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How to find your passion
This week, a friend sent me an article about why “follow your passion” is bad advice. The article cites the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, whose author, Cal Newport, makes the case that the “follow passion” cliché is flawed. He explains that innate passion is rare and has little to do with why most people end up loving their work, or not. In addition, he says, following one’s passion can lead to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Newport contends that preexisting passion is not only exceedingly rare, it also should not matter. According to the author, one should work on mastering skills of one’s current job, rather than trying to find … Continue reading
A tale of Steve Jobs’ two visits to Stanford, and of “connecting the dots”
Though I do not recall the exact date in 1983, I remember distinctly a day when Steve Jobs came to talk to us at Stanford about his vision for the personal computer industry. It was before the release of the first Macintosh (which would come in January 1984); Jobs was already an icon of Silicon Valley, due to the success of the Apple II. That day at Stanford, he spoke to us passionately about how our world would change with what was coming next: the graphical user interface, an operating system based on windows and icons, the first computer that would truly be personal. I was in my second year … Continue reading
Steve Jobs was truly about connecting things
The past two posts, and perhaps the next few, take their inspiration from the (relatively) new movie “Jobs”, which I managed to see on one of my long airplane journeys. I say “inspiration” because this film made me curious again about some of its characters and stories; that curiosity led me to re-read Isaacson’s fascinating biography, and to do a bit of research on the Internet. It turns out that some of the people portrayed on the screen, the ones whose interviews I was able to find on YouTube, are not in complete agreement with Hollywood’s somewhat fictionalized version of the events, but that is not the issue I wish … Continue reading
Steve Jobs and the lessons of his early life experience
In my coaching and teaching, I often speak of the general public’s misconception that people who emerge as world or business leaders have some extraordinary experience in their past, a “crucible” that has prepared them for leadership roles. In fact, effective leaders are characterized not so much by their specific experiences per se, but rather by the way they learn to “process” their experience, to draw the lessons from whatever happens to them. In the case of Steve Jobs, we see clearly how much experiences and reflections from his early years colored his thinking and influenced many of the decisions he made in his business career. In the previous entry, we … Continue reading
