Steve Jobs: Icon of Optimism

Oct. 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Steve Jobs died yesterday at the age of 56.   His life and impact on American Business history is being compared to that of great American entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators including John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton.  

I will argue here today that Jobs was an icon of optimism.  My conclusion is not based on any transcripts of Jobs discussing his internal voices. Instead, it is based on how he lived his life.  His success is only a small part of the optimism story.  The big story is how he encountered and dealt with failure, took risks, had self-confidence in his own judgment, perseverance, creativity, and resilience when immersed in difficult circumstances.

To illustrate a life of optimism, I have organized some key events of Jobs' life and public record statements according to how they illustrate optimistic stamina.

Success

Yes, Jobs was incredibly successful, but success by itself does not an optimist make.  In fact optimism helps create happy endings more than it is the result of a happy ending.

   * He became a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion

   * He oversaw the creation of the Apple, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

   * He led the breakthrough that led to the graphical user interface and the mouse pointing device, now the standard for controlling computers.

   * He was there for the genisis of Pixar Animation Studios and teamed up with Disney to create “Toy Story,” the first full length animated movie to be made entirely with Computer Generated Imagery.

Failure

Jobs had his share of failures.  These setbacks never defined his life, but rather seemed to serve as a jumping off point for some new and better opportunity.

   * Apple III, introduced in May 1980 had a host of technical problems and never reached its potential to dominate the personal computer market.

   * Lisa was his next project, a computer workstation, which turned out to be short lived was intended to dominate the desktop computer market.  

   * From the ashes of these failures, the Macintosh was introduced to the world during the 1984 Super Bowl telecast.

   * In 1987, he left Apple after a dispute with his hand picked CEO John Sculley, only to return 12 years later to retake the company to its grandest heights.

   * NeXt was initially a failure and lost Ross Perot nearly 20 million.  Then the  NeXt machine was used as a prototype to design the world wide web in the early '90's, and by 1996 was sold for 430 million.

Living in and with difficult circumstances

Jobs embraced his difficult circumstances as inspiring and life giving.

   * He started Apple with friend Steve Wozniak in a garage in 1976.

   * He waged a long and public struggle with pancreatic cancer since 2004, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment.

   * He lived comfortably as a homeless person after he dropped out of Reed College in 1972. Didn’t have a dorm room, slept on floor of friend’s rooms, returned coke bottles for money to buy food, and walked 7 miles across town once a week for a good meal at the Hare Krishna temple.

   * He said about the homeless experience, “I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

He was always learning and looking for new ideas

Everywhere he went, his mind soaked up an idea and insight for later use.

   * In 1975, despite being gainfully employed, he and Wozniak began attending the meetings of a computer club, Homebrew, where they eventually presented the Apple concept.

   * At Homebrew, he was described as intense and tried to hear everything people were saying.

   * In a 1979 visit to Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, he saw the Alto.  Within 10 minutes he envisioned the utility of a computer controlled by a mouse pointing device, a graphical video display, and documents presented as if on an office desktop.

Risk Taking

He took many risks.  The first was the most dramatic.

   * In early 1976, he and Wozniak began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300 out of their own pockets. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

Process Orientation

He kept his focus on the next steps needed to accomplish the goal without worrying about what others thought of his dress.

   * “Toy Story” took four years to make while Pixar struggled.  He said of the process: “You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course.”
   * He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans.

Life goals/meaning/epitaph

His optimism led to a meaningful life seen by many.  He will be missed.

   * “A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”
   * In a Stanford speech, he stated that his life motto--drawn from one of the most influential writings in his young life, The Whole Earth Catalogue--was “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”  

http://www.drrussbuss.com/optimism-blog/2011/10/6/steve-j...

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