I believe personal growth, as it's mostly practiced today, is broken.
And the reason for this brokenness is that much of education in personal growth today
fails to recognize a key situation that has changed in the world since the 1980s,
and it's accelerating. Now, to understand why, let me introduce you to a fascinating
idea by blogger Tim Urban. Urban suggests a mental model, which is beautiful.
Imagine an alien spaceship visiting two versions of planet Earth,
right? One is Earth from 50,000 years ago, let's call this Planet 1,
and one is Earth today, let's call this Planet 2.
So, 50,000 years ago, the alien ship would report that he spotted basic life,
humanoids making fire, hunting with flint tools, but when that alien spaceship
visits Earth today, he would notice something a lot more complex.
Satellites spinning across the world, people connected through the internet,
talking to each other via Skype. Now, if that alien reported back to his home
planet that he had discovered two planets, one with intelligent life and one without,
he'd be wrong. You see, according to Urban, both planets have intelligent life.
You could take a baby from Planet 1 and put that baby in the world today,
literally pluck him out and plant him in today's society, and he could grow up to
still be a scientist or an engineer, but you could take a baby from the world today
and send him back in time 50,000 years ago to be raised by a family or a tribe back
then, and he might grow up to basically learn how to make a fire and hunt animals
with a flint tool. You see, we are the same. The human species has not evolved
much in 50,000 years.
So, what is the difference? Urban says, as mankind evolved, the better we could
communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single
organism, with humanity's collective knowledge tower as its brain,
and each individual human brain like a nerve or muscle fiber in its body.
With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism,
the human colossus, rose into existence. The human colossus, I love that idea.
The difference is that in the Earth of today, we're operating more like a single
connected organism.
What Tim observed here is that humanity today is not made up of individuals alone,
but rather, thanks to our technology, and the internet, and computers,
our collective wisdom and consciousness has now come together as a human colossus,
a single organism made up of 7.5 billion individuals. We are cells in a larger
being. You, me, all of us, we are inextricably linked in a collective that
includes all human beings on Earth.
But if we are cells in a multicellular being, I'd like to ask this next question.
Are you currently functioning as a healthy cell or a cancer cell?
Are you building and working for companies that are pushing humanity forward,
or is your business, your company, your lifestyle, actually making the human
colossus sicker? We toss around words like "entrepreneur" and glorify these terms,
but when you understand the human colossus concept, you understand the BS in this.
Even an entrepreneur can be what I call a humanity + entrepreneur,
who's building a business that takes humanity forward,
or humanity - entrepreneur, making the colossus sicker, not just today,
but for future generations.
And here's the problem with education: it pushes for the individual,
ignoring the fact that we are cells in a larger being. What would education look
like if it acknowledged the colossus? Firstly, we'd differentiate between
companies serving the greater good and those that do not. We'd not vote for
politicians that divide human beings by vilifying people of different ethnicities.
Remember, we are part of one colossus. We'd not be denying climate change,
but maybe doing something to help reverse it because we care about future
generations. But maybe, just maybe, we'd also change the way we raise our kids.
We'd not be asking them questions such as, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
but maybe we'd ask them questions such as, "When you grow up, what would you like to
do to contribute to humanity?" The way we look at our lives and our world would
shift, the companies we invest in and build would shift, the politicians we vote
for would shift.
Neale Donald Walsch said it best when he was speaking once at Mindvalley U.
He said, "Your life is not about you. Your life is about the lives of everyone you
touch. And the sooner you realize this, the better off you will be." This is why
what we need today is a shift in how we educate people, a shift in how we speak
about personal growth. What we need today isn't just personal growth but collective
growth, one that's about cultivating growth not just in ourselves,
but for our tribes, our community, humanity as a whole.
Collective growth is about growing yourself but with something greater than
yourself in mind. It's about thinking bigger, using your gifts to give back,
solving problems for the sake of humanity, starting movements,
businesses, or even just ideas that push the human race forward by small or large
doses. Of course, this doesn't mean sacrificing your own well-being either,
because what's amazing is when you start living and thinking this way,
the rest of the human colossus recognizes this and rewards you for this.
You get more love, more opportunities, more prosperity, more experiences coming
your way, and these become a springboard for a better world, both for you,
the planet, and your great, great, great grandkids. But is the world set up in
a way that encourages collective growth? Not yet. Everywhere you look,
from schools, to universities, to the average personal growth coach or book,
that the zeitgeist is still too focused on the me rather than the we.
And our goal here at Mindvalley is to disrupt this, and to implant these ideas
in schools, at companies and entrepreneurs, within governments,
and it's also why everything we teach is now about empowering our community to
think beyond just growing the individual. Rather, it's about growing and developing
our families, our schools, our communities, our countries, our planet.
In other words, it's about taking the "personal" out of "personal growth."
Here's the challenge, though. Mindvalley is on the right path,
but we don't yet have critical mass to drive massive collective growth,
and this needs to happen right now because the world we live in is reaching multiple
tipping points technologically, environmentally, socially.
What we decide in the coming years will define the entire direction of our planet
and our species, which is why our goal now is to bring together not 1,
or 10, or 100 million people, but 1 billion people to help tip the scales in
the right direction for humanity. Thank you for joining us and for being part of
this community. And remember, your life is not about you.
Your life is about the lives of every single human being you touch,
and the sooner you realize this, the better off all of us will be.
Thanks for watching that, and the reason we shared that video is because we're
making some extraordinary changes to how we run Mindvalley, changes that impact
every aspect of our product, our experience, from our quest, to our
courses, to our events, our teaching platforms. On Tuesday, October 10,
you'll have the opportunity to join us and be part of this change.
I'll be showing you more about this new program in the coming days,
but for now, go up and sign up in the box below, or above, wherever that box is,
for updates so you can be one of the first people to know when we launch this new
iteration and version of Mindvalley. And I hope you do, because remember,
we're all in this together.