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He is considered the father of the digital revolution, a master of innovation and a design perfectionist
He had a network of over eight billion dollars in 2010
He is one of my personal favorite entrepreturs of all time
He is Steve Jobs from Apple and here is his top ten rules for success
The thing I would say is
when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is
and your
your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much
Ah, try to have a nice family life
have fun, save a little money
but life
that's a very limited life
life can be much broader
once you discover one simple fact
and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people there were no smarter than you
and you can change it, you can influence it
you can, you can build your own things that other people can use
and the minute that you understand that you can poke life in actually
something you know you push in, something you pop out the other side
you can, you can change it
you can mold it
Ahm, that's maybe the most important thing
is to shake off this
this ... notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it
versus, embrace it, change it, improve it
make your mark upon it
Uh, I think that is very important
and however you learn that once you learn it
you'll wanna change life and make it better
cause it's kinda messed up in a lot of ways
once you learn that, you'll never be the same again
People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing
And it's totally true
and the reason is
is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up
it's really hard
and you have to do it over a sustained period of time
so if you don't love it, you don't have fun doing it
you don't really love it
you're gonna give up
and that's what happens to most people actually if you really look at
at the ones that ended up
you know being successful "on quote the eyes of society" than the ones that didn't
often times, it's the ones that were sucessful love what they did so they could persevere
you know, it got really tough
and... and the ones that didn't love it, quit
cause they're ???????
right, who would wanna put up with this stuff if you dont love it
so, it's a lot of hard work
and ... and it's a lot of worrying constantly
and ... if you don't love it, you're gonna fail
so you gotta love it, you gotta have passion
we had absolutely no idea what people gonna do ....
because we can't afford to buy it a computer to the market so we liberated
some parts for new Packard and tari quickly i'm not report down design for
about six months and decided that
I would build on computer so we built and i was up till four in the morning
for many moons and we've got it working we showed some reference immediately
everybody want and it turned out to talk about 40 hours to build one of these
things in about another 20 30 40 bucket and we have a lot of friends at work
that similar companies who could liberate the parts also have seven Mary
screaming of arts in line
helping our friends to build computers and it's just going to be a tremendous
strain on our on our lives so we got the idea one day that that we could make a
printed circuit board without the parts and selling black printed circuit boards
to our friends and probably cut the assembly and debug time down that you
know five ten out
so wat soldiers hpc calculator and i sold my van we got 1,300 bucks together
and they are a friend of ours who is this a pc board layout person 1,300
bucks to do is lay out the side we sell printed circuit board that twice what it
cost to build them and hopefully recoup our calculator and transportation some
later date
so that's what we did and I was out trying to peddle PC boards one day and
walked into a bike shop the first by chopping out of you and Paul Terrell
then owner of the bike shop said you would like to take 50 of these computers
and I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes
and what he had one catch was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested
ready to go
which is a new twist so we spent the next five days on the phone with
distributors and convince the electronics parts distributors around
here to give us about ten thousand dollars with the parts are thinner this
time Susie as so we got the parts and we built a hundred computers and we sold 50
of them for cash and 29 days paid off with distributors and that's how we got
started so we have 50 computers leftover while that man we had to sell so then we
started worrying about marketing wearing red distribution got on the phone with
the other computer stores around the country and gradually the whole thing
began to build momentum and at that point in time we had some feeling that
we were onto something
but the feeling was is so different than the experience of actually seeing it
happen right now it's entirely different and sometimes a lot of a lot of people
ask what did you know it was going too much go into this phenomenon and you can
say yeah you know we planned it out we have led on a piece of paper but the
experience is seeing 500 people working at apple computers are different in the
experience of seeing a five-year-old kid who really understands what he's the
tool that he's got in front when you first got the job at the yo you got a
call from Steve Jobs and he offered you some advice
well he didn't call to offer me advice but we have worked together on a Nike
Apple collaboration called nike+ we took what Apple knows what nike nose and you
know brought a new technology to the market anyway long story short uh
he said hey congratulations that's great you're going to do a great job
I said well do you have any advice and he said no no you know your grade and
then there's a pause and goes well I do have some advice
it was 90 makes some of the best product in the world
I mean product that you lust after absolutely beautiful stunning product
but you also make a lot of crap
he said just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff and then I
expected a little pause and a laugh but there was there was a pause but no
laughs at the animal and he was absolutely right
greatest people are self-managing they don't need to be managed you think they
know what if once they know what to do
they'll go figure out how to do it they don't need to be managed at all what
they need is a common vision and that's what leadership is what leadership is
having a vision being able to articulate that so the people around you can
understand it and getting a consensus on a common vision we wanted people that
were insanely great at what they did but work were not necessarily those seasoned
professionals but who had on at the tips of their fingers and in their passion
the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with
that technology and he wanted to bring that it's a lot of people so the neatest
thing that happens is when you get a core group of you know ten great people
that it becomes self policing as to who they let in to that group so I consider
the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting agonized over
hiring we have the interviews I go back and look at some of the interviews again
they would start at nine or ten in the morning and go through dinner
I knew interviewing would talk to everybody in the building at least once
maybe a couple times and then come back for another round of interviews and then
they'll get together and talk about it and then before the last edited by now
it's critical hardly ever here at least to my mind was when we finally decided
we like them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype and then set them
down in front of it and if they just kind of our borders and this is a nice
computer we don't want we
I wanted their eyes to light up and then to get really excited and then we knew
they were one of us and everybody just wanted to work not because it was work
that had to be done but it was because something that we really believed in
that was just going to really make a difference and that's what kept the
whole thing going we all want to do exactly the same thing
instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be
we all knew what the computer should be and just when did we went through that
stage and Apple where we went out and we got off we're going to be a big company
let's hire professional management
we went out and hired a bunch of professional management it didn't work
at all
most of them are bozos they they knew how to manage but they don't know how to
do anything
and so what if you're a great person why do you want to work for something you
can't learn anything from and you know what's interesting you know what the
best managers are there are the great individual contributors who never ever
want to be a manager but the side they have to be a manager because all every
no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them after hiring two
professional managers from outside the company and firing them both jobs
gambled on Debbie : a member of the Macintosh team 32 years old and english
literature major with an MBA from Stanford
did he was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing
I mean there's no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance
to run this kind of operation and I don't kid myself about that is an
incredible high risk for myself personally and professionally and for
Apple as the company and put a person like myself in this job
I mean they're really getting on a lot of things we're betting that my feel
that organizational effectiveness
you know override all those in a lack of Technology lack of experience lack of
you know time in manufacturing
so it's a big risk and i'm just an example in every single person on the
Mac team almost in your you know entry level person you could say that about
this is a place where people were afforded incredibly unique opportunities
to prove that they could do a good down
they could write the book again inscribed inside the casing of every
Macintosh
unseen by the consumer are the signatures of the whole team
this is apple's way of affirming that their latest innovation is a product of
the individuals who created it
not the corporation it's very interesting
I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million
dollars when I was 24 and over a hundred million dollars for those 25 and it's it
wasn't that important because I never did it for the money
I I think money is wonderful thing because it enables you to do things
enables you to in investing ideas that don't have a short-term payback and
things like that but especially at that point in my life it was it was not the
most important thing the most important thing was the company
the people the products we were making what we were going to enable people to
do with these products so I didn't think about it a great deal and I never sold
any stock just really believe that the company would do very well over the long
term
our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products
we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends and we want to
do that at the lowest price as we can but i have to tell you there's some
stuff in our industry that we wouldn't be proud to ship that we wouldn't be
proud to recommend to our family and friends and we can't do it
we just can't ship junk so there's there's a thorough thresholds that we
can't cross because of who we are but we want to make the best personal computers
in the industry slice of the industry that wants that too
and what you'll find is our products are usually not premium-priced you go what
you go and price out our competitors products and you add the features that
you have to add to make them useful and you'll find in some cases they are more
expensive than our price
x the difference is we don't offer stripped-down lousy products you know we
just don't offer categories of products like that but if you move those aside
and compare us with our competitors
I think we compare pretty favorably and a lot of people who have been doing that
and saying that now for the last 18 months
yes mr. jobs
you're a bright an important man
your tongue
add and clear that I'm several counts you discussed you don't know what you're
talking about
I would like for example for you to express in clear terms
how is a java any of its incarnations address that the idea is embodied and
open . and when you're finished with that perhaps you could tell us which you
personally have been doing for the last seven years
yeah
you know you can please some of the people some of the time but
one of the hardest things when you're trying to effect change is that people
like this gentleman are right in some areas
I'm sure that there are some things open doctors probably even more than i am not
familiar with that nothing else out there does and I'm sure that you can
make some demos
maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things
the hardest thing is what
how does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision that's going to allow you
to sell eight billion dollars 10 billion dollars of products a year and one of
the things I've always found is that you've gotta start with the customer
experience and work backwards to the technology
you can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to
try to sell it and I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else
in this room and I got the scar tissue approve it and I know that it's the case
and as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for apple
it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer where can we
take the customer not not starting with let's sit down with the engineers and
and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we going to market
that and I think that's the right path to take
I remember with the laser writer
we built the world's first small laser printers you know and there was awesome
technology in that box we have the first canon laser printing cheap laser
printing engine
the world in the United States here at apple we had a very wonderful printer
controller that we designed we have Adobe's postscript software and there we
have apple talking they're just awesome technology in the box and I remember
seeing the first print out come out of it and just picking it up and looking at
thing you know we can sell this because you don't have to know anything about
what's in that box all we have to do is hold of something you want this
and if you remember back to nineteen eighty-four before laser printers was
pretty startling to see that people want
Wow yes and that's that's where Apple's got to get back to
and you know I'm sorry that open dr. casualty along the way and I readily
admit there are many things in life that I want defense that is what I'm talking
about
so I apologize for that too but there's a whole lot of people working super
super hard right now at apple
you know ah be John Green Oh Fred I mean the whole team is working
burning the midnight oil trying to an end and people you know hundreds of
people below them to execute on some of these things and they're they're doing
the best and i think that what we need to do and some mistakes will be made by
the way some mistakes will be made along the way
that's to it because at least some decisions are being made along the way
and we'll find a mistake affects them and I think what we need to do is
support that team going through this very important stage as they work their
butts off they're all getting calls being offered three times as much money
to go do this without the valleys hot none of them are leaving and I think we
need to support them and see them through this and write some damn good
applications to support apple on the market that's my own point of view
mistakes we made some people will be pissed off
some people will not know what they're talking about but it's I think it is so
much better than where things were not very long ago and I think we're gonna
get there
I mean marketing about values
this is a very complicated world is a very noisy world and we're not going to
get a chance to get people to remember much about us
no company is and so we have to be really clear on what we wanted to know
about us
now Apple fortunately is one of the half a dozen best brands in the whole world
right up there with nitin disney coke
sony it is one of the Great's of the great not just in this country but all
around the globe and but but but even a great brand needs investment and caring
if it's going to retain its relevance and vitality and the apple brand has
clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years and we need
to bring it back
the way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds
it's not to talk about myths and negatives it's not to talk about why the
better than windows the dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that
milk is good for you to lie but they tried anyway
the sales are going like this and then they tried got milk and the sales are
going like this
got nothing to talk about the part that focuses on the absence of the product
but but but the best example of all and and one of the greatest jobs of of
marketing and the if the universe has ever seen as nike remember 90 sell the
commodity
this is shoes and yet when you think of 90 you feel something different than the
shoe company and their ads you know they don't ever talk about the product it
will never tell you about the air soils and by the better the reeboks their
souls was not you doing advertising they they honor great athletes and they on a
great athletics
that's who they are that's what they are about Apple spent a fortune on
advertising
you'd never know it you never know
so when I got here
apple just fired the agency doing the competition with 23 agencies that you
know for mr. Naylor pick one and we blew that up and we need higher child day
the ad agency that i was fortunate to work with years ago we created some
award-winning work including the commercial both of the best out of a
maid 1984 by advertising professionals and we started working about eight weeks
ago and what was the question we asked was our customers want to know who
example
and what is it that we stand for where do we fit in this world and
what more about isn't making boxes for people to get the job done
although we do that well we do that better than almost anybody in some cases
but apples about some more than apple at the cool
its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world
of the day that's what we believe and we have the opportunity to work with people
like that we have an opportunity to work with people like new with software
developers with customers who have done it in some big and some small ways and
we believe that in this world
people can change it for the better and that those people are crazy enough to
think they can change the world are the ones that actually do
and so what we're going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in
several years is to is to get back to that core value a lot of things have
changed that would market two totally different place than it was a decade ago
and apples totally different apples place in it is totally different and
believe me the products and the distribution strategy and manufacturing
totally different we understand that but values and core values those things
should change the things that Apple believed in at its core are the same
thing that Apple really stands for them
and so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is
something that I am I'm very moved by it honors those people who have changed the
world
some of them are living some of them are not at the ones that aren't as you'll
see you know if they ever use the computer it would have been
in the campaign is think different
it's the people honoring the people who think difference and who move this work
forward and its it is what we are about it touches the soil of this company
so I'm going to have a wallet and i hope that you feel the same way about it
here's to the crazy ones
mr. its
rebels
round pegs in the square holes
ones who see things
you're not from who
respect stands
you can quote them disagree with you
we were fine and vilified
the only thing you can
change
for
and while some may see them as the crazy
because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world
want to do
thank you
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world
truth be told I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've
ever gotten to a college graduation today I want to tell you three stories
from my life
that's it no big deal just three stories
the first story is about connecting the dots
I dropped out a reed college after the first six months but then stayed around
as a drop in for another 18 months or so before I really quit
so why did I drop out it started before I was born my biological mother was a
young unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption she
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at Birth by a lawyer and his
wife except that when I popped out
they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl so my parents
who were on a waiting list
got a call in the middle of the night asking we've got an unexpected baby boy
if you want him they said of course my biological mother found out later that
my mother had never graduated from college and my father had never
graduated from high school she refused to sign the final adoption papers
she only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go
to college
this was the start in my life
and 17 years later I did go to college but I naively chose a college that was
almost as expensive as Stanford and all of my working-class parents savings were
being spent on my college tuition
after six months I couldn't see the value in it
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was
going to help me figure it out
and here i was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life so I
decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay
it was pretty scary at the time but looking back it was one of the best
decisions I ever made
the minute i dropped out
I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin
dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting
it wasn't all romantic I didn't have a dorm room so I slept on the floor and
friends rooms
I return coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with and I would
walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week
at the Hari Krishna temple
I loved it and much of what i stumbled into by following my curiosity and
intuition turned out to be priceless later on let me give you one example
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 Calla graft 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
I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces about varying the amount of
space between different letter combinations about what makes great
typography great
it was beautiful historical artistically subtle in a way that science can't
capture and I found it fascinating
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
if I had never dropped in on that single course in college
the mac would have never had multiple typefaces are proportionally spaced
fonts and since windows just copy the mac
it's likely that no personal computer would have them
if I had never dropped out
I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers
might not have the wonderful typography that they do
of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college but it was very very clear looking backwards
ten years later again 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
you have to trust in something your gut destiny life karma whatever because
believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the
confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path
and that will make all the difference
my second story
is about love and loss
I was lucky I found what I love to do early in life was and i started apple in
my parent's garage when I was 20
we worked hard and in 10 years applet grown from just the two of us in the
garage into a two billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees we just
released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier and I 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 and so 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 let the
previous generation of entrepreneurs down that I dropped the baton as it was
being passed to me
I met with david packard and Bob noise and tried to apologize for spring 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 that Apple has not changed that
one bit
I've 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 name
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 and I return to apple and the technology we developed it next
is at the heart of apples current Renaissance and Loreen 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 sometime
life sometimes life is going to hit 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 true for work as it is for your
lover's 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 and 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 don't settle
yeah
my third story is about death when i was 17
I read a quote that went something like if you live each day as if it was your
last
someday you'll most certainly be right it made an impression on me
and since then for the past 33 years I've looked in the mirror every morning
and asked myself if today were the last day of my life
what 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 remembering that all be dead soon is the
most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big
choices in life because 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
about a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer
I had a scan at seven thirty in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on
my pancreas
I didn't even know what a pancreas was the doctors told me this was almost
certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that i should expect to
live no longer than three to six months
my doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order which is doctors
code for prepare to die
it means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the
next 10 years to tell them in just a few months
it means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that will be as easy as
possible for your family
it means to say your goodbyes I live with that diagnosis all day
later that evening I had a biopsy
where they stuck an endoscope down my throat through my stomach and into my
intestines put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor
I was sedated but my wife who was there told me that when they view the cells
under a microscope the doctor started crying because it turned out to be a
very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery I had the
surgery and thankfully I'm fine now
this was the closest I've been to facing death and I hope it's the closest I get
for a few more decades
having lived through it I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty
than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept
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 as it should be because death is very
likely the single best invention of life its lights change agent it clears out
the old to make way for the new right now
the new is you but some day not too long from now you will gradually become the
old and be cleared away
sorry to be so dramatic but it's quite true
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 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 everything else is secondary
yeah
when I was young there was an amazing publication called the whole earth
catalog which was one of the Bible's of my generation
it was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in menlo park
and he brought it to life with his poetic touch this was in the late
sixties before personal computers and desktop publishing
so it was all made with typewriters scissors and polaroid cameras
it was sort of like Google and paperback form 35 years before Google came along
it was idealistic overflowing with me tools and great notions
Stuart and his team put out several issues of the whole earth catalog and
then when it run its course they put out a final issue
it was the mid-nineteen seventies and I was your age on the back cover of their
final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road
the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous beneath it were the words
stay hungry stay foolish it was their farewell message as they signed off
stay hungry stay foolish and I've always wished that for myself and now as you
graduate to begin a new I wish that for you
stay hungry stay foolish thank you all very much
i made this video because card games TV one asked me to
so there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile leave it in the
comments below and we'll see what we can do
thank you so much for watching continue to believe we I don't see you soon