A role model indeed

We all want to be successful.

Ask anyone on the road these days, what he or she wants out of life and you are most likely to get some standard answers: “money”, “success”, “fame”, “best career”, etc. There will be other answers like happiness in personal / family life, societal status and best health; but basically the essence of all these answers would be that people want the ‘very best’ now. They don’t want to be second best or the runners up. This is the world where nothing but the top matters, and all of us have followed suit. But who stands out among all of us then?

Who are the inspirational people if everybody wants the best and wants to be successful? Are these the people who have won that corporate award? Are these the people who were hit in films? Or are these the people who made those million dollars in the Silicon Valley? Perhaps the answer varies from person to person.

For me, the people who most inspire me are the ones who have maintained excellence throughout their lives, who have moved from one milestone to the other continuously (though not easily, but rather with immense challenges at times), who have pushed themselves to satisfy themselves with only the finest.

Steve Jobs is a business leader who inspires me immensely, and has been my idol. He was an intensely creative and passionate entrepreneur whose vision revolutionized the digital world. Below is a list of top traits that make him my idol:

Hard work: There is really no substitute for hard work in any sphere of life, any work or activity. Jobs was known as a guy who worked hard. He was a hard task master who expected high performance from others, but more than that he expected extraordinary performance from himself.

Creative genius: He revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. He had an acutely imaginative and creative thinking as is obvious from all Apple products.

Knew the pulse of the audience: Jobs was able to predict not only what people want right now, but also what they would desire much later in the future. He had an intuitive feel for people’s desires.

Great leadership: Steve Jobs ran a tight shop. In fact many articles, including this one, clearly say that Jobs was an ‘asshole boss’. The article says:

Jobs may have been unbelievably vile to deal with, but his employees valued his opinion and cared deeply about what he thought. This is critical, because leadership itself can be perceived as a particularly emotion-laden process. In an organisation, the leader's mood has some effect on his/her group. One theory is that leaders transmit their moods to other group members through the mechanism of emotional contagion.

But more or less everybody agrees that he was a phenomenal leader who Apple to those glories. In fact he himself famously said once:

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led." Surely his employees saw this and understood the wonderful opportunity they had got in working with him. In fact in this article, an Apple employees knowing all the nastiness and hazards of working with Jobs, has said: ““I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

Uncompromising: in an often quoted anecdote, Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. Jobs broke the contract. The shipper sued Apple which he didn’t care about. Meanwhile Apple had changed the vendor and got results that Jobs wanted.”

Relied on himself: Jobs had no one to tell him how to realize his vision. He relied on himself, his intuition and determinations. He made high-stakes decisions on his own. He stuck to his vision without wavering and took all consequences that came with his actions, whether highs or lows.

All these traits working together in tandem, gave Steve Jobs an incomparable advantage of a personality and character that did not accept failure. He has inspired a slew of people in his wake, not only business people but entrepreneurs, artists, students and individuals. His great quotes are often used to energize class-rooms and discussions. He is surely not unsung, but I feel there are things about him other than what is commonly known, from which we can all learn a lot. He is truly somebody I look up to!

I am writing about #MyRoleModel as a part of the activity by Gillette India in association with BlogAdda.com. 

Both images are from www.wired.com