Many things make sense when you think about them. Some are intuitive. Others are not. Sometimes a better explanation comes with a little twist. Consider self motivation, for instance. I’ll preface this with an example. Some of you will remember a story from earlier in my blog, I Wish To Design Serial Mobile Games For a Living. In this post, I want to expand on this a bit, and give a few additional examples.
When I was young, I was inspired to program after reading an Apple software book. I read the Introduction and learned that they had “something” that only Apple did. I fell in love with it. When I eventually went to college, I chose to major in this field. After completing my studies, I started working at Apple in 1999. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had been building cool little games on the side for the next couple of years, and I wanted a job where I could do that full-time. I knew that it wasn’t enough to work for someone else, and all I’d be doing was wasting my time building the same stuff over and over. I wanted to work on my own stuff full-time, which I would then be able to share with others in a more general sense. This is what a very senior person at Apple told me at the time [Not only] don’t you think the iPhone will be successful, it will be the most successful device that Apple has ever created? This is a very convincing argument, I felt. “Of course it will be successful. It will sell in the millions. Who wouldn’t want to have an iPhone?” I thought. In short order, I became the head of the programming team for the iPhone SDK. It was very exciting for me. Unfortunately, my assumption about the success of the I-Phone was incorrect. It was dead on arrival. Within the first year of its release, the I-Phone had sold something like a million units, just through retail channels, and was being manufactured and sold at a loss. With over half a million units in the wild, the demand for it was outstripping supply, causing a shortage of I-Phone’s in the marketplace. You’re probably thinking, how could this be? People must want these things! I told myself this, and thought that I had to work harder to make people want these things. I pushed the hard work, until I got to a point where it became very difficult to balance developing new features for a full time job with still finishing school. While I was running the I-Phone development team, I was introduced to Steve Jobs by a very talented former employee. I was then asked to come in for a meeting. I told myself that this must be it. Steve will give me a job, and maybe even one of the products I have been working on. I was so wrong. I was shocked when Steve Jobs asked me if I was able to juggle both jobs. The most painful moment in my professional career, the worst blow I had ever received, came at that moment. I had a very serious and honest discussion with him, and told him
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