Assignment 13A – Reading Reflection No. 1

Reading Reflection No. 1

I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

1. You read about an entrepreneur

• What surprised you the most? I think I was surprised the most by was the idea of the reality distortion field, in the interviews that were conducted of the people that worked with him they all described him as having this magical quality of being able to motivate people to do great things. It was taught to him while he was at Reed college, it was his ability to convince people and even himself to do almost anything for the Apple project he would use his charisma, wit, talent and hyperbole to make people that had almost quit push through to finish. This marketing talent also gave him the advantage when he did his keynote speaks about his products because this would convince the audience that the products they had just seen were the best ever and that they needed to buy one.
• What about the entrepreneur did you most admire?: I admire the fact that he was kicked out of his own company or left in his own words and decided to invest his money become wealthy and then come back to it. It take a lot to start over from fresh it takes a mental toll on a person to fail, but he realized a lot of his flaws and decided to build again. When he started NeXT he took some of his team and took what he had learned and applied it to this new avenue, even though he continued to make major mistakes he kept at what he was doing and decided that the mistakes and accidents were not going to stop him which takes a lot of determination and growing up to realize that you were wrong and that sometimes others know more than you do.
• What about the entrepreneur did you least admire?: Although he was a very charismatic person that only hid the very mean and dangerous side to him. His personality and the way that he handled things when it came to the company kept leaving the people he worked with resentful and downright scared of him. He had zero tolerance for the people he worked with sometimes, going to far as to insult people by calling them assholes, or belittle them by calling their ideas stupid and them presenting them weeks later as his own. He has a nasty streak that is not something that a leader of a major company should be, although he should have a back bone so that his employees stay focused on their projects that is not the way to do it. He is a good example for knowing how to not treat your employees or partners.
• Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?: I would say that he encountered more failure than he did success for a while. his first launch of apple and the Macintosh computer were a flop, people were on board for it at first being excited about the product but realized that there was a lot of problems with it. With the company he started which he went so far as to patent the logo for went bankrupt and it was partially because he made so many mistakes with the way that he handled the company and the finances, or how he handled the whole Bill Gates situation. Yet with all of this he kept going at it, he continued to look for new business ventures and took on more until he realized that he needed to pick on really good project and perfect it.

2. What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited? The skills that he had which is something to be looked into and studied are his oratory skills. He may have made several mistakes when it came to the business aspect of being an entrepreneur, but he was an excellent salesman. He created the "Think Different" campaign, or better said he bought it to life because after further research this was another one of those instances when he took the ideas of the people under him. Regardless of how much he thought the commercial would not work at first he came around and used his marketing and hyperbole skills to really sell the commercial and sell his products. He was an amazing salesman, that was able to convince anyone that they needed apple products, even now that still holds true.

3. Identify at least one part of the reading that confused you.: It wasn't the way that it was written or the way that the book is organized but i was really confused to how many different attempts Steve Jobs went through. There really is a lot of different steps and business plans that the man went through until he came up on the final apple company. It is hard to keep track of how many times he started over again and where he made money, where on product succeeded and another failed which is a part of the entrepreneur process and shows that it will take a lot of mistakes before you get anything right.

4. If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why? I would ask him more about his struggle with cancer, one of the things that I think was too much was how hard he kept pushing himself when he was sick, I want to know more about what motivated him to keep working even when there was a very real risk of him dying and him knowing the company could have gone on without him. I also wanted to ask him what it is he sees in like for example Pixar that made him invest in it, what is it that he sees in these ideas that makes him believe that they will be successful.

5. For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion. I do admire his sense of hard work, he poured himself into all of his projects, even when he was working on 2-3 of them at a time he has a sense of persistence. Although I do not agree with him almost killing himself with his work (getting kidney stones as a side effect of working too hard) I do know it is hard to pull away from something that you are really invested in.