Love and Loss... Steve Jobs

Love and Loss

I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 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 few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable 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. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.It was awful 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 was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

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. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs gave this as his second story of his Commencement Address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.


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Time and Life Quotes

Here are a few quotes that I like about time, life and the future...enjoy!!!

1. “Learn the past, watch the present, and create the future.”
   ~anonymous
   
   
2. “The future belongs to those who dare."
   ~anonymous
   
3. “You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future"
   ~anonymous
   
4. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
   ~Albert Einstein
   
   
5. "The past is behind, learn from it.The future is ahead, prepare for it.The present is here, live it.”
   ~Thomas S. Monson
   
   
6. We Learn . . .10% of what we read20% of what we hear30% of what we see50% of what we see and hear70% of what we discuss80% of what we experience95% of what we teach others.”
   ~William Glasser
   
   
7. "A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life."
   ~Charles Darwin
   
   
8. "Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing."
   ~Thomas Jefferson
   
   
9. "Do not look back and do not dream about the future. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny, is in the present moment."
   ~Dag Hammarskjold
   
   
10. "For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”
    ~anonymous
    
    
11. "Time is free, but it's priceless. You can'town it, but you can use it. You can't keepit, but you can spend it. Once you've lost ityou can never get it back.”
    ~Harvey MacKay
    
    
12. "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”
    ~Albert Einstein
    
    
13. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
    ~Steve Jobs
    
    
14. "How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever. .."
    ~David Norris
    
    
15. "Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever."
    ~Horace Mann
    

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