at the time, and I tried to do a good job of it, to be really useful,
but it was very hard.” This was a good start for someone who
went on to become a scientist and was a pioneer in the fight to
defeat AIDS. “I spend all my time on the AIDS issue now,” she
told me. “I’m incapable of doing anything else.”
John Sculley’s route was slightly more circuitous, although
no less logical: “I’ve always had a sort of insatiable curiosity
about things, everything, electronics for a while, then art, then
art history and architecture, all sorts of stuff. When I get in-
terested in something, I become totally absorbed by it, and I
always run out of physical energy before my curiosity is satis-
fied. I never intended to become a businessman. That was the
furthest thing from my mind. I thought I’d be an inventor or
architect or designer. I was interested in visual things, and I
was always interested in ideas and comfortable with them—in
everything from calculus to architecture.” It’s hard to imagine
a better background for heading an innovative, design-savvy
technology firm such as Apple.
The point of the first two tests is that once you recognize, or
admit, that your primary goal is to fully express yourself, you
will find the means to achieve the rest of your goals—given
your abilities and capacities, along with your interests and bi-
ases. On the other hand, if your primary aim is to prove your-
self, you’ll run into trouble sooner or later, as Ed, the lead
character in the cautionary tale in chapter one, did. The man
who follows his father into law or medicine in order to prove
himself, or the woman who decides to be a stockbroker to show
that she can make a lot of money, is playing the fool’s game and
will almost inevitably fail and/or be unhappy.
The third test is knowing what your values and priorities are,
knowing what the values and priorities of your organization are, and
measuring the difference between the two.
Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything