How To Find Meaning When Life Feels Overwhelming: Simon Sinek (Transcript)

I had good clients. “Oh, Simon doesn’t want to go to work.”

And so I kept it to myself, which is a stupid thing to do. Turns out when you’re in a dark place and you don’t tell anybody about it, it gets darker. That’s sort of how it goes.

It wasn’t until a friend of mine confronted me and said, “There’s something wrong and you are not telling me.” And I came clean. And it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, because now I did not feel alone in my pursuit of being lost. Because when you’re lost and you keep it to yourself, you stay lost. And this is just – we’re human animals. We need each other.

And so when you’re lost and you simply tell somebody, “I’m lost,” and they’re willing to just hold your hand and make you not feel alone, even though the journey is still your own, the energy you have, the focus you have, the clarity you get, exponentially increases. And that’s what happened to me.

And I now had the energy to find the problem and rediscover purpose. I made this discovery of this thing called the why. More important than finding my own, I figured out how to help others find theirs. I started helping my friends. Their friends asked me to help their friends, and before you knew it, people asking me to talk about it. And then I got an opportunity to write about it.

So there is a process to find your why. And I’m proud to be a part of that, to help people find it. It’s completely changed my life.

The Gift of Catastrophe

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Does this mean that going through a catastrophe or a low point is a gift? In retrospect, in a bizarre way?

SIMON SINEK: Everybody I’ve ever talked to who’s learned a significant lesson from catastrophe or low points, we all are secretly grateful. Nobody wants to go through it again. I hope I never go through anything like that again. It was awful. But I’m glad it happened.

I think there are lessons to be learned in everything that goes wrong in our lives. And the question is, are you willing to learn those lessons? And for those who are, who simply go through something awful – and by the way, it’s all relative. A breakup could be the thing. It doesn’t have to be something that the world regards as catastrophic. Losing a job. I mean, anything that challenges you emotionally.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: what can I learn from this? And a part of that is accountability. And I think that if we want to talk about finding purpose, you have to take accountability for your life.

Taking Accountability for Your Life

What I mean by that is no one can bestow it upon you, no one can just give you a purpose. It is within you and it is there to be discovered. But at the same time, everything that happens to us in our lives, we have to say, “Okay, how did I contribute to this? How am I responding to this? How can I make this bad situation better? What did I do to make the situation happen?”

And if it was just bad luck, then we can all easily fall in and out of victimhood. And it plays its role. If something bad happens, it makes us feel better to be like, “The world hates me.” But at the same time, at some point we take accountability for the life that we’re living in the present. The past we can’t change, but we can be fully present to say, “Okay, what am I going to get if this has happened? How can I grow from this?” And that’s accountability.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What else are the differences between the people who go through a bad time and learn lessons from it and in retrospect say, “I don’t want to do it again, but I’m glad it happened,” and the people who go through a bad time, and there’s no alchemy out the other side of it?

The Power of Sitting in the Mud

SIMON SINEK: I do believe it’s having people by our side that make us feel not alone as we go through it. I’ve talked about this before, where the mistake we make as friends is we think we have to fix or offer advice to people who are going through something.

You know, somebody’s going through something horrible, a breakup, they got fired, whatever, you know, whatever it is, something went horribly wrong. And we well intentioned say, “Well, you should do this,” or “Why don’t you just go get this.”

A friend of mine who had a job at a company for most of his career, got fired, didn’t see it coming, and he went through this deep depression. Most of the advice he got was just “Get another job.” And you know, “Success is the biggest F you” and “You’ll show them.” And they were well intentioned in their advice. But that’s not what he needed. He needed somebody to just sit in the mud with him.

It was just by happenstance, I was the first friend to come to him and be like, “Boy, that really hurts.” That’s all I said, like “That really, that really hurts. This is really hard.” And he goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Don’t worry about getting another job. Just sit for a little bit. Yes, at some point you’re going to have to, but not today. Mourn the loss.”

Just being told it’s okay to have a feeling as opposed to action, action, action, action, which is our default, especially in the States and the West. If you’re not doing something, you’re a loser. And all it takes is one friend to say, “I’ll sit in the mud with you.”

People Know What They Need

Amazingly, people know what they need. I was going through a hard time. I wasn’t my best self, I was in a bad place. And a friend called me up and said, “How are you?” And I started saying, “I’m in a bad place and this is what I’m feeling.” And she started offering me advice, well intentioned. And I said, “Can you not, I don’t want that. Can you just let me tell you, I just need to get it out.” And she’s like, “Yeah, totally sorry, totally sorry.”

So you can tell somebody what you need and you can reset. It doesn’t ruin anything. At the same time, you can ask somebody as well. If somebody’s like, “I’m going through hell,” you can say, “Do you want me to offer you advice? Do you want me to give you some opinions or do you want me to just sit in the mud with you?” And they’d be like, “Just sit in the mud with me.”

People know what they need and at the right time they’ll say, “I think I’m ready now for that advice.” Most of us are well intentioned where we either offer or if somebody’s giving us advice and we don’t want it, we just sort of shut them out, which is also the wrong thing to do. Just tell people. It goes back to communication.

But at the end of the day, doing any of this stuff alone, if one of these things happens, tell somebody. Tell somebody. You don’t need to have a best friend. You just need somebody who you can tell. This is why there’s a rise of therapy and things like that. It’s like that’s a stranger that you can tell. Surrogate, confidant. The difference between a therapist and a friend is your friend never says “Time’s up.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I love that insight around the subtext of what somebody giving you advice is saying. And it’s well intentioned and they’re really trying to help.

SIMON SINEK: Even if it’s the wrong thing, it’s coming from a good place.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re saying, “Hey, my friend’s in trouble and I want to get them out of trouble.” From an emotional standpoint, I think what your brain tells you is “I’m not okay. And my not okayness is making them not okay. So they have to fix me. I can’t be not okay, because it’s causing an impact over there.”

There’s a great scene in the Kardashians, my friend Charlie did an analysis of. He compared Theo Von talking to Sean Strickland to the mother Kardashian talking to one of the daughter Kardashians. Sean Strickland’s really, really struggling, and Theo’s response to him is, “It’s okay, man. We don’t need to talk. We can just sit here for a while if you want.” That’s literally as close to saying, “Let’s sit in the mud.”

SIMON SINEK: Let’s sit in the mud. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The Kardashian interaction was, “I need you to get over this,” which was a denial in some ways of, “Well, it’s not okay for you to not be okay. Your not okayness is making me not okay. So you need to subjugate how you’re feeling in order to organize how I’m feeling.”

Varying degrees on that spectrum of trying to help people out. It makes it feel not valid, unsafe for you to have. “I’m sad, but I can’t be sad, because if I’m sad, that makes other people sad.”

Meeting Emotions with Emotions

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. I mean, feeling guilty for being sad is not healthy. Now, if somebody gets stuck in something that’s different, that becomes clinical. You know, if you remain depressed for too long, I mean, you know, depression is normal. Like, we all go through it at some points in various degrees. It’s temporary. But if we get stuck in something that’s different. Right. That’s not what we’re talking about.

But people do. You know, we have to remember we’re both rational and emotional animals. We have our neocortex, which is our homo sapien brain. Rational, analytical thought. And we are rational animals. We can think about things. We can weigh pros and cons. We can have opinions and points of view, and we can look at facts and data. But that neocortex is not responsible for behavior or our emotions.

And then you have that limbic brain, that sort of mammalian brain that’s responsible for all of our feelings, all of our behavior. No ability for language. And because we have both, they don’t always work well together. Right. And we often get the two confused, and we forget that we are both, which is both an advantage, but it’s also produces stress and paradoxes.

And you have to meet emotions with emotions and facts with facts. And when somebody’s in emotional state, facts are not the things you want to bring to the table. That won’t help convincing somebody why they shouldn’t be upset, even if you’re rationally right.

You know, like, it’s like you do it with children, right? It’s the same with children. Nothing changes. You know, like a kid spills the milk, they start crying because they wanted the milk. “Stop crying, we’ll get more milk. Stop crying.” Or they lose their teddy bear. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll get another one.” Factually, all true. Rationally, all true.

But that’s not what we do. We say, “Oh, I know, I know you were looking forward to it.” Or, “It’s horrible. You lost it. Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m here for you.” We meet emotion with emotion. We know how to do it for children. We reinforce the fact that it’s okay to have emotions, but for some reason, just because we get older, we think, “Oh, stop that.” Right?

And at the end of the day, if somebody is in an emotional state, you got to meet emotion with emotion. But you can do the facts later.

The Performance Story

I’ll give you a silly little example. A friend of mine was in a performance. She’s a performer. And I went to see the show. It was easily the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was awful. And I could. I would. I wish I could have walked out, you know, it was awful. But I stayed and I was supportive.

And at the end of the show, I waited in the lobby, you know, to meet the performers and see my friend. And she came out all excited. She’s still in makeup and costume. And the first thing she says is, “What’d you think?”

Now, I can’t lie, right? I can’t be like, “It’s amazing,” because that would be a flat out lie, right? But at the same time, I also recognized that even though she knows I’m an honest broker, even though I know she wants my opinion, she’s in an emotional state. She’s jacked up on adrenaline. She just came off the stage. Now is not the time for rational. Now is the time to meet emotion with emotion. And by the way, she’s not depressed or unhappy. She’s just jacked up high, right?

So I said, “Oh, my God, it was so amazing to see you on the stage.” True. This is the first time I’ve ever seen you on the stage. “What a treat to come and support you.” True. And that was it. “Oh, my God. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And then she’s off.

You know, two days later, we talked. The emotions have subsided. She’s back in a rational state. I called her up and said, “Hey, you asked me what I thought. Do you want to know what I think?” She goes, “I actually do.” I went, “Great. This sucked. This was awful. This.” You know, and she’s like, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” And we had a rational conversation about it. She took none of it personally.

You know, if somebody comes off the stage and the first thing you said is, like, “I don’t know, I think you can do better,” or, “That script.” Yeah, it’s just going to hurt. It’s just going to hurt. Yeah. And we get it wrong all the time.

Timing and Empathy

And the lesson here is it’s bigger than meet emotion with emotion, facts with facts. It’s bigger than that. It’s that it doesn’t all have to be done in the moment. You can play with time, right?

So if somebody is going through something, just sit in the mud with them, you know, as they’re going through it. Yeah. “Boy, this sucks. Oof. Yeah, I mean, I know what you’re going through. Wow, you must be really hurting.” “I am,” right?

Two days later, three days later, you’re like, “Hey, I was thinking about what you’re going through with your relationship, whatever it is. Can I offer some thoughts?” I always ask permission. “Can I offer some thinking, some ideas?” The words already give away that we’re talking rational, right? They go, “Yeah, actually, you can.” There you go. Same things I was going to say two days ago.

And so we don’t have to solve everything in the moment just because we had the thought. And this is where empathy kicks in. Just because you’re having the thought doesn’t mean they’re ready to hear it. And the whole idea is, how do you be present for the person and give them the thing they need in the time that they need it? And that’s being an empathetic human being that’s being situationally aware. Right. As to sort of, what am I playing with here?

And if you’re unsure, ask. Like I said, for the most part, people know what they need. And if they say they don’t know, they’re going to say, “I don’t know.” And then you say, “Well, why don’t I try this and you can tell me how it feels? I’ll offer some suggestions, and if it doesn’t feel right, I’ll back off.” You can have these negotiations and so the skills of human interaction.

The Challenge of Being Human

And this is just an annoying thing about being human. You know, cats are naturally good at being cats. They don’t have to study, they don’t have to learn. They’re just naturally good at it. Human beings are not naturally good at being human. We suck at it. And again, it’s because of that neocortex. It’s because we have the ability to overthink everything, right?

You can literally prevent yourself from sleeping because you are thinking about something that you cannot control until you wake up tomorrow. It’s madness, right? But we have that magical ability to overthink everything. And so it’s really hard to be human. And we actually have to learn and practice and read and watch things and ask people to get better at being human.

And some people choose to be the best human beings they can be, and they go on that journey. By the way, you’ll never be a great human being. You’ll never be perfect. You’ll just be varying degrees of good. Some of us choose to go on that journey for both reasons. It feels good. It makes me a better version of myself. I like who I am more now than I did before. And for others, I am a better friend. I’m a better partner, I’m a better son, I’m a better father, whatever it is, because I chose to go on this journey.

Defining Friendship

And then it goes right back to, what is a friend? Why do we need friends? What is a friend? And I’m thinking a lot about friendship these days. We know that a lot of people are struggling with friendships these days. I think men are struggling more than women. As I talk about this concept of friendship, women come up to me, but men come up to me with much more, sort of. They’re hurting. And it doesn’t matter how successful, it doesn’t matter how old. I’m getting it from every age, every income bracket. In fact, the more successful ones are struggling the most.

And but how can we talk about friendship? We know what a romantic partner is. We know what a relationship at work is. We have formal hierarchies. It helps us understand where we are in the pecking order. But what is a friend? Does every friend have to be a deep, meaningful relationship? No, clearly. Do you want every friend to just be superficial, fun? No, don’t want that either. Do we have to make every fun friend a deep meaning? Does every engagement? No, of course not. So what is a friend? You have to have a definition of something before you know you can build it.

My definition of friend is the exact same definition I have for a romantic relationship, and it’s the exact same definition I have for community. A friendship is when two people agree to grow together. A relationship is when two people agree to grow together. A community is a group of people who agree to grow together.

And what that means is, I will take myself on. I know you’re taking yourself on. I’m going to ask you to help me, and I’m going to be there to help you. And if we get this right, community, corporate culture, friendship, romantic relationship. If we get this right, whether we stay in this relationship for a short term or a long term, whether it is successful or not, whether we actually end up hating the relationship or hating the job, one thing we can say for sure is if we agree to this, we will come out of this better versions of ourselves than when we went in.

And so the success or failure of a relationship is not the point. Clearly, we want relationships to succeed, but if they don’t, you better have gotten something out of it. And it goes full circle back to where we started, which is, if you’re going to go through shit, you might as well learn something.

And if you start with that intention from the beginning and you say to the person, after you develop a relationship or rapport, I mean, you don’t have to say it, but it’s nice to say things. I’m a great believer in putting it all on the table. “I really like you. I feel like I’m growing because of you. You teach me things, you show me things, you hold me accountable when I screw up. I like that.” Invariably you’re probably going to get a response that says, “You’re doing the same for me and I really appreciate too,” or, “Well, I’m glad you like it. I don’t get that from you.” Like, you’re going to get information.

But I think that the pursuit of friendship is to find someone who’s willing to grow with you. Now, the big caveat is, are you willing to grow yourself? Are you willing to grow yourself?

The Loneliness Problem

And I think where people get stuck, and this is the saddest part, I hear people tell me “I have no close friends.” They have friends they hang out with, people they have a good time with, go out, play video games with, whatever it is, you know. But they wouldn’t call any of them to say, “I’m struggling.” And so that’s where the loneliness sets in.

And there is some degree of accountability there, right, where we can play the victim. And the victim to be a victim means I am not accountable, right? That’s what it is. It is being done to me, but I am not. I’m a passive player in this. Right? And even if that’s true, you still have a role in this thing called your life. You’re the actor in this play. Right? You still have a role to play.

And so even if things are being done to you, how you respond is you. Right? How you respond to conflict is you. You can choose to just disengage. I’ve seen that happen professionally. I’ve seen it happen personally. Something goes haywire whether they deserve it or not, and they choose to just disengage. “Well, screw this.” As opposed to learning how to have a confrontation, which doesn’t mean coming and screaming and yelling and pointing. It means and come saying, “I am struggling. There is a story that I’m telling myself. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but can I tell you my story?”

The Diya Khan Example

And there’s a great irony in it. When you have a confrontation like that, which is your job is to help the other person feel safe, even though you feel that they’re the oppressor. Okay, let’s unpack that.

Diya Khan, who is a BAFTA winning, I think she’s an Emmy winning as well, documentarian, grew up, she’s a Muslim woman living in the UK. She made some comments on the BBC that went viral about multicultural society. And she started getting trolled by the far right by the white. By white supremacists. It got so bad that the police advised her to stay away from open windows.

The way that Diya responded was to move to the United States and try to get to know white supremacists. She was at Charlottesville walking with them. Not marching with them, but walking with them. Big difference. And she offered them a safe space to feel heard.

Now this sounds insane, right? They should be giving her a safe space to feel heard. Yeah, but that’s never going to happen. And that’s part of the problem. And I talked to Diya after George Floyd. I talked to her after January 6th. I talked to her after all of these sort of big events. And she said to me, “You’re not going to like my answer, but in all the research that she’s done with jihadis and white supremacists and all of it, in every circumstance,” she says the victim has to go first because the quote unquote, oppressor will never go first. They will never do it.

And so what she did, and she made a documentary called “White Meeting the Enemy.” You can go watch it happen. You can see it. She doesn’t agree with them. She doesn’t affirm their beliefs, but she offers them a safe space to feel heard. And then, over the course of time, something happens. You see the transformation. They can no longer reconcile their racist points of view with the fact that they now trust this woman and consider her a friend. And one by one, they drop out of the movement.

Taking Accountability in Relationships

And so if there is a boss who is a bad boss or a friend who’s a bad friend, or a partner who’s a bad partner, you can play the victim, and you can wait and wait and wait for them to do the right thing. Which should they. Yeah, they should. Yeah, it’s your boss. They should know better. They should be the one that comes and says, “Hey, it’s not working out. Let’s. Can we have a conversation? All this tension. I’d like to lean into the tension.” You’re with a partner. “I’d like to lean. We’ve been tense for the past three weeks. I’d like to lean into it.” Yeah, yeah, they should.

They won’t either, because they don’t care. They don’t know. They don’t have the skills. They’re embarrassed. They’re afraid. Who knows what the reasons are? Only a few times, it’s because they hate you and they want to hurt you. Most of the times, it’s obliviousness, fear, lack of skills.

And so, yeah, you’re the one has to go. And this is where the accountability comes in. You’re going to have to walk in and be like, “Hey, here’s the story I’m telling myself. I feel like you hate me.” You don’t say “you hate me.” That’s an accusation. “I feel. I feel like you hate me. And there’s a few things, and maybe I’m looking for the evidence because I’m really sensitive right now, but let me tell you the three things that make me feel like you hate me. And I want to put it on the table because I don’t want to hate you, and I don’t want us to fail. And I don’t know how to have this conversation, but I want to put it on the table.”

That is a human skill. And those are the skills we’re lacking. Those are the skills we’re lacking. And the only reason to want to learn those skills is because we take accountability for the people that we are.

I can’t control anything in this world. I can’t control how people treat me. I can’t control world events. I can’t control politics. I can’t control natural disasters. I have zero control over any of that. So I can sit around and wait for the world to look after me and sometimes I’ll get lucky and sometimes I’ll get unlucky. You know, things have gone my way by no talent of my own. And things have gone badly, no matter how much I tried.

Taking Responsibility vs. Playing the Victim

SIMON SINEK: So part of not being a victim, there’s the flip side as well, is you can’t take full responsibility when things go right either. You can’t mix your logics, right? I love talking to finance people, I love talking to bankers, because when they make tons of money they’ll tell you it’s because they’re geniuses and if they lose tons of money, they’ll tell you it’s because of the market conditions.

You can’t mix your logics. You’re either lucky and unlucky or you’re a genius and an idiot. But you can’t mix the logics and the same goes with ourselves. I can’t take all the credit when things go right if I won’t take some responsibility when things go wrong. I can either choose to say, all my success is dumb luck and all of my failures are bad luck, or I can say, I work hard and I’m an idiot. Right? I can’t mix the logics. You can pick which logic you want. I don’t care. But you can’t mix them.

And I think this is part of what we’re saying, which is I can choose to go through life lucky or unlucky. It’s a mode you can choose to just waft through life. You know, it’s not a criticism. Or you can choose to say, no, no, no, I take responsibility that I, in some way, shape or form, contribute to the situation that I’m in and the feelings that I have. And even though I may not have been able to control the circumstances, I can control my reaction to those circumstances.

Did I go off the handle? Did I attack somebody personally? Did I attack them versus their behavior? We do that. That one is the easiest one to fix and the most common one we make. The common mistake we make. “You’re a liar” versus “you told me a lie.” You attack someone’s character, watch how they respond. They will come back with ferocity. If you say “you told me a lie,” you can actually have a conversation about that. It’s a behavior. “You’re a cheat.” “You cheated.” “I am not a cheat.” “But I did. I did cheat.” Like, it’s not my character.

Remember, everybody thinks they’re good. And this is the thing that I think people get wrong all the time, which is really fun. And just to have these little awarenesses, I’ll give you a great example. So do you remember the movie Inglourious Basterds?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I never watched it.

Everyone Thinks They’re on the Side of Good

SIMON SINEK: Oh, it’s one of the greatest films ever made. I mean, I cannot recommend it enough. Christoph Waltz, who plays the Nazi, plays the main Nazi. It put him on the map. He was this obscure Austrian actor, and then this movie made him an international star, and I think he won an Oscar for it. Actually, he’s brilliant in it. He’s chillingly brilliant. How good he is in this Nazi role, right? And he’s relaxed and he’s got a sense of humor. He doesn’t play this caricature of evil, you know, that’s one of the reasons he’s so chilling. He’s so good at it.

So he was on a talk show when he was promoting the movie, and the host asks him, “What did you have to do as an actor to play evil so effectively?” And he’s, you literally, look, he’s got this look of total confusion on his face. He doesn’t understand the question. He goes, “What?” And the host says, again, “You were so good. What did you have to source yourself from to play evil? You were so scary.” And he looks at the host and goes, “He wasn’t evil.”

And this is why he was so good at his role. Because what he understood is no one thinks they’re evil. Everyone thinks they’re on the side of good. Everyone thinks they’re on the side of good. When we look at our political discourse these days, it’s hilarious. Everybody’s accusing each other of being evil and bad, but both sides, if you talk to them, actually think that they’re trying to do good. Both sides are on the side of good.

And if you just remember that, that people think they’re on the side of good. Now, they may be misdirected, and all of those things are still true, but everybody thinks they’re on the side of good. If you just start with that basic knowledge, how we interact is very different. Where we no longer seek to criticize because “you’re evil.” That’s my judgment. But I seek to understand where you’re sourcing that good from. And curiosity is a great way to interact with human beings with whom we disagree.

Being a Good Friend to Yourself

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t it interesting that we are better at giving advice to other people than we are to ourselves? You know, a little bit of time spent refining our… Are we in the advice giving mode or are we in the listening mode? Learning to have a mindfulness gap and being able to sit with silence and all of this sort of stuff. That is a skill that I think most people can develop really well for…

SIMON SINEK: A friend, I think so.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That is a skill that I think most people will really struggle to develop for themselves.

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, I think that’s true too. And you make a good point, which is, are you a good friend to yourself? My friend Rick, who’s sort of this remarkable entrepreneur monk, not literally, but he’s just one of the coolest sort of advice givers I know. I was talking to him about loneliness, and I asked him point blank, “Do you ever get lonely? Do you ever feel lonely?” And he smiled and said, “No, I’m always with myself.” He’s cultivated such a beautiful relationship with himself that he allows himself to have all the things, all the feels.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you know Dry Creek Dwayne? Do you know who that is? He’s a rancher and wrangler from Wyoming. Big beard, permanently affixed with a cigar between his fingers. And I had him on the show the back end of last year, and we were talking about something not too dissimilar, and he said, “I like me, I’d buy me a beer.” Yeah, it’s just such a simple way to put across. “I’d buy me a beer.”

And it took a long time. You know, he’s in his 60s now, and it took him a long time to cultivate in himself the sort of person he would want to be friends with. And if you’re the kind of person who regularly makes promises and doesn’t keep them to you…

SIMON SINEK: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you’re the sort of person who places the opinions of others over the opinion of yourself, you’re an untrustworthy ally.

SIMON SINEK: You’re a bad friend to yourself. You’re a bad friend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes.

SIMON SINEK: You’re a bad friend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re a bad self friend.

SIMON SINEK: You’re a bad friend. And I love that. If we say this is a beautiful… Let’s take that definition of self, you know, let’s add it to my definitions of two people who agree to grow together. I am one person who agrees to grow with myself. You know, I think that is beautiful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, do I think that I’m helping me?

Giving Yourself Grace and Embracing Complex Emotions

SIMON SINEK: Do I think that I’m helping me and grace is something that we don’t talk about. To give yourself grace, you know that it’s okay to have… It’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to be lonely, it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to have any feeling that you’re having. You know, just allow feelings to happen. Like things happen in the world. We have emotional responses. It’s okay.

Like, you only have to really ask for help or think you’re unhealthy if you get stuck in one of those feelings for too long. But if you’re generally having feelings, and here’s the best one, I learned this during lockdown, you can actually have two conflicting feelings simultaneously. Simultaneously.

So, for example, when I can’t get out of my entrepreneurial self, it’s in my DNA. And as an entrepreneur and as a creative person, my happy place is chaos. Because creativity is finding order and chaos. And in order for me to be creative, I got to have a little chaos, whether it’s imposed upon me or I stir the pot myself, right? So when we went into lockdown and it destroyed my business, I mean, it blew it up. I was having a blast. I was having so much fun.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lots of problems to face.

SIMON SINEK: Oh, my God, I had to reinvent the whole business from scratch. I mean, literally, I was like, I was… And I was very embarrassed because there was death and there was uncertainty and there was pain all around me and… And I kept it to myself because I… But at the same time, I realized I can have two feelings. I can be sad and I can mourn, and I can have fun simultaneously. Simultaneously.

And so I think sometimes we get embarrassed when we feel that we’re having a… Like, if I’m, like, right now, like, life’s great and my friend is really struggling, I’m embarrassed that I’m good when they’re bad. No. I can be empathetic and sit in the mud with and be like, “This is awful. Oh, my God.” And if they say, “How are you?” I’m like, “I’m great.” I don’t have to say, “Well, you know, it’s okay.” Like, we can have both.

I can be upset about the world, I can be frustrated and uncertain, and I can be excited and clear all at the same time. And I think that’s what we forget, which is, as emotional animals. The one thing that we can all agree on about emotions is they’re messy. Sometimes they fire at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Sometimes we have an emotion that doesn’t quite match the situation. Sometimes we overdo it, sometimes we underdo it. Multiple emotions simultaneously. Human beings are messy. That’s part of what makes life fun.

The Tangled Ball of String Metaphor

It’s like somebody just gave you a big ball of twisted up string and said, “Okay, the job for your life is to do your best job untangling this.” And people who go through life and just allow life to happen to them, they just walk around holding the ball of string going, “I don’t even know where to start. This is too difficult. This is a twisted knot. This is a mess. What do you want me to do with this? This is unusable. Ugh.”

Or there are some people who be like, “All right, well, this is a mess, but I’ll start somewhere. This looks like it has promise. Oh, it didn’t. All right, I’ll try something else.” And they’re just spending their life trying to untangle the ball of string. And if you just get a little bit of an untangled, not only does it give you confidence that you can get more untangled, but you serve as an inspiration to your friend. “Wow. You really are a different version of when I met you a bunch of years ago.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

SIMON SINEK: That’s because I’m busy working on this tangled ball of string. I can help you with yours. It’s probably not the same as mine. But I can show you some of the things I tried and maybe they’ll work for you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s have a look.

SIMON SINEK: Let’s have a look.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wanted to give you read an essay that I wrote last week.

SIMON SINEK: Okay.

Finding Balance Between Meaning and Happiness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That I thought might be interesting to you and it relates to something we’ve been talking about so far. Lots of people that consume work like yours listen to shows like this. Many of them would identify as something like an insecure overachiever. I think somebody that’s very introspective, they ruminate, they like to improve themselves, they’re growth minded, they’re upward aiming and I think they sometimes focus on working hard. Almost a puritan work ethic would be the way that they approach life.

So there’s a famous Viktor Frankl quote: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue.

But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem, Frankl’s inverse: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.” If ease, grace, joy and playfulness don’t come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful.

TLDR: you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn’t come easily to you. As my friend Bill Perkins says, “Delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.” Or Alan Watts: “If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them.”

Everyone is taught that on the other side of discomfort is something valuable. We’re told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren’t difficult to attain, they wouldn’t be worthwhile. This is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Some people are hyper responders to this instruction and go on to become workaholics and insecure overachievers.

From the outside, this looks like you’ve transcended the shallow need for pleasure. But in reality it’s just cope to avoid facing the fact that you struggle to feel joy. So instead you perpetually promise yourself that happiness might finally come tomorrow. But like running toward the horizon, tomorrow never arrives. Congratulations. You’ve managed to subjugate your joy as a tribute to your work.

Do not confuse humorless and fun-lacking seriousness with being sophisticated and caring about your pursuit. Thoreau says “The price of anything is the amount of life that you exchange for it.” And by this logic, many of us are paying into a bank account that we never withdraw from.

I think with this Olympic champion, the LeBron James of winning the marshmallow test, I wonder how many people are bypassing more simple day to day joy because it feels originally it was hard for them to access and now it feels flimsy, unsophisticated. “I should be aiming for something higher than this.” And I wonder how many people can be fulfilled with much simpler pleasures than the ones that they’re pursuing delayed gratification to try and achieve.

The Paradox of Being Human

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, I think it’s very well said and very well written. Look, I think both are true right at the end of the day, and you and I were talking about this off camera before we started, which is there’s a paradox to being human. And this is where Maslow and his hierarchy of needs – Maslow got it wrong. And it speaks to what you’re speaking about, right?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – people know the basic level of the triangle of the pyramid is food and shelter, that we need food and shelter first. The third level up is relationships, and then the top is self-actualization. Right? But he’s wrong because Maslow made the classic mistake, which is he forgot that there’s a paradox of being human, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups every day.

And every day we’re confronted with small or big choices: Do I put myself first at the sacrifice of the group or do I put the group first at the sacrifice of myself? And we can debate which one you’re supposed to do. And the answer is you’re both right and you’re both wrong. It’s a paradox because we have to be ourselves and pursue our own purpose, but we’re also supposed to be social animals and contribute to the society, the family, the team that we’re a part of.

And you’re saying the same thing here, which is – and this is where Maslow got it wrong. He only thought about us as individuals, right? As an individual on a desert island. You’re right. Food and shelter comes first. You know, relationships, I’ll deal with that later. But can you imagine living a whole life for self-actualization? How lonely. What about shared actualization?

I’ve never heard of anybody dying because they were hungry. I’ve never heard of anybody dying by suicide because they were hungry. I’ve heard of people dying by suicide because they were lonely. So that means relationships as a member of a group is more important than food and shelter. If you consider us members of groups, not just individuals, and it’s both.

It’s Both, Not Either/Or

And I think you’re saying the same thing here. It’s not a debate of do I put happiness ahead of purpose or purpose ahead of happiness. The answer is it’s both. And it’s messy and sometimes competitive. But there’s entire camps you have on the extreme, the hedonists that say, “No happiness in the moment, purpose be damned, we’re all going to die.” And on the other end you’d be like, “No, no longevity purpose. What’s it all mean at the expense?” And the answer is yes, and it’s both.

And I think this is where we’ve made this mistake and we keep doing this in our lives. We make complex arguments binary, and then we choose one and we attempt to build lives around one pillar when the reality is it’s both. And sometimes it’ll be in balance and sometimes it’ll be out of balance. And I think to let go.

And I think the way you construct it is, right, you have the insecure high performer, but you also have the insecure low performer, right? And the question is, okay, so what does the secure high performer look like? And I would argue that the secure high performer is not following the game plan that these people are following of grow, grow, grow, retreat, retreat, retreats, off to Costa Rica again, read every book, do every practice, take every supplement, wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, cold plunge, cold plunge, right?

You talk to the happiest people in the world, they do some of that. They don’t do all of it. They all have great relationships. And so I wish people would pay as much attention to how they show up for their friends as they do to which supplements they take, how many hours of sleep they’re getting, whether they’re cold plunging or not, or what their exercise regime is. I wish they would pay that much attention to the kind of friend they are, to the kind of partner they are that would find balance.

Lessons from the Blue Zones

Even like the blue zones. Like, everybody’s obsessed with, like, look at their diet. Look, they walk every day. They also convene and eat with their friends every single day. And they have senses of humor and they’re okay with being underachievers. Right? Like, and I think you’re right. You talked about gratitude. Gratitude is a big part of it, right? Which is to just be grateful for what you have.

Like, what if you – everybody’s chasing some sort of finish line, but what if you just today just made the decision? Because they’re all decisions. I’ve already won. I’ve already won. That’s it. I’m alive. I’ve got one good friend. I’ve got one – I’m sure everyone else can find something in our lives that we like. I got a great score in my video game yesterday. Really happy about that. Like, it can be something stupid and mundane, but something that you’re a little bit proud of, even if it’s a little bit embarrassing.

Like, I like that pair of jeans, right? I went on a good date, whatever it is, right. Things are okay. And this idea of already thinking of yourself as having won the game and the rest of life is simply, it’s all after the finish line. It’s anything you want to do after the finish line, go have a good time. And somebody gave me that advice. My friend Rick, he said, “What if you just decided you want already?” And I was like, oh my God, everything’s great.

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Redefining Success and Embracing Failure

SIMON SINEK: This idea of what does it mean to be a success? I went through this recently where I think one of the reasons I tend to find peace in things is I’m not competing with anybody else but myself. There’s always somebody smarter. There’s always somebody who’s sold more books. You read that statement. And I sat here and went, “Wow, that is beautiful. Wow, that is great.” And didn’t think, “Oh, I should have come up with that. Oh my God, he said it better than me. I have to be the one that comes with this.” No. That was gorgeous. Thank you for sharing. Wow. Right?

But by thinking of myself, I have already won. I’m not in competition with you and what you’ve written. If I think that I haven’t won yet, then I sit here and seethe, maybe get competitive.

And so I had this disagreement with somebody recently where our team missed a goal pretty significantly. I think goals are important. Like mile markers are important, but they’re not the end all, be all. It’s not the end of the game. It’s just measurement of speed and distance. And we had a five year plan. We missed the first year goal. So we’re off plan now.

And so one of my colleagues wanted to change the second year goal, make it lower. I said, “Well, why would we do that?” Well, she said, “Because we’re not going to hit the second year goal.” I’m like, “I know, because we missed the first year goal, but if we change the second year goal, that means you’re changing the whole five year goal just because we missed year one. How about we just work harder or be more creative and find new ways and maybe we’ll miss the second year goal, but man, we can keep trying. No, we’re not changing the goal. Why would you want to change it?”

And she said, “Because I don’t like to fail and I know you don’t either.” And that’s when I realized she’s wrong. I’m totally fine being a failure. In fact, I came to the realization that most of my life is a failure. And what I mean by that is my desires and my ambitions are greater than my talents or my achievements.

I want to do things in the world that I don’t know how to do them. The reality is I’m probably not going to do them. And the things that I’ve accomplished, like they’re coming close to what I want to achieve, but I haven’t gotten there and I may not. And a couple things have gone well that I planned, but most of the things fell short.

And so I’ve been very comfortable being a failure, meaning I’m comfortable falling short of big goals. And I would rather fall short of a big goal and consider myself a failure than lower the goals to the level which I can accomplish all of them, just so I can feel like I’m a success.

The Freedom of Accepting Failure

And it’s less about the goal setting, and it’s more about the mindset of being okay being the failure. Because what it does is it frees you to imagine bigger, take risks like you never imagined you could before. Because failure is not the thing you’re afraid of.

You know that entrepreneurial mindset. Anybody who starts a business is an idiot. You have an over 90% chance of failure. Why would you do that? Because their vision is bigger, their ambition is bigger than their skills or their accomplishments. And if you’re okay with that, you actually have a good time.

And so I’ve been through it where I’m depressed when I realize I haven’t achieved something, and I feel like a failure, and now I’m just cool with it. And it’s not false modesty or it’s a hack. It’s a mental little trick, like, even trying something new at work. And I said to the team, “This could be a wild success or a total failure. I don’t know, but let’s have a blast and find out which one.”

Now, you and I sitting, listening to this, going, “Well, that seems like a pretty good mentality for the success side. Having fun. Low stress.” And by the way, it absolutely might fail, but the team is like, “All right, well, it’s on us.” And we’re all taking a bet on ourselves, not each other and each other. But the point is, we all see ourselves as contributors.

And it goes back to what we were saying before, which is, do you want to be a victim and wait things to happen, or do you want to be a contributor and if it fails, you’ll be like, “Oh, we screwed that up.” And I think so much of this is mindset. So much of this is mindset.

The Tennis Player Mindset

I just watched the thing yesterday. So funny how things show up at the right time, right? I just watched the thing yesterday where a guy compared the top five tennis players. Do you know about this? Compared the top five tennis players from the top 25 tennis players. So what makes the top five so much better than all the others?

And he goes through the list. Is it their diet? Is it their coaching? Is it their work ethic? No, no, they all have that, right? And he literally goes through all the lists of what it could be, and it’s none of those things.

The one thing that the top five have that the others don’t is that when they score a point, they go, “That’s fun. I love this game. I love this game.” When they miss a point, they go like, “Oh, I missed that one. But wait till you see what I do in the next one.” And there’s sort of a joy and love of what they’re doing and a success or failure, their mindset in the moment.

And what he found is that when they have that sort of joy, “Oh, I love this game.” When it goes, “Well, don’t worry, you’ll get the next one.” Their heart rate goes down. And if you keep adding all up, those little things. So when you have your heart rate goes down, you have more. You preserve energy, you’re more relaxed. For one point or two points, it means nothing. But if you now go to the end of the match, all those little things you’ve now stored up, you have way more energy at the end, and you’re way more relaxed to play each point.

And that’s life. I think it’s a great metaphor, which is, all of this is infinite. It’s all 1% better. It’s all the British cycling team that James Clear writes about. You know that just this stupid little thing that by itself means nothing.

The Power of Small, Consistent Actions

And I’ll give you an example, right? Go back to relationships. Like, how do you find love? Like, how do you get someone to love you? Do you buy them flowers on Valentine’s Day and make sure to get them a cake on their birthday? Sure. Those things are nice, won’t make them love you.

It’s the millions of innocuous little things that by themselves do nothing. That when you wake up in the morning, you say good morning before you check your phone, that when you go to the fridge to get a drink, you’re like, “Hey, babe, you want a drink?” And you bring them one. Or you write them a little card for no reason than to say, “Hey, I wrote this card just to tell you thank you. I’m glad you’re in my life.”

By themselves, each one of those things does very, very little. But if you add them up over time, someone will fall in love with you and the same thing will happen to you. And this is the great thing about love, is you never know when it happens. It’s not like if you do these things on this date at this time, love is the reaction. You just. I don’t know, it happens at some point. Nobody ever sees it coming.

Now treat joy and life that way. There’s no date, there’s no back plan. You have to trust it’s like exercise, right? Which if you say, “Simon, I want to get into shape, can you teach me how?” Like, absolutely I can. I want you to work out every single day for 20 minutes. You’re going to have to do upper body, lower body, core. You’re going to have to do all these things.

“Well, where should I start?” Yes, doesn’t matter. Pick one. Whatever one you want to do. But eventually you’re going to have to do them all. And you have to work out every day for 20 minutes. “Well, can I take a day off because I’m tired?” Yes. “How many days can I take off?” I don’t know. But not too many. 100% of the time you will get into shape. Everybody will. Some people a little sooner, some people a little later.

“Simon, what’s the date and time that I will be in shape?” I don’t know. And neither does any doctor. But you trust the process. We all know that, that 20 minutes every day, 100% of people will have 100% success. How many things in life can you say that about?

Well, I think that living our lives and finding joy is exactly the same, which is if you can trust the process of little things, that the big retreat and the big this and the big that and the moving across the country, those things are good. Those things are helpful. That’s called intensity. Like going to the dentist twice a year is intensity. But if that’s all you do, all your teeth will fall out.

It’s the consistency of brushing your teeth every day, that even though brushing your teeth once does nothing, if you do it every single day, it works. And so, yes, go on the retreats, have fun, but those aren’t the things. It’s the consistency. And I think that’s where we miss out.

The Problem with “Crushing” Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The original name for this podcast when I was brainstorming was Crushing a Tuesday. Glad that I went with modern wisdom, but Crushing a Tuesday is an idea from Tim, and he says your life is made up of ordinary Tuesdays. So your goal should be to construct your life in a manner that an ordinary Tuesday gets crushed, that you do well, that it moves you in the right direction, that you enjoy it, that it’s positively rewarding. It’s like, “Oh, what a cool idea that life is made up of very normal Tuesdays.”

SIMON SINEK: I don’t know the concept that he talks about, but the way you’ve described it, I would actually push back a little bit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

SIMON SINEK: What if you don’t crush the Tuesday? What if you sit and watch TV all day and get nothing done? Are you a failure. Have you not crushed Tuesday? Should you be depressed and do double effort on Wednesday? Or maybe watching TV all day and being a vegetable is crushing Tuesday. So that’s the problem with words like crushing Tuesday, which is it doubles down on achievement, it doubles down on productivity.

And I learned this, this goes back many years. And I would wake up on a Sunday, wake up, you know, pretty early. Just that’s when I woke up. And then I would sit in bed and do I have no idea what until noon. And the guilt. And then somebody be like, “What? You know, I’d see somebody in the afternoon, like, so how’s your day? What’d you do today?” Because it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon, right? And I’d be like. And I had this tremendous shame that I sat in bed until noon.

And this went on for a while. And I thought myself lazy and I would do stupid stuff. Yeah, I’d read the newspaper a little bit, but I play games, maybe go get a cup of coffee, come back into bed, you know. And then I realized it’s my Sunday. I can do whatever the hell I want with my Sunday. I love sitting in bed till noon on a Sunday. And if somebody’s like, “What’d you do today?” I’m like, “I sat in bed till noon. What’d you do? Don’t remember. Don’t know. Couldn’t tell you. Nothing worthwhile.”

And it’s just what gave me what. What gave me the relaxation and recharge my batteries was not sitting in bed until noon. What gave me relaxation and recharge my batteries was liking that I sat in bed and not being intention against it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, well, that’s crushing a Sunday, you know.

SIMON SINEK: Again, but this is the problem with our vernacular in the modern day, which is these words remind us.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Crush.

SIMON SINEK: These are achievement words.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Grind, hustle, grind, hustle.

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, and that’s the problem. The words matter.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How about love a Tuesday, winning a Tuesday.

SIMON SINEK: No, no, no.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Loving a Tuesday, enjoy a Tuesday, love.

SIMON SINEK: A Tuesday, have a Tuesday. You know, survive Tuesday, get through Tuesday. Right. Like winning. Like all of these binary. Win, loss, crush, fail, you know, there. That’s the problem is the binary. We’re going right back to that problem again of those constructions that you talked about in your eloquent essay. It’s not binary, it’s messy.

Learning to Give Yourself Permission to Rest

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wanted to just loop back a little there to people’s sense of confidence in their own word. We mentioned before, we’re often able to give advice to other people that we struggle to give to ourselves. We are able to show up, be sympathetic, empathetic, understanding, patient for other people in a manner that we can’t to us.

I’m interested in how we can learn to be more at ease with these slower days. How to give ourselves a little bit of a break when we know that you probably do need to have a Sunday when you stay in bed for a little while. There is this puritan work ethic guilt that comes through. For the people who are perennial hard chargers, how do you advise them to just relinquish a little?

SIMON SINEK: I think of everything in terms of cost, right? And I always say, “What’s the cost of this always?” So what is the cost of being a high achiever? What is the cost of working constantly? What is the cost of putting all that pressure on yourself? Just weigh the cost.

My relationships struggle. I beat myself up sometimes. I can’t sleep because my brain doesn’t shut off. Just be really honest about the costs of all of that. I don’t know how to relax, okay? That’s the cost.

Now maybe you’ve earned some of it to go the other way. So maybe you’ve earned the right to lie in bed till noon just because. And if you need to make it an equation, “I earned this.” You use the analogy of deposits and withdrawals. You’ve made so many deposits, you can withdraw a little me time. You’ve earned this right.

Think of it, if you were a leader and one of your teammates works all weekend voluntarily to get a project done on time, right? You’re going to say, “Thank you.” You’re going to be like, “Great job. We couldn’t have done this without you.” And then you’re going to say, if…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re a good leader, take Monday off.

SIMON SINEK: Why don’t you take Monday or Tuesday off to get your weekend back? You’ve earned it. I’m not asking you to make to pay a cost that I’m not willing to compensate you for. You gave me two days, I’ll give you two days. May not be consecutively, but I’ll give you back your weekend. Thank you.

That gesture will make somebody feel seen and heard. And they will give you many weekends knowing that you’re willing to keep the equation balanced. If you never give them their time back and now they’re just working seven days a week, they will either burn out or they will quit.

So if we know that another person will burn out or quit, if they maintain that pace without grace, then how come… And it goes right back to yourself, managing yourself, lead yourself. You got to give yourself that time off because that’s the deal you make if you’re the friend to yourself and if you lead yourself, that’s what you do for somebody else. That’s what you… well, I’m not other people and I have no… you are. You might have a little more grit than somebody else, but you don’t have endless amounts of it.

Navigating the Loss of Purpose

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When it comes to the purpose and meaning point, how do you advise people to manage the transition if a why that previously motivated them and fulfilled them starts to fall away? You mentioned yourself there’s this sort of sense of shame, guilt, of concern, wistfulness.

I would imagine this used to be my thing and now you’re telling me that the thing that gave me loads of positive reinforcement isn’t my thing anymore and I have to go and find a new thing. That sounds pretty terrifying. So how do people who have lost fulfillment in their why cope with that transition?

The Difference Between Goals and Purpose

SIMON SINEK: Very simple answer. That was never their why to begin with. People confuse goals with purpose. It happens all the time. You see it in companies’ vision statements “to be the best.” That’s not a vision. That’s a goal. By the way, based on what metric that you chose, right?

So sometimes we have goals that drive us and they’re exciting, but then what? And you see this very often with high achievers. So let’s take extreme examples, right? Olympic athletes, it’s just an extreme example. They’re very goal oriented and they’ve confused their goal with their purpose. “My purpose is to win the Olympics.” I love how they say that “I’m going to win the…” Nobody wins the Olympics. That actually is not a… You can’t. There’s no medal for winning the Olympics, right? But that’s how they all talk “when we win the Olympics,” right?

And all of their lives are completely architected around this goal. All of their relationships are “are you useful,” all of their sacrifices. “I missed Thanksgiving, I missed birthdays. I missed all of these things because I’m disciplined.” And let’s say they achieve it. Let’s give them the success. They win a gold medal in the Olympics, and now they’re too old to compete. Their bodies are broken, whatever it is. Now what? Now what?

The Depression After Achievement

And what you find? Andre Agassi becomes the most storied tennis player of all time. What happens right after he retires? Depression. Michael Phelps becomes the most medaled Olympian in history. What happens right after he retires? Depression. My friend who her entire goal of her entire life from Fargo, North Dakota was to be on Broadway and become a New York City Rockette. She achieved both those things. She became a New York City Rockette and she became a performer on Broadway. What happened right afterwards when she retired? Depression.

We’ve confused a goal with purpose. A goal is one of the ways, even if it’s extreme, one of the ways in which we are looking to advance our purpose. But a purpose is immutable. A purpose does not change. Your purpose is fully formed by the time you’re in your mid to late teens. Who you are is fully formed by the time you’re in your mid to late teens. And the rest of your life is looking for opportunities to bring that cause to life, right?

Very common and particularly in high achievers. And they confuse their jobs with their purpose, with their identity, right? So you see these high flyers who literally are afraid of not working. Because “who am I if I’m not doing this thing?” And they’ve forgotten that the thing you’re doing is just one of the ways you can bring your purpose to life.

Finding Your True Why

So my why? My purpose is not to write books. My why is not to achieve some goal, some TED Talk over which I have no control. My why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. That’s why I get out of bed in the morning, that is permanent, for the rest of my life, till the day I die.

Now what are the opportunities that I can do that? Some of them big, some of them small, some of them risky, some of them not. And I can have goals that motivate me in the middle of that. But if I pick a goal that’s just for the money or just for the accomplishment or whatever, odds are, the stress is going to be far greater than the reward because it doesn’t contribute to my purpose.

Knowing When to Quit

And that raises the second question, which is how do I know when to quit? And some people have this false belief that grit is the thing that makes you and you never quit. That’s stupid. It is just as stupid as to say you always quit whenever it gets difficult. Both are the wrong mentality.

My test is very simple. Does the sacrifice feel worth it? If the sacrifice feels worth it because there’s some higher goal you’re trying to achieve, some higher purpose, not even goal, a higher purpose you’re trying to achieve, then you better show up the grit and you keep going. But if it just doesn’t feel worth it anymore, it doesn’t feel like I’m contributing to something bigger than myself, then it’s time to move on.

The Story of “Leaders Eat Last”

I was writing a book called “Leaders Eat Last.” It’s the single most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was impossible to organize. Each chapter could have been its own book. It was ridiculous. The amount of content that I was starting with. “Start with Why” was something like 68,000 words or something. When I was writing “Leaders Eat Last” I wrote 150,000 words and I was just getting started. I called the publisher, I said, “I think this needs to be multi volumes.” It was impossible.

And it got to the point where I couldn’t do it. It was about 8 o’clock at night and I decided I was done. I couldn’t do it. I was going to quit. And I literally went for a long walk and planned my exit, planned quitting. I went through the checklist of the things that I’m going to have to do over the next few days in order to unwind from this project.

I’m going to have to call my publisher and say I can’t do it. I’m technically in breach of contract, which means I’m going to have to return the advance. I’m going to have to make a public statement. I’ve been telling everybody I’m writing a new book and I’m going to have to say it’s not coming. So I’ll be publicly humiliated for a short period of time. But people are like, “What do you mean? We’ve been looking forward to it. Why can’t you do it?” right? So I’m going to be publicly humiliated. I’m going to have to tell my friends I can’t do it. So I’m going to be privately humiliated. I’m going to hate myself for a while, I’m going to regret it, and I’ll get over it.

I literally went through the checklist of all the things I’m going to have to do and prepare myself for.

The Call That Changed Everything

Not sure why I did, but I picked up the phone and called a friend of mine who at the time was in the Air Force, Special Forces. I don’t even think I said hello. He picked up the phone and I said, “What do you do when you can’t complete the mission?”

And as his nature, he started telling me a story. He was in Afghanistan, and he was ordered to go on a mission. He’s a helicopter pilot where all of the intelligence said that they were going to get shot down. And this wasn’t like a “kill Hitler” mission where you’re all going to die, but you’ll kill Hitler. This is like, you’re all going to die and the mission will fail. It was just a pointless suicide mission, right? All the intel was compelling.

And so he and his wingman, they’re prepping their helicopter, getting ready to go on this ridiculous, stupid mission. And his wingman turns to him and says, “What do we do? We’ve got wives, we got kids. This is literally a suicide mission. Do we refuse to go? What do we do?”

And my friend said to his wingman, “No, this is what we signed up for. We go.” And what he was saying is, “We go together.” Obviously, cooler heads prevailed and the mission was scrubbed.

And so he says to me, “Is this book more or less powerful than ‘Start with Why’?” I said, “The research that I’m doing has impacted me more than ‘Start with Why.'” He goes, “Okay, I’m going to tell you a funny little story. Before I met you, I became disillusioned with the Air Force. I didn’t want to be in it anymore. And I was going to leave, and I found this kooky little book called ‘Start with Why.’ And it completely inspired me. It made me a better leader, and I stayed in the Air Force, and I am so glad I did because I’m better than I was before. And if you’re telling me that this book is more powerful than the first one, you have to finish it. This is what you signed up for. You do it.”

And what he was saying is, “And I will be here with you.” He made me feel not alone, but he also reminded me that it wasn’t about the book. The book was contributing to something even bigger than myself, which is I agreed that I would commit myself to a life where I would work tirelessly to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. And if this is one of the things that I know will work, this is what I signed up for. The sacrifice is worth it.

And I wasn’t alone anymore. I now had somebody I could call and be like, “I can’t do this.” And he’s like, “Come on, I got you.”

The Military Mindset

And this is the thing that I learned about folks in the military, which is our friends give us advice. “You got this. Yeah, you go.” Which is basically like saying, “Off you go.” In the military, it’s things like, “We go.” Even though I have to do the work, “We go.”

I had another experience in the military where I was standing on the stage presenting to a bunch of officers, senior officers, generals and colonels, and I was telling a story that was really difficult and I started to well up. And I’m starting to tell myself, “Should I just skip over this? I could easily just…” And I was stuck. I paused because when you’re welling up, you know that if you take one more word, you’re going to lose it. And I was right there. I was at that word and I just stopped quietly.

Now, if this was in the private sector, because I know, because it’s happened, somebody will say, “It’s okay. Take your time.” As if to say, “You over there, you take whatever. We’ll be waiting over here when you’re ready.” That’s not what happened. I get stuck on the stage, I’m welling up with tears, and the four star general at the back of the room goes, “Go on.” As if to say, “We’re here with you. You’re not alone.” It cracks me up just talking about it now.

The Power of Not Being Alone

And this is what I learned about them. The reason they are high achievers, the reason they have the kind of grit that they do, the reason they do things that most of us don’t want to do or can’t do, is because at no point do they ever make each other feel like they’re alone. At every point along the way, they know that someone has their six, someone has their back. They will sacrifice their lives for people they don’t even like because they know that that person will sacrifice their lives for them.

And I think this is the missing thing that we don’t talk about enough in all of this high achievement stuff and finding your purpose stuff, it’s too hard to do alone. Human beings aren’t made to survive by ourselves. You go out into the wilderness by yourself, you’ll get eaten by something, you will die. Go out in a group, you’re fine, we’re fine. We are social animals, and we spent so much time over indexing on individual accomplishment and individual achievement and individual happiness and individual fulfillment, we’ve just overdone it that we’ve forgotten that the hack is together.

Friendship: The Ultimate Biohack

Friendship is the ultimate biohack. And if you want to find happiness instead of going on another retreat or reading another book, what I would recommend is help someone who’s struggling with the thing that you’re struggling with, commit yourself to a life of service to help somebody who’s struggling with the exact same thing you’re struggling with. And instead of over committing yourself to whatever you’re struggling with, over commit yourself to helping them find whatever it is that you’re also looking for, with no selfish intent whatsoever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Talking about groups, reflecting on the millennial question nearly 10 years later now, has…

SIMON SINEK: It been that long?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Eight. Yes.

SIMON SINEK: Wow. Time flies. Given that, that was a wild day. I remember that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, those millennials have grown up now. What advice would you give to Gen Z, who are dealing with a different but challenging climate?

The Generational Evolution

SIMON SINEK: So a lot of the things I said in that original commentary are still true. I think Gen Z is different than millennials in many ways. Many ways the same. I mean, from the technology standpoint, some of the parenting standpoint, I think where they have an advantage is I think their parents, especially the ones who are a little younger now, are more aware of over coddling their kids, which is the mistake that millennial parents made.

We’re better at affirming emotions. We’re better at allowing kids to struggle, you know, things like that, where they are very different than millennials. And the original criticisms of millennials, which is millennials, were accused of being slacktivists back in their day when they were younger, which is they’d love to go on Twitter and tell you their opinion while they’re sitting in the back of an Uber on their way to brunch. Like, they didn’t do anything they didn’t show up.

Where Gen Z are an activist generation. They don’t just complain, they strike, they protest, they speak out, they vote, they run for office. We’re having all these young kids running for office, you know, these 25 year olds running for office and they’re much more action oriented for the things that are scaring them or bothering them on all sides of the political aisles. And I think that’s a good thing. They’re taking accountability. Whether we disagree with how they’re doing it, that’s debatable. That’s fine. But they’re making sacrifices and they’re putting themselves out there, which I think is great.

The technology addiction is still a thing, but I think it’s a thing for all of us. I think it’s pronounced when kids grow up with it because they don’t know any different. And again, it’s not their fault. It’s parents who give unfettered access to a device when a child is young. They’re setting themselves up for some real challenges later.

I think there’s lots of data now. When I was first talking about it with millennials, it sounded like sort of whiny Luddite adults. But now Jonathan Haidt has written about it extensively and there’s lots and lots of data on it now. And we all know what dopamine is. We all know what a dopamine addiction is. We all know that the social media companies are hijacking our dopamine system. We all know it. It’s like common knowledge now.

The Loneliness Crisis and Solutions

So I think the awareness that they have is good, but the advice is the same, which is, and I think what Gen Z is struggling with more than probably Millennials is the loneliness question. And I think partially because of technology and isolation and because I can have a friend online and now the rise of AI friends, that’s going to be a whole new thing.

But I’m going to double down on what I’ve said before, which is if we can find ways to help them make friends. And I’m meeting young people who are still in college or just graduating high school or college. And the thing that they’re reporting is they really struggled to make friends when they were in college.

But again, they’re an activist generation. So there’s at least one I know, her name’s Alix. She started a company called Clicks, where in full disclosure, I met Alix and I fell in love with her mission. And I advised her and made a small investment. So just for full disclosure.

But basically she started a company to help young people make friends because she struggled to make friends. And the way she does it is by in person events. And she’s very open how she started an app that she wants people to spend less and less time on her app, which is like, you tell that to an investor that, you know, that’s horrible.

So I think I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful because they are so attentive. I’m hopeful for the future because of this young generation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the mistakes of older generations that millennials should not repeat?

Breaking the Cycle of Business Mistakes

SIMON SINEK: So the doubling down on rugged individualism. The concept of business existing for the benefit of an investor, whether it’s a public markets or venture capitalist. No, the business exists to give something of benefit to a customer, make their lives easier, make it more fun, take them on a journey. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. And if you do that, the investors will win. But you don’t build a company for an investor. You build a company for a customer. And you make the employees love the mission that they’re on to serve those customers.

I hope they undo that ridiculous mentality that is pervasive in business today. I think some of the things that they. The rugged individualism one is crazy. And you can see how we’ve built incentive structures that are all about individual achievement and not about team or group achievement. So I don’t want them to repeat those mistakes that they have an opportunity to re.

Business is not. This is not how business always capitalism as Adam Smith imagined it when he wrote about it. The wealth of nations wasn’t what we have now. He was customer focused, he was employee focused. And it was Jack Welch, the CEO of GE back in the 80s and 90s, and an economist named Milton Friedman that made capitalism what it is today. So capitalism is good, just not this version of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder what an infinite game looks like in a modern culture that’s obsessed with instant gratification and metrics.

Understanding the Infinite Game

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, well, you just said it. An infinite game is literally letting go of the instant gratification. You can enjoy it, you can appreciate it, but it’s just one dot on a journey. You know that it’s just one waypoint. It’s not the finish line. And you can hear how we talk about the end of the quarter, the end of the year, as if it’s the end of the game. No, it’s just one mile marker, you’re either ahead or behind. You’re either going fast or slow. That’s it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there not something deeper and more truthful in that with regards to how the human reward system works, though, that we need to move toward these little goals? We need to have these waymarker points?

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with metrics.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Tension, that balance between the two.

The Dopamine Hijacking

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with metrics. We’ve just overdone the dopamine. Understand the caveman reason for dopamine. That’s a very good reason, which is I need food. I need shelter.

So when you’re wandering across the savannas with your caveman buddies and in the distance, you see food, an apple tree, a gazelle, whatever, you become fixated. That’s the goal. Get there, and you start hunting or moving towards the apple tree. And as the apple tree gets a little bigger, you get the feeling that you’re making progress. Dopamine hit. Keep going, Keep going. The dopamine tells you keep going, and if you miss it, you’ll try another day so you can get that feeling again.

But if you get it, if you kill the animal or get to the apple tree, oh, my God. The feeling of victory. Yes. Yes. You high five all your caveman buddies. “We did it,” right? But the feeling goes away. Nobody celebrates the victory they had three years ago. That feeling has gone away, and so you have to do it again.

So dopamine isn’t supposed to feed relationships. It’s supposed to make you find the things you’re looking for or achieve the things you’re setting out to achieve. That’s what it’s designed to do. And where the hijacking happens is that becomes all of it. Repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s called addiction. Literally, almost every addiction is a dopamine addiction. And social media addiction looks most closely to gambling addiction.

But it’s the same thing, which is you become achievement addicted. Because it’s the only way you ever get a good feeling is from when you achieve things. You just have to keep doing it. And it’s kind of like moving the goalposts. I keep achieving it. How come I haven’t found success? You have it in the moment. You have that little feeling of elation, and then it goes away so quickly.

Love vs. Happiness: The Infinite Foundation

And so we confuse joy, which is infinite, love, which is infinite, with happiness, which is momentary. “I’m looking for happiness.” I can show you a million ways to get happiness, and then it’ll go away. You’re going to have to do it again.

But to find love. Like, if you’re in love with someone, you love your children, but you don’t like them every day, you can love your partner, but you can hate them in moments. But that doesn’t mean you’re leaving, just mean, “I hate you today.” But yes, of course I love you. Of course I love you.

And it’s these underlying foundations that are infinite, and the happiness sits on top of it. And we’ve forgotten to build those underlying foundations in pursuit of just those dopamine hits. And you summed it up beautifully, which is we’ve made the pursuit of oxytocin and serotonin. We’ve made the pursuit of love and purpose and joy. We’ve gamified. We’ve attempted to turn the seeking of things that require consistency and investment into events to be won or lost. And that’s not how they are.

We’re applying intensity to elements that require consistency. Goes back to the brushing your teeth analogy. We think if we go to the dentist more often, it’ll be better. No, it’ll just be more painful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. There’s an interesting idea of instrumental goods and intrinsic goods in ethics philosophy, and it’s kind of not too dissimilar to this. Intrinsic good is something that is good in and of itself. And an instrumental good is something that essentially, eventually gets you to the intrinsic good. But there is an issue that you can treat all of life instrumentally. Like everything that you do is done in service of the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing.

The Chinese Parable and Life’s Journey

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. I mean, this is the infinite mindset. This is exactly what I attempted to write about. You know, the best way to understand the infinite mindset is this Chinese parable. It’s told many ways. This is the way I know it.

Young man is born with a remarkable ability for horse riding. Everyone in the village says, “Ah, you’re so lucky.” And the monk says, “We’ll see.” He falls off his horse, breaks his leg, ends his horse riding career. Everyone in the village says, “Oh, you’re so unlucky.” The monk says, “We’ll see.” War breaks out, all the young men are sent to battle. He can’t go because of his busted leg. Everyone in the village says, “You’re so lucky.” The monk says, “We’ll see.”

Good news, bad news, who knows? It’s all part of a journey. And it sucks when you’re in it, but it’ll pass. But by the way, the same is true for good things. Like, this is amazing when you’re in it, it’ll pass.

And so the question is, how do you build the foundation? The foundation is built on relationships. The foundation is built on relationships. All the other stuff sits on top. Achievement, accomplishment, win, win, win.

And I’ve never met a successful person in my life who learned anything when things went well. They learned every lesson they needed to learn that helped them achieve when things went horribly wrong. And the most successful people in the world, every single one of them hit zero or came damn close to it. Almost every single one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So failure is a gift.

The Gift of Failure

SIMON SINEK: Oh, my God, it’s the gift. Now. None of us want to go through it. None of us want to repeat it. It’s awful. We’re all secretly glad it happened.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s an interesting idea, and I’m not.

SIMON SINEK: I’m not saying we should set it up either. Like, don’t set yourself up to fail to learn the lesson. That kind of doesn’t. Like, the goal is to learn, to grow, but you’re going to get battered. Like, life is not a smooth journey. It’s a bumpy ride. But the question is, are you enjoying the bumps? Are appreciating the bumps. At least you don’t have to enjoy them, but you can appreciate them. You can have a sense of humor.

The Power of Humor

I think sense of humor is one of the greatest things in the world. Not enough is talked about sense of humor. You know, you can’t be angry or sad when you’re laughing. It’s just. Have you ever been in a fight with somebody and somebody makes a joke and you’re trying not to smile because you’re angry and instantly the anger goes away? “Stop it. I’m trying to be angry.” Like parents and kids, that happens all the time. Kid makes a joke, parents trying to be serious. It just. You can’t. It’s too hard. It’s too hard to be sad or angry when you’re laughing.

And I think sense of humor is unbelievably underappreciated as a coping mechanism and just a way of getting through it just to see the absurdity of it, you know? And so I look for every occasion to make jokes, even when it’s inappropriate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What would you say to someone who feels paralyzed by fear of moving forward? They’re unconfident in their decisions. They don’t know whether things are going to go well, and they are scared of committing. They don’t have that level of conviction that they need to actually start to.

The Power of Vulnerability in Leadership

SIMON SINEK: Make movements, go help somebody else who’s paralyzed with the same fear. Don’t worry about it, you’re good. Just go help someone else who’s struggling with the same or similar thing. And I don’t mean create it like a self fulfilling victim circle, you know, that’s not what I mean.

Don’t confuse going to help somebody with reinforcing so I can feel better about myself. We do that all the time, right? We create these little echo chambers where we all make ourselves feel better by reinforcing. “Yeah, screw the world, they did this to us. Yeah, they did it to me too.” No, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about.

Genuinely try and help somebody get through the stuck. And the easiest way to do that, it’s also very hard, is to make it known that you’re struggling. Not so that someone will help you. It’s just to create a space that somebody will say, “me too.” Because everybody’s lying, hiding and faking, right? So we don’t know which of our friends.

Learning from Personal Experience

It’s the single biggest lesson I learned in my career. When I was young, in my career, I was pretending that I was more in control, more successful, happier than I felt. Never needed help. I was good. I had all the answers. And if I didn’t have the answers, I definitely pretended that I did. Nobody helped me. Why? I didn’t ask for it, didn’t need it, and I was projecting that I got it all under control until I got to the point where I was struggling so much that I gave up and had to admit it because I didn’t have any other choice.

And the minute somebody said, “How are you?” You’d be like, “Eh, it’s been a rough month.” If I’m honest, it turns out I was surrounded by people who wanted to help me. They just didn’t know I needed it. But I also was surrounded by people who needed help, but they were too embarrassed to share it.

The Toxic Positivity Trap

Because when I’m on top of the world, you see this in leadership all the time. Leaders make this mistake in really difficult times. Leaders come into work with a brave face. Everything’s good, everything’s fine, everything’s great. And this is toxic positivity. They’re not doing it for bad reasons, they’re doing it for good reasons. They think they need to put on a positive face to help keep everybody up.

But if it’s a hard time, what they’re doing is making people feel worse because they’re looking at their boss going, “God, they’re so happy in this stress. I mean, I can’t even get sleep. What the hell? I’m even more of a loser.”

But when a boss comes to work and says, “Folks, this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to deal with, work, I do not know how to get through this, and I am stressed and I’m worried. But you know what? We’ve got an amazing team. I know if we stick together and take care of each other, I know we’ll get through this. And I’m not worried. That’s the thing that gives me confidence.” And everybody goes, “Yeah, me too. I’m stressed too.”

The responsibility of the leader is to create the safe space.

True Leadership: Going First

And so somebody who has the courage to say, “I am struggling,” not because they’re looking for help, not because they’re looking for sympathy, somebody who has the courage to say, “I am struggling” simply to create a safe space for somebody around them to say, “me, too,” so that they can offer their help, that’s called being a leader.

We call you leader not because you’re in charge. We call you leader because you went first. Because you had the courage to go first. You are leading the way, literally.

Real Vulnerability vs. Digital Performance

And so if somebody’s really struggling, you don’t have to do it publicly, you don’t have to do it online. Just do it to one friend. In fact, I would say it takes more courage to do it to one friend. You see people put these messages out on social. They’re by themselves in their room talking to a device to say, “Here’s what I’m struggling with.” I don’t know how many takes they did to get it just right, which is just weird unto itself because that’s easy to talk to yourself, and then put it up there and get the affirmations online.

That exact same conversation to have in person to one person and look them in the eye and say everything you said to yourself in your room by yourself with your device is excruciatingly difficult because that’s real vulnerability.

The Challenge of Authentic Connection

And so I challenge somebody to find the courage to say to a friend, “I am struggling. I’m stuck. I’m confused. I’m lost. I don’t know what I want to do.” And if they start fixing you, say, “I don’t need you to fix me. What I need for you is just to listen.”

And I guarantee you, whether it’s that person or a different friend, someone will say, “me, too.” Now you have a project. Now you have an opportunity to serve. “Why don’t we go through this together? Let me do everything I can to support you, to help you get through this and find what you’re looking for.”

And you’ll find yourself reading books, listening to podcasts, reading articles. Not for yourself. You’ll find it doing it for somebody else. And that is the most fulfilling thing you can do. An act of service.

What’s Next for Simon Sinek

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Simon, you’re great. Let’s bring this one home. Dude, I appreciate the heck out of you. What are you working on now? What can people expect of the next foreseeable future?

SIMON SINEK: Lots of things. Lots of balls in the air. Writing a book about friendship. I’ve realized that all of the things that I’ve written about wouldn’t work if you didn’t have other people in your life who agree to grow with you.

And, you know, there’s an entire industry to help us be better leaders. There’s an entire industry to help us have better marriages, be better parents. There’s barely anything on how to be a friend. And yet if you look at all of those things, work, personal life, those things succeed because we have friends to support us in those journeys. Well, who’s there to support the friends? So I’m loving that research and enjoying writing that book.

Making huge changes at work, changing our business model, really enjoying myself. The team’s having a blast. We’re experimenting, trying new things, and just, you know, we’re just having fun. So better things are happening with our learning product. We teach human skills, all the things we’re talking about. I want to be a part of that journey with people if they’ll let me. So that’s happening.

Why School: Teaching Purpose

And we’re in beta right now because I figured out a way to help people find their why, and I’ve written about it and I’ve spoken about it, and so we’re in beta right now where we’re teaching. We have something called Why School, which is for coaches, personal coaches, executive coaches, people who are in corporate learning development departments. For them to come and learn my exact same process so they can help other people learn their why.

Because I realize I want everybody to have their purpose. But, I mean, there’s only one of you, there’s only one of me. And even if I trained a few people, there’s only a few of us. But for people who are already out there in the helping business, if I can give them one more tool in their toolbox, that’s cool.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where can people check that out?

SIMON SINEK: It’s not live yet, but it will come live. But, you know, SimonSinek.com is where all the good stuff is. You know, social media, all the usual places.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Beautiful. Simon, I appreciate you.

SIMON SINEK: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate a great conversation.

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