I have been following Jeff Weiner on his LinkedIn influencer feed for a while. He is a pretty darned good writer, and his posts are very insightful. In fact, some of them are so down to earth and pragmatic, that you wonder, if this guy is really a CEO.
In his post on the best advice he ever got, he goes over some pretty deep stuff. Three things that stood out to me are:
You can do anything you set your mind to — My dad
My wife keeps telling me this, and I kept refuting it until recently. To put this to practice, I applied it to an extremely simple thing such as ‘waking up early’. You ‘really’ can do anything you set your mind to.
Everything that can be converted from an atom to a bit, will be — Nicholas Negroponte
This is deep. Very deep. Especially in the current world and time. How many times a day, do you hear – “there is an app for that.”. Be it tracking the mileage my car gives per liter of petrol, to remembering to buy a few groceries on the way back home, to figuring out the best seat in a plane, to anything that you can think about. Just anything that can be digitized, … will be.
If you could only do one thing, what would it be? — Steve Jobs
This is the one thing that I have always admired in Apple. Do one thing, and do it so darned well, that you are the best. Nothing short. The story that Jeff shares in the post is that of, how Apple had started on the iPad first. At some point in time, when they realized the iPhone makes sense to be done first, they actually shelved the iPad project. They moved to the iPhone. Delivered it. And then moved back to iPad.
The story that comes to my mind is the famous quadrant that Jobs drew when he first came back to Apple. The four quadrants were laptop for consumers, laptop for business users, desktop for consumers, desktop for business users. Thats it. They focussed on one product in each quadrant. They trashed every other variant that was introduced during Sculley’s time.
Wisdom without compassion is ruthlessness, compassion without wisdom is folly — Fred Kofman
This is so deep that it took me a few seconds to digest this. But once you understand it, it is so true.
Read the original post from Jeff here.