Simon Sinek: How to Make Your Life A Success | Inc.

I'm Chris Beier, the executive producer at Inc. Magazine. I'm here with Simon Sinek, a unshakeable optimist and inspirational speaker. Thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So, let me ask you a broad question before we get into the nitty-gritty. Why are you an optimist? Why do you choose to see the world that way? Yeah, I mean I don't know if optimists choose to see it that way I think, well I guess, you can choose to be an optimist that is a point of view that you can take right you can look for everything bad in the world and think the world is crashing and it will never get better or you can choose to see the good in people and choose to see the good in the world and then that's the direction that that will follow and you know I I tend to believe that there's no finality in anything you know it's not like you know you're even though we our lives are finite life is infinite you know life goes on and and for me the goal is not to produce something that has an end point but to produce something that has momentum that can live on beyond me and so I choose an optimistic path where did you go to college I went to Brandeis University just outside of Boston you go to grad school I have half a law degree oh yeah right right I dropped out of it yeah I dropped out of Law School what what what prompted you to drop out it's not for me and I knew that it wasn't for me yeah you knew that it wasn't for you before you even went to law school oh no I wanted to go yeah but once I was there I realized it wasn't for me and I figured why waste the time yeah so when you when you dropped out of law school and went into the real world so to speak what what were the jobs that you were holding before you went off and started your own thing I was living in England I went to law school in England and I not only made the decision to drop out of law school oh so made the decision to move back to the United States and I happen to be dating a girl who was studying advertising at Syracuse and so she got this idea this bug in my ear about advertising where I could do business and creative stuff all at the same time interests and so I made the decision to go into advertising to go into marketing and so my career started me I started looking for jobs in advertising and I started ad agencies so most of your wisdom is about how to better live in this corporate world yeah how did the corporate world suit you you know I I was still an entrepreneurial I think people misunderstand what the word entrepreneur means listen you know small business owners owned small businesses and entrepreneurs solve problems and there are many many entrepreneurs inside corporations yeah and not all small business owners or entrepreneurs I say so an entrepreneur is somebody who's constantly looking for a better way to do something there's a there's a sort of a mad scientist about them it's not simply you know understanding structure and building business and and that's the way I was in the corporate world which you know depending on my bus was either welcomed or or not oh yeah I used to get in trouble for that's not how we do it around here and really did I break any rules they're like no I'm like did I get it done they're like yes I'm like did it get it done better than you expected they're like yes I'm like so what exactly is the problem you know so I was that yeah I was you know I had good relationship I was very lucky I had some some not-so-great bosses at the beginning of my career which was actually great because I learned I learned about the camaraderie of a team but I had some fantastic bosses middle and later on in my career which was really great and a lot of who I've become as a leader is very much it was very much shaped by those people when did you start developing that first philosophy that you were known for the Golden Circle the concept of the Golden Circle when did that realization start to happen so I quit the ad business and started my own marketing firm already in 2002 and throughout my entire career I was always fascinated why some advertising or some marketing worked and some didn't uh-huh and because having been on the inside I knew that I could have a brilliant team and we could have come up with amazing creative ideas and it would fail or I could have a the same team on a different thing who would come up with equally good ideas and it would succeed mm-hmm and so I would I looked at the great marketers the ones that we admired and the ones that I've written about you know your Southwest Airlines your apples the ones that perennial favorites yeah and I recognized that there was a pattern in the way in which they spoke to us like I literally could look at their ads and like see that there was an organization and I wrote it down and even back then I called it the golden circle and when I when I had my own business I would you it was just basically in powerpoints to explain why some marketing worked and some marketing didn't it wasn't when you were first talking to a client it wasn't a big idea yeah yet it was simply an organizing principle how to organize information for marketing as it turns out there's a pattern as it turns out all the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers they all think act and communicate the exact same way and it's the complete opposite to everyone else so what is it you then that decided I want to share this with as many people as I can regardless of clients from my from my advertising agency or were people reaching out and saying hey can you talk about this outside of your work it's like so many of these stories it sounds like you know I was a genius but it was much more evolutionary than revolutionary a lot more organic what I was fascinated by this idea and it had a profound impact on my own life and my own view of the world and like anybody when you read a great book you see a great movie you tell your friends to read it or see it and so I would talk about this thing obsessively because it it was like it was you know it's like when you find a new song and all you do is listen to that one oh I've been there it's the same eye it's the same thing you know that's just this obsession for this one thing the difference is it didn't lose steam and my friends were taking it to heart and we're making crazy life changes like I'd really need jobs and starting businesses once they heard this thing because of a talk you had with him at a bar yeah or yeah and Wow and I figured out how to help people find their why and I would I and my friends would invite me to their homes to share with their friends so it all started with me standing in somebody's living room in New York City like you know with one of those those prepared platters that you get at the at the supermarket with the celery and the carrots and you know like one of those in the middle of the room and I would talk about the thing called the Y and people would ask me to help them find their when I used to do it for a hundred bucks on the side it was extremely organic you know I kept I talked about it everywhere when people would tell people about it people would ask me to come talk about it and somebody invited me to come give a talk to a bunch of entrepreneurs and I said yes Wow so what happened when when you gave their first target your first real talk were you like oh my I should maybe this shouldn't just be the sidekick I didn't know that being a speaker was actually a thing weirdly so and this is we're talking 2000s I started giving these talks in 2006 because it was my own discovery of my own why that really generated a passion for this idea and what was your own why to inspire people to do what inspires them so together each of us can change our world for the better which continues to be my passion and my drive and that has not changed it one you only have one why your whole life yeah and the opportunity is to live in balance or out of balance with that with that why I say it's not created in the middle of your life it's created early in your life and if you can figure out what it is you can choose to make decisions to to bring that Y to life and that's that's what I've done as we're here in this sort of 2006-2007 area you have your marketing firm and you're doing this consultation work teaching people how to find their why when did you sort of stop doing the more traditional marketing stuff and just really focus on this is what I'm doing probably a year ish after that mm-hmm it wasn't it was relatively quickly when I realized I wanted to only do spread this message of the Y yeah wasn't sure exactly what form it would take I just knew I wanted to do it and so managed to back out of my lease my back I didn't pay a fine oh my I got out of my lease from my office yeah and started from scratch because I wanted to I had this sort of very scientific approach which is scientific method which is I had a theory I wanted to prove the theory and the best way to prove the theory was to start clean yeah and and I didn't think I was right I just think thought I had an idea and I wanted to test it until it would fail and then I would tweak the idea and so I kept looking for new opportunities big companies small companies different industries public companies private companies government military I just was looking for all the different play that I could try it waiting for it to fail and it kept working Wow it really it was really an amazing experience to see this theory just keep working but I kept the reason I was very honest I was we're honest with people they like have you worked and you know politics before I'm like nope never done it but yeah but I want to give it a try and see this works it may not but I was always very honest about what my pursuits were yeah and people again the early adopters said well let's give it a try so everybody went in with open eyes me and my clients so you continue to do this and you continue to spread this message and it kept working tell me how you got that TED talk in 2009 well as you know I became a champion for this message and a champion for this cause and it was and so when you talk about what you believe people who believe what you believe recommend you or one introduce you to people I see and so the more I talked about it the more somebody would call me and say hey there's someone I think you should meet yeah and people found me I don't know you know from somebody else so you did not seek out I want to do this for know yeah so somebody somebody reached out to me and said you know they got my name yeah and they said we've heard about you we've heard your work we'd like to invite you to do a TEDx talk in Puget Sound in Seattle yeah and I said okay sounds amazing you know TEDx was a there's a relatively new thing back then and it was a big deal you know it still had a lot of real sort of an kind of gravitas to it and so I was very excited and of course of course said yes to the opportunity this little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't let me define the terms really quickly every single person every single organization on the planet knows what they do 100% some know how they do it whether you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP but very very few people or organizations know why they do what they do there was a talk I'd been giving for three years already this is in 2009 I've been giving this talk for three years I knew my stuff inside and out and so I showed up to give the best talk I could in 18 minutes for me the challenge was the 18 minutes none the talk how long is the talk no it was like an hour laughs yeah I was like I had no idea how to do it in 18 minutes and but I just gave the best talk I could and they put it on YouTube and I didn't expect it to get as many views as it did on YouTube and it did and in a few months the Ted people put it on main Ted calm and then things went silly Wow define things went silly it went from hundreds of thousands of views to millions of views and what happened were you ready for the wave to hit what did you know where you wanted the wave to take you definitely wasn't ready for it because everything was a surprise to me I only found out that they put it on Ted calm the week it happened like there's no advance notice they didn't ask permission was like they just did it and I found out about it I didn't know what it would do it was again I was out spreading a message and it was wonderful for me to have a yet another medium to help me spread this message so I didn't have to be in the room all the time yeah what I didn't expect is it would create more demand for me as a speaker I didn't and and I never set myself on this course to be a public speaker it was it's not really a chosen profession you know if I never give another speech again I'd be fine with that I do it because I believe in the message and I think it's important to go and preach that message and I see and the what the TED talk gave me was the opportunity to spread that message at vastly greater scale you know much bigger audiences yeah and that's that's been a great honor did you ever have moments where you thought wow so many people are listening to me I hope moments of impostor syndrome moments where you doubted yourself I think I would I wouldn't call it impostor syndrome I I was more humbled by the whole thing you know I would catch myself laughing and giggling at myself like I can't believe that they let me in here yeah like that happened more frequently would I stay posture I'm more like I think they're idiots because they don't really know that I am an idiot you know it's it's a hologram marcsa said I would never join a club that would have me as a member it was a little bit of that you know it's like what's wrong with these people that they think that you know it's like that that was the only sort of impostor II thing that that crept in it do you still have that um I yeah I do I I'm sort of I still I'm sort of amazed by it all you know and I'm I there's a you know like when I meet people who I know there's an author or oh I see celebrities I guess I know yeah I know your work yeah you know my work you know yeah that's it's it's it's humbling it's it's like people who whose books I used to read you know when I was in the marketing business like like they're friends now like that's weird to me yeah like that's uh that's very humbling why is there any sort of larger flaw that you had to confront about yourself whether it's a leader or just as a human over these last ten years and rising success there's many mm-hmm the biggest lesson I learned was thank goodness I learned it pretty early on which is and I think a lot of business owners make this mistake which is because I was the boss you know in my own mind yeah I thought I had to know all the answers and if I didn't I thought I had to pretend that I did and that's stupid and what I learned is that just because I may have the the top position in the hierarchy I I'm not expected to know everything and if I pretend to know everything it diminishes the value of all the great ideas and the great intelligence around me and when things got difficult I would never admit it right I would just put on a brave face and show up every day and and the the the biggest lesson I learned was to say I don't know I don't understand or I need help at any level about any subject yeah and amazingly I was always surrounded by people who wanted a help or who knew answers but they never offered to help or offer the answers because they didn't think I needed it because I kept pretending that I knew it all right not to mention the fact that nobody likes a know-it-all so that was huge for me and and when I was willing to ask for help and accept it when it was offered and and sort of accept the humility of the fact that other people know a lot more about a lot of things than I know uh I know one thing you know and they know lots of things that's when things really started to move because we were now a team that we were actually working together

Channel: Inc.

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Rating: 4.8955784 out of 5

Keywords: Inc. (Magazine), Inc.com, Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Business, Entrepreneur (Profession), Leadership, simon sinek why, simon sinek, simon sinek ted, simon sinek speech, entrepreneur, simon sinek motivation, famous speaker, life advice, simon sinek advice, simon sinek success, success motivation, success advice, entrepreneur advice, how to be successful, successful businessman, business plan, becoming rich, making a business, secrets of success, startup, simon sinek 2019

Id: K6IFaXghzK0

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018