Rule #19 Do Something That Would Impress Steve Jobs

I once saw an interview with Dave Grohl the founding member of Foo Fighters and former drummer for Nirvana. Discussing success Grohl said, “If you do something really well long enough eventually someone will notice.”

Incredible talent is hard to hide. Eventually it will in fact get noticed and a market for that talent will arise. In one of my favorite speeches by legendary motivational speaker and mentor of Tony Robbins Jim Rohan once said, “It’s not enough to desire success you must deserve it...a farmer can’t just desire his crop. He must till the ground, sow the seeds, nurture and feed the crops and then and only then will he deserve a harvest at the proper time.”

I’m just finishing up Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. It’s a great read about an extraordinary man. Steve Jobs was not an easy man to please. In fact many of the ideas he came to claim for his own and loved emphatically were actually the ideas of others who received hateful scorn and insult when they first proposed them to Jobs. However, there was the rare occasion when Jobs saw an idea that was so genius he immediately praised it and put it into action. One such example follows.

A young software engineer had just completed an interview with Jobs. It did not go well. 

“Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show Jobs one of his ideas. Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. ‘I said, My God, and hired him on the spot,’ Jobs recalled.”

The engineer had put in the work. He had created something amazing. Even Steve Jobs was impressed. So often we get discouraged because no one is noticing our greatness or we just aren’t getting what we want out of life. I suggest taking a very honest inventory of oneself and determining if you have truly honed your skills, whatever they are, to a degree in which you DESERVE to be hired. If you have, one day you WILL be noticed.

You rule!