Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I've been going through Steve Jobs' Biography in audio format because I'm driving to my
office quite a few days in a week now, which means I need to do something with that time.
I've been listening to the biography of Steve Jobs; and it's just been amazing! It's one
of the most amazing biographies that I've listened to or read.
Inside this amazing book, it reveals some pretty amazing things about Steve Jobs and
how he made it from basically a dropoutÉ actually, from birth right throughout his
last days on earth. I'm almost through the book, about three quarters through, and it's
just very amazing, very inspiring!
A couple of things that really hit me inside the book as I was listening to it. These things
weren't said explicitly; these are just sort of conclusions that I came to.
The first one is - when you look at Steve Jobs' life, basically it screams out that
it's okay to be awesome. So, number one for me is that it's okay to be awesome.
What do I mean by that?
When you look at everything that Steve Jobs has done in terms of his business endeavors,
it's been awesome! Especially when you look at his latest products like the iPhone, the
iPad, and iTunes; the whole thing that he did with the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air.
It's just amazing! It's awesome! "Awesome" is truly the word to describe it.
Steve had no excuses for being awesome. In fact, he had this thing called his reality
distortion field where he would distort people's reality to get them to see this awesomeness.
And he wouldn't budge for anything less than awesome.
So the message that I got from that is that it's okay to be awesome. Though sometimes
I know that a lot of us, including myself (perhaps, myself especially), I get these
ideas of awesomeness, about an awesome product, or an awesome new project, or an awesome new
business and then I go and listen to everyone else.
And I get turned off by what everyone else says. There's criticism. There's strange ideas
that would say that it wouldn't work. All this sort of mumbo-jumbo. The bottom-line
is that I don't actually go ahead and do this awesome thing. And that's wrong, in my view.
We're here to create awesomeness!
So that's the first thing -- it's okay to be awesome!
The second thing that I learned from the biography of Steve Jobs is that it's okay to be unreasonable
about getting to that awesomeness.
You might have heard some quotes floating around along the lines of it's only the unreasonable
people who cause any kind of progress in the world. Because they're unreasonable that they
don't let anyone else put them down. And they're unreasonable about their goals, projections
and expectations. Because of that, they can change reality.
Steve talks about the best way to predict the future is to create it. This is what it's
about to me as well.
First of all, it's okay to be awesome. And second, it's okay to be unreasonable about
getting to that awesomeness.
So you've got to be unreasonable about getting to that awesomeness; that means that you will
have to upset some people in the process. And that's hard because some of those people
would be very close to you.
But when you think about the payoff when you get to this awesomeness -- it's not about
yourself anymore, it's about something way bigger than just yourself.
Look at the incredible change in the world that we've had because of the products we
have from Apple. I mean, I'm bit of an evangelist for Apple because I've been so influenced
and it has benefited my life so much.
Think about your own life and your own business. How can you be awesome? How can you be steadfast
and unreasonable in getting to that awesomeness?
I think to me those are now the two messages from that book as an entrepreneur. I wanted
to share that with you inside this video.
Tell me what you think. Leave your comments below. Even though I might not follow your
advice or your suggestions, I always love reading your feedback. Quite often I also
do respond to them as well, especially soon after the video gets published.
Also remember to subscribe. I look forward to seeing you inside my next video.
Talk soon!