Thinking Big

Steve Jobs is often cited as one of the greatest influencers in modern business, and rightfully so. He not only helped to establish one of the largest companies in the world but helped to resurrect that same company from almost certain death in the late 1990s. Time and time again, Jobs helped usher in a new idea via a new product that would ultimately revolutionize the industry again and again.

Those familiar with the popular biography by Walter Isaacson will know that Jobs's sustained success had a lot to do with what people called a "reality distortion field". Under this "reality distortion field," Jobs had an almost magical influence to make people truly believe in anything Jobs had to say, regardless of how wacky it seemed at the time . Where some people looked at Jobs as insane because of this, history has proved in favor of Jobs with the success things like the original Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and even the Pixar Animated Studios.

So, what was it about Steve Jobs that helped him to accomplish this? Was he a genius of Einstein-level proportions? Are his tactics for getting things done not something easily replicated by anybody else? Is he really in a league of his own?

I don't want to diminish Jobs at all because he did have a profound sense of creative confidence, but one thing we have to remember is that Jobs was heavily reliant upon other people in making his visions a reality. Within the Walter Isaacson biography, they would tell you that Jobs's "reality distortion field" helped to push them to do things they never thought possible.

My thought behind this is that we all are poor measurers of what is and isn't possible. We have the tendency to see things that return a lot of value as being really difficult to do because, admittedly, that can be the case at times.

But where something like a college degree is easy to measure because of a formalized course catalog, do we really understand what it takes to accomplish more ambiguous goals? Oftentimes when we look back at our accomplishments, we realize that the path we took to get there didn't look like what we expected in the beginning. As the old saying goes, "Hindsight is 20/20."

Frameworks like SMART goals have taught us to create goals that are "measurable", but how do we know we are being good judges of what is and what isn't realistically possible? The folks on Steve Jobs's original Macintosh team would tell you that Jobs's goals and deadlines were unrealistic...

...until they were successful.

Moreover, I think we place barriers around our thinking when limiting our scope of vision. For example, if a person sets the goal to lose 20 pounds over the next six months, they become preoccupied with the details to accomplish that goal: limiting portions, making more nutritious choices, and exercising more.

But what if that same person shot their sights higher? What if, instead, they set a goal to run a half marathon in six months? They would become preoccupied with the minutiae it would take to accomplish that goal: following a running plan, properly adjusting diet, and more. The interesting thing is that this same person would probably accomplish losing 20 pounds anyway. In fact, they might even lose as high as 40 or 50 pounds.

My point here is that it requires the same mental fortitude to accomplish "X" as it does to accomplish "Y". If you examine your own experiences, I'm sure you can find many examples of this. Parents of multiple children will tell you raising their first kid seemed like an impossibility at the time (new dad here, raising my hand!), but then they go on and live a normal, happy life with two, three, or four kids. If it was mentally exhausting to have one child, shouldn't logic tell us that having multiples would magnify that mentality exponentially?

This wasn't a problem for somebody like Steve Jobs and now Elon Musk. Musk runs three major businesses (Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City) in three of the most daunting industries on the planet (automotive, aeronautics, energy). He's still just one guy. One guy that faces the same 24-hour time clock we do. One guy who probably drinks his coffee at the same rate we do. He's just not preoccupied with the details that get him from A to B because his sights are set on getting him from A to Z.

Now, I'm not saying we all should expect to become the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. (Musk in particular probably is on the same level of Einstein as far as intelligence goes.) But there is still a lesson we can learn here.

It's right in the title.

Thinking big. Pushing ourselves to greater things than we ever thought possible. Raising the bar to unprecedented levels. Letting go of our inhibitions and fears that keep us at A to B instead of A to Z.

If it takes an equal amount of mental fortitude...

If we aren't clear what it takes to accomplish it...

If the details of smaller goals end up working themselves out along the way...

If we can provide more value than we ever thought possible...

Then why not shoot for the highest we can be?