Apple
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
dollars company with over 4000 employees. We had 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 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 world’s 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 pass. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.