Steve Jobs & Apple – Brilliant 60 Minutes Interview

This is a great 60 minutes interview with Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs autobiography.  There are some great nuggets from Steve Jobs’ life, family, style and some crazy & Weird  twists and turns.  Then end of the interview focuses on how the iPad has changed the lives of families of and individuals living with autism. Really Good Stuff!

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Have at it. Oli

Steve Jobs Advised: You've Got To Find What You Love

You’ve got to find what you love – Text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer at Stanford University June 12 2005.


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories 

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be  adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. 

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. 

After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop  out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout  the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. 

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. 

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you 

started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with 

me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was 

still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. 

My third story is about death. 

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. 

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost 

certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. 

No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. 

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid- 1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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Exercising the power Of Leverage

I don't know what the future may hold but I know who holds the future - Ralph Abernathy

A couple of months ago I wrote an article entitled  ‘Fall into the Groove; Gain Momentum’ Check http://ow.ly/6ixE2 , I shared some thoughts about my observation that enthusiasm is the energy and force that builds literal momentum of the human soul and mind. It is clear that success requires first expending more effort to produce less outcomes, but over time, you get to build momentum that enables one to achieve more epic results with less efforts.

Which one do you prefer: linear growth or exponential growth? Do you want your progress to be at the same pace year after year or do you want it to be increasingly faster? I’m sure you prefer exponential growth. After all, it enables you to achieve more with less effort over time.

To achieve exponential growth, the key is to exercise the power of leverage. The more you use the power of leverage, the faster your progress will be. On the other hand, those who don’t exercise the power of leverage will need to work just as hard every time to get the same results

‘Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort’ ~ Charles J. Givens

Exercising Leverage:

I believe that leverage is so important that you should make it a part of your lifestyle. You need to live a lifestyle of leverage. That means seeking potential leverages constantly and using them whenever possible. To see whether or not you are living a lifestyle of leverage, ask yourself this question:

Do I achieve more with less effort over time?

The more you can answer yes to the question, the more you make leverage a part of your lifestyle. Here are two things you should do to live a lifestyle of leverage:

Creatively use what you already have to build new things.

Here the focus is on the present. Look at what you already have and find how you can use them to build new things. If you have a business then find what new businesses you can build based on it. If you have a machine then find other ways to use the machine. Think of what leverageable assets you should build.

Here the focus is on the future. Instead of looking at what you now have, look ahead and think of what you want to leverage in the future. This way you can start building those assets so that they will be ready by the time you need them. Without such a planning, years might pass before you realize that you have nothing to leverage. Start working now to make your future easier.

The ability to build leverageable assets (a term I learned from Investopedia) means  - The use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital, such as margin, to increase the potential return of an investment. Leverage is a good way to see whether or not a career is good for you. There are many people who just work year after year without ever building leverageable assets. Consequently, ten years from now they may need to work almost as hard as they do today to get the same results. Choose a career that helps you build leverageable assets.

The following is an incomplete list of leverageable assets you can build and use:

1. Contacts 

I once heard from my mentor that “Your Network determines Your Networth”. Your network is a great source of leverage. When you need something you don’t have, you can reach out to your network to see if someone has it. Even if you can do something yourself, chance is there is someone in your network who can do it faster and better than you.

To maximize your network’s leverage potential, you should know people from as many different backgrounds as possible. It won’t help you much if all the people you know have similar backgrounds.

Of course, to be able to extract value from your network you should invest in it first. Help people in your network sincerely. Yes, I repeat it, Help other in your network sincerely.

2. Knowledge and skills

When you already master something, you can use it to quickly learn related skills and knowledge. What you know becomes a foundation to build upon. For example, I learn from my Cousin Micah that in the programming world once you know a programming language it will be easier for you to learn a second language. Why? Because there are similarities between programming languages and you can use your knowledge of the first language to learn a second one. (Tech Speak)

There is a category of skills that has especially high leverage power: transferable skills. Transferable skills are skills that are useful across different fields. Some examples are people skills, time management (or, even better, energy management), marketing, and communication skills. You can use these skills in many different circumstances, so they are something you should pay special attention to. The more transferable skills you learn, the more leverage power you have.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings. ~Scott Adams

3. Passions

Just like you can leverage your knowledge, you can also leverage your passions. Your passions act like a power source that motivates you to go further and dig deeper than you would normally do.

So use your passions to your advantage. Follow them and tap into the energy they provide. Leveraging your passions helps you overcome the initial period of fear of failure on your way to success.

4. Achievements

You can use what you’ve already achieved to achieve even more with less effort. Let’s say you already build a successful business. You can use that business as a basis to build a new business. You may promote your new business to your existing customers. Or you may assign some of your staff from the first business to the second one. You may also use the equipment of the first business to build the new business. As you can see, there are many ways to leverage what you already achieve.

5. Money

Money has great leverage power as long as you use it wisely. Instead of spending the money you earn on consumable goods, reinvest a significant part of it. Use it to buy and leverage other people’s time and expertise. Use it to buy tools and equipment. Use it to experiment with new opportunities.

There you have it. Go ahead assess some of the assets you have now that you could leverage to build a new business or expand the existing one, attract a new job or bring forth some new in your life. Exercise the power of leverage.

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Don’t Give UP: Overcoming With Head, Heart and Soul Aligned

By ©Irene Becker, www.justcoachit.com 

 Imagine going from a trailblazing career as the CEO of a successful multi-million dollar company, with a track history of achievement and excellence and all the social and financial capital you needed to live your best life, to being reduced to the most menial and humbling of jobs.

Would you find it difficult? Would you find it impossible? What would happen if you woke up one morning to find everything that you had worked so hard to accomplish gone? What would you feel like if you did not have family, friends or a social net of any kind to support you in moving out of the black hole in which you fell?

My name is Irene Becker, and what you have read describes that tumultuous change that occurred in my life just prior to my 40th birthday. A change, and to most people a horrible life crucible, that took me from the world of having it all, to losing it all in what seemed like a blink. A change, a horrific act of violence and madness that catapulted me into a new world of the unknown, where I was forced to learn to build again from ground zero.

I had entered a new world where my singular focus was to show my two young children that from integrity, from values, from courage and from faith can come the power to heal a head, a heart, a body and to transform one’s life, and one’s world.

The wealth and success I had acquired came from many long hours of very hard work, and from a great deal of personal sacrifice. The destruction of what had been my life, the wealth I had once known did not start on that fateful night when my life was threatened and I fled with my children, $100, a credit card and a book of psalms.

 Because, “suddenly syndrome” is never what it appears to be. While it may make us feel good to think that the road to wealth is paved with overnight success stories, and we may think that the horrible life crucibles that take us to the depth of pain happen in a blink, they do not.

The seeds that we plant, are sewn every day in the way we live our life, the choices we make, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the biochemistry that drives our bodies, and the environment in which we live and work.

 The ability to live our best life has little to do with what we have, but depends on our ability to really excavate our true self, our authentic voice and use it to sing our best song, to listen to our higher self and know that we are living in alignment with our highest purpose.

While I had build great success and wealth, while I had accomplished so much, my true self, my authentic voice was unheard and hidden behind all that I had done, all that I had commanded, conquered and acquired. I had stopped listening to what I truly needed and wanted. Or, maybe I was never tuned into my real self. For getting up close and personal, getting naked with our true needs, our true desires is something that is perhaps the most difficult thing to accomplish in a world where we are socialized to strive for that which makes us feel powerful and validated.

In a world where more emphasis is placed on taking than on giving, on acquiring than on sharing, on accumulating rather than appreciating. In a world where we are so busy doing, that we seem to have forgotten that the most important thing we can do is to BE at one with our true voice, with our true purpose, with the source of infinite love and goodness that can take us into the Light.

I believe that there is a voice in every man or woman that can be heard, if we try to listen. It is the voice of wisdom, the voice of courage, the voice of faith that transcends time, space and motion. It is the voice that echoes in all human beings, all religions and spiritual paths.

If we can reach past what is and reclaim our authentic voice, we are rich. And, if not we spend our days, our weeks, our months and our years in the illusion of living better when we are simply doing faster and more than ever before.

Lofty words? Think again. Last year the cost of executive stress to American corporations exceeded $10 + billion dollars. The price that corporations paid for absenteeism, physical illness, mental illness, and accidents that were a result of stress among the best, the brightest and the highest paid and most wealthy of people. And, this insidious erosion of human passion, purpose and potential is not an American phenomenon, but one that the World Health Organization forecasts will be the major cause of disability in the world by the year 2020.

 Will you be a stress statistic or a success statistic? And, what does success really mean?

The passion, purpose, potential and power we truly need will never be found in what we have, because it is a byproduct of who we truly are, when we realize that the greatest power that we have is the power of love. But, love starts in learning to love our self, not for what we have, not for our title, net worth or other accompaniments of success but for our true self. Loving our self for the unique qualities and flaws that make us human, that make us special, that form our unique fingerprint.

 Loving our self because we do not have to hide the power of our heart under a bushel, nor to do we have to march to a distant drummer. We can learn to hear the beat of our soul, the beat of our true knowing, the beat of love that once found can rekindle a fire on the coldest day, and heal, rebuild and restore a life, a body, a soul that has been racked with pain, with abuse, or with despair.

 Love among the thorns is my story. It is a story of struggling against incredible odds to have it all, and losing it all. It is a story of how an act of madness, an act of violence that took me from the mountain of success to the valley starting my life from ground zero helped me to discover the greatest treasure of all. It is a story of change, challenge, horror, pain and great struggle that is all negligible in comparison with the gift of love, faith and courage that my children and I were able to touch, to feel and to share.

It is my hope, and my prayer that people who read this article will go on to find their true voice, to reclaim that unique spark of human goodness that is the only conduit to true greatness, success and fulfillment.

 The formula for success and fulfillment is eternal and timeless. It will not be changed by the unprecedented velocity of change, challenge, competition or the chaos that we face in our life, our work, or our world. Create value for others, and you shall prosper. Create value for others and you shall achieve a sense of passion, purpose and potential that brings you to your greatest joy.

Today, at this very moment we each have the potential to move past the desire to receive for the self alone, to stretch out of the comfort zone and look at the people in our personal lives, our jobs and our careers, the individuals with whom we share our lives and our worlds and ask…

 Simply ask, “How can I make a positive difference? How can I express my best self, my highest purpose? How can I create value for another, because in so doing I will create a large ripple of peace and prosperity that can change a life, many lives or even impact the world.”

Irene's work is a repertoire of customized peak performance services with a unique 3Q™ focus that has been instrumental in helping clients optimize, humanize and monetize passion, purpose and potential in their work and their lives.
 

Check out Irene Becker's Insightful Blog, www.justcoachit.com/blog or reach her at irene@justcoachit.com

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