The Power of Showing Up Now | Simon Sinek

It. Okay, King. Whoa. Okay. All right. Is everyone here or do we still have people outside? Okay, so this is. We kept the best for last, hopefully. And I just wanted to introduce my friend, New York Times best selling author and the founder of the Optimism company and an amazing, amazing coach, public speaker, very influential leader in our world, Simon Sinek. So please join me in welcoming Simon. So I'm sure many of you have read his books, have seen him on social media, online, on video. And so when we discussed this session, and I'm really grateful that you accepted to do this for us, by the way, you told me, let's just have a chat and let's make it as if we were in a living room and having a conversation. So maybe to get started, talk about what actually got you to want to do what you're doing and what got you to write your first book and get you in that line of helping people be the best version of themselves.

My career is an accident. I am living proof that not having a plan for life works out just fine. But I think what happened to me is what happens to a lot of people who discover a calling. Right? My, my origin story is not dissimilar to probably a lot of people in the room. I started a small business, and I know what the statistics are that well over 90% of small businesses fail in the first three years. And if you're an A type personality with a little bit of a competitive spirit, that's kind of fun and exciting because to go against those odds, quite frankly, is stupid. And so you have to have something that drives you other than rational thought. And it was exciting for the first few years. We made it past those three years. I joined a very small group of people in America who made it, made it past three years. And my fourth year in business was completely different. The excitement had worn off, the passion had declined. And now I had to face building the structure of a business that I had established. And it wasn't the same. And my desire to go to work every, every day completely dried up. But because I had built this on force of personality, not being excited to go to work was embarrassing. Being depressed was embarrassing. Having no passion was humiliating. And so I faked it. I pretended that I had more passion than I did, and I pretended that I was more in control, more successful, and more sure than I really was. And for anyone who's ever been in a dark space, when you keep that to yourself, it gets darker, which is exactly what happened to me. And it wasn't until a very, very Dear friend of mine came to me and said, something is wrong. I don't know what it is, but something is wrong. And she created a safe space for me to come clean, which is what I did. And that weight that was on my shoulders and the energy that was going to lying, hiding and faking every day went away. And so all of that energy was now invested into finding the solution to regaining my passion. And the solution that I discovered was based on the biology of human decision making, which is that I knew what I did and I knew how I did it, but I didn't know why. And I realized that's the thing I needed. I found my why. But more important, I learned how to help others find theirs. And I would share it with my friends, and I'd help my friends find their why. They found new passion for their jobs. Some of them started businesses, they invited me to share it with their friends. I would help people find their why for 100 bucks on the side. And I saw the same thing. And when you get to have an impact in the lives of others, the that you can see and that you can feel, it's intoxicating. And it's all I wanted to do and it's all I wanted to talk about. And everything that happened following that was because other people said, there's someone I need you to meet. And I just kept saying yes. I never wanted to be a public speaker. I never wanted to stand on a stage. It's not my thing. I like being behind the scenes. I never was one of those people who thought I had a book in them. And after my first one, I was like, all right, I done. And so. But when you, when you realize that you can give something to the world that is bigger than yourself, you find yourself giving up and sacrificing whatever plan you had or ideals. Not ideals, but whatever plan or goals you had. Because this is just more exciting. And the thing that I've learned is that well run businesses and well led businesses give that to people. And just to go off on a tangent for a moment, a business is like a car. You don't buy a car simply so that you can buy gas. That's not the reason you buy a car. You buy a car so that you can go somewhere. That's what you do. Well, it's the same for business. You don't start a business simply to make money, right? You start a business to do something, contribute to something, go somewhere. And you need money to fuel that business. It's essential. And when your friends get into the car they go, where are we going? Nobody gets into the business and says, so how much gas are you going to give me? How much gas are you going to put in this thing? Right, you can fill it up with gas, but you don't know where you're going. And I think that's one of the problems with a lot of businesses. And you see it in a lot of successful businesses. They might make a lot of money, but the people who work there, they'll leave in a heartbeat if you offer them more money because they're doing it for the gas, not for the destination. And so I think great businesses, it becomes a calling, it becomes a thing that you. And the leader is looking out the front window going, look where we're going, look where we're going. And it's super exciting.

Yeah, that really, really resonates with me, with us and I think with many people here who have very purpose focused companies trying to completely change the way money moves for billions of people around the world is exactly that. So tell us a story that is not like really, you know, something that people would know in terms of the impact you've had in someone's life or in a team's direction or trajectory in doing what you do. Because you spent your time, we were just chatting the other day. You just came back from the White House where you interviewed President Biden. You know, before that you were, you know, at an event trying to change policing and you know, know leadership in the police forces around the country. Navy Seals like all these things. But you've also spent a tremendous amount of your time in your career with some of the top leaders in the world and have helped them or random people, but would love to hear a story that maybe people haven't heard from you and how you change the trajectory by helping them find their why or, or find a way to tap into their infinite game.

So it's a story. So here's the story and it's sort of a sideways answer to your question. So I wrote a book called Leaders Eat Last, which was the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life because every I could never understand. I wrote about like oxytocin and dopamine and long before it was a thing I was writing about these ideas and cortisone all and I couldn't understand why any of the biologists and scientists that I was talking to to get information, why they hadn't written my book. I was simply overlaying the biology over corporate culture. How come nobody and I Realized it was impossible to organize. Every chapter could have been its own book. Start with why was something like 68,000 words. I was writing Leaders at Last. I was just getting started and wrote 150,000 words. And we just kept going and going and going. And it became to the point where I couldn't organize it. It just. And I was a year into my life. I think I'd already lost my relationship because of the stress that I was under. It just was. It wasn't a good thing. And so I was sitting at my desk one evening, and I decided to quit. And I went for a walk to plan quitting. I'd given up. I couldn't solve the problem. And I went for this long walk in New York City, and I was literally just going through the checklist, which is, okay. I'd have to tell my publisher I'm not doing it, which is technically a breach of my contract, which means I have to give my advance back. Okay, check. Literally going through the list, I'd have to tell people I'm not writing another book. I'd be publicly humiliated. But whatever, I'll get over it, you know? And, like, I literally went through the list of the exit of quitting. And I called a friend of mine who was in the Air Force, Special Forces. He was still active duty at the time. I called him, and he picked up the phone, and I'm pretty sure I didn't even say hello. He picked up the phone, and I said, what do you do when you can't complete the mission? And as is his nature, he started telling me a story. He says, we had a mission in Afghanistan. He was a helicopter pilot. He said, we had a mission in Afghanistan where all of the intelligence said that it was a suicide mission. And not a suicide mission like, we're going to kill Hitler, but we're all going to die. It was like, we're all going to die, and the mission will fail. Like, literally a pointless loss of life, right? And all the intelligence said the air defenses were too good. Like, we can't even get in to do the thing we need to do. This is a pointless mission. And he's prepping his helicopter and his wingman. They both have wives. They both have kids. And his wingman says to him, what do we do? Do we refuse to go? What do we do? And he says to his wingman, this is what we signed up for. We go. Clearly, cooler heads prevailed and the mission was scrubbed. And they didn't go, but they were prepared to. And then he says to Me, is this book having more or less impact on you than Start with why? I said, it's having more. More impact. And then he says to me, and this answers your question. And then he says to me, well, I can tell you that before I met you, I became completely disillusioned with the Air Force. And I read this kooky little book called Start with why. And it reinspired me to see the kind of leader that I wanted to be. I decided to stay in the force. I've never been happier, and I've never had greater impact on my airmen around me. And he says, if this is. If this is. If you're saying the second book is having more impact in your life, then this is what you signed up for. You have no choice. And what was important about that is the underlying message was, and I will be with you, just as he was with me that night. And so I no longer felt alone. And I went back and finished the book. And it was stories like that. It's a story like that where I. I realized that whatever stress that I had, the impact that I. That I was having in these people's lives that I didn't even know was worth it.

Amazing, amazing story. So you spent so much time with people that are from such different backgrounds, right? From the military to corporate world to entertainment. How different are all of these worlds? And how do you adapt the fundamentals and the lessons from what you write into such different types of verticals and industries?

So I have a horizontal career. I'm a vertical expert in nothing. I have a horizontal career. To your point that I've just met all these kooky people and all these crazy places that will never interact with each other ever. And what they all have in common is one thing. They are all human, it turns out. And I like to joke, you know, like, 100% of customers are human being, 100% of employees are human being, 100% of investors are human beings. If you don't understand human beings, you don't understand business. And if I treat all problems as human problems, treat all challenges in work or military as relationship problems, something that's a foreign policy problem is a relationship problem. It's like IBM announced. IBM didn't announce anything. A couple people said, I think we should put out a press release. And somebody goes, do you think we should have them write it up? And one person goes, okay, I think we should say that a person on behalf of a major, a person who runs a country, the country's companies don't do anything they're legal entities. It's human beings who are offended by other human beings. And the number of times that you can understand very complex business challenges just by looking at the relationship you have with your spouse. It's all the same. And all of my books are just philosophy books cleverly disguised as business books. The reason they find their way into all these funny places, into like churches and schools and all of these things, artists, is because people are smart enough to know that when I give an example about a business, they can understand it's a metaphor. Now, business people will read it as a business, a case study, but everybody else will read it as a metaphor, which is what it is. And so I think that's what it is. Fundamentally, I'm fascinated by and inspired by human beings and the relationships we have. And it's all the same.

I think that's what makes you great at what you do. So the most interesting turnaround or pivot story that you've been part of in terms of impacting the direction of something that wasn't going right and suddenly has changed. Sure.

How about my own relationship, my now ex girlfriend? For different reasons, We were having a fight. And the fight went something like, here's what I did right and here's what you did wrong. And the response was, well, here's what I did right and here's what you did wrong. To which the response was, here's two things I did right and three things you did wrong. And you see how this goes. And one thing I've learned about business and relationships is mindset matters. And you can't set your mindset in the time of tension right. For the same reason you can't figure out the strategy out of a problem in the middle of the problem. You kind of want to thought about it a little bit before. So if you look like the 2008 financial crisis, the embarrassing part about that is the housing market. Nobody had thought about the 1% chance of the housing market collapsing. What would we do? And so the only option we had was to figure out in the middle of the panic, and what you get is a shit solution. And so mindset is everything. And knowing your mindset prepares you for everything. And the mindset that we had in our relationship, which was predetermined in happy times, was when we fight, let's agree that it'll be not you versus me, it'll be us versus the problem. Let's agree that we will fight not to win. We will fight to get to resolution. And we used to talk about it all the time. Hey, let's fight to get to resolution. Mindset was set. So in the thick of it, you forget the strategy. In the thick of it, you're angry, you're triggered, you're personal, you say all the worst things, and all it takes is one person to remember the deal we made. And in this particular case, it was me. And I literally interrupted this fight. And I said, new rules, new rules. I'm changing the rules. Instead of what we're doing right now, I'm gonna tell you what I did wrong and what you did right. And then it'll be your turn, and I'll start. I said, here's what I screwed up and here's what you got right. And she said, yeah, well, here's what I got wrong and here's what you got right. We were friends in two minutes. We were hugging. And what we came to realize is the other person was trying, right? And I think it's. And it turned around the anger. And I think the same is in business. The number of times we go into a negotiation to extract, we go into a negotiation to get at the expense of. And you're not going to win or do well in that negotiation. You might get. Get something in the short term, but the long term implications are not in your favor. And the strategy, the mindset of saying, I will run my business with the strategy of ensuring that everyone we do business with comes out thinking, comes out winning us and them, and we will always negotiate so that both parties win. And if that's your mouth, the way you negotiate, the way you interact with people is profoundly different than when you have an extractive point of view. So to me, some of the greatest turnarounds are, I think, the things I learned in my personal relationships that I bring to work. Because once again, I'm talking to people, and sometimes I disagree with those people, and sometimes those people piss me off. And sometimes those. It's. You just go down the list. It's just people, you know. So I think that was a pretty good turnaround.

Amazing. You talked earlier. I mean, we were just chatting outside about how in terms of execution, leadership, the military comes first, and then, you know, corporates are, you know, maybe second ish. And then, you know, everything else. Like, why do you think the military is so good? And what are the learnings that you've been able to, you know, convey to people you've worked with in the business world that, you know, stems from the military?

So to be clear, the military is not perfect. They've got Plenty. Plenty of problems we have. They have amazing leaders, and they've got some really bad leaders. But as an unbalance, the lessons, the good lessons tend to be very exaggerated, easier to see because the stakes are higher. It's life and death for us. The stakes are just dollars and cents. Like, when we screw up, we lose a company a bunch of money. That's pretty much it. When they screw up, really bad things happen. And so you start to recognize that the lessons are easier to identify. And so that's one of the reasons I sort of learned a lot from them. I'll give you one example. I don't think this is one I've written about. I had the opportunity to visit Marine Corps ocs, Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. And that's where the Marines choose their. Their officers. And I was having a meet. I was just. I was expected to have a meeting with the colonel and who runs OCS. And he was just going to give me a PowerPoint about, here's what we do at Quantico. And he showed up late for the meeting. And if you've ever met a Marine, they don't show up late. If you're on time, you're late. That's how Marines are. And he showed up late. He apologized. He said, I'm terribly sorry. We've had an incident on base, something where I had to deal with because we might have to throw one of our Marines out of the Marine Corps. I'm thinking, what did he do, right? What law did he break? And so I said, what'd he do? And the colonel said, he fell asleep on watch. And I'm thinking, he fell asleep on watch in the woods of Virginia. Like you're going to throw him out of the Marine Corps for that? I literally said that to him. He said, you don't understand, Simon. He says, when we asked him about it, he denied it. When we asked him about it again, he denied it again. And only when we gave him irrefutable proof did he say, quote, I'd like to take responsibility for my actions. The problem we have is you don't take responsibility for your actions the time you get caught. You take responsibility for your actions at the time you perform your actions. He says, we have another Marine that fell asleep. He completely admitted it, took full responsibility. We punished him. We have no problem with him. And then he went on to explain. He says, you have to understand, if I put this young leader in a leadership position and they're in a combat situation, and if his Marines doubt for one minute that that Marine, that their leader doesn't have their back, if they doubt for one minute that that Marine will lie to cover his ass, who will say things simply to make himself look good and won't take accountability for his mistakes, trust will break and people will die. And you start to understand that that story makes perfect sense in a marine context. But if you look at human beings, we're very primitive animals living in a very modern world. And if you understand sort of like the. The anthropology of human, of homo sapiens, and you go back the thousands of years when we lived in reasonably small communities no bigger than about 150, that trust is the currency that keeps you alive. And if somebody owns up to their mistakes, you will trust them and you will look out for them. If they lie to you, deceive you, or try and just pump themselves up, you will be very nervous to fall asleep at night that that person's going to watch your back and you're not watching theirs. And that's how entire communities will die. And so we carry these mentalities to this day. We have the same fears and anxieties, we have the same evaluations of each other, and these subtle cues that we're giving to each other constantly are very, very primitive, very, very caveman. And I think if you learn those lessons from the military, because the stakes are so high, you start to recognize that they are pervasive in. In our lives, and people react that way, which is why isolating people or making fun of people or pushing people out of the tribe can be very dangerous. Like kids who shoot up schools, these young men who shoot up schools, first of all, predominantly young men. And they've all been picked on and isolated. There's nothing more dangerous than an isolated young man. And again, go back to caveman, right? So have you ever watched a nature documentary with, like, a herd of gazelle? And, you know, they all sort of, like they're all grazing, and, like, one hears a rustle in the leaves, and they all go like this, right? Like, they all have this cortisol that keeps them alert to danger. And if you notice how gazelle graze, they put the old and the sick outside, and the young and the healthy are the inside. So when the lion attacks, they're going to eat an older, sick gazelle, because if they eat a young one, then the whole herd's going to die at some point because all the young ones are going to be picked up, and that's it. It's over. And so they always put the weak on the outside to get picked off by the lions. Right. It's the same for human beings. We're social animals, just like gazelle. We have cortisol that helps us. You wake up at night and go. Your spouse wakes up and goes, they didn't hear anything, but they saw your reaction. It's the same thing. And so when we ostracize, when we push aside people, when we make fun of them, the feeling they get is the same deathly fear as that gazelle who's been pushed to the side, which is you are literally being pushed out for the lions, which is why those people become actually dangerous. Because that sense of self preservation, they're left to their own devices. But again, all of these things are very easy to see when the stakes are real. They're very hard to see when the stakes are abstract or financial.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's a funny story. I actually went to Quantico right after I joined Facebook in 2014. There was a leadership off site and we spent the night in the barracks and surgeon major was screaming at Mark Zuckerberg next to me. It's like the first time that anyone had screamed at him. It was memorable.

The sergeant majors give no shit.

Oh, they give no shit. They didn't know who he was. And then it's like, we have to explain, you know, this is, you know, the guy who's running Facebook, this little thing. It was memorable. Actually, one of the things that was memorable at Quantico, beside the fact that, you know, you see those Marines completing the obstacle course and they look like, you know, superhumans. They literally like, you know, if we can complete it, we're happy and they just do it as if they were just walking around. But the. The observation for the problem solving thing, you know, that they have there where they throw people in and they're like, you have a mission and then you have all of the leadership watching from above. How people resolve the problem and then train people, anything, you know, because I remember that I was like shocked by how they had a method of teaching how to resolve problem and be problem solvers.

Yeah. So two things that I would learn from Quantico that I love. One of my favorite favorite things about Quantico and the other, the other military forces don't do this. Only the Marine Corps does this, which is if you go the enlisted route, the enlisted will train the enlisted. If you go the officer route, in every other of the forces, the officers train the officers. Except at Quantico, the enlisted train the officers. The subordinates train their future bosses. And you literally will hear them screaming at this young officer, you want me to follow you one day?

You know, sounds like Kevin, my cto.

And I found that quite amazing that they're training the people they want to follow, and they're training them to be the kind of leader that they would follow. And I found that unbelievably sophisticated, as opposed to the elites training the elites, you know, so that I loved. The other thing that I loved was they. Did they show you the LRC, the Leadership Reaction Course? So the LRC is like 20 mini obstacle courses. 10 wet, 10 dry, and. Oh, did you really? The whole thing? All 20?

Not all 25.

You did five of them. So what they do at the LRC is they time it. You run it twice. One time they'll assign the leader. One time they don't, because they just want to see what happens. But you have to do things like get all your men and materiel across the water hazard, which is what the Marines call a pond, within a set amount of time, stuff like that. Problem solving. It's a problem solving course. And what I found so sophisticated is when you look at the grading sheet that the drill instructors are using, nowhere on the grading sheet does it say whether they made it to the other side or not. They are not evaluating mission success. And I asked one of the dis. I'm like, how come you don't care if they succeeded or not? And he said, we understand that sometimes good leaders suffer mission failure, and sometimes bad leaders enjoy mission success. So whether they succeed or fail, it doesn't indicate whether they're good leaders or not. I said, well, what indicates if they're good leaders or not? He says, if they're practicing the qualities of good leaders and they understand that if you teach people to be good leaders, they will enjoy mission success more often over time. And in business, we don't do that. We evaluate people by their last success, and we don't evaluate people based on whether they're exhibiting the qualities of good leadership and promoting those people. Promote the people who succeeded this year, even though they might be terrible leaders. And I think we can do a much better job of evaluating who should lead versus who does lead.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. And yeah, it was. I remember that point because I asked the same question you asked around. And the leadership, they're looking to see how people lead other people.

The best leaders are also the best followers that they. That. And this is really sophisticated. They're evaluating the followers as well. And they will look that when the leader is asking for ideas. How do we figure this out? What are your thoughts? That a, you're contributing. And if the boss, if the leader makes a decision that's not your idea, that's not the strategy you propose, that you will work with all of your might and all of your energy to see that the leader's decision succeeds. And if it doesn't, that you don't go. Told ya. But then you pivot and you work to help change course of direction. In other words, you put your ego aside, you're completely against their idea until the moment the decision is made. And then you give all of your energy to see that the leader succeeds. And if they do, there's no animosity, there's no anger, there's none of this I told you so. I found that brilliant that they are evaluating the followers as much as they're evaluating the leaders, because they're kind of the same skill set.

So a little bit closer to home, you have companies, banks, financial institutions, exchanges, wallets here in the room, who all did us the immense pleasure of spending the day with us from all over the world. And I think we share something, which is this desire to really reinvent the way money moves around the world. And I think a lot of people here are in these positions and in these companies because they feel that passion. But it's been a long journey for some, especially if you're looking at crypto and the evolution and the cycles and bitcoin and the cycles of bitcoin. And so you wrote the infinite game, and there are lots of lessons from that. And when we talked, you're like, if you want someone to talk about money and stuff, you should have someone else. And I'm like, no, I actually want you to be here because we don't want to talk about money, but the principles that are going to guide us through this long journey. And I said something this morning which is that this, what we talked about, is the one thing that I want to do for the rest of my life or whatever, how many years of productive life I have, I want to do that and I want to see it through. And so talk about how the infinite games plays in, how we should all think about something that will take a long time to happen.

Do you want me to define the infinite game just for those who don't know what we're talking about?

Sure.

So in the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of James Karst defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is Defined as known players, fixed rules, agreed upon objectives. Football. If there's a winner, necessarily, there has to be a loser or losers. But more important, there's always a beginning, a middle and end, always. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are. And new players can join the game at any time. The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible. We are players in infinite games every day of our lives, whether we know it or not. No one will ever be declared the winner of career. Nobody wins education, nobody wins health. And definitely there's no such thing as winning business. Like when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything, right? But if you listen to the language of so many leaders, it becomes very clear that they don't actually know the game they're playing. And they talk about being number one, being the best, or beating their competition. Based on what? Based on what agreed upon metrics, objectives and timeframes. And that's the problem, because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, when you play to win in a game that has no finish line, there are very predictable and very consistent outcomes. The big ones are the decline of trust, the decline of cooperation, and the decline of innovation. And so most businesses have it wrong. And usually, whether it's in the public markets or in the private markets, when it's PE or VC backed, the pressures of winning or growth or hitting certain deadlines literally go counter to how business actually works. And those pressures do damage to businesses. And so everybody in the room knows what it feels like when you have pressure on you to make the decision that is benefiting them, but, you know, is the wrong decision to make. And so the infinite mindset is the courage to make the decision that needs to be made, even if it's not in the interest of the short termists who are flipping the bills. And by the way, I remember I was speaking at a conference once and some. He was great. This young entrepreneur raised his hand and said he wanted my opinion. He says, I've got this problem. I am having overwhelming pressure from my venture capitalist who is forcing me to make decisions that I know are bad for my business. And the pressure's overwhelming and I don't know what to do. What do you recommend? And my answer was, you took the money, you knew who you were getting into bed with, right? Like, you took the money because that VC was famous, or they offered you more than the other guy who maybe believed in you, but it was less money, so you took the money. And I think, you know, when people say to me, I want to write a book, how do I get a publisher? Or how do I choose a publisher? Most people choose a publisher that pays them the most money. And I always say, choose the publisher who you can fight best with, right? Because you're going to have a creative disagreement, and you want to make sure you can fight well with somebody who shares your goal, your creative goal. And I think the same goes here, which is choose the funding from the person you can fight best with. But the infinite mindset is that we have an ideal about how we want the world to work, and we're going to contribute and dedicate our sweat and our treasure to advance as close as we can towards that ideal, knowing we'll never get there. And we understand that mistakes will be made and we'll pivot. But the point is, we have a very North Star. It's the route that we're flexible on. And what I find so ironic is the way most businesses are built is they plan the routes without the destinations, and the most successful ones have the destinations and are agnostic to the route. And I'll give you an example. It's like you wake up one morning and you walk outside and you see your neighbor packing up his car, and you say, hey, where you going? And he says, vacation. And you go, cool, where are you going? He says, vacation. You're like, no, I heard you, but where are you going? And he says, vacation, right? And you're like, well, fine. How are you going to get to this vacation? And he tells you the route. He says, I'm going to take 95. My goal is to drive 150 miles per day. And that's exactly how most companies talk. They tell you how much money they're going to make in what period of time and how many customers they're going to get and how many transactions. But they cannot tell you where they're going or why they're doing this at all. And the problem is the route will always be blocked. There will always be traffic. There'll always be a traffic jam. There'll always be an accident that you didn't see, and your metrics will get thrown off. And what are you going to do? The organizations that have the infinite mindset, that have a clear sense of vision and are agnostic as to the root, they have a strategy, of course, and they can start off the same way. But when there's a blockage, they're going to go sideways. And to everybody else, it looks like they've gone off the rails, and they haven't. They're just going around, or they're more discerning in the opportunities that show up. Somebody says, hey, I've got a private plane. You want to come with me? And you go, yes. That goes fast. Except it's going in that direction to turn down opportunities that are going in the wrong place. That's what Infinite Mindset is. It's absolute obsession with the thing over the horizon. And you remain somewhat agnostic to how you get there as long, because it's always a winding road. And I think in your world, I think there's a lot of people who tell me what their roots are. There aren't enough people who tell me what the destination is, unless it's this amorphous defi. And, you know, they. They go all. Can I just wax philosophical on the side?

Go for it.

So I think there are two challenges that. That crypto has, right? One is. Nobody knows how to talk about it in terms that normal people can understand, and even some of the people who pretend to understand don't understand, right? So that's number one. And you can never succeed if you can only talk to yourself. And by the way, that's what I figured out from my own work. Like, I wasn't the guy who figured out that having purpose at work was important. What I figured out was the language that everybody was using wasn't working. When they talked about purpose, they all sounded like hippies. And they talk to this many people who are also hippies. Or they would debate what comes first, vision or mission. I would literally sit in rooms and we would debate what comes first, vision or mission or brand or purpose. It was stupid. And I remember I said to people who believe vision comes first, I said, what's vision? They said, it's why we get out of bed in the morning. And the people who believe mission comes first. I said, what's mission? They said, it's why we do what we do. I asked people who said, purpose comes first. So it's why things matter. Great. Let's call it the why now we can all agree. And so changing language so that those who needed to listen would listen. And I stopped preaching to the converted. And I think crypto needs to learn a lesson about changing language, because you have language that only you understand. It's like engineers talking to engineers, right? Which leads me to the second challenge, which is there's a lot of similarities about the failure of communicating climate change as there has been communicating the value of crypto. Right? So first of all, it's hilarious in climate change that we're debating whether it's man made or not. Right? That's like debating that whether you got lung cancer because of your genetics or because of your smoking, who gives a shit you have cancer. Right. Like we're debating the cause, which is completely irrelevant to the fact that there's a meteor heading towards the Earth. And then whether we should intervene or not. If there was a meteor heading towards the earth, even if it's a natural occurrence, we would work to have it pushed to the side. And all of these metaphors and analogies aren't there. And we've left it to scientists to communicate to normal people, which is like leaving it to engineers to communicate to normal people. And I think there's a lot to be learned from the failures of climate cancer and the communication of climate cancer to general people that I think your category could learn. And the value proposition has value to a small number of people and that's okay. Like, not everybody needs to move money around the world seamlessly. A lot of people do. Banks do, institutions do. I don't. Right. And to make it sound like it's, you know, the Messiah is a little bit overselling it. And I think to bring it down and actually be a little more humble actually makes the value proposition more believable. And then actually more people would adopt it and it turns out everybody would need it. But it's kind of like in publishing there's this little rule that if you ever see on a book, you know, blah, blah, blah, that will help you at work and in life. And those books don't sell because nobody believes that one idea will fix your company and fix your life now. It will just. Nobody believes it. So you just say, we'll help you at work, we'll help you at life. And then people come to you be like, I applied. And you're like, let them discover it. Let them discover it. I think there's a lot of opportunity for clear communication in your category.

No, I couldn't agree more. I mean, we actually talked about that this morning. No, no, I mean, it was actually really on point because, you know, we talked about this this morning about like, how do you make people use the technology without even knowing they're using the technology? Because no one cares about the underlying technology of sending an email. You're using SMTP and TCP ip. No one Cares.

The lights go on.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

And also, nobody cares. Like, the banks work well enough. Right. And that's part of the problem.

I mean, you know, people said that they didn't need the Internet because they could send faxes. Right?

Right.

So that's the same thing as the banks work well enough, I think.

But. But it. But it was so. But it's the early adopters, right. So I built my career. I. So my career was an experiment. I believe in the scientific method. I love testing things until they fail and then developing new theory. It's my favorite thing. And when I discovered two things, I decided I was going to try them out. So Gladwell wrote about the tipping point, but he didn't tell you how to make one. And I figured how to make a tipping point. And you need two things. You need the law of diffusion of innovations, and you need to start with why. And once I learned the law of diffusion of innovations, which is if you want mass market success or mass market acceptance for an idea, you actually don't aim at the mass market. You aim at the early adopters, number one, because you need 15 to 18% penetration of any population. And it tips just. It's a natural phenomenon. But if you ignore the early adopters, you'll always get about 10%. They get it. I love that guy. He gets it. I hate that guy. He doesn't get it. Right. Get what? You always get 10%, but it's not enough to make the system tip. And what I learned was that if you want to create a tipping point, the way you get the early adopters is you learn to start with why. You learn to communicate belief in terms that are humanly relatable and intuitive, that don't require rational understanding. They're speaking to people's limbic brains, speaking to people's values, not their intellect. And you get enough of those people, and it will tip. And so I built my whole career without any marketing, any pr. And every opportunity I had is because somebody who believed what I believe made introduction for me. And the same will happen here if you treat it like a social movement, because it's how social movements happen, it's more likely to work.

Couldn't agree more. It's crazy. We're flying through this. I know a number of people here are huge fans because they got really excited when they knew you were speaking. And I know this was not part of the plan. But think about questions that you want to ask Simon during his time here. And, you know, we'll. I don't Know whether we have an extra mic in the back or we'll just shout. We'll figure it out. Okay, great. Fantastic. So question for you on. Because there are a few people here who are starting companies that are, you know, young and early and building, etc. Any advice for them?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Best. I mean, you know this even more than I do. I think the single best lesson that a young entrepreneur can learn is these two phrases. I don't know and I need help. Right? Because there's the temptation or the false belief that we have to have all the answers or we have to get everything right. Because our reputations or our credibility is based on our intelligence, and it's not. And turns out we're surrounded by people who love us and want to help us, but they didn't think we needed it because we never asked for it. And so I learned that lesson the very hard way. But I think. And by the way, you should do it with your team, too. And I call it comfort and ignorance. Right? Like, you don't want to come to work one day and be like, I don't know how to read a piano. No one actually ever taught me. I'm actually a little insecure about it. Like, don't do that. That is not going to inspire people. But if you come to work and you're like, hey, this may surprise you, but I actually have no clue how to read a P and L. Nobody actually ever taught me. I carried a lot of insecurity about it my whole life. But you know what? I need something to show me if you just own it. Confident Ignorance. People love it. And what it does is, is it creates a safe space for other people to admit their shortcomings. And that's what we want. We want our teams to say, I don't know. And they will do so with the same confidence if we demonstrate the behavior.

Yeah. The most successful people I've worked with, who are some of the most successful people around, are the ones who have no shame at asking questions they should really know the answer to. Yeah, like, no shame. Yeah, like, and it's a dinner conversation about something totally mundane that, like, everyone knows about. And it's like, okay, can you explain this to me? Because, like, I don't know how that works.

And because it's confident ignorance. When somebody attempts to shame them, you don't know that. They go, yeah, fuck you. I don't know that exactly. Like, it's just like, they. Like, there's no. Like, yeah, I don't know what do you want from me? That's why I'm asking you, you know?

Yeah, all right, let's. Yeah, it's. I mean, really. Let's open it up to questions from the audience. Anyone has a question, raise your hand. We'll bring a mic. Or you can scream the question. It's always like that at my all hands. It's exactly like that. And then the first person, like, asks a question, and then everyone goes, all.

Right, how are you?

Good.

It's okay. Shout. Oh, yeah. Okay. So believe it or not, it's not the ones you think like, vision, charisma, right? Like, it's actually not those. Like, I know some pretty amazing leaders who aren't big visionaries, and I know some pretty amazing leaders who, like, you're like, that's the leader. No. Like, they don't have that traditional charisma that you'd expect. Not the traditional sense. There are two that are inextricably linked. The first one is courage. 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 the 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. Yeah, that guy.

Yeah. 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, because one does well. I mean, that's where he works. I was gonna visit him at his office, right? And he called me. He said, you can't come. I had a thing I gotta 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's against the military code of conduct for an officer to have a relationship with an enlisted person for discipline reasons and 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. 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's 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 have any idea how many people you've let down? He said, 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? Which I can wax philosophical about. But I should probably leave time for other questions.

I know go for courage. Courage is very important. I mean, we all need courage to see what we're working on through.

So 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 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 story 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.

See, now we have lots of questions.

Just like an early adopter, you reach a tipping point, the 15%. 15 to 18% is all you need.

Hey, thanks, Simon.

My pleasure. Hi.

You're pretty clear and about, you know, the why being so important. And also you've emphasized the importance of having strategic clarity of where you're going and really labeling that. But I talked to a lot of early companies, and the truth is they really don't have strategic clarity of exactly where they're going. And I'm curious if you have advice for people to clarify that and how they should search for the specifics of where they're going on vacation rather than just the next few steps and how they're going to get kind of there. This is a question coming from venture capital right here. Yeah. I am a vc, so.

One of the fun things about visionaries is they can see it. They can't always say it. Right. And in the early stages, they usually hire their friends or people that they know pretty well because those people have hung around with that person enough to get it to kind of see where they're going. And that works perfectly fine at very small scale. You can actually make a go of it at small scale because we're all kind of in the same room. If you listen to that person long enough, you kind of see what they see, even though they're pretty inarticulate, you know, and you get their values, you know, and that's fine for something relatively small. Where it starts to fall apart is when they succeed, you start building some scale. And now I don't spend every day with you, and I didn't grow up with you. And I'm not your friend. I was hired by some recruiter. And. And I don't know what you're trying to build. I think I know. I can't quite understand. Or I'm coming in for the wrong reasons. You're giving me equity. You know, you got a lot of funding. So now I'm, like, looking at all the wrong criteria. I'm looking at how much funding you've got, I'm looking at what your valuation is, how much equity you're going to give me. And I'm now making a strategic bet that other people see something in you that I don't see. But I'll attach myself to this for a couple years and see if I can win the lottery. And that happens a lot in tech. And sometimes it's not the founder who's able to articulate the cause. So Rollins founded Southwest Airlines, not Herb Kelleher. But Kelleher knew how to talk about it, and it was Woz who built the Apple, not Jobs. But Jobs knew how to talk about it. So sometimes it's not even the founder. It's not even the visionary. It was Joe Jebbia who's really the brain behind Airbnb. But Cesky knows how to talk about it. Right? It's not even. Sometimes the spiritual founder isn't actually the person who's good at talking about it, but you got to find that magical partnership. But if they can't articulate it ever, it's a lot of frustration. It's a lot of screaming and yelling, and it's very hard to work for those people or to invest in those people because you can't help them, and they just get pissed off at you all the time. So I think at some point it has to be articulated, but in the early stages, you can bumble and fumble, which is what a lot of companies do.

All right, one more question.

Hey, Simon, thanks for being here. The left side of the room really shown up. The right side of the room.

Yeah, I guess.

Just wanted to put it out there. I was just wondering if you have any examples of kind of having a why gone wrong, either holding onto it for too long or having it for the wrong reasons. And what point do you try to reevaluate your whys? Okay, so there's a lot in that question, because there's no such thing as a why going wrong, right? Or like, you don't have a work why and a personal why, and your why doesn't change ever.

Right?

We are the sum totals of how we were raised. Like, you are who you are based on the experiences you had as a kid. And I Am who I am based on the experiences I had as I'm a kid. And that's what makes me me now. The rest of my life offers me choices to even live consistently and act consistently with who I am or not.

And.

And if I start becoming obsessed with fame and fortune, for example, and I make decisions, my friends will say to me, it's like, I don't know who you are anymore. Right? And so what you're saying is when your why goes wrong, what you're saying is you started making decisions and you've actually let go of the why as a filter for decision making. You're making decisions for different or wrong reasons. That's usually more common because you only have one wine that lasts your whole life. And if the why truly is changeable, then it's probably poorly articulated. And by the way, it's the same for companies. A why fundamentally is an origin story. That's basically what it is. Like your why is your origin story? My why is my origin story. The company is the same. Like, why was this company founded? Because you read an article in Inc. Magazine, you're like, I'm going to start a company. Those companies don't do well. Right. When you're just chasing opportunity, what went wrong in your life or somebody else's life that you decided to take the risk of overwhelming failure as opposed to just getting a job because you believed so fundamentally that the solution didn't exist that you had to build it yourself? What's the origin story? The Disney origin story. Walt Disney started his company in a time after war and depression where people were stressed, and he gave them a place to go and escape the stresses of the world through the movies and then through Disneyland. That's why there. It's a magical place, and it's a class list. The rich and the poor hang out at Disneyland and we leave and you go read the inscription that was written in 1955, or whatever it was that's outside Disneyland. Behind these gates you will find da da da and leave behind it's all true to this day. It's an origin story. And like people, when companies forget where they come from, the business tends to go sideways because they're chasing the wrong things. We saw it and we see it regularly. Michael Eisner, on his second half of his tenure, he became obsessed with world domination. Disney went off the rails. Steve Ballmer became obsessed with beating Apple and forgot the cause, that that company was obsessed with productivity and helping people be more productive in the world. You and that company couldn't hire talent, and they kept losing talent and they went off the rails. You see it time and time again. Fortunately, both those companies were wealthy enough to stay in business until a better leader came along. Not all companies are wealthy enough to withstand a bad leader. And so if the why truly is wrong or we had to change from that why to this why, it probably was poorly articulated to start with, and it was probably based on the product. A why has nothing to do. My why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. So together, each of us can change our world for the better. It doesn't tell you how I do it, and it doesn't tell you what I do. That's the flexibility part. All companies are the same. All companies are the same. If your why has your product in it, it's not your why. It's just a statement of product.

On that note, I know you need to go somewhere else, be somewhere else, fly somewhere else. You're always so incredibly busy.

Answer a couple more questions if you like.

I mean, if you have time, we'll take a bit. Okay. One more question. From the right side. This time, just to like. Or in the back? The one on the right. Okay.

Too bad.

In the back.

Assuming he exists. Yeah. I don't know. You tell me. You're the one who's in the business. No, you tell me. Literally, tell me. No, no, tell me. What's the. Yeah, tell me. That sounds like great. Who gives a shit? So what? What is the. So my question is, what is so important about that? What is so important that you would risk your entire career to send money peer to peer, without another institution? Like, literally, who cares? Like, what about that is so important? That's what I want to know. That is not a statement of why. That's a statement of a product benefit. Or tell me how a product works. My question is, why did he make it in the first place? What was wrong? What was broken? What did he suffer? Where did the pain come from? I understand the solution.

Genesis.

Sure, sure, sure. Okay. I mean, the financial system seems robust. And is there room for more efficiency? Probably you see the point, which is if you articulate a great why, I'll give you a perfect example. Right. Of when a why is really freaking fantastic. Right. Apple talked about think different. Who are they describing? Their customers or their employees? The answer is yes. The answer is I believe what you believe. I don't work for you. Or I believe what you believe. I want to buy from you. Okay. Steve Jobs was a multi billionaire to whom we cannot Relate. And when he died, average people laid wreaths at retail stores. That makes no sense. It's because he said something that captured something for us, which is stand up to big brother, which is why he appealed to creative people and young people, because creative people and young people kind of love the idea of standing up to big brother. And you only ever see individuals in the commercials, one person versus the machine. And it's called imac, not because it's on the Internet. It's because it's me. It's I, right? Or Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines stands freedom. You are free to move about the country. It is power to the common man. It is an everyman populist message. I do not like flying Southwest Airlines. I am happy to pay more money to have my seat assigned me. Assigned to me, and I'm guaranteed to get my window. I really, really like that model. I don't like standing in line hoping I get a seat that I like. However, I love Southwest Airlines message. And I will preach from the treetops how wonderful I think they are, even though I will pay money not to fly their product. So you don't even have to like the product to want to champion the cause. So if crypto got its message right, it doesn't matter whether I'll use it. It doesn't matter whether I'll benefit from it. It doesn't matter if I understand it. If I relate to your cause, I will stand on the treetops and say, I think that is the greatest thing ever, and I think we should all pay attention to it, even if it's not for me. And the fact that I'm struggling to understand either. I don't share your beliefs, which I don't think is right, because a lot of my friends are in the business, and I like them and I like their values, so that can't be right. So maybe where it's falling apart is it's not being clearly articulated to me in terms that I can emotionally relate to. When you talk about a system or a product, like moving this from here to that, it's rational and great. Whys, great causes are emotional. We the people, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. I have a dream that one day little black children will play on the playground with little white children. These are deeply, deeply emotional messages that you interpret through your own lens. And you ascribe value to yourself, even though it's not there for you in the first place. And the fact that I would interpret your why into my world, it means it's succeeding. So it might be a brilliant paper. The question, has it been distilled to a simple understand, just do it. You know, think different. That helps me emotionally connect to it. It's deeply rational, but I don't know if it's yet emotional.

Yeah, I have thoughts on that, actually.

Or I'm wrong.

No, no, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think that, you know, if you look at the genesis of the protocols and the things that created the most value in solving humanity's problems, they often started like a little scientific project on the side. Like, the Internet itself was like that. And no one sold the Internet. It just did a thing really well that was significantly better than the thing it replaced. And then the companies that built on top of that network had a really good articulation of their why, and then were able to actually get more people on the network and do more things. And I think the Bitcoin white paper and all of that looks like the very beginning of the Internet in that way.

And just like a company, sometimes the founders aren't the ones that realize the value. You know, the Internet being a great example, they had no clue what the Internet would become. They were trying to solve a problem, which they did, and they didn't imagine how it would be used. And sometimes that's the fun, which is you didn't invent the thing, but you figured out a use case that actually makes it more interesting than the inventors. You know, some people want to leave the banks out, but not everybody. Because the devil I know, right? Like, I hate my bank. I hate them. But they all suck.

Until they don't.

Until they don't. Exactly. Right.

Eubank's pretty great. You like them?

I can't open a new bank account, though. So here's what I think is interesting, and this is the opportunity, and I think this is where you and I will completely agree, right? I think it's embarrassing that Netflix pioneered streaming and not television and movies. I think it's embarrassing that itunes was invented by a computer company and not the music industry. I think it's embarrassing that Amazon invented the E. Reader, the Kindle, and not the publishing industry. And that's where I think this category is onto something. You are doing something that should have been invented and should have been pioneered by the banks. But it won't be, and it won't. And it wasn't, because they're trying to protect their old business models, just like the music companies are trying to sell us more DVDs in a song culture and they miss the boat. And I think that is where I think this is really interesting. That, to me, is really interesting. Now, how you articulate it is a different conversation, but I think that's really interesting.

Simon, thank you so, so much for being here today with us.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

So Simon was gracious enough to sign copies for all of you of the Infinite Game that you can find outside, signed in Bitcoin orange, which was a coincidence or not a coincidence. So we're going to do that, and then we'll meet all of you at 5:30 on the rooftop for drinks, dinner and so on and so forth. Thank you.