In a long flowing river you can journey about the river, up stream and down and mostly you can avoid hazards. But Sometimes you turn a blind corner in that river and all of a sudden the river is flowing so rapidly it becomes clear that your simply can’t run against that flow and you need to surrender to it and go with the flow to save yourself.
The success journey in life is similar to a river in that it can be navigated to a certain extent, but then all of sudden “change in flow” comes along. But unlike a river in life, seeing and perceiving these change in flows is more difficult because emotions like pride tend to stop us from seeing things as they really are.
In 1986, a year after being kicked out of Apple, Steve Jobs acquired a company called the Graphics Group, part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm . The Graphics Group had some innovative animation hardware that had been used to produce special effects for Lucas’ films. Job’s plan was to leverage his hardware design skills he honed at Apple and make high end animation hardware. Jobs cared little for animation at the time and changed the name of the “would be” hardware company to Pixar, then set about building the world’s best animation hardware.
It did not work, the hardware animation business was a hard slog and it was unprofitable. So Pixar went into producing computer-animated commercials for outside companies.
In 1990 despite the fact that there were some big names using the beloved hardware, like Walt Disney Feature Animation, Jobs realised that his love for well-designed hardware was being drowned by the flow called ” “animation” or “CGI”. Jobs realised that animation was where the future of the company was. In April 1990 Pixar sold its hardware division, including all proprietary hardware technology to Vicom Systems, downsized the company but continued its relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation.
After a tough year going with the new flow of the company Pixar made a $26 million deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story – and the rest is history!
Go with the flow!







