Start With Why

much harder to identify. As their tangible success grew, something more elusive started to dissipate. Every single one of these successful business owners knew WHAT they did. They knew HOW they did it. But for many, they no longer knew WHY.

Achievement vs. Success
    For some people, there is an irony to success. Many people who achieve great success don’t always feel it. Some who achieve fame talk about the loneliness that often goes with it. That’s because success and achievement are not the same thing, yet too often we mistake one for the other. Achievement is something you reach or attain, like a goal. It is something tangible, clearly defined and measurable. Success, in contrast, is a feeling or a state of being. “She feels successful. She is successful,” we say, using the verb to be to suggest this state of being . While we can easily lay down a path to reach a goal, laying down a path to reach that intangible feeling of success is more elusive. In my vernacular, achievement comes when you pursue and attain WHAT you want. Success comes when you are clear in pursuit of WHY you want it. The former is motivated by tangible factors while the latter by something deeper in the brain, where we lack the capacity to put those feelings into words.
    Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending pursuit of WHY we do WHAT we do. Our achievements, WHAT we do, serve as the milestones to indicate we are on the right path. It is not an either/or—we need both. A wise man once said, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it pays for the yacht to pull alongside it.” There is great truth in this statement. The yacht represents achievement; it is easily seen and, with the right plan, completely attainable. The thing we pull alongside represents that hard-to-define feeling of success. Obviously, this is much harder to see and attain. They are distinct concepts, and sometimes they go together and sometimes they don’t. More importantly, some people, while in pursuit of success, simply mistake WHAT they achieve as the final destination. This is the reason they never feel satisfied no matter how big their yacht is, no matter how much they achieve. The false assumption we often make is that if we simply achieve more, the feeling of success will follow. But it rarely does.
    In the course of building a business or a career, we become more confident in WHAT we do. We become greater experts in HOW to do it. With each achievement, the tangible measurements of success and the feeling of progress increase. Life is good. However, for most of us, somewhere in the journey we forget WHY we set out on the journey in the first place. Somewhere in the course of all those achievements an inevitable split happens. This is true for individuals and organizations alike. What the Endicott entrepreneurs experienced as individuals was the same transition that Wal-Mart and other big companies either have gone through or are going through. Because Wal-Mart operates at such an immense scale, the impact of their fuzzy WHY is felt on a greater scale. Employees, customers and the community will feel it also.
    Those with an ability to never lose sight of WHY, no matter how little or how much they achieve, can inspire us. Those with the ability to never lose sight of WHY and also achieve the milestones that keep everyone focused in the right direction are the great leaders. For great leaders, The Golden Circle is in balance. They are in pursuit of WHY, they hold themselves accountable to HOW they do it and WHAT they do serves as the tangible proof of what they believe. But most of us, unfortunately, reach a place where WHAT we are doing and WHY we are doing it eventually fall out of balance. We get to a point when WHY and WHAT are not aligned. It is the separation of the tangible and the intangible that marks the split.

12
    SPLIT HAPPENS
    Wal-Mart started small. So did Microsoft. So did Apple. So did General Electric and Ford and almost every other company that made it big. They didn’t start by acquisition or spin-off, or achieve mass scale overnight. Nearly every company or organization starts the same way: with an idea. No matter whether an organization grows to become a multibillion-dollar corporation like Wal-Mart or fails in the first few years, most of them started with a single person or small group of people who had an idea. Even the United States of America started the same way.
    At the beginning, ideas are fueled by passion—that