Simon Sinek । 30 Minutes for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE

[Music] I did a little experiment with a homeless person not like on them it's not like electrodes with them voluntarily helped me because the whole idea of giving right you've all walked down the street and you've all seen someone begging and you either have or haven't thrown a few pennies in their cup when you do you feel good you bought that feeling that is a legitimate commercial transaction you know commercial transactions are defined as the exchange of consideration there was an exchange of consideration here you gave money you got the feeling of Goodwill you paid

for that feeling if you didn't give money you either feel nothing or you feel bad you can't feel good by not giving all right you paid for that feeling so now the question is how is that person encouraging us to give the joke is they act like every corporation in the world they talk about themselves me me me me me me me right like they sit there with their little Outdoor Advertising little sign right and it says I'm homeless I'm hungry I got 12 kids I'm a veteran God bless they got it all in there

trying to feel to somebody the religious vote the veteran vote you know the child sympathizer surround yourself with lots of pets go for that one too all in an attempt to get something from someone takers not givers right all about me well what do what do corporations do we've added more RAM we've added more ROM we've added more speed this one's number one we're the biggest we're the best we've been around since 1969 we're better than them we're faster than them we're more efficient than that one me me me me me me me me me

me and so even if we buy their product guess what I don't really feel much so I did this little experiment I found um um a nice homeless lady on the uh Streets of New York who's willing to help out and I learned that with her sign which was pretty typical I'm homeless I'm hungry blah she makes between $ 20 and $30 a day for you know for a day worth of work 8 to 10 hours of sitting there selling Goodwill 8 to 10 hours she'll make $ 20 to $30 $30 is considered a good

day I changed her sign and the new sign made her $40 in 2 hours and then she left it's one of the reasons she's homeless is cuz she's decided that she only needs $20 to $30 a day to live if she stayed she would have made $150 the point is she made 40 bucks in 2 hours what did the sign say the sign said if you only give once a month please think of me next time it has nothing to do with the taker it has everything to do with the giver and what are the

objections people give when they don't give I can't give to everyone how do I know that they really need it and so I address both those concerns I know you can't give to everyone so if you only give once a month my cause is legitimate I will still be here when you're ready to give 40 bucks 2 hours make it about them not about you the fact of the matter is 100% of customers are people and 100% of clients are people and 100% of employees are people I don't care how good your product is I

don't care how good your marketing is I don't care how good your designers if you don't understand people you don't understand business we are social animals we are human beings and our survival depends on our ability to form trusting relationships do you ever watch um uh Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel I was flipping through the channels one night and Deadliest Catch came on and on this episode just random they were in a huge storm now for those of you who don't know Deadliest Catch they take these crab fishing boats out in the Bearing Sea

which is like terrible and they put cameras on them and we watch right the reason that's I guess significant is because these crab fishermen have I think one of the top five deadliest jobs in the world you know I don't know what the exact number is but dozens of fishermen die every year doing this so they have cameras only on five or six of the ships even though there are many many many ships that go out fishing every season and they don't really come into proximity with each other because you know the ocean's huge and

they usually sabotage each other and give each other false information cuz they're all competitors they're all looking to get the crabs and you know make sure that they find them somebody else doesn't and you know it's business right it's just business it's okay we all do the same thing in our own companies and in this one episode this big huge storm was so violent that they had to bring all the pots which are the big cages that they catch the crabs and they had to bring little the pot back on the boat uh and wait

out the storm and just by dumb luck one of the boats that had cameras on it was in proximity of a boat that didn't have cameras on it and so they filmed they had secured all their pots on the deck and so they started filming the other boat and they filmed a guy climbing on the outside of the cage securing the pots and all of a sudden a huge wave hits the side of the boat and the guy is not there anymore and the people on the boat with the camera start screaming Man Overboard Man

Overboard Man Overboard and they turn their boat towards where they think he might be he's a stranger they don't know him they don't know the the crew members of the other boat and yet they react and they turn towards him and they find him in the drink and for those of you who don't understand how dangerous this is if the water is so cold that if you're in the water for I think that it's a minute or a minute 30 hypothermia will set in and you die and they come upon him and he's screaming don't

let me die don't let me die and they pull him on board not out of the woods yet they strip off his clothes because it's wet and cold and they wrap blankets around him to prevent hypothermia from setting in and he survives and it's overwhelming and the captain comes down and it's all on I mean you can go watch it on TV the camera comes the captain comes down and he hugs this stranger this young man his competitor he hugs this guy as if he's his own son I lost it everybody is crying and you

realize what happened here was a human interaction and the reason they risk their own lives to help this other person even though they spend every other day trying to get ahead and sabotage is because at the end of the day they're all crab fishermen and they know something about each other and they know something about the risk that they all take to do this and when push comes to shove they will put themselves out there to help each other for no other reason than they get it they're one of the same I will promise you

that every single member of that crew that day went home with a feeling of fulfillment I promise you that every single person on that crew that day felt more good in their hearts and in their jobs than the richest day they've ever pulled in my question is is what are you doing to help the person next to you don't you want to wake up and go to work for the only reason that you can do something good for someone else would you want them to do that for you by ourselves as individuals we are not

very good um we cannot lift heavy weights by ourselves and we cannot solve complex Problems by ourselves but in groups we are remarkable and so all of this stuff whether it's life whether it's whatever your job was in the service whatever your job is out of the service whether it's finding a new job um whether it's making your way finding out sort of what your passion is all of these things are incredibly difficult they're all incredibly complicated and the person who thinks that they can tackle any of these problems by themselves is a fool plain

old you're a fool you cannot I'm going to tell you you cannot do it alone and so asking for help is perhaps the greatest single thing anyone can ever learn especially where everything is new and the stresses are different and often feel overwhelming and scary totally unfamiliar and the longer you are in the service the scarier it is um because this is you had 15 years doing one thing knowing one thing learning a culture and now not only is it new people don't even understand what you did and what you know the military is one

of the most misunderstood cultures in the world it's so closed and insular that people just don't know it so you're dealing with that as well and so to ask for help in any form is brilliant I this is the single thing that completely transformed my own culture I had a small business I quit my job and started my own marketing uh consultancy bunch of years ago and for a few years I ran on force of personality and it was great but then if you have a little bit little bit of success force of Personality doesn't

work anymore and all of a sudden things started crashing on in around me cuz I couldn't I couldn't do it all and I thought I had to know all the answers and if I didn't I pretended that I did cuz I thought that's what I had to do and I learned uh I learned the very very hard way where I came it was a dark period that I had to learn to ask for help and it turns out I was surrounded by people who wanted to help me they just didn't because they didn't know I

wanted it or needed it and it was the willingness to ask for it or accept it that transformed my life and put me on the path that I'm on now now I'm really open about I can tell you stuff I'm really good at and I'll tell you I'm good at that and I'll tell you I am not good at that I need help with that if I'm struggling if I'm stuck if I'm confused I say can I ask you I call up friends I call up people mentor and say I need your help can you

help me and here's what I've learned about the building of trust we don't build trust by offering people our help we build trust by asking people for help that's what actually creates trust because it's an expression of lner ability right it allows people off to offer us safety and protection and that's an act of service for the other person listening is a trust building exercise right take it down to a personal relationship if if you've been in a if you've ever had a romantic relationships a loved one right making someone feel heard doesn't mean you're

wrong saying sorry doesn't mean you're wrong it just means you take accountability for your for your actions and I think it is important that when somebody objects to vaccination that we don't demonize or villainize them but we attempt to hear them make them feel heard doesn't mean we have to agree but they have to feel heard and you know listening is not hearing the words it's making the other person feel that they were heard we don't get to decide when hearing has happened when listening has happen they do and by the way it's not 100%

successful either you know because some people are just hellbent on and it and but that's a minority and so I think the exercise of sitting down with people and say tell me tell me what's what you're going through tell me what you're afraid of I I want to understand because we're trying to make everyone sayfe I I want to I want to hear what what your thing is and let them tell their story we have no answers we're not there to OB we're not there to react we're not there to fix or tell them that

they're wrong women are better than this than men and I think that has to happen and it can happen simultaneously they are not mutually exclusive I'll give you one one example which is I have a friend who refused to get vaccinated and I sat down with her and I said tell me tell me your reasoning right she goes well this new technology like I don't want to we don't know it hasn't been out long enough like we don't know so what I hear is fear of the unknown okay I go go on and she I

let her talk and say her thing and explain all the the things and I and then and I simply said so you're afraid of the MRNA technology right yes and I want them screwing with my DNA I said well just so you know it's 20-year-old technology but then I found something I could agree with her but but you're right it is the first time it's been commercialized you're absolutely right this the first time we've put it in the market so I affirmed her fear and then I said do you get flu shots every year she

goes I do I said okay Johnson and Johnson is a good oldfashioned flu shot it's a different technology it's not M mRNA so you're 100% right if you're afraid of of the new technology don't get Mna or fizer but Johnson and Johnson is it's just like a flu shop the same old Tech and she went it is and it is she went and got a Mna shot because she just wanted to be heard because most of her friends when she said I'm not getting vaccinated yelled at her told her she was stupid told her she's

an idiot told her she's letting her friends down told her she's making other people sick told her she's a risk to society that doesn't make somebody's mind open up all I did was let her feel heard I think we do we can't we have to do that I think some people turn off the humanity when they go to work you know they they they they may be you know loving parents and loving friends and loving you know uh uh children to their own parents and yet for some reason there's a switch that they think that

that's irresponsible to do at work now I'm not talking about necessarily wearing your heart on your sleeve every day there is something called emotional professionalism you know if you're having a bad day you can say listen I'm I'm a little off my game today but you can't sit in a meeting with your arms folded and be grumpy and give one word answers that's that's emotionally un professional you know you can have hard feelings but you can't go around screaming and yelling at people so I think there's a there is emotional professionalism but I think for

some reason especially as people make their way up the ranks they think that expressing any kind of emotion is a sign of weakness um even that word vulnerability we talk you know it's such a common word now being talked about in in the business world that you have to be vulnerable to to this day it makes some people feel very uncomfortable I don't want to be vulnerable well all vulnerability means is saying things like I don't know or I need help or I'm overwhelmed or can you you know can you help me do this because

I don't know how to do this or I've been promoted to a position where maybe I need more training and the reason we're afraid of saying that is for fear that it makes us look weak which will then damage our careers the reality is the total opposite by saying I don't know means someone can help us but instead we choose to lie hide and fake very often which eventually gets revealed enough stress piled on on that lying hiding and faking collapses either professionally or personally we either we we either feel the stress or or the

projects we're working on start to go haywire and very often when we get to those points everybody knows anyway and uh the amazing thing that I've learned is when you say um Can somebody help me um we're surrounded by people who would love to help us they just didn't think we needed it because we acted as if we didn't so I think a large part of it is is quite frankly fear fear that if I express these things that'll that people will think I'm not qualified for my job the the opposite is true and remember

when you are in a position of leadership you don't actually have to be better uh at doing the job that the people you lead you have to be responsible for taking care of them to make sure they're good at their job but for some reason we think that I have to be better than you at your own job because I'm the leader completely false I just have to make sure that you're equipped you have the tools the training and the uh psychological safety to to be the best you can be even if it's better than

me success is an elusive thing right what is it and I think it's very interesting that if most people can't define success well it means you made x amount of dollars or but if you make x amount of dollars but you spend more are you successful well well it means you come home happy every day okay how do you know when you're happy you know so I think success is a funny thing which is we all seem to pursue it but we don't know how to measure it or actually how to define it so how

do you pursue something that you can't measure fascinating so when people say to me how do you measure success it's the question we all have to ask ourselves am I am I successful I don't know I mean I had a good year last year and what does that mean does that mean I made a lot of money does that mean I was really happy oh I'll let you decide right right um maybe neither maybe both I had a good year last year but am I successful and the answer is no I don't feel I am

because I'm trying to build a world that doesn't exist yet I'm trying to build a world in which 90% of people go home at the end of the day feeling fulfilled by the work that they do so I definitely took a step a big step forward towards that goal but I'm still so far away so somebody said to me then how do you know if you're successful and the answer is if it can go by itself and so what is more interesting to me as a measurement of success is not the the markers per se

it's not the the financial goal or the the size of the house that you want to buy those are nice things go for it those are but those are not measurements of success those are just nice things to collect along the way for me it's momentum I want to measure momentum which is you know when when something is moving and you start to see it lose momentum you're like uh oh give it a push because if you don't give it a push it's going to stop and an object in stasis is much harder to get

going it requires a lot more energy to get something started than it does to keep it going right and so if you don't let it stop and you can keep it going it's this you know it still might slow down down there but you can get it going again much easier and for me the opportunity is to get the balll rolling faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and bigger and bigger and bigger it's like a snowball and my responsibility is because it's not rolling downhill yet it's not on automatic yet I need

to still keep it going to find that critical mass where it can go and at the point it can go by itself without me then I will find something else to do and that may not happen in my lifetime I I think we Must ALL Stop measuring promotions salaries and these things but rather measure the momentum of your career does my career have momentum can I see it moving in the right direction can I see it Gathering Moss you know can I see that it's e becoming easier for me to keep the momentum it's becoming

easier for me to grow the size of this thing it's it's requiring less effort that's the thing we need to make me that's the thing we need to be cognant of which is the momentum of our careers not just the the markers that we think Define our success dopamine is the feeling uh that you found something you're looking for or that you accomplished something you set out to accomplish so you know that feeling you get when you cross something off your to-do list that's dopamine feels awesome you know when you when you have a goal

to to hit and you achieve that goal you're like yes you feel like you won something right that's dopamine the whole purpose of dopamine is to make make sure that we get stuff done right the historical reason for dopamine we would never eat if we only waited to get until we got hungry because there's no guarantee that we would find food so dopamine exists to help us go looking for food we get dopamine when we eat which is one of the reasons we like eating and so when you see something that reminds you of something

that feels good we want to do the behavior that helps us get that feeling right so let's say you're out there going for a walk and you see an apple tree in the distance you get a small hit of dopamine and then what it does is it focuses us on our goals and now we start walking towards the apple tree and as The Apple Tree starts to get a little bigger we feel like we're making progress you get another little shut of dopamine and another little shut of dopamine until you get to the tree you're

like yes okay this is why we're told you must write down your goals your goals must be tangible there's a there's a biological reason for that we we're very very visually oriented animals you have to be able to see the goal for it to biologically stay focused right if you don't write down your goals if you can't see your goals it's very hard to get motivated to get inspired for example think about corporate Visions right a corporate Vision do have to be something we can see right that's why it's called a vision you can see

it right to be the biggest most respected to be the fastest growing are not Visions they're nothing right what does that even look like respected by whom your mother yourself your friends your shareholders who knows what's the metric Doo it's a morphus doesn't motivate us just like I can't tell you you will get a bonus if you achieve more you're going to ask me how much more I'm going to say more doesn't work you need a tangible goal you need a tangible goal right here's a great vision Martin Luther King I Have a Dream that

one day little black children and little white children will play on the playground together and hold hands together we can imagine that we can set our sights on that and every time we achieve a goal and achieve a metric and achieve a milestone that makes us feel like we're making progress to the go the vision we can see we keep going and going and going until we achieve something remarkable have to be able to see it dopamine like I said dopamine is the feeling you get when you set out to find something you're looking for

as well talked about the to-do list I came home from a trip just a couple days ago and I had a bunch of errands to run and I wrote down a little list of things I had to do and off I went right and I was walking past something I remembered oh I have to do that and I hadn't written it down on my I hadn't written down on my to-do list so I went in and finished what I needed to do and then when I came out I then wrote it on my to-do list

and then crossed it out cuz I wanted the dopamine feels good dopamine comes with a warning dopamine is highly highly highly addictive here are some other things that release dopamine alcohol nicotine gambling your cell phone oh you think I'm joking okay we've all been told that uh if you wake up in the morning and you crave a drink you might be an alcoholic well if you wake up in the morning the first thing you do is check your phone before you even get out of bed might be an addict if you walk from room to

room in your own apartment holding your telephone you might be an addict when you're driving in your car and you get a text and your phone goes beep we we hate email true we love the beep the buzz the ding oh right you'll be there in 10 minutes and yet you have to look at it right now you might be an addict and even if you read it and it says are you free for dinner next Thursday and you have to reply immediately you can't wait the 10 minutes you might be an addict and for

all you gen wi out there who like to think that you're better at multitasking as you grew up with the technology then why do you keep crashing your cars when you're texting you're not you're not better at multitasking you're better at getting distracted in fact if you look at the statistics ADD and ADHD have diagnoses of ADD and ADHD have risen 66% in the past 10 years okay ADD and ADHD is a frontal lobe disorder right are you telling me out of nowhere 66% of our youth have a frontal L problem where did that come

from no it's a misdiagnosis right what what are the what are the symptoms of a dopamine addiction to technology distractability inability to uh to get things done easily easily distracted you know shortness of attention it's all the same thing so we misdiagnose things it's this it's the addictive quality of dopamine we can also get addicted to Performance in our companies when all they do is give us numbers to hit numbers to hit numbers to hit and a bonus you get and a bonus you get and a bonus you get all they're doing is feeding us

with dopamine and we can't help ourselves all we do is want more more more more it's no surprise that the banks destroyed the economy because one of the things we know about dopamine addict is they will do anything to get another hit sometimes at the sacrifice of their own resources and their relationships ask any alcoholic gambling addict or or drug addict ask ask them how their relationships are doing and if they've squandered any of their resources it's an addiction dopamine is dangerous if it is unbalanced it is hugely helpful when in a comfortable and balanced

system but when unbalanced it's dangerous and it's destructive you cannot have Innovation or progress without failure it doesn't exist uh and if you truly aren't failing as you're trying to innovate then you're probably not pushing very hard because you haven't broken anything you're taking you're making very very safe choices we could never put a person on the moon without a bunch of rockets blowing up first like of course I I I met a CFO once I asked him the priorities of the company and he said efficiency and Innovation and I laughed and said well good

luck with that you know Innovation is inherently inefficient because it requires experimentation and experimentation requires failure much is said about fail fast I actually don't like the term that we I think we overuse the term failure you know the problem with the word failure is it's like the word cancer it's too broad like if you have stage four liver cancer or you have a mild melanoma those things are both called cancer but they are clearly not the same thing and the same thing is when we hear the word failure some people think failure means experiment

but a lot of people think failure means catastrophe and so when we tell our company failure is good fail fast that literally scares people we don't want to fail so I think we need a new word right we want to avoid failure failure is catastrophic and it should be avoided but Falling I think we should encourage you know when a kid falls off a bicycle we didn't tell them they failed we tell them they fell and what do we tell them get back up and try again so I don't want to tell people they failed

I want to see people they fell and I want to encourage them to try again and you know brush off their knees so I think we should fall and fall often and I will judge the quality of innovation not necessarily by if you fell but how quickly you can pick yourself back up and try again I think courage is external right the reason someone has courage to jump out of an airplane it's cuz there's a parachute on their back it's the external thing a world famous trapeze artist would never try a brand new death defying

act for the first time without a net it's the net that gives him the courage the Navy Seals are considered one of the highest performing organizations on the planet and a former seal was asked what kind of person makes it into the seals and he said I can't tell you the kind of person that makes it in but I can tell you the kind of person that doesn't make it in he said the Star College athletes who have never really been tested to the core of their being none of them make it in he said

the preing leaders who like to delegate everything none of them make it in he says the guys who show with hulking muscles covered in tattoos cuz they want to show you how tough they are none of them make it in he s he said some of the guys who make it in are skinny and scrawny he said some of the guys who make it in you see them shivering out of fear he said but every single one of the guys who makes it in when they're emotionally exhausted when they're physically exhausted when they have absolutely

nothing left to give somehow some way they're able to dig down deep inside themselves to find the energy to help the guy next to them in other words the reason these organizations and these people have the courage to do remarkable things is not because of their internal strength it's because they have the absolute confidence that there is someone to the left of them and someone to the right of them that cares about them and they will know that and it's the quality of the relationships that we maintain professionally and personally that give us the courage

to do difficult things Isaac Stern the famous violinist said music is what happens between the notes well something like trust happens between the meetings you know we few people think about the importance of building trust when they go to work or the what do I need to do today to build trust with somebody like that's doesn't really go through people's minds but we have chitchat as we walk into the meeting we've chitchat when we walk out of the meeting and we see somebody the hole they're like oh meant to tell you something or you knock

on someone's door and be like got a minute and all those little innocuous interactions over the course of time like any relationship build trust uh it's about setting up the computer setting up zoom and having a work session with somebody you know like we're not working on the same thing but I want to work with somebody a work buddy or having a a lunch with somebody over Zoom or a Monday morning huddle where we talk about what's on our heart and minds but we do not talk business on purpose or Friday uh cocktails that are

just voluntary but the most important one is to just pick up the phone and call people and say how are you that level of empathy just check in on someone and I think we neglect it because we get mired in the day-to-day but you know one of you know if you're organized or disorganized you know literally keep a list of your team on a little card next to your computer and just you know go through it and have I called this person a while and talk to this I'm just going to call and check in

it doesn't matter if something's wrong or not wrong just check in on them you know don't wait for something to break and let people know that they're uh that there's connection and there's a way to reach out and say I need help and the most important thing is for leaders to be honest and open about their need to ask for help and that that'll work [Music] [Music]