Lesson #1: Your beginnings do not determine your endings.
A lot of us came from very humble beginnings, and was not provided with a hand up.
Your parents might want the best for you and appreciate your God's giving talent, idea etc, but might not have the money to invest in your beautiful ideas.
Moreover, you might be saddled with the psychological consequences of being given up at birth.
Remember, we all have to live with the reality that we may not be born geniuses, rich, or naturally blessed.
In fact, many of us are born into really harsh family lives.
But all that doesn’t matter if we believe in the power of our dreams.
If people with much less resources managed to succeed, we can choose to do so too.
Success is measured not by what advantages you began with but how far you got with the hand life dealt you.
Don’t ever use your humble beginnings as an excuse for your inability to achieve success.
Lesson #2: Personal passion is more important than money
A case study of Steve Job of blessed memory.
Steve was taught by his adoptive father to be passionate about craftsmanship and engineering.
His father encouraged his sense of curiosity.
These were precisely the traits that enabled Steve Jobs to become a technology evangelist.
While the technology he was developing wasn’t exactly new, the level of drive, passion, and unwillingness to compromise made Apple products stand apart from the competition.
It is worth noting that Steve Jobs wasn’t as driven by money as much as his sense of curiosity and discovery.
If you’re struggling to succeed, you can do well by shifting your focus from merely making money to making a difference.
Note: this phrase is nothing to today's generation but you can still choose to be different in your world (very important).
By focusing on your passion, you can achieve more things and financial payoffs normally aren’t that far behind.
If you are driven mostly by the need to make money, it would be too easy for you to get discouraged and lose heart when setbacks appear.
When you are driven by passion, you are more likely to overcome challenges.
Lesson #3: You don’t have to be first to succeed
Almost all the technologies that made Apple a household name were, in fact, pioneered by other companies.
Everything from the graphical windows-based interface of the Macintosh to its mouse pointing device to the portable digital music playing capabilities of the iPod to the touch interface of the iPhone were existing technologies.
What Jobs brought to the table was he had the sense of urgency needed to turn ‘laboratory technology’ into disruptive technology that really changed how people interacted with and used electronic devices.
This is a powerful personal trait to copy because it is too easy for us to get discouraged by the fact that competitors are already doing what we want to do.
In fact, they already have introduced solutions to the problems we want to solve. Steve Jobs’ story shows that being a latecomer doesn’t matter.
Just because other people came ahead of us doesn’t mean we can’t beat them.
What matters is that you have the sense of urgency to give your customers/clients the value they deserve.
A lot of the technologies Apple engineered into their products existed but were either too exotic, too expensive, or too clunky.
Steve Jobs focused on boosting user experience so much that he pulled out all the stops in making Apple products intuitive, easy to use, efficient, and modern-looking.
Steve Jobs’ personal story teaches us that it doesn’t matter where we come from, how much we start with, or how other people perceive us when we first start out.
What matters is the level of passion we have for our dreams, our willingness to pursue our dreams, and our open-mindedness.
Genius, it often turns out, is not based strictly on intelligence but passion and relentlessness in finding better solutions.
