"Motivation"

October 5, 2011

“I sit in a cold, dark room with the frail mid day sun outside now almost being an accomplice to the cruel cold winds banging on my window. I am covered with a quilt but I can not quite understand why I am so overcome with despair at this very moment; last time I checked it wasn’t an effect of cold or the winds but then perhaps it can be due to what I have just read on the webpage that is opened in front of me.”

For those who remember, on 5^th October 2011, STEVE PAUL JOBS, the man behind the Apple revolution died and became forever engraved in the memory of human kind. The human race will be forever indebted to him and you very well know why. I personally was never a big follower of Mr. Jobs while he lived, while I did keep up to date with the latest developments in apple but I could never appreciate the personal greatness of this guy but then after his death, somehow, something changed. I was now looking him up in Google, reading articles on him in Wikipedia and other websites and even my Desktop had his young photograph as wallpaper. I was suddenly all for Steve Jobs and I hated myself for not being so while he was alive. Now, he is someone I look up to, someone I idolise.

Honestly we may never be able to do the kind of stuff he was able to but if we can understand even a minimal portion of his life’s philosophy, his MOTIVATION; it may very well hold us in good stead for the rest of our lives.

What do you think is the motivation of such humungous achievers like Steve Jobs? It cannot be money, otherwise won’t they stop at their first billion, it can definitely not be fame, otherwise the magnitude of their achievements would be measurable, the buck would stop at FAME but it does not. So what is it that drove Steve? Before we move forward with this discussion I have included below Steve’s Stanford address of 2005, I am very sure you might have had read it, it is in fact one of the most quoted and inspirational speeches and even if you haven’t had the chance to read it as of yet, it’s okay. Let us go over it once and see what Steve said. I did try to edit it and leave out the irrelevant parts but I could not edit much, all of it is so good and so relevant!

STANFORD ADDRESS 2005 BY STEVE JOBS

“I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories -

The First Story is About Connecting the Dots
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My Second Story is about love and loss
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2-billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out.
What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was an awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. 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.
My Third Story is About Death
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue — created by a fellow named Stewart Brand — which was one of the bibles of my generation. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Now out of the many inspirations, many positives, many points that can be taken out of this excerpt, the one I am going to talk about is the one Steve makes when he says that he dropped out of college after the first 6 months. He did not see the value in the work he was doing so he stops doing that work and switches. Now don’t you see his motivation? Don't you get the whiff? Steve Jobs was MOTIVATED by his WORK. He LOVED doing what he did, he was passionate towards it and that was his motivation! Now for example if you sit on a desk in front of a computer screen checking some accounts and if you love doing that, if you are passionate towards it, wont you want to do it more? Obviously you would. You would be motivated to sit more and more behind that desk and work more and more on your computer and check more and more of those accounts. You would make one hell of an accountant because you will find your MOTIVATION in your PASSION toward your work.

POINTS OF PONDERANCE-

1.       Do what you LOVE doing. DOING WHAT YOU LOVE is one and probably the only SOURCE of INEXHAUSTIBLE MOTIVATION.

2.       Find your source of MOTIVATION, the thing YOU LOVE. Keep looking until you find it, make it your life’s IMMEDIATE AIM.

3.       Above all, TRUST YOURSELF, if you think you are a mediocre individual, STOP THINKING THAT WAY; you are a ‘soon-to-be’ GREAT ACHIEVER in the field ‘B’ who is currently stuck in the field ‘A’ (which is not designed for you). All you have to do is find your field B (maybe it is being a DOCTOR instead of a STOCK BROKER). #WhoKnows?

P.S. Please buy your copy of Walter Isaacson's Biography of Steve Jobs and read it; it’s currently a TOP PRIORITY read on my list as well.


Because people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world; are the ones who do. – Steve Jobs