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

by Simon Sinek

The middle two sections comprise the limbic brain. The limbic brain is responsible for all of our feelings, such as trust and loyalty. It is also responsible for all human behavior and all our decision-making, but it has no capacity for language.

When we communicate from the outside in, when we communicate WHAT we do first, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information, like facts and features, but it does not drive behavior. But when we communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls decision-making, and our language part of the brain allows us to rationalize those decisions.

The part of the brain that controls our feelings has no capacity for language. It is this disconnection that makes putting our feelings into words so hard. We have trouble, for example, explaining why we married the person we married. We struggle to put into words the real reasons why we love them...

We may even say things that don’t make any rational sense. “She completes me,” we might say, for example. What does that mean and how do you look for someone who does that so you can marry them? That’s the problem with love; we only know when we’ve found it because it “just feels right.”

The same is true for other decisions. When a decision feels right, we have a hard time explaining why we did what we did. Again, the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn’t control language, so we rationalize.

This is where “gut decisions” come from. They just feel right. There is no part of the stomach that controls decision-making, it all happens in the limbic brain. It’s not an accident that we use that word “feel” to explain those decisions either. The reason gut decisions feel right is because the part of the brain that controls them also controls our feelings.

Our limbic brain is powerful, powerful enough to drive behavior that sometimes contradicts our rational and analytical understanding of a situation. We often trust our gut even if the decision flies in the face of all the facts and figures. Richard Restak, a well-known neuroscientist, talks about this in his book The Naked Brain. When you force people to make decisions with only the rational part of their brain, they almost invariably end up “overthinking.” These rational decisions tend to take longer to make, says Restak, and can often be of lower quality.

In contrast, decisions made with the limbic brain, gut decisions, tend to be faster, higher-quality decisions.

This is one of the primary reasons why teachers tell students to go with their first instinct when taking a multiple-choice test, to trust their gut. The more time spent thinking about the answer, the bigger the risk that it may be the wrong one....

Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY.

Remember the Honda and the Ferrari? Products are not just symbols of what the company believes, they also serve as symbols of what the loyal buyers believe. People with Apple laptop computers, for example, love opening them up while sitting in an airport. They like that everyone knows they are using a Mac. It’s an emblem, a symbol of who they are.

HP and Dell have a fuzzy sense of WHY, so their products and their brands don’t symbolize anything about the users. To the Dell or HP user, their computer, no matter how fast or sleek, is not a symbol of a higher purpose, cause or belief. It’s just a computer.

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

Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

Discipline of HOW Once you know WHY you do what you do, the question is HOW will you do it?

Understanding HOW you do things and, more importantly, having the discipline to hold the organization and all its employees accountable to those guiding principles enhances an organization’s ability to work to its natural strengths.

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.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea … we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

A WHY is just a belief. That’s all it is. HOWs are the actions you take to realize that belief. And WHATs are the results of those actions—everything you say and do: your products, services, marketing, PR, culture and whom you hire.

The only way people will know what you believe is by the things you say and do, and if you’re not consistent in the things you say and do, no one will know what you believe. It is at the WHAT level that authenticity happens.

What authenticity means is that your Golden Circle is in balance. It means that everything you say and everything you do you actually believe.

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. When belief enters the equation, passion exudes from the salesman. It is this authenticity that produces the relationships upon which all the best sales organizations are based. Relationships also build trust. And with trust comes loyalty.

Being authentic is not a requirement for success, but it is if you want that success to be a lasting success. Again, it goes back to WHY.

Authenticity is when you say and do the things you actually believe.

But if you don’t know WHY the organization or the products exist on a level beyond WHAT you do, then it is impossible to know if the things you...

Without WHY, any attempt at authenticity will almost alwa...

The Right...

The WHATs are important—they provide the tangible proof of the WHY—but WHY must come first. The WHY provides the context for everything else.

As you will see over and over in all the cases and examples in this book, whether in leadership, decision-making or communication, starting with WHY has a profound and long-lasting impact on the result. Starting with WHY is what inspires people to act.

“You are now free to move about the country,” they said in their advertising. That’s much more than a tagline. That’s a cause. And it’s a cause looking for followers. Those who could relate to Southwest, those who saw themselves as average Joes, now had an alternative to the big airlines. And those who believed what Southwest believed became fiercely loyal to the company. They felt Southwest was a company that spoke directly to them and directly for them. More importantly, they felt that flying Southwest said something about who they were as people. The loyalty that developed with their customers had nothing to do with price. Price was simply one of the ways the airline brought their cause to life.

It is a false assumption that differentiation happens in HOW and WHAT you do. Simply offering a high-quality product with more features or better service or a better price does not create difference. Doing so guarantees no success. Differentiation happens in WHY and HOW you do it. Southwest isn’t the best airline in the world. Nor are they always the cheapest. They have fewer routes than many of their competition and don’t even fly outside the continental United States. WHAT they do is not always significantly better. But WHY they do it is crystal clear and everything they do proves it.

There are many ways to motivate people to do things, but loyalty comes from the ability to inspire people. Only when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true loyal relationship develop.

Manipulation and Inspiration Are Similar, b...

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.

When our decisions feel right, we’re willing to pay a premium or suffer an inconvenience for those products or services.

This has nothing to do with price or quality. Price, quality, features and service are important, but they are the cost of entry in business today. It is those visceral limbic feelings that create loyalty. And it is that loyalty that gives Apple or Harley-Davidson or Southwest Airlines or Martin Luther King or any other great leader who commands a following such a huge advantage. Without a strong base of loyal followers, the pressure increases to manipulate—to compete or “differentiate”...

It’s hard to make a case to someone that your products or services are important in their lives based on external rational factors that you have defined as valua...

However, if your WHYs and their WHY correspond, then they will see your products and services as tangible w...

When WHY, HOW, and WHAT are in balance, authenticity is achieved and the buyer feels fulfilled. When they are out of balance, stress or uncertainty exists. When that happens, the decisions we make will also be out of balance. Without WHY, the buyer is easily motivated by aspiration or fear. At that po...

If they buy something that doesn’t clearly embody their own sense of WHY, then those around them have little evidence to paint a clear...

The human animal is a social animal. We’re very good at sensing subtleties in behavior and judging people accordingly. We get good feelings and bad feelings about companies, just as w...

There are some people we just feel we can trust and others we just feel we can’t. Those feelings also manifest wh...

This is the value of The Golden Circle; it provides a way to communicate consistent with how individuals receive information. For this reason 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. If the levels of The Golden Circle are in balance, all those who share the organization’s view of the world will be drawn to it and its products like a moth to a light bulb.

Promise them the world and the odds are good that you will close the deal. Once. Maybe twice. With time, however, maintaining that relationship will cost more and more. No matter the manipulations you choose, this is not the way to build a trusting relationship.

“Our company is extremely successful.” “We have beautiful offices, you should stop by and check them out sometime.” “We do business with all the biggest companies and brands.” “I’m sure you’ve seen our advertising.” “We’re actually doing pretty well.” In business, like a bad date, many companies work so hard to prove their value without saying WHY they exist in the first place.

Three Degrees of Certainty When we can only provide a rational basis for a decision, when we can only point to tangible elements or rational measurements, the highest level of confidence we can give is, “I think this is the right decision.” That would be biologically accurate because we’re activating the neocortex, the “thinking” part of our brain.

When we make gut decisions, the highest level of confidence we can offer is, “The decision feels right,” even if it flies in the face of all the facts and figures.

Ask the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders what their secret is and invariably they all say the same thing: “I trust my gut.” The times things went wrong, they will tell you, “I listened to what others were telling me, even though it didn’t feel right. I should have trusted my gut.”

It’s a good strategy, except it’s not scalable. The gut decision can only be made by a single person. It’s a perfectly good strategy for an individual or a small organization, but what happens when success necessitates that more people be able to make decisions that feel right?

That’s when the power of WHY can be fully realized. The ability to put a WHY into words provides the emotional context for decisions. It offers greater confidence than “I think it’s ri...

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 eas...