Simon Sinek: The Advice Young People NEED To Hear (Transcript) 

And the interesting thing about a why is because it is not, it is objective. A why is the sum total of how we were raised. It’s born out of the patterns and the lessons we learned from our parents, from our teachers when we’re young. And our why is fully formed by the time we’re in our mid to late teens. And you only have one why for the rest of your life. It doesn’t change. You are who you are based on how you were raised.

Now, you may not be acting as your true self. You know, people say that to us all the time, you know. It’s like, “I don’t know who you are anymore,” you know. But when you are at your natural best, your why is front and center. But we’re not always acting at our natural best. And sometimes we make decisions out of selfishness. We take the job that pays us, that offers us the most money and turn down the one to work for somebody who would probably be a better mentor. You know, we do these things all the time.

And so, you know, can you tweak the words of your why? Of course, you know, but that’s semantics. Can we find better ways to bring a why to life? Yes, that’s the evolution. But the why itself is fixed.

Trauma and Its Influence on Our “Why”

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you talk about the why being influenced by the things that happened in our life, our experiences, our upbringing, does that mean that our trauma can influence our why for better or for worse?

SIMON SINEK: Always for better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Always for better.

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. A why is always positive. And I’ll give you a real life example of somebody’s why discovery that I did. And, you know, one of the things I do when I do somebody’s why discovery, I ask them about, you know, happy experiences when they were kids. And this person said, “I didn’t have a very happy childhood. I had a really bad childhood.” And I said, “OK, so tell me a bad memory then,” you know.

And she talked about a lot of abuse in the household and a very abusive alcoholic father who would beat her mother and the kids. And she told a story of a repeated pattern of when the father would be drunk and come looking for the kids that she’d be hiding in the cupboard, protecting her brother with her arms wrapped around him to shield her brother. And she goes through this whole story.

And at the end, I pointed out to her that she’s a protector, that in these traumatic experiences, it was her instinct to protect her baby brother. And she’s lived her life. If you look at all of the times that she’s really thrived and where she’s her best self, she’s usually in a position of protection of other people. And that’s where she finds joy in taking care of other people.

And so the experiences mold us into who we are and the effects, you know, the impact will be positive regardless of where it comes from. So, yeah, I mean, a horrible childhood that made her a wonderful human being.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was going to use me as an example there to try and rebuttal that somewhat. But I remember having a very similar conversation with a very good friend of mine a week ago upstairs who talked to me about their childhood there. They’ve talked about this publicly as well.

So I’m not letting the cat out of the bag. But their father used to beat their mother up really, really severely. And she was telling me literally just a few days ago upstairs that her memories of trying to hold on to her dad’s arm as it swung for her mother when she was five years old.

And when you look at the pattern of what those early experiences have caused, and a few other experiences, she’s obsessed with helping others. And she’s, you know, building these amazing businesses. She’s unbelievably successful. It’s like frighteningly successful at a very, very young age. However, that force in her to help others has meant that she’s compromised sometimes helping herself. And of everyone I know in my life, she is the most successful woman I know. But she’s also the woman that is most unsuccessful in all of the personal aspects, relationship, boyfriend, mental health, all of these things.

So when we say, you know, I understand the positive side of it. But the negative side of it seems to be of this unbelievable, I guess, why she’s got seems to just honestly, for me not be worth it. Because this is not someone that is would say they’re, they’re happy. This is someone that is in therapy and is every day in tears and upset while serving the world in an unbelievable way. So is that a positive? Is that a positive why?

The Paradox of Giving and Receiving

SIMON SINEK: So, the rub about the why, you know, a why is basically the thing we give to the world. It’s the value we have in other people’s lives. Her friends would say of her that she is our protector. You know, that is the role we fill in their lives, which is why they love us, because we’re giving them our why it is our value. The rub, the most difficult thing about the why to understand is that the thing that we give to the world is also the thing that we need the most. It’s always balanced.

And so I would argue that, you know, it’s not that she’s unable to take care of herself. It’s that she needs to find friends, colleagues, whatever it is, who are committed to taking care of her. And that’s where the change happens. And, you know, we were talking about this, you know, before the show started, you know, there’s an entire section of the bookshop called self help, and there’s no section of the bookshop called help others. And I believe what we need is the help others industry.

I’ll tell you something, something that happened to me, a friend of mine was going through a really rough patch in her life. Her marriage was struggling, her career was struggling. She was unhappy, like just none of the boxes were getting checked, you know. And she knows what I do. I mean, we’ve been friends for forever. And she asked a favor. “Can you help me?” You know, of course, of course, I said.

And every week we had a standing 90 minute meeting where she’d come over and she would tell me what’s going on. And I would give her some advice and point out some patterns. And she’d feel fantastic. She would leave on a high and she’d feel amazing for like two days. And then it’ll go right back again. And she’d come back the following week. And this went on for months, two days, three days, and then back down again. Right.

And then it occurred to me, like I remember my own work in Leaders Eat Last. I talk about Alcoholics Anonymous, where they have 12 steps to help an alcoholic beat this disease. And Alcoholics Anonymous knows that if you master 11 of the 12 steps, you’re going to probably slide back and succumb to the disease. But if you can master the 12th step as well, you will more likely beat the disease.

The 12th step is to help another alcoholic. It’s service. And so I remember my own work and I decided to do a little — I decided to change things up. Right. And so I said to her, “Look, I love that you come and see me every week and I love helping you every week. But, you know, I struggle with things, too. And I don’t have anybody to talk to. Would you be willing to help me? Maybe we can split the time.”

And she said, “Of course, yes.” And what started to happen is every week we got together and I was genuine. I wasn’t faking it like I would unload and tell her what I was going through and what I was struggling with. And it ended up that we wouldn’t split the time. It ended up that she would spend 90 minutes talking about my stuff. Right.

And she was the advice giver and she was the one looking for the patterns. And she would leave on a high and that I would stay until the following week. It was only when we reversed the scenario where that she was — had the opportunity to take care of someone she loved, that she was able to find the solutions to her own challenges.

And I’m a great believer that — we have to remember we’re social animals. We need each other. And this is the great paradox of being human. At every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups, you know, and there’s a debate. Do you take care of yourself first or you take care of others first? And there’s a whole school of thought that says you have to take care of yourself first, because if you’re not healthy, you can’t take care of others.

And there’s a whole school of thought that says, “No, you have to take care of others first so that when you’re in need, they’ll be there for you.” And the answer is you’re both right. You’re both wrong. It’s a paradox. It’s a struggle. And every day we’re faced with sometimes big, but often small choices. Do I prioritize myself at the sacrifice of the group or do I prioritize the group at the sacrifice of myself?

And, you know, folks like Maslow, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow made a huge mistake in that hierarchy, which is his baseline. Our basic need is food and shelter. Right. I’ve never heard of anyone dying by suicide because they were hungry. I’ve heard of people dying by suicide because they were lonely. Right. And yet social relationships in Maslow’s hierarchy is number three. But that doesn’t sound right. It seems like there’s something more important to human beings than just food and shelter.

And then the top of the peak is self-actualization, which sounds the most selfish thing in the world. Like “I am so self-actualized that I would literally sit on top of a pyramid and look down at all of you unactualized people because that’s my goal, to be self-actualized.” He’s half right. The mistake that Maslow made, he’s the only thought of us as individuals and as individuals. Yes, I need food and shelter first. But as a member of a group, I need friends and I need love.

And self-actualization is not the thing I’m actually in pursuit of as a member of a group. It’s shared actualization that I’m looking for. And unfortunately, for various reasons, which we don’t have to go down that rabbit hole, the past 30, 40 years, especially in the West, we have doubled down on individualism. We have doubled down on my own career. We’ve doubled down on how do I find love? How do I find happiness? We’ve doubled down on selfishness.

And it worked for a while. It worked when the economy was really good, like in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. It’s awesome. Selfishness was great because it worked. But now in a complicated, messy world where the economy isn’t great and everything’s not roses, all that self-interest is now not working, except we haven’t been practicing and developing the skills of taking care of each other. And that’s what we need now more than ever.

Balance and Perspective

SIMON SINEK: And so I don’t know your friend. And so I can’t make any. I’m not. I can’t make any conclusions. But we are we are animals in balance, right? And nature abhors a vacuum. And so whenever I hear about these things, my question is always about the balance. So, for example, every single good thing that happens in our lives, everything comes at a cost. There’s nothing for free.

Somebody with an incredible career has no relationship with their kids, right? Everything comes at a cost. But at the same time, everything we struggle with has opportunity and lesson that goes with it. It’s always balanced. Right. And so whenever anybody tells me this great thing, I was like, “Yeah, but at what cost and was the cost worth it?”

Sometimes the answer is yes. And sometimes the answer is no. And when something horrible happens in someone’s life or something goes sideways, I always ask, “But what did you learn?” You know, I mean, my career and yours is the same. You know, the whole golden circle and the concept of why came out of me losing my passion and hating work. I went through depression. I never want to go through that again.

But I’m really glad it happened because look what it’s given me an entirely new life view. And I think of strengths and weaknesses the same way. You know, I think it’s hilarious when people say, “What are your strengths and what are your weaknesses?” Well, it depends. Life is balanced and it’s always contextual. And everything that we have that’s a strength has liability attached. And every weakness we have has strength that’s attached.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can imagine because of the books you’ve written and the channels you have and the content you produce that a lot of people come to you on a personal level, friends, family to help solve some of the problems that they’re having in their lives. I find myself in somewhat of a similar position. Maybe they’re not coming to me. Maybe I’m inserting myself into the problem to try and solve it because that’s my nature. But do you ever give up on someone?

Something I’ve thought about and I’m reflecting on my friend a little bit here. And friends I’ve had from my childhood, who, I remember offering a guy, I was like, “I will, if you can just do one month working in a in subway where he was working, I’ll pay for your rent so you can move out of that city. And go get a job.”

He didn’t do the one month in subway. And I and at one point, I get there’s part of me, he’s like, “You know, everyone’s solvable, the optimism, the optimistic in me.” And the other part of me goes, “At some point, you have to give up on people.”

Learning to Ask for and Accept Help

SIMON SINEK: So the single greatest lesson I ever learned in my career, that profoundly changed the course of my life. And it comes right before the realization that in the articulation of why, I learned how to ask for help. And I learned how to accept it when it was offered.

Okay. And I think that it’s not about giving up on someone. It’s that — that helping someone is a team sport. Success is a team sport. And if you find that you’re the only player in, in their life, when they should be the primary player, you can only be, you can only do the assists. You’ll never be the one making the baskets. That’s their job.

Right. But if they won’t take the pass, then at some point you stop throwing the ball. And it’s not about giving up on people. It’s, it’s that they have, it’s about accountability to take responsibility for oneself. And that, and giving up on somebody is, “Don’t ever call me again. You don’t take my advice. This is over.” Right. That’s giving up on someone. For, I think that the other way to do it is like, “Listen, I cannot help you if you cannot be involved to help yourself.”

Listening and Understanding

SIMON SINEK: And I will want to sit down with them and I will want to, I won’t criticize and be like, “You’re not doing this. You have to follow my advice. You have to do this. You got to go work at subway for the week.” Like that, that’s not what I want to sit down and understand what the blockage is. There’s something else.

That’s the blockage that I can get to hopefully. But at the end of the day, I will say to them point blank, “Listen, if you’re not going to be involved in this, then there’s no point to me being involved. You know, you have to like, this is a team and I’m the only player here.” And so I will always be here. And when you are ready, maybe it’s just bad timing. I don’t know what’s good else is going on in your life. And maybe this is not the right time, or maybe I’m a bad fit. But when you are ready, I will still be here no matter what. But you have to call me. There’s no more, there’s no more me throwing you the ball. Like you’re going to have to call me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then they call you.

SIMON SINEK: Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In my case, they call me. And then they say it’s time I’m willing to accept the help. And then the same cycle happens over and over again. And you go, you go, you know, five years of them calling you.

SIMON SINEK: Then they’re lying.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But they don’t think they’re lying. They always think this time is going to be different. “I’m going to do it on Monday.”

SIMON SINEK: I mean, like I said, I want to know what else is the blockage. When there’s that kind of repeated pattern, then there’s something else. And I think, I think, you know, our mistake in those situations is repeating our pattern, which is, “OK, I’m going to give you the same advice. I’m going to do the same thing. You’re going to do the same thing. I’m going to tell you the same thing. I’m going to give up on you. I’m going to go…” like we’re actually repeating a pattern as well. And so, you know, we know this is entrepreneurs, which is you got to try something completely, completely different.

And I think, this is goes back to what we were saying a moment ago, you know, which is we are not teaching the skills of how to help others. And part of one of the biggest skills of learning to help others is learning how to listen. Most of us are really crap at listening. Right. We confuse listening with a hearing the words that were spoken. You know, you’re sitting watching TV and, you know, someone you love is trying to tell you something and you’re like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And you’re still watching TV.

“You’re not even listening to me.” And we turn around and repeat all the words back to them. That’s not listening. That’s hearing the words that were spoken to you. You listening is when the other person feels heard. Right. And where you are in pursuit of meaning, not the words spoken. You’re not so literal. Right. And I think in the cases of like your friend, is to go from an advice giving mode and men suffer from this more than women, which is our intention is to fix everything. Right. All we want to do is fix, fix, fix, fix, fix.

We see the problem. Here’s the solution. But sometimes that’s not what people need. People need to feel seen and heard and understood. And maybe just maybe you’re going too quickly to fix and he doesn’t feel seen or heard or understood yet. And in this particular situation, and again, I don’t know the person, but I would I would go to an extreme listening, you know, give the kid the opportunity to empty his bucket.

Like and there’s only three terms you’re going to use in the conversation. “Go on. Tell me more. What else?” Because it sounds like whatever you think the thing is you’re fixing, it’s probably something entirely different. And until you can get to that, you’re going to give up on somebody who maybe it’s just that we had the wrong strategy.

Privilege and Mindset

STEVEN BARTLETT: It wasn’t until these examples surfaced in my life where I had friends asking me for this kind of help that I started to consider that maybe mindset itself is a privilege. One that if you don’t acknowledge and understand, you’ll end up giving advice from a very privileged place. You know, I might say, “Well, just work harder or just just cheer up.” These kinds of things come from like a misunderstanding that my brain is fortunate enough to think and be a certain way.

But I’ve never heard someone people talk enough about this idea that our mindset in and of itself is a privilege and that…

SIMON SINEK: That’s interesting. That mindset is a privilege. Is that true?

STEVEN BARTLETT: If we think about early upbringing in childhood, then? So that was maybe, you know, some people have monetary privilege from their childhood. One thing that your parents or your experiences might psychological privilege.

SIMON SINEK: So let me just think out loud for a second, right? Let’s try. Let me try and unpack that. You know, there are many stories of people who when the odds were against them, whether they came from extreme poverty or abuse, rose up to have successful and happy lives. Right. And when when we read about them or talk to them or meet them or hear interviews from them, they talk about mindset. They talk about “My mother taught is usually the mother. Like my mother taught me to never be a victim. My mother taught me that I was capable of anything.”

And so they had a mindset, you know, where some people have a victim mindset and then that’s the life they continue to live. Some people have a different mindset and it can lift them out of what we would consider unprivileged circumstances. Right. So, you know, it makes me question, then, is mindset a privilege? And we both know people that have every privilege afforded to them, you know, every one of them.

And yet, for whatever reason, their mindset is the wrong one. And they can squander all of that opportunity, all of those advantages that they’ve been afforded, you know, and make a mess. So I question whether mindset is a privilege. There are a lot of privileges in life. Mindset, I think, is one of the ones that is is there for the taking.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think about I was 18 years old, dropped out of university, shoplifting food to feed myself. And in that moment, I was entirely convinced that I was going to be a millionaire. What did I do? What did I what did I actively do?

SIMON SINEK: You just you’re just countering your own point that mindset is not a privilege.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I’m saying because I think that I have the privilege that that mindset was given to me by my experiences and maybe by my biology. I’m wondering why in that situation, if you’d put me and my best friend that I talked about with a subway example in the same situation, one of us would have catastrophized.

And me, I just saw as this wonderful stepping stone to the point that I went around my house videoing my despair, videoing my dire situation, opening the fridge, there’s nothing in it. My first page of my diary on Facebook notes, says “I’m keeping this diary because a TV production company have asked me to.” Bullshit. I like my diary because I look back and get this kid was sure that he was getting out of here.

SIMON SINEK: Well, I mean, I played tricks and games with myself as well. You know, I mean, I remember I mean, some of them are hilarious, but I did the same thing, you know, and I said I go back to the concept of why, which is which is it’s the experiences we had when we were young that formed us into who we are. It wasn’t the shoplifting alone. It was your parents. It was your friends. It was your teachers.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like is that privilege?

SIMON SINEK: I mean, at what point everybody has a why and everybody’s why is affirmative, you know, and so like I told you about the abuse story, you know, something really positive and someone really positive came out of that trauma. So, you know, I’m struggling to use the word privilege to mindset, because what you’re saying is that anyone who’s had any kind of luck or turnaround or has privilege where anyone who hasn’t and has failed, it’s because of their lack of privilege.

Like there’s too many other factors involved in that in those comparisons to just to oversimplify it and call it privilege. I’m sure there are privileged components sometimes involved in that for sure. But, you know, if we’re strictly talking about mindset, I think I’m not sure. I don’t think so. And it doesn’t because the control of our minds is the one thing that we own. It’s the one thing that is not. Like we can change the way we view ourselves and how we treat others.

The Importance of Love and Belief

SIMON SINEK: And I think what’s important and it’s a hard conversation, right? I think one of the things that’s important is I think we have to have love in our lives from someone, you know, like even people who — like I have a friend who came from a very abusive household. He found his grandmother stabbed to death and the knife was so deep that she was attached to the bed. Like that’s how bad it was. Right. And yet he had a coach who believed in him.

And so I think to have someone believe in us, to have one person see a spark in us helps us recognize that — it helps us see the spark in ourselves. You know, it just I think it takes one only one person, whether it’s a friend or a coach or a parent, a boss sometimes, you know, who says who takes a liking to us. And almost all of us, almost all of us can remember one person in our lives, which a coach or a teacher who took us under their wing and saw something that we didn’t see.

And every single successful person on the planet has that person. But I think most of us do. Most of us have somebody who saw something in us and we are who we are in part because of that person.

Impact of Remote Work on Connection and Teams

STEVEN BARTLETT: Having someone in our lives kind of links back to something you were talking about earlier, about trying to be less individualistic in our approach to our lives and our careers. Lots of your work and I was on your video subscription library and lots of your work has that as a through line about connection and people in teams.

And in the backdrop of the remote working world we’re living in, I guess my first question would be, how do you think that this post COVID world has been impacted in terms of connection, community teams, and that unity that should be on the bottom level of our Maslowian hierarchy of needs?

SIMON SINEK: Well, I mean, obviously, it took a step back. Again, I always think of things in terms of balance and cost. So it’s not good or bad, it’s both. And so let’s weigh both. Of course, we have freedom of schedule now that we didn’t have. We have freedom to live wherever we want, which we didn’t have. We have freedom to pick up kids from school or go to the dentist where we used to have to ask permission or take time off. We have that freedom now that we didn’t have.

We have for people who are introverted, they like that they can get their work done in the privacy of their own home. There are many advantages to remote working. The sharing of ideas is much more difficult, like a brainstorming, like really, really hard to do in a virtual scenario because it’s hyper polite, right? You can’t interrupt somebody as easily. Like when you have a real brainstorming, it’s messy, it’s loud, you step on each other’s words, you interrupt each other, you have an idea like, “No, no, no, no.” And nobody cares. It’s the mess, the joy of it, right?

In an online scenario, you literally can’t hear people if everybody’s talking at once. And you’re constantly apologizing and your turn and you don’t have that wonderful energy. And so I think brainstorming suffered. And then the obvious one, which is for a lot of people, and I think it dramatically affected younger people more.

But for all of us, when you’re done with work, you go out with your friends for a bite to eat or at the pub, and you bitch about work, and you bitch about your boss. Totally healthy. And you do it with the friends, whether it’s a good job or a bad job, it doesn’t matter. You have a place separated from work. That’s your friends that you go and get it all out, right? Super healthy, and you feel supported and loved and heard and all that good stuff.

That went away completely, completely. And so what ended up happening, and again, if you didn’t have a family, if you were living alone, all these things just get more and more exaggerated, right? So what ended up happening was, and again, especially young people, but for a lot of other people too, is we started looking to the people, we spent more time with people now at work, on Zoom with them all day and sometimes into the evening.

We now started spending more time with these people, and we didn’t have somebody to go out with afterwards. And so we started looking to work to be that therapeutic outlet, right? And so what so many people did is, first of all, gossip starts to swirl a lot more because we’re now venting and bitching to each other as opposed to our friends, right?

So especially if somebody’s young or susceptible, gossips can take off much quicker, which is very dangerous to a culture. But what I’ve seen is that we find one empathetic person, a good listener on the team, right? And we call them up and we bitch about our job and we bitch about our boss, but then it keeps going. Like, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I hate my boyfriend. I hate my girlfriend. I don’t know if I should…” And all of a sudden, you’re dumping all of your life’s problems on somebody from work who just happens to be a good listener. And what we’re doing is we’re increasing the stress on that person.

So we suffered it in our company, and I’ve heard it from many other companies, which is those people, those empaths, they’re quitting. And if you ask them, “Why are you quitting?” They go, “Because I’m burnt out.” And you’re looking at their workload and be like, “I don’t understand how you burnt out.” They’re burnt out from taking on all of everyone else’s stress because they’re empathetic. Everybody else’s stress becomes their stress, right? That’s the problem with this, which is…

And it’s good that some of like, as COVID eases up, like going out with our friends and having that safe space to vent away from work is really important. So in a cultural standpoint, it’s very hard to control for that. Like, I can’t interrupt it. I can’t tell them they can’t. You know, they don’t want to go to their boss to talk about this thing. But again, particularly young people, but others as well, but particularly young people, they recognize that there are boundaries at work.

And by dumping on one person that they should take on all your problems, and they listen and they listen and they listen and they listen. And sometimes they give bad advice, but they listen and they listen. We’re doing a great disservice to that other person to make ourself feel better for a few minutes.

Changes in Culture Design Post-COVID

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s one of the first times in my life that I started to think again about culture design. And it’s funny because I ran a business post COVID for seven years. We had almost 1000 people. I then left in the middle of COVID. And I’m launching businesses after COVID. And it seems that not all of the rules apply.

And a lot of that’s because of comparison now. So that’s a modern employee is comparing the working culture that they’re seeing on TikTok, and LinkedIn, to their own. And it’s almost as an employer, we’re competing with a false TikTok social media narrative that is, and people never really know what they actually want, I think, as it relates to culture, even me.

So if you ask someone what they want from their working culture, would it meet their fundamental needs? Probably not. So my question to you is, how are you on a practical level? What changes have you practically made or believe are necessary in a post COVID world that you wouldn’t have maybe stated in a pre COVID world, if any?

SIMON SINEK: Let me come at it from a slight… So if you go back a bunch of years, our lives look very different than they do now, obviously. We got our sense of purpose from church. We got our sense of community from, you know, whatever, bowling league. We hung out with our neighbors, they came over and on the weekends and had barbecues with us.

And work was a place that we went to make money to pay for our lives, pay our bills. And it was also a different time where we were super loyal to the company and the company was super loyal to us, right? And that was life. And then church attendance started to decline. Bowling leagues basically are gone. They’ve disappeared. We don’t go to community centers anymore. We don’t have our neighbors over on a weekend basis. And so all of those things, we started to look to work to replace.

So now we say to work, “You have to give me a sense of purpose. You have to give me my social life. You have to give me a sense of community and belonging.” And now we’ve added things to that list now since COVID. It’s just like, “And you have to agree with all of my politics. And by the way, you also have to be my therapy now. You have to be my place for therapy,” which is what we were just talking about, right? And it is an impossible standard to put on any culture that they can do all those things for you.

Just like we’ve put impossible standards on romantic partners, that they have to be my intellectual equal. They have to be sexually compatible with me. They have to be emotionally compatible with me. They have to share all of my interests, all of my politics. We have to vote for all the same. These are impossible standards to put on another human being. And we’re literally setting people up to fail. We’re setting up business cultures up to fail as well.

Like literally no culture can live up to that standard. And so in pursuit of that, the grass is always greener. You have people who are going from relationship to relationship to relationship, worse from job to job to job to job. And when I was younger, if you didn’t like your job or if you didn’t like your boss, the bad news was you had to stay there for a year. Because if you left in anything less than a year, you would hurt your CV. They would be like, “Why did you leave in under a year?”

And now young, again, particularly young people, there’s no stigma to quitting. And it happens sometimes too quickly. Like if you’re confrontation avoidant, and I’ve seen it happen, confrontation avoidant, “I’m too afraid to ask my boss for a raise, so I just quit.” I’ve seen it happen. Right? Or “I’ve been here for four months, I don’t like the culture, I quit.” Right? Or “I got in trouble at work, I hate my boss, I quit.”

And so people are quitting so much, my fear, like I don’t mind if something’s super toxic, get the heck out of there. Most places are not super toxic. Imperfect, yes. But toxicity is like a, there’s a standard, you know, and it’s a high bar. Or “This doesn’t fit my values, or this doesn’t agree with my politics, I quit.” My fear is that if you go, if we flash forward five years, there’s going to be a disproportionately high number of people who have eight jobs in five years.

And what’s going to happen is an employer is going to look at them and be like, “I can’t take the risk that you’re going to stick around, I’m not hiring you, you sound like an amazing candidate, but you’re too high risk for me.” Or, and, because you’ve had so many jobs over such a short period of time, you actually haven’t stuck around long enough to build up a skill set or know what it’s like to manage a storm, because you’ve stuck around in the good times and bailed on the bad times. And so you have now been in the workforce for five years, but you don’t have five years of work experience, you have four months of work experience.

And so I don’t want you either, because you’ve never been through a battle. And I see it happening. A young person who’s been at a company for eight months, goes to their boss and says, “I want a raise, I want a significant raise, because I’m doing the same job as those people.” “Those people have been in the workforce for 10 years,” “I know, but I’m doing the same work as them and I’m doing good work.” That’s true. You are doing the same work as them and you are doing good work.

The difference is I’m not paying them just because they’ve obliquely been in the workforce for 10 years. I’m paying them because you know how to hoist a mainsail in calm waters, and you can hoist a mainsail in calm waters as well as they can hoist a mainsail in calm waters. The difference is they also know how to hoist a mainsail in a storm. I don’t know if you can hoist a mainsail in a storm. I pay them more because I know that if we run into hard times, I know that they know what to do and I can trust that we can navigate. And I also know that they will teach you how to hoist a mainsail in a storm.

It’s like the same reason I buy insurance. I don’t expect my house to burn down, but I pay just in case, I’m paying them more for skill set that I hope they never have to use. That’s why they get more.

Concerns About Gen Z’s Resilience

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, one of my fears at the moment, which is perfectly linked to what you’re saying, is I have a fear and I’ve never expressed this openly. So this is the first time. So don’t all come to me at once.

I have a fear that Gen Z are the least resilient generation that I’ve ever seen. And a lot of it and this is sounds so stupid and not evidence-based, but if you look at what TikTok is telling this generation work is, and there was a video that went viral on Twitter the other day out in Silicon Valley where it shows like a Facebook employer, one of the big tech companies, she arrives at work in the morning, she takes a cup of a latte, all this free muffins.

She goes over and has the free muffin. It shows her in a TikTok literally doing like 30 seconds of work. Then she’s out doing some like pottery making class that work have put on. She comes back to the desk, does another 30 seconds of work. Then she’s off to work social. And I reflect on the storms that my father went through at work.

And I just know so deeply inside of me that there’s no way some of these younger Gen Z people could weather such a storm without quitting, doing a long LinkedIn post to criticize their employee then quitting, employer then quitting. I just fear that Gen Z when I’m hiring people that are in that generation, I almost need to go to an extra length just to check that they can cope with a high intensity culture where demands might come on a Saturday because the world doesn’t stop on Saturdays and Sundays. So I wanted to get your take on that.

SIMON SINEK: So let’s examine both sides, right? Again, let’s think of what’s the balance and what are the costs, right? It is a generation that already was starting to ask these questions, but COVID forced the rest of us to ask these questions too, which is what is the definition of work, right? Like what does a full-time job mean? And these are unanswered questions.

So I don’t have an answer as to what the future of work is because right now everything’s in flux and things have not landed yet, right? So what is the definition of a full-time job? If I don’t come to work, the definition used to be I come in at eight or nine and I leave at five or six. That was the full-time job. Now, how much work I did between those hours, it was FaceTime.

And we know that because we’ve all had jobs where we stuck around until seven. So we got FaceTime to our bus like this, right? We’ve all done it, right? But FaceTime is not a thing anymore. And so I have a full-time job and I’m offered another full-time job and I took it. And we see this like employees who have productivity issues and then they say that they’re burnt out. And like, “I know how much work you have. You shouldn’t be burnt out. Do they have a second job?

And why shouldn’t they have a second job?” “Well, we pay them benefits.” “So what? Like as long as they’re getting their work done, do we care when?” People all have side hustles. Even people who’ve got full-time come to work. Everybody’s got some sort of little side hustle. So the definition of what full-time employment is, is up for debate. And I think young people feel in particular that, “Why shouldn’t I? It’s my time. I can do what I want with it. Or I only work 40 hours because those are my limits. Respect my boundaries,” right?

And the problem is I think all of it is so literal, which is, yes, boundaries are important, but the edges of the boundaries are fuzzy, right? And it’s not like “I don’t work on Saturdays.” “Well, I agree with you. I don’t want you working on weekends. This one weekend, I really need your help to finish this project so we can get it out the door.” “I don’t take meetings after five o’clock.” “I agree with you. I think we should have that life balance. But today, I just need you to work till six to get this one project done.”

And to recognize that, so one of the things they’re getting right is that we’re married to work and we take our phones on holiday, we take our computers on holiday with us, and that work has ultimate say on our time. I agree. That should be, we should, that should go the way of the dodo. But the extreme is not to put these hard lines everywhere and say, “I don’t do this.” As an aside, the irony is, you know, they demand that we respect their boundaries and yet they seem to step on every other boundary about bringing, you know, emotional professionalism at work and dumping all of my problems on my colleagues, which is emotionally unprofessional. It’s like, that’s a boundary you can’t cross.

But there is good evidence to your assertion that this young generation seems less capable to deal with stress than previous generations. That is true. They are good at curating, you know, they’ve grown up in an Instagram, Facebook, you know, TikTok world where I’m really good at showing you the life I want you to think that I lead. And so they’re really good at presenting a confidence that they don’t have. They sound like they have all the answers when they don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But then I see you presenting that life to me if you’re a fellow Gen Z. And I go, “What? My life’s stressful and difficult. And I had to work really late and you’re having a frappuccino, latte, whatever at 3am doing pottery lessons. I need to quit.”

Honest Expectations in Work and Life

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. It raises the question, what do you want from your life? And what do you want from your work? Like, why do you have this job? You know, if it’s just to pay the bills, I mean, I hope we, I know that is the case for a lot of people that I have to have a job to pay the bills. And I hope that employers are good enough that even survival jobs are a nice place to work.

You know, Trader Joe’s great company where people who have survival jobs, it’s still a nice place to work, you know. But I think the question is, is what is the life that you’re trying to build? And if you want a job simply to pay your bills and, you know, this concept of quiet quitting, have you heard this one, quiet quitting?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard this term, but maybe I’ll hear you talk about it.

SIMON SINEK: Well, I mean, it’s been written about. It’s not my concept. But quiet quitting is this thing where I don’t quit the job, but I basically will dial back my effort and give you the minimum. So you pay me to do this job and I will do the basic minimum amount to do the job where you can’t really fire me because I’m not really doing anything badly or wrong, but I’m also not going above and beyond at all. Right.

So there’s this concept of quiet quitting where people are coming to work and they’re just doing the minimum, doing their hours, doing their job, not volunteering or raising their hands or going. And that’s it. And it raises the question, is that bad? You know, and I’m a great believer that that it’s all about expectation management. You know, like I get asked about Amazon a lot. Like, “Do I disagree with how Amazon is run?”

And my answer is the same, which is they never lied. They didn’t tell you it’s a magical place to work where it’s all Kumbaya and we all like, you know, we all hang out with, you know, unicorns every day. It’s really amazing. They’re very very open about it, that it’s very, very aggressive and very rough and very competitive. And even the people who love it only last two years because they burn out. And so because they don’t lie, you know what you’re going to get if you go work there.

And if you like that kind of culture, then go work there. If you don’t like that, that kind of culture, then don’t work there. But don’t take the job and then say, “I didn’t know” because you did like Apple. You know, people say, “Well, Steve Jobs used to drive his people really hard.” Like, but you ask the people who loved working there. They will tell you, “Yes, it was hard and there was a lot of pressure, but I did the best work of my life. And I’m glad I worked there because I never would have been able to work to that standard if I didn’t work at Apple back in the day.” Right. So the important thing is that companies are honest about the kinds of cultures that they have. Right.

It’s the lying. It’s that look how everything’s combined. And like and look, no culture is perfect. Even good ones have problems and even bad ones have advantages. Right. But I think it’s it’s about managing expectations. And I think it’s OK for somebody to say of themselves, “Look. I’m not a careerist. I am OK with the fact that I will never be an owner or a senior manager. I want to be paid fairly. I want to do decent work, but I want work to fit neatly in my life and not overwhelm it. And I’m going to look for a job where that is possible.”

And I don’t think we’re at the point where we have total honesty on both sides yet. I hope we can get to the point because there’s still stigma, because the older generations like you and me are looking at if somebody were to say to us, “I only want to work 40 hours, I’m willing to push my boundaries occasionally. But really, this is just this.” We would be like, “Well, you’re not working. So it hasn’t normalized yet.”

But I think it’s just a question of being honest with oneself and you’re allowed to change your mind as well. Like “I decided I do want to be a little harder driving and I do have more ambition than I thought,” you know, or less. But I think I think it’s just about honesty. And this point of view is as true in personal relationships as it is in our professional relationships. So I had a conversation with somebody recently and I found absolutely fascinating. And she is polyamorous. She has four boyfriends. And she’s very open about it.

And one of the things that she explains is you have to be very honest with everybody so that everybody knows what the deal is. You know, we’re thinking, I think what a lot of people do is they’re dating somebody new is casual and they’re dating somebody else that’s doing casual, but they don’t tell them about each other. So they both think that they’re more special than they are or they both are driving towards something that may or may not be true because, you know, you’re dating two or three people and you’re going to wait and see which one works out.

This in the poly world, what I’m learning is you tell everybody everything’s everybody knows. And it’s very open and honest and everybody knows where they stand. You can you can say, “I’m not into this. I want to be the soul” or “I’m OK with this and maybe something will develop. Maybe it won’t.” But the point is, it’s on the table. And I admire the level of communication. What I’m hoping is that we do the same thing in our professional lives.

So you sort of have poly work, if you will. You know, “I have two full time jobs. You know, I have three things going or I only want this kind of relationship.” And it works if both parties are really open and honest because it’s all about managing expectations. “Hold on. I thought that you were going to give me all of your attention and all of your effort and all of your ambition. And you’re telling me you only want to work. You want to treat my job as a casual job,” like just replace relationship with job. All the same rules seem to apply.

But if I knew that I would be fine with that. I would have given you a different job and had different expectations and wouldn’t have pushed you really hard. I would have given that work to someone else because I’m assuming you want to live your career like I live my career. Like I assume that I’m getting into this relationship and you’re getting into it for the same reasons as me because we never had a conversation. We are nowhere near that.

Creating Sustainable Companies

In terms of social acceptance for that kind of conversation. But I aspire for that, that somebody sits down and says a part of your CV and part of your interview says, you know, “What kind of work life balance do you aspire for and how do you view work?” Even if you change your mind and then if expectations are managed, then what’s the problem?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve answered one of the actual number one questions I wanted to ask you about today, because when I read your book, The Infinite Game, one of the big things that changed in my life was I remember I was on a plane, I read the book, started writing some stuff, came back to our office in the UK, and I did a big presentation to all my teams about how we create a sustainable company.

Because if what you’re talking about in the book is true, then and we’re not playing a finite game here, how do we redesign the business from the ground up so that it is fundamentally sustainable? I came up with this thing called WWW dot work, welfare and wealth, which is the three reasons why we exist. We made 2020 goals. So this was in 2019, 20 goals before 2020 for each of these areas.

And I’m thinking about it again a lot now, which is like, if I was to design my business in a way where my team members would stay working here forever, how would I go about that? You just answered it by saying the point about honesty. Yeah, expectations are sitting them down and saying, “What do you want from your life?” Because I’ve never asked that. Yeah, I’m as you quite rightly identified, I’m presuming they want what I want.

SIMON SINEK: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So on it, I wrote it here as a question to ask you, how do I get my employees to stay forever?

SIMON SINEK: I understand. But why should a it’s you want to create a place in which if people want to stay, it’ll be an enjoyable place that they can make a career and grow within the organization, right? Like, and for some people who don’t have aspirations for leadership, that they can come and do good work every day and sort of get fair raises on a regular basis, so that they would, you know, with cost of living adjustments, et cetera, that they want to stay there, even if it’s a middle level, like not everybody aspires to like, be a hard driving, you know, owner, you know, and I think it’s about making it a conversation.

We never treated work like a conversation. You know, we treated it like a speech. This is how it’s going to be. And I think so one of the good things that’s coming out of, you know, COVID and young people is they’re, they’re asking questions about why does work have to be that way. And employers are rebelling against it, because it doesn’t fit the way we grew up and doesn’t fit our understanding of relationships, you know, and it’s just a conversation. That’s all it is.

And by being honest upfront, then you can say, “I don’t think this is going to be a good fit for us. I don’t think you’ll enjoy working here. And so if I employ you, knowing what I know now, we will both get frustrated. And I will either ask you to leave or you will tell me you’re going to leave. That’s how this will end,” you know, because of misaligned expectations. And so I think being honest about what you want and who you are and what your ambitions are, even if they change in the middle, you can knock on the door and say, “I’ve changed my mind. I think I want to stay here forever. I told you I didn’t, but I really love it here.”

You know, and I know this from the military, you know, some people join the military, because it’s a steady job in a bad economy or because the military will pay for you to get a college education and they didn’t have the money to get it without it. So they join the military. And then when there, they fall in love with it. They never came in for service. They discovered the service and the brotherhood and the sisterhood and decided to stay, you know, and some people might have come in for the service and realized this isn’t for me.

So work should be the same. But I think there needs to be honest conversation about. And like I said, I’ve had debates, even with my partners, my work partners, you know, when they say, “Well, if we’re paying them a full salary and giving them benefits, they shouldn’t have another job.” And my question is, “Why not?” As long as our work product doesn’t suffer as a result, like if they’re phoning it in, missing all the meetings, then, yes, absolutely.

Right. Like we’re paying for certain expectation of performance, but not necessarily of when they get it done. And so. Why shouldn’t they have two jobs? Uh, but I think, again, there has to be honesty, which is we have an expectation that that of X. And if somebody says, “I don’t want to meet that expectation because I want to have two jobs” and you can adjust the salary that way, you can be like, “All right, then how about we pay you less and you can have all the freedom you want.”

Asking for a Raise

SIMON SINEK: And again, it’s a conversation. We don’t make these things conversations. We make them one way. And by the way, that’s from the employee to the employer too. “I demand X.” You know, somebody asked me recently, “How do I, you know, I want to ask my boss for a raise. How do I do it?”

And I said, “The problem, the way most people ask for a raise is like, ‘I want a 20% raise. I did my research and my job, the average salary on my job, you know, is X. My friend gets paid X. My friend, my friend gets paid X. I know somebody who I work with, you know, I’m doing the same work as them.

So I want to be compensated equally. And I want a 20% raise,’ right?” And so they’re positioning the question that leaves the employer no choice but to say yes or no, right? And even if it’s, “I can help you get that, but this is how it’s going to be, like, you’re going to have to have certain targets.” It still comes across as a no, right? Because the request was binary, right? And so the advice that I gave to this person was stop thinking of your job as an event and think of your job as a career.

Think of your continuum and go to your boss in the middle of this continuum. “I’ve worked here for two and a half years. I’ve been here through high times and low times. You know I’m loyal. And my aspiration is to stay here and grow with the organization. Can you help me figure out a path that gets me to this salary?” It’s not a yes or no now. Now it’s like, “Absolutely, I can. I can give it to you today. No path necessary.” Or “Absolutely, I can. We’re going to set some target goals that I want you to hit.

And if you can hit them, then you’ll absolutely work to that salary.” But again, it’s allowing for conversation and it’s allowing somebody to recognize that you view your own career with the organization as a continuum, that “I’ve been here and I want to continue to be here. So can you invest in me? Can you take a bet on me rather than meet my demands?” And so I think a lot of these things fail because they’re poorly presented. And this goes once again to this younger generation who seem to lack the skills for coping with stress, not very good at asking for help, very confrontation avoidant, like I said, so afraid sometimes to ask the boss, “Can I have a raise,” that they’d rather just quit.

And it’s often with an email that says, “You don’t appreciate me, you don’t pay me enough.” I was like, “What? You just had to ask me, I would have given you a raise.” And I think part of it is also that when somebody is anxious about something, they do poorly present, they do make things binary because there’s fear or anxiety or stress or fear of rejection. “What if my boss says no? Can I handle that?” Like all of these things that come into these very sort of binary aggressive things. And I always equate all of these challenges at work to personal relationships.

Like you can’t go to the person you love in your relationship and say, “I demand this.” It’s just not going to go well, right? But you present a situation, you say, “I want us to move through this and how do we work through this together?” And I think that’s how these difficult work conversations need to happen. A work relationship is a relationship like any other relationship. There’s trust, there’s anger, there’s care, there’s good days and bad days and all of the same nonsense, messiness.

And our personal relationships are at work as well. You know, there’s slightly different standards of professionalism and emotional professionals and things like that. But in terms of it’s a relationship like any other relationships, you have to treat it like a relationship. And in fact, go read relationship books if you want to fix things at work.

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Evolving Definitions of Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I read about our history as sapiens or homo sapiens or whatever, it appears that we weren’t with one partner. We were with multiple partners. We now live in a society where we’re told to be with one partner. Is that natural? Is it human? Does it work? The stats seem to suggest it’s not really working so well. I mean, if I bought a TV and 50% and they said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a 50% of these are going to break.” Yeah, I wouldn’t buy the TV, right? I’d maybe, you know, rent one, right?

SIMON SINEK: That’s funny. Esther Perel, who’s wonderful, if you don’t know her work, you know, she talks about the changing definition of monogamy. Monogamous used to mean I’m in one relationship for my whole life. Now monogamy means I’m in one relationship at a time, right? So, even that definition has changed where monogamy and people who consider themselves strictly monogamous have 15 monogamous relationships, right?

Over the course of a 10, how many close? I’ve had six close, you know, relationships. They were all monogamous, right? So, these definitions are evolving anyway, right? That’s number one. Number two, I like that we are having conversations about the health of relationships like we’re having conversation about the health of work. And these things have always existed. The difference is now the stigma of talking about them seems to have dissipated, at least in the United States where I live. Like, it’s amazing how many people are talking about open marriages, open relationships, polyamorous relationships, consensual non-monogamy.

Like, I don’t even know what all the differences of all these words are, if I’m honest. Like, there’s so many words that seem to mean similar things. I don’t understand the nuances. But the point is, it’s like, it’s amazing to me how many people are raising the question of what is a healthy relationship. And I think one of the things that boils down for me is, it goes right back to what we’re talking about, which is, it’s based on both parties, and they both get a say.

And so, if you say, “I want to live this kind of lifestyle,” and you’re upfront about it, and somebody says, “I’m cool with that,” then great. But if you lie and say, “I want to have this kind of, I want to be a strictly monogamous,” but you don’t really, because you like the person a lot. And you think that if you tell them that you want a different kind of relationship, you’re going to lose them. Like, the conversations we have are largely born out of fear. “If I tell her what I really want, she won’t like me, and then I won’t get another date.”

That’s true. That is a possibility. But if I tell her exactly who I am and what I want, and she likes me for who I am, then isn’t that better? And I think it’s the same thing that we’re just talking about work. So, I don’t think it’s right for us to say we should be strictly anything, because some people want one kind of relationship. Let’s rephrase that.

Both people in that relationship want that kind of relationship, and both people in the other kind of relationship both want that kind of relationship. Then we just have to respect that we have different points of view about what brings happiness.

SIMON SINEK: As long as you’re happy and it’s consensual, I think we’re done. And usually, the problems arise when somebody has most of these decisions, most of these problems are born out of fear, fear of loss, insecurity in a relationship, jealousy, for example. This is the other thing that friend I was telling you about who’s super open and honest about her life. I was talking to her the other day, and she says, “I’m jealous.” She says, “I’m having jealousy, and I’m trying to figure out where it’s coming from.”

And what I found so fascinating about it is she treated jealousy as a feeling, like happy, sad, angry, where in most monogamous traditional relationships, jealousy is usually an accusation, right? “I saw you look at the barista that way,” right? And jealousy is born usually out of fear. And hyper protective, possessive is born out of fear, fear of loss, right? And what I found so fascinating was she didn’t blame her partner for her feeling of jealousy. She wanted to understand where her feeling of jealousy was coming from.

It was a feeling, right? And not an accusation. And so I think the same is what we’re to all of this, whether we’re talking about work or personal relationships, everything we’re talking about today comes right back to those human skills that we are lacking.

Hard Skills vs. Human Skills

SIMON SINEK: And I hate the term soft skills, hard skills and soft skills we talk about, right? Hard and soft are opposites, right? They’re hard skills and human skills. These are the hard skills you need to learn to do your job, and these are the human skills you need to learn to be a better human being. We’re really good at teaching hard skills.

We’re junk at teaching human skills. And human skills include things like how to listen, how to have a difficult conversation, how to give and receive feedback, how to have an effective confrontation. These are skills that most people lack. We saw it after the murder of George Floyd. The number of leaders who after George Floyd was killed did nothing. They said nothing to their teams, not because they’re bad people.

It’s because they weren’t taught how to have a difficult conversation. And so they were so afraid, there’s that fear again, of saying something wrong that they would accidentally offend someone or enslave the situation that they chose nothing. And I think the same goes in our relationships. We make too many decisions out of fear, right? Now, as entrepreneurs, we understand risk, right? We understand risk, right?

And that big reward comes with big risk. Small reward comes with small risk. No risk, you’re leaving it up to somebody else. And to get over the fact that if I tell somebody who I really am, that they may not like me, well, don’t you want to find that out sooner rather than later? Because they’re going to find out. The truth is always revealed, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

The truth is always revealed eventually. But think about the magic of being able to say the kind of job you want to have and the kind of life you want to live and the kind of relationship you want to have at the risk that they may not hire you or they may not go on a second or third date with you. But think about the opportunity if you do take that risk.

Honesty in Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking about all the people listening to this right now who are in a relationship. They’ve been there for 15 years. It’s become loveless. Maybe they’re not having sex anymore. And they’re driving on the motorway now listening to us speak.

And they’re thinking, “I really want to have sex with someone else. And if I go home and tell Jane or John or whoever it is, I don’t want to be gender specific, that I just want to have sex with someone else. And I also want to keep them around. They’re going to leave. So I can’t be honest.” Right.

SIMON SINEK: So once again, it goes like asking for a raise. Right. If you make it binary, you’re backing someone into a corner. “I realize our marriage is loveless. So I want to start seeing other people. And you can too.” You know. And what you’re doing is you’re making a binary. You’re forcing someone into a binary yes or no, which is unfair to somebody.

And you’re setting yourself up for probably failure. Right. As opposed to saying, “I love you. You’re my life partner. You’re my best friend. I never, ever want to lose you. At the same time, our relationship is loveless. And I’m struggling because I crave love. And I crave that kind of affection. And we don’t have it. And so I’m struggling and don’t know what to do. And I want to know how you feel. And I wonder if we can work on this together.” So you’re making it just like the raise. It’s like, let’s make this.

Now, if you hate the marriage and get out of the marriage, you know, like if you’ve tried the counseling and it’s broken, then that’s a different conversation. But if there is the desire to stay in the loving relationship in some way, shape or form, but you’re looking for to fill a place that’s missing, then that’s a conversation. But it’s not a demand or a request. It’s a difficult. “Honey, I need to have an uncomfortable, difficult conversation. And we may not get it resolved today. But I want us to promise to stick through each other, stick through this with each other, so we can figure it out together. It might take us a day. It might take us a week. It might take us six months. But I’m going to be here throughout and want to go through this with you because I am struggling in this relationship.”

Somebody else has the right to know that their partner is struggling in the relationship. And odds are, if only one person is struggling, there’s no scenario where only one person is struggling. It’s like when we have a problem with an employee, like if we really can’t, they hate their job, too. Like it’s not a shocker, you know, and like start the conversation like, “Listen, I’m struggling with you. I know you hate it here because it can’t be one way,” right? That doesn’t exist.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m pretty sure most of the issues I’ve had in my life stem from the fact that I didn’t have an honest conversation sooner.

SIMON SINEK: Me too. Of course, me too. And I made the mistake in my life that I didn’t and I was it was well-intentioned. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. I didn’t want to offend them or upset them. And so I dealt with the difficult thing in my head and tried to come up with the solution that I thought best looked after my needs and your needs because I wanted.

But if I told you this, I would burden you with the stress of having to figure this out. So I’ll figure it out and then I’ll make the decision that I think is best for us. It’s failed every time because the mistake that I made is I treated the relationship as an individual. When it’s not, it’s two people. And the problem with a relationship with two people is I’m not in total control of the relationship. Remember, I’m a member of a group.

I’m a member of a tribe. I’m a member of a team. I’m not in total control of everything. And I have to relinquish some control. And the thing we have to deal with more than anything is fear. It’s fear that is the underlying thing why we don’t have honest conversations. It’s why we are hyper aggressive or make things binary. It’s because we fear rejection. We fear loss. We fear whatever it is. And we can ask for somebody to reassure us. And we can deal with the fear first.

Lessons from COVID

SIMON SINEK: And by saying, “I’m going to stay here. And an employer or a lover can say, I promise you, I will stick through this with you as well. I will not abandon you. We’ll get through this together.” Ah, that takes the fear down a notch, right? That we will do this together. And in my own relationships, you know, COVID, all the bad that came with COVID, again, you know how I see the world. I see the world is balanced.

There’s good and bad in everything, right? All of the struggle and bad that happened in COVID, there was tremendous good also. And in my own life, um, I had the opportunity like many of us to stop, get off the hamster wheel, and then look backwards and saying, “Do I want to get back on the hamster wheel?”

You know, or look at all my relationships. Like, why weren’t they working? Like, where’s my accountability in this? You know, uh, what was I doing wrong? And I realized that one of the things I had to do was I had to not, I had to be a better listener. And so, you know, my girlfriend, you know, when we first started dating, she’s a terrible listener, terrible, right?

I mean, we joke about it, uh, where I would say, “Babe, I need to have an uncomfortable conversation with you. This is something I’m struggling with, something you said or did that it’s making me uncomfortable. I need to work it through with you.” And she would start telling me a problem she had with me, right? And so what I would do is just hold space for that.

And the conversation would just change entirely, you know, but I had to learn what I learned about listening. That’s holding space to learn, to hold space for someone, you know, to learn to, to, to, as if, as if holding a baby, you know, um, like to let someone feel safe telling you what they need to say without you trying to fix something or disagree with something or correct something, right? “Go on, tell me more. What else,” um, was the most valuable thing I learned in COVID. Um, and the nice thing is, is when you give that to someone, weirdly, they, by some weird osmosis, they gain the capability to give it back to you because you’ve done it. If you do it enough times, you can say, this is what came later, which is, “I hear what you’re saying. And I want to talk about that. But for now, I want to finish the thing that I started talking about. Can you, can we just start with that?”

And you can say it politely. And they recognize that you’ve held space for them so many times that they’ll offer you that service and they know how to do it because they’ve, they’ve seen it modeled.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really interesting thing about that. And I was thinking about my own relationships with my, with my partner is the reason why that’s so true for me is because most of the time when someone is talking and talking and repeating themselves, it’s because they don’t feel like they’ve been heard.

SIMON SINEK: Correct. So in my relationship with my partner, the fact that we do exactly what you’ve described, where we literally go, give me a safe space. And then I talk means she only feels like she has to say it once because she feels like it was heard the first time in my previous relationship.

My, I remember being, I’m going to be honest. I was in the wardrobe one day and I’ve locked myself in there. My girlfriend is banging on the door, repeating herself. I’m not proud of this, I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth. I long context. I said, “I’m going to New Year’s Eve. Me and a client are going out to Singapore. It’s their birthday. It’s the biggest client in the world. They’ve asked me to come. It’s their birthday.” She goes, “I want to spend New Year’s with Eve with you.”

And I go, “Yeah, but I’ve told them I’m going to Singapore.” She goes, “I want to spend New Year’s Eve with you.” Yeah. And that just went on. And at one point she’s like screaming at me. So I just like go and hide in the wardrobe. Yeah. She spends all night banging on the bloody door, like repeating the same thing over and over. In my new relationship, we, we communicate with more context and we actually listen when the other person is speaking.

So it only needs to be said once and then she can speak and then I listen and I repeat it back to her and then I speak. So what are the things that same, right? So this was 10 years ago, by the way, I’m not trapping myself in wardrobe anymore. So, uh, you know, uh, the thing that I learned about being in a relationship, I used to come home and do the same thing.

Like, uh, “Hey babe, you know, I got a thing on Friday with a client,” right? Or I’ll give you an even simpler one. Um, um, “The Joneses, uh, invited us over for dinner on Friday. I know that you’re free on Friday. So I, so I said, yes, we’ll go for dinner. The Joneses on Friday” and hell ensues, you know?

And I was like, “But I know you’re, I know we have no plans,” you know? And so now what I’ve learned is when the Joneses call me and say, “You want to come for dinner on Friday?” I go, “My God, I’d love to. Let me check.” And I come home and say, “Hey, the Joneses invited us out for dinner on Friday, but I want to check with you first.” “Oh my God, I’d love to.” “Great. I’ll call them and confirm.”

And I’ve made the, again, instead of me, well intentioned, making all the decisions, even though I know, I know exactly what it’ll be. Yes. I know the answer is going to be yes. Um, what I’m doing is including the other person in the relationship. That’s all it is. It’s making someone feel seen and heard and included.

And it, and like I said, there’s so many great lessons we can learn from our personal relationships, which we can apply at work. Cause again, an easy way to understand how I view, how I approach all these things. I view it all as just human beings interacting with human beings. That’s all it is. And all the anxieties and fears and egos and all it’s applies everywhere.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Um, what’s the most difficult conversation you’ve had to have with someone? Um, when we’re talking about that honesty and communicating as authentically and openly as we can, as soon as possible, what are those difficult conversations you’ve had to have or a conversation you had maybe too late down the line and you thought, “I wish I’d had this conversation sooner.”

SIMON SINEK: I mean, they’re not different from anybody else. I mean, as you know, talking about George Floyd to my team, talking to George Floyd with my black friends, that was really hard. Um, and I made mistakes, you know, like I remember with one of my friends, one of my black friends, I was crying, you know, as we were talking about it and I said to him, “Why aren’t you crying?” And he said, “Cause it’s new for you. It’s not new for me.”

He says, “I’m exhausted. I’m like, I’m glad you’re having your experience, but it’s not my experience that you’re, you’re, this is, you’re seeing this for the first time. I’ve seen this my whole life,” you know, like that was, that was hard, you know, to have that being told at me, to me, it’s true too.

Um, but my conversations are the same as, I mean, the difficult conversations, you know, it’s about, it’s about honesty and relationship, but honestly with, with him, you know, with somebody on a team, you know, if something’s not working out or if you give somebody really hard feedback, somebody who you are really close with, it doesn’t mean you’re letting them go, but like this really hard feedback you need to give to someone and learning to deliver it with love, learning to be matter of fact, you know, one of the mistakes I would always make, you know, this, you know, these, all these theories about give somebody the, you know, the compliment sandwich, tell them something good, tell them the thing you want to tell them, tell something good.

It doesn’t work because it’s bullshit generic, something good, really specific, something bad and bullshit generic, something good, you know, seven good things, one bad thing, bullshit, bullshit, generic, generic, generic, really specific. So it doesn’t work in my opinion. It doesn’t work.

Like you, if it’s really, you know, like, you know, “I really like that you show up to work with a smile and there’s one other thing I need to tell you about,” you know, but what I’ve learned is when delivering good news, be very emotional and when delivering bad news, remove the emotion. And so like bad news at work, especially, you know, when we sit with them, so “I don’t, I don’t want to belabor this. And you’ve been with us for a long time.

I need to, it’s really hard. I need to give you some difficult feedback.” I’m infusing all of the emotion into this, right? But to be dispassionate about it, say, “Hey, I need to give you some difficult news. I need to just have a really blunt conversation with you about something that’s going on at work and it’s going to be really hard for you to hear, but I need to tell you, boom, here it is.”

People appreciate it when we’re just straight with them and, you know, not infuse all the extra emotion. Um, but you know, yeah, I think the same, I think the same as again, same as true in all relationships.

Referring to Employees as a Team

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve always found that I, I struggled to use the word employees and you just went to use the word then and you changed it to team. Yeah. Is that something that you also, the reason why, the reason why, so I use whenever I’m on the podcast, I talk about it, but my, my team will never hear me.

And if they might not have noticed this, but this has been the same for 10, for about 10 years, I will never in a, in a chat set, call them and call people that work in my company employees. Yeah. It seems to be somewhat of a violation of my values somehow. And I just noticed you went to say the word team, someone on my team, that’s what you did. Yeah.

SIMON SINEK: I mean, I, I do the same. I mean, I, I, when I show up to a group call, I’m like, “Hey team.” And like, yeah, then, you know, um, employee to me is a technical word, you know? Yeah. I don’t mind talking about employees when we’re talking about generic company stuff.

Um, I don’t mind referring to employees when I’m talking to an insurance, when I’m talking about insurance, you know, or benefits, you know, like it’s a technical term that I think is totally fine to use in technical times, but when I’m referring to people and those people have names and faces, then, then they’re the team.

Gender Differences and Unmet Needs

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you, you know, this Andrew Tate thing, this Andrew Tate guy has been in a lot of the headlines, probably a good thing. You don’t, um, he’s been in, it’s this guy that kind of came out with this kind of pro, you know, pseudo weird kind of strange masculine approach.

His base thesis, I guess, is saying that men, young men and men generally are missing something in their lives that the modern world hasn’t given them. Um, Jordan Peterson has alluded to similar things. Jordan Peterson’s been on this podcast a few times.

It’s got me thinking about gender differences and our needs in the world. A lot of people, there’s a lot of people in like YouTube and the self-help space that are saying men have these unmet needs because the world is becoming more equal and they are lacking their sense of purpose and men are meant to be, I don’t know, tribe leaders and all these kinds of things. And when you look at the suicide rates in our country, the single biggest killer of men under the age of 40 is themselves, it’s suicide.

And so I’ve been, I’ve been mulling this. Is, is the, is, is there gender differences in your view? These are all very difficult topics, I understand, but, and is, are men in particular having certain needs go unmet because of a changing world in your view?

SIMON SINEK: Everybody has unmet needs because of a changing world. Fact. Are there gender differences? Of course there are gender differences and how we respond to men versus how we respond to women is different. A friend of mine who was, um, she was, she, three things happened to her simultaneously in the military. Three things happened to her simultaneously.

Any one of them would, would be difficult, but all three of them happened to her at the same time. She was promoted to senior management. She became lieutenant colonel. She was deployed for 13 months, 12 months, and she was given her very first command. Okay. So any one of those things is, is a, is a, is a trial and all three happened at once, right?

And she took over a job where the previous five leaders had all been fired. It was a poorly run group. She would be working with people from different forces or she’s in the air force. She’d have air force and army reporting to her, some of whom were much older than her and much more experienced than her. Um, and she is a hard driving, you know, passionate young officer who said, “I’m going to turn this group around. I’m going to prove to everybody that I can turn it around.

I’ve been practicing leadership. I’ve been studying leadership. I want to be a great leader.” And it was a failure. Like it wasn’t, people weren’t, they were ignoring her. They weren’t taking her seriously. And no matter how she powered up, it didn’t work. And, um, every night she started, she would cry herself to sleep and started regretting being in the military. All she wanted to do was go home.

She didn’t want to be stuck on deployment anymore. What was something really exciting now became a regret and she didn’t know what to do. She was failing, which was hard for her to deal with alone. I mean, as, as it was. And so she decided to give up and she said, “I’m, I will not turn this group around. So if I’m going to fail at my job, then I might as, and I’m stuck here for another six months.

And so as everybody else, I’m going to change my mandate. Then instead of turning this group around, I’m just going to ensure that the rest of their time here, they really enjoy it. I’m just going to make it more fun for them to come to work every day. Because they’re also away from their families and stuck.” And then something strange really started to happen. They started to listen to her, take her seriously.

They started to respect her more. And she ended up, she ended up being very, very high performing at the end of the group, completely turned around because on her way in, she made it about herself and she made it about the metrics and she made it about the performance.

The lesson she learned was if you make it about the people, then the people will take care of everything else. And I remember I sat down with her a week or two after she got back and she’s telling me this whole story for the first time, you know, after she got back and she started crying.

And, and when she said to me, she goes, “I have never felt a joy so deep as seeing someone discover that they are capable of more than they thought they were,” which is very different than “I’m going to turn this around.” So in, in her telling me this, she said, “One of the big lessons she learned is there is such things as female leadership.”

And she had a conversation with one of the army, one of the soldiers and like, “Why didn’t you listen to me? Like why, why was it so difficult? Why did we struggle?” And he said, point blank, he says, “When a male officer yells at me,” right? “I take it, I hear it, I move on,” right?

It’s fine. “When you yelled at me, I felt like my mother was yelling at me and it was more difficult,” you know? So there are gender differences in how we respond to each other because it is a mom, dad thing, right? We respond differently. And, and men are sometimes, not always, but men are sometimes better at just being told blank by another guy, “Just do this.” And you go, “I’ll just do it.”

But when you create gender, it creates all kinds of other, other interpretations and associations like our mothers. So I think we cannot discount those. And, you know, traditional male leadership qualities are things like decisiveness, aggression, you know, those kinds of things. Traditional female qualities are things like patience, you know, maternal instincts, empathy. And I think the mistake we’ve made across all leadership is we teach male leadership. We teach decisiveness and we teach aggression.

And these are the things we teach. We teach that to everybody. And the reality is, is what makes great leaders is they have a balance. And what we should be teaching is more of female leadership. And, you know, all leaders should take on the qualities of patience and empathy. You know, this, this is the irony.

And so I think we, I think we do need to teach those skills. I mean, those are the, this goes back to what we were saying before. These are those human skills. You know, women get my work a lot quicker than men. When I was starting my career, you know, women would just nod and be like, “Yeah, yeah, what do you, of course.” And men would be like, “What are your case studies?

And what cases did you have to prove your model? Logic.” And, you know, men would fight with me on some of the details and women just inherently, intuitively understood that the humanity of the work that I was preaching just made sense. And there’s space for that. And so, yeah, I think, I think female leadership and those qualities are just necessary everywhere. But yes, there are differences and they cannot be discounted.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s difficult to talk about them though, isn’t it? It feels like a minefield. Even when I talk about gender differences, it feels like I’m going to step on a mine somewhere because you’re entirely correct. And my previous company was a managing director was a woman. And I think the business was more successful because of those qualities you suggested empathy, care patient. Yeah.

She was much more honest about honest about forecasts. Yeah. And how the business was going to perform versus a male leader. I mean, this is such a narrow example. So it’s not necessarily truth, but a male managing director we had, he was extremely exaggerating and very, very, very ambitious about forecast that we never realized.

SIMON SINEK: That makes sense. That’s consistent. And I think, you know, there’s lots of data on this, you know, men, you know, when they apply for a job and they say, “We need these 10 things.” And if they have six out of the 10, they apply for the job. And women won’t apply for the job unless they have nine or 10 of the qualities, you know, men are a little, you know, I’ve seen it happen in meetings where, you know, there’s a male entrepreneur and like the client is saying, you know, “We’d love this to have, we’d love to have this.”

And they kind of have it. And the guy goes, “We can totally do that.” And, you know, and they’ll sell it, they’ll sell it right there and then figure it out later. And I’ve sat in meetings with a female entrepreneur who has almost that, like, they’re really close. And I and that, you know, somebody saying, “We would love this.”

I’m like, “You have that. They’re like, it’s not, we haven’t tested yet. I’m like, you have it. Tell them you have it. They’re like, what’s not perfect yet?” You know? So yeah, I mean, I mean, some of it, some of it is a cultural as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have a female entrepreneur friend who has a theory. I have to stress this is her theory. Exactly, exactly right. She believes men make better entrepreneurs than women. She believes men make better entrepreneurs than women. And the logic is that as when we’re young, traditional roles for the most part still exist. That if you want to go to the prom, generally, the boy asks the girl, right? I think it’s softening, but traditional roles are still there.

Which means from a young age, boys learn to muster up courage, take a risk and get rejected. And then they have to do it again. And then they have to do it again. Right? And so you flash forward to adulthood. And men who learn that skill of asking, of taking a risk, facing rejection, being rejected, and then trying again, make them resilient entrepreneurs.

Where for, again, assuming traditional roles are played, you know, if a woman who hasn’t learned the skill of risk rejection is more afraid of the risk as an adult.

SIMON SINEK: Now, we could argue that with online dating, you know, swiping left and right, that everybody’s losing the skill. You know, we could argue that nobody has to take a risk because you just swipe right. You don’t know that they swipe left on you. They think maybe they just didn’t see you. So you only get the, “Oh, we connected,” but nobody ever gets rejected.

So are we building, that goes back to the original conversation of a young generation that’s less capable of dealing with stress than older generations. Like much, there are fewer opportunities to risk, reject, have to try again. To risk, reject, have to try again. Right? And the things that we learn as kids, these social interactions, they do become skills as adults. And so, you know, is it a softening of a generation?

Should not we be asking both, you know, boys and girls, you know, shouldn’t we not be asking them to go to the, to learn, to both have to learn to take risk as opposed to taking the risk away from everybody? I don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, you, do you know what, what I will say is I’ve had two very successful women entrepreneurs on this podcast who said the same sentence, which is “As women in the workplace, we typically don’t ask for raises as much as our male counterparts.” And that kind of supports what you’re saying now, which is men have at some point learned to just ask for the things that they want, whether it’s a raise, whether it’s a job, whatever it is, you know, but I think, I think, you know, the theory here that my friend posed is that it doesn’t come from our experiences of dating when we’re younger, that we build these skill sets that benefit us later in life as entrepreneurs, the whole, it’s not risk reward is risk, reject risk, rejection.

Interviewing Yourself

STEVEN BARTLETT: Whenever I speak to someone that does a lot of interviews and conversations and talks, you know, online a lot, I always, I always try and think of questions that I would ask them that they’ve never been asked before. And one day, I remember it was actually after you left it when we’re in the studio in LA, I thought to myself, if I was going to interview myself, it would probably be the most interesting interview in the world, because I know all of the bullshit.

And I know all of the stuff that no one’s ever asked me that I’ve maybe skirted away from or whatever. If you were sat in my chair, and you were interviewing Simon today, what is what are some of the questions you would have asked you to get up to, to get the most interesting stuff out of you? Maybe just give me one question.

SIMON SINEK: I think you’ve done a pretty good job. I mean, I think the best interviews are conversations. I think the best interviews have no agenda. But the interviewer has genuine curiosity. I think the best interviews are open ended questions that are difficult.

And in this case of your interviews, you are pretty blunt with a question that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room, a lot of questions I can wiggle out of and yours less so. But they give an opportunity to me to think out loud. I think a lot of the questions you asked today, I haven’t thought about or if I have, I haven’t sort of codified it.

And what you heard were not answers, but you heard me thinking. You know, and if you go back and listen to them, I probably, they’re probably sort of like, sort of bounce around a little bit because you hear me trying to get to an answer. They’re not answers.

I’m trying to get to an answer. And those for me are the best. Because I walk away feeling enlightened, because I got to think where usually the answers, the questions are, I’ve heard them all before. They’re very focused on my work. “When you wrote this, when you wrote that, you know, what were you thinking?” And I don’t learn anything. And so when you asked me about my work, I know the answers.

When you asked me not about my work, you asked me about life and you asked me about challenges that the world is facing. That’s what I love. So, you know, I think you’ve done that. And so the questions that I ask myself are the questions you asked me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, I’m going to ask you the question. I’m not copping out. It’s genuinely, you’re very good at what you do. I will ask you the question that I would ask myself. Okay. Which is what is the greatest? I was just thinking about it, then what is the greatest fear you have about how you’re currently living your life?

SIMON SINEK: What is the greatest fear I have about how I’m currently living my life? That I’m not 100% honest with myself. Because I’m not honest with myself, I won’t be honest to others. You know, and when somebody asks me a question that, that I’m afraid of the answer, not because I’m afraid of offending them. But I’m, I’m, I’m afraid of how I feel about the answer myself. You know, I think that would be it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you got a suspicion that you’re not being completely honest with yourself?

SIMON SINEK: I think that all of us have a capacity to rationalize. It’s, it’s one of the genius things about being a human being, we can rationalize anything. You know, I can make any decision, the right decision. You know, and I can convince somebody of it as well, you know, like, “This is definitely the right decision.” And I think it’s that it’s that gut that deep down inside to be truly honest, even if the answer is “I don’t know.” Or “I’m scared,” or “I’m uncertain,” or “I want this and I feel like I shouldn’t want it.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you have a suspicion that you’re not being honest with yourself in a certain area of your life?

SIMON SINEK: I have a suspicion that I’m not being honest with myself. I don’t think it’s a suspicion. I think it’s I think it’s confirmed. I don’t think I suspect it. I think I think I think I’m, I like every human being have elements of self-doubt and insecurity, of course, you know, and, and can convince myself of anything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You have self-doubt in certain areas?

SIMON SINEK: Of course. Well, that’s none of your business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But that’s a good enough answer.

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, those are those are those are my those are those are my that’s, that’s like, not I’m, I’m pretty open. But there are things that I want to resolve myself, I want to resolve with myself before, before I’m able to share them. Because if I share them, it has to benefit others.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, you have to have done I guess, work on I have to do work, because I’m happy to share stuff that’s in my life. If I believe that that conversation, even if it’s unresolved, has benefit to others, maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. I find it really interesting, you know, as I do this podcast, where my line is, what won’t I share? And there is things I won’t share.

Yeah, it feels like maybe I’m bullshitting myself. Maybe it’s quite a lot of stuff I don’t share, or I twist it to make myself look better. People like to be a hero, you know?

SIMON SINEK: I mean, or, or like, I think we live in a world that we have confused vulnerability with broadcasting our feelings. Right? And going on a podcast, or worse, sitting in your bedroom with your phone on self view, and broadcasting your breakup or your anger, or whatever it is on TikTok, or whatever your medium of choice is, you know, is not vulnerability, even if you’re crying. Have that exact same conversation with those exact same words with somebody you love and see how difficult that is.

That’s vulnerability. And I just the idea of broadcasting everything. I think it’s, you know, putting pictures of me as a baby and my dad holding me and happy Father’s Day, Dad, I love you. My dad’s not on frickin Instagram. What am I, what do I just call my dad and say to happy Father’s Day? I love you as opposed to, like, I think it’s hilarious, that I need to broadcast everything.

And we think that’s vulnerability, and it’s not. It’s broadcasting our emotions, which are different. So I think, you know, those conversations that you’re struggling to have, and like the ones that I’m the ones that I won’t share, it’s not that I won’t share them with anybody. It’s that I won’t share them with you. Because I like you.

But we’re not, you’re not my soulmate. You’re not the person that I confide in. I will absolutely share those deep those things that I’m struggling with. But I’ll share with somebody who can hold space for me with love, not with the desire to make a good podcast. You know, from an old fashioned perspective, you know, so so the mistake people will make is to not share them with anyone. And when I say it’s not your business, it doesn’t mean it’s not out of anyone’s business.

I absolutely do share those things, because it would be unhealthy not to. But I want to help, I want to share those things in a really safe, really safe, magical space with somebody who loves me no matter what, and kiss me no matter what, and will stand by me no matter what.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. No one has ever responded like that before, which I think is, which is amazing in and of itself, because it’s really, it’s really changed my perspective on a few things.

Closing Tradition: Question for the Next Guest

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question to the next guest. Yes, they have no idea who they’re asking it for. Correct. I wonder, I’d love to know how somebody answered my question last time. We could look at that.

I’ll tell you. Yeah, after. It’s a slightly interesting one, because it feels like it’s something we’ve discussed in many respects. What’s one conversation? What’s one conversation you haven’t had, which you know you need to? And why haven’t you had it? Are you willing to have it?

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, I won’t share the answer. And yes, I will.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you’d rather have it with the person.

SIMON SINEK: I’d rather have it with the person. To me, to broadcast it now, before I’ve talked to the person, seems unfair and disingenuous. And I think it’s kind of like when there’s a respect. It’s like when you hear about, there was a tragedy and people were killed and they don’t release the names before they’ve told the families. They tell the families first and they release the names, just out of respect.

And I think the same goes for these kinds of conversations, which is, I think we owe it to the people in our lives we love and care about to let them be the first to hear the thing that has to be said rather than the second or the last. I think it’s just, that’s how I would want to be treated too. I’d want to be the first to hear it if somebody has something to say to me. It’s just respect. So yes, there are things and they will be said.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I completely agree. And it really ties in nicely with your earlier point about having a conversation as soon as possible, an honest conversation as soon as possible. But also, I guess the adjacent point to that is having it with them first and making sure they don’t find out via the grapevine or a podcast.

SIMON SINEK: Can I, can I, can I, yes, a hundred percent. And I’ve heard stories of like people hearing about things on television, you know, and people losing their jobs they found out through somebody else, things like that. Can I just share one funny story about being honest before we close? Honesty always has to be honest, right? Like honesty is really easy, just tell the truth.

But honesty doesn’t have to happen in the moment. And this is a lesson I’ve learned, right? So I went to see a friend of mine’s play and it was easily the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I mean, if she wasn’t in it, I would have walked out. It was awful.

And at the end of the performance, I hung around with the, you know, close friends and family in the, in the foyer. And she eventually came out still in costume, still in makeup. And she knows I’m an honest broker. So after the thanks for coming, the first question was, “What did you think?” Right now I’m an honest person, but she’s all jacked up on adrenaline. She’s all jacked up on emotion.

Now is not the time, but the problem is I can’t lie. You know, we do it all. We lie all the time to protect other people’s feelings. You know, you get given a gift. It’s the ugliest sweater you’ve ever seen in your life. And they go, “What do you think?” You go, “Oh my God, I love it. Thank you.” You don’t love it, right? So don’t say you love it to protect them, right?

But you don’t have to be honest in the moment. So what I said was, “Oh my God, I’m so proud of you. It was so amazing to be here and watch you do your thing. I’ve never sat in the audience and seen you do your thing before. And it was so much joy to see you on stage.” All of that was true.

And that was done. The next day when all the adrenaline had come down and there was no more emotion, I called her up and say, “Can I tell you what I thought of the play?” She goes, “Yeah.” And then I told her point by point why it sucked. But we had a rational conversation the next day. And I think we make this mistake all the time in our relationships, which is we think we have to be honest in the moment, but we don’t read the room and understand that there’s too much emotion involved to have a rational conversation.

You know, somebody’s mad at us and we’re good. This is not the time for rational feedback. You meet emotion with emotion. You meet rational with rational. You can’t mix the two. And sometimes we’re rational, but they’re emotional, which means we have to stand down.

Right. So what I’ve learned about honesty is we have to be honest, but we can actually delay. You have to meet rational with rational and emotional with emotional.

Feedback on Simon’s Video Subscription Library

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let me give you some honesty then. I went on your video subscription library. Absolutely love it. I’m a member now. You’ll see my name in the back end and looked at the live courses coming out, watch loads of the videos. Amazing.

It feels like it feels like it’s too cheap, to be honest, because the amount of value there around all of the things that are foundational to my life, my businesses, my relationships, everything feels like it’s a little bit too cheap. It’s like a couple of cups of coffee for a month. And I can just binge all of your content, all of the videos. And you’ve got all of these other instructors on there who are teaching lessons.

Feels very cheap. That’s one thing. The only thing I thought I thought, oh, I don’t know if this is this is the best is the name. Go on. I the word subscription to me is a bad thing. Give me another name. Simon’s University, Simon’s library. Any of these things would have made me way more. So I was thinking about the name of the video subscription library video. It’s not really why I’m here. Subscription. It’s not a great word. Yeah.

So I was I was just thinking we’ll change it. But no, I mean, I haven’t. But I have no emotional connection to any of you. And the reason why it’s a technical thing and we call it a technical thing. I watched your last episode and you talked about honesty. And I was thinking this is way better than it sounds.

Yeah, you’ve got and I have to say this because people have to check it out. Basically, the you’ve distilled your books into actionable courses. There’s live classes. There’s all of your content on there. Yeah. Everything you’ve ever done. It feels like I’m ripping you off by being a member. That’s very nice. I genuinely think if I hang around there, my life would be better if I hang around for an hour a day.

My life would be better. Basically, we’ll change the name, which will make people feel even more value. And then thanks to this conversation, we’re going to charge people more.

SIMON SINEK: You should genuinely. I mean, we’ve I mean, I, you know, I’ve had this conversation with before with people, which is I know that our discovery course, I know there are people who offer sort of all kinds of purpose finding courses that they charge 1500 bucks for, you know, and I know because I’ve been told that our course is like 1000 times better than a lot of things on the market.

And yet we charge, like, I don’t know, I think I can’t remember the prices. It’s like, it was 20 something dollars for a month. But I mean, but but if you take the why discovery courses, like 85 bucks, $125, I can’t remember. But, but it’s low.

And the reason is, is because I believe I have a responsibility to let everyone who wants to learn their why learn their why, and not those who can just afford $1500. And, you know, the way we attempted to price that product was what would be slightly expensive for a college student, bloody college, you know, doing 150k debt, right?

So fraction of what you so that’s my point, which is like $1500 is exclusive. And I would rather I’d rather try and make it up in volume, because I want more people to learn their why. So, you know, is that too low?

I mean, it is a trial right now, just you know, we just launched it’s full of bugs. So, you know, I’m sure one of the the mental things was like, you know, probably shouldn’t, like, we should probably like ease people into it.

It’s a little buggy. I appreciate the feedback. But it is important for me to keep prices relatively low, because it’s more important to me that people learn the stuff and don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The price fine. I want it to be cheaper for my own selfish need, right? It was actually the name I thought did it a disservice. Okay, I’m gonna that was it. Simon’s library or Simon’s University. I have no I have no emotional attachment to it whatsoever. So we’ll make that change. Thank you very much for the feedback. Everything’s written in pencil.

SIMON SINEK: Thank you. Thank you for coming again, Simon. Honestly, it’s a huge, it’s a joy and I learned so much from these conversations. And I wish I actually need to go back through this episode with my own notes so I can change my business and my life for the better. Thank you so much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a joy. I learned I learned as much if not more than you do. So I really appreciate you having me. We’ll do it again sometime.

SIMON SINEK: I hope so. Thank you.

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