The Friday Focus is a weekly newsletter where we highlight:
An interesting read/listen/watch we love so you don’t have to scroll to find content
A quote that has us thinking
Weekend activity brainstorm - take these as a challenge!
To view all our blog posts go to getpresentapp.com/blog.
If you like these posts or have some recommendations of your own, feel free to reach out to us at contact@getpresentapp.com
Speech We Love 🎤
Steve Jobs will go down as one of the most iconic - if not the most iconic - visionary of our generation. While he was far from perfect, the lessons from this speech have impacted me profoundly over the last few years.
For those that don’t know, Steve had a very unconventional path, filled with both success and failure, on his way to becoming the most renowned entrepreneur of his lifetime.
As a result, he learned so many invaluable lessons around success, how to handle failure, what’s important in life, and how to trust yourself.
There are so many lessons in this short 15-minute speech - please take the time to listen - but the one that impacted me the most is Jobs’ idea of “connecting the dots.”
Our lives are often defined by a series of moments and decisions we make along the way. When looking back on his life, Jobs realized that it was obvious what those pivotal moments were and how they contributed to his success.
However, he also realized that it was impossible to tell at the time that those decisions even mattered.
His takeaway was that because of the complexity of our lives, it’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. It’s foolish to try and painstaking plan our lives and try to connect dots in the future. The best that we can do is have faith in what we’re doing and that the dots will somehow connect in the future.
This was such an concept for me because I fall into the trap of always trying to optimize every situation at the expense of listening to what I really want. I try to turn everything into a cost-benefit analysis and understand how every situation will turn out.
As a result, if it’s tough to tell how something will benefit me in the future, I end up ignoring that decision even if in my heart I feel like it’s the right path to take.
Life requires many leaps of faith. Sometimes you’ll succeed and sometimes you won’t. But if you never have the confidence that some risks will work out, you’ll never put yourself in a position to succeed in the first place. And that’s the riskiest thing of all.
Quote That Has Us Thinking 🧠
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary...Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
Weekend Activity Brainstorm 💪
Watch that Steve Jobs speech! 🎤
Host a dinner party 🍽️
Play some poker or another card game 🃏
If you end up doing one of these challenges, send us pictures at contact@geptresentapp.com and you can be featured in a future newsletter!