A baby was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, his unwed mother decided to put him for adoption because she wanted a girl. So in the middle of the night, his mother called a lawyer named Paul Jobs and said, “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” In his early adulthood, he went to college but decided to drop out because it was too expensive. Recalling his time there he said,
“I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.”
At 20, he and a friend started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. To raise capital for their company the two had to sell their most expensive possessions. By 1982 however, his company sales sagged in the face of competition. The two unveiled their new creation, Lisa to increase the company’s bottom line, only to be another expensive failure.
Not wanting to dwell on these successive failures, they worked on a new machine called the Macintosh. By 1986 the Mac proved to be a huge success to the company. The company had grown into a $2 billion dollar company with over 4000 employees mainly because of the work of this one man.
At 30 years, however, of he was fired from the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak. When he hears the news he said, “You’ve probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out you and you cannot breathe. The harder you try to breathe, the more you cannot breathe. And you know that the only thing you can do is just relax so you can start breathing again.” He sold over $20 million of his Apple stock, spent days bicycling along the beach, feeling sad and lost, toured Paris, and journeyed on to Italy.
Recalling this publicly heartbreaking episode he said, ‘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, he started two companies – NeXTStep and Pixar NeXTStep didn’t do as well as he had dreamed for. It did poorly and he pulled the plug in 1993. Pixar, however, was a success story. The company started the first computer-animated film, the Toy Story and when Pixar’s stock went public, he became an instant billionaire.
Meanwhile, his old company, Apple was under immense pressure from rival Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses. December 1996 he convinced Apple to buy NeXT and make its software the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS. The technology he developed at NeXT became the catalyst for Apple’s comeback. Initially appointed as Apple’s adviser, Steve Jobs was named Apple’s interim CEO in 1997.
In 2004 he was diagnosed with cancer on his pancreas. Jobs was told that the cancer was incurable and he would only live for another three to six months. Later, a biopsy showed that he actually had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. He had the surgery and survived longer than expected. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced innovations such as the iPod.
Steve Jobs advice
Sometimes life hits 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 as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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 until you find it. 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.
LIFE IN GENERAL 