[acb-hsp] Do What Jobs Did, Not What He Says

[Sharon]

What a nice balance, or nice corrective.
Sharon

-----Original Message-----
From: acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org [mailto:acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org] On Behalf Of
peter altschul
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 11:24 AM
To: Acbhsp
Subject: [acb-hsp] Do What Jobs Did, Not What He Says

Do Like Steve Jobs Did: Don't Follow Your Passion
  By Cal Newport September 20, 2012
  Steve Jobs didn't start Apple because he loved technology.  
This excerpt from "So Good They Can't Ignore You" tells the much 
messier story behind the old saying, "do what you love."
  In June 2005, Steve Jobs took the podium at Stanford Stadium to 
give the commencement speech to Stanford's graduating class.  
Wearing jeans and sandals under his formal robe, Jobs addressed a 
crowd of 23,000 with a short speech that drew lessons from his 
life.  About a third of the way into the address, Jobs offered 
the following advice: stally've got to find what you love ...  
[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you 
haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settlest.  When he 
finished, he received a standing ovation.
  Steve Jobs--a guru of iconoclastic thinking--put his stamp of 
approval on an immensely appealing piece of popular career 
advice, which I call the passion hypothesis:
  stininThe key to occupational happiness is to first figure out 
what you're passionate about and then find a job that matches 
this passionddininst
  This hypothesis is one of modern American society's most 
well-worn themes.  Those of us lucky enough to have some choice 
in what we do with our lives are bombarded with this message, 
starting at an early age.  We are told to lionize those with the 
courage to follow their passion, and pity the conformist drones 
who cling to the safe path.  As one prominent career counselor 
told me, "do what you love, and the money will follow" has become 
the de facto motto of the career-advice field.
  There is, however, a problem lurking here: When you look past 
the feel-good slogans and go deeper into the details of how 
passionate people like Steve Jobs really got started, or ask 
scientists about what actually predicts workplace happiness, the 
issue becomes much more complicated.  You begin to find threads 
of nuance that, once pulled, unravel the tight certainty of the 
passion hypothesis, eventually leading to an unsettling 
recognition: st"Follow your passion" might just be terrible 
advice./
  Do what Steve Jobs did, not what he said
  If you had met a young Steve Jobs in the years leading up to 
his founding of Apple Computer, you wouldn't have pegged him as 
someone who was passionate about starting a technology company.  
Jobs had attended Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts 
enclave in Oregon, where he grew his hair long and took to 
walking barefoot.  Unlike other technology visionaries of his 
era, Jobs wasn't particularly interested in either business or 
electronics as a student.  He instead studied Western history and 
dance, and dabbled in Eastern mysticism.
  Jobs dropped out of college after his first year, but remained 
on campus for a while, sleeping on floors and scrounging free 
meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.  As Jeffrey S.  Young 
notes in his exhaustively researched 1988 biography, stSteve 
Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward Jobs eventually grew tired of 
being a pauper and, during the early 1970's, returned home to 
California, where he moved back in with his parents and talked 
himself into a night-shift job at Atari.  (The company had caught 
his attention with an ad in the San Jose Mercury News that read, 
"Have fun and make money.") During this period, Jobs split his 
time between Atari and the All-One Farm, a country commune 
located north of San Francisco.  At one point, he left his job at 
Atari for several months to make a mendicants' spiritual journey 
through India, and on returning home he began to train seriously 
at the nearby Los Altos Zen Center.
  In 1974, after Jobs's return from India, a local engineer and 
entrepreneur named Alex Kamradt started a computer time-sharing 
company dubbed Call-in Computer.  Kamradt approached Steve 
Wozniak to design a terminal device he could sell to clients to 
use for accessing his central computer.  Unlike Jobs, Wozniak was 
a true electronics whiz who was obsessed with technology and had 
studied it formally at college.  On the flip side, however, 
Wozniak couldn't stomach business, so he allowed Jobs, a longtime 
friend, to handle the details of the arrangement.  All was going 
well until the fall of 1975, when Jobs left for the season to 
spend time at the All-One commune.  Unfortunately, he failed to 
tell Kamradt he was leaving.  When he returned, he had been 
replaced.
  I tell this story because these are hardly the actions of 
someone passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, yet 
this was less than a year before Jobs started Apple Computer.  In 
other words, in the months leading up to the start of his 
visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young 
man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics 
only when it promised to earn him quick cash.
  It was with this mindset that later that same year, Jobs 
stumbled into his big break.  He noticed that the local 
"wireheads" were excited by the introduction of model-kit 
computers that enthusiasts could assemble at home.  Jobs pitched 
Wozniak the idea of designing one of these kit computer circuit 
boards so they could sell them to local hobbyists.  The initial 
plan was to make the boards for $25 apiece and sell them for $50.  
Jobs wanted to sell one hundred, total, which, after removing the 
costs of printing the boards, and a $1,500 fee for the initial 
board design, would leave them with a nice $1,000 profit.  
Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was 
strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.
  From this point, however, the story quickly veers into legend.  
Steve arrived barefoot at the Byte Shop, Paul Terrell's 
pioneering Mountain View computer store, and offered Terrell the 
circuit boards for sale.  Terrell didn't want to sell plain 
boards, but said he would buy fully assembled computers.  He 
would pay $500 for each, and wanted fifty as soon as they could 
be delivered.  Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even 
larger amount of money and began scrounging together startup 
capital.  It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer 
was born.  As Young emphasizes, "Their plans were circumspect and 
small-time.  They weren't dreaming of taking over the world."
  The Messy Lessons of Jobs
  I shared the details of Steve Jobs's story because when it 
comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter.  If a young 
Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue 
work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los 
Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers.  But he didn't follow 
this simple advice.  Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of 
passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break--a 
"small-time" scheme that unexpectedly took off.
  I don't doubt that Jobs eventually grew passionate about his 
work: If you've watched one of his famous keynote addresses, 
you've seen a man who obviously loved what he did.  But so what? 
All that tells us is that it's good to enjoy what you do.  This 
advice, though true, borders on the tautological and doesn't help 
us with the pressing question that we actually care about: How do 
we find work that we'll eventually love? Like Jobs, should we 
resist settling into one rigid career and instead try lots of 
small schemes, waiting for one to take off? Does it matter what 
general field we explore? How do we know when to stick with a 
project or when to move on? In other words, Jobs's story 
generates more questions than it answers.  Perhaps the only thing 
it does make clear is that, at least for Jobs, "follow your 
passion" was not particularly useful advice.
  stExcerpted from So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport.  
B) 2012 by Calvin C.  Newport.  Reprinted by permission of Grand 
Central Publishing.  All rights reserved./
  stCal Newport, Ph.D., lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a 
writer and an assistant professor of computer science at 
Georgetown University.  He also runs the website Study Hacks: 
Decoding Patterns of Success This is his fourth book./
  Copyright B) 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC.  All rights reserved.
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