Learning From Picasso, Dylan and Jobs

From here:

Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan

Pablo Picasso

Andrew Ross Sorkin is puzzled: Why is Silicon Valley populated by one-hit wonders who have created one successful company at an early age, then withdrawn from the field as entrepreneurs to watch from the sidelines as venture capitalists? Sorkin notes that Steve Jobs was the rare exception, a serial entrepreneur.

Steve Jobs would not have been puzzled by Sorkin's observation. Jobs called Bob Dylan "one of my all-time heroes." He opened the public unveiling of the Macintosh by quoting a verse of Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin," and played "Like a Rolling Stone" at the public launches of both the iPhone and iPad. Jobs considered Dylan a role model:

As I grew up, I learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful...That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep risking failure, they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.

Read it all here.