Joe Costello shares the secrets of his success

It was standing room only in Sibley Auditorium the day Joe Costello came back to Berkeley to share the secrets of his Silicon Valley success in a spirited and expletive-filled motivational talk that felt a lot like a Dharma lecture laced with stand-up comedy.

Clad in bright yellow, talking fast, and gesticulating energetically, his enthusiasm and positive attitude were infectious. The one-time physics graduate student dropped out of Berkeley in the '70s to become rich and famous as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which he converted from a tiny electronic design automation company into a $1 billion industry leader. He is now CEO at think3, a company that produces computer-aided design programs.

"Learn from every person and every interaction you have," he said, and "get adroit" at staying focused in the present moment. His mantra is "positive end in mind," and his methods include not believing everything you hear and saying "no" to anything you aren’t passionate about.

"Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the execution," Costello said, warning against our culture’s tendency toward negative motivation. He used the example of negative target fixation, a phenomenon used by the Federal Aviation Administration to explain plane accidents caused by pilots who keep looking at an object they don’t want to hit.

Go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/multimedia/index.html to see Costello’s talk in its entirety.

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