Do what you Love - Rare Interview | Steve Jobs

Transcript:

Today I wanna tell you three stories from my life Reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me And we designed it all into the Mac It was the first computer with beautiful typography Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later Again, you cant connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future You have to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever 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 4,000 employees We had just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier, and I had just turned 30 And then I got fired But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did I had been rejected, but I was still in love And so I decided to start over The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world Im 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 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 and don't settle Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone elses life Don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

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    Steve Jobs quote

    You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future

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    Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary

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    Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new

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    Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains

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    Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]

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    Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life

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    I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something

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    That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [BusinessWeek, May 25 1998]

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    Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose

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    A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have

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