Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Nothing more. No big deal. Just three stories for Steve Jobs.
Story 1: Connecting the Dots
- The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed on and off for about 18 more months before actually quitting. Why did I drop out for good? It all started before I was born. My birth mother was a young, single college graduate, and she decided to give me up for adoption. She strongly wanted me to be adopted by college graduates, so everything was set up for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
- Except when I was born they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. Then my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We have a newborn boy; Do you want it?” They said, “Of course.” My birth mother later found out that my mother had not graduated from college and that my father never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She changed her mind a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college someday. That was the beginning of my life. And 17 years later, I went to college.
- However, I naively chose a college almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were spent on my college tuition. After six months, I didn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I didn’t know how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire lives. So I decided to drop out of college and trust that everything would work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The moment I decided to drop out, I stopped taking the classes that didn’t interest me, and started taking the ones that I found interesting.
- Not everything was rosy. I had nowhere to sleep at the university, so I slept on the floor of friends’ dorm rooms, returned 5-cent Coke cans to buy food, and walked 7 miles across town to eat one good meal a week at the Hare-krishna temple. I loved it. Most of the things I came across along the way by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be invaluable later on. Let me give you an example: At the time Reed College offered probably the best calligraphy course in the country. All the posters on campus, and the labels on all the drawers, were beautifully hand-lettered. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the regular classes, I decided to take the calligraphy class and learn how to do it. I learned about serif and sans serif type,about varying the amount of space between different combinations of letters, about what makes for great handwriting. It was beautiful, historic, artistically subtle, in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
- None of this had even the slightest hope of practical application in my lifetime. But 10 years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all made sense. And we designed it all on the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I hadn’t taken that particular course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows copied from the Mac, most likely no personal computer would have it. If I hadn’t dropped out, I would never have taken that calligraphy course, and personal computers wouldn’t have that beautiful typography. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. However, it was very, very clear looking back 10 years later. I repeat, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
- So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your intuition, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This perspective has never failed me, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Story 2: Love and Loss
- My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I knew what I wanted to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and within 10 years Apple grew from the two of us in a garage to a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. A year before I turned 30, we had released our greatest creation: the Macintosh. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company that you created? As Apple grew, we hired someone I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.
- But then our expectations for the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. At that point the Board of Directors supported him. So, at age 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a couple of months. I felt like I had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs—that I had let down the baton that had been passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for having acted so badly. It was a public failure, and I even considered leaving Silicon Valley. But slowly I began to understand something: I still loved what I did. What had happened with Apple didn’t change that at all. I was rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it turned out that being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me.
- The weight of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. It allowed me to enter one of the most creative stages of my life. Over the next five years, I started a company called NeXT, another company called Pixar, and fell in love with a wonderful woman who became my wife. Pixar went on to create the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a surprising turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. Laurene and I have also raised a wonderful family. I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was a bitter-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
- I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going is that I loved what I did. You have to find what you love. And this is true for both your jobs and your loves. Your jobs are going to fill a big part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you think 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 stop. And when it comes to matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And just like any important relationship, it gets better with age. So, keep looking until you find it. Don’t stop.
Story 3: Death
My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like this: “If you live each day of your life as if it were your last, someday you really will be right.” It made a big impression on me, and ever since, for the past 33 years, I look in the mirror every morning and ask myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I do what I’m about to do today?” And when the answer is “No” for several days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I will soon be dead is the most important tool I have found to help me make the big decisions in my life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—all of these things fall away before death, leaving only what is important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven do not want to die to get there. And yet, death is the