Here is a brief excerpt from one of Andrea Kates‘s blog posts. To read the complete post and check out other resources, please click here.
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Every time I meet an especially fit person, I’m prone to ask them, “What’s your secret?” I also have to admit that part of my fascination with biographies of accomplished individuals stems from a very basic urge to discover what it was they did that I could do to yield the results they achieved. Would an “early to bed, early to rise” lifestyle transform me into a renaissance man like Ben Franklin? Would adopting a vegetarian diet help me become more Gandhi-like?
So, when I read Walter Isaacson’s 630-page book, Steve Jobs, I sought answers to the basic question, “Which combination of intakes fed his appetite for invention and yielded the type of talent that many of us would like to emulate?” In other words, what was the Steve Jobs “diet”?
What do business leaders working for large companies need to understand about how he juggled diverse groups of talented individuals to drive relentlessly toward a new vision? How can entrepreneurs and mavericks craving an insider’s view of what it takes to spurn traditional rules “eat what Jobs ate” to transform their garage band level ideas into innovative products with mass appeal? And what can everyone with even a touch of pirate within include in our daily regimen to fuel our never-ending, Steve Jobs-like zeal for invention?
Without attempting to over-simplify a complex life or reduce a 630-page book into too handy of an at-a-glance list, let me present what I believe comprise the basic elements of the Steve Jobs “diet”—the core ingredients that seem to have fed Jobs’ inner engine:
1. Love of tinkering.
From a very young age, Jobs sat at his dad’s side at the car-fixing workbench. He migrated to tinkering in the world of electronics, cutting his teeth on assemble-it-yourself kits for making ham radios and “other electronic gear that were beloved by the soldering set.” Being situated in Silicon Valley exposed him to neighbors who worked in holographs, lasers, and other new technologies and a high school teacher who introduced Jobs to transistors, coils, and circuit boards.
2. Dues paying.
Despite a reputation for being an overnight sensation or a rule-shunning maverick, the truth is that Jobs paid his dues. He gained experience (working for minimum wage or worse) at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Atari where he was witnessed the early days of computing and game design and began to understand the link between technology and consumer preferences. For example, Atari’s Star Trek game was reportedly so simple that the only instructions were, “1. Insert quarter 2. Avoid Klingons.” Those lessons informed Jobs’ eventual views on elegant, intuitive product design
3. Seeing the world in binary terms. Steve Jobs had a reputation for being harsh and quick to judge. The dark side of that tendency was an interpersonal style that we might not want to include in our daily diets—being overly dismissive of people considered to be “bozos” and being described as caustic and aloof. The bright side of a black and white view of the world is a clarity of focus that seems to have led to remarkable results—he could call a failure a failure and aggressively redirect resources and attention toward the projects that he viewed as true winners.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Andrea Kates is the founder of the Business Genome® project and author of the visionary INC Magazine and 800CEORead bestselling business innovation book, Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge. (To read my review of it, please click here.) As a business strategist, facilitator, and speaker, Andrea has led more than 250 business innovation initiatives for global corporations, entrepreneurs, and organizations including…
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