Simon Sinek in his video "Leading a Fulfilling Life" says that fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. When we go out with our friends for dinner, we sit around and somebody says “I love my job” and everybody goes “Oh my god you're so lucky”. That statement should be the norm, not the exception. We have a responsibility ourselves to find a place where we want to work and with the people that we would like to work with, rather than just taking the biggest salary. We have a responsibility to take care of the people around us and we have a responsibility to speak up and ask our leaders to work with us and create a place where people want to come to work, where there's a safe space for us to take care of each other and feel taken care of. So, there's mutual responsibility all around. When you say, “How do we do it," it requires constant work, it's like how do you stay healthy. It’s a striving, similarly, the pursuit of fulfillment is a striving. This is why there is a distinction between fulfillment and happiness, to seek happiness is a lot easier because happiness is fleeting. You get a new job, you're happy, you get a raise, you're happy, you win a new piece of business, you're happy and that feeling goes away. Nobody walks around with a sense of happiness for a job they got four years ago. But, fulfillment is different, you can feel fulfilled by your work even if you're not enjoying it today, you can feel fulfilled by your work even if you're having a bad day. It’s more infinite and it's more constant. Therefore, fulfillment is a striving, it's a lifestyle and you do all these things like having a just cause, building trusting teams, and working to be the leader you wish you had. In other words, you see your life as a life of service to those around you, whether you're in a company, whether you're an employee, whether you're a leader, or if you're just a parent, you see your life in service. What makes a community highly functional is that every single person within that community sees their responsibility to serve the community rather than standing around demanding the community does something for them.
In response to the question “Do you need to know who you are to be able to give the most of yourself?”, he says that it's a chicken and egg question. You can pursue these things and you can trust your gut and people who trust their guts they kind of know, they just don't have the words for it, and understanding the “Why” gives them words. There is a little metaphor called the “Celery test” that really captures it nicely, we're constantly seeking advice on how to build a better family be it a better parent, build a better business serve our community better, whatever it is, we’re constantly seeking advice and we read books and we read articles and we ask friends and we talk about it. So, here the question comes “Which advice do you follow?” So, the analogy is, you go for dinner at somebody's house and it's a dinner party or something and everybody's got some advice about what you should do if you want to build a great community. Somebody says you need to use MNMs, somebody else says, rice milk, somebody else says, we use kitkats and somebody else says Celery. So, you go to the supermarket and you may end up following all the advice and buying everything but the problem is you may or may not get value out of some of those things. Therefore, it is important to know your “Why”, let's say your “Why” is to always be healthy and only do things that protect the health of your body and you get all the same advice from all the same wonderful people and the question is, “Which advice do you follow? and it is super easy, you only buy rice milk and celery and when you're standing in line with only celery and only milk in your basket, everyone can see what you believe. So, when you know you “Why” not only do you have better clarity and more confidence when you make your decision but you also have the opportunity to scale it a lot easier because by telling everybody what you believe, they can go shopping for you and you don't even have to be there.
