I get asked this often! Lots of reasons really but the most important one is I’ve always LOVED my ‘WORK’. First I  was a Mom then I started a Job Referral Service (People Power). Next a Montessori Teacher, then a Web Designer and Trainer: Sara Ohara.com and now ALSO a Bike Tour Guide: Scenic Cycle Tours.com. There were times in between but mostly if I wasn’t happy I just moved on. Try it, you’ll love it! And Steve Jobs agrees with me!

This man changed my life, not only my Business but my Attitude.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was known for his ability to communicate with a crowd of people. His keynotes set the standard for how companies talk about their products. He was known for being charismatic, sometimes funny, and sometimes even feisty.

In the list of his top performances is another moment worth mentioning. This one wasn’t a presentation, but rather it came during a question and answer session in 1997, shortly after he had returned to Apple. Jobs was taking questions when he was asked a rather insulting question by a man in the audience.

“Mr. Jobs, you’re a bright and influential man,” the questioner began. “It’s sad and clear that on several accounts you’ve discussed, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man went on to ask a specific question about Java and Opendoc, the latter of which was a software framework Jobs had announced would be discontinued. He then challenged Apple’s founder on what he’d been doing during the seven years since he’d been fired from the company.

Jobs had only months before returned to Apple when it acquired his new company, NEXT. There were plenty of people already mad at him (including, apparently, this questioner). He had made a lot of changes, even though he hadn’t yet been named CEO. Technically, he was just a consultant.

In response, however, Jobs doesn’t really answer either of the man’s questions. Instead, he answers the question beneath the question. In doing so, Jobs doesn’t attempt to defend his intelligence or success. He embraces the most brutal part of the man’s criticism–that he isn’t always going to get it right.

To be clear, Jobs, who by all accounts was known to be a perfectionist, wasn’t excusing mistakes. “We’ll find the mistakes,” he continued. “We’ll fix them.”

That’s an important point that we’ll get to in a minute, but first, there are a number of things that are astonishing about this interaction, not the least of which is that Steve Jobs was sitting on stage taking questions from an audience of developers. I think the chances of Tim Cook doing the same on stage at Apple’s WWDC at any point in the future are zero.

Second, Jobs handles the insult with an incredible amount of grace and patience. Jobs could have gotten defensive or angry. He would have been justified had his response betrayed that he was, at least, a little annoyed. But that’s not how he responded at all

Most important, however, those two sentences are a beautiful lesson about success. You see, success isn’t the pursuit of not making mistakes. Almost always, mistakes are the way you find your way to whatever you define as success.

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of the process. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out a strategy that doesn’t involve making any mistakes, but it usually means you don’t do much of anything–certainly not anything of value.

Jobs’s answer takes only a few minutes, but it’s an invaluable lesson about how to define success, and then how to get there.

“One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Jobs explains. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake, probably more than anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”

That last part is important. Jobs admitted that he’s made plenty of mistakes, but those mistakes don’t take away from his credibility–as the man who asked the question suggested–but rather, they form it. Scars, after all, don’t mean you failed. They mean you made it through the battle.

Obviously, your job is to make lots of little mistakes–the kind you grow from–and not big mistakes (or, the kind your business dies from). Those you grow from are a great way to learn how not to make the other kind.

Mistakes also teach you something important about whatever it is you’re building. When you make mistakes, find them, and fix them, they make your product and your business stronger. That might be the most beautiful part of all.

Thanks Jason Aten for Your Wisdom

Simple and effective, but according to Steve Jobs,
most people never do it.

Steve Jobs may have left this earth, but Apple’s co-founder and tech genius continues to have an impact that will transcend future generations. In an old video interview, Jobs shared a story that illustrates an uncommon trait found in the most successful people. Here’s an excerpt:

I called up Bill Hewlett [co-founder of Hewlett-Packard] when I was 12 years old. ‘Hi, I’m Steve Jobs. I’m 12 years old. I’m a student in high school. I want to build a frequency counter, and I was wondering if you have any spare parts I could have.’ He laughed, and he gave me the spare parts, and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard … and I was in heaven.

Don’t feel bad if you missed the key to success in that story. It’s easy to miss. Luckily, Jobs spells it out in the video a bit later:

“Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”

Ask and it Shall be Given

Without that experience at HP, would Jobs have gone on to accomplish what he did? Perhaps — we’ll never know. But we know for sure that a single phone call greatly impacted his life. It taught one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this — or any — generation to be willing to ask for something he wanted.

The same can be said about workplaces where people fear asking for help. In so many businesses today, fear keeps people from being open to asking for what they want and seeking help from their peers and colleagues. According to social psychologist Heidi Grant, 75 percent to 90 percent of all help co-workers give to one another starts with making an ask.

The question is, does your environment foster the freedom and safety for employees to do this? Most people are willing to help, and according to research, 90 percent of giving in the workplace is in direct response to people asking for help. But the fact of the matter remains that most people don’t ask for what they need; it is not being reinforced by their managers and the executives above them. Therefore, unfortunately, most of the time, nothing happens.

The Giver-Requester

Sociologist Wayne Baker from the University of Michigan wrote a book called All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success. In his research, Baker found that the “Giver-Requester” — a person who helps frequently and also asks for help frequently — is the most well-regarded and also the most productive at work.

As managers and leaders, the key is to foster an environment to liberate people to be both givers and requesters — frequently asking for help among their peers and networks and being a giver of help to those in their circle of influence.

Being a giver-requester has many career benefits as well. Baker’s research found that they:

• Are promoted more quickly and at a younger age
• Are paid better
• Are knowledgeable and trusted by their colleagues
• Are known for having great reputations

When the most successful people want something, they’re willing to ask for it. If a 12-year-old Steve Jobs could do it, so can you.

Thanks Marcel Schwantes for your Wisdom

“Make a lot of mistakes.”

Steve Jobs’s emotionally intelligent approach to mistake-making can help you build a better business.

The year was 1984. It was shortly before Steve Jobs left Apple and several years before Jobs would go on to conduct one of the biggest turnarounds in business history, bringing Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to make it one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Jobs was giving an interview to Michael Moritz, who at the time was a reporter covering Silicon Valley. In the interview, Jobs argued that the key to his success, what truly set him apart, wasn’t a superior design sense, or any other special gift.

“Things get more refined as you make mistakes and do them,” Jobs told Moritz. “So I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes.”

“But a real big thing is, the way I’ve always felt is, that if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy–and rarely does it take more money–to make it really great,” continued Jobs. “All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so: a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.”

There’s a great message in perseverance for anyone trying to build a better product or business. But it all starts with five key words from Jobs:

Jobs’s “make a lot of mistakes” philosophy is emotionally intelligent because it allows you to shift your mindset. It takes the process of making mistakes, which most view as negative, and reframes it as an integral key to making your business or product better.

Let’s break down a story from Apple’s history that illustrates the value of this advice, and see how you can apply it as you build your own business.

Fast forward to 2001, and Jobs had already begun Apple’s turnaround. However, the company faced an unexpected dilemma.

The iPod had just been released and became an overnight sensation. Designers and executives at Apple were understandably thrilled, but they also knew they needed to keep innovating–fast.

Why? Because the next logical step was to place MP3 players inside cell phones. It was only a matter of time before a major phone manufacturer figured out how to do it, which would make the revolutionary iPod obsolete.

And herein lay the problem: Apple didn’t make cell phones.

To avoid losing market share, designers quickly got to work on the first prototype of an Apple cell phone. Tony Fadell, one of the original designers, described it as “an iPod with a phone module, if you wanted to dial a number, it was like using a rotary dial.”

His conclusion? “It sucked.”

Jobs scrapped the entire project and went back to the drawing board. He pulled up plans from 1993’s Apple Newton–the company’s first attempt at a touchscreen device (and one of its biggest flops of all time). But a decade had passed, technology had advanced, and touchscreen research had improved. Jobs took one look at the plans and said, “Maybe this is the phone.”

And the rest is history.

Stories like these illustrate the value in Jobs’s philosophy: Apple’s success hasn’t been based on getting everything right the first time. In fact, critics say that the company doesn’t actually innovate. After all, the Mac wasn’t the first computer, the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, and the iPad wasn’t the first tablet.

However, Apple has built a reputation for “getting things right.” They find creative ways to take design, functionality, and user experience to the next level and give the public products they adore.

So, how do you apply this lesson to your business?

Let’s say you want to build an online course, or an app, or some other product. Start by studying your competitors, and identifying what problems or gaps their product has. How can you fill those gaps? Use that question to guide your process.

As you do that, you may be tempted to wait until your product is perfect before launch, or to beta test forever using a small test group. You shouldn’t. No matter how much you research, test, and iterate it won’t be perfect. Remember, the Newton was a total failure, and even the iPhone didn’t come close to iPhone two, or three, or 10.

Instead, make things as good as you can. Use user feedback (and your own good sense) to help you identify what needs to be improved. Then, improve. And keep improving. Continue to revise your product, again and again.

Persevere until it’s great.

Above all, remember: Mistakes are part of the journey. The more mistakes you make, the more chances you have to refine and improve.

All you need is a little more time, and the desire to see it through. Because if you can persevere, the result will be nothing short of greatness.

Thanks for your Wisdom JUSTIN BARISO

“After being fired from Apple the only thing that kept me going was I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. Your time is limited so don’t be trapped by living someone else’s life. STAY HUNGRY – STAY FOOLISH”

Visitors to Steve Jobs’s house in Palo Alto or to Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California, were all too familiar with one habit that helped Jobs to clear his mind and develop novel ideas.

Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson didn’t know it when he first met the legendary Apple co-founder, but he soon learned that Jobs preferred to have serious conversations on long walks.

Brent Schlender covered Steve Jobs for 25 years for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. In Becoming Steve Jobs, Schlender recalled that Jobs would invite him to the house “for a walk” when he wanted to talk about a subject. Jobs and chief designer Jony Ive were often seen taking regular “brainstorming walks” around the Apple campus. Pixar employees told Schlender that Jobs “was always big on going for walks with people.”

A recent batch of neuroscience research proves that Jobs was on to something. Walking really does spark our creativity.

In The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking, authors Olivia Fox Cabana and Judah Pollack cite current studies that show breakthrough ideas occur when the brain switches modes–from the “executive network” to its “default network.” While the executive part of our brain is task and goal-focused, the default network–the “genius lounge”– meanders and brainstorms. The two work together. The executive network sets a goal or identifies a problem and moves on to perform other tasks while the default network comes up with creative solutions.

According to the research, taking a walk is the best way to trigger cooperation between the two modes and unleash your most creative ideas. “If we had to choose one single mindless activity for you to do, it would be walking,” Cabana and Pollack conclude.

According to a Stanford study, walking boosted a person’s creative output by 60 percent. The subjects were given “divergent thinking” tests, which measure creativity. They were asked to think of alternative uses for a particular object and they had four minutes to come up with their responses for each set of objects. Responses were “novel” if the other participants in the group had not thought of the idea.

The Stanford researchers measured the creativity of subjects while they walked and while they sat. The majority of participants were far more creative when they walked. Movement was the key. “The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor,” according to the Stanford research.

Florence Williams prefers to walk outside. The author of the new book The Nature Fix and a contributing editor to Outside magazine, she writes, “We benefit cognitively and psychology from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces to look at.” Like The Net and the Butterfly, Williams cites research that shows our brains’ default network is the key to creativity. According to Williams, it’s the part of our brain that’s “free-ranging, day-dreaming, and mind-wandering.”

Our ancestors were on the move.

Neuroscientists who study attention say the results of walking studies aren’t surprising because our ancestors moved–a lot. According to University of Washington biologist John Medina, “from an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves that experience.”

In a study for the American Journal of Human Biology, Yale researchers say that because our brains evolved while walking, it’s good for our health and good for our minds. “So move, and preferably often, since the need for activity seems to be built into our bones and hearts and being.”

Certainly, there are health benefits to being on the move. Lower blood pressure and the reduced risk of stroke seem to be the primary benefits of walking for exercise, according to the Harvard Medical School. The latest neuroscience confirms that walking really does have a creative benefit, too.

So consider getting up out of your chair and getting on the move. A breakthrough idea might be waiting in your brain’s genius lounge.

Thanks for your Wisdom Carmine Gallo

Steve Jobs has some tips… “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.

It was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

Sometimes life is going to hit 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.

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. And don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” Steve Jobs

It’s easy to think that great leaders like Steve Jobs got that way by telling people what to do, bossing them around, or instilling fear in those who work for them. This would be a mistake. In my experience, the greatest leaders of all create a compelling vision of the future, and they inspire their employees to achieve things they didn’t think they could do. Not only that, but they know how to ask their people to help them turn their vision into reality.

In 1994-just two years before he returned to Apple, the company he co-founded-Jobs was interviewed by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. In the video from this interview, he talks about the remarkable power of asking for what you want.

“Now, I’ve actually always found something to be very true, which is most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me when I’ve asked them for help.”

Jobs goes on to tell about the time when he was 12 years old that he decided to call Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to ask for some spare parts to build a frequency counter (Hewlett’s home phone number was in the Palo Alto phone book at the time). Not only did Hewlett readily agree to young Steve’s request, but he offered him a summer job at his company, assembling frequency counters.

“I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called – I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back. Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you’ve gotta be willing to fail, you gotta be ready to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

Another Bit of Wisdom from Peter Economy