Last week we asked you a simple question on our Job Mail Facebook Fan Page. “Can you guess who said this quote? “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” In case you didn’t get the quote right, these words were said by the architectural genius Steve Jobs.
Today, we pay tribute to the legend. His life story is both inspirational and remarkable. Some say his life was cut short considering the life-changing inventions and ideas he came up with in his 56 years on this earth.
This is Steve’s story: Steve Jobs never graduated from college. His biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student that put him up for adoption. He went to an expensive college thanks to his working-class foster parents’ that saved for years to ensure that he was educated. After 6 months of studying, he could not see the value in it. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and no idea how college was going to help him figure this out. He was spending all of the money his parents had saved their entire life for him to have their dream. So he decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out. What a brave man, some may have called it a foolish move, but read on to hear how he turned his life around…
It was pretty scary at the time, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions Steve ever made. The minute he dropped out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting to him.He didn’t even have a dorm room, he slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, he returned coke bottles for the 5c deposits to buy food, and he walked 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. The college he attended at that time offered possibly the best calligraphy instruction in the US. Every poster and label on every drawer at the college campus was beautifully hand calligraphed. He decided to take a calligraphy class. He found it fascinating!
10 years later, when Apple Computer Incwas designing their first Macintosh computer, it all came back to him. Apple designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If he had never dropped out, he would have never dropped in on the calligraphy class and our personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that we are able to experience today.
To quote Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future! You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Steve Jobs was a visionary; he found what he loved to do early in life. Apple was started in his parent’s garage when he was 20 years old. After a lot of hard work Apple had grown from 2 guys in a garage to a $2 billion company with 4000 employees in 10 years. He got fired from Apple when he was 30 years old. He really didn’t know what to do for a few months. Something slowly began to dawn on him – he still loved what he does. Getting fired from Apple had not changed that one bit. He decided to start over. Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life.
Over the next five years he started a company named NeXT and another company named Pixar. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story. Pixar is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, his old employer, Apple, bought NeXT. He returned to Apple and the technology NeXT developed was at the heart of Apple’s recent renaissance.
He’s pretty sure none of this would have happened if he hadn’t been fired from Apple. To quote Mr. Jobs: “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.”
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. He died on the 5th of October 2011 (yesterday). The Steve Jobs life story is truly a source of motivation.
A Twitter user put it brilliantly this morning: “Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock, put up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college and then he changed the world. What’s your excuse?”
We at Job Mail hope that you have found this post inspiring and that all of you reading this will go out and continue to do brilliant things! Don’t blame the world for the life you were given, find what you love and make the best of what you have to make it work for you, today!
Who knows, in the next couple of year’s we may just be writing about you, just because you took the time to read this post; share it with your friends; and make your life legendary!