Five Important Life Lessons Steve Jobs Wanted You to Find Out

Five Important Life Lessons Steve Jobs Wanted You to Find Out

Jobs knew better than anyone the way to get the foremost out of life. Here's his philosophy in his own words.

If you would like to find out the way to get the foremost out of your life, there's not a way better teacher than Steve Jobs, who seemed to pack several lifetimes, never mind several careers, into his 56 years on our planet. And though Jobs didn't discuss his life or his unconventional choices publicly all that always, one notable exception was his commencement speech to Stanford's 2005 class, where he laid out his philosophy as lessons anyone can follow.

That speech is so justifiably admired that there is a text of it hidden within the software of each Macintosh computer, if you recognize the way to find it. Here's what Jobs had to mention to the Stanford graduates, and every one of us:

1. Follow your heart and trust that it knows where it's going.

Six months into his first year at Reed College, Jobs dropped out-a very big deal, since his biological mother had made college education a requirement of his adoption, and his adoptive parents had saved for years so he could go.

"I had no idea what I wanted to try to with my life and no idea how college was getting to help me figure it out," Jobs said. "And here I used to be spending all of the cash my parents had saved their entire life. So I made a decision to drop out and trust that it might all compute OK. It had been pretty scary at the time, but looking back it had been one among the simplest decisions I ever made."

He wasn't officially a student, but Jobs stuck around, dropping all his required courses and dropping in on those that interested him. One among those was a calligraphy course that explored different fonts, variable space between letters then on. Jobs was drawn to the present class so he took it, albeit it had been clearly useless for any future career he might pursue.

Except it wasn't. "Ten years later, once we were designing the primary Macintosh computer, it all came back to me," he said. "And we designed it all into the Mac. It had been the primary computer with beautiful typography." Typography that, as Jobs acknowledged, Windows and each other OS simply copied.

 

Five Important Life Lessons Steve Jobs Wanted You to Find Out

"Of course it had been impossible to attach the dots looking forward once I was in college. But it had been very, very clear looking backward ten years later," Jobs said. "So you've got to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You’ve got to trust in something-your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it's made all the difference in my life."

2. The worst thing that would happen might end up to be the simplest thing that would happen.

One of the worst things to happen to Jobs was his-very public-dismissal from Apple, ten years after he co-founded the corporate. To feature to the humiliation, the board fired him at the behest of Jon Scullery, an executive Jobs himself had recruited and hired.

"What had been the main target of my entire adult life was gone, and it had been devastating," Jobs said. "I even considered deed from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me-I still loved what I did. Then I made a decision to start out over."

Over subsequent five years, he founded NeXT and Pixar, and met and fell crazy together with his wife-things that might never have happened if he hadn't been fired. Then Apple found out it needed him in any case, and brought him back by purchasing neXT. "I didn't see it then, but it clothed that getting fired from Apple was the simplest thing that would have ever happened to me," he said.

"Sometimes life hits you within the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the sole thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve to seek out what you're keen on.”

3. You're already naked.

"When i used to be 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you reside every day as if it had been your last, someday you'll most certainly be right,'" Jobs said. "It made an impact on me." From then on, Jobs would look within the mirror every day and ask himself, if this were the Judgment Day of his life would he want to spend it doing what he was close to do? "Whenever the solution has been 'no' for too many days during a row, i do know i want to vary something," he said.

He went on to speak about being diagnosed with carcinoma, hearing that his death was imminent, then being treated and cured. Sadly, that very same cancer would return and claim his life about six years later, though he didn't realize it at the time. However his wisdom about the way to best use our brief lives was right point:

"Remembering that i will be dead soon is that the most vital tool I've ever encountered to assist me make the large choices in life," he said. "Because almost everything-all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure-these things just fall away within the face of death, leaving only what's truly important. Remembering that you simply are getting to die is that the best way i do know to avoid the trap of thinking you've got something to lose. You’re already naked. There’s no reason to not follow your heart."

4. Don't let anything make noise your inner voice.

Knowing some time in life is restricted, he told the scholars, think twice about the way to spend it. "Don't waste it living someone else's life," he said. "Don't be trapped by dogma-which lives with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions make noise your own inner voice. And most vital, 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' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

5. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Jobs closed with these simple directives, drawn from the rear cover of the ultimate edition of the entire Earth Catalog. The words ran under the image of a beckoning country road early within the morning, he said. "It was their farewell message as they signed off."

He wished that for the graduating students, he added, even as he'd always wished it for himself: Stay hungry. Stay foolish. That's advice we will all follow. Jobs always did.