How to Create Change | Simon Sinek

People with new ideas, whether they have neurodiversity or not, are threatening to the status quo. Right? And there's nothing wrong with the status quo per se. The reason the status quo exists is because things are kind of working right. And the people who are the most defensive of the status quo are people who benefit from the status quo. So if you come in and say, I'm going to try something new with no guarantee of success, and by the way, if we fail, you're all going to lose your jobs. Not a lot of takers, which is why most people don't start businesses. Most people aren't entrepreneurs, and nor should they be, because the chances of failure are overwhelming. And even if you have the desire and you've got a family and kids, it's just not worth the risk because the chances are in the high 90th percentile that you're going to fail in the first three years. And so you have to remember that. And so my rule has never been to try and convince people who don't want to be convinced, because all you're going to do is fight. I'm right, you're wrong, and they're going to say, no, I'm right, you're wrong, and you're both right. Contextual. For me, my religion for new ideas has been something called the law of diffusion of innovations. Bell curve. In every population, you're going to have a standard deviation. You're going to going to have high performers, you're going to have low performers, you're going to have an average, always. Right. What Emmet Rogers wrote about in the 1950s when he wrote about the low of diffusion is that the first two and a half percent of any population, this one included, are going to be your big idea people, your innovators, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson. Right? The next 12 and a half percent of your population are your early adopters. These are the people who are very comfortable spending time, money or energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs. They have a pretty good risk tolerance. They stand in line for 48 hours to see a new Star wars movie where you could just go two weeks later and buy a ticket and go in for them. That's worth it, right? Then you have your majority, the 68%. More cynical, more practical. What's in it for me? Will I get my money back? Am I going to get in trouble? If everything goes wrong? Then you have your laggards, the last 16%. The only reason they make any change is because you have no choice anymore. The law of diffusion says that mass market success or mass market acceptance for any idea or product, you have to achieve between 15 and 18% market penetration. And there's a social phenomenon that happens called a tipping point. It just goes. And the reason is very simple. It's because the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. The problem is, is that if you ignore this, you'll always get about 10% of people who believe what you believe, who see what you see. Right? Always. Ah, love her. She gets it. Oh, my God, he's an idiot. He doesn't get it. Get what? But that's how we describe it, right? And that 10% is not enough to make the system tip. And that's where you get frustration. And so what Geoffrey Moore wrote about called crossing the chasm is how do you get from 10% to 15 to 18%? And what I learned is that the way you talk to early adopters is by starting with why. Talk about what you believe, not what you do. Talk about why you're doing it, not what the plan is. Right. Talk about the dream. And what I learned was the more I did that, the more I found the early adopters and they were willing to take risks and they were willing to experiment. I built my entire brand with zero marketing budget and no public relations and at the time, no social media. Right. It's because I made a decision that I was going to focus only on early adopters and I was going to start with why. I got really good at learning how to talk to people at an emotional level, not a product or fact level. Right. Eventually the facts and product had to bear out, but that's not where I started. Start with why. And the system tipped. And I've done it in companies. I've done it in companies. And so if you want to affect change in your company, stop trying to convince people. So I'll give you a real life example in the early days of me spreading this message of start with why. I was doing consulting because I still hadn't figured out, like, how I wanted to spread it. And I needed every dollar I could get. I was living hand to fist. I mean, I had no money in the bank account, literally, like pennies. And I remember a guy called me and he heard about me and he said, you know, I got your number from whomever I've heard you do great work. He literally said this to me, convince me why I should hire you. Now, as much as I needed his business, I got very good at hearing who's an early adopter and who's not, convince me why I should hire you, not an early adopter. So my literally, I said to him, don't, don't. He goes, what? I'm like, I am the wrong guy for you, right? But the people who called me and said, you're onto something. It's not perfect, but you're onto something. I said yes to them every time, even if they paid me zero. Because what ended up happening is they let me experiment on their businesses. I would literally say, can I try something new on your company? They went, yeah, try. Go ahead. That's an early adopter mentality. Going back to you find the early adopters, the ones who want to try it, volunteer. I'll tell you a real life example of how it worked inside a company. You'll like this, too. A big company, they got 100,000 employees. They wanted me to build a millennial training program for them, Right? Because of millennial leadership issues. So I said, okay, but we're going to do it my way. Because this is how big companies do things. They spend lots of money to hire all the best people to make the training program, and then they launch it and they have PowerPoints galore, saying, this is why you need to take part in this program. And people go, no. And they go, no, it's really good. And then it fails. Good stuff. Just no adoption and a lot of resistance. I know this because you can't take new things and give them to the majority. Duh. So I said, we're going to do it my way, and here's what we're going to do. Because early adopters, you want small barriers. You don't want to make everything too easy. You want small barriers, right? So I said, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to teach the first class, and I don't know what the program is going to look like. We have no program. We're going to teach one class, and I'm going to teach it. And they have to apply. We only have 100 spaces, and they have to apply to be a part of it. And I made them write essays from across the company. We made the announcement. It's going to happen. We did an application process. Wasn't easy. We read the actual essays and chose 100 people. We told them that you're going to have to come to New York for the training. Wherever you are across the country, you're going to get no extra money for it. We said that nobody born before the year 1984 was eligible to come into the room, which means all the senior leaders couldn't come spy on me. I was the only person born before 84 who was in the room. And it was fantastic, and we had tons of fun. And at the end, I said, look, this program isn't built. I need volunteers to help build it. And here's the conditions I'm going to. We can't. We don't have any more money to give you. You still have to do your regular job. It's not. It probably won't help you get promoted. It's just that you think this is important work. I had 50 volunteers from the room who wanted to help build the program. Great. I let them all go back to their job. They all fly home. About two weeks later, the sponsor, my sponsor at the company calls me up, furious at me. You screwed me. I'm like, what happened? He goes, I'm getting calls from across the country from all of these managers screaming and yelling at me, demanding, why aren't my people invited into this thing? And I leaned in. I said, that's called demand. We created demand because all the early adopters went back and said, this is amazing. We need it. No marketing, no PR, no PowerPoints. And best of all, they were going to build it for us. So that's how you leverage the law of diffusion. When you have new ideas in a system that's largely resistant to new ideas.