The Compass I was Carrying: Finding My Way

I was aware of Simon Sinek. Watched a few clips and videos where I heard him speak. Never read his books until last year when an ASQ member leader suggested we read Start With Why. That night, we went around the table discussing why ASQ. I wanted to read the book but I didn’t.

My instinct shifted after the sample on Audible. I wasn’t looking for inspiration or a corporate rallying cry.

No, I needed something sharper. I desired a tool that could cut through my own personal assumptions. So I skipped the origin story and went straight to the practical work of Find Your Why.

You do not open a book like that expecting comfort. You open it knowing you are about to confront yourself. You expect excavation.

Before long you are taken down to the studs.

The only surprise was how much structure I had built on foundations I had never bothered to name.

The book forced me to articulate the purpose I had been living without language.

Somewhere in that process, two lines were scratched out on a nearby notepad.

A why was uncovered.

To challenge assumptions and elevate thinking so the impossible can become possible.

To know excellence and to make excellence known so the future is worth looking forward to.

These lines were real. They were mine.

Why I do what I do.

But they were still not the center of me.

They were and are the expression of something deeper that had been shaping my life long before I wrote them down.

I thought it was a hunt for truth.

A near primal need for integrity in myself and my work.

As the excavation continued I dug deeper until I found it.

One word.

Responsibility.

A human being is answerable for what he does with what he has been given; in work, in thought, and in life.

That is the center of my sphere. Everything else is support or scaffolding.

Truth matters because I am responsible to reality.

Craft matters because responsibility must take form to be witnessed.

Quality matters because responsibility must be repeatable and transferable.

Faith matters because responsibility precedes any earned comfort.

Love matters because responsibility always costs.

The book did not install that conviction. It simply forced me to stop pretending I did not know it.

Once I named it, I could finally see how it threads through the silos of my life. Not as separate identities, which it can seem to be, but as different arenas where the same center of being is continually tested.

At Triplett, responsibility shapes how I solve problems, build capability, and refuse to hand-wave complexity.

In ASQ Rochester, it drives me to raise standards in ways the community can feel.

At home, it guides how I parent.

Through MattyThinks, it is the voice that challenges people to think harder, see deeper, and stop outsourcing their own interpretation.

Integration is ongoing. The silos are real. But the center is no longer in question. Things are clearer now than when we first began.

If you feel the pull to understand your own operating system, not the one you inherited or the one you perform, but the one that actually drives you,

Find Your Why is worth your time.

It will not do the work for you.

It will make the work more uncomfortable and eventually unavoidable.

On the other side of that work, the world does not get easier.

It gets crisper and clearer because you finally found the compass you have been carrying in your baggage all along.