Simon Sinek explains why stating your beliefs first attracts the right people and opportunities. He introduced the golden circle in January 2006 and by June was presenting at the Pentagon. A single conversation with an editor led to a book offer in three days.
Questions this video answers
January 2006.
Around May or June 2006.
29 minutes.
Three days later.
Chapters
The minute I started talking about what I believed and stopped talking about what I did, things happened immediately. So, for example, if I would go to a dinner party where you sit on a plane and somebody says, what do you do? And you actually answer that question. If you're lucky to find 10% of the people who are actually interested in that, you can have a conversation.
But if you talk about what you believe, you talk about how you view the world.
People who believe what you believe were instantly drawn to you. And people who don't believe what you believe don't care and will walk away. And the people who are instantly drawn to you will say things like, there's someone I need to introduce you to. And so my career went from fine and it went like this. So I'll just give you one example. I first publicly articulated the concept of the golden circle. And starting with why in January of 2006, okay, by I think it was about May, May or June of 2006, I was standing in the Pentagon presenting to the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Air Force. So one of the members of the Joint Chiefs, I'm the same idiot, okay? Nothing has changed. The difference was the way I got there was I talked about what I believe, and they said, there's somebody I need you to meet. That's how I got my book deal. Somebody said to me, I went out for dinner with somebody, I talk about what I believe. They said, I need to introduce you to this editor. I have a conversation, I tell him what I believe. He says, I need you to meet my publisher. I have a 29 minute conversation with the publisher, and three days later they offered me a book deal.
And it's only because I worked very hard to talk about what I believed. You have to eventually talk about what you do because people want proof.
That it's not that I think the what's unimportant, it's that the order's wrong. People talk about what they do, they talk about how they do it, and they rarely talk about what they believe. I talk about what I believe, how I do it, and then I'll tell you about what I do. And the order matches the biology of human decision making, which is why it works.
