The inner why · The Power of Direction

In 1903, two men were racing to build the first powered, controlled flying machine.

One of them was Samuel Pierpont Langley, a respected scientist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He had a government grant from the War Department, the best minds money could hire, and the attention of the press.

The other team was two brothers who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. No college degrees. No government money. No newspaper following their work.

On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew at Kitty Hawk.

Start with why

This is one of the stories Simon Sinek uses in his 2009 TED talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” and in his book Start With Why, published the same year.¹¹ Sinek’s argument is that the people and organizations who inspire others think in the opposite order from everyone else.

He draws three circles, one inside the other. He calls it the Golden Circle.

What is on the outside: the product, the job, the result.
How is in the middle: the method, the process, what makes you different.
Why is at the center: the purpose, the cause, the belief. As Sinek insists, “to make a profit” is not a why. It is a result.

Most people, he says, communicate from the outside in. Here is what we make, here is how it is good, please buy it. The rare ones communicate from the inside out. They start with what they believe.

His examples are well known. Apple, which in his telling does not lead with “we make good computers” but with a belief about challenging the status quo. Martin Luther King Jr., who, Sinek points out, gave the “I have a dream” speech, not the “I have a plan” speech. And the Wright brothers, whom he describes as driven by the belief that flight would change the world, while Langley, in his telling, was chasing fame and position. When the Wrights flew, Langley did not try to improve on their work. He quit.¹¹

Why the why works

The deepest insight in Sinek’s model is not about marketing. It is about energy.

A what can be copied. A how can be optimized. But a why is what makes someone get back up after the crash. In Sinek’s telling, the Wright brothers took five sets of parts every time they went out to test, because that was how many times they expected to crash before supper. People with a clear why can absorb failure, because failure does not touch the center.

Long before Sinek, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.” Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi camps, quoted that line again and again. He observed that the prisoners who held onto a reason to live, a person waiting for them, a work unfinished, were often the ones who endured.¹²

A clear why does not make the how easy. It makes the how bearable.

A note on the biology

Sinek connects his circles to the brain. He says the why speaks to the limbic system, which governs feelings and decisions, while the what speaks to the neocortex, which handles language and analysis. It is a useful image for speakers and leaders. As with the “lizard brain” in Chapter 1, it is a simplification of how the brain actually works. The circle stands on its own as practical wisdom. It does not need the neuroscience to be true.

The why beneath the why

Here The Godward Way takes the circle one step further.

Ask someone their why. They might say: to provide for my family. Ask why again. Because I love them. Why? Because they matter more than anything. Why?

Keep asking, and every human why eventually rests on something. A person. A cause. A belief. A vision of a better world. These are good things. Many of them are noble things.

But each of them can become a god.

A cause can become an idol. A family can become the center of gravity of a soul in a way that crushes the family itself. Even a beautiful mission, “to make the world better,” can become the highest authority in a person’s life, and once it does, it can justify almost anything.

The Godward Way places one more circle at the center of Sinek’s three.

Not my why. The Father.

That center does not compete with the other circles. It holds them. The work still matters. The family still matters. The mission still matters. But none of them carries the full weight of the soul, because none of them was designed to.

Sinek is right: start with why. The Godward question is only this: what is your why facing?