The Personal Moat of STEVE JOBS [Part 1 of 5]
From First Principles, Jobs was designed to obsess, translate and get things across the finish line. The dots only connected looking backwards.
In this inaugural entry of The Personal Moat series, we dive into unpacking Steve Jobs’ Tech Career and Business Design. Below is Part 1 of 5, but we give a preview of all the standard aspects we cover.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but even still we’ll see the most pertinent aspects of Jobs’ Career Design come through in his career, his passion, and his drive that brought him to co-found Apple and run the company through its many iterations and incarnations.
It’s easier to look back and connect the dots (as Steve himself put it), but there’s also value in knowing oneself better and validating which Strengths to lean into for work, your career, your team, and the organization you run, to find better fulfillment and minimize pitfalls.
Now, on to Steve’s deep dive.
n this series, we cover the most important things as we look to uncover the following aspects of one’s working life:
What do you bring to the table, your team, and your org?
How do you show up in teams?
How do you show up in organizations?
What is your north star, the undercurrent of your working life agnostic of the companies you work for?
Human Design as a discipline can help uncover answers to those questions. While there’s a lot of depth to uncover, I’ll attempt to standardize it more from the outsider looking in and break it down into specific areas to see how individuals have used their Personal Moat in their working life. These areas include:
Core Personal Strengths [Covered here in Part 1]
Ideal Working Arrangements [Part 2]
Prominent Personal Pitfalls (and Potential) [Part 3]
Main Public Role [Part 4]
Overarching Work Theme [Part 5]
We’ll go into each of these and what they really mean, but I’m hoping it’s self-explanatory just from the subtitle words I’ve chosen.
Core Personal Strengths
Strengths are made of two separate Traits that come together. The Strengths covered here are the most notable and consistent in one’s Personal Moat, coming through strongest (no pun intended) when you think of the skills, mindset, and way of handling things brought to the proverbial table, your career, your team, and the organization you work for.
Strength of Concentration
One of his defining traits is the 9.3, which reads as: “The power to turn a focus into an obsession.” It’s the design of determination. It means he’s able to focus on the small, tiny details and have heavy discernment here.
The name of the Strength is more than self-explanatory, but perhaps what we can do is provide an example of how this might have played a role in Jobs’ life and work.
Concentration means staying still long enough to stay with something. It also means, in this particular case, a focus on experimentation. Try something, see what happens. From the response from a customer or audience, then try something else. That’s the nature of being able to stay with something, to try and try again and use the earlier results to inform what to do next (or not).
It also means to concentrate energy. So not only are you keeping still, but you recognize what energy can either be used or wasted. It means choosing to focus on a few things at a time, even just one thing, amongst all the other options or distractions that come your way. Essentially it’s the opposite of shiny object syndrome.
Lastly, concentration, with experimentation and learning plus choosing to use your energy on a few things, is really about the potential to truly master something. And mastery of any kind comes from trying, failing, trying again from a place of learning what not to do, and focusing one’s energy efficiently on the very few things that deserve it. And well, you know the rest of the story in Apple’s culture. Jobs’ fingerprints are all over it, even to this day.
Steve famous said this:
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Jobs said this at a time when Apple was dying, in 1997. People say this was the moment when he was able to properly raise it from the dead and save the company. The rest is history.
Strength of Organization
Organization here connotes the ability to understand the big patterns and then properly, and in a timely manner, communicate them. It’s highly visual in terms of being able to “see” the overarching patterns, then translate or describe down to the minute details what the pattern is.
Organizing that pattern and communicating it is the Strength, and the real Strength itself is most optimal when it ultimately lands with others. Steve understood this very well. As a technologist and innovator, he had the mind for understanding industry trends, how each turn of hardware computing gave way to what was possible in terms of use cases for its users, both business and consumer. And most importantly, that it wasn’t enough to just show the thing. It had to ultimately land with customers, organized in a way they would understand.
This comes through in another way in his career too. He used these skills to organize others and, on balance, their ideas. You see it when he facilitates a group of Apple employees from concept to creation, he sees the pattern and pushes others forward with it by distilling those big concepts into a structure that can be used and understood.
Strength of Imagination
Imagination is also a design of focused energy.
This Strength is wrapped in an emotional Wave of Desire with High Expectations. It’s a very deeply embedded desire to birth something.
This also comes with a basic fear, a fear of the “fates,” meaning a deep nervousness about what might or might not happen.
It’s also an experiential channel and, like all experiences, there are distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. To begin, one has to enter into the experience correctly for yourself so that you can commit to it entirely, without any preconceived notions. This is because it’s not until you get to the end, and then with some hindsight, that you can understand why it happened and how it was beneficial to your career as a stepping stone. And in fact, Jobs said this in his own words, quite literally word for word. Here, Jobs speaks at his Stanford Commencement speech in 2005:
“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
And what he says next is perhaps even more important. Remember, you don't really know what you learned from an experience until you've reached the end, or sometime after you've processed it, or even until you've started subsequent experiences. But in order to get to the end of that experience, you have to stay with it. It's the staying power of commitment, to see things through to the end, that makes it possible to get to the wisdom and the lessons that propel you to the next thing. It seems rather obvious, but it's the staying power here that matters. So watch what Jobs says next:
“You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
I think most people would read this at face value: the esoteric type of believing in the flow of life’s offerings, which is valid and true. But what I feel like Jobs is truly recommending to the broader collective here, both the graduating class at Stanford in attendance that day and those 48 million views since that speech was uploaded on YouTube, is that you must complete the journey before you know what it was meant to be. You need to get to the end before you know, so might as well remove the expectations you may have at the beginning and middle in order to get there.
As meta as it gets, Steve Jobs in 2005 was giving a speech to describe the very experience of arriving at the end and telling what he learned from his story.
Common Thread of Steve Jobs’ Strengths
Focus, both in the energy and in experimenting and making mistakes at work.
Sharing with the public is the overarching thread in Jobs’ Strengths. All three of them are about sharing, particularly about the gained wisdom and the patterns recognized from his experiences and experiments, done for the benefit of the collective.
Details, the ability to think about, discern, and translate the very large to the very small, and sustain an understanding of the minutiae, is another theme here.
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!