One thing you may not know about Steve Jobs is that he never graduated from college. His biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student and she decided to put him up for adoption. But under one condition, that whoever he went to both parents had to be college graduates. Later on she found out that the father never graduated from college, let alone high school. And the mother graduated high school but never finished college. After finding this out they went back and made a deal that Steve had to graduate with a college degree.
Steve Jobs opens up with telling us that he has three stories. Just three. And the first one is about connecting the dots. When he was younger he decided to go to Reed college, and if you don't know what that is, its a very expensive college in Portland, Oregon. Steve had no clue what he wanted to do in life and didn't think that college would help him figure it out. In his mind he thought that he was just there spending all of his parents life savings, so he decided to drop out and just hope that every thing would turn out okay. When looking back on it he describes it as the best decision he ever made. With this he was able to drop out of all the required classes that didn't interest him and start dropping in on the ones that did.
At that time Reed College offered one of the best calligraphy instruction in the country. And if you don't know what calligraphy is, it is a type of handwriting. And at that time every poster, and label on every drawer on Reed campus was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because he dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes he decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. And ten years later when he was designing the first Macintosh it all came back to him and he designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. So therefore, if he never dropped in on this class the Mac would have never had multiple typed faces or proportionally spaced fonts and sine "windows copied the Mac" its likely that no personal computer would have them. If he had never dropped out then he never would have dropped in on that calligraphy class and thus computers might not have the beautifully typography that they do today.
The second story was about love and lost. At age twenty he and his partner invented the Macintosh in his garage. Ten years later it went from two guys in a garage to a two billion dollar company with over 4,000 employers. And at age thirty he was fired from his own company. I know some of you are wondering why he was fired from a company that he started. Well shortly before, he hired someone to help run the company with him and they had a falling out and everyone on the board of directors sided with the other guy. Steve was upset and had no clue what to do because he still loved his job and liked doing what he was doing. But it turned out, in his opinion getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was able to let go of the heaviness of being successful and become a beginner again.
During the next five years he started a company called Next, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with a women who later became his wife. Pixar went on to creating the worlds first computer animated feature film Toy Story and is now the most successful animation studios in the world. In a ironic turn of events, Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs returned to working for Apple and the technology they created at Next is now the heart of Apple's current renaissance. None of this would have happened if he never was fired from Apple.
His third story is about death. He was diagnosed with cancer a little while later. He had a scan that clearly showed a tumor on his pancreas. The doctors told him with almost certainty that it was a type of cancer that was incurable and that he should expect to only live for another three to six months. Later that night he had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down his throat, thru the stomach and into his intestines where they put a needle into the pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. It turned out that he had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. He got the surgery and thankfully was fine. He says that this was the closest he had ever come to death and that he hopes its the closest he gets for at least a few decades.
I learned many things from the video, most importantly is to follow your heart. Now when he was saying that the best thing he ever did was dropping out of college, he wasn't telling you to drop out. He was sharing that from his own personal experiences that following your gut will really pay off in the long run. I know now that hopefully by following my heart or my gut that I will find what I am truly passionate about and become successful just like Steve Jobs did. Also that when you get knocked down you just need to stand right back up. Something terrible happened to him, he got fired from his job. But he made the best of it an made two new companies that turned out to be very successful. Another thing, is to live life like you were dying. Don't do something your not happy with because anything can happen.
Steve Jobs opens up with telling us that he has three stories. Just three. And the first one is about connecting the dots. When he was younger he decided to go to Reed college, and if you don't know what that is, its a very expensive college in Portland, Oregon. Steve had no clue what he wanted to do in life and didn't think that college would help him figure it out. In his mind he thought that he was just there spending all of his parents life savings, so he decided to drop out and just hope that every thing would turn out okay. When looking back on it he describes it as the best decision he ever made. With this he was able to drop out of all the required classes that didn't interest him and start dropping in on the ones that did.
At that time Reed College offered one of the best calligraphy instruction in the country. And if you don't know what calligraphy is, it is a type of handwriting. And at that time every poster, and label on every drawer on Reed campus was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because he dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes he decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. And ten years later when he was designing the first Macintosh it all came back to him and he designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. So therefore, if he never dropped in on this class the Mac would have never had multiple typed faces or proportionally spaced fonts and sine "windows copied the Mac" its likely that no personal computer would have them. If he had never dropped out then he never would have dropped in on that calligraphy class and thus computers might not have the beautifully typography that they do today.
The second story was about love and lost. At age twenty he and his partner invented the Macintosh in his garage. Ten years later it went from two guys in a garage to a two billion dollar company with over 4,000 employers. And at age thirty he was fired from his own company. I know some of you are wondering why he was fired from a company that he started. Well shortly before, he hired someone to help run the company with him and they had a falling out and everyone on the board of directors sided with the other guy. Steve was upset and had no clue what to do because he still loved his job and liked doing what he was doing. But it turned out, in his opinion getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was able to let go of the heaviness of being successful and become a beginner again.
During the next five years he started a company called Next, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with a women who later became his wife. Pixar went on to creating the worlds first computer animated feature film Toy Story and is now the most successful animation studios in the world. In a ironic turn of events, Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs returned to working for Apple and the technology they created at Next is now the heart of Apple's current renaissance. None of this would have happened if he never was fired from Apple.
His third story is about death. He was diagnosed with cancer a little while later. He had a scan that clearly showed a tumor on his pancreas. The doctors told him with almost certainty that it was a type of cancer that was incurable and that he should expect to only live for another three to six months. Later that night he had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down his throat, thru the stomach and into his intestines where they put a needle into the pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. It turned out that he had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. He got the surgery and thankfully was fine. He says that this was the closest he had ever come to death and that he hopes its the closest he gets for at least a few decades.
I learned many things from the video, most importantly is to follow your heart. Now when he was saying that the best thing he ever did was dropping out of college, he wasn't telling you to drop out. He was sharing that from his own personal experiences that following your gut will really pay off in the long run. I know now that hopefully by following my heart or my gut that I will find what I am truly passionate about and become successful just like Steve Jobs did. Also that when you get knocked down you just need to stand right back up. Something terrible happened to him, he got fired from his job. But he made the best of it an made two new companies that turned out to be very successful. Another thing, is to live life like you were dying. Don't do something your not happy with because anything can happen.