What Makes an Unshakeable Optimist? | Full Conversation

Welcome to the stage author of Molly's Game, Molly Bloom.

Hello everyone.

So I am here with Simon Sinek. Yes. And the way I met Simon is kind of strange. I became friends with some of the police chiefs in my town because I am a friend of law enforcement now, rule following citizen. And.

One of the police chiefs, she's a woman, she's extraordinary. She said, you have to meet Simon Sinek. And I said, I'm a huge fan. How do you know him? And she said, I I'm part of this group that he put together to improve upon law enforcement. And that is just Simon, the way he lives his life, there's no problem, too complex, too big. He has a vision of the world, a better world, a more just world, a more humane world. And he doesn't just talk about it, he gets into action. The work he's done with leaders and organizations has catalyzed an evolution of culture out from a fear based, self preservationist mind and into a higher, more conscious state. It is such an honor to be here to talk about his life and his work and the art of impact. Simon, hello.

Thanks Molly.

Yeah.

Molly Bloom.

So it wasn't a light lift, this vision of yours, this vision of a better world. On our pre call we talked about at the beginning, you were booed, you were heckled, your credibility was called into question. People said things like, you don't understand business. And yet you persisted. So my question is, where does your why come from? And where does this deep, relentless conviction behind it?

I think that it's think of an artist sensibility. If you talk to an artist and say, why do you paint? Why do you dance? They don't understand the question. The answer they give is I can't, not right. There's compulsion. And not all ideas have compulsion. They don't feed our souls. And I think probably shared by a lot of people in this room. The question is, what ideas should we be stubborn with and what ideas should we know when to quit? I think it's often a debate, you have to know when to quit and you should never quit. I think the answer is if you can't stop thinking about it. If the idea has so much soul, it just compels you. Those are the ones that we never quit. Where the other ones, sure, you can sort of figure out a time to walk away. And that is what this became for me.

It was something I couldn't not do.

And when you have that kind of belief in something, desperate belief, and people have it in their families, they have it in their Faith. They have desperate belief in something.

The criticism becomes part of the fun, frankly.

I mean, the story you're talking about is true. It happened in the early days when I was talking about. Start with why I was on a stage talking to a fairly large group of entrepreneurs and business owners. And the very first, it wasn't a question. The very first statement made when we went to Q and A, a guy just with the microphone said, I, I think you're naive. I don't think you've never run a multi billion dollar company. I think your ideas are useless in the real world and I don't think it'll ever work.

And my answer was, so don't do it. Next question.

And it's not because I was being difficult. It's because I never saw my job to convince people because I don't think I'm right and I don't think that I have answers. I think I have a point of view, that's all. And so I'm simply sharing my point of view. And if you don't share my point of view, I'm totally fine with that. You know, if you want to run your business your way, you run it your way. I just think business could run this way. And so I never took it personally, quite frankly, when I got comments like that or when they questioned my, my credentials or anything like that.

You never took it personally or you were able to reframe it?

No, I didn't. I genuinely didn't take it personally. Okay, like, like, I mean it happened at another one where the very first question was what are your credentials? After I've just given this whole speech, you know, and I said none. And just so he knew I wasn't joking, I elaborated and said, I have no advanced degrees. I made no formal study of this. This is just my point of view.

And.

I think one of the things that we have to remember, and I think young people don't realize this, is when someone gives you a shot, when they decide to put you on a stage and give you a microphone, or if they give you a job or if they open a door for you or make an introduction for you. You don't have to prove yourself because you've already been vetted. Somebody else has already said, you see this in new employees all the time. The company Chanel, like Chanel, they have this rule that I absolutely love that new senior executives are not allowed to speak in meetings for the first 90 days of their employment.

They want you to shut up and listen. And the reason they do that is because new employees so often feel they have to talk in every meeting to prove that you made the right choice to hire them. Like, we know you're smart. We hired you. Shut up and learn. And I think that's correct. And yeah.

I have nothing else.

At what point.

Was it in your childhood? Was it in. I mean, at what point did you decide this was your why and this was your mission and you were going to not quit?

So no one decides what their why is. Your why is inside you. And if you're fortunate enough to go on the journey of discovery, what's not fortunate enough? If you choose to go on the journey of discovery and you're able to put that why into words. So the thing that drives your gut, like there's no part of your stomach that makes decisions. Right. You know, your gut feeling comes from somewhere. And it is this deep seated purpose, cause, or belief that we all have because we're all products of our upbringing and you are who you are. And so for me, it wasn't a question of.

Deciding on it, but it was discovering it. And not uncommon. You can go through a process of discovery because you just decide you want to or you can very often struggle reveals your why to you. I think that's probably very much your case as well. You know, you had to hit the bottom before you realized who you were.

And my story is not dissimilar either way. I didn't go to not a convicted felon.

Laugh.

But you're my favorite convicted felon. The.

The.

But I had to, like, I had to face.

What I thought was bankruptcy. I had to face collapse. I had to face humiliation.

To discover what my cause was. And I think you probably share this as well, which is I couldn't have done it alone. And it took a friend coming to me in this very dark place that I spent all of my energy pretending that I was happy, more successful and more in control than I really felt.

And lying, hiding, and faking is exhausting.

And it took a friend to say, something's not right. I was so good at it, even my family didn't recognize it. And. But this friend did. And I came clean. And all of the energy went into that was going into lying, hiding, and faking, went into rediscovering passion. And it wasn't the discovering of my why that set me on the path. It was the discovering of my why. And then wanting desperately to share with my friends because I love my friends and I want them to have what I found. And they started making crazy life Changes and making these huge decisions with total confidence. And they would invite me to their homes to share it with their friends. And I would literally stand in someone's living room talking about this thing called the why. And that's what ignited the spark that I realized that I had something to give.

And you discover service. I mean, this is what a life of service means. Which is the reason people keep talking about, or we're told you have a gift. You know, well, the very definition of a gift is it's supposed to be given. And I think that if you have a gift and you're not sharing it, I think you're just selfish.

What if we don't know our why? How do we unearth it?

There's many ways to do it. You know, I, I've written a book about it, Find your why. And we have like stuff online to help people find it. But there's multiple ways to do it.

I can tell you a fun way, some of you may know about it. It's called the Friends exercise, which is really fun, which is go to a friend who you love and who loves you.

The kind of friend that if you called them at 3 o' clock in the morning, you know they would take your call. And if they called you, you would absolutely be there for them. Do not do this with a sibling, do not do this with, with a parent, and do not do this with a spouse. It doesn't work.

Because they think they know you.

Go to a friend, a friend who you love, and ask them this very simple question, why are we friends?

And they're going to look at you like you're crazy because you're asking them to put into words a feeling. And the part of the brain that controls our emotions doesn't control language. So we struggle. And ironically, you actually stop asking the question why? Because the question why elicits emotional responses. And you convert to a rational question. Come on, you'll say, what specifically is it about me? That I know that you would be there for me no matter what. And they will struggle and they will hem in the ha. And they go, I don't know. And they'll start describing you. You are trustworthy, you're funny, you're always there for me. And you have to play devil's advocate. And you go, great, that's the definition of a friend. What specifically is it about me then I know you'd be there for me no matter what. And they're going to go through a few rounds of this. You cannot help them. You cannot let anybody Else help them. You have to let them go through the stress. And eventually, after a bunch of rounds, they will give up and they will stop describing you and they will start talking about themselves. And my friends said to me, simon, I don't know. All I know is I don't even have to talk to you. I can just sit in a room with you and I feel inspired. And I got goosebumps. In fact, I'm getting them right now. And that's because they put into words something that is deep inside of me. And you know you're there. When you have the emotional response to what they're describing about themselves, you are will well up, you will have goosebumps, something will happen. And if you do this with multiple friends, you will get similar, if not the exact same answer. Because the thing you give to the world, your why, is the reason they love you. It's the thing they want in their life that fills that missing gap that they don't have, which is why we're not friends with everyone. So it's a wonderful, wonderful way to find your why.

I love that.

So kind of the next. So how long did it take before there was that inflection point, before that, was that the tipping point where people started to embrace this concept? How long were you out there speaking? How long before diffusion theory essentially took place?

So this is the thing that is just for me, fascinating about learning the discipline of starting with why and following the religion of law, of diffusion of innovations, which is ignoring the majority, and finding the early adopters, which is religion to me. I based my whole career, and that's how ideas spread on that beautiful idea. It happened immediately. 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 are 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 to 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 tell, 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.

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.

Can you talk a little bit about that biology? Because I think it's fascinating how you back these theories up with neuroscience.

Yeah, I mean, and it's not very, it's not very controversial. Neuroscience. It's Neuroscience 101. You know, it's really basic stuff, which is good because I'm not a neuroscientist. The. But I did check everything out with a neuroscientist. I'm not. You know, I think there's a lot of ideas in the market that the, the sellers of those ideas, whether they're commercial ideas or just philosophical ideas, the sellers of those ideas, the spreaders of those ideas, are looking for the buyers to just believe or take it on faith. Like the universe will provide. That's one of my favorite ones. You just ask the universe, you know, and I'm totally fine with that. But my question is, why does the universe do that? Like, I want to know the reason why that happens. Like, I'm not satisfied with. If you start with talking about what you believe, then things will follow. I know it's to be true, but why? And if you ask that question enough times, necessarily, you end up at the origins of the human species and anthropology and Biology and why this legacy machine was built the way it. It was to respond to the world around us so that we will survive. And so necessarily, when you start asking the questions about those things that we're asked to take on faith, you end up at biology and anthropology, and it sort of all starts to make sense. It also helps you understand why things don't work or when our systems get short circuited. You know, we're a very old machine living in a very modern world. We're not built for this.

The next step in this evolution was Leaders Eat Last.

You expanded your ideas outside of self and this motivation and this passion into a more universal approach that was in direct contradiction to the way that the culture of business and leadership was at the time. Getting away from the Jack Welsh of it all and into more humane leadership.

There's many parts of this work that's so fascinating to me, but one that I think is so profound is starting to understand the conditions under which humans thrive.

You do a lot of talking about fear and safety and, you know, business. Up until this point, it was very much about pitting people against each other. The bottom line, shareholder supremacy. Just these conditions that are completely antithetical to how humans survive or thrive and are productive. What was it? Were you already working with the military at this point?

So I'd have a. So the. The Air Force were early adopters of my work. I mean, Rob. Right from the beginning. And so I'd had a. I continue to have a long relationship. What's interesting about the story of humanity and the concept of Leaders Eat Last. First of all, the title Leaders Eat Last comes from a conversation I had with a Marine. I said, what makes Marines better than all the others? And he said, officers Eat Last. And it's a concept shared across the military. It just happened to be with a Marine. That's where that title comes from. And the opening story in Leaders Eat Last is a war story.

You know, I like to joke that they're. That in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. And in business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain.

Right.

And.

But the true origin story for Leaders Eat Less, which is not in the book, was.

When came from an. I don't talk about it that often. I have talked about it, but I don't talk about it that often, which is. I had the opportunity to go to Afghanistan with the Air Force. I had been doing a lot of work with the Mobility Forces, the Air Mobility Forces are the branch of the Air Force that are responsible for all of the big planes that don't drop bombs or shoot bullets. So no fighter jets, no bombers, but the tankers, the cargo planes, Air Force One, all of that stuff belongs to Air Mobility Command. And the general who was in charge, he said, you've got to know us really well, but it would mean a lot to me if you would be willing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see our men and women perform their duty. I would like you to see what they do. Would you be willing to go? And I said, yes.