The ‘Five Whys’ Strategy to Uncover Your Life’s Work
How to get to the root cause and find your work that matters most
I’ve been doing some soul-searching lately and part of the process was looking deep into my core values and goals. If you don’t know where you’re going you’ll never get there, right?
I went to work, journaling-out my ideal day and forging the major themes of my future (one of the reasons I chose the writer’s path). I spent a long time developing what I thought was a respectable list.
But everything changed once I discovered the five whys.
I was listening to a podcast about the Toyota company. Famous for their methods of lean manufacturing and almost zero-error production, Toyota also has a secret weapon for root cause.
Originally intended to uncover manufacturing problems, the five why root cause analysis is a deceptively-simple tool you can use to get to the root cause of ANYTHING.
You ask ‘why’ five times.
That’s it. Nothing else to it. The only way the method works is if you answer the questions honestly. We’ll walk through an example in a minute, but first, why does this method work?
If you ask the question once, you’ll get a surface answer. Why do you want to quit your day job? To become a full-time author…
