Start With Why, by Simon Sinek

In "Start With Why", by Simon Sinek we are told people make decisions as represented by a golden circle. The core of the circle is why, the next layer is how, and the outer layer is what. He said that in our decisions to buy something we don’t buy what a company does we buy why they do it. 

This means that the traditional approach of starting with “what” is communication from the outside in, compared to starting with “why”. Sinek says that the core of our decision making process is where we ask ‘why” we do things.

He also suggests that this is also a metaphor for leadership saying, “There are two types of leaders: those who decide to manipulate to get to the end result, and those who start with the end result in mind and let everything else naturally fall into place.”

This book sat in a “to read pile” for a long time, so long that I had to ask myself why I hadn’t read it? After finishing it I realized why. It was because the very question presented by the book seem to suggest reading to find a success formula which didn’t motivate me.

Probably for about 10 years after I got out of collage I read all the positive thinking success books available at that time. Dale Carnage's book "How to Win Friends and Influence People and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich were good ones but mostly all of these type of books seemed to be the same.

This book had a few different ways of looking at things but was not one where I could find the “why” for recommending it.