which becomes the biggest company
in the world today, a trillion-dollar behemoth that changes everything.
Now, what kind of man walks into a lunch room to pick up a bagel and declares that
he is going to be the next great storyteller, and then in a span of 12
to 13 years, actually shifts the tide of the world to make that happen?
And that's why I believe that there is such a thing as people who have the
ability to create mass influence in the world. And I honestly don't know what's
going on. I don't know why it works. But I know that if you looked at the
ancient Indian sages, the gurus at the ashrams that Steve went
to study at, they talk about the world as an illusion. They talk about the world
as Maya. And they say that with the right training, you can shift this Maya.
You can, in short, bend reality. So if you find these ideas fascinating,
I certainly do and I've been exploring these ideas for almost a decade now,
I've used many of these ideas to create the life that I want,
to create Mindvalley and other companies I've created. I'm certainly
like at a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of that compared to masters
like Steve Jobs, and yes, I called him a master,
but what I like to do is to create a structured approach so that not just I can
do it, but thousands of people can play with these ideas. And I encourage you
to check out this masterclass I'm doing where I go deep in the topic.
It's about an hour, an hour 10 minutes, and I think you'll find it fascinating.
The title of the masterclass is "Bend Reality." So check it out.
It's completely free. If you like the masterclass,
you might want to enroll in some of the Mindvalley programs,
the advertisements are at the back of it, but this masterclass is completely free
and I think you're absolutely going to find this idea intriguing.