NL: Hi everyone. My name is Natalie Ledwell and this is The Inspiration Show. Today on the show, I have a very good friend of mine who is talking about his new book called “Live Big” and he has been a partner of Mind Movies for a long time with the company Mind Valley and he’s a very good friend so I’m looking forward to introducing you more to him. But before we get into the cracks of our interview today, I just want to remind you that once the show is over, don’t forget to click the link below this video so that you can download the free ebook version of my bestselling book “Never In Your Wildest Dreams”. So, let me introduce you to my friend Ajit. Now Ajit, I have forgotten how to pronounce your surname.

AN: Ajit NAWALKHA

NL: That’s right. Just what he said. (laughter) Now like I said, Ajit and I have been friends for a number of years and I know that you work with the company Mind Valley which we do a lot of work with as well. But for those people who are not familiar with you, can we get a little bit of your background and your story on how you fell into doing what it is that you do right now.

AN: Absolutely. So my name is Ajit Nawalkha like I said previously. And I was born in a small town in Jaipur, India, in a household of 23 other people. And this household was basically grandparents and cousins and cousin’s cousins and everybody just crammed in to a small space and that kind of started my journey. My journey started in that house and as you can imagine that somebody who is kind of looking for a little bit of space in their life because they’ve been crammed into a small space with a lot of people at all times in their childhood. I was somebody who was very driven to create wealth for myself, a turn to love myself. And that got me excited, that got me started on my journey, that got me really curious about figuring out what gets somebody from my type of place to be able to create a new life for myself and it wasn’t until very late that I really figured it out for myself and again, I don’t claim that it works for everyone but definitely worked for me and it wasn’t until very very very late that I realized that in my journey kind of took its turn because first, making that decision of saying I want to be wealthy and then going in and schooling and trying to get an education that can make me wealthy. Then I went in to to really taking a chance with life and really trying to figure it out by experimenting with different ideas, different businesses, which all bobbed by the way, but learning through all those experiences, eventually learning an internship role with the company Mind Valley like we talked about, about a decade ago, where eventually I really learned and started interacting with individuals like yourself, with many other trainers and educators and coaches. I learned from the masters you could say, in personal development, and how to really re-wire yourself to be able to create success that you can create for your self irrespective of the circumstance that you come from. It takes the time and the effort and so forth but you can create the reality that you want to create and that really got me, got me from the place that I was to the place that I am. It’s the interaction with wonderful individuals like yourself and many other trainers and teachers and educators that I learned from and in the process I also rediscovered myself because you see, there was a point in life where I definitely fulfilled my dreams of wealth because I was chasing it and I was chasing it real well. So I had the house, I had the car, I had the bling-bling, and whatever that is that you would want but I realized that in the process of creating a living, I kind of didn’t really create a life and to really expound the (inaudible) was that I had great wealth, I had to learn more about success if you look at it from outside in, I was doing great job in the world I was focused for but what I didn’t have was my health, my relationships, my own inner soul being fulfilled. And that led me to a whole new trajectory of really finding work that was not only purposeful but also gave me the time and space to create a life beyond just my living, right? So the thing that funded all of the things that I wanted to do. I wanted to really travel and not just travel for attending another event but travel to experience the place. I wanted to have a family, I wanted to have love back in my life. I wanted to be able to reclaim my health and not be overweight, and all that type of stuff that tend to, that I realize that it seemed right to me and it seems like the dialogue that we tell the world to work really hard and then you will be successful and you’ll be happy and that’s what you really do everything for, it was only until later in life that I realized that yes, you work really hard but at what expense? And working hard, does working hard really mean working long? Does that really define us or is there more to us as human beings than putting how many hours in a clock a day. And that really shifted my reality, that really challenged me and that is where my book kind of really works. It wasn’t the idea when I started the journey, that idea was me just really finding myself, me just really asking the question of saying is it the absolute truth that you have to work your guts out to be able to be successful or can you be successful without having to work that hard or working that long even if it’s hard work it’s at least not long work. Can you have it all? Can you have all of the elements of life? And what I first found for myself and then I started working with other entrepreneurs and trainers and teachers, and said to ask them the same questions and I found most of us, tend to work so long that we forget about creating a life and be only focused on our living or we are constantly living in a state of anxiety which starts to hurt our health and well-being and so forth, and all of that led me to really try all these ideas that I was trying on myself with these different entrepreneurs and trainers and educators, only to find that eventually it all really created that transformation that I could create for myself in their lives as well which is that you can yes, have it all, you just need to have certain perspectives to really be looked at differently than what you’ve been taught and trained on and that’s really the story of me coming all the way up to here, funding many companies and I run many companies but I work maybe 4 hours a day.

NL: Yeah. You know, our stories are very similar. I’m also from a very large family. I’m from a country area, not India but in Australia. And you know, I think my 30s is what I call my beige years because you know, Glen and I, we had like 20 different businesses with varying degrees of success but I call it beige because beige is such a nothing color. You know, it’s like we were going through (inaudible). And it wasn’t until we saw the Secret and we started going down this route of personal development that it actually was the big shift for us. So it’s interesting how important it is that you had, yes, you need to have the business acumen, of course you need to have that. But you don’t get quantum success, you don’t get massive success until you actually combine that with the mindset in the law of attraction and the personal development stuff as well, because when you put the 2 of those together, this is when you can create outrageous success.

AN: Absolutely. I really believe business is personal. And personal growth is business growth. So if you grow yourself you will tend to grow your business. And yes there is practical elements and training that you need to really understand the business dynamics of things but really if you really think about it, a business success is purely in to mind by the way the person who has founded that business or runs the business, how they operate in their reality. Like, what is their ambition? What is their drive? If they are driven, if they are ambitious, they will find a way. And that’s really the difference that a successful works is not successful business has, is that the entrepreneur itself, the founder, the CEO of the company, is not driven the right way, or hasn’t been fully educated to not understand that they need to work on themselves if they want success in their business. I think that’s the part of the big misunderstanding in the business world. People rely too much on the strategy and don’t understand, it’s about the person.

NL: Yeah. I know and I have so many friends right now who are going through this thing, they’ve worked really hard and maybe I think, because we’ve been in Mind Movies for 10 years now, and it seems to be this 10 year itch that’s happening, and now either questioning their message or they’re questioning their business or they’re questioning their lifestyle because they’re like “I’ve worked so hard, and I’ve got here, wait a minute, I forgot to get married, and wait, what about kids” (inaudible) what they forgot about their life. So tell me about Live Big like what are some of the points that you really impress upon us inside the book?

AN: So the keypoint to the book is really that everything is perspective. So that’s kind of the summary of everything. It’s 25 different perspectives that I share that you may want to consider about you, about time, about team, about product, about passion, about purpose, across many different dimensions of business and it’s not only applicable to business entrepreneurs, it’s also applicable to professionals because what we really dive in to is we really question how is it and what is it that we have been trained to think about and how to really think about it differently. For example, like the conversation we were having about working really long and hard and people forgetting about their lives. That usually happens because we become so purposeful and it’s a good thing, like you know, I’m purposeful, that’s a good thing, why should somebody complain about that, you shouldn’t but you must also argue is the purpose limited to what you can do for the world or is purpose also about you, right? So arguments like that and to be able to really switch over the perspective and say, if your purpose also includes you, how do we create a life around that right? And that’s like the most, definitely the first chapter of the book, is talking about purpose because sometimes you get the purpose bits all wrong. We make purpose all about the world and we forget that if we don’t take care of ourselves there is no world and we can’t take care of the world or we will take care of the world but become spiteful about it eventually. Right? Because we’ll be like “I did all of this for the world and nobody is grateful about it” or “I was able to break only a small dent in the universe” right? And because we are so caught up in our purpose, we think it will be all of the universe would be defined by your purpose but that doesn’t happen, you know, it’s a dent, it’s a small fragment of change that we bring in which of course, then creates the birth life back in eventuality, it’ll create a huge difference and that is true about what we do especially in the personal growth space and business transformation space is we do a small bit and that creates transformation that will last decades if we do it right but the question really for us to ask is how do we define our purpose and how to really look at our purpose slightly differently so it creates an over encompassing powerful life. We talk about the concept of time like I mentioned, we talked about the concept of how do you really think about people. Again, big reason why entrepreneurs tend to overwork is because they think they are the reason why their business works, right? And they have to work really hard for the business to work. That’s a commentary and I see you nodding because I know that you’ve heard it so many times, I mean entrepreneurs go “yep”, it’s about how many hours can I put in to this thing. Right? And they think that’s the way, and that’s the (inaudible) right? It’s everybody, Oh hustle hustle hustle it out. Right? And hustle it out sounds really a fascinating story, it’s a great story to tell, that’s not how business should go. Really a business is a lot about the function of people that end up in business. If your business is a function of your work and the amount of work you do, it’s probably not a sustainable business and it probably won’t last the test of time, and it’ll probably end as you and your drive. Like for example the entrepreneurs that we were just talking about, if after 10 years they’re going “I’m burnt out, why did I do all of this?” Well guess what, that business is going to disappear because now the entrepreneur is not excited about it. Right? But a business would last beyond the 10 years because the entrepreneur had nothing to do with the growth of the business, they were a piece of the puzzle but they were not the entire scheme of things. There were more pieces in the puzzle and the business can outlive the entrepreneur, it can outlast the passion of the entrepreneur because 10 years is enough time for you to build out a team that will actually sustain the business and carry forward a business even when you’re gone. So the question really is, the argument really is, the proposition really is and that one context and like I said, they have 25 of these, which will change the way you think about it and it will change the way a business is built, you’ll have more time and your business will grow. So here’s one thing that people need to understand, what I found is when entrepreneur works for less, their business grows more. It makes no sense to as we hear it but what I found repeatedly with entrepreneurs is you work 50%, when we work with entrepreneurs and that’s the intent of the book as well, you work 50% of the time than what you’re working. We’ll hopefully reduce your time if you’re working 10 hours a day, we hope that you’ll work 4-5 hours a day and your business will grow anywhere between 30% to 200% and we have found that result consistent over our different clients and that’s why the book comes in because we knew that after a point I can’t really do more clients, I have my own businesses, I do clients just for my passion, but we wanted to offer the book as like a note that you can use, and go I can just slip over and I can use these same strategies, these perspectives, these tools, to be able to create a business that really grows consistently and at the same point in time, doesn’t take all of my soul.

NL: Yeah. And personally, you’re a new father, you have a 1 month (inaudible), so how are these principles really played out in how you are now never getting through, you know having a young family?

AN: I’m actually really grateful that I discovered before having a family because I can’t even imagine the old version of me being a father and which is probably why I never wanted to be a parent. I actually wrote about it when I had the baby, I had my son. I wrote about it how for the longest amount of time, I’d never want to be a parent, I didn’t see the point of it, it’s too much hassle, to much work, why would I want to do that? I have this thing that I’m (inaudible), you know, it’s like business is my baby. The classic. That’s what I used to think. And I’m so grateful that I was able to rediscover time, I was able to rediscover things and I was able to rediscover what really really really successful entrepreneurs really do and not just this dialogue that we keep hearing. And because of that reason it did a lot of me to already create so much time and space that I actually can enjoy the birth of the my baby. Like I was with my wife all the time. I’m still back home like 4-5 hours a day I work then I’m back home so I get to really see like you know, do the little things, cooing and his first other sounds, then crying. I’ve seen all of it. I’m very grateful that I get to do that because of the things that we talked about in Live Big.

NL: Yeah. So awesome. Ajit, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really excited for the new book and for the way that it can really reframe for a lot of entrepreneurs how they look at their business. You know, and it stands to reason, if you’re stepping out and you have the ability to only work 4 hours a day, that means you’ve created the right team around you that can actually take the load for you and you know, that’s why I’m eternally grateful for the team that we have at Mind Movies and how they’re able to service our community in such an empowered way. So yeah, eternally grateful for that. So darling, if people want to reach out to you and connect with you or get their hands on the book, where can we send them to do that?

AN: So you can get the book at livebigthebook.com, livebigthebook.com and you’ll be able to order from multiple channels available for pre-order right now where we are live. But it’ll be available for it to ship to you by 11^th of December this year so go ahead and get a copy of the book. You can reach out to me on instagram, facebook, just google my name if you can spell it which should be easy not hard. But go to livebigthebook.com, it’ll give you multiple links. We’ll also give you a 21-day program that helps you reset your reality to be able to design your life, just have it all. So that comes as a bonus for the book. The links will be inside the book when you get the copy on post 11^th of December. So that’s how you get the book and that’s how you could connect with me.

NL: Wonderful. Well, we’ll make sure that we have the correct spelling of your name on this site here so that people can easily go (inaudible).

AN: Absolutely, thank you.

NL: Pleasure chatting to you. Now guys, I encourage you to please let’s share this video, get the word out, you can do that by clicking the facebook and the twitter share buttons on this page. Now remember you can click the banner to the side or the link underneath the video to be able to go straight to Ajit’s website. And then after that, don’t forget to click the link below that to download the free ebook version of my bestselling book Never In Your Wildest Dreams. So until next time, remember to live large, choose courageously, and love without limits. We’ll see you soon.