MG Siegler on the Importance of Enthusiasm

MG Siegler, on the “Incredible, Amazing, Awesome Apple” supercut video that made the rounds this week:

While certainly there is some element of hearing something so many times that you start to believe it, that’s nothing new, any good salesman will do the same thing. But why I think the tactic works so well with Apple is because they actually believe what they’re saying. Just watch Steve Jobs in that video. It sure seems like he’s damn sure that what he’s talking about is amazing. He’s excited about it. So is Phil Schiller and the others on the Apple team. And that excitement translates on a level unseen.

Agreed. And on the flip side, it’s always obvious when Jobs is not enthused about what he’s talking about on stage. E.g. this piece I wrote three years ago:

Jobs’s extraordinary marketing savvy and famed reality distortion field leave some people with the impression that he’s a talented fabulist. That’s wrong, though — Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he’s able to convince people of things that aren’t true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it’s because he believes what he’s saying. The reality distortion field isn’t something he projects willfully; it’s an extension of his own certainty. Remember his onstage demo last year of the Motorola Rokr iTunes- compatible phone? His contempt for the device was palpable; when he failed to successfully switch from song playback to accept a call, he seemed poised to just toss the thing off-stage and cry out that it was a piece of garbage.

★ Friday, 18 September 2009