Seed an Idea

For next few minutes, set yourself free! Forget about all the dogmas! Forget about your age, you’re 23. You’re young and restless. You don’t have that exact thing how are you going to make an impact on the world, but you cannot settle for just anything. You are passionate, yeah! You know this word. Passion, you’re living it. Right now, in this very moment. It’s not over yet. It’s the year 1976! Yes, seventies, and yes you don’t have to care about your retro look by the way, just try keeping 70’s fashion away from your mind! Focus on your inner self, you’re passionate. This all is happening at this very moment. Finally, I need not mention arrogant. What more you want? Okay, you’ve just dropped out of your college, started looking at your friends? Who can play wozniak?

So it’s 1976, you’re passionate about doing something amazing, everything around you is positive, you’re living the positive Steve jobs role. You’re all set, becoming Steve jobs.

And here it is, what am I looking at? The very next moment, you seem to lose that confidence, where’s that confident expression from your face? You’re losing it & bam! You’ve lost it. You can’t play Jobs anymore.

Story’s over! It got over at that very moment, when you started to feel negative. May be when you’d get the idea of dropping out of college is what made you negative, and you started losing it?

May be you weren’t wrong, it happens. And that’s why Jobs was an exception. He was young, restless, passionate and sometimes arrogant too and yes he dropped out the college. But he did so because he didn’t find any value in it. He was firm with his decisions, and believed that it’ll all workout alright. He was confident, doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t have lost his confidence at times, but that was momentarily. He was able to continue doing whatever he wanted, because he blindly believed that he has control over his actions, and following your instincts can take you, where you truly want to go, but only actions can take you there. He was able to start & yes, in year 1976, he along with his geeky friend wozniak were able to produce apple I in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66. This was just the start.

Once, in an interview, he was asked about what made him so passionate about apple. His response was, “Once when I got a chance to visit a school, I saw a class with whole bunch of kids using apple tools for their studies, and that was fascinating in a way where very few people in case of apple II four, designed a computer & gave it to some other people who didn’t know how to design but they knew how to manufacture it on a large scale, then they gave it to some people who didn’t know how to design or manufacture but they knew how to distribute & then they gave it to people who knew how to write software for it & then came the consumers, who did magical things with this machine! It was a whole inverse pyramid that grew, which blossomed!” And yes, he was right, in fact he was right because everything came from an idea, a tiny little idea: seed.

P.S. This boring article is an excerpt from my not that boring book talk on Becoming Steve Jobs, given while I was working in TCS.