Entrepreneurship week: taking inspiration from Steve Jobs, Apple Computer
As the world marks Global Entrepreneurship Week with plenty of events to inspire and motivate people to build new businesses, we think it is appropriate to remind ourselves of the inspirational talk that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, Inc., gave in 2005 at the commencement address to Stanford University students in California.
His speech touched the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs around the world, and as before, we recommend you spend the time to read it. It is both motivational and educational for potential entrepreneurs as well as management teams going through a tough time in their start-up phase.
While it shows the resilient nature of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the experiences that Steve Jobs encountered are not very different to those that many entrepreneurs in that region as well as in Europe and other parts of the world have gone through. For example, in the 1980s, 1990s and in the 2001 recession, many top managers or even company founders may have been made redundant or fired. Now we have the latest round with potentially tens of thousands of people being affected once again.
In the corporate world, you may want to stay put in the current climate, but then again, you may just be wondering how to break out and start on your own, now being a good time to start building the foundations of your venture.
Steve Jobs’ speech tells us there is no scope for negative thinking. If there’s an idea, if there’s motivation and a good business plan and team behind it, then everything else should be secondary. His speech tells us that if you have a dream, then there should be no reason why you cannot pursue it, assuming you have made all the right calculations.
In his words: ‘stay hungry, stay foolish.’ Good advice.
We present a summary of his speech below.
The early days
In his speech, Steve Jobs talked about the early days, on why he decided to drop out of college, and when his only warm meal came from a weekly trip to a Hare Krishna centre. It also talked about what inspired the first Apple product, what it felt like being fired from Apple, about trusting in yourself, being persistent in pursuit of what you want, to learn to grasp the opportunity rather than waste time, and about staying hungry...
Doing a start-up is about going through the downside as well as the upside, and many successful entrepreneurs have had to encounter both the ups and the downs.
Trusting in yourself
In the first of three stories that Steve Jobs recounts, he talks about how the many unexpected events in his early life shaped the experiences of his future business life.
For example, how after deciding to drop out of college because of personal circumstances, he then attended a calligraphy class at Reed College. In this class he says he could never have imagined how it could have any practical application in life. But when he came to designing the first Macintosh computer, he used his experience from 10 years earlier in that calligraphy class to develop multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts.
The point of this story, he says, is it was impossible to know this or connect the dots looking forward when he was in college, but that it was very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Quoting from his speech, “..you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the 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.”
Persist in what you want to do
In the second story, he tells about the need to persistently pursue what you really want without settling for less. The background is his creation of Apple Computer, the public humiliation he received when fired, and then his creation of NeXT which subsequently was purchased by Apple and sees Steve Jobs back at the helm of its revival.
We felt that the words he used were very powerful and rather than paraphrasing have quoted this section directly here:
“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.”
He says that he felt that he had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. He said, “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.”
This is when he started NeXT and Pixar. The latter went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is considered the most successful animation studio in the world. And then, Steve Jobs says, “In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.”
“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.”
Grasp the opportunity – don’t lose any time
In his third story, Steve Jobs talked about the need to make timely decisions and grasp the opportunities as they happen. He recounts this as the fear of death had come upon him when he was diagnosed with cancer.
He said, “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.”
His message here is, “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.”
The full speech is published in the Stanford Report on June 14, 2005.
Comments on this story? Send an email to the editor: address - editor [@] thechilli.com
 |
|
|
© Chilli Publishing Ltd 2008 |
19 NOV 2008 |
