Steve Jobs: Levels of Success Every Entrepreneur MUST Master!

He's considered the father of the digital revolution, a master of innovation, and a design perfectionist. He had a net worth of over $8 billion in 2010. He's one of my personal favorite entrepreneurs of all time. He's Steve Jobs from Apple, and here are his top 10 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 life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, 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 that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, That's maybe the most important thing, is to shake off this erroneous 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. I think that's 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, if you're not having 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 the ones that ended up being successful, unquote, in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, oftentimes it's the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? So it's a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don't love it, you're going to fail. So you got to love it. You got to have passion.

We had absolutely no idea what people were going to do with these things when we started out. Matter of fact, the two people it was designed for was Woz and myself, because we couldn't afford to buy a computer kit on the market. So we liberated some parts from Hewlett-Packard and Atari and worked on a design for about 6 months and decided that we would build our own computer. So we built one, and, uh, Woz was up till 4 in the morning for many moons, and we got it working. We showed some of our friends, immediately everybody wanted one. And it turned out that it took about 40 hours to build one of these things, and about another 20, 30, 40 to debug it. And we had a lot of friends that worked at similar companies who could liberate the parts also. And we found ourselves spending every spare moment of our time helping our friends to build computers. And it was just getting to be a tremendous drain on our lives. So we got the idea one day that we could make a printed circuit board without the parts in it, sell these blank printed circuit boards to our friends, and probably cut the assembly and debug time down to, you know, 5, 10 hours. So Woz sold his HP-65 calculator and I sold my van, and we got $1,300 together, and we paid a friend of ours who was this PC board layout person $1,300 to do us a layout. Decided we'd sell printed circuit boards at twice what it cost to build them and hopefully recoup our calculator and transportation at 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 bike shop in Mountain View, and Paul Terrell, the then owner of the bike shop, said he would like to take 50 of these computers, and I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes, and— but he had one catch, which was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested, ready to go, which is a new twist. So we spent I spent the next 5 days on the phone to distributors and convinced the electronics parts distributors around here to give us about $10,000 worth of parts on thin air, just on enthusiasm. So we got the parts and we built 100 computers and we sold 50 of them for cash and in 29 days paid off the distributors. And that's how we got started. So we had 50 computers left over. Well, that meant we had to sell them. So then we started worrying about marketing, worrying about distribution, got on the phone to 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 on to something. But the feeling is so different than the experience of actually seeing it happen right now.

It's entirely different.

And sometimes a lot of people ask, "Well, did you know it was gonna mushroom into this phenomenon?" And you could say, "Yeah, you know, we planned it out." lead on a piece of paper. But it's different than the experience of seeing 500 people working at Apple Computer. It's very different than the experience of seeing a 5-year-old kid who, uh, really understands what he's— the tool that he's got in front of him.

When you first got the job as CEO, you got a call from Steve Jobs and he offered you some advice.

Well, he didn't call to offer me advice, but we had worked together on a Nike-Apple collaboration called Nike Plus. So we took what Apple knows, what Nike knows, and brought a new technology to the market. Anyway, long story short, he said, hey, congratulations. It's great. You're going to do a great job. I said, well, do you have any advice? And he said, no, no. You're great. And then there was a pause. And he goes, well, I do have some advice. He goes, Nike 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 laugh at the end. And he was absolutely right.

The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. You, if 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, 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 weren't— 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 who wanted to bring that to lots of people. So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of, you know, 10 great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.

We agonized over hiring. We had interviews. I could go back and look at some of the interviews again. They would start at 9 or 10 in the morning and go through dinner. A new interviewee 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 we'd all get together and talk about it.

And then they'd fill out an application.

No, they never filled out an application.

The most critical part of the interview, at least to my mind, was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype, and then we sat them down in front of it, and if they just kind of were bored or said, "This is a nice computer," we didn't want them. We wanted their eyes to light up and them 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 gonna really make a difference. And that's what kept the whole thing going.

We all wanted 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 we just went and did it.

We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and we thought, "Oh, we're gonna 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 were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. And so, if you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from? And you know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because 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 Coleman, a member of the Macintosh team. 32 years old, an English literature major with an MBA from Stanford, Debbie 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. This is an incredible high-risk both for myself personally and professionally, and for Apple as a company, to put a person like myself in this job. I mean, they're really betting on a lot of things. We're betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness, you know, override all those, you know, 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, and every single person on the Mac team, almost to 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— 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 when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25. And it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in 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. You know, I never sold any stock and just really believed that the company would, would do very well over the long term.

Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices 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 are thresholds that we can't cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And we think there is a very significant slice of the industry that wants that, too. And what you'll find is our products are usually not premium priced. 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 products. The difference is we don't offer stripped-down, lousy products. 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 have been doing that and saying that now for the last 18 months.

Yes.

Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man.

Here it comes.

Sad and clear that on several counts you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. I would like for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say, Java in any of its incarnations addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years.

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 OpenDoc does, probably even more that I'm 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 into a cohesive larger vision that's going to allow you to sell $8 billion, $10 billion of product a year. And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to 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've got the scar tissue to prove 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 starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take. I remember with the LaserWriter. We built the world's first small laser printers, you know, and there was awesome technology in that box. We had the first Canon laser printing, cheap laser printing engine in the world, in the United States here at Apple. We had a very wonderful printer controller that we designed. We had Adobe's PostScript software in there. We had AppleTalk in there. Just awesome technology in the box, and I remember seeing the first printout come out of it and just picking it up and looking at it and thinking, 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 this up and go, "Do you want this?" And if you can remember back to 1984 before laser printers, it was pretty startling to see that. People went, "Whoa, yes." And that's where Apple's got to get back to. And, you know, I'm sorry that OpenDoc's a casualty along the way, and I readily admit there are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea 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, Avi, John, Garino, Fred, I mean the whole team is working, burning the midnight oil, trying to, and people, you know, hundreds of people below them, to execute on some of these things and they're doing their 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 good, because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we'll find the mistakes, we'll fix them. And I think what we need to do 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 3 times as much money to go do this, do that. The Valley's 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 out in 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 going to get there.

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's 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 want them to know about us. Now, Apple, fortunately, is one of the half a dozen best brands in the whole world, right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country, but all around the globe. And, 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 beads and feeds. It's not to talk about MIPS and megahertz. It's not to talk about why we're better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It's a lie, but they tried anyway. And the sales were going like this. And then they tried Got Milk, and the sales have gone like this. Got Milk doesn't even talk about the product. Matter of fact, it focuses on the absence of the product. But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity.

They sell shoes.

And yet, when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don't ever talk about the product. They don't ever tell you about their air soles and why they're better than Reebok's air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That's who they are. That's what they are about. Apple spends a fortune on advertising. You'd never know it. You'd never know it. So, when I got here, Apple just fired their agency. They were doing a competition with 23 agencies that, you know, 4 years from now would pick one. And we blew that up and we hired Chiat/Day, the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago. We created some award-winning work, including the commercial voted the best ad ever made in 1984 by advertising professionals. And we started working about 8 weeks 6 weeks ago. The question we asked was, our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world? What we are about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody. In some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That's what we believe. We've had the opportunity to work with people like that. We've had an opportunity to work with people like you, 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 that 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 of this campaign in several years is to get back to that core value. A lot of things have changed. The market's a totally different place than it was a decade ago. And Apple's totally different. And Apple's place in it is totally different. And believe me, the products and the distribution strategy and manufacturing are totally different. And we understand that. But values and core values Those things shouldn't change. The things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. 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. But the ones that aren't, as you'll see, you know that if they ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac. The theme of the campaign is "Think Different." It's the people— honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward. And it is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company. So I'm going to go ahead and roll it, and I hope that you feel the same way about it I do. Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who 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 I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you 3 stories from my life. That's it, no big deal, just 3 stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months. But then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why'd 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. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college, and that 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 6 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 in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food 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. 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 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. 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 that course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied 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 10 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. 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 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 at 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'd let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. That I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing 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 at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd 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 5 years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named 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 returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene 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's gonna 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 as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is gonna 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. 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 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. 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. 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 7:30 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 3 to 6 months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order. Order, which is doctor's 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 it 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 viewed 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. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, 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. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles 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 '60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools, and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, 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 have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, 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 if 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. Believe!

And we'll see you soon. Bye-bye!