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20 Amazing Life Lessons-Steve Jobs

Don’t Wait

When the young Steve Jobs wanted to build something and needed a piece of equipment, he went straight to the source.

“He began by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get parts.”
 

Make Your Own Reality

Steve Jobs learned early that when you don’t like how things are in your life or in your world, change them, either through action or sheer force of will.

“As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.” – Joanna Hoffman, part of Apple’s early Macintosh team.

“I didn’t want to be a father, so I wasn’t,” Jobs later said, with only a touch of remorse in his voice.
 

Control Everything You Can

Steve Jobs was, to a certain degree, a hippie. However, unlike most free spirits of the 1960s-to-1970s love-in era, Jobs was a detail-oriented control freak.

“He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.” (more…)

Don't Mess With Women

fact-Bottle of Wine
(Women will LOVE this one!)
A woman and a man are involved in a car accident on a snowy, cold Monday morning; it’s a bad one. Both of their cars are totally demolished, but amazingly neither of them is hurt. God works in mysterious ways. After they crawl out of their cars, the man is yelling about women drivers. The woman says, ‘So, you’re a man. That’s interesting. I’m a woman. Wow, just look at our cars! There’s nothing left, but we’re unhurt. This must be a sign from God that we should be friends and live in peace for the rest of our days.’
Flattered, the man replies, ‘Oh yes, I agree completely, this must be a sign from God! But you’re still at fault…women shouldn’t be allowed to drive..’
The woman continues, ‘And look at this, here’s another miracle. My car is completely demolished but this bottle of wine didn’t break. Surely God wants us to drink this wine and celebrate our good fortune.’
She hands the bottle to the man. The man nods his head in agreement, opens it and drinks half the bottle and then hands it back to the woman.
The woman takes the bottle, puts the cap back on and hands it back to the man.
The man asks, ‘Aren’t you having any?’
The woman replies, ‘No. I think I’ll just wait for the police…’

MORAL OF THE STORY:
Don’t mess with women.

Socrates on Success

“Once A young man asked Socrates the secret of success. Socrates told the young man to meet him near the river the next morning. They met. Socrates asked the young man to walk with him into the river. When the water got up to their neck, Socrates took the young man by surprise and swiftly ducked him into the water.

The boy struggled to get out but Socrates was strong and kept him there until the boy started turning blue. Socrates pulled the boy’s head out of the water and the first thing the young man did was to gasp and take a deep breath of air.

Socrates asked him, “what did you want the most when you were there?” The boy replied, “Air”. Socrates said, “That is the secret of success! When you want success as badly as you wanted the air, then you will get it!” There is no other secret.”

Hitler was on 82 different drugs

adolf-hitler_02Maybe that’s why he was such a “sick” bastid?took a primitive form of Viagra when he tried to have sex with Eva Braun, a new book on the Fuhrer’s fragile health has claimed.

Adolf Hitler also

Based on long-dormant medical archives and formerly classified military documents, it claimed the dictator was so afraid of pills that most of his medication was injected.

The authors of the book, titled Was Hitler Ill?, claimed he took 82 different sorts of medication during his rule of Nazi Germany including the primitive “Viagra”, which was a testosterone extract.

The book is largely based on papers from Dr. Theodor Morrell, regarded as a quack among many in the upper echelons of Nazism, who Hitler came to rely on with increasing urgency during the war.

The less-than-flattering nickname “Reich syringe master” was given to him by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, himself a morphine addict by war’s end. (more…)

From $8 a Month to $20 Billion

“Twenty-five years ago, when Zong Qinghou was 42, he made his living selling soft drinks and popsicles to schoolchildren. He says he earned about $8 a month — less than a third of China’s average wage at the time — and was so broke that he once slept in a tunnel under the streets of Beijing rather than spend on a hotel.

“Today, Zong, 67, is still selling soda — and lots of other things — as the wealthiest man in mainland China, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its December cover package, “The World’s Richest People.” His net worth of $20.1 billion as of Oct. 5 ranks him No. 30 in the world…”

– Bloomberg, Zong Tops China Billionaires as Communist-to-Capitalist

The responsible trader puts risk control first. That means staying clearheaded in respect to potential outcomes, refusing to “drink the kool-aid” while everyone else chugs it.

Given the need for realism, though, it’s good to temper cynicism with awareness of what’s possible… the potential in what could happen, with hard work, if things really go right.

In that regard, extreme success outliers are not to be envied or copycatted — obviously one needs a lot of fortuitous circumstance (plus the hard work) to do what Zong did.

Instead, fat tail successes serve as a useful reminder that perhaps, just perhaps, outlandish aspirations are not so outlandish… and could even be modest in respect to what’s been done.

After all, if a man in China can go from making $8 a month at age 42, to being worth $20 billion at age 67, who is to say what you or I might achieve? 

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