Many of us were saddened this week to hear of the death of
Steve Jobs, the technology genius and innovator and co-founder of Apple. He was only 56 years old and lost and long
battle with pancreatic cancer. He and I
were born in the same month in the same year, so his untimely passing was something
that caused me to pause and reflect maybe more deeply than just out of respect
and admiration for his incredible accomplishments.
I reflected back a number of years ago when I had an opportunity
to meet and spend some time with Steve.
I was running a technology business at the time and we met in California not long after he had made the commencement
address at Stanford University. That
address, especially now, has become quite famous and oft-quoted, but at the
time it was still relatively unknown outside of the tech community and people
who were admirers of Steve.
When we spoke I noted he similarity, in my
mind, between his advice to the graduates, quoted below, and advice from
Jack Welch, another of the CEOs that I admired greatly and who I had worked for at GE. In his address Steve had said the
following…
“Your
time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped
by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't
let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
He made that statement in the context of his fight against
cancer, and how facing death had directed his focus in a different way. But what we talked about was a ‘rule’ that
Welch talked about often with the GE management team that had a similar context; “Control
your own destiny, or someone else will.”
So how does this fit in with SVdP Atlanta and our work.
Well, I think first you have to know something else about
Steve Jobs that you may or may not have heard over the last few days. And that is that he was the adopted son of
middle-class parents, that he dropped out of college after one semester because
of the financial burden on his family, and that he got fired from his first CEO
job at Apple; the company he had founded.
And yet, because of his intelligence, determination, focus, and drive he
became one of the richest men in the world who has left a lasting influence on
how we live our lives that will continue for generations to come.
How can we take that lesson and apply it to the people we
serve? How can we use that example to
support those who are struggling? The
Steve Jobs story could have easily gone the other way any of number of
times. The number of ‘forks in the road’
that he faced – one leading to success, one to despair – were numerous. Yet each time he ended up on the right
one. Why? Maybe there was some luck, probably there was
some timing, and definitely there was some determination and drive.
But ultimately the only one, the only one that mattered was
determination and drive. Steve Jobs
wanted to succeed. Steve Jobs refused to
let himself fail. And he won; big time.
When we deal with the people we serve we often can’t give
them everything they need. We can’t pay
all their bills, we can’t get them a job, and we can’t fix broken relationship and
bad life choices. But what we CAN do is
help them understand that they ultimately control their own destiny. They can make the changes and commitments in
their lives that will lead to success; success that is defined by their dreams
and their aspirations and their abilities.
I think that all too often we drown people’s dreams in our
own definitions and aspirations of what we define as success. And I don’t mean ‘we’ as individuals, I mean ‘we’
as society. We define success as a
college education and yet we have people with four year degrees and forty years’
worth of debt working for minimum wage at the gas station because they can’t
apply their degree to the real work of the world; yet they have creative
talent, craft skills, or labor skills that they would love to use and which
would offer the opportunity for a good living and a shot at real success. We have people living from paycheck to paycheck
because we define success as a 3,000 square foot house in a gated community and
a BMW in the driveway, We have people drowning in credit card debt at 29.99%
interest because we define success as each of the kids having a car on their 16th
birthday and designer label clothes to wear to pre-school.
There is nothing wrong with success. As long as it is something that is internally
defined and internally driven. During
this re-creation of the economic reality of our day we are going to have to
make sure that those we help (and we ourselves) understand that there is a 'new
normal'. And the new normal is that there
is no more normal. We will have to adapt
and change to meet the changing world at a pace that is even more rapid than it
has ever been. So it becomes that much
more critical that we make sure that we have the courage and the heart to do
what we know is right for us.
I’ll leave you with something else Steve Jobs said in 2005
at Stanford.
"You've
got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your
lovers. 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."
John Berry
CEO and Executive Director
