This Is What The 1% Do! | Steve Jobs

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason 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 going to 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. Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? So it's 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.

Need motivation?

Watch the top 10 with Believe Nation.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Steve Jobs, and our take on his top 10 rules of success. Enjoy. Rule number 2 is focus on your products.

The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet, if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products. Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award or who won the Baldridge Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services. And so one can spend enormous amounts of money on quality, one can win every quality award there is, and yet if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. And so I think where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. And we need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services. Now again, quality isn't just the product or the service, it's having the right product, you know, knowing where the market's going and having the most innovative products is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product when you have it. And I think what we're seeing is the quality leaders of today have integrated that quality technology well beyond their manufacturing, now going well into their sales and marketing and out as far as they can to touch the customer and trying to create super-efficient processes back from the customer all the way through to the delivery of the end product so that they can have the most innovative products, understand the customer needs fastest, etc., etc.

Rule number 3 is be innovative.

The whole premise for Apple's existence is to come up with better products, highly differentiated, better products that then the third-party software developers can develop new and exciting and different applications on that they can't develop on other types of personal computers. And if Apple gives that away by giving away their future system software, then I'm not sure that, that the market needs Apple. So my whole question in this is, what is Apple's differentiation if this is successful? And if it's not successful, what is Apple's innovation which is going to propel it through the '90s like Macintosh did through the '80s? I'm not, I'm not sure. I'm sure that there are a bunch of bright people there, and I'm sure they have some some good ideas.

What do you think that we'll be able to do with, with this field called personal computing where you are in control that we, that we can't do today?

Um, well, what's happening right now with our industry is it's bifurcating. Uh, all current generation personal computers, all IBM PCs, uh, all, most of the current Macintoshes are all going to go portable. They're all going to be smaller, all portable within 2, 3 years, everything will be portable. And yet, customers are also demanding at the same time more power. And more power falls into 3 or 4 areas. People want large color screens that they can put photographs on. Ask anyone in the upper part of desktop publishing as an example. People want motion video. People want to be networked with very high-speed networking, at least Ethernet speeds. And people want to be sending all of this rich media around the network. Unfortunately, this second class of product cannot be made portable. So what I see is, I see our industry bifurcating where the current generation of products are going to be portable, and the next generation of products, these very powerful, highly networked color machines, are going to be desktop machines. And that's where I think we're going. What is going to be the new breakthrough that causes the next spurt of growth in our industry, just like spreadsheets did in the early '80s, desktop publishing did in the late '80s? And again, I come back to interpersonal computing. I think personal computing, which we mastered in the '80s, its mission was to improve individual productivity and at best creativity. And with over 50 million personal computers shipped in the '80s, it worked. The next thing for the '90s, though, needs to be more. Improving individual productivity isn't enough anymore. The real competitive advantage in the '90s is gonna come from improving, improving group productivity and collaboration. Improving group productivity. And that is going to be achieved through interpersonal computing. Using the same desktop tool that revolutionized analysis and planning with spreadsheets, that revolutionized publishing with desktop publishing, using those same tools to revolutionize human-to-human communication, collaboration, and group productivity. And I think that is going to be the third revolution of the desktop computer in the first half of the '90s.

Rule number 4 is develop great leadership skills.

One of the keys to Apple is Apple's an incredibly collaborative company. And so, you know how many committees we have at Apple?

No.

Zero. We have no committees.

No committees.

We are a very— we are organized like a startup. One person's in charge of iPhone OS software. One person's in charge of Mac hardware. One person's in charge of iPhone hardware engineering. Another person's in charge of worldwide marketing. Another person's in charge of operations. It's— we're organized like a startup. We're the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for 3 hours once a week and we talk about everything we're doing, the whole business. And there's tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. And teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they're gonna come through with their parts. And that's what we do really well. And we're great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well. And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.

And are people willing to tell you you're wrong?

Yeah.

I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean, people who work—

Oh yeah, no, we have wonderful arguments.

And do you win them all?

Oh no, I wish I did. No, see, you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. Otherwise, good people don't stay.

But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas.

I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn't?

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, There's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business.

I'll see you there.

Rule number 5 is solve problems.

One of the hardest things when you're trying to affect 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, 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. Made that 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.

Rule number 6 is find your passion.

A lot of people come to me and they say, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I go, oh, that's great. What's your idea? And they go, well, I don't have one yet. And I say, well, I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you to find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work. And I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don't blame them. It's really tough and it consumes your life. I mean, if you've got a family, and you're in the early days of a company, it's— I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure it's been done, but it's rough because it's pretty much an 18-hour-a-day job, 7 days a week for a while. So unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're gonna not survive. You're gonna give it up. So you gotta have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about. Otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that's half the battle right there.

Rule number 7 is unleash creativity.

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 the design for about 6 months. 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 and 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 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 How did you know it was going to mushroom into this phenomenon? And you could say, yeah, you know, we planned it out. We had it laid 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 really understands what he's— the tool that he's got in front of him.

Rule number 8 is master marketing.

Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. 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, 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 And the way to do that is not to talk about speeds 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.

Is 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 them why they're better than Reebok's air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They, they honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That's who they are. That's what they are about.

Rule number 9 is evolve with technology.

Our industry— some people think our industry is very mature and they think there is going to be, you know, rapid consolidation and very few companies left over, and it's pretty much very predictable from here on out. Which is a— that point of view I do not share at all. I think we're about 1 inch down a road that's many miles long. And that every time there's major technological innovation, there's a tremendous opportunity for new players, for a reorganization of the industry to occur. And I think that I think that there is certainly as much opportunity for innovation in the next 5 years as any 5-year period I've ever seen in our industry. I think there's just as much opportunity for new companies to come along, for new approaches to be taken, and for customers to get much better computers 5 years from now than they have today. So I'm pretty optimistic. And I think we all need to remember that we're just in the infancy of this revolution, and it will continue to occur throughout our lifetimes. And I hope, and I work with a group of people that all work very hard to make sure that the rate of innovation doesn't slow down and that most of that innovation continues to come out of the United States of America.

And rule number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is think differently.

Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product, some things are not done as well in a product. Some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices. And if the market tells us we're making the wrong choices, we listen to the market. We're just people running this company. We're trying to make great products for people. And so we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, "We don't think this is part of what makes a great product. We're going to leave it out." Some people People are going to not like that. They're going to call us names. It's not going to be in certain companies' vested interests that we do that, but we're going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers. And we're going to instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They're paying us to make those choices. That's what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed, they'll buy them. And if we don't, they won't. And it'll all work itself out.

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 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 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 deposit. 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. 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. 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 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 I brought in a young man 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'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. Sometimes life's 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 as true for work as it is for your lovers. 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. 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, 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 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.

To get some Bill Gates motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

No regrets about anything? I wouldn't try and go back and change anything. I mean, for example, The antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, you know, was bad for the company.

It created a lot of distraction