My last piece of advice before I die | Steve Jobs

Transcript:

Iʼve actually always found something to be very true which is most people donʼt get those experiences because they never ask. Iʼve never found anybody who didnʼt wanna help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up, I called up, thisʼll date me but I called up bill Hewlett when I was. 12 years old, and he lived in Palo Alto, his number was still in the phonebook, and he answered the phone himself and he said yes? And I said hi Iʼm Steve jobs, and Iʼm 12, Im a student in high school and I wanna build a frequency counter and I was wondering if you have any spare parts I could have. And he laughed, and he gave me the spare parts to build this frequency counter and he gave me a job that summer in Hewlett-Packard, working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters, he got me a job in the place that built them, and I was in heaven. And Iʼve never found anyone who said ‘noʼ or hung up the phone when I called, I just asked. And when people ask me I try to be as responsive, you know to pay that debt of gratitude back. Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask, and thatʼs what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act, and youʼve gotta be willing to fail, you gotta be willing to crash and burn, you know with people on the phone, with people starting a company, whatever. If youʼre afraid of failing, then you wonʼt get very far.

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    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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