This is the graduation commencement address that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, gave at Stanford in 2005. In this powerful speech, Steve recounts three personal stories from his personal life in which his main emphasis is, " the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

Personally, I found his speech to be powerful and motivational, so enjoy!

Below is the entire transcript of the speech...

Okay, this is no trick, Paul Karason's skin really is blue, it turned blue from...

The first time I lost that amount of money was during the devastating economic crash in the real estate market. My company was investing in real estate doing flips, rentals, and short/long-term investments. We also got into hard money lending. During the crash we had individuals and companies default on money we lent. That was the first time!

The second time was yesterday, but not as significant. I am playing a game on ESPN called Streak for the Ca$h. The game is simple and it is free, you simply pick a game winner for all different sports and whoever get's the longest winning streak for the month wins $50,000, and if you have over 27 winning streaks in a row, you can win $100,000. 

Don't worry there is a leadership lesson here, not just a sports talk... Keep reading!

My approach was more based off running simple statistics and probability to get the wins versus who I thought would win or what other people were voting for. I made sure to not...

How do we find peace? Does Obama provide it? Does war create it? Does a treaty guarantee it? Does Miss America's dream inspire it?

World peace, I do not know. However what I do know is we do not have personal peace enough. We do not have stillness in life. We all only have only 168 hours per week, awake for only 112 of them, that is a total of 6,720 minutes of productive time. Here is a challenge, CLICK the image below and do NOTHING for two minutes.

Can you do it?

Coaching Moment:
Make a practice of silent peace everyday. That is a total of 14 minutes out of 6,720 in a week. You can afford it! Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.

When you look at marketing and the value of it's worth, you must look at the avenue of marketing. It has always been said that word-of-mouth advertising works. The warm market penetration needs to really be assessed by more businesses. In Warren Buffet's book, The Warren Buffet CEO: Secrets from the Berkshire Hathaway Managers, written by Robert Miles, on one particular visit with GEICO, Warren talks of the humility of the CEO of GEICO, Tony Nicely. GEICO is known for spending the most money on advertising than any other company. Whether you are fans of the caveman who I guess were deeply offended, the googly eyes, the gecko, the woodchucks chucking wood, or perhaps the little piggy who said, "Wee wee" all the way home, or perhaps good 'ol Abe telling the truth you can recall dozens of different commercials of theirs. Below is the annoying pig...

Often times when I am talking to clients or potential partners about their marketing strategies I ask them if they have ever seen a GEICO commercial, and like clock work everyone says...

The following is an excerpt of a blog from a great friend of mine discussing some things we should all be doing, always, enjoy...

Provided courtesy of Chris Conrey:

Everyone knows the old salesman maxim: Always Be Closing. Made famous by Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross performance (watch here – some foul language) which has been shown in 20% of sales meetings across the world since the movie’s release in 1992 – any professional salesperson has heard this term approximately 4,576,861 times over the course of their career.

But there are other things you should always be doing.

• Always Be Learning – get better at something every day. Read books, blogs, magazines, anything. Put what you learn into practice. Try something new.
  
• Always Be Giving – I spent a week away on a business trip, then launched right into volunteering my time for WordCamp Phoenix this weekend. Sure the easy choice would be to sit at home with my girls and rest, but I wanted to support a great organization who has helped a ton of people learn about and use WordPress.
• Always Be Listening – you never know when you may hear someone who has a problem you can solve. I was in a certification class this past week and overheard people a table over from mine talking about all sorts of development and agile culture problems. Oddly enough, those are the problems we solve at Integrum. Made for a nice way to intro myself and add a lead to my pipeline.

Read the other 9 things that we should always be doing HERE.

Many of you have special talents, gifts, and abilities and it feels good to be held in a high regard for them, of course it does. But at the end of the day where has it gotten you? Nowhere. A large group of people walk away to watch the next big act.

So the irony of leadership is here. We think just because we are on stage and in front of people we are leading. We think we are leading when people applaud and stand in ovation for us. We think we are leading when we are showing a skill that no one else has. However leadership is not about the leader, it is about the...

I recently sent out a tweet that said, "Stress & burnout comes from living out of alignment w/our values. When not in tune with our inner core we experience distress. #BringValue." As it posted to Facebook one of my friends asked me to explain. I realized a simple Facebook post explanation was not adequate so here is the thought dug up a little deeper...
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If you were to look at any list of great leaders of the century, and you would find these five people at the top of the list: