Steve Jobs has to be the greatest entrepreneur of his generation, doesn’t he?
Look at what he has accomplished.
His Apple Inc. briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in the world. He has revolutionized and transformed whole industries such as the cellphone and music businesses. His company has created products and services we never would have imagined a need for.
He’s made elegant design as important as the functionality of the products.
He has literally changed the world.
But it wasn’t a straight line to the fame and glory he enjoys today. Jobs overcame incredible obstacles and persevered.
He has created products that have totally missed the mark. Does anyone remember the Lisa computer? He was even fired in the mid-1980s from the company he founded. For most folks, that would have been the end of their entrepreneurial career. For all intents and purposes, Jobs should have been the answer to a trivia question on Jeopardy about who started Apple. Instead, he miraculously returned in the mid-1990s to lead Apple to unbelievable triumph in the marketplace.
His recent resignation as the company’s chief executive officer reminded us of his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. This speech is available on You Tube at http://tinyurl.com/JobsSpeech. In this speech, he reflects on what life events have taught him and their impact on his day-to-day life and his business. (The speech is just 15 minutes and is well worth your time to watch.)
From his speech:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Don’t settle.
These words ring loudly in our ears as a touchstone for all entrepreneurs to aspire to achieve every day because it’s so easy to settle.
The path of least resistance is to settle. The poor economy makes us settle. The sheer effort to run a business causes us to settle. Customers are too often all right if our business settles.
Unfortunately, settling is the reason why so many small businesses fail.
For us, the true genius of Jobs is not just in the cool and innovative products Apple brings into being but also, and more importantly, the philosophy by which he operates as an entrepreneur.
His mantra is pretty simple to understand yet very difficult to implement. It is communicated very succinctly in his commencement speech at Stanford. We’d sum it up this way: It’s about the passion for your business, it’s about never ever settling and, finally, it’s about never giving up, no matter how many times you get knocked down.
Our advice is watch the commencement speech and then spend some time reading the numerous articles that have been written over the past couple of weeks about his career and his impact on Apple and on business.
If we are going to pull this country out of the ditch we are in, we need more entrepreneurs following the sage advice of Steve Jobs to make that happen.
Pat Sisneros is the vice president of college services at Everett Community College. Juergen Kneifel is a senior associate faculty in the EvCC business program. Please send your comments to entrepreneurship@everettcc.edu.
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