Simon Sinek: There’s a statistic that over 90% of people go home at the end of the day feeling unfulfilled by their work. This is the difference between liking your job and loving your job. You can like your job, but do you love your job? Over 90% of the people who work these days don’t. And I imagine a world in which that statistic is completely reversed, in which the vast majority of people go home at the end of the day feeling fulfilled by the work that they do, feeling that they’ve contributed to something bigger than themselves.
Question: How do you find fulfillment at work?
Simon Sinek: I’ve always been a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. But about five years ago, I reached a point in my career where my passion was gone. I stopped loving what I was doing and I even got to the point where I didn’t even really it anymore and for a happy person, just being unhappy was bad enough.
And it was this point in my life that I made this discovery, this thing called, the ‘Y’. And what I learned is that every single organization on the planet, even our own careers, function on three levels. What we do, how we do it, and why we do it. These are the things that we think make us different or special compared to everyone else. But very few of us can clearly articulate why we do what we do. And I don’t mean to earn a living or provide for your family; those are results. By why, I mean what’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief?
And after I learned my why, I literally stopped telling people what I did and only started telling them what I believed. And not only was my passion restored, but my career and my life changed dramatically and took on an entirely new path with vastly more meaning.
