The Cure for Nihilism with professor Suzy Welch

Sometimes in life, we choose the wrong path. When we feel like we're living a lie, it's hard to know what to do next. That’s where Suzy Welch comes in. She’s obsessed with helping people create lives worth living. A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Suzy teaches a popular class called “Becoming You,” where she takes students down a brutal, but liberating, journey to live as their authentic selves. According to Suzy’s research, purpose is the key to unlocking the real you, but finding that purpose is often trickier than we imagine. I had a blast talking, and debating, with Suzy about what it means to craft a purpose-driven life. In this conversation, she shares with me the difference between passion and aptitude, the reason luck is overrated, and why so many people struggle to know their own values. To learn more about Suzy and her work, check out: her book, Becoming You and The Becoming You Podcast with Suzy Welch

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I had a student. He was in banking. He was living his parents' values, not his own, just as he had long suspected he was an artist in banking. Well, his interests really were beautiful women and fashion. And he said, "My purpose, my area of transcendence is to dress Kim Kardashian." When he first said it, the class like burst into laughter. They thought he was joking. And he said, "No, I'm not kidding. I'm going to make the clothing that make women impossible not to look at. I've been living a lie." So I said to him, "What are your parents going to say?" And he said, "They're probably going to say, 'At last, because I've been miserable for 10 years.'"

• 0:34Simon Sinek?

  Here's a story. A smart, hardworking person spends years of their life chasing an ambitious goal. They structure their life, career, and identity around this one particular outcome, only to realize it was never what they wanted. How do we admit to ourselves that we might be on the wrong path? That's where Suzy Welch comes in. Suzy has lived many lives: broadcast journalist, bestselling author, consultant, and now professor of the class Becoming You at NYU's Stern School of Business. Her students learn what it means to become their most authentic selves. Becoming You is also the name of Suzy's podcast and new book. I had a blast talking with Suzy about what it takes to create a purpose-driven

• 1:18Simon Sinek?

  life and why sometimes it takes a midlife or even a quarter-life crisis for people to find the path they want and need to be on. This is a bit of optimism.

• 1:32Simon Sinek?

  Suzy, I have heard so much about you.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  I've heard so much about you.

• 1:36Simon Sinek?

  How long have you been teaching?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Four years.

• 1:38Simon Sinek?

  So what made you wake up in the morning and say, "You know what? I think I'd like to teach."

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Well, it would have been beautiful if that's how it had gone. What had happened was I had a long, and many would say, successful career in broadcast journalism. And then I had run a tech startup. And then my husband got very sick, and I had to pull back on my work to take care of him. And then he died and I actually went to the woods of upstate New York with my children. It was during the pandemic and in fact, I thought I'd never work again. And my actual thought was I will never actually return to the world again. I was going to stay up in the woods and walk my dogs for the rest of my life. And that felt like logic at the time. I mean, I now can look back, it was five years ago and I could think, oh, that was grief. And so in the middle of this, I was lost.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  And then, uh, thanks to the goodness of Hoda Kotb, I had sort of an intervention where they called and asked me to come back on the Today Show. And I went back on and I had this realization, I'm thinking, oh my God, I must return to the world. So being back at work was this incredible gift. And I was like, I'm, I've got to be back at work. I, I actually, I actually can't stay in the woods. I had this idea for this class, the class that eventually did become Becoming You, about how to think about your life more intentionally. And right in that moment, in this act of incredible, uh, I, I don't know what it was. I happen to believe in God, so I'm going to say it was that, but I, I understand that others might not. But this incredible thing happened where a friend wrote me and he said, hey, I'm just checking in on you.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  By the way, I'm teaching at NYU Stern right now and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I stared at it, like I stared at that email, like, and my, I had a physical reaction, like my body was like, ah, that is it.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  That is the purpose I was waiting for. So I jotted some notes down about what this class might be. Now I had gone to business school myself. I understood what a business school curriculum was. I understood what you learn and you don't learn. So I found my way into the office of the dean of NYU Stern Business School because we had mutual connections and because I've been swimming in this world for 40 years. And I described the class to him and he said, you know, we don't have that class. I said, I know, I looked at the curriculum. And he said, well, do you think you could create that class? And I said, we, I could try. And I did, and we thought we'd try it as an experiment. And the next thing you know, it was very popular and it took off. They came to me and said, look, we'd like you to teach this many more times this semester. And we're wondering if you'll join the faculty.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  And I did, and that's why I teach both management and that class, so.

• 4:17Simon Sinek?

  So what I'm so curious about is, is what are the misperceptions that people have about what it means to live a life with purpose on purpose, becoming their full selves? Like, I'm just so curious what the big misperceptions are of the journey that you take them on.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Two gigantic misperceptions. One is they think the journey is going to be easy. They just need somebody to sort of tell them what to do. It's a very hard journey. The second is that it's woo woo, that it's new agey, that it's kind of soft and fuzzy, and you're going to sort of float to your purpose. Whereas in fact, this is the hardest work of our lives, is painting our self-portrait. Well, guess what? As the great philosopher since the beginning of Tom Hanks, knowing yourself is the hardest thing to know. And so I take them on this journey that's brutal, frankly. The nickname for my class, the nickname for my class is the class where everyone cries. Okay. And you know, look, the biggest crybaby is me because they're up there telling their stories. And the last capstone of the class is they get up and they tell the story of their lives, the narrative of their lives for the next 40 years.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  They tell the story of what their lives will be. You know, there's not a dry eye in the house. I mean, people are sobbing, and I am sobbing in the back row, trying to keep it together. Because when people are invited to figure out what their purpose is, and then they discover, which happens in my class every semester, they're liberated, free to go run in the right direction. Is there anything more emotional?

• 5:39Simon Sinek?

  Yeah. When did you learn yours?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  About age 60, about age 60. I've always been in the neighborhood of it. But then the day I stepped into the classroom to teach Becoming You, and I saw what was happening in front of my eyes, and I saw all of my values. All of my aptitudes and all of my interests in the same moment, all converging in teaching students, I could have levitated. And sometimes when I'm teaching, I think I am levitating. I'm so happy. I feel exquisitely alive. And people sometimes say to me, how will I know if I'm living my purpose? It's like, that's sort of like asking if you know when you're in love. You know when you're in love because your body tells you.

• 6:15Simon Sinek?

  Practically speaking, what specific things changed in these people's lives?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:21Simon Sinek?

  Very practical, very specific after your class.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Do we have 17 hours? So, look, I do this excavation process. It's a 13-step process. I do seven exercises to uncover their values. I mean, no one knows their values. I've conducted research. I had long suspected that people didn't know their values. And so, once I finally got onto the faculty of NYU and I had the NYU research apparatus at my hands, I conducted research. Guess, Simon, how many people actually can identify with any kind of specificity, their values?

• 6:54Simon Sinek?

  I would venture a guess to say 10%.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  7%. Very good. That's the best guess I've ever gotten. Usually, people are sort of all over the place. 7%. And we did a large study, double-blind, blah, blah, blah. 7% people, usually people sort of name virtues, they name skills. They don't even know what values are. Why? We are never taught values. We're taught the volume of a cylinder in high school, but we're not taught what a value is or how important it is. So, I think that there's 15 human values. That's part of my own research, the Welsh Bristol Values Inventory. If you'd like to read my PhD thesis, I'll send it right to you. But I do believe that there's 15 human values. Please read it. Then there'd be two people who read it, you and me, and my thesis advisors. And we have different levels of these 15 values.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And you can come out of this process with a list of your own ranked. I would say 50% of the students take TNT to their lives and completely change their careers. I had a student, he was in banking. I mean, I can tell you a million stories. Let's take him. He was brought up to be a banker. He came from a family of bankers. He went to London. He worked in banking for five years. He went through the process. He found out he was living his parents' values, not his own, nothing like his own. Figured out what his values were. We did a lot of testing. He found out his aptitudes. Oops, just as he had long suspected, he was an artist in banking. Okay?

• 8:11Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  And then he found out his interests. Well, his interests really were beautiful women and fashion. Okay? And he was in banking. He stood up in front of class to tell the story of his life going forward, and he said, My purpose, my area of transcendence, as we call it, is to dress Kim Kardashian. When he first said it, the class like burst into laughter. They thought he was joking and he said, no, I'm not kidding. I'm going to make the clothing that make women impossible not to look at. I've been living a lie. And he totally blew up everything. I was standing in the back of the class like waiting for his parents to call the dean to say, you must fire this professor. She just blew up my son's life. So I said to him,

• 8:44Speaker 00

  what are your parents going to say? And he said, they're probably going to say, at last, because I've been miserable for 10 years. I had a student who was in consulting miserable, miserable, miserable. After she went through this entire process, she decided to go into business in Denver with her sister. Her parents had been immigrants from Jamaica. They'd come over, they had cleaned office buildings at night. Okay, there's a whole army of beautiful people who do this in New York City. Her parents had been two of those people. They saw how corrupt the business was, how many layers there were, how the people who were doing the cleaning were constantly getting ripped off. And after she went through this process, she left management consulting and she and her sister started a company that actually, right now, they're trying to transform the entire office building cleaning.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  It's called Sisters Cleaning Service and they're trying to reinvent this business so that more of the money falls down to the people actually cleaning the toilets. Okay? And love, love her, love her sister, and they want to have a very small.

• 9:38Simon Sinek?

  Basically, what you're doing is amplifying passion.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  I think I am identifying it. Okay, a lot of people don't know their passion. They don't, they're in search of it. Now, a lot of times people have passion and I don't want them to do it and they shouldn't do it because they don't have the aptitudes. That's why I talk about purpose, because I think that your values are part of your passion. That's what you really believe in. Your interests are part of your passion. But we do this middle work, which is what you could actually do. Okay, you may want to be a singer, but if you don't have Mariah Carey's voice for, get it.

• 10:09Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, a passion for something and a talent for something are not the same thing.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  No, but you've got to have the overlap.

• 10:14Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And it's got to match your values also.

• 10:16Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, I've always believed that like the, the sort of this zero sum formula for success, which is talent plus hard work plus luck. Winning the lottery. Is all luck, no hard work, no talent. And it works. You see people who they work so, so hard. And they're talented, but they just can't get a break. You know?

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Can I give you a different construct?

• 10:39Simon Sinek?

  Please.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  I'm gonna give you another theory and see what you think about it. I've been testing it for many, many years and I've tested it on every successful person I've ever talked to. And I like my theory. So here it is. I call it the pie theory of long-term success. Okay, we're talking about sustained success because frankly, luck is a wash. You'll have good luck and you'll have bad luck. Okay?

• 10:56Simon Sinek?

  Sure.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  All right, so here's my theory. Let's take luck out of it because luck cancels itself out over time. All right. The chances of your long-term sustained success are a function of three things. P I E. The quality of your relationships with people. How good you are to people. How well you listen, how trustworthy you are, how deep you are with people, how authentic. Okay, so P, the quality of your relationships with people. That's number one. Then there's I, ideas. The quality of your ideas. How original your ideas are or how much you champion other people's ideas. I, ideas, okay? So how smart you are or how, how much you can relate to a customer that you can feel their pain and come up with an idea. And then the third is E. And that's execution.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  And it's whether or not you get shit done. Okay? Do you do what you say you're gonna do? Do you finish what you started? It's really a matter of integrity in many ways, that E. Because the world is just suffers with these people who say they're gonna do things who don't walk the talk. Okay? So at the end of the day, your long-term success as a human being, as a leader, as a business person, as a friend, as a mother, as a lover, as everything.

• 12:07Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Is a function of the quality of your relationships with people, the quality of your ideas and the quality of your execution. Luck has nothing to do with it. Cause luck cancels itself out.

• 12:17Simon Sinek?

  I want to go back to that luck idea. You know, luck has definitely been a part of my journey.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:22Simon Sinek?

  I gave my first, my TEDx talk, the one that went viral at a time when there weren't that many TEDx talks.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Right?

• 12:30Simon Sinek?

  So if I were to do it today, when there's literally tens of thousands a year. You know, there's no way that that, that that talk would have, that that talk would have popped and went viral like it did. There's just no way.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  I disagree.

• 12:41Simon Sinek?

  Was it done in a time where there was a lot less competition?

• 12:43Speaker 00

  No. Okay, that's very humble of you. Okay?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Humble, but you know what? It was a freaking great idea. That's why it went viral.

• 12:52Simon Sinek?

  I mean, yes, it's a great idea. Thank you. But given the quantity of TEDx talks that are out now, there are other great ideas that people are talking about around the world, and they just don't go viral like they did when I did mine, which was just a matter of timing.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm just gonna push back more, okay? Because I don't, when my students come to me and say it's all luck, I want to give up, I don't like-

• 13:12Simon Sinek?

  I didn't say it was all luck. I didn't say it was all luck. I said luck was a component.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  It was. You captured the long tail of it, though. Okay, because then what happened was, it kind of went viral, and people went to go find out more about you. And when they went to go find out more about you, you were saying smart, interesting things, and they stuck around. So they went to go watch it another time, and they told a friend about it. Of course, luck plays a role. And any successful business person will say, I got some really lucky breaks. I get it. But I think that when you start believing that luck is everything, you lose how much intentionality and how much agency we actually have.

• 13:44Simon Sinek?

  I do not for one minute believe luck is everything.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  I know.

• 13:47Simon Sinek?

  But I do believe luck is a thing. So let me ask a somewhat leading question. What's the value of living a purpose-driven life? I mean, taking the woo-woo out of it, right? If I'm really cynical, like, who cares?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  That's right. And look, I bump into nihilists all the time. I had an AMA in class, ask me anything, I, you know, sort of open it up to the floor. And a student raised his hand, and he said, can I ask you a question? Sure. And he said, do you ever get tired of teaching this purpose stuff when you know in the end we're all gonna die? And I basically said to him, look, I think we have a moral choice. We can be nihilists, or we can be optimists. I think it's a moral choice to believe in the future, and to believe in ourselves, and to try to build a life where we're alive, because how we act is contagious. And I don't want to give anybody the disease that kills your soul. And so we have an actual moral obligation to have the behaviors and attitude that spread joy. Otherwise, I think you're actually morally wrong. I'd go so far-

• 14:44Simon Sinek?

  Just to be, if I put my cynical head on, like, doesn't that verge on woo-woo? That, you know, we have a moral obligation to spread joy? I mean, to a lot of people-

• 14:51Speaker 00

  No.

• 14:52Simon Sinek?

  That literally sounds like, you know, we should wear tie-dye and-

• 14:54Speaker 00

  I would say that actually, I think when you start talking about moral imperatives, it's no longer woo-woo. Okay? It's like, everything is not okay. That's woo-woo. Go put on your tie-dye, and, you know, do all your woo-woo stuff. Everything is beautiful. Everything's okay. That's woo-woo. I'm actually drawing a very stark line here, like, it's wrong, and it's right. And it's actually morally right to-

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Find your purpose because then you will feel the joy of having your purpose and living your purpose. When we don't live by our purpose, we don't just kill our own soul. We kill the souls of everyone around us. You're kind of a murderer. All right? So let me be very unwoo. I think it's like you're like a killer. You're like a murderer of other people. When you choose nihilism, that's how strongly I feel about it.

• 15:40Simon Sinek?

  Well, I mean, the science backs you up, by the way. When people lead without a sense of purpose or cause, it creates stress in the system. It creates stress in the people around them. The feeling of stress is cortisol. And when we have a lot of cortisol and a stress in our bodies, it actually weakens our immune systems and actually does make us more susceptible to things like cancer and other illnesses. And so, yes, the science would back you up that being short termist and selfish and a lack of purpose can actually kill people around you. Yes.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Yes, I've heard the science argument. It's 100% correct. You can see it with your own eyes. I want to say one other thing about it, which is further reasoning. You can love business and you can hate business. I happen to love business and I know there's good people in business and bad people in business, but I believe that business is a force and should be and can be a force for good. So if you're living your purpose and you create an organization where people are empowered to do that, then business grows and it thrives and it creates more opportunity for people. So you're actually doing something for the economy. Okay. And for culture and society, because growing thriving economies are good for everybody. Okay. So I also believe that there is this capitalistic argument and economic argument for it. There's no downside to it.

• 16:49Simon Sinek?

  Of your students, you gave some specific examples about how people's lives changed after they learned their purpose. What were their lives like before it?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  The first thing I want to say is that some people go through the process and all they do is tweak their lives because they've been quite close to their purpose and just one thing needs to get tweaked. So not everybody goes through the becoming you process and like blows up their life. I don't want to misrepresent that. Okay. I had a student come in and I thought she was in utter despair because she told me she was. She was like, I gotta change my life. I'm in agony when I'm with, when I'm being a CEO, I'm a terrible mother. When I'm with my daughter, I'm a terrible CEO. You gotta save me here. And we went through the whole process. And when she came out the end of it, she thought, oh, actually, I just need to tweak this one small thing involving how much. And she just did a tweak and it was sort of a mindset change. Okay. It was a clarity inducing experience.

• 17:31Simon Sinek?

  Yeah. You said you didn't find your purpose until 60. So what was life like before that?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  It was great. I mean, in many ways, but I mean, I had, there were a lot of shareholders in Suzy Inc. Okay, I had four children and I had a husband who had a gigantic career. The terms of our marriage, uh, which was an extremely happy marriage, were just that his career came first. And so I was doing a huge amount of accommodating to my, my children, which I chose to have. And my husband, his career, I honored. And so there were a lot of times where my career could have taken off in ways that I really wanted, that I had to say no. But I was always closely approaching. I mean, look, I worked for Oprah. I was on the Today Show. I mean, I'm not going to say I had a crappy career. It was spectacular. Was I ever fully free? No, because I made some choices about putting my family ahead of my career.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  It, but look, there was a time, I was very, very close to a career pinnacle, very, very close to it. And my husband had a health setback. He, he was sick for quite some time. We came home from the doctor and he said, I really need you right now, Suzy. And I just, the producer of the show I was on at the time had just said to me, given me indication that something kind of amazing was about to happen for me. And he said, can you take a sabbatical for six months? And I said, of course I can, of course I can. I wanted to. Uh, I didn't want him to be sick, but um, I, you, when you're, when they put the port in, you know that the, you got to be there. And um, I remember he then went to go lay down and I went to the kitchen sink and I was washing dishes and I was sobbing and I was mourning the life that I wasn't going to have.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Would I do it again? In a heartbeat, but it was, uh, there were compromises.

• 19:06Simon Sinek?

  What impact did you have on Jack's life as a leader? When you came into his life, what, who was he and what did he become because of you?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Well, look, he had just retired from GE when we met. We met the day after he retired. Um, Jack was the greatest C in my opinion, Gracio, whoever lived. And I think that I could never have done his job and um, of his era. His legendary status, I think, was very well earned and uh, you know, GE went south afterwards. And so that was a great tragedy, very sad. I wish it hadn't happened. But I think that as a human being, he changed. But I think one of the things I taught Jack, and I want to make it clear that Jack taught me more than I taught him. Okay. So I, I don't want to misstate this. Jack taught me an enormous amount about, about business and about life and taught him golf, which is, thank goodness for that. But I think the one thing I taught Jack, which he probably himself, if he was sitting here, would say is that I taught him that life can be very hard for people.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Everything came very easily to Jack Welch, right? He was incredibly talented, incredibly athletic, incredibly likeable, incredibly quick. And he surrounded himself with people just like himself. And he had a bit of trouble wrapping his arms around the fact that for some people, just making it through the day was brutally hard. Like, he didn't understand anxiety, for instance. He just couldn't understand how anyone could be anxious. He didn't understand depression. He didn't understand that life was hard. And I think that very early on, I said to him, you know, there are beautiful, brilliant, fantastic people who are 100% broken. Are you aware of that? And he said, what are you talking about? And he had not been in the world of the art. So I had been managing, at that point, writers. And I said, let me tell you about my best writers.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And I would describe like the mental state and the sort of personalities of like the best writers working for me. He would say to me, you're making this up. You employ these people? They're broken. And I said, yes, beautifully broken. And so I think that the place that Jack grew, and he grew very quickly. It wasn't like it took him very long to get it. He got it instantly. And he was like, oh, my God, I just never saw it. And I had a kind of a tunnel vision about the emotional lives of people. And so I think after that, he got softer. He was always warm, but he had more tenderness in him. Imagine never having really heard music. And then at age, he was 65 when we met. And then suddenly, at age 65, somebody playing Stevie Wonder for you. He said to me, what is this? I said, this, my dear, is Stevie Wonder.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  And he was like, why have people been keeping Stevie Wonder from me? And I was like, well, no longer.

• 21:33Simon Sinek?

  So one of the things that I have to touch on, when you saw that email that said, I'm teaching a class at NYU Stern, something came over you, that you had to go pursue this. And then that when you walked into class, you started buzzing. And now this was my purpose. And what you had discovered was service.

• 21:57Simon Sinek?

  That that your purpose comes alive when you have the opportunity to serve others.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  I have a theory about this, which is that we are living our purpose when we are doing two things at the same time. And one piece of it is service and the other piece of it is self actualizing. So Maslow had the hierarchy of needs. And when he first created it in 1948, he had the tippy top being self actualization. That's kind of, you know, that is like living your best life. That is, that's actually living your values and your aptitudes and your interests. Okay. So that's it. Then he came back 13 years later, right before he died. And he said, I missed something. I've done more research. And there's this thing on top of it called transcendence. And that's when you're self actualizing and giving back service. And so that's why I call purpose. That's why I use the term for purpose, area of transcendence, referring to Maslow,

• 22:43Speaker 00

  self actualization plus giving back. So I had done a lot of things that I was very good at. Okay, I had been on TV. I had been writing all this other stuff. But it was when I got back in the classroom that I was able to do what I call non-syby, not for oneself, that I was able to add on top of that, this layer of service. So I don't think service alone necessarily equals purpose, although it's a gigantic help. I really do think it's two things at once. I mean, I really do. I think it's self actualizing plus this feeling of giving back. That's bam, that's it.

• 23:15Simon Sinek?

  I think about your two examples of the banker. And by the way, any parents that push their kids to go into banking, I think that's a form of child abuse. But the ones, the one who went from banking to fashion and the one who started the business with her sister, both of them changed from living a life where they were in a what about you? What are you going to do? What are you going to advance? And then they turned into, no, I'm going to do this for other people. And the passion came from the desire to take whatever the thing they had was desire, passion, love, purpose, whatever it is, and they did it for someone else. And then that sense of I found my thing came when it was a giving, a pushing, not just a pulling or a taking.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Now, I want to say that you can be a banker or a consultant, and you can be giving back because the way you can do it is you can be a mentor to somebody else. You can be helping the people that you work with. You can really be helping customers. I mean, I don't think that those professions necessarily don't allow service. You can do that work. And say you have, say you're caring for an elderly parent, you need money and so forth, and you go into banking for financial reasons. You can commit your life on the weekends to acts of service. I just don't think they're mutually exclusive. I don't think everybody. Can have a job.

• 24:27Simon Sinek?

  But hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me push you a little bit here.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Please.

• 24:31Simon Sinek?

  Your whole thing is that this idea of the true you, the purpose you is beautifully integrated into all that you do. So to bifurcate your life, that I do banking during the week and I do this life of service on the weekends is inherently not a purpose driven life.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  I think I'm a realist and that is that some people simply have to work for money. You know, they go to a factory and they put their foot down on a lever over and over again all day long because that's what they do. And it's very hard to find purpose in those jobs. But some people have to have those jobs. That's the only skill they have.

• 25:03Simon Sinek?

  Oh, I gotta take you on a tour.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:05Simon Sinek?

  I've got to take you to see Barry Waymiller, which is an American manufacturing company.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  I hundred percent know that there are companies that can do it.

• 25:14Simon Sinek?

  The job itself is not purpose driven, right? As you said, putting your foot on the lever and making the machine go is not unto itself purpose driven.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:22Simon Sinek?

  But they show up to work with the desire to take care of the person to the left of them, to the right of them. And the job is incidental. The job is the place in which they get to show up and live a life of service.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  In this, we are in agreement in that you can create that work in a company. And you know what? It's the job of the leader to make meaning of it. The leader needs to say, this is how your work contributes to the greater good. You are not just putting your foot down on the lever and over and over again. When you do that, you are part of this work. But man, that takes a leader. That takes a great leader explaining the purpose of it.

• 25:49Simon Sinek?

  Or someone who has a terrible leader, but someone has made the choice to live a purpose driven life and come to work every day saying, I'm going to look after the person to the left and to the right of me, despite the fact that I work in a place with a terrible leader.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  I know. It's hard in those environments. I mean, the perfect time is when the work has been integrated with purpose. But I do have to be realist. There are some jobs, you know, if you're working at Cumberland Farms and you're working at the cash register, that's what you can do. You have from nine to four every day when your children are at school. And you've got that job. That's the only job because you've got to be able to walk to it. Okay, let's just be real here. Some people do not have a lot of optionality. All right? How do you get purpose out of that job? Well, then you think, you know what? What I'm doing, every time somebody comes to this store, I can make their day better. I can smile at them. I can ask how they're doing. And that's on them. But imagine how much better it would be if your manager of that store just said, "Look, you know, we're in the service business here, and we can, you know, this is not just mercenary. We can make lives better for our customers and so forth."

• 26:42Simon Sinek?

  Hundred percent. The scale and efficiency, when you have a well-led organization or a well-led team, hundred percent. You and I are in lockstep there. The only point I'm making is that to choose to live a purpose-driven life is the choice of the individual. And though it is more efficient and though the environment will be way better, if my leader is that way inclined also, but I don't have to be the victim of a leader who isn't.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. It's hard. It's better when leaders are doing...

• 27:10Simon Sinek?

  Much more difficult, without a doubt. You know, I agree with you about the duality of the Maslow thing. And I think he had it slightly wrong when he articulated the first model. Because he said the lowest level is food and shelter. And the third level up is relationships.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:29Simon Sinek?

  And community. The mistake Maslow made is, human beings, we live in paradox, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups. When you look at the hierarchy of needs, food and shelter. Maslow was only thinking about us as individuals. As an individual, yes, food and shelter absolutely comes first. But as a member of a group, social relationships are more important. I've never heard of anybody dying by suicide because they were hungry, but I have heard of people dying by suicide because they were lonely. Right? And stories of people who want to be in community before they die. Those two models, it's what he articulated, that hierarchy of needs, I would argue is for an individual. And for a member of a group, it's been in a different order. And at the top, this idea of self-actualization,

• 28:12Simon Sinek?

  even unto that self, like, "I am self-actualized at the tip of a pyramid, looking down upon all you unactualized people." You know, what about shared actualization? The genius of your class is not that you're helping someone find their purpose, is that they're going through it as a class, that they have shared actualization and they support each other and they cry with each other and they hold each other and they celebrate each other.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:36Simon Sinek?

  And I would argue that success of finding your purpose isn't just going through the process, but it's going through the process with others and being in service to others as they look to find their own.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  And you make a perfect point, and I'll tell you why. I, a while ago, stopped taking private clients because I intuitively knew in my bones it was something that had to happen in group.

• 28:54Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  And there's something that happens in that room. Like, I teach it in groups. I teach it outside of NYU as part of NYU. It's an open enrollment course and we do 60 people at a time. And they come in as strangers, okay? We do, we do the whole course in three days. They come in as strangers and they go out as incredibly close friends. They stay in touch with each other. Something happens in the discovery process together. It forges relationships and friendships like you cannot believe.

• 29:18Simon Sinek?

  That makes sense. To go through an individual experience with a group?

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:23Simon Sinek?

  I mean, that's, that's kind of what group therapy is, right?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 29:26Simon Sinek?

  Like, if you, if you go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're going through something for yourself in community. And it goes right back to where we started, which is the amplification. I, as an individual, will help amplify the benefit to the group and the group will help amplify the benefit to me.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. I have a cowbell that rings like crazy and I had to, I had to, more cowbell. I had to get it because when I put the students into groups, it was impossible to get them out of group. I'd say, "Okay, let's do this activity. You do it on your own. Now get with a group of three people. Talk about your findings." And the group would set fire as they were doing, they were going through the process in community. And finally, I would say, I'd have my microphone, "Class, class." And no one would stop talking with each other. So finally, I had to get a freaking cowbell and stand up there ringing it like a mad woman to shut them down. But that is, to your point, is that it is one plus one equals 12. Because of this process of finding purpose in community and people want to find it on their own, it's not really as rich an experience.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  We have to hear ourselves think and talk and we have to process other people's journeys to amplify our own journey.

• 30:30Simon Sinek?

  And I think the magic of life is learning that my journey is our journey and our journey is my journey.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:36Simon Sinek?

  And how do I support the collective and the collective support and accept the support from the collective?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:43Simon Sinek?

  When I do a why discovery with someone, the thing that they're always surprised to learn is that a why Fundamentally, it is something uniquely yours that you give to the world. Like my whys to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. It is who I am, it is core to my being, it is what lights me up, it's what excites me and inspires me. But fundamentally, it is something I am, I wake up every day to give away.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:08Simon Sinek?

  And that's why they call what we have gifts.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:11Simon Sinek?

  Because gifts are forgiving. It's not something you received, it's something you're supposed to give away. Your gifts are for giving away.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  I think our whys are similar. My, I would say my purpose is to help you find your purpose. And it's the same kind of feeling. It's like, this is why I levitate. And you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's something you must have when somebody finds their whys. It's like a drug. You gotta have more of it. You gotta have more of it. It's like, oh, my God, you know, it's just, oh, I gotta, to see somebody have that discovery. If everybody knew what that felt like, they'd want more, they'd want it too.

• 31:42Simon Sinek?

  But we've all had that experience, right? For actors who stand on a stage to feel the energy of an audience, for someone to, a parent to teach their kids how to ride a bicycle. And the first time you let go of the seat without training wheels, the elation you get to see someone accomplish something by themselves, for themselves, with your help. Like, we've all had that feeling of elation and levitating when we get to be there to support and see someone else thrive. It's sustainable, whereas, you know, any great accomplishment, whether you made a lot of money or hit a goal or got a bonus. Like, those things feel amazing and the feeling dissipates in about a week.

• 32:21Simon Sinek?

  But to live a life of service to the people closest to us, even if it's just our families, like, that stuff is sustainable. That stuff is, that's called love.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is love. I remember one time I was teaching in my management class, not in my Becoming You class. And I had a longtime manager who was my guest that day. And we were talking and doing a Q and A with the students. And at one point, I turned to her and I said, well, you know, ultimately, management, you know, being a manager is an act of love. And she said, yes, it's totally an act of love, blah, blah, blah. And we were talking about how management, managing people well, was an act of love. And then we both turned to the class at the same time and they were sitting there with their mouths hanging open. And I said, what is the problem? And like, every hand went up, every hand in the room went up. And they were like, what about boundaries? And you can't have. Your work family be your home family. This is very dated. Maybe it was when you were young, but the management is not love and you can't get in people's

• 33:15Speaker 00

  lives. And I was like, you don't know what you're missing.

• 33:18Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  If you think you're going to go out and do work without love, if you think you're going to go to work and not love the people sitting there.

• 33:23Simon Sinek?

  But also being in love with your friends and being in love with your family, being in love with your, your, your employees are not the same love.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  And it's not.

• 33:28Simon Sinek?

  But it is still a love. I mean, like you're right.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  It's a love.

• 33:31Simon Sinek?

  To conflate, to conflate the love you have for a sibling with an employee is ridiculous.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  We're, we're, we're sophisticated adults because I understand the difference between these different kinds of loves. But like, if I go into work and I'm managing my people and there's not some element of generosity in my heart about it, blech, it's just technical.

• 33:47Simon Sinek?

  Suzy, it's such a, such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for being so open and so lovely. And I, I'd love to come and visit your class sometime.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Oh, don't ask twice. I will come and get you.

• 33:57Simon Sinek?

  I would love to. It would be a joy for me.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Okay, well, it's happening.

• 34:03Simon Sinek?

  If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simoncinek.com for classes, videos and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Ja and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Ruderchan.