Recently, I described my love for books and that they regularly change my life. This week, I have finished another such a book. In fact the most important book so far this year! It’s called Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
For a long time, I have struggled to put certain feelings and life experiences into words. This book has helped me to get the much needed clarity.
It has showed me that I am a “Why” person. A person that needs a clear purpose, a sense of direction and perspective in life. Whenever I am clear about this purpose, I have energy and passion, and my life is in balance. And whenever I lose this purpose, I begin to struggle, begin to lose energy, begin to feel frustrated, which usually ends in a state of “depression”. I have struggled with these painful ups and downs for many years, and now I can finally put them into words. This will change my life!
Key points from the book
- Finding purpose is a process of discovery, not invention. A purpose can only be identified by looking at your own past, your values, your upbringing and life experiences.
- Gaining clarity of your purpose ironically is not the hard part. It is the discipline to trust your gut, to stay true to your purpose, cause or beliefs. Remaining completely in balance and authentic is the most difficult part.
- There is a difference between running with all your heart with your eyes closed, and running with all your heart with your eyes wide open.
- “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” — Henry Ford
- When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.
- It’s all rooted in biology: The limbic brain makes all the decisions, but has no capacity for words. That’s why we say „I don’t know why, but it just feels right.“ And once the feeling is right, we can rationalize and verbalize it with our neocortex.
So what is my own purpose?
My purpose in life is to reach my full potential, and to inspire others to do the same. This is why I am an entrepreneur. This is why I love books. This is why I love personal development. This is why I love productivity and efficiency. This is why I am an idealist. This is why I love sharing my experiences. Finally I get it. It’s so simple and clear. Thank you Simon Sinek!
Here is the 18-minute “Start with Why” TED talk by the author. A great summary, but no replacement for the book!
This is why I have been attracted to Kiva.org, to Exsila, to Gottlieb Duttweiler, to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. They all incorporate a deep sense of Why.
Start with Why: Book Notes
- “If you are the kind of person that likes to have (… eg full control of your life) BOY do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials etc. etc.”. Start with Why, not with What and How.
- “I believe… I believe… I believe” Start with Why! (Success factor of Martin Luther King)
- Build a megaphone that is loud and clear. As founder/ceo you are the company, you preach to the world. Others are inspired and are beginning to spread the gospel!
- Great brands are not just brands, they become symbols. Harley Davidson is a great example. The have communicated so clearly and consistently over the years, that it has become a symbol. People proudly tattoo the logo on their body! Those people don’t know the current stock price and don’t care about the management. They care about the belief, about what it represents!
- Those companies (Apple, Harley Davidson etc.) have a cult-like following.
- It’s all rooted in biology: The limbic brain makes all the decisions, but has no capacity for words. That’s why we say „I don’t know why, but it just feels right.“ And once the feeling is right, we can rationalize and verbalize it with our neocortex.
- Leverage The Law of Diffusion: Focus first on innovators and early adopters. You don’t need any tricks or incentives to get them. In fact they are willing to take pain and inconvenience in exchange for being first. They then will help to convince the early & late majority. Don’t immediately go after the majority. Find your true disciples/followers first!
- Schoolbus test: What would happen if the current founder/ceo were hit by a bus? Solution: the founders “why” must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the company
- Debt collecting company: instead of threatening people, this company tried to listen and create rapport with the debtors. The agents were not paid on commission, instead they received a bonus depending on the number of thank you cards they sent out (to thank them for speaking to them on the phone). She had to hire people who believed what she believed, to treat people well. It was about “why” and not only the “what”. That way she created a company full of kindness and compassion. This company collected 300% more debt than the industry average. And the debtors ended up doing *more* business with the original company after the collection agency was hired. This is unprecedented
- A construction company focused on work-life-balance. Everyone who stayed later than 5:30pm was removed from the bonus pool. Productivity went up and wasting time as well as turnover went down.
- Measure your “why” (number of thank you cards sent out; number of people leaving work by 5:30pm etc.)
- Money does not equal value. Value is a feeling, a perception. A measurement of how well the why is implemented. Brands are a great example: put two exactly the same products next to each other, one with the brand logo and one without. The one with the logo outsells the other one significantly, although they are exactly the same products.
- How is a brand created? With a clear sense of why! Then trust emerges and value is perceived. This creates loyalty.
- Southwest Airlines is the most profitable airline in history. Every single year they turned a profit. The idea was even copied from another company. What distinguished Southwest was the clear focus on their Why. The CEO had a clear philosophy of “employees first”. If employees are happy, they will treat customers well. If customers are treated well, they come back and the company and shareholders will do well. It’s that simple.
- Walmart’s original why: “Look after people“
- Walmart’s Why died in 1992 when Sam Walton died. It has been scandal-ridden ever since, because people have mistaken the How and What with the Why. The Why got lost.
- Costco was founded in 1985 by James Sinegal with a similar Why than Sam Walton’s. It thrives to this day because Sinegal is still around. Like so many “Why” companies, they believe in “Employees first”, pay 40% more than the competition, and have 5x lower turnover than Sam’s Club.
- An investment on the date Sam Walton died in Walmart generated a 300%, in Costco a 800% return.
- Both Sinegal and Walton never took more than $430k salary per year, consistent what they believed. The latest CEO of Walmart receives $5.43m and wants to turn the culture around. No comment.
- “Some people embrace them. Some people are repelled by them. But it can’t be denied. They stand for something!” (true for all Why companies and also true for early Trigami)
- You must follow the law of diffusion! Only 2.5% of the population has the Innovator mentality. They are the group of people willing to trust their intuition, and take greater risks than others. It’s no coincidence that Microsoft has 96% market-share, and Apple maintains about 2.5%.
- Steve Job’s Why was to challenge the status quo, to revolutionize old industries. Bill Gates’s Why was to reach as many people as possible (“A computer on every desk and in every home”)
- Split = The moment when a company loses it’s Why and becomes obsessed by the What and How. This happens to most great companies at one point, especially when the early Founder/CEO leaves and hasn’t succeeded by creating a lasting culture around his Why.
- An arrow by itself is not dangerous. It’s only dangerous when it has big momentum in one direction.
- To achieve this momentum, you need to pull it 180 degrees in the other direction.
- Same with the Why. A Why can only be identified by looking at your own past, your values, upbringing and life experience. It cannot be identified by customer or employee interviews or market research, and not by looking ahead of what you want to achieve.
- Finding Why is a process of discovery, not invention.
- Apple’s Why developed during the rebellious 60ies and 70ies, the formative years of it’s founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
- Every single person has a Why. Each company/organization also has one, because it’s the tangible What to the Why of it’s founders.
- Gaining clarity of Why ironically is not the hard part. It is the discipline to trust one’s gut, to stay true to one’s purpose, cause or beliefs. Remaining completely in balance and authentic is the most difficult part.
- The few that are able to build a megaphone around their cause, and not just a company, are the ones who earn the ability to inspire. In doing so they harness a power to move people that few can even imagine.
- Understanding the Why of any social movement always starts with one thing: You.
- Over 90% of all new businesses fail in the first 3 years. The foolishness of thinking that you’re part of a small minority of those who actually will make it past 3 years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are: driven by passion, and completely irrational.
- The story of the authors first company (the exact same thing happened to me at Trigami, it’s crazy but also a great relief of how similar the stories are): “We beat the odds because of my energy, not because of my business acumen. But I didn’t have the energy to sustain that strategy for the rest of my life. We needed better systems and processes if this business was going to sustain itself. I was incredibly demoralized. Intellectually I could tell what I needed to do. I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t just unhappy. I was depressed. The depression made me paranoid. I was convinced I was going out of business. I was convinced I was going to be evicted from my apartment. I was convinced that my clients knew I was a fraud. Any energy I had to sustain the business, now went into propping myself up, pretending that I was doing well. I knew I needed to learn to implement more structure before everything crashed. I attended conferences, I read books, and I asked successful friends for advice on how to do it. Trying to fix the problem didn’t make me feel better, it made me feel worse. I started to have desperate thoughts. I thought about getting a job. For an entrepreneur this is like suicide. Anything. Anything that would stop the feeling of falling I had every day. I knew I was a failure. (…) I discovered what the real cause of my stress was. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it. The problem was: I had forgotten why! I had gone through, what I now know is: A Split. And I needed to rediscover my Why. What I had lost was: perspective. I knew what I was doing. But I had forgotten why. There is a difference between running with all your heart with your eyes closed, and running with all your heart with your eyes wide open. For three years, my heart had pounded, but my eyes had been closed. I had passion and energy, but I lacked focus and direction. I needed to remember what inspired my passion.”
- “I had always been curious why people do the things they do. (…) I discovered why people do what they do. I became obsessed with the concept of why.”
- The author’s why: “To inspire people to do the things that inspire them.” (…) “It didn’t matter if I was doing it in marketing or consulting, it didn’t matter what types of companies I worked with, or which industries I worked in. To inspire people to do the things that inspire them. So that together we can change the world. That’s my path.”
- “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” — Henry Ford
- Henry Ford was a brilliant Why guy.
- „Henry Ford would be proud of me. After months of thinking I couldn’t, now I could.“
- From then on, the author started with why for everything he did. He talked about his why to anybody who would listen. Those early adopters who heard his cause, introduced him to other people they believed would benefit from it. So the Law of Diffusion started to do it’s job and now he is well known in this space.
- He started to talk about it. He shared it. There would never be a special formula or secret sauce of which only he knew the ingredients. The goal is that everybody and every organization can discover their why. So he shared everything, else it wouldn’t have been consistent with his Why.
- “I am the same person. I know the same things I did before. The only difference is: Now I start with Why. Like Gordon Bethune who turned around Continental Airlines with the same people and the same equipment, I was able to turn things around with the things I already knew and did. I’m not better connected than anyone else. I don’t have a better work ethic. I don’t have an Ivy League education, and my grades in college were average. The funny part is: I still don’t know how to build a business. The only thing that I do that most people don’t is that I learned how to start with Why.
- If you follow your Why, then others will follow you.
- When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you. (The story of cross runner Ben, who has an illness and needs 2x the time to finish a race. When he falls down, everybody helps him. When he finishes, he has 100 people behind him. Because he doesn’t compete against others. He competes against himself.)
- Olympic athletes don’t help each other. They’re competitors. Ben is not there to beat anyone but himself. He never loses sight of that. His sense of why he is running gives him the strenght to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep getting up, to keep going and going.
- Now think about how we do business. We’re always competing against someone else. We’re always trying to be better than someone else. Better quality. More features. Better service. Always comparing ourselves to others. And no one wants to help us. What if we showed up to work every day simply to be better than ourselves. What if the goal was to do better work this week than we did the week before. To make this month better than last month. For no other reason than because we want to leave the organization in a better state than we found it. 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 to outdo themselves. The pursuit for those who lose sight of why they are running the race, is for the medal or to beat someone else. What if the next time someone asks you “Who’s your competition?” we replied “No idea”. What if the next time someone pushes “Well, what makes you better than your competition?” we replied “We’re not better than them in all cases” and what if next time someone asks “Well why should we do business with you then?” we answer with confidence “Because the work we’re doing now is better than the work we were doing six months ago and the work we will be doing six months from this point will be better than the work we’re doing today, because we wake up every day with a sense of why we come to work. We come to work to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. Are we better than our competition? If you believe what we believe and you believe that the things we do can help you, then yes, we’re better. If you don’t believe what we believe and you don’t believe the things we do will help you, then no, we’re not better. Our goal is to find customers to believe what we believe, and work together so that we can all succeed. We’re looking for people to stand shoulder to shoulder with us, in pursuit of the same goal. We’re not interested in sitting across the table from each other in pursuit of a sweeter deal. And here are the things we’re doing to advance our cause. And the details of how and what you do follow.”
- This time it started with Why. 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.
