Steve Jobs is being eulogized as a technology icon, but he should be remembered as the first and most successful entrepreneur of the digital age.

Neither engineer nor programmer, Jobs wasn’t a technology nerd who succeeded at business; he was a businessman who succeeded with technology. He was a creative mastermind, not a scientific genius.

Jobs didn’t spend, as Bill Gates did, thousands of hours in a computer lab designing codes. Instead, he was a visionary, a marketer, an inventor. He understood products from the outside in, not the inside out.

If most software or hardware engineers had been born at a different time, they would have built roads or bridges. In another era, Steve Jobs would have been Edison or Gutenberg.

Jobs was enormously successful not because he understood technology but because he understood consumers. Because of that, unlike those of any other technology leader of our time, the business lessons of Steve Jobs are universally applicable.

He understood, for example, that the role of an entrepreneur is to transform the operating environment rather than simply respond to it. When he recruited John Sculley, the Pepsi executive who would later force Jobs (temporarily) out of the company, he asked him: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

For that reason, he saw innovation as the sole responsibility of the entrepreneur and had little interest in studies of consumer habits or desires. When asked what market research helped spawn the iPad, Jobs answered: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

In a recent article I covered the 5 Keys to Success. Today I’d like to talk a little more about mindset. What exactly is a mindset? Does it just happen or do you create it?

A mindset has to be developed, so in a sense it’s created over time. However, many people have developed mindsets due to the conditioning of their environment. It’s not something they intentionally created, it just happened. Once a person realizes they’ve developed a mindset that wasn’t their own creation, many begin to change it, so it also involves awareness.

In fact, 95% of the people you meet don’t really have their own mindset, they just accept the way they’ve been conditioned to be. More than likely, if you’re reading this site on a regular basis, then you’re someone who doesn’t want outside influences to condition you. You want to create your own success and develop your own mindset.

Read the rest of this article from Blogging Tips.

“Creativity is now considered the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a much-referenced recent study by IBM. ”

Read the rest of this article from Fast Company.

“Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers.

In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

Read the rest of this article from Newsweek.

“Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness.

I know, I know. Last time I appeared on Write to Done, I was naked so you’re probably thinking, “Is this woman sex-crazed?” Well, I do like to bare my soul once in a while, but what I love even more is exposing other people’s secrets.

The people I speak of are writers. They lust writing. When you’re in lust, you can be desperate to keep that feeling alive. So when creativity goes limp, writers are the ones who know the secrets to keeping it interested. They know how to flirt with it, tease it and arouse it. In fact, they know hundreds of ways to get their creative freak on.”

read the rest of this article from Write to Done.

“At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.”

Read the rest of this article from NY Times.

“A kid raised in a blue-collar home in Los Angeles, who got into trouble in school, who managed to scrape his way into an acting and directing career, and then went on to create a world-renowned film festival that changed the fortunes of independent filmmakers . . .

. . . Even a person like that, even a person like Robert Redford, can screw it up.

Redford’s faults: hiring badly, impatience, inability to communicate, ineffective relations with subordinates.

He laid them all out Thursday before an audience of about 300 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at a seminar sponsored by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and by Towers Watson & Co., a human resources consulting firm.”

Read the rest of this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Every year, Cannes produces lively debate surrounding the work entered, the Lions awarded, and any resulting trends from the various categories. And, as they should, the categories have changed to better reflect our industry. Last year a Public Relations category was added and even the highly coveted Titanium Lion has evolved for greater relevance.”

Read the rest of this article from Forbes.

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