Steal This Life Hack from Steve Jobs
I’m an Apple fanboy.
This wasn’t always the case. I was a Windows devotee until my first iPhone, the 3GS. My teenage history with computers can be marked by the different Windows boot screens. I thought Bill Gates was cooler than Steve Jobs. Just goes to show how silly teenagers are.
Don’t get me wrong, Bill Gates is a great person. I have tremendous respect for him as a visionary, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. But I almost never think about Bill Gates. I often I think about Steve Jobs.
And it isn’t just because Steve Jobs left us too early. I miss Satoru Iwata, former Nintendo President, as well but not like Steve Jobs. Both individuals left us too early. But Jobs had some extra magic about him.
His Stanford commencement speech came up in conversation recently and it prompted me to watch it again. The part of that speech that I remember most is that life only makes sense in hindsight and you have to have faith that things will all work out as you are living it.
It’s the idea that the process is more important than the outcome.
Almost every successful person will tell you that luck played a role in their success. There is no way to prove or disprove it but common sense tells us that seemingly random events happen all the time so it has to play a role.
An idea executed at the wrong time might fail. The same idea done at a different time could be a huge success. The only difference being the luck of when.
There’s nothing we can do about such uncontrollable events or acts of nature. But that doesn’t mean all of life is random luck. It means we have to focus on the things we can control.
We can’t control the outcome but we can control our processes.
Ray Dalio would call these principles. Maybe you know it better as wisdoms or simply best practices. They are ways of thinking or acting that is designed to maximize the probability of a good outcome.
Processes don’t guarantee a smooth experience or that everything will make sense in real time. Often times it will only appear to have worked in hindsight. There needs to be an amount of faith in the process.
We each have to find the processes that mesh with who we are. Something that works for me might not work for you. My favorite processes are:
- time spent learning is never wasted time
- question foregone truths that have been subject to minimal scrutiny
- only take risks with limited downsides you can live with
Then we practice these processes each day as best as we can and have faith that it will all work out.
