INTRODUCTION

We travel a lot for business, but sometimes our business just won’t wait—it climbs right onto the plane and finds us. That’s what happened to Peter one day, on a flight from Miami to St. Louis. Here’s the story as Peter tells it:

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was get to where I was going. Another flight. Another stranger to sit next to. I prayed to the airline gods for a seatmate who wouldn’t invade my space, physically or verbally. I just wanted to be left alone. But as it turned out, my neighbor was going to be one of those people and this was going to be one of those flights.

I was settling in for the four-hour trip when Steve sat down and introduced himself. After some chitchat, he started telling me what he does for a living. If you’ve been in this situation, you already know that Steve was not, say, a bodyguard for Hollywood stars, eager to share behind-the-scenes stories about their love lives and recreational drug use. No salacious stories or gossip to entertain me for the flight. No. For twenty-three years, Steve had been selling steel. Yup, steel. Riveting.

It turns out, however, the steel Steve sells is not just the run-of-the-mill variety. His company, based in Sweden, produces a particularly pure form of steel that enables machines to run more efficiently because their parts—for example, a car’s transmission—are lighter. An engineer himself, Steve could personally attest to his product’s superiority over other options on the market.

As he wrapped up, Steve looked at me expectantly, obviously longing for a follow-up question that would let him talk more about steel. Trouble was, I didn’t much care what Steve did. It’s not that I’m aloof or unsociable or only interested in gossip. I’m none of the above. What draws me in is not what people do for a living but why they do it. So instead of asking Steve how much his steel costs and who his best clients are, I turned to him and said, So what?

Well, er, Steve faltered, not understanding the question. So I put it another way: I get that the steel you sell is very pure. I get that it allows for lighter components, which makes machines more efficient. But so what?

Steve stammered a bit more, then blurted out, Well, not so much material needs to be used.

Getting closer. I pushed a little more.

And what difference does that make? For a moment Steve looked as if he might crumble. All he’d wanted was to make small talk. Now he was stuck with my weird questions for the next three hours (the tables had turned). But we kept talking and I helped him find his answers.

As it turns out, such pure steel means that parts built with less material still remain strong. Using less material means needing to do less smelting (the process of extracting metal from its ore), so less energy is used in the steel production process and thus less pollution is created. And when the steel is used to produce a machine such as a car, those advantages are repeated: the car is lighter, so it uses less fuel and therefore produces less pollution. And as if that weren’t enough, purer steel is easier to recycle than other varieties. This was actually interesting . . . but we still hadn’t gotten to why Steve was so enthusiastic about his job.

Saving fuel and reducing pollution is great, I said, but there must be something more to this business that’s kept you going for twenty-three years. That’s a long time to do something and still be passionate about it. There must be something more at stake, something you truly believe in, I prodded him. And then it happened. For the first time in our conversation, I saw Steve’s eyes light up. And his feelings poured out.

Steve is committed to keeping the planet healthy for his children and future generations, and one way to do that is to be more responsible in the way we use our planet’s rich resources. For all the time he’d been talking to me about steel, he never once mentioned this, yet it was the very thing that inspired him to start telling a stranger on a plane all about pure steel.

I asked Steve for permission to rephrase his sales pitch. In simple terms, I began, speaking as if I were Steve, I believe in using natural resources for the benefit of humankind. And I also believe that we should do so responsibly, leaving the planet safe and healthy for our children. This is what led me to become an engineer and to join my current organization. Our company, based in Sweden—a country committed to sustainability—has developed a way to help engineers create lighter, more efficient, greener products. And our particular path to sustainability happens to be lightweight steel.

Thank you, Steve said, beaming. You’ve just put into words the reason I love what I do.

Simply by starting my version of the pitch with why he loves his job, I helped Steve see that it’s not what he does that has kept him fulfilled for more than two decades. What inspires him is why he does it. By connecting his work to his sense of purpose, Steve had discovered his WHY.

* * *

Your vision is only actionable if you say it out loud. If you keep it to yourself, it will remain a figment of your imagination.

Every one of us has a WHY, a deep-seated purpose, cause or belief that is the source of our passion and inspiration. You may not yet know what yours is or how to express it in words. But we guarantee, you have one. If you’d like to understand your WHY, and would rather not wait until Peter sits next to you on a flight, this book can help. We believe that all of us deserve to live as Steve does: waking up inspired to go to work and coming home, at the end of the day, feeling fulfilled by the work we do.

Fulfillment isn’t another word for happiness. All kinds of things make us happy at work: hitting a goal, getting a promotion, landing a new client, completing a project—the list goes on. But happiness is temporary; the feeling doesn’t last. Nobody walks around energized by the memory of a goal hit twelve months ago. That intensity passes with time.

Fulfillment is deeper. Fulfillment lasts. The difference between happiness and fulfillment is the difference between liking something and loving something. We don’t necessarily like our kids all the time, for example, but we do love them all the time. We don’t necessarily find happiness in our jobs every day, but we can feel fulfilled by our work every day if it makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. (That’s the reason we can feel unfulfilled even if we’re successful by standard measures like compensation and status. Fulfillment comes when our job connects directly to our WHY.) Steve, our man of steel, finds happiness when he closes a deal but finds fulfillment knowing that he is contributing to a higher cause with larger implications. Happiness comes from what we do. Fulfillment comes from why we do it.

Steve is a lucky man. Though he couldn’t articulate his WHY until he met and talked with Peter, he had been living his WHY for decades and as a result felt inspired and fulfilled. But what if the company in Sweden had been acquired by a larger company that downsized Steve? What if he’d had to look for a new job without knowing his WHY? Given his decades of experience, he’d most likely have tried for another job selling steel. But if the new company wasn’t dedicated to sustainability, his sense of purpose would have vanished along with his enthusiasm when talking to strangers on planes. And he might never have connected the pieces and seen that his passion for his work actually had nothing to do with steel in the first place.

If we want to feel an undying passion for our work, if we want to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY. And that’s the reason we wrote this book.

* * *

Find Your Why is a distillation of what our team has learned from over twenty-five years of collective experience conducting Why Discoveries. We have helped all kinds of people—including entrepreneurs, individual employees, small businesses and teams within large businesses—to find their WHY. This book was designed to help you find yours.

Below is an outline of the seven chapters. The first two contain information that’s fundamental to finding your WHY, and we urge everyone to read them. After that, you can move on to either chapter 3 or chapter 4, depending on whether you’re discovering your WHY as an individual or as a team or group member. Finally, we recommend that all readers review chapters 5, 6 and 7. At the end of the book, we offer assorted bits of additional information that may help you as questions arise.

Chapter 1 is a highly condensed recap of Start with Why, the book written by Simon Sinek, who popularized the concept of WHY. This section discusses some of the benefits of knowing your WHY.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the process of discovering your WHY. This is important to read whether you’re doing this on your own or with a team.

Chapter 3 is the step-by-step process for individuals—entrepreneurs or employees—to find their personal WHY. If you are using this book to help your team or organization find its WHY, though not imperative, completing this section and learning your own WHY can help you lead your group through the discovery process.

Chapter 4 explains what you need to do to prepare for a Why Discovery for a team, organization or any tribe in which people are brought together to work.

Chapter 5 picks up where chapter 4 leaves off and explains how to take a tribe through the Why Discovery process.

The WHY is the destination and HOWs are the route we take to get there. Chapter 6 is all about the HOWs, the actions we take to bring our WHY to life.

Chapter 7 explains how to share your WHY with others, and how to begin to live your WHY and put it into practice.

The appendixes provide answers to the questions we receive most often in our workshops and cheat sheets for when you (or another facilitator) are conducting the workshops.

One of the hardest things to predict about finding your WHY is how long it will take. In chapters 3 through 5, we outline the process for individuals and tribes, and estimate, based on our experience, approximately how much time each step will take. But these numbers are only averages. For some, the process goes more quickly, and for others, more slowly. There is no right amount of time. What’s important is to stick with each section or step until you feel confident about moving on to the next one.

To be honest, knowing you’re about to turn the page to chapter 1, we feel a little jealous. We love helping people find their WHY. For us—Peter and David—we wish we could be there personally with each one of you. But our vision is to bring the WHY to life for as many people as possible. And so we will be your virtual guides as you set off on your adventure. Inspire on!

CHAPTER 1

Start with Why

A Primer

Sometimes a project that looks like an easy win for us turns into a disappointment or even a disaster. More importantly, sometimes we, or a competitor, succeed brilliantly when all the usual business assumptions say we should have flopped. These outcomes can seem mysterious, but they’re not if looked at in a framework that starts with WHY.

In his book, Start with Why, Simon Sinek uses a model that he calls the Golden Circle to explain how legendary leaders such as Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers were able to achieve what others who were just as smart and hardworking, and sometimes better funded, were not.

If you’ve read Simon’s book or seen him talk about WHY on TED.com (http://bit.ly/GoldenCircleTalk), you’re already familiar with the Golden Circle; this chapter will serve to remind you of the most important points. If the Golden Circle is new for you, what follows is the heart of the matter—and is essential preparation for your own search for WHY.

Every organization—and every person’s career—operates on three levels, as shown in the illustration on the next page: What we do, how we do it, and why we do it. We all know what we do: the products we sell, the services we offer or the jobs we do. Some of us know how we do it: the things that we think make us different or stand out from the crowd. But very few of us can clearly articulate why we do what we do.

Hold on, you might say. Let’s be honest here—aren’t most people working to earn money? That’s the obvious ‘why.’ First, money is a result. Though it is a part of the picture, it’s not what inspires any one of us to get out of bed in the morning. And for the cynics out there who think they or others really do get out of bed for the money, the question we ask is, what is the reason they want the money. Is it for freedom? To travel? To provide a lifestyle for their kids that they didn’t have? Is it to keep score and show they have done more than others? The point is, money isn’t the thing that drives people. WHY goes much deeper to understanding what