It was my birthday yesterday, and one of my good friends sent me Apple’s video “The Crazy Ones” along with birthday greetings. This is one of my favorite videos of all time, as it is one of the few videos that celebrate the peculiarities and the craziness of leaders and world changers.
For at least 10 or 15 years now, I have had a burning desire to impact and improve this world we live in. When I started off, my mind couldn’t really grasp the path that I would have to walk to accomplish that. I thought the only way to make a difference was to create something huge and to create it NOW! My mind was not developed enough to understand that things take time to manifest themselves in reality and that there is no shortcut to such a grand goal. I started working on extremely large projects, none of which worked out as they were far bigger than I could ever have accomplished at that time. The failures would make me feel frustrated and powerless, but my drive would not subdue, so I continued hitting walls at an uncomfortable speed. But as time passed, I realized that I would have to find more realistic approaches to my dreams. I read books and tried to understand how successful people become successful.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher
I don’t know exactly when it happened, most likely a slow transformation over a long period, but I eventually realized and was willing to accept that things take time and that my approach should not be to look for quick, explosive results. No, it should rather be a slow but steady process. Each step I take does not have to be a large step; it only has to be in the right direction. As long as I am slowly but surely moving towards the possibility of changing the world, I will be happy with my results. I must, while traveling my path, build up knowledge, experiences, networks, and finances so that when the time comes, I will have the resources needed to make change.
To continually work towards success, whatever your goals might be, you must have great passion. As Steve Jobs says in the above video, it’s extremely difficult to achieve grand goals, and any sane person would give up on all the craziness unless they have a burning passion for what they do and what they want to achieve. That passion is exactly what I have seen in all the great entrepreneurs and leaders I have worked with. This is not a side of them that everybody sees, as they usually don’t want to advertise how obsessed and passionate they are, since society would usually want to put them in a straitjacket and in a padded room. Society does not create great men and women. If it did, we would have many more of them. It’s those crazy few who decide to create their own path, independent of what society thinks, that create change.
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
– Steve Jobs
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