My Review Of The Movie “Jobs”

Seen any bad movies lately?

I have.

Last week, I attended an event in New York City with 120 of the world’s top entrepreneurs. It was extremely motivating and energizing (and hugely profitable!) to spend two days with the likes of Jay Abraham, Tim Ferriss, Peter Diamandis and other brilliant business leaders from around the world.

My friend Steve Sims, CEO of the world’s #1 luxury travel company Bluefish, arranged for us to see a sneak preview of the movie “Jobs” the night before its official release to the public.

This seemed to be a perfect fit for our group after two full days of connecting, brainstorming and sharing a considerable amount of business- and life-changing information, since it was a “biopic” about perhaps the greatest entrepreneur of our time: the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar.

We walked a short two blocks from the site of the event to a Times Square movie theater for our private screening, all abuzz with excitement about what we were about to experience.

But then they showed the movie.

First, let me say that I thought the acting was good. And I also thought they did a super job of taking us back to the 70’s. It was a blast seeing all of the cars, fashion and hairdo’s of the day, and brought back all kinds of fun memories for me.

But it just wasn’t fun watching the movie itself.

All I kept thinking during the whole thing was, “Wow. This HAD to be made by someone who doesn’t know or like entrepreneurs in general, and Steve Jobs in particular.”

All entrepreneurs experience more downs than ups, in both our business and personal lives. We’re all living, breathing examples of the saying, “You must fail your way to success.”

So if you put together a chronological history of our lives, treating every event as if it were equally important, our stories would be made up of many more negatives than positives. However, as entrepreneurs, we know and accept the fact that the benefits of our relatively few successes will far outweigh the losses of our failures.

The same is true, of course, of the life of Steve Jobs.

But you wouldn’t know that from watching this movie.

It seemed like every personal and professional shortcoming Jobs had was noted – and magnified. But there wasn’t nearly enough focus on or celebration of his successes, if you ask me – or any other successful entrepreneur.

I won’t spoil it for you in case you haven’t yet seen the movie (this is DEFINITELY one you should wait to see on TV or rent from Redbox for a buck, if you really insist on seeing it at all), but I will share with you part of a conversation I had right after our pre-release screening with a clearly-disappointed Brendon Burchard:

The gist of Brendon’s complaint was how the movie didn’t even mention Jobs’ greatest successes or show the ways in which his genius revolutionized several industries and changed the world for the better – yet it took great pains to detail all kinds of faults he had and mistakes he made.

It also conveniently ignored some MAJOR positive things about Jobs’ early partner, Steve Wozniak, including how he generously gave millions of dollars to his fellow Apple co-founders out of his own personal share of the company’s fortune.

In fact, there really was hardly anything positive at all in this film about any businessperson.

And sadly, every single high achiever I talked to after the screening had a similar reaction to the film as Brendon and I did.

Which is really too bad, because we were all so excited about it.

Before we actually saw it.

How about you?

Have you seen the film?

I’d love to read your review in a comment below.