Thursday, June 24, 2010

If you don’t know who Steve Jobs is you certainly are aware of Apple, the company he co-founded. He serves as CEO of Apple and is on the Board of the Walt Disney Company which now owns another company he ran….Pixar Animation Studios, the brains behind the Toy Story movies.
Anyway today’s segment is not as much about him but the advice he gave five years ago when he was the commencement speaker at Stanford University.

We know of him as this ultra-successful computer and technical genius and business magnate. However he’s truly an example of someone who overcame numerous obstacles in his life starting with the fact he was adopted. Jobs would attend Reed College in Oregon but dropped out after one semester. While not officially a student he started attending classes that interested him, including calligraphy. He didn’t even have a dorm room and pretty much slept on the floor in friends’ rooms and bummed a meal wherever he could get one. He still insists that calligraphy class had a lot to do with the design of the fist Macintosh computer. Anyway Apple started pretty much in his parent’s garage but by the time he was 30 they were a $2 billion company with more than 4,000 employees. However shortly after that he got into a much publicized dispute which led to the Board of Directors firing him even though he started Apple. Jobs told the Stanford grads that firing was the single best thing that’s happened to him because it led him to starting Pixar and not only that paved the way for his return to Apple years later. His message, “sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick but don’t lose faith.”

What Jobs really believes and I do too is that we really need to find what we love and that’s true for your work and your personal life. What young people sometimes fail to realize is that your work does 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 and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it so keep looking until you do. I close with a few quotes from that speech. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…they somehow already know want you truly want to become.” Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.