On Sunday night, after a weekend of speaking and celebrating my birthday, I went to bed, turned on my DVR, and put on 60 Minutes. The first segment was about Steve Jobs. His biography came out this week and they were interviewing his biographer Walter Isaacson.

I always study successful people and I was reminded who I am as a business man. For the last several months, actually all of this year, I have been taking a step back to reevaluate where I want to take my professional life. In that time, I have been also focusing on me as a person.

A few attributes about Jobs reminded me about who I want to be, who I am, and what principles I want to keep near me.

First, there was a clear dichotomy of Steve Jobs being a business man and a true artist.  He understood that if he wanted to be a success, he had to be hard-nosed, but above all that, he wanted to create slick products that would help people. Like Jobs, I love the business end of things but I never put anything out there that I don’t believe with one hundred percent of my heart. I don’t bend the truth to make it look sexy, I always eat my own cooking, I live by what I write and speak about. I try not to sugar coat anything. I am an artist first, then a businessman.

For the most part, Jobs was curious about the world and about making cool products to make the world better.  I am curious about the way people live their lives and I look at the world from my chair and try to convey what I see from my chair.

Timelapse - Lighthouse (Oct 2012) from IMK Digital Multimedia on Vimeo.