*....Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish*
*continued
*
*
*
* My second story is about Love and Loss.*
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I
started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10
years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation —
the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew
we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me,
and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the
future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did,
our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly
out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was
devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had
let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of
events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was
still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of
being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,
less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become
my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature
film, *Toy Story*, and is now the most successful animation studio in the
world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to
Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's
current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been
fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient
needed it. *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. And that is as true for
your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part
of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you
believe is great work. 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. As with all
matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep
looking until you find it. Don't settle.
(.... to be continued)
* * *
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