Building a Mountain of Leverage Course Preview: What you can "give" with leverage
What you can "give" with leverage
When he was 31 years old, Steve Jobs talked about his "first taste" of leverage, and he offered a beautiful reflection on the flip side of leverage: not what we get from leverage, but what we can give through it.
This course is oriented around the former idea, but flipping the script can be an even more powerful long-term motivator. Here's how Steve put it:
The first time I felt it was when I visited a school. It had 3rd and 4th graders, and they had a whole classroom full of Apple IIs. I spent a few hours there and I saw these 3rd and 4th graders growing up completely different than I did because of this machine.
What hit me about it was: here was this machine very few people designed, about four in the case of the Apple II. Then they gave it to some people that didn’t know how to design it but they knew how to make it, to manufacture it. And they could make a whole bunch of ‘em. Then they gave it to some people that didn’t know how to design it or manufacture it, but they knew how to distribute it. They gave it to some people that didn’t know how to design it or manufacture it or distribute it, but they know how to write software for it.
Gradually this sort of inverse pyramid grew, and when it finally got into the hands of a lot of people. It blossomed out of this tiny little seed. And it seemed like an incredible amount of leverage, and it all started with just an idea. And here was this idea taken through all of these stages resulting a classroom full of kids growing up with fundamentally different experiences, which I thought might be very beneficial to their lives because of this germ of an idea a few years ago. That’s an incredible feeling…to know you had something to do with it -- and to know it can be done. To know you can plant something in the world and it’ll grow, and change the world, ever so slightly.
Leverage is how your ideas can ripple through time and space to impact millions. One idea, a small team, and some long levers can truly move the earth.