English transcript

Look how wildly successful he was.

But here's why.

There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early 90s,

of signal to noise ratio.

What was so brilliant about Jobs

that I tell every CEO now, and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business,

his vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours.

Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year,

just the next 18 hours you're awake.

You're going to get those three things or those five things done

that you have deemed critical for your mission.

They must get done today.

Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise.

So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80-20.

80 signal, 20 noise.

And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning

and expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts, it was all email.

He was right. He was right.

And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that

is Elon Musk.

He has no noise.

He does not deal with noise.

He is 100% signal, 24 seconds,

you know, every cycle.

I mean, the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute,

60 minutes of every hour,

the 18 hours he's awake, it's all signal.

And look what he's achieved.

Now, that's very awkward for him socially,

because noise is dealing with your family sometimes, or noise is saying hi to a friend,

or noise is listening to some doom scrolling on some social media app

that just takes your mind, or maybe playing your guitar.

But very few people on earth, if you go back in history, you're going to find out

that the geniuses of their time

were close to 100% signal.