The Personal Moat of STEVE JOBS [Part 3 of 5]
Steve Jobs was fired from his own company. Then came back and built the most valuable company in history. Most people explain that with genius or luck. The actual answer is more specific than that.
This is Part 3 on Steve Jobs in our series called Personal Moats. We cover people in Tech by breaking down their Individual Strengths (Part 1) and Team Skills (Part 2), Personal Potential and Pitfalls (Part 3, which is below), Public Role (Part 4 to come), Part 5 (Overarching Work Theme, also to come).
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All of us have our own versions — differentiated — of these aspects of our Career and Business traits below.
If you’re ready to learn more about your own unique Personal Moat or about Human Design and how it can help your career, team, or business, feel free to reach out. I’m doing free consults focusing on those who, like me, are in tech. No pitch, just conversation if you feel like taking the next step.
Prominent Personal Pitfalls (and Potential)
Before we get to how BG5 derives Personal Pitfalls and at the same time incredible Potential (and how you can differentiate your own) we first have to understand the mechanics of how we operate in our work.
If you think about the way in which you work primarily through communication, it’s been studied that only about 7% of the message you’re delivery is from the words alone. Now with Slack and Teams these days, it’s very much sometimes the only thing that we use to communicate with our colleagues and our teams but think about how often you run into situations where the message doesn’t land like you would want it to, or that it requires more words and a Zoom call to get the message across. As much as many of us frown on RTO policies, there is something to be said about communication in person that minimize misunderstandings.
So where does that leave the rest of the 93% that isn’t communicated through text/speech alone?
Body language and tone are things that come to mind. But more importantly it brings up a concept where we are subconsciously simultaneously broadcasting and receiving subtle cues in messaging to each other in a work setting. And it is in the particular areas where we are open to receiving is where the miscommunication/misunderstanding can lead to our Personal Pitfalls. And it is in these areas that BG5 — as a mechanical discipline — can help illuminate the specific areas in each and everyone of us that is most subjected to being most easily influenced by others without filter.
Similarly, broadcast is the set ways in which we bring things to the table.
Neither of these are direct related to specific knowledge. It’s more about what are the underlying parts of us, the way we are wired where we are receiving influence, amplify that in a team and at the same time how we are doing that to others unconsciously.
Pitfall: Blame. Potential: Collaboration & Objectivity
This is a pitfall who is someone who is inherently collaborative and works well and indeed helps to process (or assimilate) information with other people as a sounding board. But having other people to “bridge” some of the gaps of your potential also means that without them you tend to find fault in the other when they’re missing.
There are a lot of pros to being collaborative and that you need other people and how to work together but in the inverse, it also mean that you might feel there is a gap when other people that complement you are not around. For Jobs’ ability to assimilate collaborative, here as a Pitfall it means he’s prone to playing the blame game — prone to finding hiccups and those gaps as someone else’s problem rather than his own.
But with time it maybe blossom into its real potential: wisdom. We know very well and from many individuals that have worked with Jobs over the years that he was relentless and cutthroat. Jobs appeared to have an ego, something to prove, a perfectionist and often took it out (on himself) but was most visible on his team. This was particularly true in early in Job’s career.
But we also know that later on his career and particularly after and around the time he gave his Stanford Commencement speech that he was reaching his potential. You hear that from the collaborators at the time from Tony Fadell to Jony Ive. He still was highly critical, but he had perhaps learned to use it to his advantage and not to the point where he alienated his colleagues and team.
From Jobs’ Design we can also identify 4 additional areas where he’s open and subjected most to influence from the outside and would affect him in these ways:
Overcompensating or competing for things that don’t matter
Inflexible
Spending time thinking about things that don’t truly matter
Constantly searching for identify and direction
We see this thread in all parts of his career but also particularly in the first half of his career.
If you’re ready to learn more about your own unique Personal Moat or about Human Design and how it can help your career, team, or business, feel free to reach out. I’m doing free consults focusing on those who, like me, are in tech. No pitch, just conversation if you feel like taking the next step.
This is part of The Personal Moat series. We’ll have more on Steve Jobs’ Ideal Working Arrangements, Pitfalls, Public Role, and Work Theme in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!