#249 Steve Jobs In His Own Words

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high. So I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show. So we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today. And I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason is because this is so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up.
It is really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time.
So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it and you don't really love it, you're going to give up.
And that's what happens to most people.
If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, oftentimes it's the ones who were successful, loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough.
And the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane.
Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it?
It's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don't love it, you're gonna fail.
That was Steve Jobs talking about the importance of passion. And it's from an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is I, Steve, Steve Jobs In His Own Words.
So I counted the other day and I think I've done 13 different podcasts on Steve Jobs. I will link them all with episode numbers in the show notes.
Most of those, he's the main character, like there were biographies or books exclusively dedicated to him. In a few, it's about like his partners like Johnny Ive or like Ed Catmull at Pixar. But even after reading all these books on Steve Jobs, I didn't know the book that I'm holding my hand even existed. I walked into a small used bookstore the other day. And about after an hour of just going through all their shelves, I walked out with six books for $23. I love used bookstores. And not only because they're usually fantastic values, but because you just find books that you didn't even know existed. And this book is a great example of that. It is about 120 pages long. It is just quotes organized by topic from Steve Jobs. So consider this a bonus episode of Founders. Most of this is just gonna be Steve Jobs talking directly to you and I. And so I'm gonna jump right in. He's talking about it's normal to have anxiety before you introduce a new product. He's talking about the way he felt right before he debuted the iPad. And I thought this was remarkable because it's the last product he ever introduced. And you just think about how many groundbreaking products he had created up until this point of his career, and he's still anxious.
Even though we've been using these internally for some time and working on it for a few years, you still have butterflies in your stomach the week before, the night before the introduction, the day before the launch. You just never know until you get it into your customer's hands. This is Steve on the fact that the core of your company is the quality of employee you have. He repeats this over and over again, that the founder's most important job is recruiting, is to assemble the greatest concentration of talent that you possibly can. He says, all we are is our people. That's what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great, bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.