I don't think it's helpful to copy what they do as CEO. I look for what they did in their lowest paying job and how they changed as they progressed in their careers. Of course, very few autobiographies cover this.
I think this is quite insightful. There was a post on here a while ago about William Faulkner being an absolutely atrocious postmaster when he was in college. Of course, a lot of artists tend to have a more meandering paths than a lot of CEOs, but his habits as a postmaster were probably just as important to his writing career as his later habits.
This may be more applicable to artists, but my own take is that a lot of people would be surprised at how much a lot of really successful people looked like "losers" for a significant part of their early lives, due to them living in their own world and not working hard enough on anything they didn't care about because they spent all their time thinking about the one thing they really cared about.
> Faggin: Well, for the timing of the product out, that was put three-and-a-half months of my life at 80 hours a week doing the layout. I mean, that was the only way I could solve that challenge. We couldn’t find a layout draftsman. They weren’t experienced enough or fast enough. And that was the absolute, the limiting time in terms of getting the product out. Because the design, Shima pretty much was doing it all the time it was allotted, but the layout was just not getting done fast enough. And so that’s why I had to do it. You know, a CEO doing layout draftsman job was not something that would be normal, but that’s what I had to do, and I did it. So that’s how I solved that problem. And that certainly saved many, many, many months for the project. As I said, I did two-thirds to three-quarters of the chip drawing it myself.
Great point. Telling us how the CEO operates day to day now when they are the finished product is not helpful in understanding how they became that person. A step by step description of their career would be more useful. How did they get every promotion, how much was luck by being in the right place and how much from hard work and talent. What were the thinking and strategies they used along the way.
Have you found any source for this kind of information. Sometimes I’ll look over the work histories of founders LinkedIn, but employment history is pretty superficial information.
This may be more applicable to artists, but my own take is that a lot of people would be surprised at how much a lot of really successful people looked like "losers" for a significant part of their early lives, due to them living in their own world and not working hard enough on anything they didn't care about because they spent all their time thinking about the one thing they really cared about.