PDF Summary:The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, by Vishen Lakhiani

Many of us are unknowingly trapped by inherited beliefs, societal expectations, and unquestioned rules that limit our potential. In The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, entrepreneur and self-help expert Vishen Lakhiani provides guidelines to help you escape from those psychological and cultural restraints. Ultimately, he seeks to empower you to live a happy, purposeful life—and to decide for yourself what such a life looks like.

This guide will start with how to examine the ideas your upbringing imposed on you and discard the ones that no longer serve you. We’ll then describe Lakhiani’s two-pronged approach to self-improvement: improving beliefs and improving habits. To conclude, we’ll discuss how to balance being content in the present with being excited about the future.

Our commentary will compare Lakhiani’s principles with other influential self-help books such as Awaken the Giant Within. We’ll also provide scientific research to support Lakhiani’s ideas. Finally, we’ll offer ideas to help you get started on reinventing your mind and your life.

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The first category, and the more obvious of the two, is how you view yourself. The author suggests that you practice self-empowerment by taking a few minutes each day to remember what you love about yourself. For instance, maybe you’re a hard worker, or a kind and generous person, or you have really attractive eyes.

You can also think about things you’re proud of doing. This could be something as impressive as winning a prestigious award, or as mundane as offering a ride to someone who needed it. In short, anything that helps you remember how great you really are will improve your self-image.

(Shortform note: The scientific term for self-empowerment is self-positivity bias. In simple terms, this means that you have a largely favorable view of yourself, emphasizing your strengths and positive attributes over your weaknesses and flaws. Some psychologists suggest that self-positivity bias has a number of evidence-based mental and physical health benefits, such as lower stress levels, boosted confidence, and increased motivation.)

The second category, which is equally powerful, consists of your mental models about how the world works. However, these external models can be harder to update. This is because doing so involves thinking about what you’ve observed and learned, then filtering through those observations to find useful, empowering insights.

For example, young people may think that you have to be wealthy or attractive to find a great romantic partner. However, by thinking rationally about the couples they’ve personally seen, they’d realize that people of all different economic classes and body types can and do end up in happy relationships. With that update to their worldview, they could then realize that it’s also possible for them to find such a relationship.

Counterpoint: Even False Beliefs Are Powerful

Beliefs about the world in general fall under the category that life coach Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) calls global beliefs. These are universal beliefs about your life or the world as a whole, such as believing that you’re an intelligent person or that people are generally good at heart.

Notably, whereas Lakhiani emphasizes developing more accurate beliefs about the world to empower yourself, Robbins argues that it doesn’t really matter whether global beliefs are true or not—they’re powerful motivators as long as you believe they’re true. This means you can adopt empowering mental models of the world even before gathering enough evidence to “prove” to yourself that those models are accurate.

For example, one common mental model is the idea that people who work hard will be successful. Adopting the belief that hard work pays off will motivate you to work hard and keep trying to reach your goals. Conversely, adopting the belief that hard work has no benefit will only lead to feelings of helplessness and despair, because it implies there’s nothing you can do to improve your situation. Therefore, one could argue that it’s better to believe in the value of hard work whether or not that belief is objectively correct, because it makes you feel empowered rather than hopeless.

Evaluating Your Progress

Lakhiani promises that your life will improve in numerous ways as you continually update your beliefs and habits. However, it’s likely that some aspects of your life will improve less than others, and you may still find yourself dissatisfied in some ways. To help correct this imbalance, the author provides a rubric for assessing the various areas of your life, so that you can give extra attention to updating relevant beliefs and habits.

For this evaluation, Lakhiani wants you to rate each of the following aspects of your life on a scale from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied).

• Your love life
• Your friendships
• Your finances
• Your environment (the quality of your home, car, workspace, and so on)
• Your health
• Your learning habits (how much are you learning, and how often?)
• Your emotions (essentially, how happy you feel)
• Your spirituality. Note that this includes practices like meditation and connecting with nature, not just religion.
• Your career, including future career opportunities
• Your self-image—how satisfied are you with yourself?
• Your family relationships
• Your contributions (are you making the world a better place?)

Once you’re done, Lakhiani urges you to choose one or two areas that you’d like to focus on improving—don’t try to work on every aspect of your life at once, because that’s likely to be overwhelming and discouraging.

Meditate With Your Ideal Self

Even in areas of your life that you know you’re dissatisfied with, it might be difficult to figure out how to boost your satisfaction—what do you really want, and how can you get it? Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You) offers some practical advice for answering those questions: Meditate, and connect with your ideal self.

To do this, start by finding a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Sit down with a pen and paper, take deep breaths to center yourself, and release any fears or negative emotions. When you feel relaxed, visualize the best version of yourself sitting across from you: a “you” who’s completely satisfied with every aspect of their life. Then, take note of how they look, behave, speak, and communicate through their body language; what are they wearing, how are they feeling, and what do they do every day?

Next, listen to the advice that this ideal self wants to give you, even if it’s something you might disagree with at first. This advice should be uplifting, caring, and helpful. Now, imagine the particular aspects of this person’s life that allow them to live their values—where they’re living, what job they’re doing, the relationships they have, their daily tasks, their habits, and so on.

Finally, imagine them giving you the key to that life—their life, routines, behaviors, and skills are now yours. This final step will put you in an “action” mindset that encourages you to set appropriate goals and enact the tasks and behaviors necessary to become your ideal self.

Balancing Present Contentment With Future Anticipation

As you continue to update your beliefs and habits, Lakhiani promises you’ll move closer to an ideal state of being: one where you’re happy in the present moment and yet excited about the future.

This is a difficult balance to strike, and the author says that finding it requires moving away from the traditional idea that your happiness comes from achieving major life goals. Instead, create a bold and exciting vision of your future, but recognize that you can be happy while working toward it. By separating your concept of happiness from your vision of the future, you can be content with your life as it is, yet still look forward to even better things to come.

For example, becoming a millionaire is a fairly common life goal, and people pursue it because they think wealth will make them happy. However, in the process, they often make themselves miserable by devoting their lives to jobs they hate, just because those jobs pay well. If such a person were to recognize that becoming a millionaire isn’t actually a prerequisite for being happy, they could find a job that suits them better (even if it pays less). By doing so, they could start to find contentment in the present, while still looking forward to the day when their wealth crosses that million-dollar threshold and seeking out ways to make that happen.

People Evolved to Focus on the Future

Lakhiani’s principle that the ideal state is one where you’re both happy now and excited for the future closely echoes what Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long write in The Molecule of More. However, they add that it’s so hard to find the balance between those two feelings because our brains are wired to respond much more strongly to future possibilities than to present-day circumstances.

Lieberman and Long explain that our innate focus on the future is an evolutionary holdover from a time when people needed to be constantly searching for more and better things in order to survive. Our ancient ancestors needed to hunt and gather food, find or build secure shelters, and so on. If they’d been content with what they already had, they most likely wouldn’t have survived (and therefore we wouldn’t exist today).

The authors suggest balancing contentment with anticipation by finding a job or hobby that demands your full attention in the present, but also gives you long-term goals to strive toward. For example, making art is one way to do this: You need to focus all of your attention on what you’re making at the moment, but you also need to have a vision of what the finished product will look like—and, looking even further ahead, perhaps goals such as selling your art, getting it into a gallery, or winning a competition.

Training Yourself to Be Happy

The first part of striking this balance is finding happiness in your present circumstances, whatever they may be. Lakhiani argues that this is possible because happiness is a skill you can practice—or, more accurately, a set of three skills that he urges you to practice daily.

The first skill is thankfulness. Lakhiani suggests that you spend a few minutes each morning and evening thinking about what you’re grateful for, both in your personal life and your professional life. It doesn’t matter whether anyone else would think these things are important or worth celebrating, as long as they’re meaningful to you. For each one you think of, take a few moments to deeply feel and appreciate the positive feelings it creates within you.

(Shortform note: Intentionally letting yourself enjoy positive emotions like thankfulness doesn’t just feel good, it actually boosts your ability to create the future you’re excited about. In Feel-Good Productivity, doctor and productivity expert Ali Abdaal describes psychology’s broaden-and-build theory. This theory states that positive emotions like happiness make you more creative (they “broaden your mind”), and also build a reserve of mental energy that you can draw on when you’re tired or feeling down.)

The second skill Lakhiani urges you to practice is letting go. Many of us hold onto anger and grudges for past wrongs and sabotage our happiness by doing so. Letting go of those negative feelings is crucial for creating real, lasting contentment.

Lakhiani’s process for letting go of anger is similar to the previous skill. Begin by closing your eyes and remembering the event that upset you as clearly as possible and the person or people responsible for it. Allow yourself to fully feel the hurt and anger of being wronged. However, don’t remain in this state for more than a few minutes, or you run the risk of reinforcing your grudge rather than working through it.

Finally, try to find feelings of compassion regarding what happened to you. Consider what might have led the other person to act the way they did, and whether you’d have done any better in their position. You can also consider how the experience might have taught you an important lesson or spurred you to become a better person in some way.

Lakhiani warns that you may need to repeat this process many times to fully let go of the negativity, but promises that you’ll feel a bit better with each repetition. Eventually you’ll reach a point where you’re comfortable forgiving the person and moving on from what happened.

Tip: Practice Loving-Kindness Meditation

One way to potentially help yourself find compassion and let go of anger is through practicing metta (loving-kindness) meditation. Tara Brach explains this practice in Radical Acceptance and says the goal is to recognize the innate goodness that all people share—Brach, a practicing Buddhist, calls it their “Buddha nature.”

Metta traditionally begins by cultivating feelings of kindness and compassion for yourself. Think about the things that make you a good person, and wish yourself feelings of peace and happiness. This part of metta meditation is similar to what we discussed in the “Empowering Yourself” subsection.

Once you’ve established those feelings of love and kindness for yourself, expand them to include the person or people most important to you. This typically means your immediate family, your partner and your children (if any), or your closest friends. From there, expand your circle of loving kindness in stages: first to include other people you already know well, then casual acquaintances, and finally strangers.

The final step is to find feelings of metta for people whom you don’t like, especially those you feel anger or disgust toward (most likely including the people who have wronged you). At first, meditating on good feelings and well-wishes toward those people will feel forced and insincere. However, Brach promises that, as you continue to practice metta meditation, your feelings of loving kindness will become more and more genuine, even toward people you once despised.

The third skill is contribution, which means helping others and making the world better. Lakhiani explains that people tend to think of “helping” only in terms of either doing physical labor or donating money, but there are many other ways you can contribute to others’ well-being. For example, you could teach professional or life skills that you excel in, and give advice based on exceptional experiences you’ve had (good or bad). There are also opportunities to help out in your local community, such as volunteering at a community center or joining a neighborhood cleanup crew.

(Shortform note: Part of the reason contributing to others’ well-being is important to your own happiness is that humans evolved to work together and support each other. In Humankind, historian Rutger Bregman explains that our ancient ancestors survived because of cooperation and social learning (gaining skills and knowledge by watching each other). In fact, he argues that early humans’ capacity for learning from one another is why our technology developed so rapidly, meaning that our innate talent for social learning is why we’re now the dominant species on Earth.)

Designing Your Own Version of Success

We’ve discussed how you can become content in the present; the other part of Lakhiani’s ideal mindset is excitement about the future. To cultivate that sense of anticipation, he recommends rebuilding your personal vision of success from the ground up and designing a future you can truly look forward to.

Do this by thinking about three important questions:

1. “What do I want to experience?” If you had the personal and financial freedom to do anything you wanted, what kinds of experiences would you seek out? For example, some people dream of traveling the world, while others imagine a quiet life as the owner of a local shop or as a stay-at-home parent.

(Shortform note: In The Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte suggests a slightly different approach to setting long-term goals: Ask yourself how you want to feel. She argues that other goal-setting methods such as determining what you want to do—or, in this case, what you want to experience—are only means to the end of feeling how you want to feel. To build on one of the above examples, someone might want to travel the world because they want to feel a sense of excitement. In this case, their ultimate goal isn’t actually the experience of traveling, it’s the feeling of being excited.)

2. “Who do I want to be?” Consider what kind of person you’d need to be in order to live out your answers to the previous question. Also think about what changes you’ll need to make—what kinds of personal development you’ll have to undergo to get from the person you are to a person who can have those experiences. Continuing the previous examples, if you want to travel the world, you most likely need money and courage, and few personal commitments keeping you home. On the other hand, to start a small business or raise a family, you need to be someone who can fully devote yourself to those kinds of responsibilities.

(Shortform note: Striving for self-improvement is admirable, but trying to become your ideal self isn’t always practical, especially for people who struggle with perfectionism or anxiety. This is because such people often set unreachable ideals for themselves, such as never making mistakes. Such impossible goals then lead to a cycle of self-criticism and disappointment as they constantly fall short of their impossibly high standards. Therefore, it’s often healthier and more sustainable to focus on making constant small improvements and practicing self-acceptance, rather than striving for a specific “ideal” version of yourself.)

3. “How do I want to help?” Remember that the third happiness skill Lakhiani urges you to develop is contribution. Therefore, your answer to this question will help guide you toward both present contentment and future excitement. Try thinking about it in two parts: how you can help others every day starting now, and how you can help others after you’ve become the person you envisioned in question #2.

(Shortform note: Contribution is an important skill for both present and future happiness because it helps you to feel useful. In The Courage to Be Happy, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (citing the work of psychologist Alfred Adler) say that helping others is a fundamental part of feeling welcomed and valued in your community. Those feelings of belonging and worth, in turn, are necessary for your overall mental and emotional well-being. However, the authors add that value, as a concept, can only exist in relation to other people. Therefore, you must contribute to others’ well-being in order to make you happy—it doesn’t matter what you do or how much you achieve if your only concern is for your own benefit.)