From Maverick To Meta-Entrepreneur: Naveen Jain’s Rules to Live By

What you will learn:

• Success habits from Viome CEO Naveen Jain.
• Two key phrases that fuel innovation.
• How to think outside of the box
• Why it is important to pivot to purpose post COVID.
• What a meta-entrepreneur is.
• How to adopt the mindset of a meta-entrepreneur.
• How to leverage failure.
• How to cultivate curiosity.

Healthcare Industry Interrupted

Naveen Jain isn’t interested in predictability or stability. The tech industry maverick is crazy in all the right ways. If you want to read up on his extensive list of accomplishments click here.

For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing on his latest venture Viome and the mindset, habits, and skills that put him at the helm of a revolutionary company that is changing the healthcare landscape and making gut microbiome testing simpler and more accessible than ever.

Until the last decade, it was widely accepted that our genes determine the quality of our health. It was thought that if you had a genetic predisposition for a disease or condition, there was nothing you could do about it. We have been led to believe that what is written in our genes is our unavoidable destiny.

The latest research in the field of epigenetics is disproving this theory. Not only are we seeing that conditions such as diabetes, anxiety, and autoimmune conditions are preventable, but they are also reversible.

In actuality, it is our gene expression that determines whether or not we will develop an illness, and through regulating diet and exposure to environmental factors, we are actually able to turn our genes on and off.

Naveen rejects the claim that this is a new discovery. Just because we are now at a stage of scientific sophistication where we can study and prove what is going on inside of our bodies, doesn’t mean we haven’t intuitively known about this from our early evolution. Jain argues that science is catching up to what we have always innately known to be true.

Even as far back as 2500 years ago, Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.” Other quotes that resonate with the Viome CEO include, “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food,” and, “One man’s food is another man’s poison.” The research backs up these philosophies.

This is an ancient wisdom that originated from a high level of connection to and awareness of our bodies. These principles have been passed down through traditions like Ayurveda. It is only recently that we have become so disconnected from our bodies and from age-old farming practices that we have turned away from our natural inclinations.

Viome’s tagline is: Imagine a world where illness is optional. Why didn’t they choose a tagline that promotes the idea that illness will be completely eliminated? Because we still have free will.

The testing and services that the company offers can give people a clear idea of what they should and shouldn’t eat and what nutrients they might need to replenish, but it is up to the consumer what choices they will make with that information. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him balance his gut microbiome.

How To Leverage Failure

Recently I had Naveen on a radio show that I host each week on Radio Zindagi in the Bay Area. The title of the show is Confessions of A Futurist with Sanjiv Goyal.

The title was chosen for a particular reason. Often when there is someone of status brought on as a guest to a show, the interview focuses on their successes and accomplishments. Little if anything is said about their failures or hard times.

People don’t realize how many failures it takes to make a successful entrepreneur. And it is my hope to get my guests to “confess” to the times that they were down on their luck, made a wrong turn, or simply miscalculated, and share the story of how they leveraged that “failure” and how they persevered.

When I pressed Jain about his failures he expressed that in his opinion we need to redefine how we view success and failure as a society. “Every idea that doesn’t work is simply a stepping stone to a better and bigger idea… You only fail in life when you give up, everything else is just a pivot.”

Jain said that having started seven companies, he came to the realization that ups and downs are a given of life. Like the peaks and valleys formed by the measure a heart monitor takes, meaningful life has its highs and lows. When the line is smooth and static, that means there is no heartbeat, no lifeforce energy — you are dead.

Jain accepts volatility as a given of life and of business. The way he gets himself through the downturns is through keeping faith. He knows that just like the line on a heart monitor if you are in a valley, it is only a matter of time before things look up again and the energy and the direction change.

What It Really Means To Be An Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship isn’t about creating a company, it’s about taking accountability and ownership of solving a problem. Visionaries are a dime a dozen. Anyone can have an idea or brainstorm solutions, but entrepreneurs are the special breed of people who actually go out and DO something about it.

Then there is the special breed within the special breed: meta-entrepreneurs. This is a term I use to refer to those of us who tackle the largest problems and reap the largest rewards for the human race.

Naveen Jain is a meta-entrepreneur. This means he is an entrepreneur operating on an exponentially influential scale. He has connected the dots in a way that has revolutionized gut microbiome testing, thus making it accessible to millions, if not billions. He changed the way the tests are done for all of humanity.

Through his efforts, Jain created the base layer of progress for the next layer of innovation to happen. And like any qualifying meta-entrepreneur, he thusly honored his place in the lineage of innovators that have furthered human evolutionary progress.

So what are his secrets?

Naveen Jain’s Meta-Entrepreneurial Blueprint

• He assigns the right meaning to life events.
• He accepts and expects change and challenge.
• He is careful about his mindset and what language he uses.
• He nurtures his curiosity.
• He has faith in the power of vision.

It’s the meanings we assign to the events in our lives that determine the quality of our life and how we feel about ourselves and our circumstances.

Two different people may experience the same event and one person may say “My life is over,” while the other person may say “Look at this amazing opportunity!” The first person feels desolate due to the meaning they assign, while the second feels lucky.

Take the current example of COVID. Many people are viewing it as a disaster, but Jain thinks in ten years from now it will be viewed as the best thing that could have happened. It is accelerating, change, progress, and growth, three words that make any entrepreneur start to salivate.

Though from an individual standpoint people are suffering and dying and my heart goes out to them, from a systemic point of view, the revolution in healthcare infrastructure may not have happened for another generation without this catalyst.

This break from routine allowed us to rethink what is possible on a mass collective scale. COVID exposed the amount of broken infrastructure in healthcare and other industries and got us to start thinking about solutions.

Surfing the Waves of Change

For Naveen, having ups and downs means that he is doing something worthwhile. Taking risks lets him know he is living life to the fullest, and being in a downswing means it is only a matter of time before he is up again. In this way, he pulls through the downs and celebrates the highs, and appreciates both parts of the process.

“When you are down all you have to do is hunker down and stick together knowing the next beat will be up and when you are on top of the beat, never get too cocky because winter is coming and you will go down.”

Usually when things look grim, people panic. That is when emotions and stakes are high and they tend to forget that trials are a guarantee in life and business. So if you’re an entrepreneur, remember this fact, that all of the major companies of today including giants like FB, Twitter, and Amazon, have been on the brink of death at one time or another.

Take hope if you are there in this part of the process. Put your head down. Do the work and wait for things to swing in the other direction. That’s how Naveen Jain gets through his hard times, and his mindset provides an excellent model.

Exercises in Innovation

Innovation is Jain’s sport. In order to create and connect the dots the way he does, he uses two phrases to get his creativity flowing and spark his curiosity.

1. Imagine a world where…
2. What if (fill in the blank) were possible?

When we use the word imagine, it switches on a mindset of abundance and possibility. Try it right now. Say, “Imagine a world where (fill in the blank) is possible.” Imagine a world where no one dies of cancer, for instance.

This simple exercise gets our intellect past the five-dimensional world of what is in front of us, what can be seen, heard, and touched right now. This is a phrase that futurists like Jain connect with daily. Pro tip from the CEO: “The more vividly you can describe that world the easier it becomes to create it.”

The second powerful phrase used by entrepreneurs and big-thinkers is: What if? Saying what if also opens a world of possibilities and moves our thought process out of the box. Viome was born from the question, what if there was an affordable, simple way to test what is in the gut microbiome?”

Futurists, meta-entrepreneurs, and visionaries don’t see the world as it is, they see it as it could be. They live in a world of possibility and nurture their curious natures. Indeed curiosity should be encouraged at all costs, especially in the young children of today who will grow up to be the futurists of tomorrow.

Pivoting to Purpose

In light of our conversation about “failures,” I asked Jain how we should redefine success and failure. His response was, “Success should not be defined by how much money you have in the bank, but how many lives can you improve in your lifetime.”

This reframes shifts the measure of success and failure away from tangible results to the intentions we set. Businesses are just now catching on to what Jain figured out a long time ago: that pivoting to purpose is the only way to create large sustainable enterprises.

Doing good and doing well aren’t mutually exclusive. The intention is key. If an entrepreneur sets out to make a billion dollars, it’s likely his venture will fail, but we all see the results when the intention is to help a billion people live better lives.

Final Advice from the CEO

“Dream so big that people think you are crazy. Never be afraid to fail because you only fail if you give up.” Jain urges us to remember that it only takes one person to change the trajectory of how all people live and that you don’t start that journey with a million dollars in the bank. The meta- entrepreneur’s life is for the crazy ones, the innovators, the foolish, and the hungry. Do you have what it takes?