Transcription
down. >> Steve, by the way, not a nice guy. He would say to a room full of people, Kevin, I don't give a [ __ ] what the students want or the parents think or anybody thinks. It's what I want. They don't know what they want till I tell them what they want. And I said, "Steve, you sound like such an [ __ ]. You have no idea what that sounds like."
He says, "No, no, that's how it is, Kevin. Now, are you making money with me? Am I your fastest growing OEM? Have we not been wildly successful and continue to be?" I said, "Yes, Steve, that's true." He said, "And [ __ ] shut up and do what I say."
>> That's how he talk to you.
>> 100%. And here's what I learned. Look how wildly successful he was. But here's why. There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early '90s of signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about jobs that I tell every CEO now and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business. His vision of Signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours you're awake. You're going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80/20. 80 signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning, expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts. It was all email. He was right. He was right.
And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. He does not deal with noise. He is 100% signal 24 seconds of, you know, every cycle. I mean, the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute, 60 minutes of every hour, the 18 hours he's awake, it's all signal. And look what he's achieved.