Why It Matters to Have a Single Mission..
A line I once submitted to a company blog banner contest...
"To go" presupposes two things.
A sense of responsibility toward the reality that one can stand on one's own,
and the courage not to settle into the balanceone has built. — those two.
That's how we arrived where we are now, and that's how we'll keep moving forward.
- GONET
While cleaning out long-postponed emails, I stumbled upon something with a similar spirit in the Yeh Byung-il Economic Notes folder..
Why It Matters to Have a Single Mission..
The people in the photos also had their own missions. Making money mattered, but it wasn't the most important purpose.
They wanted to make something amazing that could change the world. They also wanted human life to get better.
Why does it matter to have a single mission? Because when things get hard, what makes people walk into the flames is, in most cases, not money. At that point money isn't enough motivation.
What matters is what's worth doing in life, what you're willing to gamble on to realize your dream. This intangible human spirit cannot be quantified and put into a business plan. But behind every technology that has successfully broken through the walls, there has probably always been this creative force. (p. 19)
"I want Stanford students to be able to find a cure for cancer in their dorm rooms."
Though it ended in failure, Steve Jobs said this while building the NeXT Workstation.
// my. Something doesn't have to succeed to have meaning. Meaning isn't only for the sake of today's completion. Those meanings that seem to be nothing now pile up. Even if the person who started that meaning fails, the meaning spreads to those around them, and in the end that meaning becomes shared by everyone.
The Jobs we now admire was a flawed person. Intoxicated by small successes, he pushed reckless passion onto others, and ended up trying to oust a rival (John Sculley — whom he personally recruited with great effort, but later began to feel threatened by). He ended up being pushed out himself. And twenty years later, the smartphone was built by inheriting and developing the very idea of the man he had tried to oust.
"(Technological) revolutions happen not for profit but because they are important to do."
That's what Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said.
Sometimes a photograph says more than words. As I turned the pages of the "records" photographer Doug Menuez made of Silicon Valley's "special era," I found myself thinking a lot.
The original title of this book is <Fearless Genius>. As the subtitle "The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985–2000" indicates, photographer Doug Menuez documented Silicon Valley from 1985 to 2000. 1985 was the year Jobs was pushed out of Apple, and 2000 was the year the dot-com bubble burst.
Menuez, who was looking for a story in Silicon Valley, noticed Jobs — who had been kicked out of the Apple he'd founded and had just started a new computer company, NeXT. He proposed to Jobs to capture all of NeXT on camera, and Jobs, who at the time dreamed of building a supercomputer with the power to change education, accepted the proposal. Menuez's project — to put the spirit and substance of "innovation" on film through Jobs and the employees of NeXT — had begun.
Once Jobs gave permission, other Silicon Valley companies also unlatched their doors for Menuez. In this way he photographed NeXT, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Autodesk and other companies, and the people of that era.
Looking back now, Silicon Valley of that time looks "romantic." Menuez said, "What matters is what is worth doing in life, what you are willing to gamble on to realize your dream," and added:
"To battle-hardened businessmen, my words may sound naive. The selfless struggle of the technological idealists of the earlier era to develop new technology may not be realistic. But what I saw was that without this kind of passion, nothing can be achieved. To do something properly, there must be a desire deep in the heart."
In 1985 I was a college sophomore, and in 2000 I had left the media company and was serving as the head of a U.S.-based media firm. Looking through the photographs in this book, I looked back on what I was doing from 1985 through 2000. What were you doing back then?
▶ Yeh Byung-il's Economic Notes - Twitter: @yehbyungil / Facebook: www.facebook.com/yehbyungil
