1.
Quotes from the book, Start With Why.
By Simon Sinek.
Created by Brandon Metoyer.

2.
“Great Leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before
the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with Why.”

3.
“We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating
what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us
feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to
inspire us.”

4.
“If a company does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world
to perceive anything more than WHAT the company does. And when that happens,
manipulations that rely on pushing price, features, service or quality become the primary
currency of differentiation.”

5.
“Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when
things go wrong, and we don’t trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it
should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a
sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self- gain.
With trust comes a sense of value- real value, not just value equated with money. Value by
definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t
convince someone to trust you.”

6.
“The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when the metric
becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer tied to WHY
you set you to achieve it in the first place.”

7.
“Cultures are groups of people who come together around a common set of values
and beliefs. When we share values and beliefs with others, we form trust. Trust of
others allows us to rely on others to help protect our children and ensure our
personal survival.”

8.
“Now consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people brought together
around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company
together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture- the strong sense
of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, all share. So the logic
follows, the goal is not to hire people who simply have a skill set you need, the goal is to hire
people who believe what you believe. “

9.
“What all great leaders have in common is the ability to find good fits to
join their organizations - those who believe what they believe.”

10.
“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated
people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give
motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they
will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.”

11.
“Companies with a strong sense of WHY are able to inspire their employees. Those
employees are more productive and innovative and the feeling they bring to work attracts
other people eager to work there as well. It’s not such a stretch to see why the companies
that we love to do business with are also the best employers. When people inside the
company know WHY they come to work, people outside the company are vastly more
likely to understand WHY the company is special. In these organizations, from the
management on down, no one sees themselves as any more or any less than anyone
else. They all need each other.”

12.
“The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader
is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the people
inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to find new
ways of doing things. The people who answer the phones and talk to customers,
for example, can tell you more about the kinds of questions they get than can
anyone sitting in an executive suite miles away.”

13.
The ability of a company to innovate is not just useful for developing new ideas, it is
invaluable for navigating struggle. When people come to work with a higher sense of
purpose, they find it easier to weather hard times or even to find opportunity in those hard
times. People who come to work with a clear sense of WHY are less prone to giving up after
a few failures because they understand the higher cause. Thomas Edison, a man definitely
driven by a higher cause, said, “I didn’t find a way to make a lightbulb, I found a thousand
way how not to make one.”

14.
Trust is a remarkable thing. Trust allows us to rely on others. We rely on
those we trust for advice to help us make decisions. Trust is the bedrock for
the advancement of our own lives, our families our companies, our societies
and our species.

15.
“Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization
feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and
acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues
and the organization as a whole will look out for them. The results in reciprocal
behavior. Individual decisions, efforts and behaviors that support, benefit and
protect the long-term interest of the organization as a whole.”

16.
“With balance, those who are good fits can trust that everyone is on board for the same
reason. It’s also the only way that each individual in the system can trust that others are acting
to “leave the organization in a better way than we found it,”...This is the root of passion.
Passion comes from feeling like you are a part of something that you believe in, something
bigger than yourself. If people do not trust that a company is organized to advance the WHY,
then the passion is diluted. Without managed trust, people will show up to do their jobs and
they will worry primarily about themselves. This is the root of office politics - people acting
within the system for self-gain often at the expense of others, even the company. If a
company doesn’t manage trust, then those working for it will not trust the company, and self-
interest becomes the overwhelming motivation. This may be good for the short term, but over
time the organization will get weaker and weaker. “

17.
“The goal of business then should not be to simply sell to anyone who wants what you have
- the majority - but rather to find people who believe what you believe, the left side of the bell
curve. They perceive greater value in what you do and will happily pay a premium or suffer
some sort of inconvenience to be a part of your cause. They are the ones who, on their own
volition, will tell others about you.”

18.
“Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes from a clarity of WHY. It
comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself. Energy, in
contract, comes from a good night’s sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite.
But only charisma can inspire. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not. “

19.
“It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a
wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.”

20.
“For a message to have real impact, to affect behavior and seed loyalty, it needs
more than publicity. It needs to publicize some higher purpose, cause or belief to
which those with similar values and beliefs can relate. Only then can the message
create any lasting mass-market success. For a stunt to appeal to the left side of the
curve of the Law of Diffusion, WHY the stunt is being performed, beyond the desire to
generate press, must be clear. Though there may be short-term benefits without
clarity, loud is nothing more than excessive volume. Or in business vernacular:
clutter. And companies wonder why differentiation is such a challenge these days.
Have you heard the volume coming from some of them?”

21.
“For companies to be perceived as a great leaders and not dictators, all their symbols,
including their logos, need to stand for something in which we can all believe. SOmething
we can all support. That takes clarity, discipline and consistency.
For a logo to become a symbol, people must be inspired to use that logo to say
something about who they area. Couture fashion labels are the most obvious example of
this. People use them to demonstrate status. But many of them are somewhat generic in
what they symbolize….
It’s not just logos, however, that can serve as symbols. Symbols are any tangible
representation of a clear set of values and beliefs.”

22.
“With a WHY clearly stated in an organization, anyone within the organization can
make a decision as clearly and as accurately as the founder. A WHY provides the
clear filter for decision-making.”

23.
“What companies say and do matters. A lot. It is at the WHAT level that cause is brought to
life. It is at this level that company speaks ot the outside world and it is then that we can
learn what the company believes.”

24.
“It’s too easy to say that all they (companies) care about is their bottom line. All
companies are in business to make money, but being successful at it is not the
reason why things change so drastically. That only points to a symptom.
Without understanding the reason it happened in the first place, the pattern will
repeat for every other company that makes it big. It is not destiny or some
mystical business cycle that transforms successful companies in impersonal
goliaths. It’s people.”

25.
“In my vernacular, achievement comes when you pursue and attain WHAT you
want. Success comes when you are clear in pursuit of WHY you want it. The former is
motivated by tangible factors while the latter by something deeper in the brain, where we
lack the capacity to put those feelings into words.
Success comes when we wake up every day in all that never-ending pursuit
of WHY we do WHAT we do. Our achievements, WHAT we do, serve as the milestones
to indicate we are on the right path. It is not an either/or - we need both. A wise man once
said, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it pays for the yacht to pull alongside it.” There is
great truth in this statement. The yacht represents achievement; it is easily seen and, with
the right plan, completely attainable. The thing we pull alongside represents that hard-to-
define feeling of success.”

26.
“At the beginning, ideas are fueled by passion - that very compelling
emotion that causes us to do quite irrational things. That passion drives
many people to make sacrifices so that a cause bigger than themselves
can be brought to life.”

27.
“The reason so many small businesses fail, however, is because
passion alone can’t cut it. For passion to survive, it needs structure…
Passion may need structure to survive, but for structure to grow, it
needs passion.”

28.
“It is not a coincidence that successful entrepreneurs long for the early days. It is no accident that
big companies talk about a “return to basics.” What they are alluding to is a time before the split.
And they would be right. They do indeed need to return to a time when WHAT they did was in
perfect parallel to WHY they did it. If they continue down the path of focusing on their growth of
WHAT at the expense of WHY - more volume and less clarity- their ability to thrive and inspire for
years to come is dubious at best. Companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks, the Gap, Dell and
so many others that used to be special have all gone through a split,. If they cannot recapture their
WHY and reinspire those inside and outside the organization, every one of them will end up looking
more like AOL than the companies they were.”

29.
“Learning the WHY of a company or an organization or understanding the WHY of
any social movement always starts with one thing: you.”

30.
“All leaders must have two things: they must have a vision of the world that
does not exist and they must have the ability to communicate it.
The question is, where does vision come from? And this is the power of
WHY. Our visions are the world we imagine, the tangible results of what the world
would look like if we spent every day in pursuit of our WHY.
Leaders don’t have all the great ideas; they provide support for those
who want to contribute. Leaders achieve very little by themselves: they inspire
people to come together for the good of the group. Leaders never start with what
needs to be done. Leaders start with WHY we need to do things. Leaders inspire
action.”

31.
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