“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993] Steve Jobs.
What an absolute legend! Steve Jobs was successful, not because he chased money, or a big business, he did not chase either fame nor money. Steve Jobs was hotly in pursuit of fulfilling his life potential. What happened as a result of that has impacted every household on the face on the planet.
More qualified people will write historical, accurate, detailed and inspiring blogs about Steve Jobs and I don’t feel a need to replicate them neither do I want to not do Steve Jobs justice. All I want to say is that Steve Jobs died at the age of 56 with the knowledge that his presence on earth contributed something powerful.
This is something that should inspire us all – we life life, once.
R.I.P Steve Jobs.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Steve Jobs 1995
Watch this very powerful talk by Steve Jobs on ‘How to live before you die’ – this is an incredibly powerful piece of footage. Get inspired.
I had a conversation with a friends Mum this weekend, and, don’t get me wrong, I am not going all ‘religious’ on you, but I think that it is a great shame that the UK has moved away from it’s Christian foundations. Please allow me to explain why.
We live in a greed obsessed society. We want what we cannot afford to have and, as we have seen, those who cannot afford their ‘wants’ resort to other means to ensure that they get them. We loot, whether it is young people on the streets or MP’s who go against the rules that they created in order to make more money. Our marketing is highly consumerised (my spell check tells me that no such word exists but please go with it). If we are not happy with our partner we trade them in for another model, or many have their cake and eat it. Family values have been exchanged for gang alliance. The religion that we worship is the football team that we support. Our nation is fame hungry. We update our Twitter and Facebook status’ in the belief that ‘my story’ is the only story that needs to be heard.
Let’s face it, in many ways, collectively, we have become immoral. Not only are we becoming immoral but our collective moral conscience is slowly being worn down.
Of course, I am not perfect, I am by no means a saint. It would be easy to read this post and agree that ‘they’ are like that. However, I am a firm believer that, wrongly, our morals are flexible when it comes to our own self interests.
So, back to religion. I am not saying that in an age before ours, when the accepted behavior was that families attended Church, was a perfect world. It wasn’t. But there is something about being reminded of good Christian values that reminds us as individuals that we are part of a whole, that the world does not revolve around ‘me’ and our outlook on life changes.
Basic Christian values can be exchanged for a ‘good’ moral code. Gluttony, greed, selfish ambition, pride, jealousy, envy are all common traits in today’s society. However, at least hearing about Christian values, being reminded of them by family, at Church, at school provides our minds with a moral ‘check’, a simple reminder of the way that we should live our lives.
We do not have to subscribe to the whole package. The whole Christian story is not one that we have to believe in, however, at a very basic level, whether purely as a man who existed or as a character in a book, the person of Jesus maintained a life-style that we would all benefit to follow both personally and as a collective.
I have spent some time in some poor countries, Kenya and Fiji, whose residents still remind each other of basic Christian values and, in all honesty, they are seriously humble places to live. I have met people who have nothing, but what they have they would not hesitate to share. I have been involved in business deals (with Tribewanted) where an individuals word is the basis of an agreed contract. I have seen, first hand, communities where they consider each of their children as their own. There is no selfish attitude, only an attitude of greatfulness and otherness.
I know reading this post, people will comment – why does it have to be Christian and not other religious beliefs. I know that there are many perceived flaws in what I am saying because, as individuals, we now have an in-built intolerance to anything relating to ‘God’.
I don’t have all the answers and, in no way, am I suggesting that we should all be going to church on a Sunday morning. I just merely believe that or moral framework has suffered in direct correlation towards a decline in our attitude towards the church and our engagement with anything ‘christian’.
Something has to change, for the sake of individuals, communities and generations to come. If our moral code only reduces, where do we end up?
Please do feel free to comment, add your thoughts, agree, disagree in the comment section below. It would be great to hear, listen, learn!
War fatigue. Charity fatigue. Famine fatigue. Compassion fatigue. Just like every other fatigue that is out there we can suffer from rioting fatigue. The images have been spread far and wide, I am currently in Australia where the rioting has been branded ‘civil unrest’. I have contacts in America who thought I was back in London and emailed to see if I was okay. We have had open letters to David Cameron’s parents. We have had the comedy of rioters vs photoshop. We have had the the angel volunteers via riotcleanup. We have had those who are raising money for those who want to raise money for something nice for Ashraf and those who want to Keep Aaron Cutting. So many people, have said so much that it is easy just to start to switch off but, seriously, what the hell is going on?
Like many I have heard the racist arguments referring to rioters as “ethnic dole-ite scum” (when a millionaire’s daughter and a school mentor got arrested for looting). I have equally read Nina Power’s Guardian article entitled, ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored‘. So much has been said and, in all honesty, there is an element of truth in most of it as people speak from their own perspective.
We can hunt these kids down and we can lock them up but, in my opinion, this will cause a greater number of young people to rise up en-mass with an even bigger revolt. Maybe not this week, or next week, but at some point. I have heard many comments referring to consumerism and greed and how are young people want what they can’t have or can’t afford as a symbol of status and so they take it. Perhaps it is even the taking of the object that adds to the status. Nevertheless, in my opinion there is this deep, deep feeling of dissatisfaction, of emptiness, a lack of vision, a lack of understanding of worth and potential.
It took a very personal, powerful event in my life for me to realise that we ‘live life, once’. I truly believe that if we can grasp the reality of the concept that we live this life only once then we will realise that our potential knows no bounds. This potential is not based upon what we have or have not got. Our potential is not based upon where we were educated, our upbringing or the mistakes that our parents or even government may have made. But when we grasp the reality of the fact that we are on planet earth, merely once – dreams are within our reach, ambition is endless and our potential is unlimited.
Imagine a country in which the very same young people who put effort, energy, attention, drive and focus into rioting and looting placed the same amount of energy and dedication into the discovery of their potential. We would see new businesses, new opportunities, new employment, new world records, new sports champions, new olympic hopefuls and on and on.
Of course these are my thoughts, based upon my belief of what could truly happen if understood that we are not futile but grasp the power of our potential with both hands and not stop. I don’t know how we get there, I don’t know how we educate, how re-educate, from the ground up. These things I don’t know.
The one thing that I do know is that humanity has been created with awesome potential and if we could just tap into that, in these young people then something damn well powerful could take place.
I want to let you into a little secret. When I was younger I had a dream that every time I went to Alton Towers, the UK’s biggest theme park, I imagined that one day I would have enough money that I could shut down the theme park for the day, for myself and my for friends.
I would literally walk around Alton Towers imagining what it would feel like to have the place shut down just for me. I would imagine how my friends would think I was so awesome that I could afford to close the park and invite a select few. I envisaged that my friends would look up to me, respect me and would be impressed. I wanted to have Alton Towers shut down for me and my friends for the day, in the same way that Michael Jackson did.
I often had a number of day dreams of this nature including driving into my secondary school playground in an expensive convertible sticking a metaphorical two fingers up at the kids at school who used to bully me. It sounds pretty dumb, huh? It sounds like a typical childhood dream, doesn’t it?
But it is not so dumb, it’s a sense of belonging and respect is a natural human desire. These dreams continued as I got older. I wanted fame, status and profile. I wanted to be known for being somebody. I wanted people to look up to me and respect me. This desire for profile was deeply rooted in the fact that, as a kid, I had bad acne, I was crap at football and I was bullied. I set about working damn hard to become a ‘somebody’ just so that I could prove these people wrong.
However, this deep down desire to prove myself started to become the foundation upon which I made every decision. I created Tribewanted in order to improve my status, in my own mind. I launched thenerve.tv and Rock Control in order to achieve fame and bring in the money. The very foundation on which I based my decisions was wrong. My foundation was to gain a profile so that I could have money and status in order to prove myself to the shadows of the bullies in my mind, who had moved on in their own lives. This was very wrong.
When you make business decisions, or even life decisions, based upon a wrong foundation you make the wrong choices which ultimately becomes destructive. My desire to still prove myself, even today, resulted in me making bad decisions with thenerve.tv and Rock Control – I did not focus on clear revenue streams, I made decisions to increase my profile rather than focus on the success of the specific business at hand.
It is only recently that I have spent time thinking about these dreams as a child, this desire to beat the bullies and the subsequent wrong foundation. Once you are aware that something is wrong in your life, as soon as it comes to light then this is the first step to start dealing with it, of breaking down the foundation and starting again.
Once my desire to increase my profile, for all the wrong reasons is stripped away it is exchanged for something else that provides a deeper, stronger foundation. The desire to achieve my dreams is now based upon a passion to reach my potential. I truly believe that we live life, once and as a consequence we should discover our reason for being and pursue it with a relentless passion.
I am damn excited. I know that I have the potential to do some awesome stuff and I am on this one exciting journey to improve, to learn, to grow and as a result I will achieve something exciting, whatever it is. As I work towards my goals I make decisions, not one whether I can increase my profile, but based on working towards my potential.
It’s exciting stuff.
What are you chasing? If you have any comments on this blog please leave them before or contact me.