Steve Jobs’ Wisdom: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish | Life Lessons and Success Secrets

Steve Jobs’ Top Ten Rules for Success

He is considered the father of the digital revolution, a master of innovation, and a design perfectionist. He had a network of over eight billion dollars in 2010. He is one of my personal favorite entrepreneurs of all time. He is Steve Jobs from Apple, and here are his top ten rules for success.

Embrace Change and Influence Life

“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. Ah, 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 who 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; in fact, something you know, you push in, something you pop out the other side. You can change it, you can mold it. Ahm, that’s maybe the most important thing is to shake off this… 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. Uh, I think that is 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.”

Passion is Key

“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, you don’t have 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, you know, being successful ‘on quote’ in the eyes of society than the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones that were successful, love what they did so they could persevere, you know, it got really tough and… and the ones that didn’t love it, quit because they’re ??????? right, who would wanna put up with this stuff if you don’t love it. So, it’s a lot of hard work and… and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and… if you don’t love it, you’re gonna fail, so you gotta love it, you gotta have passion.”

Building a Computer

“We had absolutely no idea what people gonna do because we can’t afford to buy it a computer to the market so we liberated some parts for new Packard and Atari quickly. I’m not report down design for about six months and decided that I would build on the computer. So we built, and I was up till four in the morning.”

Starting Apple Computer

“For many moons, and we’ve got it working, we showed some reference immediately, everybody wanted, and it turned out to talk about 40 hours to build one of these things, in about another 20, 30, 40 bucket, and we have a lot of friends at work that similar companies who could liberate the parts. Also, have seven Mary screaming of arts in line, helping our friends to build computers, and it’s just going to be a tremendous strain on our lives. So we got the idea one day that we could make a printed circuit board without the parts and sell black printed circuit boards to our friends and probably cut the assembly and debug time down, you know, five, ten hours or so. What’s so just HPC calculator, and I sold my van, we got 1,300 bucks together, and there are a friend of ours who is this a PC board layout person, 1,300 bucks to do his lay out the side. We sell printed circuit boards that 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 Palo Alto. Then owner of the bike shop, Paul Terrell, said, ‘You would like to take 50 of these computers,’ and I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. But what he had one catch was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested ready to go, which is a new twist. So we spent the next five days on the phone with distributors and convinced the electronics parts distributors around here to give us about ten thousand dollars with the parts this time.

So we got the parts, and we built a hundred computers, and we sold 50 of them for cash in 29 days, paid off the distributors, and that’s how we got started. So we had 50 computers leftover, but that meant we had to sell, so then we started worrying about marketing, worrying about distribution, got on the phone with the other computer stores around the country, and gradually the whole thing began to build momentum.

At that point in time, we had some feeling that we were onto something, but the feeling was so different than the experience of actually seeing it happen. Right now, it’s entirely different, and sometimes a lot of people ask, ‘When did you know it was going to be this phenomenon?’ and you can say, ‘Yeah, you know, we planned it out; we had it on a piece of paper,’ but the experience of seeing 500 people working at Apple computers is different than the experience of seeing a five-year-old kid who really understands what he’s the tool that he’s got in front.”

Advice from Steve Jobs

“When you first got the job at the yo, you got a call from Steve Jobs, and he offered you some advice. Well, he didn’t call to offer me advice, but we have worked together on a Nike-Apple collaboration called nike+. We took what Apple knows, what Nike knows, and you know, brought a new technology to the market. Anyway, long story short, he said, ‘Hey, congratulations, that’s great, you’re going to do a great job.’ I said, ‘Well, do you have any advice?’ and he said, ‘No, no, you know, you’re great.’ And then there’s a pause, and he goes, ‘Well, I do have some advice. It was 90, 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 a pause but no laughs at the end, and he was absolutely right.”

Leadership and Vision

“Greatest people are self-managing; they don’t need to be managed. You think they know what, 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, 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 were not necessarily those seasoned.”

Building a Core Group and Recruitment

“It’s a lot of people so the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of, you know, ten great people that 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, agonized over hiring, we have the interviews. I go back and look at some of the interviews again. They would start at nine or ten in the morning and go through dinner. I knew interviewing would talk to everybody in the building at least once, maybe a couple of times, and then come back for another round of interviews. And then they’ll get together and talk about it, and then before the last edit, by now it’s critical, hardly ever here, at least to my mind, was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype and then set them down in front of it. And if they just kind of our borders and this is a nice computer, we don’t want. I wanted their eyes to light up and then 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 going to really make a difference, and that’s what kept the whole thing going. We all want to do exactly the same thing.”

Hiring and Management

“Instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be, we all knew what the computer should be and just when did we go through that stage at Apple where we went out and we got off we’re going to 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 are bozos, they knew how to manage but they don’t know how to do anything. And so, what if you’re a great person, why do you want to work for something you can’t learn anything from? You know what’s interesting, you know what the best managers are? There are the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but they have to be a manager because all everyone else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.”

Taking Risks and Money

“After hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both, Jobs gambled on Debbie, a member of the Macintosh team, 32 years old and an English literature major with an MBA from Stanford. He 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. It’s an incredible high risk for myself personally and professionally and for Apple as the 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 feel that organizational effectiveness, you know, overrides all those in a 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. In every single person on the Mac team, almost, in your 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 a good down. 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.”

Money and the Importance of the Company

“It’s very interesting. I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million dollars when I was 24 and over a hundred million dollars for those 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, 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 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, and I never sold any stock. I just really believed that the company would do very well over the long term.”

Making the Best Personal Computers

“Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest price as 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’s a threshold that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry, and a slice of the industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products are usually not premium-priced. You go, what?”

Competition and Customer-Centric Approach

“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 price. The difference is we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products. You know 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 who have been doing that and saying that now for the last 18 months.”

Addressing Questions and Criticisms

“Yes, Mr. Jobs, you’re a bright and important man. Your tongue, add and clear that I’m several counts you discussed, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how is a Java, in any of its incarnations, address that the idea is embodied and open. And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years. Yeah, 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 than I am 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 eight billion dollars, ten billion dollars of products a year? And one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backward 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 we’re going to market that. And I think that’s the right path to take.”

The LaserWriter and Customer Appeal

“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. And there we have Apple talking, there’s 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 the thing, 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 up something, ‘You want this?’ And if you remember back to 1984, before laser printers, it was pretty startling to see that people want, ‘Wow, yes.’ And that’s where Apple’s got to get back to.”

Supporting the Team and Learning from Mistakes

“You know, I’m sorry that OpenDoc got caught up along the way, and I readily admit there are many things in life that I want defense that is 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. Ah, be John Green, Oh, Fred. I mean, the whole team is working, burning the midnight oil, trying to and and people, you know, hundreds of people below them to execute on some of these things, and they’re they’re doing the 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 to it because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we’ll find a mistake affects them, and I think what we need 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 three times as much money.”

Supporting the Team and Writing Applications

“To go do this without the valleys 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 on 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 I think it is so much better than where things were not very long ago, and I think we’re gonna get there.”

Brand Marketing and Apple’s Brand

“I mean, marketing 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 wanted 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 great, not just in this country but all around the globe. But, but, 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.”

Marketing Approach and Focusing on Values

“The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about myths and negatives. It’s not to talk about why we’re better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk is good for you to lie, but they tried anyway. The sales are going like this, and then they tried, ‘Got Milk?’ and the sales are going like this. Got nothing to talk about the part that focuses on the absence of the product. But, but, but the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing and the if the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity, these are shoes, and yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than the shoe company, and their ads, you know, they don’t ever talk about the product. They will never tell you about the air soles and by the better the Reeboks, their soles was not you doing advertising. They honor great athletes, and they own great athletics. That’s who they are. That’s what they are about.”

Apple’s Core Value

“Apple spent a fortune on advertising; you’d never know it. You’d never know. So when I got here, Apple just fired the agency doing the competition with 23 agencies that you know, for Mr. Naylor, pick one, and we blew that up, and we hired Chiat/Day, the ad agency that I was fortunate 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 eight weeks ago, and what was the question we asked was, our customers want to know who we are, and what is it that we stand for, where do we fit in this world, and what more about isn’t making boxes for people to get the job done, although we do that well, we do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple’s about something more than Apple at the core. Its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world, and that’s what we believe. And we have the opportunity to work with people like that. We have 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 are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”

Story of Connecting the Dots

“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 three stories from my life. That’s it, no big deal, just three stories.”

Dropping Out of College

“The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did 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, if you want him?’ They said, ‘Of course.’ My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college, and 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 of my life.”

Dropping in on Interesting Classes

“And seventeen 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 six 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.”

Calligraphy Class

“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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.”

Calligraphy and Typography

“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.”

Embracing Mortality

“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 three to six 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.”

A Second Chance at Life

“I lived 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.”

The Value of Life

“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.”

Introduction

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.

The Passage of Time

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.

Avoiding Dogma

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.

Follow Your Heart and Intuition

And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition; they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Inspiration from the Past

Yeah, 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 sixties 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 new tools and great notions.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Stuart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it ran its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-nineteen seventies, and I was your age.