Simon Sinek argues that businesses mistakenly use finite analogies (war, sports, campaigns) which encourage short-term, goal-for-goal’s-sake thinking. He advocates treating business as an ongoing lifestyle—like health—where goals are useful metrics but must be contextualized within long-term trends and leadership quality to avoid incentivizing harmful behaviors.
It's not about abandoning goals. It's contextualizing the goals. And what most businesses lack is context for the goals. So we use all the wrong analogies in business, we use war analogies. It's a launch, it's a campaign. You know, we use sports analogies. You know, it's. It's 4th and goal. And like, we gotta. And. And they're all finite constructions.
We need to start thinking of business like a lifestyle. Right? Think of it more like health. Like, I want to be healthy. What does it take to be healthy? Well, you have to exercise, you have to eat right. You have to nurse your personal relationships. You have to get enough sleep. There's probably 30 other things. You can't do all of these things perfectly all the time. It's a striving. Well, what you have to do well in business, you need good product, you need good service, you need good leadership. So you can't do all those things perfectly all the time. It's a striving. And you can absolutely have arbitrary goals in that. We love a metric. Human beings love a metric. So, for example, I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. Arbitrary number, arbitrary date, which is largely how we pick financial goals. We're going to hit this goal by this date, make it this number.
And it's arbitrary, and that's fine. And so you go and you stand on the scale every morning. You're doing all the right things. We love measuring, we love counting, we love feeling the progress. And then you hit your goal on the right day and the right time and you're ecstatic. But here's the thing. You have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. It doesn't end. And it's the same with business. You hit your goal, but the whole thing called business and all that striving and marketing, and it doesn't end like you have to keep doing it. But I think it's more interesting when we miss the goal. Because if you're doing all this stuff and you stand on the scale on that day and you miss your goal, you know what happens? You keep working out. Nothing happens, right? And what's more important is the trend, because you are more healthy now, you are healthier now than you were when you started. You just happened to pick the wrong date. Clearly, you're going to hit it in a month. And I think what we as companies need to start doing is, first of all, contextualizing the goal. The reason we need to hit this goal is because it helps us build towards that bigger vision. And when we hit it, we look at the context. Do we have bad leadership that just at the last minute, in the last quarter had all these promotions so they could hit their numbers, but they're a terrible leader, building a terrible team, and this has been their year. But we bonus that person versus the other team that's really well led, that's doing everything right, beautiful, steady growth line. They just happen to miss the number. We give them nothing. So we're accidentally incentivizing the wrong behaviors. I think we need to start looking at trend data, because that's infinite mindedness. And I think we need to start contextualizing those goals. If they lack context. If it's goal for the point of goal, you're in a finite game.
