The Dream You’re Chasing Might Not Be Yours

It was close to 11 PM in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was done. I’d woken up at 7, worked non-stop for ten hours, and I was burned out in the way only founders understand — that bone-deep kind of tired where the only thing you want in the world is the pillow. 

But I had one more call on my calendar. It was with Srikumar Rao — an MBA professor and, at the time, just one of the many American authors Mindvalley was publishing. Back then, these late-night calls with US-based authors were normal for me.

I was dreading this one. My only job was to run through the items on the agenda, be polite, and get off the phone so I could sleep.

What I wasn’t expecting was that the man on the other end of the line was about to become one of the most profound influences in my life. And it would begin with a poem.

A few minutes into the call, Rao paused and said, “Hey Vishen, is everything okay? You sound stressed.”

I wasn’t about to admit it. “No, no, it’s all good. It’s just kind of late over here, but I’m happy to talk.”

He paused again. “Hang on. Let’s stop for a second. May I read you a poem?”

My first thought, honestly: I do not have time for this. It was the last thing in the world I wanted. But Rao was an important connection, and I didn’t want to be rude. 

So I asked, trying to hide my frustration, “How long is it?”

“Just listen,” he said.

And then he read me these words. I’m going to share them in full. Read them once. Then read them again. Notice what happens in your body:

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety; 
If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain. 
From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. 
There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.
— Rumi

When he finished, I didn’t say anything for a moment. I don’t think I could.

Then Rao explained what the poem was really about. He said: Vishen, if you were truly doing what is in your dharma — what your soul came here to do — you wouldn’t be experiencing this level of stress.

Dharma

Dharma is a Sanskrit word that doesn’t really translate cleanly into English. It’s something like your soul’s duty. Your cosmic role. The path your life is meant to move along if nothing is interfering with it. In the Indian traditions, it’s the quiet understanding that you came here to do something specific, and when you’re doing it, the universe seems to open doors for you. When you’re not, doors close. Things get heavy. The work that used to energize you starts to feel like dragging a boulder uphill.

Here’s what Rao was really telling me that night, hidden inside a thirteenth-century poem: the stress I was feeling wasn’t a time management problem. It wasn’t a productivity problem. It wasn’t even a business problem.

It was a signal.

A signal that somewhere in my life, I was chasing something that wasn’t actually mine. Running after what I thought I wanted. And as Rumi said — when you do that, your days become a furnace of distress and anxiety. Not because you’re lazy. Not because you’re not working hard enough. But because you’re pouring your finite, precious life force into a goal your soul never actually signed up for.

It took me two years to really understand what Rao had handed me on that call. But when I finally did, it rearranged my entire life.

I know this painfully, because I got it catastrophically wrong

Years before that call with Rao, I had what on paper was one of the greatest experiences of my young life.

I was a computer science major at the University of Michigan, and I had been selected for the Microsoft internship. This was the mid-nineties. Working for Microsoft back then was like working for Apple or Google today. I was one of about 1% of applicants who’d made it in. I was part of a gifted cohort. And during that internship, I was invited — along with the other interns — to Bill Gates’ home.

It was the most beautiful home I had ever seen in my life.

I remember standing there, in Bill’s house, thinking about my grandfather, who had believed in me so deeply. My parents, who had sacrificed so much to put me through an American education. Everything had worked. Everything. The Malaysian kid had made it to the top of the mountain the world had told him to climb.

And I felt nothing.

Not nothing exactly. I felt impressed with myself. I felt proud. I felt validated. But underneath all of that — in the quiet place Rumi was pointing at — there was an unmistakable feeling of: this isn’t mine.

I lasted eleven weeks at Microsoft before I got myself fired.

As I boarded the taxi out of Sea-Tac Airport, part of me felt like a complete failure. But another part of me was quietly, almost embarrassingly, elated. Because for the first time in years, I could feel what my own soul actually wanted. And it wasn’t that.

I just didn’t have the language for it yet. I wouldn’t get that language until Rao read me Rumi, years later.

The two kinds of wanting

Here’s the distinction Rumi was pointing at, and what it’s taken me two decades of building Mindvalley to fully metabolize:

There are two completely different kinds of wanting, and most of us can’t tell them apart.

The first comes from ego. It arrives with urgency. It says: I need this so I’ll finally have enough. I need this to prove something. I need this before someone else gets there first. Ego desire carries the signature of who you’re trying to become for other people. When you sit with it quietly — no phone, no distractions — it feels like tension. Like performance. Like rehearsing a version of yourself for an audience.

The second comes from soul. It doesn’t feel like hunger. It feels like recognition. Like remembering something you already knew. It carries the signature of who you already are. When you sit with it, it feels like relief. Like exhaling. Like coming home to a house you didn’t know you’d left.

Same outward behavior — a person working hard, building, striving. Completely different engine underneath.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the manifesting industry has spent forty years teaching us to visualize harder, affirm louder, and vision-board bigger — without ever asking whether the thing we’re trying to pull into our lives is actually ours in the first place.

You cannot manifest your way out of a life that isn’t yours.

What the science says

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert spent his career studying something called affective forecasting — the way we predict how future achievements will make us feel. His landmark research, laid out in his book Stumbling on Happiness, shows that we overestimate the emotional payoff of our goals by 200 to 300%. 

Our “psychological immune system” levels us out far faster than we expect.

Translation: if you’re chasing a goal because of how you think it will make you feel when you get there, you are almost certainly wrong about the feeling. And you’re burning years of your finite life to find out.

This is what standing in Bill Gates’ house at twenty-one taught me in my body — years before I had the research to name it. I had achieved the thing. And the thing did not deliver the feeling I’d been promised it would deliver.

Because the goal wasn’t mine.

How to tell them apart in your body

Here’s what I’ve learned to feel for, and what I now teach people in our work at Mindvalley.

Ego desire arrives with urgency and tightness. Your jaw clenches. Your shoulders creep up. There’s a constant hum of not enough underneath the ambition. You check metrics obsessively. You compare yourself to peers and feel either superior or crushed — never at peace. You fantasize about the announcement of the achievement more than the achievement itself. When you finally get it, there’s relief for about 11 days. Then the goalposts move.

Soul desire shows up differently. It’s warm and expansive. It lives in your chest, not your jaw. You think about it and feel energy, not anxiety. You’d do the work even if nobody watched. It doesn’t need external validation to feel real — though validation may come. And when you achieve it, there’s a quiet yes that doesn’t fade. Not euphoria. Something deeper. Alignment.

Try this right now. Pick a goal you’re currently pursuing. Close your eyes for ten seconds. Feel into it.

Does it feel like reaching or remembering?

That’s your answer.

The voice you’re running on

Read this slowly and be honest. No judgment.

Now notice what those voices produce in real life. Actual goals. Actual sentences you say to yourself or post on Instagram:

Notice the pattern.

Ego desires are about proving, comparing, and arriving. Soul desires are about expressing, contributing, and becoming.

One is driven by not enough. The other is driven by who I am.

Why this is the real reason manifesting stops working

When you try to manifest from ego, your visualization gets contaminated. 

The vision board says freedom and abundance. But the nervous system underneath is broadcasting: I’m not enough, please validate me, I need this to prove I matter.

The universe — or your reticular activating system, if you prefer the neuroscience frame — responds to the signal, not the words. And the signal of ego desire is fear, dressed up as ambition.

This is why so many high-performing, spiritually-curious, smart people I meet are stuck. They’ve read the books, done the vision boards, listened to the podcasts. And the manifestation engine keeps sputtering. 

They assume they’re doing the technique wrong.

They’re not. The technique is fine.

The goal is the problem.

The shift isn’t about wanting less. It’s about wanting clean. Wanting from wholeness instead of lack. Creating from alignment with your dharma instead of from anxiety about your image.

When you do that — when the want is actually yours — Rumi’s second stanza kicks in. “What you need starts to flow to you. Without any pain. Because what you want also wants you.”

Someone who gets this at a level that startled me

The first time I met Regan Hillyer, she was one of the few CEOs I’d met who was genuinely, from-the-bones calm. Not performed calm. Not “I meditate so I’m zen” calm. The kind of calm that comes from knowing exactly which of her desires are hers, and which ones she’s quietly released.

She calls her method Energetic Architecture — aligning your internal state so precisely with your actual desires that the external results become almost inevitable.

What I love about her work is that she skips the usual visualization theater and goes straight to the body. She’ll ask you to name your biggest goal, then ask where in your body you’re holding it. Chest, warm, expansive? That’s the soul. Jaw, shoulders, clenched fists? That’s ego dressed up.

Her program, The Art of Manifesting, won Mindvalley’s Most Popular Program in 2024 — which tells me a lot about how hungry people are for this exact conversation right now.

The field where soul-led creation actually happens

There’s something that shifts when you put hundreds of people in the same space, all of them doing the real work of stripping away the goals that aren’t theirs and reconnecting with the ones that are.

The noise quiets. The field shifts. And the desires that emerge in that room come from a completely different place than the ones you’d write down alone in your journal with Instagram open in the next tab.

That’s what we’re creating with the Manifesting Summit. May 15–17, 2026. Free. Live.

This isn’t another “visualize your dream life” workshop. It’s the environment where soul-led creation actually happens, surrounded by teachers and seekers who know the difference between grasping and genuine desire, and can help you feel the difference in your body, not just understand it in your head.

Regan will be there. So will some of the deepest thinkers on conscious creation I’ve ever shared a stage with. And we’ll be going places most personal growth events are too polished to go.

If you read that table and recognized your own voice in soul desires more than you’d like to admit, this is the field you need to be in.

Step into the field.

With love,

P.S. If this news stirred something in you — Leave your comment. I read every single one.