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

by Simon Sinek

Apple even changed its legal name in 2007 from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. to reflect the fact that they were more than just a computer company.

The change wasn’t practical, it was philosophical.

The concept of “better” begs the question: based on what standard? Is a Ferrari F430 sports car better than a Honda Odyssey minivan? It depends why you need the car. If you have a family of six, a two-seater Ferrari is not better. However, if you’re looking for a great way to meet women, a Honda minivan is probably not better (depending on what kind of woman you’re looking to meet, I guess; I too shouldn’t make assumptions). Why the product exists must first be considered and why someone wants it must match.

Those people who share Apple’s WHY believe that Apple’s products are objectively better, and any attempt to convince them otherwise is pointless. Even with objective metrics in hand, the argument about which is better or which is worse without first establishing a common standard creates nothing more than debate. Loyalists for each brand will point to various features and benefits that matter to them (or don’t matter to them) in an attempt to convince the other that they are right.

Good quality and features matter, but they are not enough to produce the dogged loyalty that all the most inspiring leaders and companies are able to command. It is the cause that is represented by the company, brand, product or person that inspires loyalty.

Instead of asking, “WHAT should we do to compete?” the questions must be asked, “WHY did we start doing WHAT we’re doing in the first place, and WHAT can we do to bring our cause to life considering all the technologies and market opportunities available today?”

Our need to belong is not rational, but it is a constant that exists across all people in all cultures. It is a feeling we get when those around us share our values and beliefs. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe.

Go abroad and you’ll form instant bonds with other Americans you meet.

No matter where we go, we trust those with whom we are able to perceive common values or beliefs.

But when a company clearly communicates their WHY, what they believe, and we believe what they believe, then we will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to include those products or brands in our lives.

We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.

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, so we talk around it or rationalize it. “She’s funny, she’s smart,” we start. But there are lots of funny and smart people in the world, but we don’t love them and we don’t want to marry them. There is obviously more to falling in love than just personality and competence. Rationally, we know our explanation isn’t the real reason. It is how our loved ones make us feel, but those feelings are really hard to put into words. So when pushed, we start to talk around it. We may even say things that don’t make any rational sense. “She completes me,” we might say, for example.

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.

Our limbic brain is powerful, powerful enough to drive behavior that sometimes contradicts our rational and analytical understanding of a situation.

Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to make decisions with only empirical evidence. This is why those decisions take more time, feel difficult or leave us uncertain.

Those decisions started with WHY—the emotional component of the decision—and then the rational components allowed the buyer to verbalize or rationalize the reasons for their decision.

This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds.

This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and great organizations are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things we would never think of asking for.

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.

They observed that when people took their washing out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white it was or compared it to newer items to see how bright it was. The first thing people did when they pulled their laundry out of the dryer was to smell it. This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.

The power of the limbic brain is astounding. It not only controls our gut decisions, but it can influence us to do things that seem illogical or irrational. Leaving the safety of home to explore faraway places. Crossing oceans to see what’s on the other side. Leaving a stable job to start a business out of your basement with no money in the bank. Many of us look at these decisions and say, “That’s stupid, you’re crazy. You could lose everything. You could get yourself killed. What are you thinking?” It is not logic or facts but our hopes and dreams, our hearts and our guts, that drive us to try new things.

Once you know WHY you do what you do, the question is HOW will you do it? HOWs are your values or principles that guide HOW to bring your cause to life.

Making it even more difficult for ourselves, we remind ourselves of our values by writing them on the wall . . . as nouns. Integrity. Honesty. Innovation. Communication, for example. But nouns are not actionable. They are things. You can’t build systems or develop incentives around those things.

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.

It is at the WHAT level that authenticity happens.

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.

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

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.

The problem was not with WHAT they did, the problem was, no one knew WHY Song or Ted existed. They may have even been better than Southwest. But it didn’t matter.

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.

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.

Without WHY, the buyer is easily motivated by aspiration or fear. At that point, it is the buyer who is at the greatest risk of ending up being inauthentic.

This is the value of The Golden Circle; it provides a way to communicate consistent with how individuals receive information.

To learn how to apply WHY to a business situation, you needn’t look much farther than how we act on a date. Because, in reality, there is no difference between sales and dating. In both circumstances, you sit across a table from someone and hope to say enough of the right things to close the deal. Of course, you could always opt for a manipulation or two, a fancy dinner, dropping hints of tickets that you have or whom you know. Depending on how badly you want to close the deal, you could tell them anything they want to hear.

In Brad’s case, it is obvious that the date did not go well. The odds are not good that he will get a second date, and he’s certainly not done a good job of laying down the foundation to build a relationship. Ironically, the woman’s initial interest may have been generated based on those elements. She agreed to go on the date because her friends told her that Brad was good-looking and that he had a good job and that he knew a lot of famous people. Even though all those things may be true, WHATs don’t drive decision-making, WHATs should be used as proof of WHY, and the date plainly fell flat.

Let’s send Brad out again, but this time he’s going to start with WHY. “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.”

In business, like a bad date, many companies work so hard to prove their value without saying WHY they exist in the first place.

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.

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.

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. Again, this is biologically accurate, because gut decisions happen in the part of the brain that controls our emotions, not language.

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.”

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 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.

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. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

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.

Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain.

Value, by definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t convince someone to trust you. You have to earn trust by communicating and demonstrating that you share the same values and beliefs.

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.