A friend just sent me this nice quality version of me nervously asking Steve Jobs a question at All Things Digital (D5) a few years back. I asked him for his advice for entrepreneurs like me…on how to try to build an awesome company like Apple.
Transcript Of What Steve Jobs Said:
“Yeah, people say you have a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true and the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t any rational person would give up.
It’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, if you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.
And that’s what happens to most people, actually.
If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society, and the ones who didn’t, often times it’s the ones that are successful love what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough.
And the ones that didn’t love it, quit. Because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?
So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and, if you don’t love it, you’re gonna fail.
So, you gotta love it, you gotta have passion.”
[The video above cut off before he finished his answer but he went on to add the below thoughts which you can find in this (lower-quality) video: Steve Jobs & Bill Gates Answer Rob Kelly Question At D5 — you have to watch Bill Gates answer my question first]
Steve Jobs Transcript Continued:
“…And I think that’s the high order bit.
The second thing is, you’ve gotta be, you’ve gotta be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people.
And you’ve got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, how to make decisions without knowing people too well and hire them, see how you do, and refine your intuition,and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just build itself.
Because you need great people around you.”
By the way, that was the first time I had heard the term “high order bit.” Being non-technical, I had to look it up. Wikipedia’s definition:
In computing, the high-order bit (also called the most significant bit (msb)) is the bit position in a binary number having the greatest value. The msb is sometimes referred to as the left-most bit on big-endian architectures, due to the convention in positional notation of writing more significant digits further to the left.
