Could this be the real key to living an inspired life?
by Paul Dunn in People+Organizations | 1 Comment | Add your comment

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You know how it is. You meet some people and they just radiate.

Their face looks like it’s seriously alive — almost lit up. Their posture is (usually) erect. They have a certain ‘air’ about them.

And when they speak, irrespective of the volume at which they speak, you lean in to want to here what they’re saying. You notice they speak in specifics, not generalities. You notice their words convey certainty.

You notice they don’t criticize and you feel their optimism. You get the sense that these are people who jump out of bed each morning. They are indeed inspiring. And you become inspired by them too.

So what is it that creates this, what is it that gets them jumping out of bed where others roll over when the alarm clock rings.

And you can sense, can’t you, that companies are like this too? Some, like Apple for example or Air Asia, just seem to be able to create a ‘buzz’ where others drown in ‘fuzz’.

Friend and author Simon Sinek has decoded the answer for us. In his brilliant book, ‘Start with WHY’, Simon effectively defines the ability to live an inspired life as the ability to be crystal clear on your own ‘why’ — the very thing that drives you forward.

Another friend of mine put it this way recently, “you really can achieve anything when you have a big enough why.”

And the ‘why’ is NEVER about making money or making profits — those things are results — they come FROM the why; they’re not the why itself.

Take Air Asia’s Tony Fernandez as an example. His ‘why’ was (and is) to bring travel to people who previously could not even contemplate travel — to widen the horizons of people if you like. And his why, like Richard Branson’s remains pretty much the same.

Branson has a classic why, ‘to shake things up, to do it with fun and disregard for the status quo’. He owns 300 companies now. And yet each one has that same ‘why’.

So what we do might change, but our why, once we’re really clear on it, never does.

And the clearer your own why becomes, the more people you’ll attract.

It’s so crucial to understand that. As Simon Sinek puts it: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy WHY you do it.”

And once you’re clear on your own why, you’ll never be concerned with ‘converting’ people to your cause or to your product or service. Simon Sinek expresses that this way, “The goal is not to do business with everyone who needs what you have; it’s to do business with those who believe what you believe.”

So of course, here we are talking about ‘why’ so it’s fair that I let you know my ‘why’ — the thing that gets me jumping up out of bed in the morning. It’s this: To give your business the power to change our lives.

We’ll talk more about how to do that in the next issue of WOW Insights. Stay tuned (and find your why — it’ll be one of the most important things you’ve ever done).

ABOUT THE COLUMNIST

Paul Dunn is now known worldwide as the ‘Wizard of WOW’. He’s a best-selling author, a creator of successful international businesses and his audio and video programs are now in use by over 156,000 businesses around the world. He is passionate about giving back to Social Causes to increase the level of joy in our world. He serves as Chairman of the revolutionary Buy1GIVE1 (www.b1g1.com). He gets up every morning to, as he puts it, ‘give businesses the power to change our lives.’

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