At 17, he went to Reed College. His parents spent all their hard-earned money
to finance his education. However, he
couldn’t see the value of what he was doing.
He had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. Worse, he had absolutely no idea if college
education was going to help him figure out what to do with it.
He didn’t have any dormitory room so he slept on the floor
of his friends’ room, retrieved and returned Coke bottles so he can get their 5
cent deposits and use them to buy food, and walked seven miles across town every Sunday to get at least one good
meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
Reed College offered the best calligraphy instruction that
time. And so he took it without
realizing what it might be worth in the future.
Ten years later, when the machine that is now called the
computer was being designed, it all flashed back to him. And he made the first
computer with beautiful calligraphy.
If he didn’t drop in to take the calligraphy class, he
couldn’t have created a product with such a wonderful feature.
FIRST LESSON: You cannot connect the dots in your life
looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. The best things about the future is that its
yesterday is today. So you must trust
that your dots today, what you do today, and what you have today can somehow
connects with the future.
His products started in a garage. In fact, he worked in a garage at the age of
20. After 10 years, such garage was
transformed into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
A year after they have launched their newest products at the
age of 30, he was fired. He was publicly out and became a public failure.
Many months passed and the heaviness of being successful was
replaced by the lightness of being a beginner, less sure about everything. But it freed him to enter one of the most
creative periods of his life.
He still loved his brainchild products. But he realized that
he had to move on. After the next five
years, he already had a started a new software company called NeXT, and another
one called Pixar. Pixar is now the world’s successful and multi-awarded animation
studio. After sometime, he sold the NeXT
to the company that once fired him. And he was invited to lead the company
again.
SECOND LESSON: Don’t settle. Don’t be comfortable. Look for your passion. Work where you are best at. Consistently searched for your ultimate
dream. Keep looking if you haven’t found
it yet. Sometimes life may hit it the
head with bricks. It doesn’t matter. Never lose faith. And fight.
When he was 33, he was diagnosed with cancer. His doctor advised him to “get your affairs in order,” the other way of saying that “you only have six months to live and to bid goodbye.” Some may call it miracle for one might during his biopsy, the doctor found out that the cancer was curable by surgery. It was his closest encounter with death.
Third Lesson: Death
is life’s change agent, perhaps the world’s greatest invention. It clears the
old to give way to the new. Right now,
the new in us, but someday, not too long from now, we will gradually become old
and be cleared away. So live, each day as if it is your last minute. It could
be. Don’t waste your time living
somebody else’s life. Follow your heart
and intuition. Stay hungry and absurd.
BY the way, the man whose story I told above is Steve Jobs, the CEO and founder of Apple Computer and Pixar Animated Studio.
Source: Is there a job waiting for you? by Lloyd Luna.
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