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I worked at Apple for 10 years—here’s what Steve Jobs taught me about how to be successful ‘at anything in life’

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By Justin Santamaria, & Ash Lamb

From 2003 to 2013, I was an engineer at Apple, where I led the teams that built FaceTime, iMessage and CarPlay.

Getting to work closely with Steve Jobs was an opportunity I’ll never forget. He was a visionary who taught me a lot about not just how to make products that people love, but also how to be successful at anything in life.

Here are the three simple yet profound lessons I learned from Jobs that have helped me succeed in my career as a tech entrepreneur today:

1. Mastery demands iteration.

Illustration: Ash Lamb for CNBC Make It

Getting something right requires patience and hard work. But it also means knowing when to stop making changes; you’ll know when you’ve arrived at the best product when you’re beyond excited to share it.

During my first week at Apple, Jobs was prepping for an iChat demo. “I’m going to make the crowd sh** their pants,” he said.

Jobs knew he had executed something great.

2. Use your failures as stepping stones to success.

Illustration: Ash Lamb for CNBC Make It

When Apple was ready to release the iPhone into the world, the foundation was already there, making it possible to keep taking new and different risks later on.

With every product, Jobs expected things to go wrong. But he also understood that messing up was often worth the reward. Perfection may not exist, but greatness could be achieved with a few software updates.

3. Remove the rock that’s blocking you from going beyond your comfort zone.

Illustration: Ash Lamb for CNBC Make It

The original iPhone changed the world forever in 2007, with its multitouch screen and digital keyboard as highlights.

The decision to remove the mechanical keyboard was a clever industrial design solution. It allowed the iPhone to have more screen space for other creative features.

Feature Image Credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

By Justin Santamaria, & Ash Lamb

Justin Santamaria is a former Apple engineer. Currently, he is the co-founder of the fitness app Future. Prior to Future, he led the guest experiences product team at Airbnb. Follow him on Twitter.

Ash Lamb is an illustrator and designer based in Barcelona, Spain. He spends his time deconstructing and illustrating ideas for creative entrepreneurs, and teaching people how to create impactful visuals at visualgrowth.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Sourced from CNBC make it

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The simple trick Steve Jobs followed to be ‘most productive,’ according to his former executive assistant

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By Courtney Connley.

As a former executive assistant to late Apple founder Steve Jobs, Naz Beheshti got an up-close view of what it took for the tech CEO to be successful.

In addition to prioritizing his well-being by exercising regularly and meditating daily, Beheshti, who is now an executive wellness coach and founder of the corporate wellness company Prananaz, says Jobs also was “extremely efficient and productive because he worked on his energy management and not necessarily time management.”

“Yes, it’s good to manage some of your time,” the author of “Pause. Breathe. Choose: Become the CEO of Your Well-Being,” tells CNBC Make It. “But to optimize your day and be most productive and not fall into the productivity trap, you have to manage your energy.”

Executive wellness coach Naz Beheshti.
Executive wellness coach Naz Beheshti. Photo credit: Naz Beheshti

A productivity trap, Beheshti describes, is “when we’re just constantly chasing more hours in the day” and “wearing our lack of sleep like a badge of honour.”

“The way some people do it, even my clients when they first come to me, is they say, ‘Oh, I only slept two hours.’ Or ‘I pulled an all-nighter because I needed those extra hours in the day to be more productive,’” she explains. “But is your quality of work productive and up to par during those hours where you are supposed to be sleeping and rebooting your body and mind? Typically it’s not because you’re not performing at your best when you’re exhausted.”

To avoid this trap of working around the clock, Beheshti suggests managing your workload the way Jobs did by “looking at your day and defining or identifying what parts of your day you have the most energy.”

“Do the things that you typically procrastinate on, or that are challenging or that you don’t typically find as inspiring when you have the most energy and focus on optimizing your day based on your energy rather than the time,” she says. “Because we all have the same number of hours in the day, right? But this is why some people get a lot more done in a day than someone else does.”

This “important shift” from time management to energy management is what Beheshti says she advises all of her clients to do as they work towards managing their stress and overall well-being.

“Your well-being is really about taking empowered action,” she says. “It’s your choice to become the CEO of your well-being. And, when you are the CEO of your well-being, you show up as your best self in all areas of your life.”

Feature Image Credit: The late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

By Courtney Connley

Sourced from CNBC

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Steve Jobs Used the 30 Percent Rule to Bring Apple Back From the Dead (It’ll Work for You, Too)

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By Justin Bariso

By focusing on the best of the best, Jobs transformed Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was in dire straits. Once known as a major innovator, it was suffering from severe mismanagement and lack of focus. Apple had built its reputation on simplicity and quality, but it was now working on a plethora of products, many of which were lackluster at best.

Jobs immediately began working to change this. Within a decade, the company would be transformed.

I recently discovered an interview Jobs gave over 20 years ago, just shortly after he’d been rehired by Apple. In it, he reveals one of the secrets that would lead to Apple’s future success:

We examined the future product roadmap … and what we found was that 30 percent of them were incredibly good. And about 70 percent of them were either pretty good, or things that we didn’t really need to be doing. Businesses we didn’t really need to be in. And so, we’ve pared a lot of that back, so we could focus the same amount of original resource even more on what was remaining–and add a few new things in.

So, the resources that we’re investing are equal or greater than we have been, but it’s on fewer things so we’re going to do a better job at them I think.

Jobs’s advice is about more than simple focus–it’s a simple way to apply emotional intelligence into your everyday life.

I like to call it the 30 percent rule.

Why you need the 30 percent rule

We live in an age of distraction. Never-ending notifications, instantaneous communication, and easy access to endless information. Fear of missing out moves us motivates us to try to do everything that our minds and hearts desire.

But as you move from one shiny object to another, you’ll slowly discover a fundamental truth:

You can’t do everything.

And if you try, you won’t do anything well.

Jobs knew this. He walked into Apple in 1997, the company he’d co-founded and was ousted from over a decade earlier, and he saw chaos. He saw disunity. He saw lack of direction.

The total had become less than the sum of its parts.

To combat this, Jobs made priority number one the shrinking of Apple’s product line–and ensuring that whatever the company made, it made extremely well.

The result was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history. The iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. New and improved computer design. Retail stores that looked like something out of the future.

By focusing on the 30 percent, the best of the best, Apple rebuilt its reputation for creating simple, clean, beautiful products that are a joy to use. The company continues to excel today based on the philosophy it developed under Jobs’s leadership.

How to make the 30 percent rule work for you

It’s easy to find things that are fun and interesting to work on. But don’t forget that every task, every project, takes a specific amount of resources. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a CEO, those resources are limited.

So, you have to ask yourself:

  • Am I making the best use of my resources?
  • Am I focused on the 30 percent–that is, making the best of the best?
  • Or am I wasting time on distractions?

It takes deep thinking to answer these questions properly. So make sure you schedule time throughout the week, month, and year to take a step back and analyze your situation as objectively as possible. Don’t leave this up to chance; make an appointment in your calendar and mark it with high priority.

Then, once you answer those questions, make the necessary adjustments. It will probably mean giving up things you’re kind of interested in, or things you’re kind of doing well.

It may mean turning down meetings.

Missing out on opportunities.

And making tough choices.

Because remember, no one can do it all.

But if you think things through, choose wisely, and work hard–you can do it right.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images. Steve Jobs.

By Justin Bariso

Sourced from Inc.

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Steve Jobs Figured Out Branding 40 Years Ago. Why Are We Still Reinventing It?

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By Geoffrey James

Weirdly, every entrepreneur wants to be like Jobs but they don’t bother to master the basics.

In my experience, marketers don’t frequently start their own companies, which is a pity, because most startups from the get-go make these three basic branding errors that hobble their growth:

1. A head-scratcher brand name

A brand name that needs to be explained is a liability rather than an asset. Ideally, a brand name should create a positive emotion that ties into the product or service. The classic example here is Apple Computer. (It’s a computer, but it’s small, tasty, and easy to use.)

One of the worst brand names I’ve encountered is Deuce Productions. The term “productions” could mean anything, and the word deuce refers to a playing card with two pips. Turns out, it was an events production company run by a pair of twins. Even when explained, it’s a head-scratcher.

If I were rebranding them and they really thought (for some reason) that being twins was a competitive advantage (I’m not at all sure about this), I’d advise them to go with something that actually has a positive and meaningful twist, like “Twice-as-Good Events.”

2. Launching with multiple brand names

Over the weekend, a friend asked me to look at his branding plan, which included a corporate brand, a product brand, and a personal brand, all of which were different from each other.

It’s very difficult to establish a single brand in the minds and memories of investors and customers. Three brands? Not gonna happen. I told him to focus on one brand and dump the other two.

I learned this one the hard way. When I first launched myself as a writer/speaker/consultant, I tried to promote “Geoffrey James” and “The Institute for Business Wisdom.” I quickly learned that two brands was one too many and rebranded as Geoffrey James LLC.

Startups should ideally launch with a corporate brand that’s also its product brand. Once again, the classic example is Apple Computer, whose first product was … you guessed it … the Apple computer.

3. Adding new brands rather than extending existing brands

Many companies seem to think that the more brands the better. (I think this belief might be a leftover from the “Heinz 57” days.) The worst example of this was General Motors, which was a brand-name salad until the company wised up and dumped half of them.

When expanding your product set, it makes far more sense to extend your existing brand than to launch a new brand name. That way, you take advantage of whatever momentum your current brand has acquired. Again, the classic example is Apple, with the Apple I, Apple II, Apple III, and then Macintosh (still building on the small, tasty, easy meme).

Let’s apply this principle to a real-life startup.

I recently purchased a full-body motion-capture suit (for doing SFX like Gollum) called Perception Neuron PRO from a company named Noitom. Just to be clear, I have no relationship with this company; I just happened to buy one of its products.

Both Perception Neuron and Noitom are head-scratcher brand names, but they’re also disjoint. Noitom recently launched a new product called the Hi5 VR Glove. That’s a decent brand name (if you know what “VR” means), but it has no obvious connection with the original two brands.

A better approach would have been to start with a corporate and product brand name like Hi5 MOCAP and a first product named the Hi5 MOCAP Suit. That would then be followed by the Hi5 MOCAP Glove, etc.

This simplified brand scheme would have made the company and its products more memorable, easier to promote, and easier to combine and package.

Feature Image sourced from: Getty Images

By Geoffrey James

Sourced from Inc.

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