Chaplin's Birth Mystery

A letter hidden for years by silent movie pioneer Charlie Chaplin has come to light which claims he lied about his birthplace and was in fact born in a gypsy caravan.

The letter, written to Chaplin in the 1970s, claims he was born on the 'Black Patch' near Birmingham rather than in London as previously believed. 

The comedian, one of most iconic personalities of the 20th century, received the letter six years before he died in 1977, and kept it hidden in his desk drawer.

It stated that the British comic actor's claim in his memoirs that he was born in London was wrong and instead relocated his birth, on April 16, 1889, to a caravan in the town of Smethwick, in central England.

Believed to be genuine by Chaplin's family, the letter was found in the locked drawer of a bureau which was inherited by Chaplin's daughter, Victoria, after his widow Oona died in 1991.

It was only found after his daughter had a locksmith open up the drawer.

The letter is set to be included in a British radio documentary tomorrow and reveals the inauspicious beginnings of the man who earned worldwide acclaim for his performance as the 'little tramp'.

It was sent by Jack Hill, of Tamworth, who says that he knew about the British actor's real background from his aunt, who was a gypsy queen.

Mr Hill wrote: 'The caravan belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick near Birmingham.'

The Black Patch was a thriving Romany community based on the industrial edge of Birmingham in the 1880s.   

Chaplin's birth certificate has never been located, even though by the late 1880s it was a legal requirement. His older half brother Sydney had one.

Until now it was thought he was born in London in 1889.  His mother Hannah, whose maiden name is Hill, was descended from a travelling family.

 

WHAT THE LETTER SAID:

'Hello Charlie,

'If you would like to know, you were born in a caravan, so [was I]. It was a good one, it belonged to the gypsy queen who was my auntie. 

'You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick. So was I, two and a half year later. 

'Your mum did move again with her dad's circus and later settled down in London but whereabouts I do not know.'

Jack Hill, who adds he is not out for any money for the information, signs off:

'Goodbye and good luck,

Jack Hill.'

She was a singer and actress with the stage name Lily Harley, who separated from her husband Charles when young Charlie was three.

There may have been some shame in having a Romany background, which is thought to be why Chaplin made much of being a Londoner, particularly after he emigrated to America in 1910.

Secret letter: Charlie Chaplin aged 12 (left) in 1901 and aged 25 in 1914 (right). He received the letter telling him of his birthplace six years before he died in 1977

Inauspicious beginnings: Chaplin may have been born in a gypsy travelling wagon similar to this

The letter is one of a number of documents about the comic being kept in a bomb-proof concrete vault in Montreux, Switzerland, the country where his relatives now live.

Other documents include reel-to-reel recordings of Chaplin improvising at the piano.  

There are also press cuttings which detail the British Army's banning of the Chaplin moustache from the trenches during the First World War.

Chaplin is one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, famous for his signature character, the Little Tramp.

The survivor of a tough workhouse childhood, he became one of the best-known film stars in the silent movie world before the end of the First World War.

Chaplin's oldest surviving son Michael has said the idea of Chaplin being a gypsy born in Smethwick, the West Midlands, does not bother him.

He believes the letter must have been significant for Chaplin to have kept it.

There are plans to turn the Chaplin family home in Montreux into a museum.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358970/The-secret-letter-claims-Charlie-Chaplain-son-gypsy-queen.html#ixzz2lZKbmqGl
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Chaplin: The Composer

Click this link to hear a sampling of his music:  Chaplin's Music

Most people have no idea that Charlie Chaplin wrote nearly 500 pieces of music.  He had the help of a trained arranger, but they were his songs.  He was also self taught on the Cello and Violin and could play the piano.  He had a natural talent for developing just the right song for each scene in his later movies.  Once sound was available, he went back and wrote music, creating a sound track for his feature films.  The song, Smile, This is My Song and the theme from Limelight were all hits on the charts.

Chaplin vs. Sacha Baron Cohen

It is a total embarrassment that Sacha Baron Cohen (SBC) got any kind of an award with Chaplin's name on it.  To even put SBC in the same country with Chaplin is a travesty.  Chaplin would turn over in his grave to be connected with SBC.  While I personally enjoy SBC in isolation for what he does, don't speak his name in the same company as the genius that Chaplin was and is.

Read the excerpt below and watch the clip of his stunt involving a supposed survivor of City Lights:

"We gave short shrift yesterday to the video ofSacha Baron Cohen‘s acceptance speech, when he took the stage to accept the Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence In Comedy. And then murdered the wheelchair-bound 87-year old Grace Collington, right after the unsuspecting audience was told she appeared in Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights as a 5-year-old.

Is this more outrageous than when Baron Cohen promoted Bruno by giving Eminem an aerial tea-bagging at the 2009 MTV Awards, or when, as The Dictator, he dumped an urn on red carpet interviewer Ryan Seacrest and told him that if anyone asks who you are wearing, you can say Kim Jong Il? Baron Cohen is most certainly keeping the spirit of Andy Kaufman alive, and I think that this week he set the bar to a level even he will be hard pressed to top. Here is his Britannia stunt in two segments, and below that is his MTV Awards and Oscar handiwork"

See the full article and clip of SBC's stunt Here

Famous Quotes from Chaplin, Kelly and Jobs

Charlie Chaplin:

"Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone."


Gene Kelly:

"There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy."


Steve Jobs:

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me."

How Steve Jobs and The Ipad Succeeded Where Others Failed

Steve Jobs’s solution to Google’s Android-everywhere strategy was simple and audacious: he unveiled the iPad. Many knew Jobs was going to unveil a tablet despite what he had told Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal seven years before. “It turns out people want keyboards . . . We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail,” Jobs had said.

If Google was going to try to win the mobile-platform war on breadth, Jobs was going to win it on depth.

But he’d clearly reconsidered this. If Google was going to try to win the mobile-platform war on breadth, Jobs was going to win it on depth. All then-Android chief Andy Rubin had to do to expand Android was to get it on more and more machines; like Bill Gates with Windows, Rubin didn’t care which products were hits and which were not as long as in the aggregate the Android platform was growing. For Jobs to make Apple’s strategy work — to grow the iOS platform vertically — he needed to hit it out of the park every time.

When executives inside and outside Apple wondered if Jobs was making the same mistake against Android that he made against Microsoft — if he was keeping his platform too rigid — it seemed that, if anything, Jobs was increasingits rigidity. Starting in 2010, Jobs had more and more Apple products assembled with special screws to make it difficult for anyone with typical screwdriver heads to open the cases of his machines. (It seemed like a small thing, but to those inside Silicon Valley its symbolism was large: One of Android’s pitches to consumers was the flexibility of the software and the devices.)

Maybe more people in the world would own Android phones than iPhones. But the people who owned iPhones would also own iPads, iPod Touches, and a slew of other Apple products that all ran the same software, that all connected to the same online store, and that all generated much bigger profits for everyone involved. Only someone with the self-confidence of Jobs would have the guts to set such a high bar.

Jobs laid out his new invention for the world as if he were helping his audience complete a vast jigsaw puzzle.

Is There Room for a Third Category?

Minutes after Jobs unveiled the iPad on January 27, 2010, it appeared as if he’d cleared the bar he’d set for Apple by a mile. He laid out his new invention for the world more slowly than usual, as if he were helping his audience complete a vast jigsaw puzzle. He put up a slide with picture of an iPhone and a Macbook laptop, put a question mark between them, and asked a simple question: “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle?”

Jobs then raised what had become the usual answer to this question: “Some people have thought that’s a netbook. The problem is that a netbook isn’t better atanything. They’re slow. They have low-quality displays. And they run clunky, old PC software [Windows]. They’re not better than a laptop at anything. They’re just cheaper.”

The foundation of Jobs’s iPad pitch was counterintuitive. Most people don’t buy a laptop for the tasks they were originally designed for — heavy office work, such as writing, crafting presentations, or financial analysis with spreadsheets. They use it mostly to communicate via email, text, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook; to browse the Internet; and to consume media such as books, movies, TV shows, music, photos, games, and videos. Jobs said that you could do all this on an iPhone, but the screen was too small to make it comfortable. You could also do it all on a laptop, but the keyboard and the trackpad made it too bulky, and the short battery life often left you tethered to a power outlet.

What the world needed was a device in the middle that combined the best of both — something that was “more intimate than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smartphone,” he said.

Only after more buildup did Jobs say what the world was waiting for: “We think we have the answer.” A picture of the iPad dropped nicely into place between the iPhone and the Macbook on the slide.

In a Long Line of Tablets, How Did the iPad Succeed Where Others Failed?

It wasn’t the iPad’s looks that had everyone rapt. Many wondered if they were watching the world’s greatest entrepreneur make a huge mistake.

Fred Vogelstein

Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor at WIRED. He has been a staff writer at Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report; his work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

The tablet computer was the most discredited category of consumer electronics in the world. Entrepreneurs had been trying to build tablet computers since before the invention of the PC. They had tried so many times that the conventional wisdom was that it couldn’t be done.

Alan Kay of Xerox PARC — who is to certain geeks what Neil Armstrong is to the space program — drew up plans for theDynabook in 1968 and laid out those plans in a 1972 paper titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.” Apple prototyped something it called the Bashful in 1983 but never released it. The first tablet to get any consumer traction came from Jeff Hawkins, the entrepreneur behind the PalmPilot in the late 1990s. He built the GRiDPad from Tandy, which was released in 1989. GO Corp. took the next whack at tablet computing with the EO in 1993. (GO Corp.’s early employees included Omid Kordestani, Google’s first business executive, and Bill Campbell, Apple’s vice president of marketing in the 1980s.)

Apple unveiled the Newton in 1994. This groundbreaking PDA turned out to be Silicon Valley’s Edsel: a one-word explanation for why tablets could never sell. It also became emblematic of Apple’s Jobs-less era, when the company was run by a series of increasingly unsuccessful executives until it nearly went into bankruptcy; it was, fittingly, one of the first projects Jobs killed when he returned in 1997. By then, if you wanted computing power that was portable, you could buy a laptop. Everything else involved too much compromise. Indeed, the PalmPilot and devices like it became so popular for the next half decade because they didn’t try to do too much.

They were watching the world’s greatest entrepreneur make a huge mistake. The tablet computer was the most discredited category of consumer electronics.

The most recent effort in tablets had been made by Gates and Microsoft in 2002. By 2009 — even though tablet PCs were still being sold — it felt as if the Amazon Kindle were the only thing available that even resembled a tablet. But it wasn’t really a tablet. You could download books and the text of newspapers and magazines and read them on its black- and-white screen. But that’s all it effectively did.

All of this made doing a tablet risky for Jobs, especially with Google breathing down his neck. Some wondered if it didn’t make it too risky. But it also made a tablet the perfect project for Jobs to tackle. He had already reimagined the personal computer, the portable music player, and the cell phone. And he truly reimagined the tablet with the iPad. It did almost everything a laptop did. In addition, it was a quarter the weight; had three times the battery life; had a touchscreen like the iPhone and turned on without booting up too; and was always connected to the Internet.

And there was no learning curve for consumers because it came with almost the same software (plus apps) on an iPhone.

Technically, one navigated an iPad the same way as an iPhone, but the difference in user expectations was vast. Cellphones were always designed to fit in a pocket and be navigated with fingers. But navigating something like the iPad with a screen the size of a laptop’s had always required either a stylus or a trackpad/mouse and a keyboard. In a video shown at the unveiling, Apple’s former head of iOS software Scott Forstall said “If you see something, you just reach out and tap it. It’s completely natural. You don’t even think about it. You just . . . do.”

The immediate reaction to the iPad was full of oohs and aahs. The Economist famously put a picture on its cover of Jobs in religious garb holding the device – “The Book of Jobs: Hope, Hype, and Apple’s iPad” said the headline.

‘If you see something, you just reach out and tap it. It’s completely natural. You don’t even think about it. You just . . . do.’

But Why Were People So Skeptical at First?

As the father of the Macintosh, Jobs had more credibility than anyone else to reimagine the PC and challenge the conventional wisdom about tablets. “Steve hated the fact that the Macintosh wasn’t mainstream right away — that everyone wasn’t just fucking sweating to get one,” a Jobs confidant said. “So we talked a lot about how we could make sure the iPad caught on right away.”

Yet the reaction to it in the days and weeks thereafter was, remarkably, tepid. There were widespread gripes about the iPad’s lack of a camera, its lack of multitasking, and the images of feminine protection some said its name conjured. It looked like an iPhone, only four times bigger.

Amid his standard “I won’t comment on a competitor’s products,” competitors such as Google’s Eric Schmidt said snidely, “You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” Gates said, “I still think some mixture of voice, the pen, and a real keyboard will be the mainstream. It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

The biggest criticism, however, was the one Jobs thought he had answered in his presentation: What do I need it for?

The skeptical public reaction had a simple explanation. No one had ever seen a device like the iPad before, and the first ones would not go on sale for two months. While consumers knew instinctively that they needed a phone and a laptop because they had been around for a long time, the only tablets they had ever seen were devices they didn’t want.

If you wanted computing power that was portable, you could buy a laptop. Everything else involved too much compromise.

Even those who worked on the iPad at Apple were dubious about it at first, like former Apple engineer Jeremy Wyld, who worked on the software for it and the iPhone: “I remember when I first saw it, I thought it was a rock fetch [a pointless endeavor], to tell the truth,” he said.  “I thought, ‘This thing is ridiculous.’ ” Wyld wasn’t just shooting his mouth off. He was one of the earliest engineers on the Newton in the 1990s, before leaving Apple for engineering jobs at Excite and Pixo.

When he looked at the first iPad, all Wyld saw was a bigger iPhone that now no longer fit in your pocket. “I saw that when we made things bigger, people didn’t like it.” What Wyld discovered was that the iPad looked like an overgrown iPhone because it ran the same software and had a touchscreen, but it was really a new kind of laptop.

You’d never give up a smartphone to own an iPad, but you would certainly dump your laptop to own one. That it looked like a large iPhone was initially something to be criticized. It turned out that the bigger screen, as simple a tweak as this was, was exactly what made it such a new and powerful device.

The importance of screen size seemed so obvious to Joe Hewitt — who had written the Facebook iPhone app in 2007 and had helped conceive and build the Firefox Internet browser in 2002 — that the day after the iPad’s unveiling, he wrote a nine-hundred-word blog post saying the iPad was the most important thing Apple had ever done. The year before, Hewitt had been fiercely critical of Apple for its restrictive app store policies. But his years of developing software for many different devices and platforms told him that the iPad had solved a fundamental problem.

“I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social-networking website into a handheld, touchscreen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mother ship, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, the iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. … The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.”

Journey to the Center of the Mobile Universe

Unlike the iPhone, which got developed faster than it should have been, the iPad’s journey through Apple’s hardware, software, and design teams was long. (Jobs told Isaacson that it started in 2002.)

Perversely, the work that seemed technically hardest — building the multitouch display that is now on every tablet and smartphone — got the furthest, while seemingly the most straightforward work — figuring out a way to build the rest of the device — quickly ran aground.

Part of what gave the multitouch work traction was that one of the engineers on the project, Josh Strickon, had built a crude multitouch display for his MIT master’s thesis. And by 2003 he had, with Steve Hotelling and Brian Huppi (both still at Apple) figured out a way to show off a much more refined version of the technology to Tony Fadell (now at Nest). The point of the demonstration was to position the multitouch team, known then only as the Q79 group, to get $2 million in Apple funding.

The Q79 group needed to turn the big circuit board that would tell the screen to respond to finger inputs — it currently sat on a separate two-by- two-foot circuit board that was hardwired to the screen — into a single chip that could go inside a device. The demo went well. The team showed off the virtual keyboard and the pinch and spread features that are so strongly associated with the technology today, and got Fadell’s approval.

The problem was that the tablet hardware was unusable. The energy-efficient processors that would eventually drive the iPhone and the iPad were not yet powerful enough to run software that would appeal to consumers. The tablet needed a hard drive, which took up too much room in the case because flash storage was still too expensive in the capacities they needed. What that left was a machine without a keyboard that was not much lighter, cheaper, or better powered than a laptop.

Apple shelved the project before Jobs revived it to build the iPhone. Only after the iPhone came out in 2007 did Jobs start to reconsider a tablet.

The iPad wouldn’t have been possible without the iPhone. It would have been too expensive to build and sell for $600 in 2007. The required low-power ARM chips weren’t fast enough to run something with a screen that big. And without all the content in the app store, consumers would not have known what to do with it.

But by 2009 the technology was ready: There was finally enough bandwidth, powerful enough processors, and strong enough batteries to make a tablet useful. Multitouch had proved to be hugely popular in the iPhone, so the idea of using a virtual screen to write emails or type in web addresses was no longer foreign. Because Apple was selling so many iPhones, it had driven the price of components for a tablet down to affordable levels.

The question that remained unanswered when Jobs returned to Apple from liver transplant surgery in the summer of 2009 was what kind of device the tablet would be. Would it be just an iPhone with a bigger screen or would it have its own set of apps that set it apart? Initially Jobs was leaning toward its being just a bigger iPhone. Jobs thought of it purely as a consumption device, a confidant said. You wouldn’t be able to edit documents or spreadsheets on it. And he was leery of having it become an e-book reader like the Kindle, which had been out for nearly two years. Jobs thought people were reading less and less anyway, and that those who still did read books would prefer the physical over the electronic versions.

What do I need it for? While consumers knew instinctively that they needed a phone and a laptop, the only tablets they had ever seen were devices they didn’t want.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s iTunes boss, and Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of global marketing, were among those who made it their mission to help Jobs clarify his point of view. Schiller pushed Jobs to modify his view of what a “consumption device” really meant. If someone sent a document or a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation, iPad users needed to be able to edit it. Cue, meanwhile, made it his mission to get Jobs to rethink his view about e-books. Amazon’s Kindle was getting much more traction than they expected; readers were downloading e-books at an astonishing rate.

In testimony during the Department of Justice’s antitrust trial against Apple in June 2013, Cue explained the evolution of the e-books on the iPad this way: “When I got my first chance to touch the iPad, I became completely convinced that this was a huge opportunity for us to build the best e-reader that the market had ever seen. And so I went to Steve and told him why I thought [the iPad] was going to be a great device for e-books . . . and after some discussions he came back and said, you know, I think you’re right… He started coming up with ideas himself about what he wanted to do with it and how it would be even better as a reader and store.”

Because Apple was selling so many iPhones, it had driven the price of components for a tablet down to affordable levels.

Cue said the “page curls” in the iBooks app, which show up when you flip an iBook’s page, was Jobs’s idea. It also was Jobs’s idea to pick Winnie-the-Pooh as the freebie book that came with every iBooks app. He thought it best showed off iBooks’s capabilities. “It had beautiful color drawings that had never been seen before in a digital book,” Cue said.

***

When the first iPads went on sale in early April 2010, it became clear that the initial tepid public reaction to the device had been misleading. Apple sold 450,000 in the first week, 1 million in the first month, and 19 million in the first year. It took Apple six months to catch up with how fast consumers were buying them, and by 2011 the iPad had overtaken the DVD player to become the hottest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.

Within a year of the iPad’s release it seemed remarkable that Jobs had spent a moment worrying about Android’s rise in 2009 and 2010. Android continued its astonishing growth, but iPhone sales accelerated just as fast. In 2011 Apple made $33 billion, as much as Google and Microsoft combined; it had already passed Microsoft in 2010 to become the biggest technology company in stock market valuation. In 2011 it had passed Exxon to become the biggest company, period, in stock market valuation. By the end of 2011 it was sitting on so much cash — $100 billion — that if it had wanted to use that money to become a bank, it would have ranked among the top ten in the world.

Would the iPad be just an iPhone with a bigger screen, or would it have its own set of apps that set it apart?

Most notably, by the middle of 2011, the iPad was proving to be a more revolutionary product than even the iPhone and the iPod. The iPod and iTunes changed the way people bought and listened to music. The iPhone changed what people could expect from their cellphones.

But the iPad was turning five industries upside down. It was changing the way consumers bought and read books, newspapers, and magazines — as well as the way they watched movies and television. Revenues from these businesses totaled about $250 billion, or about 2 percent of U.S. GDP.

The Android team at Google scrambled to keep up with the relentless pace of Apple’s innovations. But in 2011 they were being outflanked on almost every front. Yes, there were more Android devices in use than iPhones or iPads combined. But platform size was turning out to be just one, not the only, measurement of dominance in the Apple/Google fight. With the iPhone and the iPad, Apple still had the coolest, most cutting-edge devices. It had the best content for those devices. It had the easiest-to-use software. And it had the best platform for making content owners and software developers money.

Platform size was turning out to be just one, not the only, measurement of dominance in the Apple/Google fight.

On top of all that, the iPad was also upending the personal computer business. It was eating into PC sales the same way that in the 1980s PCs ate into sales of minicomputers and mainframes from such companies as Digital Equipment and IBM. Some iPad buyers did indeed make the iPad their third device, as Jobs had predicted. But many others decided they now needed only two, and they started ditching their Microsoft-run HP, Toshiba, Acer, and Lenovo laptops at an accelerating clip. The shift hit Dell so hard that by the beginning of 2013 Michael Dell, its founder, was trying to take the company private to retrench.

It’s fitting that Dell has been hit among the hardest: When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Michael Dell declared he had so little faith in an Apple recovery that if he were Jobs, he’d “shut Apple down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Dell, with founder Michael Dell at the helm, began its journey as a private company this week.

Adapted and excerpted from Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (to be released November 12). Copyright 2013 by Fred Vogelstein. Reprinted by permission of Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Learning from Steve Jobs

Lessons Learned From 4 Steve Jobs Quotes

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Are there certain leaders that you find inspirational?  Steve Jobs inspires me because he faced tremendous adversity in his life, but he never gave up.  Jobs influenced the transformation of many industries including computing, telecommunications, entertainment, retail and digital publishing.

Steve Jobs was one of the pioneers of the personal computing revolution and is considered one of the prolific visionaries of all time. On top of building and resurrecting Apple AAPL +1.59% when it was about to go bankrupt, Jobs also co-founded one of the greatest animation studios existing today, known as Pixar.  Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, but he went on to start another computer company called NeXT Inc. immediately after that.  Over a decade later, Apple bought out NeXT Inc. and Steve Jobs was named CEO again in 1997.

Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the most valuable publicly traded company in 2011. But Jobs resigned as the CEO of Apple due to health reasons in August 2011. He passed away nearly two months after that.

Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a memo to staff members saying “I hope everyone will reflect on what [Steve Jobs] meant to all of us and to the world. Steve was an amazing human being and left the world a better place. I think of him often and find enormous strength in memories of his friendship, vision and leadership. He left behind a company that only he could have built and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We will continue to honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to the work he loved so much. There is no higher tribute to his memory. I know that he would be proud of all of you.”

Throughout Jobs’ career, he participated in many interviews and gave a powerful commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. As I pored through many of Steve Jobs’ quotes, I found four of them especially insightful:

Don’t Dwell On Mistakes

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations,” said Jobs in a quote within the book called “The Journey Is The Reward” by Jeffrey Young.  Throughout everyone’s career, mistakes will be made.  Do not dwell on the mistakes. Move on from your mistakes!

If you are a chef and your newest recipe burned in the oven, try preparing the recipe in a different way.  If you are a mobile developer and your app does not get any downloads, then scrap it and try something new.  If you are a stock trader and made some bad investment decisions, then find stocks that are not as volatile and find better ways to diversify your portfolio.

As a writer, I have created some articles early in my career that have gotten only a couple of hundred hits (if I was lucky). Recently I have written some articles that have received over a million hits recently.  I was only able to improve my writing by learning from my mistakes, getting feedback from my colleagues and learning from my competition.

Steve Jobs made many mistakes in his career while working at Apple too.  He oversaw several product failures like the Apple Lisa, the Macintosh TV and the Apple III.  He also made many bad managerial decisions. This did not stop him from building the most valuable company in the world.

Love What You Do

This past summer, Gallup released the results of a poll that showed 70% of Americans either hated their job or was “disengaged” from their work.  This sounds like a big problem, doesn’t it?  Most people take a job out of necessity rather than being passionate about that line of work. When Steve Jobs discovered that he was passionate about design and technology, he stayed focused on that industry.

Jobs once said “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Sometimes it takes time to decide what you are passionate about.  The sooner you discover what your passions are, the faster you will find job fulfillment.  If you want to feel fulfilled in your current job, take on a project that you are passionate about on top of your daily duties.  Have a job that you absolutely despise?  I’m sure that has happened to all of us, but do not settle and keep your ear to close to the ground for other potential opportunities.

Distinguish Yourself

“We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me too’ products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream,”  said Jobs in an interview when the Macintosh was released in January 1984.

Distinguishing yourself is one of the most important aspects of your career.  If you simply become lazy and apathetic about your job, then the odds are that you will be laid off. You can prevent this from happening by dreaming bigger and work smarter. Trying something that is not part of the status quo can be a gamble, but it is better to reap the rewards rather than sticking to the norm.

Before Apple built a music player, there were already MP3 players on the market.  There were also many other types of smartphones on the market before the iPhone was built.  Clearly Apple was able to find ways to distinguish themselves, even though it was a big risk.  An Apple senior executive reported recently that the company spent over $150 million on the original iPhone and they put their best engineers on the project.  If you want to take a gamble on a vision that you know can be big, you should not hold back on some of your resources.

Acknowledge People That Helped You Succeed

As you start to succeed in your career, I believe you should acknowledge the people that have helped you get there. Building a career is difficult and you will constantly need to have people on your side.

When Steve Jobs announced his medical leave in 2011, his daughter Lisa was skeptical about visiting him since her relationship with her father was built on resentment.  Steve Jobs told his daughter many times that he wished he had been a better dad when she was younger.  Lisa knew her dad’s condition was not good so she made sure to visit and make reconciliations.  “I’m very glad she came.  It helped settle a lot of things in me,” said Jobs in his biography written by Walter Isaacson.

Steve Jobs was also visited by Google co-founder Larry Page shortly after that.  Page asked Jobs if he could receive tips on how to be a better CEO since he was taking that position from Eric Schmidt at Google.  Jobs said that his first reaction was to be dismissive of Page because he believed Google ripped off Apple’s products when building Android.

“But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me when I was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down the block who worked for HP. So I called him back and said sure,” said Jobs in the biography.  Jobs talked to Page about focus, choosing the right people, how to know who to trust and how to build a solid team.  Jobs also suggested to Page that Google focuses on five of their best products and cancel the rest because they are dragging them down.  “The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.”

As you start to succeed in your career, it is important to remember who some of your biggest cheerleaders were. If someone recently hired you for a job that you wanted, make sure to thank the people that hired you. If someone helped you finish a project that you were frustrated with, then give them positive feedback to their manager or take them out for a nice lunch.

Are there any quotes from Steve Jobs that inspire you?  Let us know in the comments below.

Chaplin on PBS

August 28th, 2006

Charlie Chaplin

About the Actor

Charlie Chaplin was one of the greatest and widely loved silent movie stars. From “Easy Street” (1917) to “Modern Times” (1936), he made many of the funniest and most popular films of his time. He was best known for his character, the naive and lovable Little Tramp. The Little Tramp, a well meaning man in a raggedy suit with cane, always found himself wobbling into awkward situations and miraculously wobbling away. More than any other figure, it is this kind-hearted character that we associate with the time before the talkies.

Born in London in 1889, Chaplin first visited America with a theater company in 1907. Appearing as “Billy” in the play “Sherlock Holmes”, the young Chaplin toured the country twice. On his second tour, he met Mack Sennett and was signed to Keystone Studios to act in films. In 1914 Chaplin made his first one-reeler, “Making a Living”. That same year he made thirty-four more short films, including “Caught in a Cabaret”, “Caught in the Rain”, “The Face on the Bar-Room Floor”, and “His Trysting Place”. These early silent shorts allowed very little time for anything but physical comedy, and Chaplin was a master at it.

Chaplin’s slapstick acrobatics made him famous, but the subtleties of his acting made him great. While Harold Lloyd played the daredevil, hanging from clocks, and Buster Keaton maneuvered through surreal and complex situations, Chaplin concerned himself with improvisation. For Chaplin, the best way to locate the humor or pathos of a situation was to create an environment and walk around it until something natural happened. The concern of early theater and film was to simply keep the audience’s attention through over dramatic acting that exaggerated emotions, but Chaplin saw in film an opportunity to control the environment enough to allow subtlety to come through.

Chaplin was known as one of the most demanding men in Hollywood. Regardless of the size the part, Chaplin walked each actor through every scene. Chaplin knew that a successful scene was not simply about the star, but about everyone on the screen. He demanded that the entire cast work together in every performance. Without this unity he could not express the subtlety of character that was so important to him. The only way to achieve that unity was to maintain complete control over every scene. This constant attention to detail ran many features over-time and over-budget, but the public reaction assured him and the studios that what he was doing worked. As his popularity increased he took more liberties with filming. Movies such as his 1925 hit, “The Gold Rush”, demanded unending reworking of scenes and rebuilding of sets.

Chaplin typically improvised his story in front of the camera with only a basic framework of a script. He shot and printed hundreds of takes when making a movie, each one a little experimental variation. While this method was unorthodox, because of the expense and inefficiency, it provided lively and spontaneous footage. Taking what he learned from the footage, Chaplin would often completely reorganize a scene. It was not uncommon for him to decide half-way through a film that an actor wasn’t working and start over with someone new. Many actors found the constant takes and uncertainty grueling, but always went along because they knew they were working for a master.

Though Chaplin is of the silent movie era, we see his achievements carried through in the films of today. With the advent of the feature-length talkies, the need for more subtle acting became apparent. To maintain the audience’s attention throughout a six-reel film, an actor needed to move beyond constant slapstick. Chaplin had demanded this depth long before anyone else. His rigor and concern for the processes of acting and directing made his films great and led the way to a new, more sophisticated, cinema.

Book Taking Shape

A listing of my chapters.  I've added a few since the last time.  I may move them around a bit until I think it's just right, but who knows?

Chapter 1 Chaplin, Kelly, Jobs:  Brief Biographies

Chapter 2 Early Influences

Chapter 3 Hard Work Pays Off

Chapter 4 Timing is Everything

Chapter 5 Rapid Rise to the Top

Chapter 6 Leveraging Fame & Fortune

Chapter 6 The Media

Chapter 7 I’m on Top, Now What?

Chapter 8 The Right Team

Chapter 9 Running a Tight Ship

Chapter 10 Missteps

Chapter 11 Loyalty

Chapter 12 The Next Big Thing

Chapter 13 Creative Freedom

Chapter 14 On Hard Work

Chapter 15 On Politics
Chapter 16 The Competition

Chapter 17 Effects on Those Closest to Them

Chapter 18 Continued Innovation

Chapter 19 The End

Chapter 20 Legacies

Chaplin Tries Ex Girlfriend in City Lights

Unsatisfied with the work of Virginia Cherrill as the blind girl in the last scene from City Lights , Chaplin fires her just as the shooting of the movie is almost complete because she took some time off one day to get her hair done. He brings in Georgia Hale, his leading lady from The Gold Rush, to try in the final scene where the blind girl, now cured, realizes the tramp is the one who helped her to get the sight giving surgery. Still unsatisfied, he brings Virginia back to shoot the scene and he takes the final shot of the movie as no actress could give him what he wanted. Watch here as Georgia tries to provide Chaplin with the performance he wanted.

Georgia Hale from the Gold Rush 1925

Click below to see Georgia's performance as the now cured blind girl.

Click here

Chaplin: The Ultimate Perfectionist

Chaplin showing why he was a perfectionist: In “the Flower Girl,” scene from City Lights 1931, he enters and exits an expensive parked limousine in a traffic jam to avoid a motorcycle policeman. There in front of him is a beautiful flower-selling Blind Girl (Virginia Cherrill). She hears the limo door slam, assuming he is a rich millionaire. She offers him a flower, a boutonniere - his first reaction is a flirtatious one (before he learns she is blind). He is smitten by her and gives her his last coin for the single flower for his buttonhole. [According to Guinness World Records, this sequence took 342 takes to make - the most retakes for one scene.] This is a rare glimpse of Charlie Chaplin (Official) at work taken by a friend on the set with a camera. Chaplin was very secretive about his methods and this scene was crucial to the entire movie where the blind flower girl must perceive the tramp as a millionaire instead of a poor tramp.

To watch this scene on YouTube click below.

Click here

Chaplin behind the camera

Chaplin taking the flower from the blind girl.

Gene Kelly in All of His Movies Set to Music

Kelly Does Chaplin

This little clip shows Gene Kelly in the movie An American in Paris from 1951, doing a little dance number with some French children.  He's showing them how he dances and near the end of the clip, does a little homage to Charlie Chaplin.  A little girl yells, "Charlot" which was what the French called Charlie's tramp character.  I just love the connection of Kelly to Chaplin.  In my book, Bold, Brash & Brilliant, www.boldbrashandbriliiant.com, I look for any connection regardless of how small.  They were both geniuses, workaholics, taskmasters and control freaks, but they produced the best product on the market for their chosen craft.

Gene Kelly: A Brief Bio

Gene Kelly was embarrassed when his mom sent him to dance classes.  Although he was small for his age, the 8-year-old fought back when neighborhood bullies teased him for being a sissy.  By the time he was a teen, he realized good dancing attracted girls, so he continued the lessons.  After Kelly entered college in 1929, he and older brother Fred worked up dance routines to earn money by winning talent contests and performing at nightclubs. The family opened a dance school in 1930, and Kelly taught there while earning a degree in economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Yet crunching numbers didn't grab Kelly. Dancing did.  And soon enough he started racking up huge numbers as one of the top movie stars of all time.  The American Film Institute ranks Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" as the best filmed musical, with "An American in Paris" at No. 9.  Kelly (1912-96) was the son of Harriet and James Kelly, a phonograph salesman for Columbia Records who lost his job at the onset of the Great Depression.

Kelly's Keys

Top musical director, dancer and choreographer.

Overcame: Ridicule as a child for learning to dance.

Lesson: There is nothing that can't be improved.

"I find it almost impossible to relax for more than one day at a time."  The family stayed in financial step with dance studios in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pa., and when Gene graduated from Pitt in 1933, he taught there full time.  Bigger Dreams In 1937 he moved to New York City to become a choreographer. Failing, he returned to Pittsburgh, teaching dance steps for a local company.  Feeling that provincial experience wouldn't count for much, he aimed once more for New York, wrote Clive Hirschhorn in his Kelly biography.  This time Kelly bought a one-way train ticket in August 1938. In three months he landed his first Broadway part and impressed the producer, who put him in eight routines in his next musical — and hired him to choreograph "Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe." Soon he was dating cast member Betsy Blair.

Then came Kelly's big break.  He landed a spot in the Rodgers and Hart musical "Pal Joey" in 1940, and that shot him to stardom.  Cast member Van Johnson recalled: "I watched him rehearsing and it seemed to me there was no possible room for improvement. Yet he wasn't satisfied. It was midnight and we had been rehearsing since 8 in the morning. I was making my sleepy way down a long flight of stairs when I heard staccato steps coming from the stage. I could see just a single lamp burning. Under it a figure was dancing: Gene."  Kelly's early career lesson is that practice can lead to a bigger stage.  Arthur Freed, the top musical movie producer of all time, according to the documentary "Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer," saw "Pal Joey" and loved it.  He introduced Kelly to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer honcho Louis B. Mayer, who promptly offered him a contract — and was astounded when Kelly told him he first wanted to finish the stage run of "Pal Joey" in October 1941.  When it ended, Kelly married Blair and moved to Hollywood.  His first movie was "For Me and My Gal," with Judy Garland.  Kelly proved to be a stickler, insisting on redoing dance routines. That caused tension with the director, but all was forgiven when the film became a hit in 1942. 

Two years later Kelly starred in "Cover Girl" opposite Rita Hayworth. By then, Freed was giving him creative control over his career, and the star showed what he could do with it in 1945's "Anchors Away" alongside Frank Sinatra. They rehearsed for eight weeks. Kelly ordered 73 takes of one scene.  With creative control of the dancing, Kelly insisted on having much of it shot in New York. "He was one of the very few musical directors who shot on location," Peter Smith, chairman of the department of theater arts at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., told IBD. "That was revolutionary, since everyone else was simply using sound studios."

Joseph McBride, the screenwriter who wrote "Into the Nightmare," said: "Kelly's everyman qualities and athletic approach to dancing were a complete contrast to Fred Astaire, his only peer, who projected an aristocratic demeanor and seemed almost magically ethereal in his dancing. Kelly's Irish-American upstart's charm and regular-guy image helped audiences identify with him and made his very masculine style of dancing popular, transforming movie musicals forever."

Smith added: "When you think of Astaire, you have an image of a very sophisticated, white tie-and-tails persona. Kelly wasn't formally trained in some ways, so he developed his own set of skills and was really a genius at choreography. Prior to him, male dancers all looked tall and lean, but Kelly opened the door for shorter, muscular guys. Without him, I don't think we would have musicals like 'West Side Story.'"

Kelly's career in film is a reminder that boundaries don't hinder the fearlessly creative.  Hurdles And Huzzahs

Kelly hit his share of bumps, as with "The Pirate" in 1948, but he quickly bounced back with "On the Town" the next year — and with something even bigger in 1951.  That's when he starred in "An American in Paris," which won the Academy Award for best picture. Also at the 1952 ceremony, Kelly landed an honorary Oscar for his contribution to filmed musicals.  "Kelly was the consummate artist who pushed himself very hard and expected the same of his colleagues," Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar wrote in "Singin' in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece." "They found him to be a powerhouse of energy, creative ideas and almost overwhelming self-confidence. But he was also very fair and considerate and ready to drop his own dancer numbers from release prints if he believed the overall good of the film would be served."

Also in 1952, Kelly co-directed, choreographed and played the lead in "Singin' in the Rain."  Besides being many critics' favorite musical, AFI ranks it the fifth best movie of any kind.  "Its impact on American popular culture after its 1952 release grew over the course of half a century following its initial release," said Hess. "The movie garnered more fans with the advent of each new generation, and the spread of color television in the mid-1960s gave average viewers an opportunity to catch a glimpse of its original glory in their living rooms. The 50th anniversary of the movie led to a digitally renovated version of the film being shown in 2002. While the initial release had only been in eight other countries, it was eventually translated into many languages for a worldwide audience."

Downside

In December 1951, after shooting "Singin'," Kelly went to Europe and sank into three movies that turned into shipwrecks. Also, his marriage fell apart, and by the time he returned to America in July 1953 the heyday of the movie musical was over.  With MGM under a new penny-pinching boss, there were no more location shoots, so 1954's Scottish fairy tale "Brigadoon" was filmed on a sound stage and Kelly had little control over the unhappy result: The movie lost money, and the critics ripped it.

Kelly had enough of MGM by 1957 and left to direct Broadway plays and Paris ballet. He appeared in a few films and on TV in the 1960s, winning an Emmy for directing the 1967 kid movie "Jack and the Beanstalk." The same year, he directed a movie smash, "A Guide for a Married Man," starring Walter Matthau. But two years later his "Hello, Dolly!" flopped.  Then in 1974, Kelly helped narrate the surprise hit "That's Entertainment!" Moviegoers got into the musical highlights, so two years later he directed a sequel, coaxing an aging Astaire out of retirement to perform song-and-dance duets with him.

Then came the crown of his career, wrote Hirschhorn: "No honor Gene received throughout his lengthy career could match the glittering annual Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 5, 1982, when together with Lillian Gish, Benny Goodman, Eugene Ormandy and 95-year-old stage director George Abbott, he was one of the recipients of an award for a lifetime achievement in the performing arts."  Kelly's last on-screen appearance was to introduce "That's Entertainment! III" in 1994. Kelly died two years later at 83.

He continues to have an afterlife on sites like Gene Kelly Fans. 

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/management-leaders-in-success/092013-671903-gene-kelly-danced-his-way-to-top-of-movie-musicals-for-two-decades-uwlwords-gene-kelly-rehearsed-routines-until-perfected.htm#ixzz2gWfkTuZs