Ron Johnson, who ran operations at Apple, shares stories from working with Steve Jobs, including grading his Stanford commencement speech. He talks about choosing mentors, learning from people instead of classes, and being deliberate about who you work with.
Chapters
How many of you have read his commencement address? How many of you got a phone call within an hour of the address to ask for a grade? I did. Steve called me. I'd been working with him a lot. And he gave that famous commencement address. And he called up at like 12:15. The ceremony had actually been about 11:30. And he said, Ron, how are you doing? Great. How were the stores yesterday? Really did well. By chance, were you at the address? I said, yeah, I was. I thought it was very good. And he said, okay, great, hung up. Calls back a few minutes later, says, I've got to ask you, I'm only going to do this once in my life. I want to know how I did. So I'm kind of on the spot. What grade do I give Steve about his commencement address? And I said, Steve, I give you a B+. And he thought, he said, a B+? I said, well, you know. He says, why? And I gave him a couple of reasons. He said, oh, he goes, that sounds fair. Well, then the next day, and on the internet you're reading like this is the, like the most highly regarded commencement address ever. So a year later, I was just going through my day and the Stanford commencement, I sent Steve an email. I said, by the way, I rethought my grade. You now get an A-. So I upped his grade, which was good. But Steve was a wonderful person to work with because he— so many dimensions, but he taught me so much about life, not just business. And as you go through life, you're going to learn most of what you learn not from the classes you take, but from the people with whom you interact. And so take time to pick people carefully. who you work with, people that share your values, people that you can learn from, people that will inspire you, people that will motivate you to do your best work. But make sure you learn the lessons of life. And as I saw Steve's picture, I keep reminded about that commencement address. One of my favorite lines, he kind of said, you know, life's a journey, but you can never connect the dots looking forward, only looking back. So as you go through an experience in life, you can always look back and say, well, here are the things that impacted that outcome. But nobody can looking forward. That's one of the mysteries of life. But we each control the path we're on. And so it's really important you make good choices along the way on the path. Does that make sense? And I kind of think when I look back to my life as a young person who grows up like most, it looks like most people in the room with Pretty good families, pretty good opportunities, you probably are on like a highway with some really obvious exits. You know, I was young, Stanford. It's pretty hard to take the Stanford exit off the highway and have a bad outcome. It's not a real original path. You know, thousands of people choose that every year, but it's a good choice. You travel a little further, Harvard Business School. It's hard not to pick Harvard Business School and have a reasonable outcome. But ultimately in life, it's when you choose the exit that's a little bit of a road less traveled that I think you'll find a much more interesting outcome. You'll learn more valuable lessons and you'll perhaps find more meaning in what you do. Because the expected path doesn't necessarily fit for everybody. It's just the easy choice. But when you somehow happen across something that just really gets you up in the morning and gets you going, that's when you've picked the right path. And that's often the less traveled path. And just thinking about Steve, you know, he dropped out of college, right? He took the Reed College exit. Maybe not as easy as Stanford, but a reasonable exit. And he just wasn't content, and he dropped out. As you said, that led him dropping out of other things. And Steve had a very kind of unique journey, but that led to a pretty good outcome. So for each of you, you've got your own path. Don't follow someone else's path, pick your own. But as you go, find good people to work with and learn along the way. Make sense?
