Start With Why
Manipulators, Short-Term Gain Over Long-Term Consistency
Manipulators usually provide a short-term gain that generally compromise long-term consistency or growth. Applying a manipulator, such as a promotion, may increase sales for the time the promotion is in effect and as soon as it is over nobody is buying anything. To maintain sales, you need to keep having promotions. This is bad business as you effectively need to keep your prices down so you can sell. Big companies may be able to do this, but small ones not so much as they need to grow in a sustainable fashion.
Price Manipulator
Basically, who keeps the lowest price wins or keeps winning because most customers would rather pay less than more because for them the company is just an entity that gets them what they want. No warranties or some dedication towards customers whatsoever. If the company or companies you are buying from do not give you any sense of trust and the only reason they seem to exist is to make money, basically they exist out of someone’s greed, then your inclination is to fill someone’s pocket just because it is affordable. You only do it because it gets you the object you need and if you can get it somewhere cheaper then you buy from there. Low prices do not display what a company believes in. What they do does.
Promotions Manipulator
This is like the price one, only that you offer limited benefits for a period of time instead of keeping more money in your pockets. Things like “buy 4, get 1 free” or “toy inside” can be very effective as they tell you that on top of what you normally get, you get a bonus as well. The one with “toy inside” is a bit cleverer because it engages the same mechanisms as gambling games. You don’t know what they toy is, you don’t know if you’re going to like it, but you feel happy when you do get one that you like. It’s the surprize that does the trick. You might find yourself buying a similar product again just for the toy inside. I know I had urges to do that just to have the full set. As before, promotions help sales, but do not show what the company believes in.
Fear Manipulator
This is a powerful one and activates the most primal areas of the brain. The instinct for survival, the fear of death, the fear of losing something perceived as valuable.
You may have come across a call from a health insurance company that applied this manipulator over and over and more aggressively with each failed attempt. Things like “what would you do if you would wake up in an accident and you get 2nd degree burns all over your body? What if it was a family member?” Basically, playing on fear and how accidents are unpredictable and building on that, the follow up question on why wouldn’t you protect yourself? By the time I had this “discussion” I had read this book and I could tell this manipulator was applied, quite skilfully which is scary enough on its own. I was able to see through it, but I still felt the fear that the other person was trying to use.
Aspiration Manipulator
While the fear manipulator taps into the primal instincts of survival and preservation, this one is still emotional but rather tries to make something we want to do somewhat easier or more appealing. “Instead of going to the gym you can take this pull and do some exercise at home and in just one month you get the body you want!” sounds something like it.
Again, this does not tell anything about the company. Do they believe in their people? Healthy lifestyle? What is it? They are only trying to sell you a pill.
This is the same for the fear manipulator. When they play on your fear, do you really feel safe? Do you really feel protected? A bit iron for someone claiming to provide quality health insurances to generate fear to sell their product. What if you have heart problems and you get a panic attack while in this conversation? The joke would be on them.
Peer Pressure Manipulator
It goes along the lines of “societal status” or “socially accepted” norms. If everyone buys something and uses it then that may be peer pressure on you so you don’t get left out. Promotions from celebrities may have the same effect. “If Beyonce is using it, then it must be good, right?”
This is a very common manipulator because it shows general acceptance of a product, from the public, which gives some indication of quality or that the product is useful.
Once again, the reason we buy said product or why we are looking at it in the 1st place is not because of what it stands for, or what the company stands for, but because everybody is talking about it or because we see ads all over the place basically doing the same thing.
Novelty or Innovation Manipulator
This is a nice one. The product has the latest and greatest technologies in it. Top notch CPU, super resistant casing, ultra-new GPS & the latest AI. It’s all new and useful and reliable and great tech, that’s why you should buy this product.
This can be coupled with peer pressure to be even more convincing. It’s not just new, it’s generally accepted and promoted by celebrities.
In all of this, you do not know why you need all this fancy tech. What purpose does it serve? You buy the product for what it is and not for why it exists. We still don’t know for what the product stands for because it is only presented as an object that does things, and not what the vision behind it is.
Carrots and Sticks
These are only a few of the manipulators that are being used and are presented in the book. They all have a common pattern in that one way or another, they try to convince you to buy their product and not mention why it exists in the first place. If it even makes sense or if it advances a cause, whichever that may be.
This does not always mean that if a company that tries to sell you a product without mentioning their WHY is trying to manipulate you. It may be obvious to them and may decide it can be omitted, or they simply forgot or don’t even know their why. This is another thing that a company must realize, that their why is not always the one they claim and most times it emerges from what it does. It is observed, understood, and eventually changed if a different vision is more preferred.
Actions reveal intents and beliefs.
The Golden Circle
The question is about motivating and inspiring people over seeking a profit. Sometimes even a decision between the two. In fact being faced with this decision will illustrate whether we are going after money, after profit or we have a purpose that goes beyond material gains.
Most big companies today did not set out to become the most profitable. Indeed, we do need to make a profit so our business can grow and better realize our vision. But big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, CD Projekt Red did not start with profit as their main goal. They each have a vision that they wish for the world. Something to better our day-to-day life and improve the way we do things. They all have a WHY. They all have a vision that goes beyond the material world even through the palpable projections of these visions are material.
When promoting a product or service, if you start by specifying why this product exist and what is its purpose then people get a sense of what you are about. What you believe in and how will that product or company grow.
When you start with WHY you expose your motivation, you expose what you want to accomplish. Afterwards you can continue explaining HOW you will be achieving your WHY, or at least part of it, and finally the WHAT will show and offer palpable results for following you WHY, Your WHAT is your product, while your WHY is your drive.
While our WHY can be discovered by observing our behaviour, because that displays what we believe in, our behaviour is not our product. What we realize is our product.
When we lead with our motivation, this gives us a drive that keeps us going through the highs and lows when we start a business, will keep us going when we face tragedy and drama in our personal life. It’s a drive, a motivation, a purpose that is beyond us. A purpose that is greater than our life.
It is very likely that there are more people with the same drive. People that share the same purpose. People that may promote this purpose through products that realize it. Taking part, promoting, buying these products. They form a loyal follower community because your WHY is their WHY as well, they want to see the same vision realized. There may even be different products that work together towards the same vision.
The Golden Circle shows the way we communicate, starting with our WHY, following up with our HOW and finally saying WHAT we do. Doing it this way, rather than the other way around, not only expands WHAT we can do, because anything that aligns with our WHY is a valid WHAT, it engages with the audience, and it transmits what we stand for. It inspired people and motivated them to buy our products because by doing that they support this purpose.
When leading with WHY we can have multiple WHATs. Anything that promotes the WHY fits the bill. Even HOW we do it.
If we do that, it will feel natural to have multiple WHATs, while doing it the other way around it feels odd to promote a WHAT and then come up with a different WHAT because people associated the person or organization to one product (their WHAT) and when that changes it feels like it’s a whole different person or company. It feels strange.
The Law of Diffusion of Innovation
Statistically, only about a 2.% of the population are innovators. People that bring something new in the world, people with vision. Having vision does not automatically mean, by default, the person knows how to realize this vision. It is often the case that visionaries cannot implement their vision because they are not technical enough. They promote and develop their vision. They need people that believe in this vision, they can start to see it and work towards accomplishing this vision.
People with technical skills, people that know the HOW, have the WHY but lack the visionary capabilities. They can articulate what they believe in, but they cannot visualize it. People that have the HOW are part of the Early Adopters, they are not necessarily innovative in how they view the world or how it can fundamentally be better.
They can be innovative on how a vision is implemented, technical novelty. A HOW type needs a WHY type while a WHY type needs a HOW type. When the two cooperate we can get companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, companies driven by a vision, and not by profit, companies that change our everyday life. None of these companies started with profit in mind, they all started with a vision.
Early Adopters are not only made of HOW types, but These are also people that identify with the same vision, the same WHY.
Early Adopters are the backbone of a vision. They are the ones that identify with what we believe. They have the same following and they decide to opt in because they can somewhat see our vision, the picture that becomes clearer. They want to take part in this because we already believe what they believe. They will start to talk about your business, about your product, about your WHAT driven by your WHY, they will willingly promote your company and product because your WHY is the same as theirs.
Early Adopters do not really look towards having an optimal product or a bug-free product. They will help you improve what you do because they believe in what you do and why you do it. This is one of the ways they can participate. Early Adopters help promote a new, or existing, business and are the loyal followers of the vision driving it. To neglect them is to gradually ignore your following, your WHY.
The Early Majority is when your business starts booming, people are noticing you and they start to trust you. This is because of your promotional campaigns that advertise your WHY, but even more because of the Early Adopters that tell their friends about your business and how they believe in it. Their friends are most likely to become Early Majority members because, generally, people trust their friends about this great product. Slowly, but surely if your product is good enough, they will adopt it and promote it. Not at the same levels as Early Adopters, but still, Early Majority members offer more practical reasons for why to buy this product.
This brings the Late Majority into view. Members of this category may not really care about our vision or motivation. People in this category may have different drives for why they wake up in the morning. Late Majority members look to more practical reasons for our product, they most likely do not care what it promotes, they do care how it is useful to them. How this product helps them in their life and how it can help them achieve their own WHY, their own vision.
Finally, the laggards. These are the least interesting people regarding our WHY. They generally accept using our product, or similar products, because they have no choice or because absolutely everyone, they know use this product. The aunt that gave up texting because everyone is on Facebook now. The uncle that now uses a smartphone because classic phones are hard to find or are mostly useless these days.
Losing the Why
As a company grows and its product becomes popular it is quite possible to lose their initial motivation and vision. Things like profit, growth, investors, and pressure from investors may clutter the vision of a company and seek to apply manipulators and short-term gains over long term ones. The people promoting the company may not share the vision, the new CEO may think otherwise. A lot can contribute to losing our WHY.
Another side of the story is communicating our WHY. If our vision is to be seen and embraced by others we must communicate it, we must find a way to transmit it to others so they can begin to conceptualize it. Otherwise, the vision will only live in our heads, and it will be gone once we are no longer around. In this case we cannot really say we lost our WHY or that our WHY has been lost because it wasn’t there to be lost in the first place.
Communicating and maintaining out WHY is important not only for WHAT and HOW we do it, but for not going astray from it. Our WHY is the reason we get up in the morning, the reason we endure, it is what motivates and defines us in a large sense. Without it we can lose our sense of self, we would be less driven and somewhat lost.
After a while after we started working towards our WHY, more than on a personal level, we may encounter success. Success is measured by WHAT we do, our products, the palpable results of our work. In our success we can lose sight of what drives us, it depends how well we know our WHY and we started in the first place, or the people we work with do not quite get or believe in our WHY. For them it could be just a job, it pays the bill and that’s what they care about. This is not judgement of others, everyone is free to believe what they want, to have their own WHY, to do as they think it is best for them. This is just a fact. Not anyone on the street will believe what we believe. Not everyone will be, at least, interested in our WHY and even more so to promote and be part of it. If the people that do not share the same vision get to decide where the company is headed then the WHY will go fuzzy and it will eventually be lost This happened to Microsoft when Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, when Steve Jobs was let go from Apple and made Pixar. There are other examples. Once the visionary that drove the company leave so does the vision and the company starts to rot unless the vision is carried on, like the Olympic Torch, by the next people in charge. Succession can keep vision alive beyond just one person.
What is Your Why?
The book, at the end, asks the reader about their WHY, their motivation for getting up in the morning. I had to spend some time thinking and introspecting about the answer because I did not know the answer. Not what I think or would like my WHY to be, but what it really is, what I really believe in.
While helping others does sound noble and what we should be doing, that is not it. My motivation is more individualistic and selfish. I believe in growth, self-improvement that is. I cannot imagine myself mentoring others in their own self-improvement, I am just a provider of materials in these dreams. I don’t teach them anything or tell them anything. They do it on their own because the road of self-improvement is a lonely road. We make friends along the way, but our progress is 100% our responsibility. We are the ones that must make the climb. We cannot do it for others because they would not really improve. Like a butterfly coming out of their cocoon, they must struggle to ger out so the enzymes from the body would get pushed into their wings from the pressure they exert on themselves. If the enzymes do not fill the wings, then the wings are not heavy and strong enough the butterfly would not be able to fly. It would die.
If we “help” the butterfly get out of their cocoon, we would be killing them. Not right there on the spot, but we are condemning it to death. This is the same for self-improvement. I cannot “help” people out of their “cocoon”, they must get out themselves. Some do not even want to leave; they became familiar in the confides of what they know and decide to ignore the unknown. I cannot help these people; I can only tell them what I know to be true and relate episodes from my own experience and let them decide for themself.