Assignment-27A-Reading Reflection #3

Steve Jobs by: Walter Isaacson

1) You read about an entrepreneur:

• What surprised you the most?: The thing that surprised me the most about Steve Jobs' is his entire journey of life and all of the events he had experienced. Experimenting with LSD in India, dropping out of college, building one-hundred computers in a month, etc.
• What about the entrepreneur did you most admire?: The thing I admired most about Steve Jobs is the way he handled adversity and failure. This man went through hell and back in trying to be successful. He looked at all of his opportunities as a way to be creative and invent something this world has never seen before. He just wanted to make a difference in this world with his own inventions. He valued the aspect of success to the highest level and he wouldn't stop until he had reached that level.
• What about the entrepreneur did you least admire?: The thing about Steve Jobs' that I least admired is the way he treated his team of employees. They all wanted to reach the same results of success, but I think Jobs' wanted it more than anyone and he wasn't going to rest until he got the results he envisioned. 
• Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?: Jobs' had surely encoutnered adversity and failure when he dropped out of college, he was fired from Apple in 1985, and his "NeXT" computer project not doing so well. Jobs' still continued to take risks and look for new opportunities to make a difference in the world by investing in Pixar, rejoining and saving the company of Apple with his help of brilliant moves such as coming to a deal with Microsoft to implement the Microsoft Office program into the Mac.

2) What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited: The competencies I've noticed that the entrepreneur exhibited is the fact that practice makes perfect. Jobs' was an extremely motivated hard worker and he wouldn't accept results if they were mediocre. He wanted the closest thing to perfection.

3) Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you: One part of the reading that was confusing to me was the fact that Jobs' lost a fortune from the "NeXT" company that he invested a lot of time and effort into after he had just recently been fired from Apple. BuT, going back to the confusing part is that I don't understand why he quickly bought a share of Pixar and invested a percentage into Pixar after all of those failures. 

4) If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why?: If I were able to ask Steve Jobs two questions, my first question would be, "Why didn't you give Steve Wozniak the credit he deserved?" And my second question would be, "What was the hardest thing you've experienced in your life? Whether it was business failures, personal life matters, etc. Even though these seem like obvious questions to ask a guy like Steve Jobs, I would ask Jobs these two questions because I feel like he would give me an answer I need to hear when it comes to the concpets of success, failure, personal relationships, and how hard it can be to manage all of these when life doesn't deal you a good hand.

5) For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion: I think Steve Jobs' opinion of hard work is again, the notion of practicing perfection of his art. He seems like he was a big perfectionist and it bothered him if there was something about his creation or product that didn't look right in his eye.