Book Review: Start with Why

Recently I’ve been questioning again what my why is in my career as a programmer, and at the same time I came across Start with Why and got hooked by the introduction. I read around 5 chapters before deciding to stop, because it felt too repetitive, the core content (the golden circle of why, how, and what) was already covered in earlier chapters. In the book, the writer says that a lot of people or companies start making their products from “What” instead of “Why.” This later gives them harder competition, because the product doesn’t really have a vision or character. The book emphasizes that a company needs to start from “Why” when creating a product. The prime example in the book is Apple, when Apple started making products, they thought about how to make things easy for their users, and that shaped both their products and the way they market them.

Companies need to focus on the people, the customers, instead of only talking about their own product, because customers care more about themselves than about your product. They notice your product because they’re interested in it, or because it seems aligned with what they want. One example from the book: a tech company released an MP3 player and marketed it as having 5GB of storage, while Apple advertised their MP3 player as “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Apple might not have had the best technology at the time compared to competitors, but because they thought about their customers’ ease of use, people were more interested in carrying 1,000 songs, because that’s actually what they wanted from an MP3 player.

Here’s an example of a product made starting from What → How → Why:
“We sell this fresh orange juice. It’s extracted from fresh oranges and uses stevia as a sweetener. Take this to help your healthy diet.”

Now flipping it to Why → How → What:
“We believe diet doesn’t need to make you suffer, in fact, you need to enjoy it as part of your daily life. That’s why we created this freshly extracted orange juice with a zero-calorie sweetener, to freshen your days.”

The reason I dropped the book was due to its repetitiveness. I no longer saw any value in continuing to read it. Besides, I feel like this is more of a marketing book; switch to “why” and you might get better text for marketing. Especially while writing this book review, I feel it reads more like “marketing text or a campaign.” Surely, focusing on “why” will have a good impact, I guess, but I’d personally like to know how many people truly grew or got helped from reading this book. Just discovering your why won’t magically make you the next Apple. It might just help you wake up in the morning and enjoy more of your work.

In my opinion, this book isn’t practical. Up until chapter 5, I didn’t really find any guide on how to find my why, the book just kept telling me I need to start from why. I expected some guidelines, tips, and tricks on how to actually find my why and how to incorporate it into my work or product. Also, since I read the translated version, the Indonesian translation wasn’t good for me. I also checked Goodreads, and some people said to just watch the TED Talk, it covers most of Start with Why anyway.

Thank you for reading this far, have a nice day.