Simon Sinek – “motivational speaker, author and organisational consultant”
A while ago on Facebook, a viral video did the rounds. It was about the “millennial” subset of people. Wikipedia has a a definition in place for them:
“There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends; demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years. Millennials are sometimes referred to as “echo boomers” due to a major surge in birth rates in the 1980s and 1990s, and because millennials are often the children of the baby boomers.”
We sure do like putting labels on things. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the video here it is:
I’ll give you a quick summation of the content of the video:
- Millennials are self entitled, egotistical and ignorant
- Millennials are horrible people because they use their phones all the time
- Millennials grew up in the age of the “participation trophy”
- Millennials are unable to form meaningful relationships
You get the idea.
It’s all very convincing too. Mr Sinek has a background in marketing and advertising and it shows. The way he speaks is fluid and full of flashy jargon designed to sell you on the idea that he knows exactly what he’s talking about. He just wants to shed light on the subject right?
Of course he does!
Wait a minute – it also turns out that Mr Sinek happened to have authored a book on this very topic about the same time this video went viral.
My take on this video is pretty simple.
It’s pure bullshit.
I won’t get into the reasons here because it’ll make this post very long. My point here is that he has seemingly created or fed into a problem that people believe exists and then given us the “answers” to that problem, as long as you shell out $30 for his book. His strategy is create the problem, sell the answer.
IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.
Part 2 of this post comes tomorrow, where I talk about how this ties right into nutrition.
See you tomorrow fam.
Happy Monday!