Yesterday Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. He made his company to hit the top as the highest market value business in the US surpassing ExxonMobil. I’ve been watching Steve closely since 1997 as he started again with his new iMac and wished him all the best (I was even wondering if it was a good time to buy Apple shares!). I admired his presentations, his vision and clarity when it comes to the future of the tech world. He showed his great potential with every new product as he dominated so many markets from music to the tablets industry. He created an unbelievable culture in Apple so they could built one of the greatest tech products in the world when other just managed to produce mediocre mobile phones or less than average tablets. It must be a great feeling to influence so many peoples’ lifestyle and build such a strong company. Of course he was just a leader with so many people working for the success but we can see many examples like Nokia or Yahoo where lack of proper leadership makes a company loose their value and fade away.
Sometime ago I watched his Stanford Commencement speech from 2005 and I really liked it. Today, when reading about his resignation I stumbled upon his best quotes and read again this fine part:
“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 is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
A story of a guy who wanted to run his business like Zappos or Netflix – getting to cash-flow positive and profitable as quickly as possible with customers in mind while giving a lot to employees. Find out how he overcame obstacles, found his way to plan a day without any meetings scheduled and why he is saying that his move was completely insane.
Your reasons behind the switch
Paul Montwill: What were your main reasons behind the switch? Was it about freedom to work in a family-like company you didn’t have while working in a corporate world?
Michael Fitzpatrick: There were several reasons behind my switch from the warm and cozy blanket (this was before the breakout success of the Snuggie by the way) of a larger corporation to the adventure of starting a new business.
I’ve spent my career building web collaboration products, and had always wanted to be able to work in an environment where all aspects of the company were focused on customer and employee success. For me, the opportunity to start a new business with a focus on making customers successful was really exciting. I also wanted the opportunity to create an environment where we worked hard, but the company invested in its people. ConnectSolutions has very high expectations for delivering innovative work, but we also manage to have a lot of fun along the way. Companies such as Netflix and Zappos are examples of the type of culture I like to shoot for. As an example, everyone here has customer-success metrics as an important component of their overall success, and that ensures that the right decisions are always made for the customer first.
I’ve just finished watching a jaw-dropping video of Danny MacAskill doing amazing tricks on his bike. You probably saw something similar many times but this one is absolutely different. Amazing sceneries of Scotland, great soundtrack and unbelievable way Danny “rides” his bike with such lightness and joy. It is another example of passion and patience that give birth to masterpiece. He has been practising street trials for more than 12 years and even had to gave up his job as a mechanic to do it full time.
Join over 9 mln people who watched the following video. Make sure you watch it in HD and be amazed for 7 minutes.
There are so many blogs about productivity and lifestyle design on the Internet that it is hard to count. Most of them usually follow the same pattern with very similar posts. But there are some of them that really stand out in terms of writing style, topic selection and unique value offered to their readers.
One of them is Abundance Blog by Marelisa Fábrega. She writes great posts with useful tips for everybody interested in personal development. They are pretty long and offer a lot of value. The mission of her writing is to show you how to get the most out of life. She covers topics from creativity, productivity and simplicity.
3 great posts by Marelisa
1. How One Hour a Day Can Change Your Life – many people dream of making a switch from a boring job to start doing the stuff they are passionate about. They often say that because of their daily job they don’t have time to do something on the side. The post shows that one hour a day can be enough to follow our dreams. I love the story of a famous writer John Grisham. It is a must-read piece.
How did Grisham go from being stuck in a job he disliked – and which provided little remuneration in return for his hard work – to getting paid millions to do what he loves? He made the sacrifice of getting up each day at the crack of dawn, heading down to his office, making a pot of strong coffee, and sitting at his desk to work on his writing before his official workday began.
“I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side – I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
If you are a creative person and have difficulty in making money or being motivated by external incentives, read the great post’s conclusion:
In order to enhance your creativity, to prevent being “a puppet of circumstances”, and to live up to your full potential, you need to take your focus away from extrinsic rewards – such as money, prestige, and so on – and, instead, place your focus on intrinsic rewards. That is, your main reason for performing your work should be your enjoyment of the task itself, the feeling of satisfaction you get from being involved in a given project, and the sense of meaning you derive from carrying out your work.
Gary Vaynerchuk shows us the real potential of Social Media and the freedom that Web 2.0 brought to all of us. From artists to marketing gurus we can go out and spread our message. If we have enough passion and patience we no longer need to be afraid of gatekeepers, as Gary repeats all over again. If you are a musician you can record your song and let people buy it or download it for free. If you are an artist you can become another Hugh Macleod with his iconic cartoons on the back of business cards. All you need is your talent, what’s unique about you and determination.
On the video you can watch above Gary is speaking on Web 2.0 Expo in New York and as he is an extremely passionate guy he expressed his message in a very direct way:
“There is way to many people in this room right now that are doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that! There is no reason in 2008 to do sh*t you hate!”
For me Gary Vaynerchuk is a new Seth Godin but focused much more on Social Media. Do you want to know more about Gary? Google “Winelibrary TV” or “Crush it”.
When talking about personal growth, self-development or generally about lifestyle design many times we hear questions like “How to find motivation?”, “How can I gain confidence?”, “How to find fulfilment?”. These are really important questions and many people work really hard to find answers for them in their lives.
Many times they look outside at things, achievements, goals, expectations… and they end up with disappointment. I would like to invite you to read a poem that talks about values you can grow in your life when focusing on “Love of Oneself”, a “healthy selfishness” as we may call it. It really resonates with my life and I find it groundbreaking with many great thoughts hidden inside.
An exciting story of an Italian who worked for Adobe/Macromedia for over 6,5 years and found his way to switch to the passionate life. He built on the side and launched a web app for mockups called Balsamiq Mockups.
Peldi - Beach coding in Mexico (before the switch)
Switch in numbers!
11 months of coding to push the first version of the app out
The more I read in the Internet about becoming self-employed, the more I feel I will succeed. Why? Because becoming an Internet entrepreneur is like quitting cigarettes or losingweight – gather more people around you with similar goals and it will be easier to reach your targets together. I regularly feed myself with articles and ebooks of people who have developed their own business or are on the way to it. Not only makes me feel more confident about my efforts, but also there is something else – I feel that we all do this together, especially that most of this people want to share their knowledge, support you and guide you because they know how hard it is in the beginning.
A friend of mine went to the USA for summer holidays and while doing some sightseeing, she met a guy and started to have a chat with him. They were talking friendly for a while and then she said she would like to come to America to continue her studies but can’t afford that. And like in the American dream, he offered her financial support to cover all the costs. He said that somebody helped him in the same way when he was young. After graudating from university she is now studying MBA while working as a stock market analyst in one of the companies in North Carolina.
Probably you have heard a lot of stories like this and they are indeed nice to read but what is my purpose of writing about that?
If you can’t, have a read about Michael Arrington, a former attorney and entrepreneur who is now 37 and two years ago nothing seemed to show what is coming. He became famous because of his TechCrunch blog and now has a whole farm of different kind of tech blogs with a few people taking care of them. Working 16 hours a day and living in one of the richest places in the USA he is one of the most influential tech journalists. Find out why he didn’t want to sell TechCrunch for $8.5 million, what are his plans for the future and what is so special about this guy.
Paul Montwill specializes in Digital and E-commerce Strategies, Online Marketing and industry analysis. He is an E-commerce Sales Director in one of the European IT companies, a blogger and he offers consultancy.
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One of them is Abundance Blog by Marelisa Fábrega. She writes great posts with useful tips for everybody interested in personal development. They are pretty long and offer a lot of value. The mission of her writing is to show you how to get the most out of life. She covers topics from creativity, productivity and simplicity.
