Perspective

Fast Company has a great audio excerpt from a Steve Jobs interview where he discusses Pixar and running a business like a marathon.

I’m more a writer than a speaker, and I’ve always admired great writers more than great speakers, because writers are able to deliver both tone and content much clearer and with more depth. As a reader, as opposed to an audience member watching someone speak, I retain more more of the message.

This 100 seconds of Steve Jobs dispensing his thoughts on life is probably something we should all listen to every morning.

Since I first read Mona Simpson’s eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs, I randomly keep coming back to one part that sticks out even more so than his famous last words.

Had dinner with some friends tonight, including Jim Gilliam. When I got home, I re-watched his PdF 2011 “The Internet is My Religion” talk. You should, too.

Love the anecdote at the end about a four year-old boy born in a Cambodian prison.

“Smiling is one of the most basic, biological, uniform expressions of all humans.”

Favorite quote from this TED Talk with teacher John Hunter: “Spontaneous compassion.” From TED: John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, [...]

If they can, so can we. From TED: Phyllis Rodriguez and Aicha el-Wafi have a powerful friendship born of unthinkable loss. Rodriguez’ son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001; el-Wafi’s son Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted of a role in those attacks and is serving a life sentence. In hoping [...]

Retired Army four-star general Stanley McChrystal gives an excellent TED Talk on leadership, especially as it relates to leading in the military in the age of new media.