By Carla Kalogeridis and Kathryn Deen
The unshakable optimist, the why guy — whatever comes to mind when you think of Simon Sinek — our exclusive interview provides fresh insight from this wildly popular leadership author, speaker, and founder.
Real Leaders: You had a milestone birthday last year. How did you feel about turning 50, and was this one hard for you?

Simon Sinek: I’m not a big birthday person. I don’t like being the center of attention and wasn’t planning on doing anything, but my friends said I had to, so I threw them a party. I knew there were six other guests who also had milestone birthdays that year, and so when it was cake time, I had six additional cakes with their names and ages on them because why should I be the only person who celebrates my milestone?
RL: We have a special section in this edition about executive coaches. Have you ever had a coach?

Sinek: I have had a coach. I’m a great believer in having a coach. Finding a coach is like finding a partner. It’s got to be somebody who gets you, and there’s got to be a good personality match. You might need a couple sessions to figure that out, and it can be hard. I don’t understand how people in senior positions think they don’t need it. Professional athletes think they need it — how are we the exception?
Maybe because we can’t see our swing. We have blind spots, and sometimes it’s good to talk through a problem with a dispassionate person who’s not involved. Most of the conversations we have are with coworkers who are quite passionate about the decisions we make.
RL: What leadership blind spots are you noticing these days?

Sinek: Most leaders think they’re good listeners. It’s hilarious. Also, people get promoted, and they forget that a whisper becomes a shout. A little offhanded “way to go” could make someone’s week, but an offhanded “that wasn’t very good work” could destroy someone’s confidence. Learning how to manage that is very, very difficult for leaders.
I’ll tell you one funny story. I was having a photo shoot, and we started pretty early. I asked what time lunch was, and they said 1 o’clock. I said, “Can we get the food in here at noon? I’m kind of hungry.” So they got it in at noon, no big deal. Then we had another shoot and we started pretty late, like 10 a.m., and the food came at noon. I was like, “Why is the food here so early?” And I found out in the background that when they were making the schedule, someone said, “Simon insists on having the food at noon,” which, of course, is nonsense.
Self-awareness is one of the biggest blind spots. Actually, self-awareness is a misnomer — self-awareness is situational awareness. When you’re sitting in a meeting, do you know that you’re talking too much? Well, you won’t know that unless you see people in the room trying to speak but you keep interrupting them. You learn self-awareness by honing the skill of situational awareness — in other words, paying attention to the room.
Another leadership blind spot is asking for people’s advice after you’ve already given your opinion. That’s a big one. I would classify that under listening skills.
RL: You do quite a bit of keynote speaking and ranked No. 2 on the Real Leaders Top Keynote Speakers list for the last two years. How does speaking relate to your why?
Sinek: My why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them, so together, each of us can change our world for the better. I’m agnostic as to how I deliver that message. It happened by accident that I became a speaker, but clearly, it fulfills the why. For many years, I thought of myself spreading my message as a preacher. I was spreading a gospel of the way business should work. It made perfect sense. It’s not the only way I can spread my message, but it certainly has been a good one for me.
RL: How do you give your audience goosebumps?

Sinek: That’s an underappreciated skill, which is the art of storytelling. When most people speak, they make it about themselves. “Let me tell you how great I am. Let me tell you about all my accomplishments.” There’s some ulterior motive — buy my book, buy my product, subscribe.
The way you connect with an audience is you have no ulterior motive other than to serve. I don’t ever think I’m right. I think I have a point of view, and I’m there to share it. I’m not looking for people to agree with me. I’m looking to offer an invitation. One of the reasons I connect with an audience is because I’m genuinely there as an act of service. I’m there for them. I’ve always had that mindset. Before I go on stage, I’ll mutter out loud to myself under my breath, “You’re here to give,” just to remind myself. It’s wonderful.
RL: Would impact company leaders benefit from seeing themselves as preachers of their cause?
Sinek: The simple answer is of course, but frequently saying that you’re an impact company is preaching to the converted, and it can potentially alienate the unconverted. Don’t talk about it so much — just do it. Just be impact, right?
To constantly say you’re an impact company is about self-aggrandizing. It’s virtue signaling for the people who are already in the club. If you’re truly an impact person, your responsibility is to invite people who are not already in the club and to find the language, methods, and systems that are an invite rather than an attempt to convince or shame. Just do the good work, and then you’ll reach the cause that you’re preaching. Find the language that invites as many people as possible.
I don’t use the words vision or mission or cause or purpose. I use the term why. I found new language that reinforced those who already believed but that invited people who weren’t sure to take a look. The only way a movement can move is with new people.
RL: After the murder of George Floyd, you started a nonprofit called The Curve to support better leadership in policing. Why did that particular incident resonate with you so deeply?
Sinek: Multiple reasons. It’s a profoundly human problem caused by humans, and the impact is on humans. It is largely a leadership and culture problem. Yes, policing has issues in training and hiring, and those are symptomatic of the leadership and culture problems that policing suffers from. If you look at the advances in leadership theory, the military is way ahead of most corporations when it comes to embracing new ideas, but policing is about 20 years behind. Though often well-intentioned, outside pressures and legislative fixes either flat out won’t work or will have a short-term or minor impact without completely changing the culture of policing, which is what’s needed.
The only way to do it is from the inside out. I was drawn to it because it’s an unbelievably complex human problem, which interests me. I like very difficult things. And there’s already plenty of people looking for the cure for cancer. There weren’t enough people who were doing this except as outsiders looking in.
RL: You are known for being unshakably optimistic, but is a little pessimism helpful for leaders?

Sinek: Let’s first define optimism, which is not blind, nor is it naive positivity where you’re saying everything’s fine, everything’s good — that’s dangerous. Optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright. It allows for darkness, it allows for difficulty, it allows for frustration, it allows for anger, it allows for pessimism. But fundamentally, it is the undying belief that even if it’s a difficult time now, if we work together, we will get through this and come out stronger.
I’m cynical very often. I can be grumpy, I can be judgy, but that doesn’t affect the fact that I fundamentally believe the future is bright.
RL: Leaders are often deeply devoted to their causes. Talk a little about your concept of cause blindness and how they can avoid that pitfall.
Sinek: We are living in leaderless times. There seems to be a distinct lack of idealism in the world. Our presidents don’t talk of world peace anymore. Go back a few years and world leaders like Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy literally talked about peace on earth in their inaugurations. Being driven by a higher calling is very important to inspire people and instill trust, loyalty, and innovation.
We’re very short-termist these days. We’re driven by short-term growth or short-term impact investor pressures, and a large part of it is because of the loss of idealism.
One of the things that prevents and insulates you from cause blindness is idealism because you’re looking so far ahead to advancing a cause that is for all practical purposes unrealizable. World peace is not realistic, but it is inspiring, and we can take steps toward it. Cause blindness tends to be when we become sheltered and looking down and can’t see the forest for the trees. When you look up at the grand vision, it actually makes you more awake.
RL: What about your term ethical fading? How can leaders make sure that ethical fading doesn’t creep in to their businesses?
Sinek: We’re all susceptible to ethical fading, and this is where strong leadership and strong culture inoculate you — if you have a truly just cause and are not simply driven by short-term financial gains. You must also spend the time to build strong teams where there’s psychological safety, and if you do these things, you are inoculated from ethical fading.
In any company, people will have stupid, unethical ideas. We all do. But in a good company, someone will go, “We’re not going to do that.” It’s not the generation of the idea; it’s whether the idea gets implemented or not. Ethical fading happens with poor leadership and an incentive structure that rewards short-termism. Good leadership and good incentive structures are the antidote.
RL: You talk about the importance of having worthy rivals, not competitors. What have you learned from making that mindset shift?
Sinek: This is one of the most magical mindset changes that somebody can make, and it’s so easy to do.
You’re going to learn so much by being grateful for those who do things better than you rather than trying to undermine or compete or put them down. You become more like, “Damn. They’re good.” And it makes you better because they become pacers that push you harder, right? You’ll find solutions to problems that you’ve been struggling with from a worthy rival. It makes you much more self-confident and relaxed and better at what you do. You are less distracted by the silliness of creating fake competitions where there are no finish lines.
RL: How have you implemented this mindset in your organization?
Sinek: It’s become a practice that when we’re working on something, someone will ask, “Who’s the worthy rival on this?” and we’ll go find the best of breed, the people who are more experienced, way better, and really innovative.
RL: How does your concept of infinite-mindedness impact leadership?
Sinek: It depends where in the pecking order you are. If you’re at the top of the pecking order, you know that having just causes is really where it starts, and then adjusting the incentive structures to ensure that you and your people are building an infinite-minded company.
If you’re just in the organization, you have no say over the incentive structures or setting the vision. But you can come to work every day to be the leader you wish you had and to ensure that the people with whom you work go home every day feeling inspired, safe, and fulfilled. Infinite-mindedness is: “How do I help the people around me rise?” They’ll become better versions of themselves because I worked with them and because they worked with me.
That mindset has a massive impact on someone because you find yourself in service, which is ultimately what an infinite mindset is.
RL: As a trained ethnographer, you’ve discovered patterns about how the best leaders and organizations thrive. What are the prominent patterns you’re seeing today?

Sinek: The big one — and I don’t say it explicitly, but all my work touches on it — is this idea of human skills. Cats don’t have to work very hard to be good at being a cat, but it turns out that people have to work pretty hard to be good at being human. We are not good listeners. We are not good at giving or receiving feedback. We’re not good at having difficult conversations, and the list goes on. The biggest pattern I’ve seen is that to be human takes work, and those who do the work become better human beings, better leaders, better friends, better spouses, better sons, better daughters, better parents.
It doesn’t matter where we learn it. If you learn to be a better listener because your relationship is struggling, you’ll bring that skill set to work. At work, we can teach people how to be better listeners because we want them to cooperate better. And then, you’ll bring that skill set home to your relationships and to your parenting because the skills are the skills. They don’t teach human skills in business school, and I think companies have the opportunity to pick up the slack.
Companies that teach human skills tend to outperform the companies that don’t. And though it’s hard to measure, I would venture a guess that companies that double down on teaching those things, I bet the people who work for them have lower divorce rates, their kids do better at school, and they have lower rates of cancer and diabetes and things like that, which are all stress-related disorders.
There are a lot of good reasons to hone our human skills. All my work is in some way, shape, or form talking about human skills. Notice I don’t use the term soft skills. I hate the term soft skills. Hard and soft are opposites, and these are not opposite skills. Hard skills I need to do my job. Human skills I need to be a better human. And I need both those things to excel in life and at work.
RL: You implemented an agreement with your friends during the COVID pandemic that none of you would cry alone. When it comes to leadership, is there anything that just has to be done alone?
Sinek: Accountability. Ultimately, if you’re the leader, the buck stops somewhere, and if a decision is made and it goes wrong, you can’t cast blame if someone on your team made the decision and you trusted that they could. You have to support them in the difficulty of repairing whatever that bad decision was. We’re not talking about negligence here. We’re talking about someone just made a bad call. Accountability is a solo affair. Everything else can be shared. Joy and congratulations can always be shared. I would never do that alone.
We see lack of accountability a lot. When people say, “The lawyer said we can’t do that,” what they’re really saying is, “I won’t take accountability for the decision that needs to be made because of the risk associated with it.” Lawyers don’t make decisions. Lawyers advise on risk. My lawyers tell me that I can’t do things all the time, and I say, “Tell me what the risks are,” and then I’ll either do it or not because I think it’s worth the risk or not. But ultimately, it’s my decision. Anybody who pushes that off is becoming a refugee from accountability.
RL: Your last book came out in 2019, and it’s 2024…

Sinek: You sound like my publisher.
RL: When are we going to see your next book? What will it be about?
Sinek: I’m working on a book about friendship. There’s an entire industry to help us be better leaders. There’s an entire industry to help us be better parents. There’s an entire industry to help us eat better, work out better, sleep better. Yet there’s precious little to help us be better friends.
If you look at all the challenges we face in the world today, and with anxiety and depression and suicide on the rise — even our obsession with longevity — friendship is the ultimate biohack. If you learn to be a good friend, you live longer, you’re healthier, you’re less susceptible to addiction. It is the greatest thing in the world, and yet there’s so little that teaches us how to be good friends. I’ve really become quite obsessed with what it means to be a friend.
The number of us who prioritize work over friendship because our friends will understand when we cancel on them is really gross. Your work will never be there for you in hard times. Your work’s not going to save you, but your friends will. Nobody calls their work ride or die.
So many of us think we’re a good friend, but if you really peel the onion back a little bit, are you sooner to cancel on a friend for a meeting, or would you postpone a meeting for a friend? Do you know how to be there for someone when they’re struggling, or do you just try and fix their problems? Do you know how to listen to someone so that they feel heard? If a friend’s depressed, do you tell them to buck up, or do you go to their house, get into bed with them, eat ice cream, watch movies all day, and be depressed with them so that they don’t feel alone in that space?
We all have a lot to learn about how to be a better friend, so I’m writing that book with my friend Will Guidara, who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality.
RL: Can you expand on how being a better friend makes you a better leader?
Sinek: Friendship is scalable, right? Being a better leader doesn’t necessarily make you a better friend, but being a better friend definitely makes you a better leader. It is the only truly scalable skill. Being a better dad doesn’t necessarily make you a better friend, but being a better friend makes you a better dad.
RL: Are you good at friendship? Or is it a self-identified weakness that led you down this journey?
Sinek: Like everybody, I thought I was a good friend, but I still have some stuff that I’m learning. I’ll give you an example. I thought I was a great listener — until I took a listening class. I learned that I am an absolutely fantastic listener with people I will never see again for the rest of my life, but with my friends, I was appalling. When my friends would say, “You’re such a bad listener,” I’d be like, “Do you know what I do for a living?” Turns out I was crap. I was useless. And so I called my friend and said, “Remember when you told me I’m a bad listener? Turns out you were right.”
There’s a lot to learn. I’m definitely a better friend now than I have been in the past because I am learning more about human skills. Managing a friendship is difficult and requires a lot of intentionality.
RL: Circling back to that big birthday, how would you characterize your first 50 years? How do you envision your next 50?
Sinek: It’s all a magical journey. I’m in life for the fun of it. Some of it is easy, some of it is hard, some of it is clear, some of it is foggy. But all of it goes better when I do it with others. “Remember that time…” is a much more fun conversation than, “Let me tell you what I did.”
And any kind of stress is endurable with others around us. It’s a journey with others. We all make the mistake sometimes of forgetting that we are surrounded by people who love us. They’re there to help us if we just ask. So the first 50 years has been learning those lessons, quite frankly, that I’m not alone. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to accept it. It doesn’t make me dumb or weak. In fact, it makes me stronger. It makes me more confident. It makes me more grateful, more humble.
The next part of my life, however long it is, is the joy of getting to live with purpose, to take all those lessons and actually do it all.
RL: What’s your message for the Real Leaders community?
Sinek: The best thing that this audience has is each other. I hope they spend time in this community without their phones, without their computers, without their emails. I hope they talk to each other about what works and doesn’t work.
I cannot emphasize enough the value of community when doing something difficult and bucking the system of how capitalism has worked for the past 30–40 years. It’s the status quo that is working against us. And even though it’s trendy for every company now to have a purpose on their website, go compare the decisions they make to the statements on their websites, and in many cases it’s just marketing. How are you treating your employees? You can’t call yourself an impact company and not practice good leadership or learn good leadership or teach your people good leadership.
Just go do the good work. Do the work that demonstrates the impact that you’re having because the people who want to come work for you in this new generation of employees, they care about that stuff.
RL: What companies are your gold standard when it comes to leadership and impact?

Sinek: I love Patagonia. They demonstrate it in their bottom line. They demonstrate it in the way they treat people. They demonstrate it in the way they talk about the impact they’re having on the communities in which they operate. They don’t use any euphemisms — they just do it. They just get it done, and they’re open, and they’re accountable. They still do damage, and they don’t recycle everything, and they’re super honest about it. We should copy their model.
Airbnb is also pretty good, and Brian Chesky is open about being an infinite-minded company. All of them have work to do. None of them are perfect. They all have blind spots. They all have pressures. But the way that Airbnb treated its people during COVID when they had to have layoffs was a model of how to do it. They were so generous. They set up a page on their website and uploaded everybody’s resume who lost their job, and the day they got laid off, you could hire them. That’s so much more than just saying, “We care about our people.” This is a company that even cared about them after they let them go. They didn’t just let them go — they helped them land on their feet. That, to me, is impact.
Level Up Your Human Skills
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