Source:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130226121959-22330283-best-advice-lessons-from-my-dad-and-steve-jobs?trk=prof-post
Since
we launched the Influencers platform on LinkedIn several months ago,
I've had the chance to share a few different posts with some great
advice I've received over the years. When our editors mentioned
they were running a special edition of Influencer posts focused on the
question "What is the best advice you've ever received?" I thought it
would be a good opportunity to digest some of those posts and add some
additional advice I've found to be particularly valuable.
You can do anything you set your mind to -- My dad
As
a child, I can't recall a day that went by without my dad telling me I
could do anything I set my mind to. He said it so often, I stopped
hearing it. Along with lines like "eat your vegetables," I just assumed
it was one of those bromides that parents repeated endlessly to their
kids. It wasn't until decades later that I fully appreciated the
importance of those words and the impact they had on me.
Today,
the question I'm asked most often by students and interns is how best to
achieve their career goals. As simple as it sounds, the short version
of my response is that you have to know what it is you ultimately want
to accomplish (optimizing for both passion
and skill, and not
one at the exclusion of the other). As soon as you do, you'll begin
manifesting it in both explicit and implicit ways.
Everything that can be converted from an atom to a bit, will be -- Nicholas Negroponte
In the Fall of 1994, I read
"Being Digital"
by Nicolas Negroponte. In the opening chapter Negroponte posited that
by virtue of the ensuing digital revolution, everything that could be
converted from an atom to a bit would be. Having just started as an
analyst in the Corporate Development group at Warner Bros, it didn't
take much to realize this coming transition would have material
implications on the studio and the entertainment industry in general.
Thus began my nearly two-decades-long career in digital media.
Do you want to push paper around or do you want to build products that change people's lives? -- Dan Rosensweig
Roughly a year after I started on the Corp Dev team at Yahoo in 1994,
Dan Rosensweig
joined as Yahoo's new COO. He tried recruiting me to an operating role
on his team literally every time I saw him over the first year of his
tenure, but I would always decline. Then, almost a year to the day he
started, Dan said, "Jeff, you've always told me that your lifelong
ambition is ultimately to reform the education system in the U.S. Let me
ask you something: Do you think you are going to be better prepared to
make that a reality by pushing paper around, working on strategy, and
doing deals; or by moving in to operations and building teams, inspiring
people, and developing great products that change people's lives?"
Suffice it to say, I accepted on the spot and haven't looked back since.
We are the stories that we tell -- Deepak Chopra
Several
years ago, I asked Deepak how massively scaling consumer web platforms
could best contribute in a world that felt increasingly besieged by
secular challenges. His response was that ultimately we are the stories
that we tell; that the importance of storytelling was as old as humanity
itself, dating back to the time of cave drawings. He went on to explain
that if society was exclusively focused on rehashing the problems of
the world, e.g. rising unemployment, global warming, threat of
terrorism, etc, it would create anxiety, stress, and a planet steeped in
self-fulfilling negative energy. However, if we came together and
focused on not only identifying the problems, but developing the
solutions and shining a light on those success stories, we could change
the dialog and manifest more positive change. That discussion forever
changed my appreciation for the power of narrative, regardless of the
size of the audience.
If you could only do one thing, what would it be? -- Steve Jobs
Shortly
after Jerry Yang became the CEO of Yahoo, he invited Steve Jobs to
address the company's leadership. Among many insightful things that
Steve shared that day, the one that continues to have the most profound
influence on me was his discussion regarding prioritization. Jobs said
that after he returned to Apple in 1994, he recognized there were far
too many products and SKUs in development so he asked his team one
simple question: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? He
said that many of the answers rationalized the need to do more than one
thing, or sought to substantiate bundling one priority with another.
However, all he wanted to know was what "the one thing" was. As he
explained it, if they got that one thing right, they could then move on
the next thing, and the next thing after that, and so on. Turned out the
answer to his question was the reinvention of the iMac. After that, it
was the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and the rest, as they say, is
history.
Interestingly enough, years later I heard Jobs speak at
All Things D and he explained that the company had actually been working
on the iPad before the iPhone, as he had long written off pursuit of
the phone as being prohibitively challenging given the carrier
landscape. However, once a window of opportunity opened up to
successfully bring a phone to market, he hit the pause button on the
tablet, and only returned to it once Apple got the iPhone right. Pretty
mind blowing to think that a company as large and successful as Apple,
and someone as prodigiously talented as Steve Jobs, would temporarily
shelve something as important as the iPad for the sake of focus, but
that's exactly what he did.
Wisdom without compassion is ruthlessness, compassion without wisdom is folly -- Fred Kofman
After
having worked at Yahoo for seven years and making the decision to
leave, I started to think a lot about what I wanted to do next. I've
long been interested in education reform, and specifically the
democratization of knowledge, which was one of the primary dynamics that
drew me to the consumer web, digital media and search specifically.
Consistent with this passion, I drafted a personal vision statement: To
expand the world's collective wisdom.
A few weeks after developing that vision, I found myself at dinner one night with my friend
Fred Kofman, founder of
Axialent, author of
"Conscious Business",
and one of the most enlightened people I've met throughout my career.
After sharing my objective with him, he said, "That's very powerful, but
bear in mind, wisdom without compassion is ruthlessness, and compassion
without wisdom is folly." The line stopped me cold in my tracks. After
some additional back and forth, I said I was amending my initial vision
to read "To expand the world's collective wisdom and compassion" and
that objective has influenced every aspect of my work ever since.
Five steps to happiness -- Ray Chambers
After
a legendary career on Wall Street where he was widely acknowledged as
having developed the modern day leveraged buyout (the acquisition of
Gibson Greetings in 1982), Ray gave it all up in the late-eighties to
pursue a life of philanthropic activity. Among other endeavors, he
founded or led efforts such as the National Mentoring Partnership, the
Points of Light Foundation, America's Promise, The Millennium Promise
Alliance, Malaria no More, and today is the special emissary to the
United Nations to help eradicate deaths due to Malaria. As one of my
mentors, I've learned a lot from Ray through the years, but the one
piece of advice that I find myself coming back to most often are are his
five steps to happiness:
Live in the moment
It's better to be loving than to be right
Be a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional
Be grateful for at least one thing every day
Help others every chance you get
shimrit/Flick