Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

by Simon Sinek

If we were all rational, there would be no small businesses, there would be no exploration, there would be very little innovation and there would be no great leaders to inspire all those things.

Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe.

when the WHY is absent, imbalance is produced and manipulations thrive. And when manipulations thrive, uncertainty increases for buyers, instability increases for sellers and stress increases for all.

If the leader of the organization can’t clearly articulate WHY the organization exists in terms beyond its products or services, then how does he expect the employees to know WHY to come to work?

Manipulations can motivate the outcome of an election, but they don’t help choose who should lead.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.”

What authenticity means is that your Golden Circle is in balance. It means that everything you say and everything you do you actually believe. This goes for management as well as the employees.

Ask the best salesmen what it takes to be a great salesman. They will always tell you that it helps when you really believe in the product you’re selling. What does belief have to do with a sales job? Simple. When salesmen actually believe in the thing they are selling, then the words that come out of their mouths are authentic.

The WHATs are important—they provide the tangible proof of the WHY—but WHY must come first.

and none was eager to give up any ground. But Southwest was not built to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. They just happened to use an airline to do it.

Only when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true loyal relationship develop.

When we are inspired, the decisions we make have more to do with who we are and less to do with the companies or the products we’re buying.

Loyalty, real emotional value, exists in the brain of the buyer, not the seller.

an organization must be clear about its purpose, cause or belief and make sure that everything they say and do is consistent with and authentic to that belief.

“You know what I love about my life?” he starts this time. “I get to wake up every day to do something I love. I get to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. In fact, the best part is trying to figure out all the different ways I can do that. It really is amazing. And believe it or not, I’ve actually been able to make a lot of money from it. I bought a big house and a nice car. I get to meet lots of famous people and I get to be on TV all the time, which is fun, because I’m good-looking. I’m very lucky that I’m doing something that I love, I’ve actually been able to do pretty well because of it.”

Like on a date, it is exceedingly difficult to start building a trusting relationship with a potential customer or client by trying to convince them of all the rational features and benefits. Those things are important, but they serve only to give credibility to a sales pitch and allow buyers to rationalize their purchase decision. As with all decisions, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, and WHAT you do serves as the tangible proof of WHY you do it. But unless you start with WHY, all people have to go on are the rational benefits. And chances are you won’t get a second date.

The ability to put a WHY into words provides the emotional context for decisions. It offers greater confidence than “I think it’s right.” It’s more scalable than “I feel it’s right.” When you know your WHY, the highest level of confidence you can offer is, “I know it’s right.” When you know the decision is right, not only does it feel right, but you can also rationalize it and easily put it into words.

WHY I’m in business—to inspire people to do the things that inspire them.

The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe.

Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don’t trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain.

Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

Those who lead are able to do so because those who follow trust that the decisions made at the top have the best interest of the group at heart.

“It doesn’t matter who wins or loses, what matters is how you play the game.” It was at this point that young Howard raised his hand and asked, “Then why do we keep score?”

No one likes to lose, and most healthy people live their life to win. The only variation is the score we use. For some it’s money, for others it’s fame or awards. For some it’s power, love, a family or spiritual fulfillment. The metric is relative, but the desire is the same.

The Only Difference Between You and a Caveman Is the Car You Drive

the goal is to hire people who believe what you believe.

“You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.”

Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.

Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.

Average companies give their people something to work on. In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people something to work toward.

The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

If you are curious as to how Colgate finds itself with thirty-two different types of toothpaste today, it is because every day its people come to work to develop a better toothpaste and not, for example, to look for ways to help people feel more confident about themselves.

didn’t find a way to make a lightbulb, I found a thousand ways how not to make one.”

It causes some pause when we consider how we hire people: what’s more important, their résumé and experience, or whether they will fit our community?

Historically, trust has played a bigger role in advancing companies and societies than skill set alone.

There is a big difference between jumping out of a plane with a parachute on and jumping without one. Both produce extraordinary experiences, but only one increases the likelihood of being able to try again another time.

Only with mutual trust can an organization become great.

Great leadership is not about flexing and intimidation; great leaders, as General Robinson proves, lead with WHY. They embody a sense of purpose that inspires those around them.

Some in management positions operate as if they are in a tree of monkeys. They make sure that everyone at the top of the tree looking down sees only smiles. But all too often, those at the bottom looking up see only asses.

Trust matters. Trust comes from being a part of a culture or organization with a common set of values and beliefs. Trust is maintained when the values and beliefs are actively managed.

Passion comes from feeling like you are a part of something that you believe in, something bigger than yourself.

Without managed trust, people will show up to do their jobs and they will worry primarily about themselves. This is the root of office politics—people acting within the system for self-gain often at the expense of others, even the company.

Each of us assigns different values to different things and our behaviors follow accordingly.

There is an irony to mass-market success, as it turns out. It’s near impossible to achieve if you point your marketing and resources to the middle of the bell, if you attempt to woo those who represent the middle of the curve without first appealing to the early adopters.

According to the Law of Diffusion, mass-market success can only be achieved after you penetrate between 15 percent to 18 percent of the market. That’s because the early majority won’t try something new until someone else has tried it first.

Get enough of the people on the left side of the curve on your side and they encourage the rest to follow.

If you have the discipline to focus on the early adopters, the majority will come along eventually. But it must start with WHY.

Energy Excites. Charisma Inspires.

Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy.

It’s not Bill Gates’s passion for computers that inspires us, it’s his undying optimism that even the most complicated problems can be solved.