Start with Why

This is neither to paraphrase nor parrot Simon Sinek’s wonderful book Start with Why, but rather to think about why “starting with why” is nearly always the smartest and most efficient way to figure out nearly anything. As a teacher, parent, coach, or mentor, inculcating the habit of “starting with why” is the best thing you can do for anyone.

So let’s start with “why”.

A fundamental rule of pedagogy is this: Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. This is attributed variously to Benjamin Franklin and to Xun Kuang, a Confucian philosopher, and maybe to others. No matter, the truth is that the more you get involved in, and personally process, the patterns and procedures and connections and all the moving parts, the better you understand the subject matter in a holistic way, and the more likely it is to stick and be useful. That’s the reason it is so beneficial to ask “Why?” again and again until you finally own the whole process. It’s how you teach yourself important things.

The better you understand “why”, the better you can begin to solve “why not”. It may be that something is not working properly, or it may be that there is a better way, or it may be that there is a workaround for a missing component. This is true for a mechanical gizmo, it’s equally true for a sales campaign or a broken relationship.

Good lawyers ask “why” all the time. It’s one thing to observe that there is a setback of ten meters on a certain parcel of land, it’s quite another to ask “Why?” and winkle out that the property adjoins a brownfield full of noxious industrial waste. It was one thing to accept that the common law did not recognize a tort of invasion of privacy, it was another to ask “Why not?” and discover that the policy reasons of a century ago no longer make sense. That opens the door for arguing (successfully) for change.

“Why” is the most important question to ask about matters which control our behaviours, or the behaviours of others. For example, someone may be a two-pack a day smoker or refuse to eat shellfish. Understanding the reason (or lack thereof) will be the key to change, if change is wanted. Perhaps you don’t eat lobster because you think it tastes gross, or because it once made you deathly sick, or because you are a committed vegetarian, or because you once had a pet lobster, or just because you’ve never had the chance. Whatever the reason, in your mind and subconscious there is a hard road-closure barrier that says, “NO LOBSTER!!!” If you can sort out how that came to be, you can first of all decide if you want to change or not, and if so, you have the clues for dealing with change. But that’s really beyond my expertise and you would want to talk to someone like my friend Nathalie Plamondon-Thomas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6w7GgmcFJM) , who deals with self-improvement through getting
to the root of your hangups.

All that said, there are a few areas of life where “why” only makes things more difficult. The gender of nouns in French, for example, probably has some abstruse explanation buried deep in the history of the language, but even if you knew the reason it would be of little or no help in figuring out which nouns take le and which take la. Why a forest should be la forêt and a drill should be le foret is just, well, “one of those things”. Once, when I was trying to find some pattern to remember the gender of French nouns, a kindly but exasperated professor told me it was simply a “matter of faith”. He was right. At the end of the day, one learns noun genders because, just like rules in English or any other language, “it just sounds right”. And perhaps that’s the best explanation for “why”!

In my coaching and advising of professionals, my favourite question is “Why?”, because in understanding the reason you do what you do, the better your chances are for change and improvement. That’s something that anyone can do, but as with so much human endeavour, it is often the case that a new set of eyes and an outside perspective is the magic ingredient for cracking the “why?”

And why wouldn’t you?