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

by Simon Sinek

Those people are not necessarily showing up because they believe in your WHY, they are showing up for the money. A classic manipulation. Paying someone a lot of money and asking them to come up with great ideas ensures very little.

“Well, that’s easy,” he said, “employees come first and if employees are treated right, they treat the outside world right, the outside world uses the company’s product again, and that makes the shareholders happy. That really is the way that it works and it’s not a conundrum at all.”

But that’s just one of the things I’ve done—it’s not my passion and it’s not how I define my life. My cause—to inspire people to do the things that inspire them—is WHY I get out of bed every day. The excitement is trying to find new ways, different WHATs to bring my cause to life, of which this book is one.

Regardless of WHAT we do in our lives, our WHY—our driving purpose, cause or belief—never changes. If our Golden Circle is in balance, WHAT we do is simply the tangible way we find to breathe life into that cause. Developing software was merely one of the things Bill Gates did to bring his cause to life. An airline gave Herb Kelleher the perfect outlet to spread his belief in freedom. Putting a man on the moon was one goal John F. Kennedy used to rally people to bring to life his belief that service to the nation—and not being serviced by the nation—would lead America to advance and prosper.

embody. And if the commercial speaks to you and you’re not

A wise man once said, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it pays for the yacht to pull alongside it.” There is great truth in this statement. The yacht represents achievement; it is easily seen and, with the right plan, completely attainable. The thing we pull alongside represents that hard-to-define feeling of success.

It is not a coincidence that successful entrepreneurs long for the early days. It is no accident that big companies talk about a “return to basics.” What they are alluding to is a time before the split. And they would be right. They do indeed need to return to a time when WHAT they did was in perfect parallel to WHY they did it. If they continue down the path of focusing on their growth of WHAT at the expense of WHY—more volume and less clarity—their ability to thrive and inspire for years to come is dubious at best. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Starbucks, the Gap, Dell and so many others that used to be special have all gone through a split.

My uncle used to make tennis rackets. His rackets were made in the exact same factory as a name-brand racket. They were made of the same material on the same machine. The only difference was that when my uncle’s rackets came off the assembly line, they didn’t put the well-known brand logo on the product. My uncle’s rackets sold for less money, in the same big-box retailer, next to the name-brand rackets. Month after month, the name-brand rackets outsold the generic-brand ones. Why? Because people perceived greater value from the name-brand rackets and felt just fine paying a premium for that feeling. On a strictly rational scale, the generic rackets offered better value. But again, value is a perception, not a calculation, which is the reason companies make such a big deal about investing in their brand. But a strong brand, like all other intangible factors that contribute to the perception of value, starts with a clear sense of WHY.

If Apple stays true to their WHY, the television and movie industries will likely be next.