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 twenty. We worked hard, and, in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over four thousand employees. We had just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. 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 thirty, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar (photo), and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's 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 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.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything— all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure– these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly 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 people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
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 others' 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.
Rico says the unnamed villain was John Sculley, whom Rico found to be useless, and so, eventually, did Apple's Board...
Rico says that a little-known piece of history is that his then-wife, Rhoda London, was working at Regis McKenna Advertising in Palo Alto in the early 1980s, when Apple got started. Regis, friends with Jobs' family, offered to help the kid with his 'little computer company', and she ended up brushing Steve's hair for his first official Apple photo...
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