You Don’t Need to be a Visionary – It’s Fine to be a Follower | Simon Sinek | Big Think

You Don’t Need to be a Visionary – It’s Fine to be a Follower |

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Visionaries know why they get out of bed each day. Do you? Ethnographer and leadership expert Simon Sinek explains how to find direction and fulfillment in your personal and professional life.Do you know why you get out of bed in the morning? According Simon Sinek (ethnographer, leadership expert, and the official mascot for optimism), answering "because I have to" isn’t quite cutting the mustard.

Finding your purpose in life is an insurmountable task – worse than that, it’s a motivational poster catchphrase that’s difficult to find any authenticity in. Which is why Sinek doesn’t recommend you jump from zero to visionary in one leap. He’s the first to admit it’s daunting, and in this video he calls us out for being obsessed with visionaries. From Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to Ariana Huffington and Bill Gates, we have to crane our necks to look up at these cultural gods of innovation who have changed and are changing our world. How do you even step one foot up a mountain that big?

What if, at the outset, purpose wasn’t about finding yourvision, but finding a vision? In Sinek’s view, we are under no obligation to be great thinkers and leaders, but we are almost bound by a contract of respect for one another to find a person, a company or a cause that we believe in and can help build, to improve the lives of all society. Is it amoral to aimlessly live out our life expectancies when we could be contributing?

Sinek is passionate about something usually only patriots, politicians and historians get hyped over: the Declaration of Independence. He adores this document because it doesn’t just announce the fact that America exists, but it declares exactly why America exists, something Sinek says most companies overlook. There are likely to be at least a thousand other companies doing what you do, making the same product that you make, but one company’s reason *why* can be the thing that sets it apart.

Perhaps we’d benefit from drafting a personal declaration for the ‘why’ of our own existence – or more realistically, at least, for this coming year. Find a vision that makes you get out of bed every morning with a fire in your belly. Follow someone else's great lead, do what excites you, and an original vision may come from there.

Simon Sinek's most recent book is Start with Why How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.

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SIMON SINEK :

Simon O. Sinek is an author best known for popularizing the concept of "the golden circle" and to "Start With Why," described by TED as "a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?"'. He joined the RAND Corporation in 2010 as an adjunct staff member, where he advises on matters of military innovation and planning. His first TEDx Talk on "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" is the 3rd most viewed video on TED.com. His 2009 book on the same subject, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009) delves into what he says is a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision-making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and organizations over others.

He has commented for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, FastCompany, CMO Magazine, NPR, and BusinessWeek, and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, BrandWeek, and IncBizNet.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Simon Sinek: I don’t know when it happened in the history but we’ve become obsessed with the concept of having a vision, right. And there’s this overwhelming pressure on entrepreneurs or any of us for that matter that we all have to have a vision. People even ask us so what’s your vision? You know what’s your vision in your job? What kind of vision do you want to build or follow? And at the end of the day we’re not all visionaries. We don’t all have big change the world kind of visions. And even if we have some sense of it very few of us are really capable or able of articulating that vision in words so clearly than others could imagine that same world that we imagine.

Sometimes it’s just a feeling. And so I think it puts an unfair stress and an unfair burden on all of us that we have to have a vision. I don’t know. I just want to go to work and be happy and feel like my life and my work is valuable. Do I need more than that? But I do believe we have to find a vision. We have to have direction.

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