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

by Simon Sinek

There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you. Loyal customers often don’t even bother to research the competition or entertain other options. Loyalty is not easily won. Repeat business, however, is. All it takes is more manipulations.

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

As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone. Plus it costs money and is stressful waking up every day trying to compete on that level alone. Knowing WHY is essential for lasting success and the ability to avoid being lumped in with others.

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. A failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt.

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

“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. People are either motivated or they are not. 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.

Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are obsessed with what others are doing.

Volume is reasonably easy to achieve. All it takes is money or stunts. Money can pay to keep a message front and center. And publicity stunts are good at getting on the news. But neither plants seeds of loyalty.

For a WHY to have the power to move people it must not only be clear, it must be amplified to reach enough people to tip the scale.

Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending pursuit of WHY we do WHAT we do. Our achievements, WHAT we do, serve as the milestones to indicate we are on the right path. It is not an either/or—we need both.

Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it.

The question is, where does vision come from? And this is the power of WHY. Our visions are the world we imagine, the tangible results of what the world would look like if we spent every day in pursuit of our WHY.