Start With Why

1. All great companies started with WHY.

2. Manipulation vs inspiration.
a. Aspiration, fear, .
b. Peer pressure..
3. Inspire instead to manipulate.
4. It's worth repeating: people don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.
5. The problem was, they advertised their product as a "5GB mp3 player." It is
exactly the same message as Apple's "1,000 songs in your pocket." The difference
is Creative told us WHAT their product was and Apple told us WHY we needed it.
6. If a customer feels inspired to buy a product, rather than manipulated, they will be
able to verbalize the reasons why they think what they bought is better.
7. It is the cause that is represented by the company, brand, product or person that
inspires loyalty.
8. 90/271
9. No matter where we go, we trust those with whom we are able to perceive
common values or beliefs.
10. companies don't offer us anything else besides the facts and figures, features and
benefits upon which to base our decisions. Companies don't tell us WHY.
11. A failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt.
12. Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make.
13. 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.
14. It's What You Can't See That Matters
15. 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.
16. Only when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true
loyal relationship develop.
17. 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.
18. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our
WHY, trust emerges.
19. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization
is driven by things other than their own self-gain.
20. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow younot because they have
to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to
21. The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when the
metric becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer
tied to WHY you set out to achieve it in the first place.
22. Now consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people
brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It's not products or
services that bind a company together. It's not size and might that make a
company strong, it's the culturethe strong sense of beliefs and values that
 everyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, all share. So the logic follows, the
goal is not to hire people who simply have a skill set you need, the goal is to hire
people who believe what you believe.
23. The issue is how we write those ads. They are all about WHAT and not about
WHY. A want ad might say, for example, "Account executive needed, minimum
five years' experience, must have working knowledge of industry. Come work for
a fantastic, fastgrowing company with great pay and great benefits." The ad may
produce loads of applicants, but how do we know which is the right fit?
24. "Men wanted for Hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of
complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition
in case of success."
25. As Herb Kelleher famously said, "You don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude.
You can always teach skills."
26. 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.
27. Companies with a strong sense of WHY are able to inspire their employees. Those
employees are more productive and innovative, and the feeling they bring to work
attracts other people eager to work there as well.
28. In these organizations, from the management on down, no one sees themselves as
any more or any less than anyone else. They all need each other.
29. When Motivated by WHY, Success Just Happens.
30. Innovation Happens at the Edges.
31. If they are constantly reminded WHY the company was founded and told to
always look for ways to bring that cause to life while performing their job,
however, then they will do more than their job.
32. Trust is a remarkable thing. Trust allows us to rely on others. We rely on those we
trust for advice to help us make decisions. Trust is the bedrock for the
advancement of our own lives, our families, our companies, our societies and our
species.
33. There is big a 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.
34. Real Trust Comes from the Things You Can't See.
35. Working hard to clear a path for others so that they can confidently go on to do
bigger and better things has in turn inspired others to clear a path for General
Robinson to do exactly the same thing.
36. The question is, how do you get enough of the influencers to talk about you so
that you can make the system tip?
37. Give the People Something to Believe In.
38. A just law," Dr. King expounded, "is a manmade code that squares with the moral
law. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.... Any law
that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human
 personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation
distorts the soul and damages the personality."
39. Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure
and easy to copy Charisma is hard to define, nearly impossible to measure and too
elusive to copy. All great leaders have charisma because all great leaders have
clarity of WHY; and an undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than
themselves.
40. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not.
41. And unless you're an astronaut, it's not the work we do that inspires us either. It's
the cause we come to work for. We don't want to come to work to build a wall, we
want to come to work to build a cathedral.
42. My causeto inspire people to do the things that inspire themis WHY I get out
of bed every day. // Simon Sinek
43. Regardless of WHAT we do in our lives, our WHYour driving purpose, cause
or beliefnever changes.
44. A clear sense of WHY sets expectations. When we don't know an organization's
WHY, we don't know what to expect, so we expect the minimumprice, quality,
service, featuresthe commodity stuff.
45. COMMUNICATION IS NOT ABOUT SPEAKING, IT'S ABOUT LISTENING.
46. A WHY without the HOWs, passion without structure, has a very high probability
of failure.
47. 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 WHYmore volume and less claritytheir
ability to thrive and inspire for years to come is dubious at best.
48. "What gets measured gets done,"
49. Like most inspiring leaders, Jobs trusted his gut over outside advice. He was
regularly criticized for not making mass-market decisions, such as letting people
clone the Mac. He couldn't; those actions violated what he believed. They failed
the Celery Test.
50. But that's not what gave Walton or those who worked at Wal-Mart the feeling of
success. It was people Walton valued above all else. People.
51. It has to do with a purpose, cause or belief that started many years ago with a
couple of idealists in Cupertino, California. "I want to put a ding in the universe,"
as Steve Jobs put it. And that's exactly what Apple does in the industries in which
it competes. Apple is born out of its founders' WHY.
52. There is a statistic that hangs over your headover 90 percent of all new
businesses fail in the first three years.
53. The only thing that I do that most people don't is I learned how to start with WHY.
54. If You Follow Your WHY, Then Others Will Follow You.
55. All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear
year after year. Those who forget WHY they were founded show up to the race
every day to outdo someone else instead of to outdo themselves.
56. Imagine if every organization started with WHY. Decisions would be simpler.
Loyalties would be greater. Trust would be a common currency. If our leaders
were diligent about starting with WHY, optimism would reign and innovation
would thrive. As this book illustrates, there is precedence for this standard. No
matter the size of the organization, no matter the industry, no matter the product
or the service, if we all take some responsibility to start with WHY and inspire
others to do the same, then, together, we can change the world. And that's pretty
inspiring.