My favourite business nugget from Steve Jobs 💡
Steve Jobs left us with a lot of profound insights to help guide us in our lives.
His favourite book, “The Autobiography of a Yogi,” was something I read during my coast-to-coast travels throughout India. It is also one of my favourite books.
The lessons in faithful piety from the book may have also inspired one of my favourite quotes from him:
“You can’t connect all of the dots looking forward into the future. But you have to trust that they are going to connect.”
A little bit of personal backstory..
My father, a former captain in the military, became inspired one day by the graphite shaft used in stealth bombers. He went on to create the first graphite golf shaft, and founded a company called Aldila, whose products are now being used all around the world. After that, he started a company called Odyssey Golf, which is now the #1 putter brand in the PGA…
On a personal level, he was ever the disciplinarian. Today, children spend their days in front of screens all day long. But he would never let me watch television before 5pm (which was fine, as that was when Dragon Ball Z aired on Cartoon Network…)
He installed a pullup bar in the doorway of my room and every day, I owed him pushups and pullups before I could go to school. When my friends and I went to the arcades and wanted to play a game, we had to do 10 pushups for one quarter. 2.5 cents per pushup was our earnings.
On one side of my room were posters titled “What it takes to be number 1” and articles written by old figures such as Earl Morrall and Vince Lombardi.
It was essentially as if he was preparing me for a life as an entrepreneur — full of grit and tenacity.
“Tenacity is probably the most important attribute in an entrepreneur. It’s the person who never gives up — who never accepts “no” for an answer.”
— Mark Suster
Rooted in such an upbringing, it was almost my predetermined path in life to try and “connect the dots” however I can.
And for the last 20 years — that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
I’ve studied and experimented with all of the “hacks” to optimize my life and business to its full potential and become one of the 10–15% of people enjoying unconventional success… and shared my learnings with others who’d follow my footsteps.
I wrote my first book “Buy Your Own Island” with 300+ pages of lifestyle design hacks and techniques, and then “Dr Growth” a few years later sharing all of the business growth hacks I had learned to create a smart, efficient and profitable business.
It’s been years of daily efforts.
Anything I found that was good, I implemented, tested and tweaked… using myself as the proverbial guinea pig.
“The yeoman work in any science, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.”
– Michio Kaku
Within the mines of experience, I’ve sought out and kept all of the diamonds, rubies and sapphires and discarded with the rubble.
And I’ve drawn references and performed research using a variety of sources across a wide spectrum of disciplines, and integrated and experimented with their usage over many years.
I have interviewed hundreds of experts in “lifestyle design” to pick their brain and learn what makes them tick…
Successful CEOs, vloggers, podcasters, adventurers who traveled the world for decades, people who traveled from one side of Eurasia to the other, people who crossed the ocean in a row boat, investors, athletes, shamans, authors, digital nomads, and many more…
I started OpenWorld Magazine and podcast to help tens of thousands people get “unstuck” and consciously optimize their lives by design to help them break free and get ahead of the pack.
How to work smarter, do more, and be more efficient with their time and their lives. And I have taught these principles and best practices to thousands of students in more than two dozen countries and dozens of cities.
All of this has culminated in my life’s work, “Unlimit.” 🔥
My goal with this book is to honour the spirit and wisdom of Steve Jobs and to help each person who reads do a little bit better job of “connecting the dots” for themselves.
If you’ve always demanded more from yourself, if you have always knew that you could reach a little bit higher and always wanted to draw a little bit more upon your full potential, then you and I are kindred spirits in this quest.
And I welcome you as a fellow comrade-in-arms.
