The Infinite Game: How to Lead in the 21st Century: Simon Sinek (Transcript)

North Vietnam had lost 35,000 of the 85,000 troops. That way went on for about a month. There, about 100 Marines were lost and 1,500 North Vietnamese were lost. Over the course of 10 years in Vietnam, America lost 58,000 men. North Vietnam lost over 3 million people. That’s an equivalent to 27 million Americans in 1968.

HOW DO YOU WIN MOST OF THE BATTLE?

And if you look at the Vietnam War, America won nearly every single major battle it fought. So it raises a very interesting question. How do you win most of the battle? How do you decimate your enemy and lose the war? Clearly, we don’t fully understand this concept of winning and losing. It’s not simply the score that we keep. There’s something more to it.

There’s a wonderful man by the name of James Carse. He’s a theologian. He used to teach at NYU, who wrote this wonderful little book called Finite and Infinite Games. And in it, he defines these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. If you have at least one competitor, you have a game. And there are two types of games, finite games and infinite games.

Finite games are defined as known players, fixed rules and an agreed upon objective. Football. We all agree to the rules of the game and we all agree that whoever has more goals at the end of the game is the winner and we all go home.

An infinite game is defined by known and unknown players. The rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game, to keep the game in play. When you pit a finite player versus a finite player, the system is stable. Football is stable. When you pit an infinite player versus an infinite player, the system is also stable. The Cold War was stable because we could not have a winner or a loser. We just both kept playing to make sure that the game stayed in play. That’s what kept it stable.

There’s no such thing as winning or losing an infinite game. What happens is when the player — one of the players runs out of the will or resources to continue to play, they drop out of the game. But the game continues with you or without you.

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Problems arise, however, when you pit a finite player versus an infinite player. Because finite players are playing to win and infinite players are playing to keep playing and they’ll make very different strategic choices as a result. And this is what happened to America in Vietnam.

America was fighting to win and the North Vietnamese were fighting for their lives. And they would fight to the very last man if necessary. And when a finite player finds themselves against an infinite player, they will always find themselves in quagmire, racing through the will and resources to stay in the game.

So this gets me thinking. We are surrounded every day of our lives by infinite games. We are all unwitting players in these infinite games. There’s no such thing as being number one in marriage. There’s no such thing as winning in your friendships. There’s no such thing as winning global politics and there’s definitely no such thing as winning business.

But if we listen to the language of too many leaders, they don’t know the game they’re in. They talk about being number one, being the best, beating your competition, based on what agreed upon metrics, based on what agreed upon timeframes. Meaning the vast majority of our businesses, even of our political leaders, are playing by finite rules in an infinite game, which means we’re racing through the will and resources to stay in the game. In business we call it bankruptcy or merger and acquisition. Which means we need to completely readjust how we think about leadership to actually play for the game we’re in.

And the reason is important, because when we play with a finite mindset in the infinite game, there’s a few very predictable things that happen. There’s a decline of trust, there’s a decline of cooperation, and there’s a decline of innovation.

I had a real life experience that showed me what the difference between the two games was. I spoke at an education summit for Microsoft. I also spoke at an education summit for Apple. At the Microsoft summit, I would say that 70 to 80% of the executives spent about 70 to 80% of their presentations talking about how to beat Apple. At the Apple summit, 100% of the executives spent 100% of their presentations talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn.

One was obsessed with where they were going, the other one was obsessed with beating their competition. Guess which one was in Quagmire, guess which one was racing through the will and resources to stay in the game. At the end of my talk at Microsoft, they gave me a gift. They gave me the new Zune when it was a thing. This was Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. And this little piece of technology was absolutely fantastic. The user interface was simple, it was easy to understand, it was elegant, it worked flawlessly. It was a brilliant little piece of technology.

I’m sharing a taxi with a senior executive from Apple after the Apple talk, and I couldn’t help myself, I just had to stir the pot. So I turned to him and I say, ‘You know, Microsoft gave me their new Zune. It is so much better than your iPod Touch.’ And he looks at me and he says, I have no doubt. And the conversation was over.

Because an infinite player understands that sometimes you have the better product and sometimes they have the better product. And there’s no such thing as winning or being the best, there’s only ahead and behind. And the only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself. The goal is to make a better product this year than you had last year, to ensure that your culture is stronger this year than it was last year, that your leaders are growing at a stronger pace this year than they were last year, that everything about your organization, your systems, everything is improving, improving, and improving. It’s constant improvement. There is no end to this game. It’s a game of constant improvement.

HOW DO YOU LEAD IN THE INFINITE GAME?

Which means if we have to completely reconfigure how we think about leadership for the infinite game, it begs the question, well, how are we supposed to lead in the infinite game?

There are five things that have to happen to really become a leader for the infinite game. One, you have to have a just cause. Two, you have to have trusting teams. Three, you have to have a worthy adversary. Four, you have to have existential flexibility. And five, you have to have the courage to lead.

Just Cause

A just cause is a purpose or cause that is so just, you would willingly sacrifice to be a part of it. It doesn’t have to be sacrifice your life, but you would turn down a higher paying job because you’d rather stay here and be a part of what you’re doing now. It means that you willingly work late hours or go on business trips or maybe not see your family as much. You don’t like it, but it’s worth it. It feels worth it. That’s what a just cause is.

There are many great just causes out there. Apple was founded on the premise that individuals should be able to stand up to Big Brother. That’s why they’re so appealing to creatives and young people, people who like the idea of standing up to Big Brother. The United States wrote in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, endowed with these unalienable rights, amongst which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is an ideal. Just causes are a description of a future state so ideal that for all practical purposes, we will never actually achieve that vision, but we will die trying. That is the point.

This is what gives our lives and our work meaning, that it’s not about simply achieving some sort of metric, hitting some sort of goal that has no purpose, but rather that every goal we hit is a marker that we’re making progress towards something even bigger. It’s about momentum, not about absolutes. Yes, metrics are very, very important. They help us count speed and distance. And every milestone we pass makes us feel like we’re getting closer and closer, which re-energizes that we can do this, we can do this. You have to have a just cause.

Sometimes we use the word vision. I don’t like the word vision because there’s no standard definition of it. I talk to companies all the time. I say, what’s your company’s vision? To be the biggest in our industry by 2024. What’s your vision? They give me a dollar sign, an amount that they want to hit. It’s nothing to do with vision. The reason we call it vision is because you have to be able to see it. Imagine a world that is different to the one we have now that you believe that if everything that you did in your organization went perfectly, you would contribute to the building of that world.

I have a vision. I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work, and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. I have completely devoted everything I do to help advance this vision of the world. I know I won’t ever get there, but I’ll die trying. That is the point.

Every organization that says we choose trust, every organization that says we choose people before profit, every organization that says there’s got to be a better way in which we’re doing this, every organization that wants to protect its people means we’re making progress towards this world that I imagine.

Again, it’s what gives our lives and our work, meaning we will willingly devote our lives to these just causes. Too many people go looking for a cause, you know, depending on what job they’re in. This is, I have friends, you know, they have a job and I’m like, do you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself? They go, absolutely. Then they quit or they get fired. And then they say, no, this, this, this new job, this is the thing I wanted to do. And they quit or they get fired and they get a new job. And this, this is the one.

Every job you have, regardless of whether you quit or get fired, it doesn’t matter. Every job you have should be contributing to the same vision. And the thing about vision that’s so interesting is we don’t have to put pressure on ourselves to be visionary. There’s a very small handful of people in our population who are visionary. You’re Steve Jobs’s, you’re Richard Branson’s, true visionaries. We don’t have to have a vision, we have to find a vision.

If there was someone else’s vision that gives us goosebumps, if there’s someone else’s vision that we say, that’s the world I want to live in. I have a dream, said Martin Luther King, that one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children. If you want to live in that world, choose his. And devote your life and devote your career to helping build that vision in some way, shape, or form, even if it’s only small steps. That’s what makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves.

Find a vision is the important part. It’s so important when we talk to organizations to ask them, what do you believe? What is the vision, what is the just cause?

Trusting Teams

Number two, trusting teams. I went on a business trip to Las Vegas and they put me up at the Four Seasons out there. Beautiful hotel. The reason it’s a beautiful hotel is not because of the beds. Any hotel can buy a fancy bed. It’s because of the people who work there. That when you walk through the hallways and somebody says hello, you get the distinct feeling that they wanted to say hello, not that they were told to say hello. We can tell the difference.

We’re highly attuned social animals. We can tell the difference in this kind of behavior. You can always tell when somebody’s working on commission. Right, you can tell. They happen to have a coffee bar in the lobby. And so one afternoon I went to buy myself a cup of coffee and the barista working that day is a kid named Noah. Noah was funny and charming and engaging and I stood there for far too long joking around with Noah just to buy a cup of coffee.

So, as is my nature, I asked Noah, do you like your job? Without skipping a beat, Noah said, I love my job. Now to someone in my line of work, that’s significant because like is rational. I like the people I work with, I like the challenge, I get paid well, I like my job. Love is emotional, it’s a higher order thing. Do you love your wife? I like her a lot. It’s different. Noah said, I love my job.

So immediately I followed up. Tell me specifically, I asked, what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me, you love your job. Without skipping a beat, Noah said that throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I’m doing. Ask me if there’s anything that I need to do my job better. Not just my manager, any manager.

And then he said, I also work at Caesars Palace and there the managers walk past us and catch us if we’re doing anything wrong. There they want to make sure we’re doing everything right. They want to make the numbers. I like to keep my head below the radar and just get through the day and collect my paycheck. He said, only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself. That’s a trusting team. That’s what a circle of safety is.

When we come to work and we feel we can be ourselves, we feel that we can make mistakes, we feel like our bosses are there to see us succeed. I get this question all the time. Simon, how do I get the most out of my people? Like they’re a towel that you wring. It’s a flawed question. The question is, how do I help create an environment in which my people can work at their natural best? And the answers will be entirely different. That’s called good leadership. And a leader’s responsibility is to create an environment in which people can work to their natural best, in which the people can trust each other, develop these trusting teams.

Trusting teams is something very specific. Trusting teams means that someone can come to work and raise their hand and say, I made a mistake. I don’t feel like I have adequate training to do the job you’ve asked me to do. I’m scared. I’m having problems at home and it’s affecting my work. I need help. Without any fear of humiliation or retribution. If anything, they say these things with absolute confidence that people will rush in to help them.

If we do not have trusting teams, what we do have is a group of people who show up to work every single day, lying, hiding, and faking. They would never admit mistakes for fear that it would put them on some short list for redundancies the next time they come up or get in trouble. They’re never going to tell you that you promoted them and they don’t know how to do their job for fear that they haven’t earned it or they’re not good enough or that they’re going to lose your trust. They’re never going to admit that they’re having trouble at home and it’s affecting their work for fear that if they were to take a day off, it would affect them. And they’re certainly never going to say they need help.

Well, guess what happens to an organization where the majority of people aren’t admitting mistakes and aren’t saying they need help. Eventually, things start to break. They start to compound. We saw it happen. You remember the news a couple years ago. United Airlines dragged a passenger, a paying passenger off their aircraft with a broken nose, a concussion, and two broken teeth. I feel sorry for every member of that crew because 100% of them knew that that was the wrong thing to do and did not intervene because they feared getting in trouble more than they feared doing the right thing. They stood back and watched.

This was not an anomaly. This did not happen overnight. This was not a one-time occurrence. I flew United Airlines years before and I saw something play out in front of me that was a red flag. I was waiting to board the aircraft and a scene played out in front of me where one of the passengers attempted to board the plane before their group number was called. High crimes and misdemeanors.

And the gate agent yelled at him. Step aside, sir, I haven’t called your group yet. Please step aside and wait till I call your group, is how she talked to a paying customer. I spoke up. I said, why do you have to talk to us that way? Why can’t you talk to us like we’re human beings?

And she looked me in the eye and said, sir, if I don’t follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job. What she revealed to me is that she does not feel safe in her own organization. Her leaders do not trust her to do the job for which she’s been trained to do. And guess who suffers? Customer and company.

The reason we like flying Virgin or Southwest Airlines and any of these other airlines is not because they have some magical formula to hire the best people. It’s because the people who work there feel safe. They feel like they have agency. They feel like they can make decisions in their own jobs and they feel like their leaders trust them to do the job for which they’ve been trained to do. And guess who benefits? Customer and company.

That’s what creating a circle of safety is. That’s what a trusting team is. That people feel like they have control and agency over their own jobs.

I spoke at a large energy company. I did a workshop with some senior executives, a large energy company in the United States. And it was an unbelievably hot room they had at the end. So I said, I asked something seemingly very obvious. Do you think we could turn up the air conditioning? And we came back after lunch, it was the afternoon, many hours since my request, and it was still unbelievably hot.

And I said, were we able to turn up the air conditioning? They said, yes. We told the facilities people here they had to send the request to headquarters in Houston. We’re waiting for Houston to get back to us before they can turn down the air conditioning. That’s the air conditioning. Imagine how the rest of that organization works. That everyone there is afraid to make a decision. No one has any agency or control.

And there’s one thing we know about human beings, that our sense of enjoyment from our work does not come from work-life balance and how much yoga we do. Our sense of enjoyment at work and the sense of stress we have is all about our sense of control. That when we feel like we have control over our work, we actually enjoy it more. And control is taken away from us where we’re fear-making any kind of decision whatsoever, we actually, that’s what increases stress dramatically amongst human beings.

If you want to play in the infinite game, you have to have trusting teams, people who are willing to help each other when things go wrong, people who are willing to admit mistakes. But if we can’t keep the organization self-improving, it will break.

Worthy Rival

Number three, worthy rival. There’s another guy who does what I do. He writes books, he does the speaking thing, and he’s exceptionally good at what he does. He’s incredibly well-respected. I personally really admire his work, and I hate him. I’m not being funny, I actually hate him. He’s never done anything mean to me. He’s always been very polite and charming whenever I see him. It’s irrational, I hate him, what do you want me to tell ya?

And I will regularly go on the internet and check my book rankings, and then immediately check his. I don’t check anyone else’s, just his. And if I’m ahead, I’m smug. And if he’s ahead, I fume. And when people bring up his name, I sort of like, yeah, he’s great. So we were invited to speak at the same event once, and I don’t mean like him in the morning, me in the afternoon. I mean like on the stage, we were going to get interviewed together. And the interviewer thought it would be fun if we introduced each other.

So I went first. I turned to him on the stage and I said, “You make me incredibly insecure.” I said, “All of your strengths are all of my weaknesses. And whenever your name comes up, it makes me uncomfortable.”

He looked at me and he said, Funny, I think the same about you. The reason I hated him, had nothing to do with him, it’s because he reminded me, he revealed to me, his very existence revealed to me my weaknesses. And it was much easier to take that energy and put it against someone than it was to admit to myself that I’ve got some work to do.

It was an amazingly cathartic experience that day. I have never since checked his rankings. And I actually love him now. And I’ve stayed at his house and we talk to each other all the time. He’s become a dear friend. I’m not going to tell you. There’s a whole moral to the story that has nothing to do with who it is. It’s fiction, maybe, it’s all fiction. It’s actually not.

So I said the only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself. But what you have to have is a worthy rival. Someone who is better than you in your own industry, perhaps, or in another industry who’s better at something that you do. And instead of hating them and trying to beat them and trying to outdo them, we learn from them, we admire them, we respect them because, by revealing to us our weaknesses, it gives us tools to go back and then see where we need to improve.

And we wish them the best of luck. It’s not about them, it’s about us. Because the goal is not to beat them, the goal is to simply improve and stay in the game as long as possible. And if they drop out before us, so be it. The game will continue with them or without them. A worthy rival.

Apple, in the early days, had IBM, big blue. IBM represented the Navy and Apple were the pirates. And then IBM dropped out of the game. Then it was Microsoft. Hi, I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. They represented the Navy and Apple represented the pirate. And then they dropped out of the game. And now it’s Google and Facebook that Apple is pitting themselves against in terms of privacy and other things like that.

A worthy rival reveals to us our weaknesses so that we may go back and improve. If we’re obsessed with beating our competition, it’s like running in a race and tripping the other competitors. You will win the race, but you’re still a slow runner. And the problem is, there’s going to be another race and another race and another race and another race and it never ends. Sure, you win a couple, but you’re still a slow runner. The point is to get better yourself.

Have a worthy rival, know who they are. They can be companies, they can even be individuals at work. I completely am against the idea of creating internal competition. I hear this from companies all the time. We like to drive performance by pitting our people against each other. Well, that means they’re going to undermine each other.

I want my people to share information, not hoard it. I want my people to help other divisions, not complain about them. But rivalry is good. You can absolutely have rivals in your own company, people who you know are better at your job than you. People who are better leaders than you, that you look at them and say, “I want to be like that girl. I want to be like that guy. They’re so good. They make me insecure, they’re so good.” Those are the people to admire. Have rivals, absolutely. Again, it’s another tool for constant improvement, which is what we need in the infinite game.

Capacity For Existential Flexibility

Number four is the capacity for existential flexibility. So there’s something really funny when you think about what is existential if you compare finite games and infinite games. In a finite game, it’s the game that ends. So the football game ends, but the players continue to exist until there’s another game. They just wait to play another game, right? The game ends.

In the infinite game, it’s the players that disappear. The game is constant, but the players cease to exist. Companies go bankrupt. The Roman Empire doesn’t exist anymore. The players disappear. So this concept of existential flexibility is literally existential. Can you stay in the game because you’re the one that’s going to disappear?

The capacity for existential flexibility is quite simply a dramatic shift in strategy because you find a better way to advance your cause. So in the early days of Apple, Apple had already come off the success of the Apple I and the Apple II. It’s the late 70s, early 80s. And their next big computer was whatever they were developing. And coincidentally, Jobs and a few of his senior executives went to visit Xerox PARC, which was the innovation center for Xerox.

And Xerox showed them a new technology that they had invented called the graphic user interface, where you didn’t have to learn a computer language to use a computer, which is how it used to be, but now you could use a thing called a mouse and you could move a cursor on a desktop and click on folders and move them around in things to use the computer. And Jobs saw this technology and thought this was amazing.

If he’s trying to empower individuals to stand up to Big Brother, this means that way more people would have access to the technology than the people who learn a computer language. And as they left Xerox PARC, he said to his guys, we have to invest in this graphic user interface thing. And one of the executives, the voice of reason, said, “Steve, we can’t. We’ve already invested millions of dollars and countless man hours in a completely different strategic direction. If we abandon that, we’ll blow up our own company.”

To which Jobs actually said, better we should blow it up than someone else. That decision became the Macintosh, a technology so profound that the entire software of Windows is designed to look like a Macintosh. The reason we all have computers at home and at work is because of that decision.

To the outside world, it looks like you’re crazy to do that, that you would risk the loss of money or the potential failure. Why would you abandon something that’s working for something that might not work? But to the person who makes the decision, because they are driven by just cause, it is so easy for them to see that staying on the path they’re on is the path that will lead to death. That this decision is the obvious choice and the money means nothing. Because it means survival and the ability to continue to thrive.

Existential flexibility. So George Eastman was also a visionary. He was a young guy working in a bank in Rochester, New York and he decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He was 22, he was 21 years old, something like that. And so everybody was land prospecting back in those days. It was like the dot com. And so he wanted to become a land prospector.

And so he was all ready to, he was going to go on a trip to prospect land and a colleague of his from the bank said, you should take a camera to take pictures of the land that you want to prospect for reference. The problem was in those days, the main way you could take a picture was you had to hire a photographer. You couldn’t take pictures of your own holiday, you couldn’t take pictures of your own family. Only professional photographers could do that.

So Eastman ended up not going on the trip but he actually picked up the hobby of photography. And the problems are so complicated. You’d have to take all of these chemicals and these camera the size of a microwave oven and tents to load the film. And the guy was like, why can’t it be a little simpler? This is ridiculous. I just want to take pictures for fun, it’s not my business.

And so he figures out a way to coat the plates, the film plates, so he didn’t have to deal with all the toxic chemicals out in the field. Turns out other photographers wanted his plates and they started buying them. So he improves upon the technology and he invents something called film. Where now you could take a hundred pictures on a flexible piece of film built into the camera.

He flies to England to present his technology at what’s the equivalent of a technology show, the big photography show here where people come from miles around to see whatever is latest and greatest, what’s the big thing in Vegas? Oh wait, what is it? CES, thank you, it was like CES. And it was a huge hit.

Everybody thought this film thing was absolutely unbelievable; it was incredible and nobody bought one. It was a complete commercial disaster because the quality of the photographs wasn’t good enough. They were too grainy and for professionals they needed high quality film.

Now for any of us, for any of us who are entrepreneurs or came up with a technology, the obvious choice would be to go back, improve the technology, the demand is like begging for your product, we just have to fix the technology and we’re good to go. That’s not what George Eastman did. Because he was obsessed with democratizing photography. And even if he got it right, how many professional photographers are there? He wanted to make it easier for the rest of us just like he made it easy for himself.

So he made an existential flex. He completely abandoned the professional market and he said, you know, there’s an entire market that doesn’t care about the quality of the photograph, the general population. And they marketed the camera and the flexible film to the general population. It is because of George Eastman that we take our own pictures of our own families and our own holidays.

George Eastman went on to build Kodak, a word he made up by the way because he thought K was a strong sounding letter. And he went on to be one of the richest men in the world up there with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers.

Years later, a company that continued to be obsessed with the democratizing of technology that had continued to make it easier and easier and easier for us to take pictures, in 1975, Kodak invented the digital camera. And when the young man who invented it showed it to the executives, first they complained about the quality of the picture. Then they said, nobody wants to look at pictures on a screen. And then they decided to suppress the technology for fear that it would cannibalize film sales.

And they built an entire company — they made the paper, they made the chemicals, they made the machines, they made the film, all based on this one thing and they couldn’t imagine having to reconfigure their company to something different. They gave themselves 10 years. They knew somebody else would figure it out the digital thing and they gave themselves 10 years. And over the course of those 10 years, do you know what they did? Nothing.

And yes, new technology started to emerge and Kodak actually made billions of dollars licensing their patents for the digital camera. And then when those patents ran out, three years later they went bankrupt. Because they didn’t have the capacity for existential flexibility.

If you’re not willing to blow up your company, the market will blow it up for you. And that’s exactly what happened. There was a limited runway. They had the cause, they chose to abandon the cause in order to do something finite, in order to do something to protect the certainty of the future versus doing something that they know is the right thing to do for the long term. That’s the capacity for existential flexibility.

The Courage To Lead

Which leads to the final point, the courage to lead. I always joke that it’s a little embarrassing that I have to have courage on the list. But the reason it’s there is because everything that I have told you today is unbelievably difficult. All of the pressures in our lives, whether it’s from the markets or from our families or from the incentive structures in our companies are trying to force us to consider the finite. They’re trying to force us to consider the short term over the long term, consider profit before people.

And by the way, when I talk about putting people before profit, I don’t mean like 1% profit, 99% people. Like, it can be like 51-49. It means there’s a bias. It means that when there’s a decision that we know that one of them’s going to be sacrificed, we lean towards people. Doesn’t mean we’re anti-profit.

Remember, to stay in the game, you need resources and the will to stay in the game. Profitability is important, but you have a bias for people. That’s hard, that’s hard. It’s much easier to have redundancies rather than figure out a way to protect them. If you look at all the companies we admire, all of the ones that I would consider infinite leaders, either they’ve never had redundancies or they only use them very, very sparingly in extreme times and they’re very, very embarrassed that they did and it was a complete shock to their system that they’re still reeling from and they admit it. That takes courage.

Do you know how much courage it takes to make an existential flex with cause in mind? Why are you making this change? Because I have a vision of a future that’s completely unrealizable and that’s why I’m going to change the direction of my company. Walt Disney did it.

The guy basically invented animation like we have it today. He was the first one to put sound to an animation. He was the first one to make a feature-length animated film, Snow White, where you could be physically transported but the problem was once you were done with the film, it was over. He wanted to physically keep people in the movie, in the fantasy and after all that success, no one would let him make the parks. And so he sold all of his interests in Walt Disney animation and he quit to start an entirely new company and he had to self-fund it because he says he couldn’t put up his dreams as collateral with the bank. They’re not interested in his dreams as collateral and that became Disneyland which to this day makes I think more money than any other division in Disney and continues to grow and grow and grow. It is infinite.

Disneyland continues to improve. That was truly what his vision was. That takes courage to put it all on the line. It takes courage to say I don’t know what I’m doing and the leader has to set the example. That’s scary because we think we have to have all the answers and we have to be tough all the time to admit fallibility. It’s hard to admit that there are other people out there that are better than us.

We’ve all been in new business pitches and somebody says what about your competition and we come up with some nonsense about how we’re actually better than them when deep down inside we know they’re so much better than us. I remember this back in the early days when I had a marketing consultancy before all the Y stuff and all the career I’m on now.

And I remember I used to go into new business pitches and I remember being so brutally honest. I would say I’m really good at this. I’m okay at this. You should not hire me for this. And they kept wanting me to hire me for everything just because I was honest. Because every other pitch that they had the day before, that other company was brilliant at everything. And even though they knew that I sucked at these things, they just knew I’d be honest when things broke. There’s something to be said for honesty.

We trust honest people. It’s anthropological, it’s biological, there’s no escaping it. It goes back to early, early, early mankind. When somebody says there’s danger, it has to actually be there. When somebody says there’s no danger, you’re fine. We have to actually believe them.

That’s why we take recommendations from close friends and not strangers. Like if some stranger walks up to you on the street and says, you should see this movie. But if your friend says, you should see this movie, you like rush out and buy a ticket. You don’t even read the reviews. Trust. There’s something to be said for honesty.

It’s hard being honest all the time. It’s really hard. Do I look fat in these jeans? I like the other jeans better. Nobody said honesty has to be mean.

The courage to lead fundamentally means you’re willing to be open-minded to consider that maybe, just maybe, the way you think the world works may be wrong. And the way we’ve been building our business based on all the social conventions and what everybody tells us are the right things to do maybe is wrong. And just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean it’s right.

Remember, the vast majority of the business philosophies and practices that we practice today are not norms of business. They’re recent. They come from the 70s and 80s. The concept of shareholder supremacy where we prioritize the interest of an external shareholder over the interest of our employees or customers was a theory proposed in the late 1970s, popularized in the 80s and 90s by bastards like Jack Welch who ran GE.

The concept of using mass layoffs to meet an arbitrary financial projection at the end of the year did not exist prior to the 1980s. It was popularized by bastards like Jack Welch and General Electric. Rank and yank, the idea of ranking your employees based on performance, promoting the top 10% and firing the bottom 10% did not exist prior to Mr. Welch.

And this man named Milton Friedman, an economist, they gave this guy a Nobel Prize. They gave Milton Friedman a Nobel Prize. He is credited with basically offering us what is considered the accepted definition of the responsibility of business. He said the responsibility of business is to maximize profits within the bounds of the law.

What happened to ethics? Because ethics is a much higher standard than the law. The makers of the Titanic in the early 20th century built a ship that was four times larger than any other ship of the day. And the regulations that governed lifeboats were based on the size of the ship and they didn’t yet have a lifeboat for all provisions. It said if your ship is this size, you need this many lifeboats. If your ship is this size, you need this many lifeboats. And their ship was four times larger than the largest.

So they knew that eventually the regulation would catch up, that eventually you’d have the lifeboats for all provision in the law. But until it did, meh, literally to save money. That was their reason, to save money. They left empty berths on the Titanic where the lifeboats will go when the law catches up. But until then, we’ll just put nothing.

So they only had 25% of the required lifeboats for the number of passengers that were on board the Titanic. We all know what happened in 1912. An iceberg. You want to guess how many people died? You’re right, 75%. They broke no laws.

Think about the number of CEOs that get dragged out in front of the court of public opinion after they’ve done something disgustingly unethical and what do they all say? We were within bounds of the law. We broke no law. This is the standard for business? And so people who are anti-capitalist now, what they’ve completely failed to understand is that the capitalism we have is not actually capitalism as Adam Smith envisioned it. We have a bastardized capitalism. Capitalism for bastards, if you like.

And the capitalism we practice today is not actually the purest form of capitalism. It actually undermines capitalism. Where we have increasing levels of stress, we have declining levels of technology, declining levels of trust, declining levels of cooperation. We have unstable economies. It’s because of this false view of capitalism that we have.

As Adam Smith envisioned it, it was about trust, it was about cooperation, it was about human beings. He believed that you prioritize people over profit. He actually wrote in “The Wealth of Nations“ that “I don’t need to speak any further about it. It’s obvious.” And then didn’t write anything else about it. That’s why we have to challenge the system. That’s why we need an infinite mindset. That’s why we have to have the courage to stand up to Milton Friedman and say, “You’re wrong, I don’t care about your prize.”

Well, he must be right. It’s to stand up to bastards like Jack Welch and people who’ve immortalized him. And to say, no, our form of capitalism prioritizes people, trust, cooperation, empathy, maternal instinct, longevity. Not the same as long-term or sustainable. I don’t use the word long-term. 20 years is long-term, 30 years is long-term. Infinite.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE IN INFINITE LIFE?

Which all raises a very interesting question. What does it mean to live an infinite life? Clearly, our lives are finite. But life is infinite. We are the players in an infinite game. We’re born, we die, we come, we go. The game goes on with us or without us. The game doesn’t care.

And like the game of business, like the game of education, like the game of global politics, we do not get to pick the game, but we do get to pick how we play. That is the only choice we have. And if we choose to live our lives with a finite mindset, we’re playing to win. We’re playing for somebody else to lose. We’re playing to advance our careers faster than everybody else, to make more money than everybody else. We’re comparing the scores constantly. We’re slicing and dicing to show that we’re the best, we’re number one.

We get to make up the numbers in the time frame but it’s really important to us that everybody thinks we’re number one. You don’t build trust that way. Cooperation is hard to come by. Innovation, forget about it. You’ll be rich. And then when you die, you don’t get to take any of it with you. And we won’t miss you. We’ll forget your name. And your business will probably close right after you. Or if it doesn’t, it’ll go like this slowly. If it’s large, it can afford to stay in business for a while but that doesn’t mean it’s permanent.

Infinite Mindset

Or we can choose to live our lives with an infinite mindset, which means we give our businesses a cause worth coming to work for. We give our families a cause worth helping each other out for. We commit ourselves to being the leaders we wish we had. We commit ourselves to building circles of safety in which people feel safe and we trust each other. And we’re willing to take risks to be vulnerable, to set the tone.

Because if we take care of each other, this can outlast me. We’re willing to have rivals and be honest about our weaknesses and admit that there are other people who are much better at what we do than us. And we should learn from them. We’re willing to make that massive shift if we find a better way to advance our cause. And we will have the courage to say to all the people who say that we’re crazy, idealistic. Yeah. Yeah, we are. Yeah, I’ll take my risk. I’ll take my risk.

Because fundamentally, that’s what the infinite mindset is. It’s a code for the idealists to operate in a world that is telling us we should be realistic. It’s a code for people who believe that an unrealizable vision that’s worth devoting our lives to advance is better than a short-term goal. The choice to live an infinite life means that we leave a legacy. It means that when we pass, others will pick up the torch and continue without us.

I had a chance to sit next to Richard Branson at dinner once. And I asked him, when you die, how should we judge you? How should we judge your success? I asked him. I said, what did you do at Virgin that we will look back and say you were successful? And he said, ‘Do not judge me by anything I did at Virgin. If you want to judge my life, you judge me by the quality of my children.’ That’s an infinite mindset. That is someone who’s lived their life with the expectation that other people will carry a torch, and all of the foundations he laid were not for profit, they were not for fame, they were to keep the torch burning. The choice is ours.

Thanks.

QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSION

So let’s do questions. Can we bring the house lights up, please? House lights, house lights, all the way up. In the back, too. It’s so nice to see you. So we have microphones there, there. There’s two up top as well. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there. And there. So go to the mics, and then other people can hear your questions. And if you have babysitters, you can go. I won’t be offended.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Simon, I’m Lara, lovely to meet you.

SIMON SINEK: Hello.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: One of my favorite stories that you tell is the one about Bob Chapman, and how Bob has, he believes in heart count rather than head count, and how he introduced the furlough program. And when I first heard that, I was so moved because I’ve never worked in any company, and I’ve worked in many, and I can’t think of a single company that would have employed that. So is it that it’s very rare that people have the courage to lead, that it really is based on who they are as a human and their desire? Or can that be something that builds momentum and that people see that it’s the right thing to do? Because otherwise, how do you effect sea change across the corporate world?

SIMON SINEK: She’s referring to a gentleman by the name of Bob Chapman who I wrote about quite extensively in the book “Leaders Eat Last.” And as you said, in Bob’s company, they do not have a head count, they have a heart count. In hard times, it’s very hard to reduce a heart count. It’s a way of viewing human beings. And they view that, they have the belief that every single person in their company is someone’s son and someone’s daughter. And they keep that in mind every time they make a decision, that I’m responsible for someone’s son and someone’s daughter.

And yes, it is who Bob is. I mean, he is, that is who he is. He oozes humanity and idealism. He’s a kind of remarkable human being. And the question was, we want more of Bob Chapman’s. So, my friend George Flynn, who was a retired marine general, said the first criteria to be a leader is you have to want to be one. Right? So if you enlist in the United States Marine Corps, you cannot drop out. You can’t change your mind at any stage and say, I’d like to leave, please. When you’re at boot camp and you hate your life, you sign the contract, they will not let you out. Nothing.

If you want to be an officer in the United States Marine Corps, of the ten weeks of training, you can drop out for the first six weeks. You can just leave. No questions asked. They’ll let you out of the contract. Because their attitude is, we don’t want leaders who don’t want to be leaders.

And so the choice to be a leader is a decision. That comes first. But then the education to become a leader is a lifestyle. It’s like the choice to become healthy. Right? And at the early days, it’s usually a lot of heavy lifting and a steep learning curve. I have to change the way I eat. I have to go to the gym. I hate that. And then you get into shape and you feel good and you look good and your doctor is very happy with you. And the worst part is once you’re in shape, you have to keep going to the gym and eating healthy for the rest of your life. It’s not something you do, achieve your goal and then stop. It’s the choice to live a life that way, even though there might have been a finite goal in the short term.

Leadership is the same. It is a lifestyle. It is a muscle that requires constant exercise. And though you may study all of the theory about leadership and you may have been good at it at one time, if you don’t keep it up, the muscle will atrophy. And the problem is, too many people in leadership positions would rather be in authority than maintain the lifestyle of leadership. They think that once they get ranked, it endows them with certain powers. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t.

The good news is there’s a movement. We’re here talking about leadership. We’re changing the vernacular of what leadership means. We’re using terminology like servant leadership more. You hear people demanding that their companies have purpose. We talk about things like trust and cooperation in ways we didn’t use to talk about them before. I could not have had a career in the 80s and 90s. No demand at all. But now I get to stand on stages and call Jack Welch a bastard and people applaud. The movement is going in the right direction. So I’m optimistic.

It took us 30 to 40 years to get where we are today. It’s going to take us 30 to 40 years to get to somewhere more optimistic. But this is why you’re here. Everybody here has raised their hand and said, count me in. Because it’s not one of us, it’s all of us. We have to change the way we show up as leaders. We have to change the way we build our companies. We have to change the way we show up as employees. I don’t care if you work for a company with 10,000 people. If you work with somebody to the left and you work with somebody to the right, you can be a leader. Leadership is the responsibility for those around us, to see those around us rise. And I think we’re in good shape. We’re moving in the right direction. Thank you for being a part of it.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for that. That was amazing. A quick question on your third point, which is about the adversaries, worthy adversaries.

SIMON SINEK: Worthy rivals.

MALE AUDIENCE: Yeah. And picking your rival, so in a more specific way, if you’re a challenger brand, for example, do you pick another challenger brand who you consider worthy, or is it about the big incumbent that is not necessarily worthy but a bigger rival?

SIMON SINEK: So very often with challenger brands, there’s some sort of ideology that got them all angry in the first place. Right? It’s all fired up. And even though you’re not competing against whatever the incumbency is of the model, their mere existence keeps you honest about what your cause is.

So one of the best things that ever happened to the West was the Soviet Union because it reminded us what we stood for because they existed. And when they went away, things have kind of got a little squirrely because we have to, like, remember without anybody to balance it off. Right? Apple was really great when there was a big thing and even people are questioning what does Apple stand for anymore? It’s hard to discern now. Right?

So if you’re a challenger brand, the most important thing is that what you’re standing up against is the ideology, not the company. Because if you eventually get big, you haven’t won. You haven’t won. They just dropped out. The Soviet… America didn’t win. The West didn’t win the Cold War. The Soviet Union dropped out because they ran out of the will and resources to stay in the game. The Cold War is alive and well. I can give you a whole thing about that if you want. Cold War 2.0, I got a whole theory.

And so if you’re a challenger brand, then you have to know what you stand for and sometimes the easiest way to know what you stand for is to have something that is different than what you stand for as your worthy rival. But you have to keep a strong ego because the goal is not to beat them. The goal is to spread your gospel and not theirs. It’s a rival gospel. Yes?

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Simon. It’s Kirsty here. I caught one of your Instagram rambles in October when I think you must have been finishing this book and you were questioning everything that you were doing. I caught it really early in the morning here in Belgium actually and you were talking about the why, you were talking about vision and mission.

Now that you’ve stated the five areas that you have brought to life as a group of leaders, managers, people who are noticing that there is a movement happening with how we work and how we show up, what would be one area, what’s a simple thing that we could take away from tonight that we could all start to do?

SIMON SINEK: So those things that I told you about, you cannot do existential flexibility without a just cause and I would argue even trusting teams because otherwise everybody is going to panic and think you’re crazy. Worthy rivalry, like just cause and trusting teams really are bigger than the others. Existential flexibility is a capacity. So I think if there’s one thing you can do, it’s articulating what that’s all for, which begs the next question, what’s the difference between just cause and why? Because I said start with why and now I’m saying start with just cause. Are they the same? Did you just change the words on it?

No. The why comes from the past. The why comes from the past. It’s who you are. It’s why the organization was founded. It’s who you are as a human being. It’s the thing that drives you. It is immutable. It’ll never change no matter what happens in your life. It comes from looking backwards. A just cause comes from looking forwards. It is an unrealized future that if your why were to be brought to life in the most magical of ways, the world that would exist would be this world. It is the dream. It is the fantasy. We call it vision because we can see it.

So you have to be able to articulate what this world looks like in terms so clear that other people go, I can see it. That sounds amazing. Sign me up. So challenge yourself. And there’s multiple ways to do it. If everything we did went perfectly, what would the world look like? What will we commit our organization to help build or your life or however you want to look at it? And then the path to building trusting teams is the path of good leadership. That’s what it is. So commit yourself to being the leader you wish you had. Yes, hi.

No, you work here. Okay. You can ask questions too.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Simon. Yusuf, nice to meet you. Firstly, thank you for opening my mind and thoughts in changing me into a student of leadership and a student of the infinite game. Thank you for that. Keep going.

My question to you is two hopefully simple ones. How can a student of infinite theory work, influence, or transform a finite organization? And two, I’m really interested in understanding the military concept. And I’ve listened to you a number of times describe that. And I’ve seen it in programs and shows. The military, how it shapes minds to a point where that individual will put the most precious thing, their life, on the line for their partner. How can we create that in our organizations? Not in the time frame of years, but in the time frame of weeks and months like the military.

SIMON SINEK: Yeah. So let’s answer those questions in reverse. So one of the things that I have deep admiration for the military, and the admiration I have for the military is the exact same love and admiration I have for artists, is because they both undertook their paths knowing that they weren’t going to get rich and felt like it was a calling and were willing to sacrifice to advance this thing, whatever it is, and be a part of something. So to me, it’s the same love.

And the thing that I noticed immediately when I started hanging out with folks in uniform is you and I have colleagues and co-workers. They have brothers and sisters. They literally refer to the people they work with as brothers and sisters. And the relationship is one of brother and sister, which is they may fight, but you try and attack my brother or sister, you’ve got to go through me. They love each other. Love is the word they will use. The Marine Corps calls them the intangibles.

What makes the Marine Corps strong are the intangibles. What they mean is empathy, love, devotion. These mushy words. And you’re asking me a question like how do we do it in weeks and months. These are human beings we’re talking about. So that’s like asking me, can I give you advice so that you can fall in love in a matter of weeks instead of having to do this whole getting to know them. Being vulnerable. I got no app for that. It’s a slow, ploddy process.

Sometimes you get lucky and you have a meeting of the minds and you have shared values and it goes a little quicker, but even though we get really excited and we jump in the relationship, three months later we’re like, what was I thinking? There is no way to speed up. It takes more than a week, but if you’ve been doing something for seven years and you don’t love it, maybe it’s wrong. I just don’t know where it happens.

So what I do know is that the way you build trust inside an organization is the exact same way you fall in love. Which is you devote yourself to the care of another human being sometimes at the sacrifice of your own interests. It means when the person you love comes home from work and they said I had a terrible day and you had an amazing day, you don’t say a word about your amazing day at all. And you sit there and listen with love and empathy to their horrible day as opposed to waiting for your turn to speak.

It means that you wake up in the morning and you say good morning to them before you check your phone. It’s little things. It means you learn to listen and listening is really easy. It means you make the other person feel heard. So if you can go learn all of those things on how to make a friend and how to fall in love, now go do all of those things at work. That when somebody walks into your office and goes oh, fuck my day. You go, what’s happening? And you listen so they feel heard. Don’t give them advice. Don’t fix anything. Just listen.

When they tell you how awful it is, say that sucks, tell me more. Right? It’s the same thing. It’s the exact same thing. And I promise you, I promise you, you will build those relationships where you will fall in love with the people you work with. And you will call them brothers and you will call them sisters and they will say the same of you. So that’s how you do that.

And by the way, the military doesn’t do it in 13 weeks. What they do is they create a foundation for it in 13 weeks. But it takes time for those relationships to truly form. And the first question was how do we… How does an infinite mindset play in a finite game? In a company that’s driven by finite leaders? That one’s the hardest one of all. Because we cannot change the mindset of people two, three, four levels above us. There’s nothing we can do.

But if we adopt the infinite mindset, it’s like preparing yourself. It’s like getting ready for the eventual change. It’s like when the internet showed up. It’s like most companies panicked. But there was a small group of like, oh, we saw this coming a long time ago, right? Netflix, one of my favorite examples, right? So Netflix, you remember, we used to… They used to mail us the DVDs. And that’s just because streaming technology wasn’t good enough yet. But they knew it was coming. Of course it was going to improve. So they had this subscription model.

Blockbuster, which was the number one video rental place in the world, their CEO went to the board and said, you know, we should probably do this subscription thing. And the board said no. Because they made 12% of their revenues from late fees. And look what happened. They’re bankrupt. And as soon as the streaming got better, Netflix was there. So what I would urge you to do is maintain your infinite mindset, but hone it. Get good at it. Practice leadership.

Don’t worry about changing people’s minds you can’t change. Be the leader for the people around you. And you may leave the company because you choose to, because they want you out, because there’s too many people who love you. I’ve seen that happen, by the way. I’ve seen wonderful leaders get pushed out because they have too much loyalty and too much love towards them, and the senior leaders threatened. I’ve seen it happen. Right?

But be that person, because it’s going to change. You hear it. It’s changing. I used to do these things. I used to get 30 people show up. We just filled Central Hall. Right? Like, this is the movement. So just keep at it, because the revolution is coming. Oh, you don’t work here. You’re just polite.

MALE AUDIENCE: Well, he was there before me. You have to forgive me if I stutter, because I’ve just realized how many people are here. I run and own a theater school for kids, and for the last couple of years, with my older kids, they’ve been going through a lot at school with exams, et cetera, and things like that. So I’ve been subliminally professing your ideals and similar ones with, like, Bob Chapman, Jim Senegal, et cetera, Branson, and they found it all very, very helpful.

But when I try and talk to them about what their teachers and their headteachers at their schools are doing for them, it seems very much that schools, those that haven’t already, seem to be going in the direction of adopting the finite mindset of results, impact. And I spoke to one of their headteachers and said, or rather they were very quick to say, look, how many of our students got six A-star to C grades? And I said to him, well, how many of your students were happy whilst they were studying those results? Because there’s no point in having results if the kids are dead by the end of the week. And he looked at me like I was crazy.

So I just thought if you had any thoughts on this stuff in the education system and any advice for apparent nutcases like me who are trying to run accounts and are just being told we’re idealists as if it’s a bad thing.

SIMON SINEK: So, you know, one of the problems in schools is that we run our schools much like we run businesses, which is we become more obsessed with the metric than we have with the education, with the child. We don’t teach curriculum, we teach children. And the education doesn’t end when they leave school. And the problem is that teachers don’t feel taken care of. The leadership in school is a corporate leadership model and it’s not where the headmasters are not obsessed with the care of the teachers because if you get that right, the teachers will take care of the students, don’t worry about it.

I say it all the time, CEOs are not responsible for the results. So why do you keep talking about are you responsible for the customers, you’re not, you’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results. There’s not a headmaster on the planet responsible for the children or the curriculum. They’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the curriculum and the children.

And if you get that hierarchy right, it works just fine. So if you’re a more forward-thinking parent, you’re going to go find a school that does that. If you don’t have a choice and you’re in a school that has an old model, then the way you will raise your children and the kind of pressures you will put on your children will be slightly different.

There’s nothing wrong with teaching our kids that they have to still do well at school. Reality still exists. I’m not against reality. I’m just an idealist operating within it. But I think, I definitely think that we need school reform and I think we need to teach the fundamentals of leadership to anybody who aspires to be a headmaster or gets promoted to that position. Big Change is a charity that’s doing it.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for a great talk. My name is Drew. In our industry, I kind of lead a project. I like to call it a project over business, where we lead thousands of people who have aligned to our values, who see the vision, there’s a serious energy, and great. But like any growing business or project, it gets hungry and needs investment, whether it’s from the banks or whether it’s from the investors. My vision is infinite and I align to what you say, like Malcolm X, you’re the next Malcolm X kind of theory.

But on the other side, the shareholders: when’s my exit plan, when’s this, when’s that, they have a finite game and because they hold the money streams, they think they can control the show, trying to play a finite game against my infinite game. How do you handle it? Because every time they ask me, what’s your exit plan? I kind of say, well, it’d be the coffee and then heart attack probably, but they don’t take that seriously. How do you handle that? Infinite versus infinite, finite players in the same project trying to control the streams.

SIMON SINEK: Did you get a say in, do you own the company?

MALE AUDIENCE: Yes.

SIMON SINEK: You took their money?

MALE AUDIENCE: Yes.

SIMON SINEK: I got no problem, I got no problem with you looking for investors, but you took the number more than the investor. You took the one who offered you more money than you did from the person who aligned to your values. You took the person who was investing in the exit rather than investing in you and your vision.

Berkshire Hathaway does not sell the stocks it buys. Find money from somebody who believes in you and your vision and will give you the might of their wealth of experience and the people who work to advise you rather than force you into the exit.

MALE AUDIENCE: Makes sense. Thanks.

SIMON SINEK: I feel like I need to apologize after that answer.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Simon. Thanks for the talk and thanks for my question as well. The first four principles that you spoke about, it seems like it’s really underpinned by courage, which you spoke a lot about. Courage to a lot of people individually within teams and within business is a scary thing. What would you say fosters courage? Is that an internal thing? Is it innate? Or is that something that you actually seek from the people around you?

SIMON SINEK: In my experience, courage is an external thing. I’ve had the opportunity to meet people who have risked their lives to save the lives of others, and they didn’t have to. They would not have been faulted if they didn’t. They were not ordered to. They may have violated orders, in fact, to do so. I’ve had the chance to ask them, why did you do it? Almost unanimously, they say, because they would have done it for me. It’s the sense that someone has my back that gives me the courage to do something for them.

If you’re a world-famous tightrope walker and you wanted to try a brand-new death-defying act for the first time, you’re going to do it with a net. It’s not your ability that gave you the courage, even though you’re really good at it. It’s the net. It’s this external thing that gave you the courage and you build it. I think that to live with a servant’s heart, to be that empathetic leader, what that engenders is that people start to believe that you have their back, that you would do something for them, that you would sacrifice your interests to protect them. Miraculously, they’ll do it back.

The only thing that makes you a leader is you’re the one who went first. You’re the one who took the risk first. That’s the only thing that makes you the leader. Leader is not because you have the rank. We call you leader because you literally led us. You went first towards the danger, to take the risk. You set the tone. People may have been cynical at the start, and you did it again, and they may have been cynical again, and you did it again, and they realized, wait, this is for real. Weird human things happen, and they start to offer you the same kind of love and trust back.

I believe it’s external, and I believe it’s based on the quality of human relationships, which means it doesn’t happen overnight. In the military, they do not build a trust in combat. It’s not when they step off the plane with their rifles and arms where they all trust each other. It’s in peacetime where they’re training and training and training and training and learning to love each other. The Israelis, one of the most successful militaries in military history, the unit that you train with when you’re 18 years old is your unit for the rest of your life. So when you’re in your mid-40s and you get called back for reserve, it’s the same people you trained with when you were 18 years old, because they so understand that the bonds that you form when you’re a kid, that they want those bonds throughout your entire military career. They understand where the trust comes from.

So I believe that we talk about human beings. We forget we’re social animals. You know, there’s an entire section in the bookshop called self-help. There is no section in the bookshop called help others. And yet, at the end of the day, by ourselves, we’re crap. Like, we’re just not that good by ourselves. We’re not that strong. We’re not that clever. But you give a team together, we can lift anything and solve any problem. Not a single person on Earth solved any problem by themselves. It never happened. And even if it was their big brain, there was somebody who believed in them, who gave them a break, or who funded them, whatever it was, they did not do it alone. I think it’s our ability to foster relationships that underpins the courage we need to do those difficult things.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi. Hi, Simon. My name’s Mark. So I’ve got, it’s a two-part kind of question. The first one is when you go into organizations and you talk to leaders and tell them about bringing meaning and purpose for their employees, and they tell you, oh yeah, we’ve got a well-being day. We organize once a year. We’ve got that covered. What would you want to tell them?

The second thing is, as a leader yourself, I guess, of the organization, where do you fail as a leader? Where do you recognize that you fail as a leader?

SIMON SINEK: Let’s ignore the second part of the question. And talk about the first one. Oh, by the way, it’s half past eight. Technically, it’s a 75-minute thing, so if you need to leave, want to leave, now’s a good time. You won’t offend me. But I’ll keep going if you want to stay.

Okay, so the first thing, when people say to me, well, we have a wellness thing, we got that covered, my response is about consistency versus intensity, right? So, if you stop brushing your teeth and only go to the dentist twice a year, will your teeth fall out? Yes, they will. Right? You cannot go to the gym for nine hours and get into shape. But if you work out every single day for 20 minutes, you will absolutely get into shape. I just don’t know when.

And the reason companies like intensity is because it’s easy to measure. We had the event, we hired the speakers, we gave them a certificate, check, they’re all leaders. Right? But it’s the daily little things. It’s the tons and tons of just innocuous things. That is what builds up. Like brushing your teeth. What does brushing your teeth for two minutes do? It does nothing. Unless you do it every single day, twice a day. And it’s consistency that we forget about. Yes, you need intensity, you still gotta go to the dentist, but it’s this balance of intensity and consistency. And too many companies think they can solve a problem with intensity, and I challenge them to consider the consistency stuff. So, I use the gym analogies and the brushing your teeth analogies and they get the point.

Where do I fail as a leader? We don’t have enough time. Like any person, I can succumb to fatigue, and then all the things I talk about sometimes I forget. For me, especially when I’m writing a book, I’m my worst because I like teams. I like working with people. I work better when I work with people, and writing a book is a very lonely process, and I actually get lonely. So, all these negative thoughts rush in, which then come out. And I’m very lucky that I have a couple of team members who either tell me, but more importantly, they put up a little barrier so that I won’t hurt myself or hurt others.

Now, I’m sometimes too quick with decisions. I’m very proud that I can make big decisions, but sometimes it’s too quick. Sometimes I need to listen for just a minute more to find out what something is. It’s a work in progress. I’m constantly learning. It’s really funny, I took this listening course, and this is what I learned. I learned that I am a spectacularly good listener to the people who I will never see again for the rest of my life. But the people who I love in my life are terrible. So, when people say, “You’re a bad listener,” I’m like, “I write the book.” No, terrible, terrible. So, I had to learn to take the skills that I know but actually apply them to people that I love. So, I’m getting better. I’m getting a lot better. You’re welcome.

MALE AUDIENCE: I just want to finish. I think we’re speaking on the same stage in Greece, and I also love Adam Grant.

SIMON SINEK: I didn’t know I was speaking on a stage in Greece, but awesome. Who’s next? Yes, we’ll go in the top back there.

MALE AUDIENCE: Simon, thank you. Thank you very much for the inspiring talk. You framed in a very western way philosophies that are, you know, ways of life, lifestyles, actions that for me ring true in an Asian context, whether it’s yoga in Southeast Asia or the Chinese mentality of a millennial empire. How do you feel about the current environment, worldly?

SIMON SINEK: You mean how in the West we’re trying to win and China has a thousand-year plan?

MALE AUDIENCE: Is the competition between the US and China on AI or –

SIMON SINEK: Yeah, Asia is way ahead of us. Asia is playing an infinite game. The Chinese are playing an infinite game. Of course, they’re playing an infinite game. They’re just waiting us out. They make plans for literally hundreds of years. We make plans for the next election cycle.

Yeah, I think a lot of the stuff I talk about is heavily Eastern, and the idea of infiniteness and infinite life is heavily Eastern, for sure. You know, I think we have this funny thing in the West where we like things we can easily understand, and we don’t like to use things we don’t understand. Love is a tricky thing to understand, but I know it exists. I don’t have a metric for it. I can’t measure it, but I know it’s there. I love my children. I love my spouse. Show me the metric. Your kid’s pretty crap at school and kind of a bit of a pain in the ass, and he beats up his sister, and you still love him? I do. It’s hard to put into metrics.

It’s hard to put into rational things, and I think Eastern philosophies embrace things we don’t understand better than we do, and it’s about striking that right balance, I think. We do the same thing with medicine, right? We cut the body up into systems, and you’re an expert in whatever your system is, and you go see an endocrinologist, and it’s clearly glandular. I like Eastern philosophies as well. They’re like, you stick a needle in here and it helps your knee. Well, why? Well, you know, it just does.

Yeah, I think this is definitely a blending for sure. And China is ahead.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks for your wonderful speech. I had a question on the general question about achieving happiness on a day-to-day basis. Given the infinite game idea, if you’re at a workplace, and like someone said before, you have an infinite mindset, but you’re in a finite structure, on a day-to-day basis you might get a bit demoralized when you have to work, when you actually have a vision to do something else, but you’re meant to do tedious tasks that you’re not interested in.

I personally am just a student. I’m a 20-year-old student. I’m doing engineering. I came in to study, I guess, with the idea that I want to build products that have an impact on people, that change people’s perspective of things, and apps that help people, but on a day-to-day basis I’m on the mindset of the university, which is getting exams done, getting results done. So how do I stop myself from getting demoralized on a day-to-day basis while this change happens for the universe in the future?

SIMON SINEK: So I make the distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness comes when you win the game, when you get an A on your exam. Happiness comes when your number comes up in the lottery, and then it goes away. You know? That feeling. Joy is something more underlying. And you ask, how do I have happiness on a day-to-day basis? You don’t. The things that you will do, you will not necessarily enjoy. But the question is, do you have a sense that they’re a part of something bigger? That’s where the value and the joy comes from.

You don’t have to like every day, but you do get to love every day. You don’t like your children every day, but you love your children every day. Right? And I think we have this, we’ve created this unrealistic expectation that every day at work has to be amazing. Like every day of your relationship has to be amazing, and every day in your friendship has to be amazing. It’s just not, it’s an unfair standard to put on a human being, and it’s an unfair standard to put on an organization.

And sometimes it’s us. Sometimes the organization is trying so hard, but we have a narrative in our head that we can’t let go of, that it’s us that’s creating the unhappiness every day. We make ourselves victims. And everything you see, you’ll find all the evidence. Or we can choose to change our narrative. You know? I have a friend who moved to, from a liberal city to a very conservative city in the United States, and she was very worried. And I said to her, it’s the most wonderful opportunity in the world. She says, but I’m going to hate all these people.

I said, or you can learn to listen, understand what their motivations are, and understand what they care about, and I bet you’ll discover that your values are the same as theirs. Right? Some of it’s narrative. Some of it’s perspective. Don’t seek happiness. The happiness will happen here and there. Seek joy. And that comes from relationships. And belonging. And cause.

Oh, I have to stop. I’ll do one more. One more.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hi. First of all, so, I’m kind of exercising my courage here.

SIMON SINEK: You said, sorry?

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Exercising my courage to come and talk to you. So, first question is, I am a serial entrepreneur in the technology and games industry. And I also have been building a YouTube channel with a cause to encourage more young girls to become entrepreneurs. And to also start their own companies in the games and technology industry. So, I would love to ask if you would be fine for me to interview you at some point. That’s the first question. I had to ask. Sorry.

SIMON SINEK: I love it. Do it.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Good. So, second question is about scaling. So, right now, my company has 70 people, everyone based in London, and we have been doing pretty well coming from, you know, zero to ten. But obviously, as we scale, the leadership team and everyone in the organization needs to be multipliers of everything that myself and my co-founders have been, you know, instilling in the organization. So, are there some ways for us to make sure that we have multipliers as we scale?

SIMON SINEK: So, fundamentally, scale breaks things. You know that, right? So, organizations can be like a family, and then they hit about 25 people, and it starts to get really complicated, and a lot of organizations struggle to get past that number, because now you need structure and hierarchy and things that just make normal businesses work, right?

Plus, you’re not all friends anymore. You didn’t all grow up together. The first group of employees, like, we actually were friends, right? So, you’re up to 70, you said. You know, you can still all know everybody’s name. You still can refer to people. You’ll max out about 150, and then it gets really complicated. And scale just breaks things for human beings. We’re just not made for it, right?

So, the way you do it is with effective hierarchy. You should have an effective training program to teach leaders, and you should be considering somebody’s leadership abilities, not just their results when you’re promoting people. And there should be an opportunity to learn leadership, practice leadership. You should be teaching it, because you have to create the environment in which you have people who can keep the organization going without you. We call it the school bus theory, which is, what happens to your company if tomorrow you get hit by a school bus? Will it fold, or will it keep going? Right?

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hopefully it’ll keep going.

SIMON SINEK: Hopefully it’ll keep going. Hopefully. So, we’re relying on hope. Hope is not a good business plan. Right? How about it’ll absolutely keep going? Because the cause is crystal clear, and everybody we hired believed in the cause, and even if they were the best qualified person, because we suspected they didn’t share our values or believe in our cause, we didn’t hire them. Right? There was somebody who was toxic in the organization, and we coached them and coached them and coached them, and they proved to be uncoachable, and even though they were the highest performing organization in the world, that salesperson sells more than anybody else, we made the difficult decision to ask them to leave, to go and find joy somewhere else. They’re a good person, they’re just a bad fit. Right?

Those are hard decisions, and those are the kinds of decisions that other people see you making, that you actually do believe in your cause more than your growth plan. Because the problem with growth plans is they’re arbitrary. You made it up. How big you want to be in two years, five years, ten years is literally a work of fiction. Right? And then we get all bogged down if it works or we’re not going on pace. Now, yes, that stuff’s important. Good to have goals. Good to have things to reach for. Yes, but they’re there to push us, but they’re not there to determine that we’ve succeeded or we’ve failed. Right?

It’s something to give us to strive for, because we’re still visually driven animals. We still like dopamine to drive us. We still like short-term things to help us. The infinite game still includes finite games. So I think in order for you to scale, you have to ensure that the people who you’re putting in leadership positions aren’t just good at their jobs, they’re good leaders. There’s plenty of data on this that top sales people don’t necessarily make great sales managers. There’s no correlation. Great sales managers are good at getting the sales people to be at their natural best. And they’re okay not making any sales themselves. There’s no correlation.

So are you promoting your top performers or are you promoting your best leaders? And you better be teaching them how to lead once you promote them. Thanks very much, everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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