Gary Keller Interviews Simon Sinek

Do not roll your eyes

He brought up Gottman, and the finding that you can predict whether a couple survives within about five minutes. The tell is one partner rolling their eyes while the other talks. Contempt. Once it is there, it is usually over.

If you find yourself internally rolling your eyes when you’re talking to clients or colleagues, you should probably get out of the business.

Simon Sinek

Jason Abrams said out loud that he had just written down “don’t roll eyes.” The room laughed. That is the session in miniature. A very simple thing most people would rather receive as a framework than go and do.

What money actually buys

Gary pushed back for the room. People think if they just succeed hard enough, money handles the rest.

Money buys options. It doesn’t buy happiness. But it pays for the yacht to pull alongside it.

Simon Sinek

Biggest laugh of the hour. Gary told everyone to write it down. His point underneath it was that we are finite oriented, focused on what is in front of us, and blind to the fact that good things compound slowly.

The Friends Exercise, which is free

Gary asked how you find yours. Simon named the workbook and the coaches, then gave away the version that costs nothing.

What Simon’s friend eventually said was that he could sit in a room with him without talking and feel inspired. Do it with a few people and you get the same answer, because they are all describing the same thing you give the world.

Gary answered his own question

Halfway through he stopped interviewing and talked about himself. He had always assumed he was a business person. Then it struck him that he is a teacher, and a writer, and that looking back he had been doing exactly that since his teens without deciding to.

That understanding has been the filter for everything in my life since.

Gary Keller

Simon lit up, because it made his point. Define yourself as a teacher and the benefit of your work goes to other people by definition.

You can always tell who walks out on stage to sell books or get followers. And you can tell when somebody shows up to give.

Simon Sinek

Then he told the better story

Gary had gone out to teach others what he was doing. As long as he was involved they succeeded. When he left they failed. So he came back to Austin, pulled two of his first partners and his first administrative hire into a conference room at a law firm, and asked one question. Why are you in business with me?

He wrote every answer on the glass wall, then made them look at it and told them a lot of these words mean the same thing, so pick one. The two that bookended the list were being a win win person and taking everyone with you. That became the belief system the company still teaches.

It is the Friends Exercise, run on a business, years before Simon named it. Gary noticed that himself and called it life changing.

Courage comes from safety

On what leadership gets wrong, his opening word was “most.” We heroize individuals, prioritise metrics over meaning, and promote high performers, which only proves they were good at the job. The learnable skills are unglamorous. Feedback, hard conversations, conflict, listening.

Then the strongest stretch of the hour. When they tried to identify what separates Navy SEALs from the rest of the military, the answer surprised everyone.

They love each other more than others have the capacity to. They fear letting down their teammates more than death.

Simon Sinek

Courage is not a personality trait. It comes from feeling safe, and feeling safe comes from knowing somebody has your back. The threshold is lower than you would guess.

All that’s required is one person who says, I got you. If this whole thing goes sideways, I’ll still be with you.

Simon Sinek

He tied it to companies running layoffs over a missed projection. Profitable, just not as profitable as promised, so you lose your job. Anxious people do not take risks, do not offer their best ideas, and do not look out for each other.

The thermometer, and his own correction

Gary asked the practical question. The Infinite Game sounds great, but I still have to make X contacts today.

Simon’s answer was university volunteers phoning for scholarship money. Numbers were down. Consultants rewrote the scripts, which helped a bit. Then somebody brought in an actual recipient to talk to the volunteers for five minutes. Same scripts afterward, and the numbers went through the roof. They were no longer calling for a thermometer on a wall. They were calling for a kid they had met.

He said “take all the thermometers down,” then corrected himself in front of the room, which I appreciated.

I was wrong about thermometers. It’s okay to measure progress. You’re just not doing it for the thermometer.

Simon Sinek

Three things you can actually do

Gary’s list, taped to the desk

He admitted he was not naturally a good friend. His fix was mechanical. He wrote down the people he wanted to be close to, taped the list to the top of his desk at home, and works through it. Text, email, call. A habit rather than an intention.

Simon’s birthday calls

Your calendar already tells you. He calls close friends and sings, badly and on purpose. One friend told him at the end of the song that he was the first person to call all day. Not the first to sing. The first to call. Everyone else had texted.

The eight minutes

This is the one I will use. His friend Maria had been through something rough and had not asked for help, except she had, in texts that read like all her other texts. He could not tell the difference.

She had read that connecting for about eight minutes is enough to make somebody feel less alone. So they agreed on a code. If either needs it, they text and ask, do you have eight minutes. Anyone can leave a meeting for eight minutes. You are not solving anything. You are making the person feel like they are not on their own.

On social media, which ties this to the rest of the event

Near the end came a question about social media, noting that around 90% of the room had said it does not come naturally and they only do it because they feel they have to.

If you don’t like it, everybody can tell. The people who are good at it do well because they enjoy it. The challenge is not to avoid doing it. The challenge is to do it in a way you want to do it.

Simon Sinek

He tried copying people with bigger followings, hated it, and it did not work anyway. The metrics he cares about are not followers. They are how many people trust the work and how many forward it, because forwarding it means spending your own credibility on it.

Which sits neatly next to what Amy Porterfield told the same room about social being a bridge rather than a destination.

Ned

Gary’s last question was what was on his mind that morning.

Simon paused long enough to apologise for it. Over the weekend a close friend had introduced him by video call to a man named Ned, who had ALS and could no longer speak. The next day another friend joined and they called Ned again, three old friends of twenty years, and Simon watching.

That morning he woke up to a text saying Ned had died.

I woke up with gratitude, and just how fleeting life is. Most of the stuff we stress about is really stupid. And I hate that it takes death or tragedy to remind us of that.

Simon Sinek

Asked why he came at all, given how much he turns down, he gave two reasons. The values, and that a room full of business owners is where he can do the most good. The world he imagines only happens if other people go and do the work.