I absolutely love the insight in this Fast Company article from April 17th, “The Lost Tapes of Steve Jobs” by Brent Schlender.

In the path of a creative person, especially a serial entrepreneur like Jobs…there are ebbs and flows in the creative process. The beauty of this article is the raw look of exactly what happened in the 1985-1996 hiatus from Apple in Steve Jobs life. I can see the struggle, the fight, the learning lessons and perceived mistakes that were the gold nugget creations for his future success. More importantly, you see how Jobs had to start managing creative talent and artists from Pixar which I believe led him to his greatest insights…the understanding of the Creative Class which would become his target audience for all future Apple products. Nothing could have set him up better for future success than these experiences and perceived “failure”.

Unleashing and tapping into the worlds fastest growing demographic is how I believe Apple tapped into it’s gold mine and still does!! If you don’t understand this demographic in your business, your missing out on the largest shift this world has ever seen… and it’s no fad by any means. Just look at how fast Pinterest has grown. WHY? Pinterest is about beauty, inspiration, aspirational, eye catching images. It’s a visual twitter for the creative class, created by the creative class showcasing on  a visual pinboard who you want to be, where you want to be, what people find cool and what they wish they had. It’s about dreams…what you wish you had and the things you want.

Pinterest is now a virtual tie for 2nd in website referral traffic for it’s 20 million users and growing. The average user is on 89 min/month compared to the average twitter user for 21 minutes per month. (Facebook has 850 million users staying online an ave of 405 min/month.)

Pinterest is about beautiful images and cool photos…not everyone can do that and create the emotional response that makes this site so viral. The artists and creatives have this skill and talent for sharing beauty and their emotions and it’s taking over Twitter FAST!!!

Thank goodness for the “Wilderness Years” of Steve Jobs so he could get into the mind set of how to manage his creative employees and how to tap into the minds of the target audience that would catapult the future success of Apple products.

Leanne