How To Get Rich According To Steve Jobs

There are a million ways to make a million dollars, and in this video, we're looking at one of them. If Steve Jobs were alive today, he would be among the top 10 richest people on the planet. Jobs was known to be a non-conformist, a man focused on building a legacy that would outlive him. This is how to get rich, according to him.

Welcome to alux.com: how to get rich according to Steve Jobs, a series by alux.com. All right, so we'll start off right here. If you do the right things at the top line, the bottom line will follow. Do the right things on the top line; the bottom line will follow. Steve Jobs understood perfectly that an empire needs a bedrock foundation. You can't build a product that will generate billions in revenue unless you do the first steps right.

If you've got the right strategy, the right people, and the right culture, you will build the right products, and naturally, the right marketing and the right logistics will come as a result. Therefore, focusing on the top line and having the right foundation in place is key to building something great. The bottom line is not an end in itself; it's the result of doing everything else right. In other words, Jobs looked at the environment in which he worked with great importance.

You see, sometimes it's not about what you're doing but with whom, where, and in what form. You could have the greatest idea of all time; you could have a product in your mind that could literally change the lives of millions of people, but if you disregard the way in which you operate, who you work with, what motivates them, what brings everything together, well, you're not going to take off. We experience this firsthand when building the courses with the Alux app. Without the right team and the right framework that makes things possible, you've got little to no chance of releasing anything worthwhile.

Even a great brand needs investments and caring if it's going to retain its relevance and vitality. But, but, but even a great brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its relevance and vitality. And a brand is not just a logo or a name; it's a promise a business makes to its customers. But promises need to be renewed, and commitments reinforced. Never take your brand for granted.

What you'll find out is that even behemoths like Apple, Microsoft, or even Meta require constant nurturing and investments to stay relevant. That way, a business continues to stay relevant to its customers and keep up with the disruptive advancements in the industry. Steve Jobs made this mistake himself with Apple, and there were multiple instances where he needed to step in and take things back to the drawing board.

You see, we learned a very valuable lesson a couple of years ago about branding. The logo, the font, the typography rules, the design language—all that stuff is for other brands to know who you are. It's corporate, but the real brand is for other humans to know who you are; it's about expectations. What do people expect when they hear from you?

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. Steve Jobs was not only a visionary; he was also a non-conformist. He believed that in order to leave behind a lasting legacy, you have to walk your own path. You have the power to shape the world, to teach.

The key is to not accept the status quo, but to challenge it and dare to envision something different, something better. If you do what everyone else is doing, you think like everyone else is thinking, and you're never going to stand out. Don't be intimidated by the world around you; everything you see, every invention, every system was all created by people who are no smarter than you are. So don't hide away your potential from the world, or you'll never know how high you can reach.

There's no rule that decides when you're good enough; only you can decide that. And when you decide you are good enough, well, your world view changes. You gotta act, and you gotta be willing to fail. You gotta be willing to crash and burn versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. Um, I think that's very important. Failure, even though you should avoid it at all costs, is the best teacher. When you learn from it, you should know this by now.

You can't create the future by only ever playing it safe. You need to act, take risks, and be willing to fail sometimes. Yes, you might crash and burn, but it's in the ashes that innovation is born. Without taking risks, without experiencing any failure at all, you'll never truly know what you're capable of. The point is the world belongs to those who act.

You can write this down and put it on your desk: it all starts with a move, Aluxor. It doesn't start with a decision; it doesn't start with a plan. That's all the pre-work stuff. When you actually start moving, actually doing the things that you keep saying you will, that's when you start taking control of your future. Focus is about saying no, and the result of that focus is gonna be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Focus is about decluttering—it's about simplifying. It's not about doing a hundred things decently, but doing a selective few exceptionally well. When you say no to the distractions, the surplus, and the irrelevant stuff, you're making a conscious decision to pour your energy, time, and resources into what truly matters. Remember, you can be a jack of all trades, or you can excel in a chosen few. The choice is yours.

Creating great products isn't about stuffing them with countless features; it's about crafting a handful of functionalities so well they integrate seamlessly and offer intuitive experiences to the customer. When you focus on quality over quantity, you're saying yes to excellence; you're committing to delivering the best to your customers. It's not just about the individual elements; it's about how they come together and how they interact into a final version of the product. And this is why Apple sells more than six hundred thousand iPhones every single day. It's all about the customer experience that keeps users loyal to a brand.

Ultimately, focus is about making a trade—a bet with your future self, if you will. You bet the single thing you're focusing on will make it all worth it in the end, and you commit to the idea that saying yes to something now will be worth more than saying a lot of no's in the process. And look, most of the time, this is a requirement. If you say yes to investing your extra cash at the end of the month, you'll have to say no to an extra vacation this year. If you say yes to eating healthy, well, you might have to start saying no to that fast food rush after a night out with your friends. If you say yes to starting a business, you say no to financial stability for the next couple of years.

Only when you get comfortable with saying no to these types of things will your focus skyrocket. You've gotta start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can't start with a product and then figure out where you're going to try and sell it. You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it.

And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. To create a great product that sells to billions of people, you need to have the end user in mind. You can't expect to create a product without any market research and then figure out who's going to sell it. So before you even start building anything, you should understand what problems your customers have and then use technology to solve these problems.

This way, you make something that people actually want to use because it makes their lives better or easier. When you make something, even if it's just for yourself, you're still making it for another human being to use. This is something that seems to evade wannabe entrepreneurs. Most rush in to create businesses around things nobody asked for, then invest millions in marketing trying to convince you otherwise. It's a create-a-problem-and-then-sell-the-solution type of business. Most of the time, these businesses end up being unrequited middlemen between a customer and the product.

Businesses that sell tickets to events are an example. You see, when you make something that people really care about, it sells itself. Great marketing can't sell a bad product, despite what people think. And speaking of marketing, customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing; they form their own opinions on quality from their own experiences with the product or service.

Customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services. Customers don't just buy a product; they buy into an experience. It's their personal interaction with the products and services that shape their perceptions of quality.

You simply can't manufacture this perception with marketing alone. It comes from delivering exceptional products and services that exceed their expectations time and time again. You see, there are only two types of marketing that work: there's stupid money marketing—think Hollywood, where they have so much money thrown into marketing that it's pretty much impossible for you to not know what the next blockbuster this summer is. And even with that, most movies nowadays flop.

And then there's stupid simple marketing, which is basically word of mouth, where your thing is so good that people talk about it naturally. This type of marketing doesn't require millions of dollars on a budget; it requires a really good product, and the internet will take care of things by itself. In Apple's case, well, they had both.

If you don't love it, you're going to give up. If you don't love it, you're going to fail. So you gotta love it; you gotta have passion. Creating something truly revolutionary is not a walk in the park; it is hard work. And if you don't love it, if you're not passionate about it, you're going to give up. But if you truly love what you're doing, you will persevere. It's this passion that keeps you going, that pushes you to overcome every obstacle that comes your way.

But here's the thing: motivation can make you get up from your bed in the morning, but it cannot make you send those emails. It can't make that spreadsheet exciting; it can only get you so far. In the end, you need to find some sort of enjoyment out of this. It's rare to really love what you do, but to despise it entirely, or to do it on autopilot, it's not going to get you anywhere. And we can't tell you how to enjoy the process.

Okay, you need to find your own reason. Maybe you want a better life for you and your family, and that thought is what gives you energy. Maybe you found something you're actually good at doing, and it makes you feel satisfied. Or maybe, finally, something clicked after years of taking L's, and it's confirmed that you're actually capable of great things. The why is up to you to find out, and it's extremely important if you want to keep going.

There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. There's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. Because look, okay, a great idea does not always translate into a great product. Great ideas, they're just a starting point. Transforming them into great products requires craftsmanship, attention to detail, and a relentless pursuit of excellence.

It's not about how quickly you can get a product to market; it's about getting it right. You see, there's a great deal of behind-the-scenes work that nobody sees; work that doesn't get recognized, or awarded, or displayed in any fashion. Those who started their own businesses, well, if I know exactly what we're talking about, you see it takes two hours to watch a movie and about two years to make one. Even something as simple as a 10-minute YouTube video can take days over days to get right.

There's really a lot of work that nobody sees because that's not the point; the point is the end product. But when you're aware of the work involved and you prepare for it, it doesn't take you by surprise. How many times have you heard people say, "Man, I didn't think it was this hard," right after they start to do something new? It's because they failed to see and recognize all of that behind-the-scenes work.

You've got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. You've got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. Because everybody wants to play for the Lakers or whichever other top team you're into, okay? We're not trying to start a debate here; the point is when you're big, everyone wants to work with you or for you.

But what happens when you're not the Lakers or whatever? What happens when you don't get to choose from a carefully selected pool of top talent, people who can't wait for a chance to work at your company? Well, you need to scout. You need to learn how to see the potential in people, how to nourish it, and how to help them grow. If you want a great team, you need to understand what makes people tick and what they're really good at.

You see, a superstar team can lose to a well-put-together team any day of the week. And as a bonus here, we'll give you what we think are the three most important things you need to look for in a potential teammate:

1. They know they can do great work.
2. They know their work has great value.
3. They have all the tools required to make that great work.

At the end of the day, if at least these three things are met, you can build a superstar team all on your own. And there you have it, Aluxor. This is just one of the millions of ways to get rich, as we'll explore in the future entries of this series. Let us know your thoughts on these kinds of videos; we'd really appreciate your feedback.

And as a thank you for sticking with us until the end, we'll leave you with a "too long, haven't watched" for the video. So Jobs' strategy can be summarized as this: "Imagine an experience people would love to have, and then build a product for them." This is extremely powerful, Alux, and we hope you found this video valuable. Who should we do next? Let us know in the comments, and we'll see you back here next time. Thank you!