The Teachings of Steve Jobs

The first story he told was about dropping out of Reed College. More exactly, he stopped paying tuition for classes he didn’t like but stayed on campus, dropping in on classes he did like. One of these was a calligraphy class. The relevance of this chance event is in front of me as I write this blog entry and in front of you as you read it: different fonts for computer text and proportional spacing, innovations introduced by Jobs years later that made the first Macintosh computer the apple of so many people’s eye. The point? Jobs told his audience to connect the dots in life, appreciating that you cannot do so looking forward. You can only do so when looking back. And you need faith - optimism? - that someday the dots will connect.

The second story he told was about getting fired from Apple Computers, the company that he had co-founded. Talk about coupling insult with injury! But hurt and dismayed though he was, Jobs realized that he still loved what he was doing, so he kept doing it. He founded Pixar. He founded NeXT, which was then acquired by Apple, and you know the rest of the story. The point? Find something that you love to do, because “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

The third story was about his experience with pancreatic cancer, which made his own mortality more than an abstraction. According to Jobs, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life” because it allows you to sidestep the trap of thinking you have something to lose. The point? Jobs reported that he often asks himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” When the answer is no for too many days in a row, he knows he needs to change something.