My friend Dixie sent me this email yesterday. I thought I should share it with you.
I encourage you to join us for the Dynamite Live event if you can.
Bruce
314-477-4948
From: Dixie “Dynamite” Gillaspie [mailto:dixie@DixieDynamiteCoaching.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2011 2:20 PM
To: bclithero@stlconcierge.com
Subject: iLessons: What we learned from Steve Jobs about starting with YOU
I have had a FANTASTIC week, and I’m going to pass it on!
I’m PUMPED about the caliber of people I see registering for Dynamite Live. The audience is as exciting as the line-up of speakers and coaches. (Even my favorite “muse partner,” Scott Ginsberg – aka @NameTagScott – is joining us.) PLUS, I’ve had some generous sponsorships from Absolute Barter Company, Rue Lafayette, iWatchRadio, and Sound Wisdom.
So here’s what I’ve decided to do to pass on the generosity… Every day between now and Wednesday, October 12th, I am going to issue a refund to ONE person who’s registered for Dynamite Live.
I know… I could increase my audience by giving tickets to people who wouldn’t come otherwise, but that’s not my style. I believe in rewarding the people who take action, the people who invest in themselves (see #3 in this very article,) the people who commit to next steps even when they can’t see exactly where that will take them.
So, if you’re already registered, watch your inbox; it may have money in it. If you’re PLANNING to register, do it now and get your name in there for tomorrow’s drawing. If Dynamite Live isn’t right for you, I honor your awareness and your choice.
In any case, PLEASE celebrate with me that Dynamite Live is turning out to be a validation of my love and commitment to the community of entrepreneurs I serve and read the rest of this message – I’ve included a BONUS iLesson that just showed up for me today!
FIRST iLESSON:
In fine-tuning, fleshing out, and generally agonizing over the next 5 articles that will be coming your way I listened to the Commencement Address Steve Jobs gave for Stanford University in June of 2005.
While there are many quotes taken from this address that are being posted everywhere you look, there are also some gems that seemed to have been overlooked by the masses. I also found quotes that took on new nuances when processed in the context of his presentation.
I frantically transcribed these bits of his speech, then noticed the link to the transcript.
I could have cussed myself for doing it the hard way instead of using the good ole cut and paste method, but the repetition of listening, typing, listening again to check myself burned these phrases into my mind in a way that read, cut, click, paste, would never do.
Bonus lesson for me today:
When you’re tempted to rail at yourself for being, blind, stupid, careless or otherwise inefficient, look for the advantage you might have lost if you’d applied a more efficient method.
SECOND iLESSON:
The First Essential Ingredient to Success – It begins with YOU!
This is the focus of the curriculum for next Thursday, day one of Dynamite Live because without including all three aspects of this ingredient your success path is already blocked by a BIG brick wall!
It’s interesting that Steve Jobs was referred to as the “man who put ‘personal’ back in the ‘personal computer.’” He branded his innovations with an i in front of their function, the iMac, iPhone, iPod, iPad and more.
He honored the iNdividual to the extent that Apple’s “Think Different” ad spot, which he originally narrated although that version never aired, paid tribute to the “crazy ones.”
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes … the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. … You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. … They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Yes, it begins with you.
I mentioned there are three aspects to this Ingredient, Steve Jobs embodied them all.
1.) You have to embrace your control and responsibility for every choice and every outcome.
Given up for adoption before he was born by an unwed college student, one thing that should have been assured for him was a college education. His birth mother felt so strongly about higher education that she dictated that she would only relinquish her child to a couple who were college graduates.
But when the chosen couple decided that they’d rather have a girl, a call went out to the next candidates in line, “we have an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?”
They did, but his birth mother was horrified. Neither of these loving people were college graduates, in fact, Steve’s father had not graduated from high school. His birth mother refused to sign the final adoption papers until his new parents promised to send him to college.
And send him they did, to an expensive, and highly respected, institution.
After a short time he realized that he was burning through his parents saving at an alarming rate, and he had NO idea how he would use the education. He chose to withdraw his enrollment.
Then he made another choice, he CHOSE to continue his education by dropping in on classes that interested him.
The outcome? He took a course on calligraphy, and what he learned there was incorporated into the Mac design. So today I can type this message to you in any one of hundreds of typefaces, which we now call fonts. Because, as Steve pointed out, Windows just copied the Mac – if he hadn’t fallen in love with calligraphy and typography it might never have found its way into our daily lives.
When Steve was fired from Apple, he was devastated. He’d brought in a leader he believed could take his beloved company to new heights and found himself turned into a failure. “A very PUBLIC failure,” as he says, and he thought about “running away from the Valley.”
Ultimately, however, he went to some of the leaders he respected and apologized for what he saw as his screw up. He found a way to return to embracing his control and responsibility and he made NEW choices. He founded Pixar and NeXT and put his love of innovation back to work.
You will never achieve success by abdicating control, blaming everyone else, believing that circumstances or the opinions of other people will determine your outcomes.
You will have success when you learn to revel in knowing that YOU are in control of your life. Remember , even when you give control to others that is your choice and you are always free to change it.
About that period of “starting over,” Steve later said:
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.
2.) You have to know yourself and love the self you are right now.
Some people say Steve was arrogant. I don’t know, I didn’t know the man. What I have observed of his public persona was that he was confident and he was driven.
He knew his “power base” wasn’t in who was on his side or the market share or wealth he commanded. His power base was in who he was and what he could accomplish, the value he could deliver, because of who he was.
He believed in his worth, and it wasn’t calculable in any currency.
He knew what had worth to him, and that wasn’t calculable in currency either.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.
I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.
One of the reasons Steve dropped out of college, then continued to drop into classes was because he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He didn’t know himself well enough to invest in a degree, but he believed in himself enough to sacrifice to get an education. Most important, he knew himself well enough to know what would and would not serve him while he figured out how he could serve.
3.) You have to believe in your potential and invest in it continually.
Know that loving the “self you are right now,” doesn’t suggest you should halt the growth process. As many wise people have said, “You are either growing or you are dying.”
The last of the three life stories that Steve Jobs shared with those young people facing their bright tomorrows was about death. At a young age he had read the suggestion that you “live every day as though it were your last.”
That gave him the incentive to change, to grow, and to constantly evaluate his daily choices. Sharing the story of his first encounter with cancer, he said,
I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful, but purely intellectual concept…No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent.
Steve Jobs didn’t wait until he was told he was going to die. He treated death as a “useful concept” to continually invest in life.
Perhaps you’re seeing, as I did after reviewing the success stories of so many of the mentors I’ve studied over the years, why all success recipes begin with YOU taking control, knowing and loving yourself, and investing in yourself.
I’ve invited my own coach and mentor to kick off Dynamite Live with just this message.
Kimberly Schneider, fondly known as the “Manifestation Maven,” has a magical knack for getting people to see themselves and their potential in a new light. She also teaches a powerful method for embracing that control with joy and manifesting outcomes that would never have seemed possible before.
Kimberly’s new book, “Everything You Need is Right Here,” won’t be available until early next year, but our audience will have the opportunity to grab a digital copy, along with the accompanying audio.
Bill Ellis, Branding For Results, will be helping us segue way from knowing and loving ourselves into achieving clarity about our purpose and our personal brand.
Bill’s “Seven C’s of Branding” was born out of a combination of his observations and experiences during his 25+ years at Anheuser Busch in branding and marketing integration and his 8+ years working with entrepreneurs to construct powerful brands by embracing their big dreams.
We’ll also be helping you master the use of this ingredient though a couple of small group coaching sessions. Prepare to do some work, this is the part where you “invest in your potential!”
If you know that Dynamite Live is the investment you need now (although at $259 including meals for all three days it’s a smaller investment than many you could make) please join us.
And remember, if you’re joining us, you’ll want to make that official now to be including in the drawing for a FREE ticket (I’m going to refund the ticket price to ONE committed individual every night before I go to sleep from now until Wednesday, October 12th.)
Whether you’re able to join us or not, I hope you’ll start doing the work to make YOU a powerful foundation for your dreams, to make YOU a catalyst for growth, to make YOU one of the “crazy ones” who believes in your SELF, your VALUE, your POTENTIAL, and your DREAMS enough to change the world!
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