What "Leaders Eat Last" means - Simon Sinek

What "Leaders Eat Last" means - There's a funny story that goes along with how we came up with the title of this book and we are all to blame.

Here I am writing a book about the importance of working with people, interacting with people, and human relationships, and yet the way I and the publisher interacted was we would send emails to each other with title suggestions.

Every now and then we'd get on the phone but it was mainly done through email. Somebody would send a list of their favorite and you know somebody would write back "That's junk, I kind of like that one" and it was a labored horrible process. No one ever, we never agreed, it was just talking at each other, and by coincidence, I happen to be walking past the publisher's office and decided to stick my head in and say hello, went upstairs and we sat down and within I think 30 or 40 minutes we had a title that we all fell in love with.

And what you realize is we can tell an idea to someone over email but you can't interact. And if you think about how ideas really happen it's not presentation, response, presentation, response. It's an interruption and backward and forwards and battling and saying no, no, no, that's not what I mean and it's messy. And it's the messiness that cannot happen over an internet connection, over email because everything is exact over email. It can happen over the phone but it's so much better in person when you get to see someone's body language and you see the frustration and you try and re-explain yourself.

And we told each other stories as opposed to telling each other what we think it should be and the story that I told was not being able to understand what made the Marines so amazing at what they do. I sat down with a Marine Corps General, General Flynn actually, who wrote the foreword for the book and I said to him, "What makes the Marines so great?" And he looked at me and said, "Officers eat last." And it sort of struck me that if you compare that to the business world, in the entrepreneurial world, entrepreneurs are always told "pay yourself first," "look after yourself first" and yet I'm being told by this Marine General that it's the complete opposite.

And there's a symbolic gesture but more importantly there's there's an importance to it. There's a photograph I saw you know in these Kenya shootings that just happened not so long ago we had the amazing experience that a photographer happened to be in the building. Usually, we see the aftermath and here we now have photographs of the actual shooting going on. And there's one photograph that was in the New York Times that both haunted me and inspired me to this day. It haunted me and inspires me I should say. And it's the photograph of a mother and the sound of gunshots lays herself on top of her child and you see this picture of a mother lying on top of her child and you realize that's what it is, that's what leadership is. That when there is danger it's not protecting myself but it's rather willing to put myself in harm's way to protect another.

That's what eating last means. It means that I will give the very, the very essence of life, food, and water, I will give it to the person I love first so that they may live even if it means I eat less and that's what "officers eat last" means. It is symbolic but it is also very real and real leadership, real leaders, I've even given up the terminology of good leaders and great leaders. You're either a leader or you're not a leader. That's it. Real leaders, biological, and anthropological leaders are mothers who instinctively without weighing the pros and cons of the bad things that may happen to them throw themselves on their children. That's what leadership is. Do we believe that our leaders would throw themselves on us, you know if they heard gunshots? If the economy shook would they quickly throw themselves on us? That's what "leaders eat last" means. It is very literal. It is very, very literal.