Courage Comes From Friendship | Simon Sinek

It is very hard to lead. It's very hard. It's lonely, and it's thankless, and the pressures are often overwhelming. And I think the courage to do the right thing, the courage to make the decision that needs to be made, the courage to speak truth to power, the courage to say what you don't know, the courage to ask for help. These are excruciatingly difficult things in practice. Easy to say on a stage. Right. And then that's very closely tied with integrity, which is to make the decision that needs to be made versus the one that everybody's pushing you to make. And this funny thing about ethics is we all kind of know what they are. You know, it's actually not a very. And the law is a lower standard than ethics. I'm tired of companies making horrible decisions, and they trot them out in front of Congress, and they all say the same thing. We didn't break any laws. It's like if you have the patent to an essential drug and you try to hit your financial goals, so you raise the price of that drug a thousand percent. There's nothing illegal about that. And then launch crypto things after that guy. Yeah, exactly. It's not illegal, but it is unethical.

And I think courage and integrity of all the people that I've met, that it's not that they make all the right decisions, but they command a respect like I have never seen from other people. It's those things. I'll give you one example of how it sounds. A buddy of mine in the military, still active duty, I was supposed to go visit him on base just to hang out, and he called me. He said, you can't come. I had a thing I got to deal with. And what happened was some young officers went off base, which is allowed. They went out, you know, they went out, you know, eating and drinking, which is totally fine. And they had a young enlisted woman with them. And it is. It's against the military code of conduct for an officer to have a relationship with an enlisted person for discipline reasons and all. All of that. And one of the young officers, a male, was driving the car, and he was nervous that when he came on base that he would get pulled over by the cops for Breathalyzer for drunk driving. And so he told the young enlisted woman to drive.

So she took the wheel. They drove on base, they got pulled over by the cops. She got breathalyzed, and she got arrested for drunk driving. Turns out two of them were dating. You know, a whole host of bad there. She has to he's an officer. It's just whole hosts of bad. And these officers, these young men had now ruined their careers and they were going to be thrown out of the school that they were in, which was Air Force Top gun. The top 1%, right? And my buddy is in charge. My buddy's the commandant of all of Air Force Top Gun, So he has to talk to them. I called him up a few days later. I said, how'd it go? And what he said was remarkable. So if that was you and me and we had to sit down with them one by one, what I would say, what most people would say is, what were you thinking? How can you be so stupid? You have thrown your career away. What were you thinking, you idiot? You know better is probably what I would say. That's not what he said. He said, do you. Do you have any idea how many people you've let down? He said, you're. You're your senior officers who nominated you for this position, You've let them down. Your parents who supported you to get to this place, you've let them down. Your commanding officer, who's there with you every day, you've let them down. Do you realize how many people you have let down with your behavior? Which is way harder, Right? And my point is, he wasn't criticizing the fact that they did something stupid. He was criticizing the quality of their integrity. And that's what I mean. When there's a leader with integrity who owns up to the mistake they made, who says, I fell asleep on watch, that's on me. And I'm really attuned. I'm really attuned to integrity and accountability. I'm really attuned. Like when a project goes sideways and the leader in charge of that project attempts to say, it's not that bad, or the leader of that project says, I know why it happened, it's because of this other person, as opposed to going, it happened on my watch. I'm really attuned to people who say, that's on me, because that's all integrity. Courage and integrity is what gets you accountability. If you don't have courage and you don't have integrity, you don't take accountability. Because saying I screwed up at the expense of the company, at the expense of my co workers, is excruciatingly difficult. So if you push me on that question, I'm going to say courage and integrity.

Now, it raises the question, where does courage come from? Here's what I've learned. Where courage comes from. I do not believe that courage is deep, internal fortitude. Dig down deep and find the courage. I just don't think that's true. Because the people I've met who truly have courage, courage that we don't have, if you ask them, why did you do it? They all say the same thing. Because they would have done it for me.

If you ask them, why did you do it, it's because the fear of letting somebody down is worse than dying. If you ask them, why did you do it, it's because they know that someone has their back and would do the same for them. And so what I've learned is that courage comes from relationships. That.

All you need is one person in your life, one who says to you, I gotcha. I gotcha. If this whole thing goes sideways, I'll still be there with you. Or they'll put their hand on your shoulder and say, you got this. You got this. I know you can do this. You have to do this. That was what my friend said to me. He said, you have no choice. But he didn't say to me, go. The underlying message was, I am with you. You. You are not alone. I felt alone before I called him. I did not feel alone after I called him. And when you know that there's one person in your life, I don't care if they're your business partner. I don't care if they're a hired employee. I don't care if it's your spouse. I don't care if it's your best friend. If you have one person in your life who you know without a shadow of a doubt has your back, no matter what stupid decisions you make, the amount of courage you have to do the right thing is incredible. So this is why I'm so fascinated with and so obsessed with, are we good at fostering friendship and most of us don't. Most of us are crap at being friends. And let me tell you, the better friend you are, the better friends you have, and the better friends you have, the more courage you have to do the most difficult things in the world, like build a business.