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FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Defining leadership principles to emulate...
Stay hungry, stay foolish
Stay foolish. Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas,
new experiences, and new adventures.
- Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was a product of the He later recalled, “On the back cover of reflected the contradictions,
the final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: Stay Hungry. “Stay Foolish.”
Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career, by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complimented by a hippy nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid dropping, enlightenment seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life, from the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis to the way he ran his business, his behaviour
two great social movements that
emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and anti-war activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and anti-authoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wire heads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both, were various paths to personal enlightenment; Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation.
The combination of these cultures was found in publications such as Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue. On its first cover was the famous picture of earth, taken from space, and its subtitle was ‘Access to Tools.’ The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs, who as we know became a hippy, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971 when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to Apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out.
confluence, and eventually synthesis of all these varying strands.
Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its adds, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippy at heart. The famous “1984” add showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think different” adds: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in square holes.”
If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are usually the ones who do.”
Contributed by
Oye Jolaoso
*Source: Harvard Business Review
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