Motivation Mh11

Robert Toru Kiyosaki is an American businessman and author.  Kiyosaki is the founder of Rich Global LLC and the Rich Dad Company, a  private financial education company that provides personal finance and  business education to people through books and videos.

In 2005, Steve Jobs Gave an Incredible Speech at Stanford University. Here's What to Steal From It

'Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.'

1. Structure

The  first big lesson in this speech comes less than a minute into it,  when Jobs establishes the audience's expectations for the structure of  what comes next.

He does it with this line: "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories."

It's  masterful. It uses the rule of three. It frames what comes next as  stories--not lessons, not advice (even though all three stories have  clear morals).

And, it reassures  the audience that nothing they're about to hear will be complex or  controversial. If you take nothing else from this analysis, take Jobs's  structure.

2. Pacing

The  speech takes just 14 minutes to deliver. It runs only 2,255 words. (By  comparison, this article runs about 600 words.) Of those 2,255 words,  1,959--86 percent--are devoted to the three stories.

There  are no words wasted. Nothing else bogs it down. He respects the  audience's time. He doesn't even waste words thanking the deans, as most  graduation speakers do.

Plus, the stories are nearly identical in length: 720 words for the first story, 604 for the second, and 635 for the third.

Jobs  paid so much attention to design in his life's work. I can only imagine  he was acutely aware of the degree to which people react with positive  emotions to symmetry, and to groups of three. None of this is an  accident.

3. Connection

The three stories Jobs tells are about:

• how a calligraphy class he took in the 1970s led him to insist that the Macintosh computer have high-quality fonts,
• how getting fired from Apple turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him, and
• what he learned about life, after he was told he had pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Of course, all three have much deeper themes. Who am I? What do my experiences mean? How do I find what I love?

Ultimately,  of course, there's a note of sadness involved, as we know Jobs had only  a bit more than six years to live at the time of this speech. And it  makes one of the most-quoted lines from the speech even more poignant:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

Steal this speech

Jobs was an enormously complicated man -- as I wrote a few years ago: both "a creative genius" and "a total jerk."

But he also famously adopted a quote that he attributed to Pablo Picasso: "Good artists copy; great artists steal."

I  think that's your license to at least borrow the best parts of this  classic speech, especially the structure, the pacing, and the striving  for an emotional connection. Do that much, and you'll walk away with  your audience wanting more.

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