Steve Jobs left behind several teachings on how to live to be successful: here are 5 life lessons explained to students in one of his most famous speeches.
Steve Jobs, the iconic founder of Apple, has left the world with many life lessons.
From his speech to students at Stanford University in 2005, for example, we can glean 5 lessons for living your life to the fullest.
From curiosity to the ability to learn from failure to the importance of cultivating your passions, the lessons of Steve Jobs are a precious legacy that we can still draw from to succeed in life.
1. Be curious
Steve Jobs said: “I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and my working-class parents’ entire savings went toward my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I had no idea how college would help me figure it out. And there I was, spending all the money my parents had saved for their entire life. So I decided to drop out. ”.
But from this drastic and difficult decision came the most interesting things in his life. Jobs said he finally started taking classes he liked and stumbled upon experiences “by following my curiosity and intuition that proved invaluable later.”
The example is easy to give. Dropping out of school, the founder of Apple decided to take a calligraphy course. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating,”, he said.
“None of this had any hope of having any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we designed the first Macintosh computer, it all came back,” he added.
In short, his curiosity about calligraphy gave birth to the first computer with beautiful typography. “If I had never taken that single class in college, the Mac would never have had as many typefaces or fonts as it did.”.
And since Windows simply copied the Mac, no personal computer would likely have them. If I had never dropped out, I would never have taken this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the beautiful typography they do: Jobs’s first lesson is to never stop learning through curiosity.
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2. From failure to new opportunities
Apple’s success story is made up of several stages. Like that of Jobs getting fired. As he put it:
“Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from the two of us in a garage to a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just launched our finest creation, the Macintosh, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.”
For a few months, I didn’t really know what to do, Jobs recalled. But then he discovered that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him. “The heaviness of being successful had been replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. I was free to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Over the next five years, he started a company called NeXT, and another company called Pixar, and got married.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, Jobs returned to Apple, and the technology he developed at NeXT ended up at the center of Apple’s resurgence.
3. Choose a job you love
“I think the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You have to find what you love,” Steve Jobs advised students.
Your job will fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work for you, according to Jobs. “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.”
4. Remember that you will die someday
The Apple founder often reflected on the meaning of a quote he read as a young man: “If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
Remembering that you will die soon is the most useful tool for making the big choices in life, according to Jobs. “Because almost everything, all the expectations, all the pride, all the fear of embarrassment or failure, those things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,” he explained.
Steve Jobs recalled in a 2005 speech that he had never been closer to death than when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since then, however, he has developed this theory:
“No one wants to die. Yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that’s as it should be, because death is very possibly the best invention of life.
It is the agent of change. It clears out the old to make room for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too far from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.”
A disconcerting logic, which however helps to choose only what is truly important.
5. Listen to your heart
“Have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. Somehow they already know what you really want to become. Everything else is secondary”: this was Steve Jobs’ advice to the students.
“You have to trust in something: your instinct, your destiny, your life, your karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and has made all the difference in my life”, Jobs recalled, encouraging the audience of young people listening.
The Apple founder then referred to a publication very dear to him, “The Whole Earth Catalog” by Stewart Brand. It was a sort of prototype of the search engine as we know it today since it collected essays, articles, and reviews on all kinds of things.
On the back cover of their last issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind of road you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were an adventurous type, Jobs pointed out in his speech.
Below are the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”. It was their farewell message as they said goodbye. And I have always hoped so, the Apple founder concluded. That very slogan “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” has today become the symbolic teaching of Steve Jobs.
Original article published on Money.it Italy 2024-10-06 14:15:00. Original title: 5 lezioni di vita da Steve Jobs da conoscere assolutamente
