Don't Settle

What was it about Steve Jobs that created the kind of international loyalty that has people frenetically tweeting and posting about him, following his death yesterday at the age of 56?

Lickable (sic) as Apple’s products are, I don’t think that’s it.

Our esteem for leaders and people of influence is based more on the how rather than what, of what they do.

For many, Jobs’ life was emblematic of possibility - born out of wedlock, put up for adoption, dropped out of college - begging the question, “what’s my excuse?”

He challenged people to find and do work that they loved:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma." 

Above all he said to people “Don’t settle.”  

Many of us work in environments and organisational cultures that repress our vitality, our curiosity, our youthful innocence; and we collude, allowing this part of us to emerge only outside work, or in the snatched escape of holidays that we dream of for months.  Yet this denies us fulfilment and reward in the very place where we invest most of our energies.  Ironically, it also leaves our organisations, colleagues and customers impoverished.  Many of our unique skills and insights have been left at the office door.

This is echoed by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet,  

“Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.”

If you are not fulfilled - being all that you could be - at your current work, how might you find what you truly love.  Or how might you allow it to find you?