My gadgets - computer, tablet and phone - all have washi tape that cover the cameras. Yes, including the front camera of my phone coz I don't take selfies anyway. 🙈😂 Why? Coz I've heard that with the sophisticated technology nowadays, someone could actually control your phone's camera or microphone and take data anytime. And it doesn't help if you've seen an episode of Black Mirror. 😱🙈
Then last weekend, I read this article from The Guardian entitled "Are your phone camera and microphone spying on you?". According to the article, if you have installed any app that allows you to do voice calls, video calls and send images, and gave that app permission to your camera and microphone, that app could technically do the following:
Access both the front and the back camera.
Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.
Take pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.
Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.
Livestream the camera on to the internet.
Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.
Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.
Scary, right?
The article also goes on to cite real-life cases on how other parties could collect data from you including the government and hackers.
What could you do? Make sure to only download apps from reputable developers. But even if they are from reputable companies, you don't have to give the apps permission to your camera or microphone the entire time if you only use the app for other purposes e.g. just reading content or sending text messages. Then, in the few times when you need to use the app/s for voice or video chats, or to send images, you can temporarily give access to the specific app to your camera or microphone. It's a bit of a hassle but it may be all worth it for privacy and peace of mind.
The thought of colonizing a planet used to be pure fantasy… just a theme for sci-fi movies and comic books. But guess what? There’s a real person who’s stated life purpose is to turn humans into space colonizers. Elon Musk. One of the richest men the world with a net worth of USD12B as of September 2015 based on Forbes.
With the innovations Musk's companies have produced, Musk is the closest to a real-life Tony Stark. He has revolutionized the aerospace, automotive and solar industries like no one had since the Wright Brothers.
Reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance gave me peek into Musk's life story.
So who is Musk? What is his life story?
He’s the man behind SpaceX, a company that builds affordable rockets in the US. Why did he focus on affordability? Simply put, his analogy was why build a Ferrari for every launch when it was was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick?
SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Its USD60 million per launch cost is much less than Europe’s, Japan’s, even Russians' and the Chinese. (One player for example charges USD380 million per flight.)
In November 2012, just a few months after it started shipping, the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year out-beating eleven other vehicles from companies such as Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Subaru in terms of raw speed, mileage, handling, and storage space. And it could be recharged for free at Tesla’s stations located in highways across the US.
Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it. While owners sleep, Tesla’s engineers tap into the car via internet connection and download software updates. How cool is that?!
Several months later, Consumer Reports gave the Model S its highest car rating in history—99 out of 100—while proclaiming that it was likely the best car ever built. The Model S was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired.
America had not seen a successful car company since Chrysler emerged in 1925. One year after the Model S went on sale, Tesla had posted a profit, hit $562 million in quarterly revenue, raised its sales forecast, and become as valuable as Mazda Motor.
In October 2014, Musk unveiled a supercharged version of the Model S with two motors—one in the front and one in the back. It could go zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. The company had turned a sedan into a supercar.
Musk isn’t technically the original founder of Tesla but he just bought into the company in the early stages (incorporated in 2003, the original founders were Eberhard and Tarpenning and they named it Tesla Motors after Nikola Tesla, the inventor and electric motor pioneer). But as what people say, without Musk’s money, marketing savvy, engineering ingenuity, and leadership, the innovation may not have unfolded the way as it did.
When Musk accomplished these 2 feats - SpaceX and Tesla - analysts started comparing him to Steve Jobs who had successfully claimed similar achievements in two different industries (a new Apple product hit + a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year). In Musk’s case, there was even a third feat - SolarCity - started in 2006, it is now the largest installer and financier of solar panels for consumers and businesses. In 2014, SolarCity was valued at close to $7 billion. Whoa...
And do you know what made Musk get into solar energy? It just made sense to him since enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface in about an hour to equal a year’s worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.
Brilliant mind. It makes one curious how his mind is wired. And why ordinary mortals like us don’t have thoughts like that. Hahaha….
Anyway, before telling you how his mind wired, some may remember Musk in his early tech successes. In 1995, he had a company called Zip2 (described as a primitive Google Maps combined with Yelp) which Compaq ended buying in 1999 for USD307M (where Musk got USD22M).
His next startup was a payment solution called X.com but he ended up buying another payment startup called Paypal to consolidate with X.com (again, he wasn’t the original founder of PayPal; he just bought into it). eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for USD1.5B and being the biggest shareholder, Musk got a lot and that’s what he used to initially fund SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. But it wasn’t an easy ride as most of his companies took several years to perfect the inventions and start making money.
So what makes Musk special? What was his growing up years like that made him what he is today?
Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 (his grandparents and parents were born in Canada but they moved to South Africa).
When he was a kid, his parents thought he was deaf because when people spoke to him, he seemed to be in trance and had a distant look in his eyes. But according to Musk, in those trance-like moments, he was able to concentrate on a single task ... he could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity like an engineering drawing produced by computer software. Wow....
Musk also loved to read. After school, he would go to the bookstore and stay there from 2pm to 6pm to read. When he ran out of books to read at the library (around 3rd or 4th grade), he started to read Encyclopedia Britannica. And since he had a photographic memory, he remembered a lot of facts. At the dinner table, when one of his siblings would wonder aloud about the distance from Earth to the Moon, Musk would say the exact measurement at perigee and apogee. (I can’t even remember these terms! Wahaha…)
Musk was 10 when he saw a computer for the first time in a mall and got awed, and soon got his own computer. At 12, he designed a video game about alien space fighters he called Blastar and which was featured on a trade publication in South Africa.
(Side note: His gift on being able to study something new and put all the details together is very much still there. When SpaceX was just starting, Musk and team went to Russia to buy a rocket but the sellers wouldn’t budge in to the price he wants. He told his team that they could just build their own rocket and presented a document detailing the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket! Wow...)
Growing in South Africa, Musk was exposed to apartheid. He was bullied too - very badly. He mentioned in the book that he even got a nose job when he was an adult to repair the damage bullying did to his face.
His classmates in South Africa remember Musk as likable and quiet but not considered as one of the smartest. But the reason for this was Musk didn’t have interest in subjects that didn’t make sense to him where he was ok with just getting a passing grade. But for subjects like like physics and computers which he found important and useful, he got high grades. In his own words:
There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A. I can remember failing subjects in like fourth and fifth grade. Then, my mother’s boyfriend told me I’d be held back if I didn’t pass. I didn’t actually know you had to pass the subjects to move to the next grade. I got the best grades in class after that.
At 17, Musk left South Africa for Canada. He spent the next year working a series of odd jobs around Canada like tending vegetables, shoveling out grain bins and cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill.
One activity which Musk likes to do together with his brother is to read the newspaper and identify interesting people they would like to meet. They would cold-call these people to ask if they were available to have lunch. Among those that they called was a top executive at a bank. It took six months to get a sked with this bank executive but the 2 made an impression that this bank executive ended up offering Musk a summer internship at the bank and became his trusted advisor. His exposure during his internship greatly influenced him to do his tech startups (Zip2 and X.com) and the rest is history.
That is Musk's life story in less than 2,000 words. :)
So what else is in Musk’s pipeline other than turning humans into an interplanetary species?
The latest software update of Model S gives the car autopilot functions. The car has radar to detect objects and warn of possible collisions and could guide itself via GPS. “Later, you will be able to summon the car,” Musk said. “It will come to wherever you are." Wow. Tesla’s third-generation car, or the Model 3, due out in 2017, is expected to be priced at around USD35,000 - a milestone that would officially make electric cars truly mainstream. Tesla has also begun modeling a type of submarine car that could transition from road to water. Double wow. SpaceX, on the other hand, is developing reusable rockets. Instead of the conventional disposable rockets which break apart and crash into the sea, SpaceX is testing rockets that can return to Earth on a floating pad at sea or precisely land back at their original launchpad. Imagine, rockets that can be used over and over again for trips to space (just like planes!). Reusable rockets are expected to further cut prices to at least 1/10 versus its rivals. Amazing.
Musk also unveiled something he called Hyperloop – a new mode of hi-speed transportation via cars in pods inside a tube. You might wondering how fast is fast when he says hi-speed? The Hyperloop could take you from LA to SFO in 35 minutes! He explained that the pods would float on a bed of air produced by skis at their base. Each pod would be thrust forward by an electromagnetic pulse, and motors placed throughout the tube would give the pods added boosts as needed. These mechanisms could keep the pods going at 800 mph. And it's going to be solar-powered. Mind-blowing, right?!
I hope I get a chance to visit SpaceX, the Tesla factory or even the Hyperloop test site and see all the brilliant engineers of Musk working on these mind-blowing inventions. The things which Musk's companies have developed are the kind of things we used to see only in fictional movies and books. And once upon a time, a kid in South Africa read about them too. But this kid, unlike us ordinary mortals, didn't just stop at the pure enjoyment of reading about them. He was able to figure out how to make them happen. :)
Traditional marketing, as we know it, is creating brand awareness via TV, radio, print, billboards, getting celebrity endorsers, etc. The book "Growth Hacker Marketing" by Ryan Holiday explains how a new generation of megabrands like Facebook and Dropbox have successfully created global brand awareness without spending big budgets on traditional marketing.
In an article written by an influential technologist and entrepreneur, it is predicted that growth hackers will replace marketing.
So what is growth hacking and what do growth hackers do?
Here's the simplest definition I could find in the book:
The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. - Aaron Ginn
One of the earliest examples of growth hacking actually dates back to 1996 when Hotmail was launched. During a meeting between the Hotmail founders and a venture capitalist, the VC asked the founders - could you put a message at the bottom of everybody’s screen?
So Hotmail put this at the bottom of each message sent via Hotmail:
P.S. I love you. Get your free Hotmail.
By just adding that one-liner, Hotmail's growth became exponential - 1M users within 6 months. Users doubled in 5 weeks. By December 1997, with nearly 10M users, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for USD400M. Everything was implemented and executed by people without the slightest bit of marketing experience. (The stats may not look impressive today but don't forget, in 1996, the global internet penetration was less than 1%.)
Given the Hotmail case study, you could say that the
job of a growth hacker isn’t to do “marketing”, it’s to grow companies
really fast ... to take something from nothing to make it something
enormous within an incredibly tight window.
What else makes growth hackers different from marketers?
A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, pay per click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share” , growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth - and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a startup from nothing to something.
But beyond getting the product out there, the book also highlights the important of the product itself. Holiday cites that the single worst marketing decision you can make is starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs. Or to put it another way - the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people - no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.
An example of tweaking or refining would be Instagram. Did you know that Instagram didn't start as Instagram? It was previously called Burbn and its purpose was a location-based social network with an optional photo feature.
The founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app - the photos and filters. In one meeting, one of the founders asked - how are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?
So Burbn was tweaked and refined. It became Instagram - a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? 100,000 users within a week of relaunching. Within 18 months, the founders sold Instagram to FB for USD1Billion. Whoa...
When a product reaches a point where its value proposition and customers are in perfect sync with each other, this is called the Product Market Fit (PMF). It's considered the holy grail for every growth hacker. And this isn't expected to happen at launch. Achieving PMF could be after several tweaks resulting from understanding user feedback.
And achieving PMF, as Holiday pointed out, is very critical because he explains that the prize and spoils no longer go to the person who make it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.
The last important point discussed in the book is about virality. I like how virality was defined in the book - Virality is not an accident. It is engineered.
How do you engineer virality?
1. The product must be inherently worth sharing.
2. Don't just encourage sharing but create powerful incentives to do so. If you
do it right, people will advertise your product and feel like they are
the ones getting something out of it.
The best example for me here is Dropbox. You get rewarded for various user actions. Link your account to FB and get free 150MB storage, refer a friend and get 500MB free storage, and so on. And guess what? 35% of Dropbox customers come from referrals. Wow.
Since everything in growth hacking is trackable, the virality of a product is measured by its K factor. K factor, in the medicine world, is used to describe the contagion of disease. In the startup world, the viral coefficient measures the number of new users that each existing user is able to convert.
The book has a lot of other interesting things and this is just a peek. It's
an easy and fast read - only about 100 pages. I have the revised
and expanded version published in 2014; the original version was
published in 2013.
In the expanded version, there are additional sections like the FAQs with Holiday - these are frequently asked questions Holiday gets via email and Twitter. I picked one question that's the most useful for startups. Here you go:
If you were launching a startup or new product, what questions would you ask yourself before launching?
- Who are my ideal early adopters?
- How can i make my platform particularly enticing to them right now?
- Why is this service indispensable? Or how do i make it indispensable to them?
- Once they come on board, does the service provide/encourage/facilitate them inviting or bringing more users with them?
- How willing and prepared am I to improve based on the feedback and behavior of these users?
- What kind of crazy/cool thing can I do to get attention - something that, ideally, no one has ever done before?
If you're into marketing, or thinking of having a startup, or have a startup already, or just simply interested in technology, Growth Hacker Marketing is a great read. :)
If you’re managing or a part of an IT startup, Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” is one of the most useful books you can get your hands on. The goal of a startup, according to Ries, is “to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.” Thus, the Lean Startup is a new approach in the development of innovative new products that emphasizes “fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.” Ries identifies the five principles of the Lean Startup which are as follows: 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. Entrepreneurship is a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Thus, entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any company size, sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. As Ries puts it - every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, the following should be done - measure progress, set up milestones, and prioritize work. The greatest takeaway for me is the concept of MVP or Minimum Viable Product. Sometimes when we create products and services, we want so many features available at the beta stage when in fact, we’re not sure yet if the core components would even click to the target market. What needs to be done first is to identify the assumptions we want to validate and define the bare minimum features that would prove/disprove those assumptions. Case in point, when Groupon was launched, it wasn’t intended for ecommerce but to urge groups into collective action such as fundraising or boycotting a certain retailer. But the original idea didn’t click so the founders tweaked the concept and tried something different. By using a WordPress blog and reskinning the template, they published a new post about an item each day e.g. a shirt, and they emailed the PDF coupons (sometimes totaling 500 coupons per day) via Apple Mail to the buyers. With such simple mechanics and using free tools, they were able to validate group buying behavior. But just imagine, if the founders developed a full-blown solution for their original concept, they would have spent a fortune for something that the market didn’t even want. For more info on the Lean Startup Methodology and useful diagrams, you can check out http://theleanstartup.com/principles.
I’m
a big fan of Steve Jobs. When Icon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act
in the History of Business came out in 2005, I got a copy – even if
it was an unauthorized biography. Last
week, I downloaded the kindle edition of Steve Jobs by Walter
Isaacson – the authorized biography. It’s USD11.99 for the kindle
version vs USD35 for the hard cover. Anyway, as
a background, the author, Isaacson, is a former chairman of CNN
and managing editor of Time Magazine. He has also written
biographies of Eintein, Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. Whoa... How
did the book come about? It was Jobs who asked Isaacson to write his
biography. He persistently asked Isaacson since 2004 but Isaacson kept
on deflecting his suggestion until Jobs’ wife called Isaacson in 2009
to tell him that if he were going to write the biography, he has to do
it now because Jobs was sick. Jobs
gave Isaacson full control over the book and waived his right to see it
in advance. His only involvement was choosing the cover art. (Very
consistently Jobs til the end.) Anyway,
I’ve just read about a fifth of the book and it’s hard to put it
down. Here are some interesting tidbits which I don’t remember reading
from iCon (btw, I love Steve Wozniak too): -
Jobs and Wozniak created a thing called Blue Box which enables you to
call long distance and overseas calls for free. They used if for fun
and pranks. The most daring was when they called the Vatican and
Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope! -
One time, Jobs needed to raise funds to buy a car. He and
Wozniak looked at help-wanted postings in a school bulletin board and
discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking
college students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. For
$3 an hour, Jobs, Wozniak, and Jobs’ gf wore costumes to play Alice in
Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit! -
When Jobs proposed to Wozniak that they put up their own company and
sell Wozniak’s new computer design, Wozniak felt that he had to offer it
first to HP (his employer). He demonstrated the new computer model
to his managers in 1976 and though the senior executive at the meeting
was impressed, and seemed torn, he said it was not something HP could
develop. (Too bad for HP!) -
When Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple partnership, they were actually
3, the third was a guy named Wayne. They split the ownership 45-45-10.
But 11 days after they signed the partnership papers, Wayne got cold
feet and withdrew since it was a partnership (not a corporation) and
they will be personally liable to creditors should the business go
bad. Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010, it
would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion! Instead, in 2010, he
was living alone in a small home in Nevada, where he played penny slot
machines and lived off his social security check. But what’s admirable
about Wayne is he had no regrets. He said “I made the best decision for
me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my
stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.”
There's so much to learn from Jobs but here are my favorite excerpts from the book: On Jobs’ view on money: I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.
==========
On Jobs’ famous reality distortion field:
Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.” When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
========== On how he got people to do what seems impossible:
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
========== On hiring A+ players:
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.” ==========
On his unparalleled passion on craftmanship:
One of the most extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.” One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.” Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time.
==========
On how he wants to conduct product review process:
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” ========== On his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address (he was supposed to get help from the scriptwriter of “A Few Good Men”, Aaron Sorkin, but Sorkin never got around submitting anything to Jobs so Jobs ended up writing it himself – his first time to write a speech.):
“Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple turned out to be good for him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” The students were unusually attentive, despite a plane circling overhead with a banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale that enthralled them.It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it brought: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ========== On why he wanted his biography written (talking to the author, Isaacson):
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.” He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” ==========
On market research:
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.
On the intersection of art & science:
Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. ========== On what has driven him:
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.
==========
On his view about death: One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”
==========
I also liked Isaacson’s analysis about Jobs -
He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.
I tremendously enjoyed reading the book – knowing more about Jobs and the stories behind the Apple products we use. I’ll never look at Apple products the same way again.
I also enjoyed Isaacson’s writing so much so that I downloaded his biography of Albert Einstein right after I finished reading Steve Jobs. Now I just have to find the time to read it. :)
I finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson about 3 weeks ago. There are so many things to write about but I just don't have the time to organize my thoughts yet. But hopefully, I'll have some time over the holidays.
Anyway, one of the stories in the biography that gave me goosebumps involves Steve Jobs' biological dad and his long-lost sister, Mona Simpson.
Steve and Mona met each other when Mona was 25 and they hit it off. Eventually, Mona was able to trace their biological dad and she invited Steve to go with her to meet the dad. Steve didn't have any interest reconnecting with the dad anymore and because of this, he asked Mona never to mention him when she goes meet the dad.
So Mona went to Sacramento alone to meet their dad. During their conversation, the dad revealed to Mona that she had an older brother. Since Mona promised Steve not to mention him to the dad, she innocently asked her dad what happened to her brother. The dad just replied that the baby is gone and that they'll never see him again.
Later on during the same conversation, the dad started describing the previous restaurants he had run. He said that there had been nicer and fancier restaurants before his Sacramento restaurant. He said that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That was a wonderful place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs.” He also added, “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, and a big tipper,” her father added.
<goosebumps>
When Mona told Steve about her conversation with their dad, Steve remembered the Mediterranean restaurant and the Syrian owner. He even recalled meeting the Syrian owner and shaking hands with him! But neither of them knew they were father and son! And we thought such scenes only happen in movies. Unfortunately, unlike in movies, theirs never had a happy ending because Steve didn't really want to reconnect with the dad.
Anyway, a friend mentioned to me that Mona gave a very touching eulogy for Steve Jobs and also described Steve's last moments so I dug up the transcript.
Please get some tissue first before you start reading.
Here goes -
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs by Mona Simpson I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.
Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.
We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.
That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”
I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.
His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.
None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.
What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
****************
Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1988, she has held the Sadie Samuelson Levy Chair in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16, 2011, at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.
Last month, a news came out that a South Korean couple was arrested after their baby starved to death due to malnutrition because they were too busy raising a virtual child on role-playing game, Prius Online. According to the report, the couple would spend 12 hours in internet cafes to raise their virtual child but would only feed their real baby once day! Unfathomable. Choosing something virtual over someone real. What were they thinking?! And the reason for their online addiction was to escape reality as both of them have lost their jobs.
I know this is a very extreme case but if you think about it, any time spent on playing virtual games is technically lost time. For inputting real resources (your time and effort), you reap in something virtual.
Of course, like everyone else, I also had my Farmville days – though it was short-lived (just a couple of months!). Haha… The realization came when during one dinner late last year, Farmville was brought up as one started to get restless since it was time for her to harvest crops. The incident started a long conversation about virtual games (which almost turned into a debate) and the group was split between players and non-players. Some players were raving about how big their farms are and how much money they had. Then one of the non-players commented something like, “That’s so ridiculous. You spend a lot of time playing and yes, you’re rich virtually but how about in real life? Why don’t you just spend that time in making real money?”. Good point. Haha…
But for me, the more important realization is the time you put in when you play is a resource that you can never get back that’s why we’ve to spend our time wisely. During my Farmville days, I would stay up late just to plant and harvest! No more time to read and blog at night ... So not worth it. Sleep is more important! I love to sleep so it wasn’t really hard to give up playing after making the realization. Haha… But if you’ve the discipline and self-control to keep your playing time in moderation and you’re not neglecting any other obligations, playing should be ok. :)
For the record, since I have moved on several months ago, I’ve never really missed playing because I like how I chose to spend my evenings better. :)
P.S. The Farmville image above was actually a screenshot of my farm on the day I decided to quit. I just had to keep a screenshot souvenir of my virtual farm at its best. Haha... :)
I started reading the book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell and it's so hard to put it down. I loved "Tipping Point" and "Blink" but I think this is his best so far.
We've heard and read stories of successful people and usually, their successes are attributable to hard work, perseverance, right timing, etc. But in "Outliers", Gladwell looks into other things like their family, birthplace, birthdate, among others.
One emerging result from studies of successful people who perform complex tasks is that mastery requires a critical minimum level of practice. The magic figure that surfaces is 10,000 hours to achieve the level of mastery associated with being world-class expert in anything according to neurologist Daniel Levitin. This has shown in studies on composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players and even master criminals. In short, 10,000 hours of practice means a loooooonnnnggg time.
Mozart for instance started writing music at age 6. But his masterworks were not composed until he was 21.
Before the Beatles got its first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live a total of 1,200 times.
Most of us probably know Bill Gates' life only after he dropped out of college but did you know that he started programming as early as when he was in 8th grade in 1968? Apparently, he was already obsessed with programming in his early high school years that he even skipped athletics. Gates and Paul Allen even got kicked out for stealing passwords and crashing a system at age 15 or 16. And to get access to computers, Gates also sneaked out of their house after bedtime to go to the University of Washington and do programming at 3-6am! Whoa...
Gladwell also emphasizes that practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing that you do that makes you good. And what's more, he says, is that people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. :)
