I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the 5 cents 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 was lucky, I found what I loved 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 had released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier and I had 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 things went welll. 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. 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 had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. 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 had 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 of the most creative periods of my life. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life gonna hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is ture for your 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...
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 make 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 wanna 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's no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who wanna 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 is 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 is 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...