Today, co-founder of Apple, NeXT, and Pixar Steve Jobs was the Commencement speaker at Stanford University located in Stanford California, where he urged the graduating students to never give up and follow their passion and do what makes them happy.
The 55-year-old said to put all the situations together and figure out how to solve it.
At the age of 17-years-old, Jobs would attend Reed College for only a short period of time.
He was never interested in the required classes he was taking and had the idea of joining classes he was interested in taking.
Jobs found an interest in calligraphy and got him the idea of designing the Macintosh computer.
“If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced font,” said Jobs.
Jobs continues and adds, “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
He believes that connecting the dots looking forward is impossible, but looking backwards is.
When Jobs was 20-years-old, he and Steve Woznick started the Apple company in his parents’ garage.
The company had over 4000 employees and they made about $2 billion.
10 years later, Jobs would suddenly get fired from the company he started.
The company would end up going through a fallout. To add on to this, Jobs didn’t own majority of the stock. He owned less than 50 percent.
“I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly,” he said. “I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley.”
Jobs continued and added, “But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did.”
Jobs felt that the best decision for him to make was to go back to square one.
He would go on to make another company named NeXT and Pixar as well as meet Laurene Powell, who would become his wife.
Pixar would release the movie 1995 film Toy Story. Toy Story was the first entirely computer animated feature film.
The following year, NeXT would get acquired by Apple and just like that, Jobs was back at Apple.
One quote that inspired Jobs was “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and had a tumor in his pancreas.
Doctors informed Jobs that he would most likely have less than three months to live.
He had to spend as much as he can with his family because he was expected to die any day now.
The form of pancreatic cancer he had was able to be curable with surgery, in which Jobs would go on to have the surgery and has been fine ever since.
Jobs would go on to say the phrase “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
Always be willing to take chances and make decisions that could some how work for you.
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