Steve Jobs was a hustler

In the wake of Steve Jobs death, I and others look to him for inspiration and instruction on how to achieve success. He has been hailed as a genius, a visionary, an inventor, even a tweaker.... but to me the single quality that accounts for his early success is none of those things. Steve Jobs was first and foremost a hustler. Were it not for his hustle, his relentlessness, his brazen acts of manipulation, I think it’s unlikely he would have had the opportunity to achieve the success he did.

-In high school, Jobs cold called Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of HP, and convinced him to give him free electronic chips and a summer job.
-While taking a high school electronics class, Jobs called Burroughs and lied to them in order to get them to send him a free electronics part.
-Jobs convince Wozniak to build and sell blue boxes, a device for making illegal free long distance phone calls.
-Jobs got Wozniak to design parts for Atari (his employer at the time), and lied to him about the payment he received.
-Jobs convinced Wozniak to sell circuit board that became the Apple I instead of giving the plans away as he originally intended.
-Jobs sold the first 50 apple computers to the Byte Shop before they existed and before they had the means to build them.
-Jobs parlayed the invoice from the Byte Shop into getting a line of credit to buy the parts for the first 50 Apple computers.
-Jobs convinced Wozniak to quit his job at HP and work for Apple, partially by going behind his back and convincing others that influenced Wozniak.
-Jobs convinced Xerox to show him their GUI and mouse technology in exchange for options to buy Apple stock.

From this point forward, Steve Jobs had money and was less of a hustler, less underhanded, and more of a shrewd negotiator. From my perspective this energy, resilience and hustle is the root of Steve Job's success.

1 comment:

vijay said...

Thanks for sharing this..Indeed there are a lot of smart, hard working people who have a lot of opportunity but still lose out.You need that spice to get that magic ingredient..