Success? By the time Steve Jobs was 30 he’d turned Apple, a company he’d started in his garage with his friend Steve Wozniak into a $2 billion enterprise with 4,000 employees.
Failure? The board of directors fired Steve Jobs from his own company.
How do you come back from that? If you’re Steve Jobs you start Pixar (now the most successful animation studio in the world) get invited back to Apple and completely revolutionize modern technology with the introduction of iPods, iPhones, iPads, iDon’tknowwhatelse.
How does a guy who quit college after six months keep ending up the razor’s blade of the cutting edge?
You can listen to Steve Jobs explain it himself here in How To Live Before You Die. http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die
These are the main points:
Follow Curiosity and Intuition
After quitting school Steve didn’t immediately leave the college, he hung around and started taking courses he was interested in, rather than the ones he needed to fulfill his requirements. One of those was calligraphy. He took it because he loved it, not because it would lead him anywhere specific. He learned about typefaces, what made typography great. Ten years later he was figuring out what he wanted to include in his new computer, and suddenly those typography classes seemed very useful indeed. All of us have all those cool font options because of the calligraphy class Steve Jobs took because he found typefaces fascinating.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Figure out what you love to do
Initially getting fired as CEO of Apple must have seemed like the worst possible thing that could have happened, but in retrospect, Steve Jobs says it was the best thing that ever happened to him. It freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life.
He started Pixar and a new hardware company called neXT because he still loved the computer business. Apple bought neXT and now that technology is at the heart of Apple.
And Pixar? Over to you Buzz: “To infinity and beyond!”
Sometimes life will hit you on the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. Find what you love to do. Do what you believe is great work. Keep looking. Don’t settle. You’ll know when you find it.
Live each day as if it’s your last one
Each day ask yourself, if today was the last day of your life, would you want to do what you’re doing? If the answer is no too many days in a row then something needs to change. Thinking about the last day of your life helps you distinguish what’s really important. Helps you stop thinking you’ve to something to lose. Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others drown out your inner voice. Your own intuition knows what you want to be – so listen to yourself!
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