Page 200 - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo

MAKE IT LOOK EFFORTLESS 181

is one of the most important aspects of Steve Jobs’s impact on
Apple: he has little or no patience for anything but excellence
from himself or others,” Evangelist concluded. 4
In October 1999, Time magazine reporter Michael Krantz was
interviewing Jobs one day before the introduction of a line of
multicolored iMacs. Jobs was rehearsing the big moment when
he would announce, “Say hello to the new iMacs.” The comput-
ers were then supposed to glide out from behind a dark curtain,
but according to Krantz, Jobs was unhappy with the lighting. He
wanted the lights to be brighter and to come up sooner. “Let’s
5
keep doing it till we get it right, OK?” said Jobs. The show’s
lighting folks practiced again and again as Jobs grew increas-
ingly frustrated.
“Finally,” Krantz reports, “they get it right, the five impec-
cably lighted iMacs gleaming as they glide forward smoothly
on the giant screen. ‘Oh! Right there! That’s great!’ Jobs yells,
elated at the very notion of a universe capable of producing
these insanely beautiful machines. ‘That’s perfect!’ he bellows,
his voice booming across the empty auditorium. ‘Wooh!’ And
you know what? He’s right. The iMacs do look better when the
lights come on earlier.” The scene that Krantz described could
6
be interpreted in one of two ways: either Jobs is a microman-
ager or, as one of Jobs’s friends observed in the article, “he is
single-minded, almost manic, in his pursuit of quality and
excellence.”

What Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, and

Winston Churchill Have in Common

Psychology professor Dr. K. Anders Ericsson has studied top ath-
letes such as Michael Jordan as well as superachievers in other
walks of life: chess players, golfers, doctors, even dart throw-
ers! Ericsson discovered that star performers refine their skills
through deliberative practice. In other words, they do not just
do the same thing over and over, hoping to get better. Instead,