#88 How to Dream and Live Big with Ajit Nawalkha

Ajit Nawalkha (0:00)

So, what's true for me is I don't give up, and I always want to push the needle a little bit, and I always want to push the line a little bit, and I always want to try and see what is beyond what everybody has thought about, I can create.

But I don't necessarily say that's the characteristics for all individuals, because everybody shows up differently, and has a very different set of characteristics that can be utilized.

And to be able to go, hey, how is it that I can change my reality going forward? How is it and what is it that I can do in the times to come where I can actually change my reality? Life is a dance. Life is music. You keep playing it, but you know that there will be an end. There will be death and that will be the end, right? But you don't work for the end, you work for the play.

Siim Land (0:45)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:47)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:53)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:54)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:58)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Ajit Nawalkha. Ajit is a serial entrepreneur, global educator and consultant.

He co-founded companies like Mindvalley, Evercoach and Teach. He's also the author of the books, The Book of Coaching and Live Big. Ajit, welcome to the show.

Ajit Nawalkha (1:19)

Thank you for inviting me, Siim.

Siim Land (1:21)

I'm pleased to have you here.

And can we can just talk a little bit about your background? You know, most of the listeners might not have heard about you. Where do you come from? And how did you end up becoming an entrepreneur?

Ajit Nawalkha (1:32)

So I was born in the small town of Jaipur in India about several years ago, of course, and I don't want to date myself, but that's where I was born. I was born in the household of 23 other people. This was basically my family, my extended family, my cousins, my grandparents, my parents, my parents' cousins, all of us lived together in the same house. And as we kind of live together, of course, you can imagine when there are 23 people sharing the same space, it leads to not having a lot of abundance in context of the place that you have, the space that you have, and also, of course, the amount of money that you can spend on things that you would really like to have. And as a teenager, as a young kid, I always struggled with that. I struggled with the idea that I had my room was my brother's room, was a playroom, was a study room, was the guest room, was all the rooms that are possible for us. So it was a little bit challenging for me personally to live in that reality and to grow up in that reality and to be able to go, hey, how is it that I can change my reality going forward? How is it and what is it that I can do in the times to come where I can actually change my reality?

And that led me to really take some early risks in life. Firstly, I tried to change my reality by just making money.

And so I studied for what in India is the traditional route, which is try to be an engineer, a doctor, or an accountant. I was not very good at studies, so neither of those really were working out for me. But I did make an attempt at trying to be an engineer.

Didn't really qualify for the exams, tried to study hard, didn't really enjoy it, wasn't really enjoying the part of studying it and so forth. And so eventually decided that I think I need to figure out something else in my life. It led me to get introduced to a student organization, got me to get introduced to do some part-time jobs early on in my career. The reason being because I didn't know what to do beyond study because that's the way it was taught in India. It was what was popular in India and I was like, that's not gonna work out for me, but I still wanna get the abundance. It got me interacting with a lot of trainers, educators early on in my career, worked with student organizations where I learned from a ton of mentors who were willing to help. Got me excited about saying, hey, eventually at some point, I can actually be able to create a business for myself. Got excited, didn't really know how to do that. Again, not coming from a wealthy family. I didn't have anybody who could support my endeavors or my business ideas or anything. So I went to the traditional route. I took a job and as I took the job, my entrepreneurial instinct still stayed with me and so even in the job, I was fairly entrepreneurial, fairly progressive, fairly somebody who would always reach out to say, hey, maybe we can do something more than what we are trained to do, which led me to finally create a company with the founders of that media house that I used to work for where they invested in that project. We didn't really make it work. It kind of bombed, honestly.