What Is Your Why?

Have you ever found yourself in one of those conversations with a four year old when they respond to everything you say with “why?” This is a frustration that many of us have experienced. The child comes to you with a question. You provide the best answer you can come up with and then the child just says “Why?” You respond with a fuller explanation hoping to make your answer make sense for the child and then once again you get “why?” Again you try to clarify your answer and you get still once again “why?” This chain only ends when either you give up in frustration or the child becomes interested in the toy you offer up as a distraction.

Children ask us why because they want to have a better understanding of the world around them. When children are young they ask lots of questions. I am told that children stop asking us questions when they stop believing that we have the answers. Today that can happen as early as ten or twelve years old. In many ways though we too function like twelve year old children. We stopped asking questions long ago. Perhaps it is because we think we now have all of the answers. Or maybe we are sometimes too embarrassed to ask the question because we don’t want the world to know that there is something we do not know. Or maybe, we just remember back to the days when we too were four years old and some adult got frustrated with our unending round of asking “why?”

I recently read again the famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche “He who has a why can endure any how.” This came up once again today in a conversation with a friend and colleague when we were talking about the day to day pressures of work. The pace of our days has become so hectic that we spend much of our time in reaction mode. The current buzz word in the business world is “I work 100 hour weeks.” I have no idea as to what happened to the old badge of the workaholic who worked 80 hours each week. I don’t put in 100 hour weeks and so it is difficult for me to imagine what that must be like. However, just a simple calculation tells me that you would have to work over 14 hours each day, every day in order to work a 100 hour week. Since most of us are not the CEOs, this also means that we need to drive ourselves to and from work each day so let’s factor in just an hour of your time for your daily commute. Also, assuming that you have a really bad diet (exclusively fast food) you would still need about one and a half hours each day to pick up and eat your food (I recognize that some of us work while we eat). As for personal hygiene tasks, let’s give that a total of an hour each day (potty breaks included given how badly you would be eating). That would leave you about six hours to sleep every day. So now the question I would ask is “Why?”

I guess that if you are the CEO of a large company your “why” is to grow the business or to create shareholder value. Maybe you work in Silicon Valley and you are creating the next groundbreaking technology that will turn your stock options into a billion dollars. But you are more than likely just an average person that is somehow caught up in the sense of importance and status you get from saying “I work 80, 90, or 100 hours a week.” Whatever need is being fulfilled by this super human effort, it is time to stop and ask “why?”

Now the truth is that very few people actually work 100 hours a week. In fact, there are few of us that actually work for 60 hours each week, and I will save for another day my discussion of how few of us really do put in the 40 hours for which we receive our pay. But, no matter how many hours you actually work, have you spent any time lately making sure of your “why?” Whether you work for yourself, or work for a small company, or work for a large corporation, sometimes work can be hard. If you are self-employed you deal with cash flow problems and worry about how you will generate the next deal. If you are work for a company you worry about getting the work done that has been heaped upon you. Some of us are working with psychopaths that are making our lives miserable. And then there are those of us that are just working at jobs that are not stimulating or challenging. No matter what situation you find yourself in today, you need to take the time to really understand your “why.”

In order to answer the question we need to go beyond the immediate. We need to not just stop at the simple answers like how much money we need, or we have bills to pay, or even because we can’t afford to lose our job. I love to quote the old saying “what profits a man to gain the world, yet lose his soul?” You need a bigger “Why?” Your “why” must make a difference in your life or in the lives of those you love. Your “why” must be filled with passion. Why did a person like Martin Luther King risk his life? It was because he had a dream. His dream was his “why.” Why does a fireman run into a burning building? It is because their “why” is to save just one life if possible. Why does a mother shield her child with her own body when danger strikes? It is because her “why” is that she values the life of her child more than her own. These are the kinds of “why” that matter. These are the kinds of “why” that makes the risk, or the pain or the challenge make sense. These kinds of “why” don’t translate to money, or pride, or status. These are the kinds of “why” that makes a difference in the world. These are the kind of “why” based on established values and character.

Why did you get up this morning? Why are you working so hard? Why didn’t you have time for dinner with your family? Why did you spend one-on-one time with your child? Why did you not stop to say I love you? Keep asking this question. Take the time to figure out why. We all need a “why” so that we can endure our “how.” Taking the time to identify your “why” will keep you on the path you have chosen for your life. Knowing your “why” makes the how worth every step of the journey. Commit your “why” to writing.

There is so much power in the answer to that very simple question. I guess that we all need to wonder why?