Category Archives: Mindset

A.I. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (F.U.D.)

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AI is “a tool to be mastered rather than a force to be feared.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed during a commencement address that took place on Friday, May 15, 2026, at the University of Arizona.  

The graduating class’s response highlights growing tension between big tech’s evolving technology regarding artificial intelligence and the economic anxieties of Gen Z graduates entering an uncertain, AI-disrupted labor market.

The boos and jeers occurred when Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, drew a parallel between AI and the transformative impact of the personal computer had on society, telling graduates that AI would touch every career path.

Many graduating college students across the nation harbor fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) regarding AI and are worried about the availability of entry level jobs  The graduates are stepping into a job market heavily impacted by corporate restructuring and high-profile tech layoffs tied to AI integration.

Rather than ignoring the concerns, Schmidt said “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you.” He acknowledged their concerns as “rational,” summarizing their anxiety: “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating… and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”  

Furthermore, Schmidt urged the graduates to lean into the technology rather than retreat from it, framing it as a “rocket ship” they need to board to help shape its trajectory.

In another commencement address, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent address at Carnegie Mellon University positioned AI as “a tool to be mastered rather than a force to be feared.”

Steve Jobs on Hiring

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Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs on hiring:

“It seems like all the good people I really want to hire, it takes me a year to hire them. It’s always been that way, even at Apple.”

“I usually meet somebody that is really good. And you can’t get them. And then you go try to find other people. And nobody measures up.”

“When you meet somebody that good, you always compare them to this one person. And you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise.”

“And I’ve always found it best not to compromise, and just keep chipping away.”

His VP of Marketing took a year and a half to hire.

“And they’re all worth it.”

Steve Jobs is a company founder and leader with scar tissue explaining what he

On hiring:

“It seems like all the good people I really want to hire, it takes me a year to hire them. It’s always been that way, even at Apple.”

“I usually meet somebody that is really good. And you can’t get them. And then you go try to find other people. And nobody measures up.”

“When you meet somebody that good, you always compare them to this one person. And you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise.”

“And I’ve always found it best not to compromise, and just keep chipping away.”

His VP of Marketing took a year and a half to hire.

“And they’re all worth it.”

This talk is Steve Jobs at his most unfiltered. A founder with scar tissue explaining what he learned the hard way.

This MIT lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book you’ve read combined.

Steve Jobs’ 1992 MIT lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book you’ve read combined.

Steve Jobs What’s the Most Important Thing He Learned

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A MIT student asked Apple’s founder and CEO: Steve Jobs what’s the most important thing he learned at Apple that you’re doing at NeXT?

Jobs thought for a moment.

“I now take a longer-term view on people.”

“When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn’t to go fix it. It’s to say, we’re building a team here. And we’re going to do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year.”

“So what do I need to do to help so that the person that’s screwing up learns, versus how do I fix the problem?”

“And that’s painful sometimes. And I still have that first instinct to go fix the problem.”

“But taking a longer-term view on people is probably the biggest thing that’s changed.”

On not knowing your own competitive advantage:

“A lot of times you don’t know what your competitive advantage is when you launch a new product.”

“When we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing. Sounds funny, because that turned out to be the Mac’s compelling advantage.”

“We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers. But we never thought about PageMaker, that whole industry really coming down to the desktop.”

“But we were smart enough to see it start to happen nine to twelve months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing.”

“And it became the Trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America.”

The same thing happened at NeXT.

They built software to help developers create apps faster. Their target customers were Lotus, Adobe, WordPerfect.

Then big companies started showing up and saying: “You don’t understand what you’ve got. The same software that allows Lotus to create their apps faster is letting us build our in-house apps five to ten times faster.”

“And you dummies don’t even know it.”

Jobs admitted: “It took them about three months before we finally heard it.”

Steve Jobs On Competitive Advantage

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In 1992, Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs talks to MIT students about competitive advantage:

“Hardware churns every 18 months. It’s pretty impossible to get a sustainable competitive advantage from hardware. If you’re lucky, you can make something one and a half or two times as good as your competitor. And it only lasts for six months.”

“But software seems to take a lot longer for people to catch up with.”

“I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac, and it’s arguable whether they’ve even caught up.”

On technology windows:

“You can use the concept of technology windows opening and then eventually closing.”

“Enough technology from fairly diverse places comes together and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible. And a window opens up.”

“It usually takes around five years to create a commercial product that takes advantage of that technical window opening up.”

“And then it seems to take about another five years to really exploit it in the marketplace.”

He gave examples from his own life:

Apple II lasted 15 years. DOS lasted 15 years. Mac was eight years old at the time and would easily last another five.

“These things are hard. They don’t last because it’s convenient, or even because it’s economic. They last because this is hard stuff to do.”

Steve Jobs on Getting Fired from Apple

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In 1992, an MIT student asked Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs the following question: where would Apple be if you hadn’t left?

Jobs paused.

“I’ve obviously thought about this a lot. I think everybody lost. I think I lost. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost.”

“And having said all that, so what? You go on. It’s not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm.”

That’s Steve Jobs. Getting fired from the company he built, comparing it to losing a limb, and shrugging.

He spent the rest of the talk explaining what he learned about building companies.

Steve Jobs on Consulting

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“Consulting is like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only two dimensional. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.” ~ Steve Jobs

Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs walked into a room full of MIT MBA students and asked how many were going into consulting business.

Many hands went up.

He said their careers would be “like a picture of a banana.”

“You might get a very accurate picture. But you never really taste it.”

He spent the next 60 minutes explaining what actually builds careers:

“Without owning something over an extended period of time, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.”

He continued:

“Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.”

“You do get a broad cut at companies, but it’s very thin.”

Then the line that made the room go silent:

“It’s like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only two dimensional. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.”

“So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends. You can say, look, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes.”

“But you never really taste it.”

This was 1992. Jobs had been fired from Apple seven years earlier. He was running NeXT. He had scar tissue.

Mindset – Playing to Learn

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“I play to learn something…The worst possible thing you can ever do is to stop. It’s to not learn.” ~ Kobe Bryant

An interviewer asks NBA basketball legend and Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant the following question: “Are you someone who loves to win or hates to lose?”

Kobe responds:

“I’m neither. I play to figure things out. I play to learn something. Because if you play with a fear of failure or you play with the will to win that supersedes fear, I think it’s a weakness either way. If you play with fear of failing, you’ll capitulate to that fear. If you play with the sense of ‘I want to win, I want to win,’ then you have the fear of what happens if you don’t. But if you find common ground in the center, you’re unfazed by either. That enables you to stay in the moment and not feel anything other than what’s in front of you.”

The interviewer asks: “How did you become someone who doesn’t seem afraid of failing?”

Kobe responds:

“What does failure mean? It doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of your imagination.”

He explains with an analogy:

“Let’s use happy endings. Everybody wants a happy ending, right? Snow White finds her prince and lives happily ever after. Well, I call BS on that because two months later, they had an argument and he’s sleeping on the couch. The point is: the story continues. So if you fail on Monday, the only way it’s a failure is if you decide to not progress from that. If I fail today, I’m going to learn something from that failure and try again on Tuesday. That’s why failure doesn’t exist.”

The interviewer asks: “If you finished your career without a championship, would you have looked at that as a failure?”

Kobe:

“No. I would look at it as being extremely disappointed, because I had a dream and goals I wanted to accomplish. If I didn’t accomplish those goals, I’d have to ask myself why. Poor leadership? Failure to communicate with my teammates? Lack of preparation? Those would be reasons why I didn’t win. So I’d have to analyze that. And as I evolved post-basketball into business, those same weaknesses would reveal themselves there too. If I don’t learn from that, I’m going to struggle again.”

He concludes:

“I can take those situations and learn from them and have them make me a better person later in life. But if I don’t take that stuff and apply it someplace else, that’s failing. The worst possible thing you can ever do is to stop. It’s to not learn.”

Elite Champions’ Mindset

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“To have it when you need it most you must practice it when you need it least.”

Success comes from consistently executing basics with precision, building strong habits and routines, and developing a “next play” mindset that quickly moves past mistakes to what you do next, according to Alan Stein, Jr., a keynote speaker, author, and former elite basketball performance coach.

From Stephen Curry to Simone Biles… here are 12 key mindsets of the world’s top athletes, writes Alan Stein, Jr, in a post on X:

1) They never get bored with the basics. They work towards mastery of the fundamentals… during the Unseen Hours… every single day.

2) They earn their confidence through repetition. They know that repetition is not punishment but rather the most proven form of learning and skill acquisition of all time.

3) They remain humble and grateful. No matter good they are… they can always get better. This allows them to stay open to coaching and willing to accept feedback.

4) They have a clear vision of what they want to achieve. However, despite being goal driven, they focus heavily on habits and the process. They spend minimal time wishing, wanting, and hoping. Instead, they work to develop the daily habits, behaviors, routines, and micro-skills needed to progressively inch toward their goal.

5) They make their preparation their separation. They maximize the Unseen Hours – the time behind the curtain when the lights are off and the arenas are empty. They understand that ‘To have it when you need it most you must practice it when you need it least.’

6) They don’t fear mistakes – they embrace them! They understand that mistakes are part of the growth process. They acknowledge that ‘Success comes from good decisions. Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions and learning from mistakes.’

7) They control the controllables. They put their focus, energy, and attention into their own effort and attitude – and they let everything else go. They don’t allow the environment or circumstances to dictate how they show up.

8) They quickly move to the Next Play. When things don’t go their way, when they make a mistake, or when life is less than preferred… they quickly wipe the slate clean and move on!

9) They make those around them better. They lead by example, hold those they care about accountable, and live by the mantra that a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

10) They are relentlessly consistent and consistently relentless. They uphold a high standard of excellence even when they don’t feel like, when they don’t want to, or when it’s not convenient.

11) They have an attitude of extreme ownership. They take full responsibility for everything in their life. They don’t blame, complain, or make excuses.

12) They embrace pressure. Pressure is a privilege. They feel stress and pressure just like everyone else, they simply manage it more effectively be viewing it as a privilege.

Well, there it is. A blueprint for performing at your best. And you don’t need to be Stephen Curry or Simone Biles to live these 12 mindsets – they are readily available and accessible to you right now.

But don’t be tricked by their simplicity. Each of these mindsets is basic in premise, but very challenging to execute consistently. Remember, just because something is basic… it doesn’t mean that it’s easy!

Source:  https://www.fastleader.net/alanstein

What You Focus on Grows

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“Every day you have a choice. You can choose to focus on the many reasons to feel angry, sad, and defeated. Or you can choose to focus on the many reasons to feel grateful, blessed, and happy. Choose wisely.”

Your attention and focus decide the tone and direction of your life, since what you focus on grows louder and larger.

Anger and discouragement multiply when you feed them, and so does gratitude. Nothing can change outwardly until your mindset shifts on the inside.

You can let frustration hijack your day and joy, or you can ground and focus yourself in what’s good, pleasing, and excellent.

Both options are available to you every morning.

While one, frustration, can drain you, the other, gratitude, can steady you.

Happiness isn’t pretending things are perfect; it’s choosing not to let what’s wrong blind you to what’s right. That choice, repeated daily, quietly reshapes your entire life.

When you focus on the good in your life and are always gratefu, you are more likely to see opportunities and take action to make your goals a reality.

Don’t Settle for Comfort

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“Don’t settle for a life smaller than your dreams. You are capable of more than you imagine, and every step toward your potential honors the purpose you were given.” ~ Nelson Mandela

This quote or idea emphasizes living to your fullest potential rather than accepting mediocrity or comfort over growth.  It requires not settling or turning away from the person you’re meant to become.

Don’t settle for a life that is less than you are capable of living. Your potential is not an accident, and neither is your desire for more. Every day you accept less than what you’re capable of, a part of you quietly knows you’re meant for something greater.

You weren’t created to get by, to stay comfortable, or to repeat the same year over and over. You were created to grow, to stretch, to rise, and to see what becomes possible when you stop shrinking yourself to fit a smaller life.

Start where you are, with what you have, but refuse to stay where you are. Trade excuses for action, fear for courage, and doubt for one small bold step at a time. Your future self is already thanking you for not settling.