Start with why

I Am a Failure
There are three months indelibly printed in my memory—September to
December 2005. This was when I hit rock bottom.
I started my business in February 2002 and it was incredibly exciting. I was
“full of piss and vinegar,” as my grandfather would say. From an early age, my
goal was to start my own business. It was the American Dream, and I was living
it. My whole feeling of self-worth came from the fact that I did it, I took the
plunge, and it felt amazing. If anyone ever asked me what I did, I would pose
like George Reeves from the old 
Superman
TV series. I would put my hands on
my hips, stick out my chest, stand at an angle and with my head raised high I’d
declare, “I am an entrepreneur.” What I did was how I defined myself, and it felt
good. I wasn’t like Superman, I was Superman.
As anyone who starts a business knows, it is a fantastic race. There is a
statistic that hangs over your head—over 90 percent of all new businesses fail in
the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of a competitive spirit in them,
especially for someone who defines himself or herself as an entrepreneur (hands
on hips, chest out, standing at a slight angle), these overwhelming odds of failure
are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking
that you’re a part of the small minority of those who actually will make it past
three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are,
driven by passion and completely irrational.
After year one, we celebrated. We hadn’t gone out of business. We were
beating the odds. We were living the dream. Two years passed. Then three years.
I’m still not sure how we did it—we never properly implemented any good
systems and processes. But to heck with it, we’d beaten the odds. I had achieved
my goal and that’s all that mattered. I was now a proud member of a very small
group of people who could say, with statistical proof, that I was an American
small business owner.
The fourth year would prove to be very different. The novelty of being an
entrepreneur had worn off. I no longer stood like George Reeves. When asked
what I did, I would now tell people that I did “positioning and strategy
consulting.” It was much less exciting and it certainly didn’t feel like a big race
anymore. It was no longer a passionate pursuit, it was just a business. And the
reality was that the business did not look that rosy.
We were never a runaway success. We made a living, but not much more. We

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had some FORTUNE 500 clients and we did good work. I was crystal clear on
what we did. And I could tell you how we were different—how we did it. Like
everyone else in the game, I would try to convince prospective clients how we
did it, how we were better, how our way was unique . . . and it was hard work.
The truth is, we beat the odds because of my energy, not because of my business
acumen, but I didn’t have the energy to sustain that strategy for the rest of my
life. I was aware enough to know that we needed better systems and processes if
the business was to sustain itself.
I was incredibly demoralized. Intellectually, I could tell you what I needed to
do, I just couldn’t do it. By September 2005 I was the closest I’ve ever been to,
if I wasn’t already, completely depressed. My whole life I’d been a pretty happy-
go-lucky guy, so just being unhappy was bad enough. But this was worse.
The depression made me paranoid. I was convinced I was going to go out of
business. I was convinced I was going to be evicted from my apartment. I was
certain anyone who worked for me didn’t like me and that my clients knew I was
a fraud. I thought everyone I met was smarter than me. I thought everyone I met
was better than me. Any energy I had left to sustain the business now went into
propping myself up and pretending that I was doing well.
If things were to change, I knew I needed to learn to implement more structure
before everything crashed. I attended conferences, read books and asked
successful friends for advice on how to do it. It was all good advice, but I
couldn’t hear it. No matter what I was told, all I could hear was that I was doing
everything wrong. Trying to fix the problem didn’t make me feel better, it made
me feel worse. I felt more helpless. I started having desperate thoughts, thoughts
that for an entrepreneur are almost worse than suicide: I thought about getting a
job. Anything. Anything that would stop the feeling of falling I had almost every
day.
I remember visiting the family of my future brother-in-law for Thanksgiving
that year. I sat on the couch in the living room of his mother’s house, people
were talking to me, but I never heard a word. If I was asked questions, I replied
only in platitudes. I didn’t really desire or even have the ability to make
conversation anymore. It was then that I realized the truth. Statistics
notwithstanding, I was a failure.
As an anthropology major in college and a strategy guy in the marketing and
advertising world, I had always been curious about why people do the things
they do. Earlier in my career I started becoming curious about these same themes
in the real world—in my case, corporate marketing. There is an old saying in the
industry that 50 percent of all marketing works, the problem is, which 50
percent? I was always astounded that so many companies would operate with

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such a level of uncertainty. Why would anyone want to leave the success of
something that costs so much, with so much at stake to the flip of a coin? I was
convinced that if some marketing worked, it was possible to figure out why.
All companies of equal resources have equal access to the same agencies, the
same talent, and the same media, so why does some marketing work and some
doesn’t? Working in an ad agency I’d seen it all the time. With conditions
relatively equal, the same team could develop a campaign that would be hugely
successful one year, then develop something the next year that would do
nothing. Instead of focusing on the stuff that didn’t work, I chose to focus on the
stuff that worked to find out what it all had in common. The good news for me
was there was not much to study.
How has Apple been able to so consistently outmarket their competition over
and over and over? What did Harley-Davidson do so well that they were able to
create a following of people so loyal that they would tattoo a corporate logo on
their bodies? Why did people love Southwest Airlines so much—they aren’t
really 
that
special . . . are they? In an attempt to codify why these worked, I
developed a simple concept I called The Golden Circle. But my little theory sat
buried in my computer files. It was a little pet project with no real application,
just something I found interesting.
It would be months later that I met a woman at an event who took an interest
in my perspectives in marketing. Victoria Duffy Hopper grew up in an academic
family and also has a lifelong fascination with human behavior. She was the first
to tell me about the limbic brain and the neocortex. My curiosity piqued by what
she was telling me, I started reading about the biology of the brain, and it was
then that I made the real discovery.
The biology of human behavior and The Golden Circle overlapped perfectly.
While I was trying to understand why some marketing worked and some didn’t,
I had tripped over something vastly more profound. I discovered why people do
what they do. It was then that I realized what was the real cause of my stress.
The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, the problem
was I had forgotten WHY. I had gone through what I now know is a split, and I
needed to rediscover my WHY.

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