One of my favorite bloggers happens to be a client. Her name is Nilofer Merchant. Of all the Steve Jobs’ ‘lessons’ that have been gleaned, I believe she has written the best and I share a part of it with you here…

“When I was growing up, I looked for a savior in just about everyone.

There were too many fruitless visits from child protective services. There were too many police cars that arrived to “quiet things down” only to let them flare up again the next day. There were too many visits to the hospital.The police men, the agency representatives, and even the hospital workers seemed unable to do anything about what they clearly knew was a problem. There were still too many holes in the wall from when the rolling pin aimed at me, missed.

Since those adults were unable to help me, it’s no wonder that I started to imagine a hero in my father, whom I did not remember and hadn’t seen since I was a toddler. I created a fantasy life where he rode to my rescue. Finally, when I was 12 years old, I met him again. And, of course, while the specific story is complicated, you won’t be surprised to find out that the person who had abandoned me when I was a baby wasn’t the person who was going to save me years later.

The day I met him, I realized something that would shape the rest of my life: there was no Hero (or Heroine) who was going to save me. I needed to save myself.

So, it’s with that life context that I am watching the beatification of Steve Jobs. Google the term, “Steve Jobs tribute” and you get back 5 million plus results. And I’m fairly sure that’s an undercount. There’s a good reason for this; the Hero Narrative has deep roots in our culture. We find it in history books and religions, in our sports teams and, yes, even in our corporate cultures. We obsess. We deify, as if there is a single defining idea of how innovation works, what makes a leader great, or how success happens.

This is not new. It is the idea of The One and it shows up in many ways: Who will be the next leader of the free world? What nation will be the next superpower? Which visionary company is the single conqueror of industry? (It’s Amazon, it’s Google, it’s Facebook, it’s Apple!). And we have it in management disciplines with debates like: isn’t it better to have one smart person than lots of ordinary people working for our organizations?

But I wonder if this framework is wrong.

Let’s take another look at Steve Jobs’s own example. He didn’t study other people; he followed his own passions. He didn’t seek meaning by trying to emulate someone else’s life, or even emulating the winning business practices of his day — as I’ve written before, he created a clarity of purpose for himself. The same principle can apply to all of us.

via blogs.hbr.org

With all due respect to the Harvard Business Review, I’m going to ask you to follow the ‘via’ link and read the rest of Nilofer’s article and please, comment on it there…

I’m tempted to say that Nilofer is my hero, but I can hear her tell me ‘Dude. Be your own hero!‘ as clear as day in my mind. Her closing words say it all: “The cultural change when people know their own purpose and their own power in creating change is what could change everything: for ourselves, for our organizations, and our economy. So, go ahead and buy that Walter Isaacson book. But, let’s not obsess over being the next Steve Jobs or starting the next Facebook or [whatever]. Let us, instead, be inspired to find our own purpose in the world, and a tribe of people to do it with.”

Related articles

• Be Your Own Hero (blogs.hbr.org)
• Steve Jobs, By Walter Isaacson (independent.co.uk)