For the past 15 years, Simon Sinek has penned books that CEOs and other business leaders have relied on to find their purpose, embrace the long game and lead in ways that inspire trust, loyalty and lasting impact.
Today, as The CEO Magazine speaks to him via video call in London, it’s clear the British-American author and motivational speaker has a new topic on his mind: friendship.
“If you think about it, there’s an entire industry to help us be better leaders – I’m part of it,” he explains with the typical eloquent enthusiasm that has seen his TED Talks and other videos go viral.
“There are also entire industries to help you have a successful marriage and to help you find love.”
By contrast, there’s precious little to help us be better friends.
“If you ask people if they are a good friend, most people will say yes. But, peel the onion just one layer, and you’ll find that most of us are pretty bad friends. We deprioritize our friends all the time,” he points out.
“We deprioritize our friends all the time.”
Yet friendship is a natural medicine for many of the problems plaguing modern society, such as anxiety, depression, stress and loneliness.
“All of those things are fixed with friendship,” he says.
It is, Sinek enthuses, the “ultimate biohack”.
“We need to learn how to be friends, how to make friends, how to foster friendships, how to end friendships, how to resolve friendship conflicts,” he says.
After all, if you have conflict in your marriage, you don’t immediately get a divorce. You get therapy.
“I’ve never heard of anyone getting friend therapy, but we’ve all heard of two people who have a huge fight deciding they can’t be friends anymore,” he adds.
“The way we treat friendships disposably is so upsetting to me. I’m absolutely hell-bent on helping people be better friends and have better friends.”
Real friends not deal friends
As Sinek has increasingly started writing and speaking about the importance of friendship, he’s noticed that one demographic above all others has approached him, admitting that they don’t know how to make friends: successful men.
“I’m talking about very successful people who don’t have many friends,” he says, adding that the people in this demographic have have “deal friends” but not real friends.
“If you’re a senior executive and your life is filled with deal friends, you should probably work on that.”
He uses the example of a senior executive of a major Fortune 100 company who, after leaving the role, couldn’t understand why all the invitations to the fancy parties dried up.
“It never occurred to him that they were never inviting him in the first place. They were inviting the position he held, and now that he no longer had that position, they were inviting his successor. He thought they liked him, but they didn’t care about him at all,” he notes.
“I’m absolutely hell-bent on helping people be better friends and have better friends.”
Sinek shares this story to highlight one crucial point.
“Find real friends who value you for you, not just for the position you hold and what you can do for them,” he urges.
The other business insight to draw from cultivating strong, fulfilling friendships?
“Every single skill about being a better friend makes you a better leader. How to listen, how to hold space, how to resolve conflict, how to have difficult conversations.
“Every single one of those skills is an advanced leadership skill.”
Why friendship matters
No surprise, then, that Sinek is currently writing a book on the subject.
And like his bestselling titles, Start with Why, Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game, it’s been inspired by his own life experience.
“I’ve had mentors, I’ve lost mentors. I’ve had jobs, I’ve lost jobs. I’ve had romantic partners, I’ve lost romantic partners. There’s only one constant that has existed my whole life, and that is the reason I am who I am and I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved: my friends,” he reveals.
“When times were bad, they sat in mud with me. When times were good, they cheered me on, made me feel proud and inspired me to keep going.”
As he’s learned how to be a better friend, Sinek no longer takes his friends for granted.
“I’ve learned how to listen, hold space and how to put my ego aside and celebrate their wins instead of feeling insecure that I didn’t accomplish what they did,” he says.
“I’ve learned to make them feel heard when they’re struggling rather than trying to fix their problems.
“As a result, my friendships are deeper and better. I know, no matter what I go through, I will get through it because of my friends.”
“Every single skill about being a better friend makes you a better leader.”
It was his friends who encouraged him to put pen to paper again to write about the subject.
“That has been the case for every single one of my books,” he says, smiling.
“It wasn’t a childhood dream. It’s because people around me said, ‘Simon, your ideas have helped me also. You should probably write this down.’
“And so I did, and this is no exception. I want to write this down because it really matters.”
Starting with why
Sinek explains that there is a semi-autobiographical angle to everything he writes.
“All of my work is me attempting to share some of the problems that I’ve been able to solve for myself, that happen to work for those around me,” he says.
He burst onto the scene with his TED Talk on the concept of WHY, which has since been viewed over 60 million times. It was followed in 2009 by his first book, Start with Why.
The work came from a fascination with marketing, in particular why some marketeers succeeded, the likes of Apple and Southwest Airlines, and why others failed. His musings led to the creation of a concept he called the Golden Circle.
The Golden Circle argues that truly inspiring leaders and brands start by defining and communicating their ‘why’, their core purpose, before explaining how they do it and what they offer.
It was something Sinek had largely kept to himself during what he describes as a “dark and depressing” time in his life, when he fell out of love with his work.
“I kept all that darkness to myself because, superficially, my life was good,” he explains. “I felt so embarrassed to tell people that I didn’t want to go to work tomorrow.”
It wasn’t until a close friend expressed concern about his wellbeing to him that he came clean.
“At that moment, a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders and all the energy that went into lying, hiding and faking every day could now go into finding a solution,” he continues.
That’s when Sinek turned to the idea he had been nursing in his head.
“I realized that I knew what I did and I know how I did it, but I didn’t know why,” he says. “I became obsessed with finding my why.”
Not only did he learn to find his why, but he learned how to help others find theirs.
“I was helping my friends to find renewed love for their work. Some even started businesses.”
The more he talked about it, the more people wanted to invite him to talk about it.
“It just became a very organic journey,” he admits.
The growth of purpose
Start with Why has sold five million copies around the world and still strikes a chord today, more than 15 years since it was first published.
“I never expected any of it, but it makes sense when you understand that the work is fundamentally human,” Sinek says of its enduring relevance.
“The underlying foundation of the concept of the Golden Circle is not based on my opinion; it’s based on the biology of how the human brain works.”
This authenticity resonates with anyone who wants to listen.
“It makes me immensely proud, quite frankly, that the work has continued to resonate for so many years in big business and small business entrepreneurs and startups. I’ve seen it show up in churches, schools and universities. It spreads on TikTok,” he enthuses.
Sinek recently had the opportunity to revisit his words to see what he would change for the 15th anniversary edition.
Save for improving on some of the wording and updating some of the case studies, he didn’t change any of the substance.
“It still works,” he says.
“There’s only one constant that has existed my whole life, and that is the reason I am who I am and I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved: my friends.”
The work has become a point of reference for businesses like Airbnb, sweetgreen and Thrive Causemetics, but Sinek says CEOs who know their company’s why are still the minority.
“They think they do, but if you ask them to define why the company exists, they’ll say some nonsense like to make money or to provide our shareholders value,” he explains.
None of these are whys – or a reason to exist, he cautions.
“They’re results and they’re important, but they aren’t the thing that inspires everyone to want to be a part of the company and who willingly sacrifice, pay more money, go out of their way to work with your company over another,” he says.
“All it says is that your purpose is to make money. Well, no customer cares at all about your profit, so why would a customer be loyal to you for this reason?”
The good news, he adds, is that while he would still argue that most companies don’t properly know their why, more do than before.
“Even better is the news that more want to; the fact there is demand to want to know is important,” he says.
An infinite mindset
Sinek knows that this message wouldn’t have resonated during the 80s and 90s, when the likes of Milton Friedman and Jack Welch’s models of shareholder supremacy and short-termism reigned supreme.
“My books would have been complete failures, I would have been laughed at,” he says.
It’s a case of right place, right time for both Sinek and the CEOs and other authors questioning these old styles of leadership.
“It worked in the short-term, but has had damaging impacts on companies, employees, customers and economies, which we can now see thanks to empirical data.”
It hasn’t stopped him from being accused of being an idealist, Sinek says, especially as he started to publicly speak about applying James P Carse’s 1986 book, Finite and Infinite Games, to business, resulting in 2019’s The Infinite Game.
“The more I started to learn about the ‘infinite game’ and make Carse’s work practical, the more I started to realize that I wasn’t the naive one. All of these short-term business leaders were. They were the naive ones who didn’t understand how the business world worked,” he says.
“No customer cares at all about your profit, so why would a customer be loyal to you for this reason?”
A finite mindset, Sinek argues, is playing to win when, in reality, there’s no such thing as winning in business.
“It doesn’t exist. Nobody will ever be declared the winner of business. If one of your big competitors goes bankrupt, you won’t get a trophy,” he notes.
An infinite mindset is waking up with constant improvement at the front of your mind.
“How do we become a better version of ourselves today than we were yesterday? How can I make this company one percent better today, how can I make our marketing, our finances, our culture, our product development, our leadership better?” he asks.
This concept of constant improvement is completely different to one of trying to beat the competition.
“And you never view the end of the financial year as the end. It’s merely a waypoint, a mile marker along an infinite marathon,” he explains.
“It tells you how fast and how far, but it’s not the end of anything.”
Sinek is nowhere near done with his work either, and as he writes his upcoming book, it’s clear that his personal why continues to drive everything he does.
“My why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that each of us can change our worlds for the better,” he says.
“That permeates everything I say and everything I do. It underlies who I am as a leader and as a friend, as a brother, as a son – everything I do. That is the foundation.”
Simon Sinek’s thoughts on...
Shifts in how CEOs define purpose
“When I first started, the reason I didn’t write a book about purpose is because, if you talked about purpose at work, people threw you out for being some hippie. It was like talking about astrology at work. This is why I found ‘why’ as a concept, it’s safe language.
“It’s amazing that a company’s why is now part of the business vernacular and that a younger generation is saying they want to work for a company that has a sense of purpose. That means even CEOs who think it’s a pile of nonsense are forced to fake it because the market demands it, which is great.”
CEOs trapped in legacy systems
“People don’t fear change, they fear sudden change that threatens what they already have. That’s why I believe in evolutionary change over revolutionary change. You don’t need a massive overhaul or a big PowerPoint presentation to start shifting mindsets. Just start small, focus on your early adopters and lead with why. That’s how you build momentum and create lasting, meaningful transformation.”
Building trust at scale
“Leaders set the tone. Just like when JFK didn’t wear a hat and suddenly men stopped wearing hats, leadership behaviors ripple through culture. It’s the little things that matter. If a leader lies to avoid talking to someone, they’re condoning dishonesty, and that small act can snowball into massive scandals.
“But if a leader listens, says ‘Let’s see how we can get to yes,’ admits when they don’t know something and shows humility, that sets a positive tone that spreads throughout the organization. We follow leaders biologically; that’s why we call them leaders. Not because they’re at the top of the organization. Because they’re supposed to go first and demonstrate what right looks like.”
