Business Lessons From a Visionary

Many people around the world are mourning the passing of Steve Jobs this week. He made a tremendous impact not just in the technology arena, but in various areas of our lives. He's even been called a world-changer.

According to a myriad of articles all over the internet, Jobs was known to be determined, focused, enthusiastic and a perfectionist, even to the point of being called crazy. He didn't give up, though, and he didn't stop at "good enough." He went the extra mile - and beyond. We can all learn from Jobs, including owners of small contracting businesses.

Here are some quotes we hope you'll think about as you go to work in your own business:

"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

"To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that."

"When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there."

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me."

"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."