3 Great Lessons from Hazret Steve Jobs

In this so called modern era marks of Hazret Steve Jobs can not be avoided unless one is living in some pre-historic and non discovered region of the earth. Most strikingly although world wide web (www) was not discovered by him but it was developed on a computer known as Next produced by the company with same name and owned by Steve Jobs. Later his venture led to invention of wi-fi. Taking these two products down from shelves would immediately change this era from modern age to the middle ages.

I was reading a wonderful book about him entitled, ‘Steve Jobs -The man who thought different’ by Karen Blumenthal recently. Although whole book is wonderful but three lessons extracted by the author about Steve Jobs were amazing. I could not resist myself from sharing them here.

The first one is about focus. In fact Steve Job’s point of view in this regard coincides with that of Ibn Khaldun stated about 700 years ago. Ibn Khaldun wrote in his book Muqadimmah that time has come (!) when there is a great pollution of information. A lot of information is becoming available to every one. People are using it without knowing how to analyze or produce it. Steve Job also said similar thing while describing focus. He stated, ‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you have got to focus on - (however) focus means saying No to the one hundred other good ideas there are. You have to pick carefully’. He stressed upon rejection of non-related issues resulting in focusing to the required one. It is simple to understand as rejecting the non required and distracting issues would help one to concentrate and handle the one he/she should have been doing. 

Being easy said, it is not easy enough to implement. This is explained well by the second lesson explained in the said book i.e. ‘simple can be harder than complex’. This explains a lot of things why humans intend to make complex analysis, decisions and products. It is easy to do so because this involves a lot of constraints and dimensions and any related failure can be blamed on one of them or one of the unknown complex reasons. However once your analysis, decision and product is simple, it becomes more difficult to find a reason for failure or an issue to blame. Creating simple thing is difficult and so is defending it. For simple products if they don’t serve the purpose they are not of any other use! Thats why simple devices thought by Steve Jobs when served their purposes were hot cakes.

Lastly Steve Jobs believed that if someone does not keep planning for future he wouldn’t have any! It is also restated by some other experts as ‘failure to prepare is preparing for the failure’. One always need to plan for future and most of us may do it quite well. However the success comes to only those who dare to risk failures in their quest to implement those plans.

Lastly may I dare to disagree with Hazret Steve Jobs famous saying ‘dots are connected backward only’. This is true but there are other ways also to connect the dots for success. This issue I’ll be explaining hopefully in my next blog soon.