But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want.
The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year."
That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?
I find that even when I'm working on projects I'm passionate about, there are still days - and plenty of them - when the work is a relentless grind of frustration and dullness.
Even when you're doing exactly what you want to do, it's still going to be tedious a lot of the time. And even if you're in the lucky position of being able to hand grunt work over to other people, admin, management, planning, and other distractions are never going to go away.
Interestingly, top CEOs rarely talk about their inner lives, so we have no idea how happy or fulfilled they truly are.
The first thst happened when I became a lead is that I got to do a lot more of the thankless grunt work so that my teammates can focus on implementing the (relatively) fun new features.
In what way do you mean this question? If the point is that there are only so many spots for talented actors, I disagree. It used to be there were 3 networks with, say, 4 half-hour slots per evening in prime time. There were maybe a handful of movies out per month. And maybe there were a dozen plays on Broadway (? - not much of a theater goer, so maybe I'm wrong on this).
Now with cable, DVDs, internet, mobile phones, computers, etc. there are thousands more slots available for talented actors. There are thousands more slots available for mediocre actors. There are movies in the theater, movies that go straight to streaming/DVD, made-for-TV movies on the traditional networks and the thousands of smaller cable networks. There are series on traditional TV, series on cable networks like HBO and Showtime, series on streaming like Netflix and Amazon, series on free services like YouTube.
If, on the other hand, your point is that being good at acting is limited to people with some talent, training, and time, then I agree. Most people would not be good actors. But there's no shortage of space available for actors if they want it.
That's a strange question. It's conflating fame and acting, which are (mostly) orthogonal. Would you ask how many people can make it as famous software engineers?
There's probably a limit to the number of 'famous' people in the world, depending on your idea of fame, because people simply can't know about an unlimited set of other people.
But the world can have more artists, of all kinds. We're nowhere close to the limit on the number of great actors our society can support. We'd need more theatres, acting teachers, costumers, lighting designers, etc., but I don't see why we couldn't have 1000 more Anthonys Hopkins (in skill, not fame) in my city.
A sample:
But not everyone has the potential to be Steve Jobs. Not just because most people are rather more ordinary, but because there are a limited number of jobs that are really fun, greatly admired, and fairly well remunerated, which is what most people want.
The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, "Yeah, I didn't get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year."
That's most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them?