In the early days, he didn't know what to do with his life. He followed his intuition and followed Zen way of life, calligraphy, electronics etc. All without any notion of practical application in his life. What he called dots that only could be connected backwards.
Albert Einstein was bored.
After graduating, he couldn't find a teaching post. He worked at the Patent Office. The birth of theory of relativity was on a public transport as he was day dreaming as he was commuting to work.
Later on came hard work.
If we were not bored, we will not have the chance to listen to our intuition and inner voice. They are audible when we slow down. We will try different activities when we are bored. We will only daydream when we are bored.
Roxio made 52 attempts, took over 8 years and almost went bankrupt before rolling out the all popular angry bird sensation.
Pinterest just become the third most popular social network after struggling for many years and when it started, it had "catastrophically small numbers".
Groupon is a listed company now but it almost died before it rose to the top.
WD-40 is called WD-40 because the previous 39 experiments to create the right solution failed.
Thomas Edison made over 10,000 attempts before inventing the light bulb. He said famously:
I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.
Omgpop's owner only had $1700 in his bank account. He had a whole lot more after his company was bought over Zynga. Before Draw Something, there were more than 30 other games. It is not a one-hit-wonder as well.
iPod was introduced 24 years after Apple II. That's why Steve Jobs said:
People say you have to have a lot of passion for what your doing and it’s totally true and the reason is ah is because its so hard, and if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard, you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, your not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it ah – you’re going to give up!
When we got to know about successes, it all appears so easy. Those people are so lucky. Well, we forgot about how hard they have tried, how much they have sacrificed and what they have to go through.
Steve Jobs said we've got to have passion in what we do because it is real hard. If we don't love it and have fun doing it, we will fail because that is the only sane thing to do. We don't like to do things that are hard.
I personally think that "passion" is an overused word. Successful people tend to sum it all up with "passion". And I think many (including myself) mistaken that "passion" comes first, that we've got to love this thing before we start doing it.
I believe it starts from "intuition". Don't think too much. Just follow our hearts and start doing. From here, Mark Cuban and Malcolm Gladwell rightly put it that the more we do, the better we get. When we are good at something, people look up to us as experts, we have recognition, the thing will get easier and easier to do, it gets more fun and we love it more and that's passion. So it's:
Intuition -> Action/Create -> Fun -> Passion
Of course, there are people who know their passion from the beginning, like Connie Talbot, Charice and Mozart. They are the prodigies. For the majority of us, I believe it's action first.
Also this series that describe the evolution of personal computing is also interesting:
What I learned from the documentaries:
Big organisations stifle creativity (unless the culture when it started is pro-creativity)
IBM's processes reduced risks to their lowest. They had their fair share of approving authorities. That was why they were slow in adopting innovation. At first in seeing personal computers as the next wave. Then they were also slow in reacting to Compaq who reengineered IBM's personal computer and made one that was cheaper and ran all software that could run on IBM computers.
Xerox's management set up Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to seek innovation to protect their business from the death of printed reading material. Steve Jobs said the innovations at PARC could have let Xerox became the IBM or Microsoft of that time. However, Xerox's management took notice of none.
Idea, belief, action and some luck is needed to make it
Paul Allen bought the operating system to sell to IBM for $50,000. Tim Paterson had built it based on the CPM by Digital Research. It was not an original idea! IBM had almost gotten CPM if they were not turned down a visit by Digital Research's receptionist. That was luck! From there, Bill Gates built upon it, added features he had seen from the Macintosh and built the multi-billion software empire.
Steve Jobs got the idea for the graphical user interface for the Macintosh from Xerox PARC. He added to the Macintosh design the belief that he had for personal computers. He was also lucky to have gotten the Xerox PARC researchers to show him their brainchild.
As fate would have it, the Altair inventors, the VisiCalc inventors, Tim Paterson whom Paul Allen bought the operating system from gave it all up. A stroke of luck could have made them millionaires or billionaires like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and other pioneers of this Information Technology revolution.
When in the flow, you don't think you are working hard, you think you are having fun
Bill Gates described that they were working really hard but it was fun. They would code non-stop, grab a bite and sometimes so engrossed in discussing codes during meals that they forgot to eat and go back to coding. Bill Gates even forgot to bathe! It was still fun!
I don't care about right or wrong, I care about success
Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were ruthless in their pursuit for the ultimate personal computer. They squeezed their workers really hard and they made enemies, but they don't care. Appears that that's the key to success. Sometimes, we are just too concerned about what others think about us.
Be aware, read the signs and don't rest on the laurels
To stay relevant, we have got to keep check of the direction that the wind is blowing. All once successful, Excite lost it, Netscape lost it, IBM lost it.
At the beginning, Steve Jobs said Wozniak and him merely wanted to create personal computers for their friends - not to create a billion dollar company to make lots of money. Derek Sivers created a website to help his friends sell their CDs. Then CD Baby grew big and he sold it off at $22 million. I believe the key to be a successful insurance agent is to genuinely want to educate and help people to achieve adequate protection in times of need. The successful property agent genuinely wants to help people to find the most suited accommodation and take care of all the administration work such that the transaction goes through smoothly. The best hawker wishes to serve up food for the soul. Money should be last of the reasons. photo credit: EricGjerde via photo pincc
He did not believe in governing according to opinion polls. Government’s job is to govern and deliver what it promised, even if some policies were unpopular. Voters can then decide whether he had delivered at election time every five years.
Many of us have problem describing what we have done in our monthly progress reports to management. Some of us can't even remember what we had for lunch at dinner time! Simplicity in life? No extraordinary or phenomenal events? Nothing exciting? Well, I think Steve Jobs had a fulfilling life which is why (I believe) he parted with 3 words: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow". If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs ... took drugs. dropped out of school. had a singer that he unwaivering adored - Bob Dylan. travelled to India to learn more about Zen Buddhism. chose to eat fruits and vegetables for his meals and didn't bath. had some illustrious romances - got a child from the first one, had a short one with one that was very much older than he was and finally found the one that could complement him in many ways. peddled Blue Box with Wozniak and almost got caught by the police. played silly tricks on friends with electronics. started Apple, NeXt and Pixar! created Apple II that over 2 million loved. created the Macintosh that many love. created iPhone that over 100 million (and counting) love. created iPad that over 15 million (and counting) love. revolutionalised the music industry with iTunes. revolutionalised computer-animated film industry with Pixar. became a millionaire at 24. became a billionaire at 40. had 4 children. had cancer. Got well and got it again. Well, I think that's a lot of things that he had accomplished in 56 years. How much can we achieve?
I have to post this video. This is from a personal hero of mine - Steve Jobs.
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. - Steve Jobs, 2005
Connecting the dots Nobody knows what will happen in the future. All decisions, all people that we meet and all events that happen tilt us towards a certain trajectory. It is like archery. The fine adjustments made just before releasing an arrow have pronounce effect on the target board. It is paradoxical. We are not sure what our decisions will lead to but they have huge impacts on our lives. I believe that's when we have to lean in, to follow our intuitions, to listen to our hearts and take action after action, after action. About love and loss Steve Jobs advised us to look for our loves both in work and in lovers. When we love what we do, we will do great work. When we do great work, we will be satisfied with what we do. For those of us who have not found what we love, let's keep searching, don't settle. About death Don't wait, he said. Our time is limited. Don't worry about what others say of us. Listen to our hearts and follow our own intuition. I was asked the question, "Do you like what you are doing everyday?" in a seminar years ago and the reply was: "If no, why are do doing this? You've got only 1 life...". That really got me thinking. A mentor once asked me, "Do you think Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs work for money?". Of course not. In fact, Warren Buffett's pay package stayed around $100,000 yearly for a very long time. Being billionaires, their fortune can easily last them and their children for a lifetime. They are certainly not in it for the money, it is the passion for their work.
Besides the iPhone, iPad also had its share of critics when it was released: “For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlighted as “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad” (no multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name came in for ridicule in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene products and maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on Twitter that day. There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be the mainstream,” he told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with the iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” He continued to insist that the Microsoft approach of using a stylus for input would prevail. “I’ve been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,” he told me. “I will eventually turn out to be right or be dead.” Excerpt From: Isaacson, Walter. “Steve Jobs.” iBooks. Frankly, I also thought it was an enlarged iPod when I first saw Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. It wasn't until I got my hands on it before I experienced the magic. You cannot experience the intimacy that it brings about, between you and the Internet, between you and your photos and videos, between you and your books, until you hold an iPad in your hands. So the iPad was put down and was sneered at, following the iPhone. You have to find the courage to press on. This is tenacity. photo credit: Dennis Burger via photopincc
Didn't know when the iPhone was first released there were so many heavy weight negative comments. How not to believe in those negative comments? I believe it must be through very strong belief in what one is doing. In the case of Apple, they must have believed strongly in their product. They were building something that they themselves wanted to use. The road to success is not just full of unknowns. There could be adversaries who want to steal our dreams. photo credit: kevin dooley via photopincc
