How knowing your ‘why’ can help you win in business?
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. — Simon Sinek
Understanding the reason why you choose to do something is the first step to doing anything successfully.
Entrepreneurship is something many of us decide to pursue for one reason or another. It can be extremely rewarding but as the old saying goes…
Nothing good comes easy.
Entrepreneurship looks glamorous on instagram but speak to almost any self made entrepreneur and you will quickly find out that it’s probably one of the most difficult things you can ever decide to do.
Take creating content for instance. It takes an average of 22 months for a youtube channel to reach 1000 subscribers. Thats almost 2 years! and you are still not guaranteed any type of success or income.
Over 835, 000 new UK businesses were registered in the last year and 80% of those businesses failed.
What is it about the ones who succeed?
In this article we will be discussing the reason why having a ‘Why’ is so important and how it can make or break anything and everything you decide to do with your life.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how — Friedrich Nietzsche
Money is not enough.
Your ‘why’ is not a stagnant statement. It evolves overtime as you reach the next stage of your life.
Patrick Bet David discusses this in his video “The Evolution of your why?”
There are four stages in which your ‘why’ evolves.
- Survival — Your why is to make sure you can feed yourself and pay your bills. This is where your job is useful and you feel good about having a job when you need to find a way to survive.
- Status — Now you have an income and have freed yourself from the survival mode you usually end up wanting to better your lifestyle. You may decide to get a car or graduate from having a room in a shared house to getting your own place, now your why becomes to increase your status. Both personally and socially.
- Freedom — Your basic needs are taken care of and you are now living pretty comfortably however now you feel like all your time is spent working and you don’t really have much time to enjoy anything. Your job begins to feel tedious and you begin to get into that cycle of unmotivated Monday’s and feeling that elation on a Friday afternoon.
This is usually the point when people begin to consider entrepreneurship as an option to gain that freedom. The idea of working for yourself, choosing your own hours and making more money starts to excite you.
4. Purpose — You quickly realise that the freedom you hoped for in entrepreneurship isn't as easy to get as you thought. You quit your 9 to 5 job to start working 8am till 11pm. You now have less time than before and way more responsibility.
So what drives you to continue this journey and not go back to that secure job?
Entrepreneurship must be approached with purpose and once you know your purpose your whole being will refuse any other option (unless you completely run out of money of course).
Survival, status and freedom is not enough to keep you going on this path. Purpose allows you to do the boring parts of your work with focus because you understand why it needs to be done.
Conclusion
At times on my entrepreneurial journey when things got hard. I asked myself ‘why can I not just be content with a usual 9 to 5 where my day is basically planned out for me. I know what I’m getting paid at the end of the month and I can leave my work AT work and not bring it home on the weekend.
I realise that there are things I want to achieve in life that require me to take this journey and I’m willing to sacrifice as much time and energy as I need to.
Whenever you feel like giving up remind yourself of the reason why and I promise it will give you the motivation to get through anything.
