I like Simon Sinek.

I feel like I know him. He probably doesn’t know me. I don’t care, I still like him. Let me explain WHY.

Simon has a great book “Start with Why”. He spends a lot of the book looking at the diagram – the Golden Circle.

WHAT: Every single company and organization on the planet knows WHAT they do.

HOW: Some companies and people know HOW they do WHAT they do. Whether you call them a “differentiating value proposition,” “proprietary process” or “unique selling proposition,” HOWs are often given to explain how something is different or better.

WHY: Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money—that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

The simplicity of understanding WHY and making sure your HOW and WHAT connect with that has really helped me and my story work.

So  yes, I am asking the question “WHY” a lot.

It’s about connection

People have to connect with your “WHY”. A lot of companies have a purpose (WHY) that has come from the leader, which is how it should be – but, and this is a big but, people have to connect to that WHY. If your WHY is to build a large, profitable and successful company – people won’t connect with that. People aren’t interested in helping you to build a company and become more successful. WHY has to connect with their heart.

A story of failure?

My story is not much different from a lot of other young entrepreneurs. Armed with a vision of how I could do it better, a lot of passion and the right amount of insanity, I set off to do something with an over 90% statistical change of failure: start my own business.

In all of this it was necessity that helped me articulate the “Why.” It was my need to understand what was causing my frustration and my need to get out of the corporate world. I knew what I had been doing. I knew how I had doing it, but I didn’t know “Why.” Success and happiness can only fully exist if all three of those things are in balance.

Only when I learned to articulate “Why” I do what I do — to inspire people to do the things that inspire them – would my life start to turn around. I literally stopped talking about what I did and only started talking about what I believed: the power of storytelling. In the beginning my story had no connection what so ever with the world of business and clients. But people who believed what I believed wanted to learn more. My friends started talking about my “Why.” They invited me to their homes for informal gatherings to talk to their friends. I started to get invitations to more and more places, from more and more people — everyone who wanted to learn about this thing called the “Why.” My “Why” became social and was working all the new social media channels. And learned using these as I things evolved.

My life profoundly changed and I had a new direction.

I started doing things and meeting people I never imagined I would. In fact, there’s not a single thing I’m doing now that I imagined doing, let alone wrote down in any plan. I never imagined I would become a speaker, yet now I get two to four speaking requests per month. I never imagined writing a book. I never imagined working with CEO’s and senior managers on defining THEIR story. Yet I now and then and I sit down with leaders of all kinds of companies.

Which brings me to the most simple big-why-point: I am not an academic, nor am I some consultant with some “proprietary process.” I’m just a guy who discovered something that profoundly changed my life — a new direction. I made a decision that I would work to share what I had discovered because if more people could also find clarity of “Why,” it would make the world a better place, and this was a totally selfish pursuit because I would prefer to live in a better world — a world filled with optimism and inspired leaders.

So yes, I believe this why stuff is important.

I am (not) that guy!

I was in Prague a few weeks ago -speaking on a conference about Brand Journalism- with David Henderson –a guy I have been following quite a bit on his blog. David is an award-winning journalist and communication strategist. David asked me to join him in this conference to talk about storytelling. Just four years ago, I was starting up a little out of-the-box-local-communication-consultancy-business. The big dreams I had then was of making a living out of working with storytelling in a bizz environment. I never thought of becoming a more international oriented (and bigger) communication consultant. I never imagined doing what I do now and especially never imagined doing what I did a few weeks ago at the conference. Besides, even if I did imagine something like it, no one would have taken me seriously.

What makes the whole experience even more surreal is that I wasn’t there as an outsider. David asked me to join him in leading the whole conference as an adjunct key note speaker. In other words, I was there as an equal.

I’m not that much more experienced than I was four years ago. The only thing that changed — the thing that changed the course of my career so dramatically — was the introduction of a clear Why into my life.

Why this why stuff changed my life

I did not invent the concept of Why; I just discovered it. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that exists deep in the human brain and influences the behavior of every one of us. It is what drives our behavior and is where our inspiration comes from. The discovery happened by accident, not because I was looking to fill some market segment, but because I needed feel inspired again. I had lost that feeling and I wanted it back.

Today I continue to work hard to focus my career around my Why, which is both to inspire people to do the things that inspire them and to not worry about what I would do or where it would take me. This was the opposite of what most of us are raised to think from hearing: “Figure out what you want to do and focus on that.” I still don’t know what I want to do, but I know Why I do the things I do. It is this open-minded approach that has opened so many doors for me.

That is my story.

I’m actually quite uncomfortable talking about this stuff. Still I did decide to tell you my experience with this “why” stuff because I believe it is crucial in defining YOUR story and to make sure your story would stick and resonate with your audience. So stay close to yourself when you work on your story. In defining and working your story forget all the this crazy and complex positioning talk of classical communication consultants. (I still most of the time don’t want to be called a consultant because of the negative stories that circulate around this kind of business.) Just connect with your big “why”, try to write it down and you’ll see that you will not be a long way from mnailing down YOUR story. And all sort of happy connections will automatically follow…

Do you know this consultant joke?

The Oldest Profession…

A medical doctor, an engineer, and a management consultant were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world.

The doctor started… “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken from Adam’s body. This must have required surgery, and so I can claim with a high degree of confidence that mine is the oldest profession in the world.”

The engineer responded, and said, “But earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most impressive application of civil engineering. Therefore, dear doctor, you are wrong: mine is surely the oldest profession in the world.”

The management consultant leaned back in his chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?”

Don’t be that guy and start your own WHY thing today. Start looking at your BIGGER story.

Note:

Few days after this blogpost I read this great article from Clay Forsberg “Don’t fool yourself, your customers don’t care about you“. I think you should read it.