Adventures in Entrepreneurship with Jeremy Hanks

Steve Jobs

I hope you watched that interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference.

While I watched it, there were 2 things that Steve Jobs said that I liked so much I typed them out so I could share them with everyone. Steve and Bill were asked by an attendee what advice they could give him to continue to find success at his 100 employee new digital media company. Steve said:

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true and the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, and you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being ‘successful’ in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, often times it’s the ones that are successful love what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit. Cause they’re sane. Right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it. So, it’s a lot of hard work. And it’s a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you gotta love it, you gotta have passion. And I think that’s the high order bit.

The second thing is you gotta be a really good talent scout. Because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you’ve gotta figure out how to size people up fairly quickly. Make decisions without knowing people too well. And hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition. And be able to help build an organization that can eventually just build itself, cause you need great people around you.

When he said those things, I said to myself, “Amen brother Steve!” Especially the part about having the passion. And perseverance. And even about how sane people quit. So I guess that means it’s the insane people that keep going then. And I’m still going, what does that say about me?

Finally, they were asked by another attendee about how science fiction deals with concepts like the metaverse, the Matrix, and other sort of far-out science fiction type stuff and what parts of this they thought would be a reality in the next 5-10 years. His answer was great:

I don’t know, and that’s what makes it exciting to go into work every day. Because as we talked about earlier, this is an extraordinarily exciting time in the industry. And lots of new stuff happening, so I can’t even begin to think of what it’s going to be like 10 years from now.

Great thoughts. Great time to be alive to watch all the extraordinary changes happening in the world. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs is one cool and wicked smart dude.

Popularity: 9% [?]

4 Comments; Filed under Entrepreneurship, Personal, Technology

Subscribe by [RSS] or [Email] to enjoy regular updates from my blog.