Simon Sinek distinguishes why from vision: why is your unchanging foundation rooted in the past, discovered through life patterns. Vision, or what he calls a just cause, is future-directed and can shift. You have one why but can hold multiple visions for different parts of your life.
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What's more important, why or vision? They're equally as important. They're different things. So why comes from the past. Remember, it's an origin story. It's where we come from. And to discover your why, you look backwards in your life. We look for patterns across our life. When things were naturally going extremely well, we look for patterns. We can identify that pattern. That is our why. It's the thing that we give to the world. It comes from the past. It is the foundation of who we are. Vision is where we're going. It's about the future. It's about imagination. It's not based on something objective. Vision is entirely subjective. Your why is objective. You have one. It never changes. For your whole life, your vision is subjective. You can pick any vision you want. It's the world you're trying to build. Preferably, it's good to stick to one vision, tweak it every now and then, because otherwise you're all over the place. But you can have more than. You can only have one why. And everybody has one. You can have multiple visions. You can have one for your family, one for your company. You can have one for your community. You can have multiple visions. You can apply them differently. So I like to talk about vision as a just cause, mainly because there's no standard definition of vision. And so many organizations and individuals say, my vision is to be a millionaire. My vision is to. I mean, that's not a vision, that's just a goal. That's why I call it a just cause. So for me, vision is about just cause. A cause so just that we would willingly sacrifice in order to help advance this cause.
So think of it like a house. A why is the foundation of the house? Once you build a foundation, it's there, it's solid. It's what gives the organization or our lives structure. But you don't change the foundation. That's it. Now you can have a vision of the house you want to build, of the life you want to lead, of the company you want to build. And you build on the foundation. So there's basic structure that's going to remain the same, but. But you can change the shutters, you can add floors you can expend, you can expand, you can redecorate. So vision is where the house is going. Y is where the house is coming from, where it's built upon.
