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 entrepreturs of all time he is steve jobs from apple and here is his top ten rules for success the thing i would say is
apple stock price in 2010, when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your 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 there were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it you can, you can build your own things that other people can use and the minute that you understand that you can poke life in actually
something you know you push in, something you pop out the other side you can, you can change it you can mold it ahm, that's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this 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 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, 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 actuallyif you really look at at the ones that ended up you know being successful "on quote the eyes of society" than the ones that didn't often times, it's the ones that were sucessful love what they did so they could persevere you know, it got really tough
and... and the ones that didn't love it, quit cause they're ??????? right, who would wanna put up with this stuff if you dont 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 we had absolutely no idea what people gonna do .... because we can't afford to buy it acomputer to the market so we liberated
some parts for new packard and tariquickly i'm not report down design for about six months and decided that i would build on computer so we builtand i was up till four in the morning for many moons and we've got it workingwe showed some reference immediately everybody want and it turned out to talkabout 40 hours to build one of these things in about another 20 30 40 bucketand we have a lot of friends at work that similar companies who couldliberate the parts also have seven mary screaming of arts in line helping our friends to build computersand it's just going to be a tremendous
strain on our on our lives so we got theidea one day that that we could make a printed circuit board without the partsand selling black printed circuit boards to our friends and probably cut theassembly and debug time down that you know five ten out so wat soldiers hpc calculator and isold my van we got 1,300 bucks together and they are a friend of ours who isthis a pc board layout person 1,300 bucks to do is lay out the side we sellprinted circuit board that twice what it cost to build them and hopefully recoupour calculator and transportation some later date
so that's what we did and i was outtrying to peddle pc boards one day and walked into a bike shop the first bychopping out of you and paul terrell then owner of the bike shop said youwould like to take 50 of these computers and i saw dollar signs in front of myeyes and what he had one catch was that hewanted them fully assembled and tested ready to go which is a new twist so we spent thenext five days on the phone with distributors and convince theelectronics parts distributors around here to give us about ten thousanddollars with the parts are thinner this
time susie as so we got the parts and webuilt a hundred computers and we sold 50 of them for cash and 29 days paid offwith distributors and that's how we got started so we have 50 computers leftoverwhile that man we had to sell so then we started worrying about marketing wearingred distribution got on the phone with the other computer stores around thecountry and gradually the whole thing began to build momentum and at thatpoint in time we had some feeling that we were onto something but the feeling was is so different thanthe experience of actually seeing it happen right now it's entirely differentand sometimes a lot of a lot of people
ask what did you know it was going toomuch go into this phenomenon and you can say yeah you know we planned it out wehave led on a piece of paper but the experience is seeing 500 people workingat apple computers are different in the experience of seeing a five-year-old kidwho really understands what he's the tool that he's got in front when youfirst got the job at the yo you got a call from steve jobs and he offered yousome advice well he didn't call to offer me advicebut we have worked together on a nike apple collaboration called nike+ we tookwhat apple knows what nike nose and you know brought a new technology to themarket anyway long story short uh
he said hey congratulations that's greatyou're going to do a great job i said well do you have any advice andhe said no no you know your grade and then there's a pause and goes well i dohave some advice it was 90 makes some of the best productin the world i mean product that you lust afterabsolutely beautiful stunning product but you also make a lot of crap he said just get rid of the crappy stuffand focus on the good stuff and then i expected a little pause and a laugh butthere was there was a pause but no laughs at the animal and he wasabsolutely right
greatest people are self-managing theydon't need to be managed you think they know what if once they know what to do they'll go figure out how to do it theydon't need to be managed at all what they need is a common vision and that'swhat leadership is what leadership is having a vision being able to articulatethat so the people around you can understand it and getting a consensus ona common vision we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did butwork were not necessarily those seasoned professionals but who had on at the tipsof their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of wheretechnology was and what we could do with
that technology and he wanted to bringthat it's a lot of people so the neatest thing that happens is when you get acore group of you know ten great people that it becomes self policing as to whothey let in to that group so i consider the most important job of someone likemyself is recruiting agonized over hiring we have the interviews i go backand look at some of the interviews again they would start at nine or ten in themorning and go through dinner i knew interviewing would talk toeverybody in the building at least once maybe a couple times and then come backfor another round of interviews and then they'll get together and talk about itand then before the last edited by now
it's critical hardly ever here at leastto my mind was when we finally decided we like them enough to show them themacintosh prototype and then set them down in front of it and if they justkind of our borders and this is a nice computer we don't want we i wanted their eyes to light up and thento get really excited and then we knew they were one of us and everybody justwanted to work not because it was work that had to be done but it was becausesomething that we really believed in that was just going to really make adifference and that's what kept the whole thing going we all want to doexactly the same thing
instead of spending our time arguingabout what the computer should be we all knew what the computer should beand just when did we went through that stage and apple where we went out and wegot off we're going to be a big company let's hire professional management we went out and hired a bunch ofprofessional management it didn't work at all most of them are bozos they they knewhow to manage but they don't know how to do anything and so what if you're a great person whydo you want to work for something you
can't learn anything from and you knowwhat's interesting you know what the best managers are there are the greatindividual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but the side theyhave to be a manager because all every no one else is going to be able to do asgood a job as them after hiring two professional managers from outside thecompany and firing them both jobs gambled on debbie : a member of themacintosh team 32 years old and english literature major with an mba fromstanford did he was a financial manager with noexperience in manufacturing i mean there's no way in the worldanybody else would give me this chance
to run this kind of operation and idon't kid myself about that is an incredible high risk for myselfpersonally and professionally and for apple as the company and put a personlike myself in this job i mean they're really getting on a lotof things we're betting that my feel that organizational effectiveness you know override all those in a lack oftechnology lack of experience lack of you know time in manufacturing so it's a big risk and i'm just anexample in every single person on the mac team almost in your you know entrylevel person you could say that about
this is a place where people wereafforded incredibly unique opportunities to prove that they could do a good down they could write the book againinscribed inside the casing of every macintosh unseen by the consumer are thesignatures of the whole team this is apple's way of affirming thattheir latest innovation is a product of the individuals who created it not the corporation it's veryinteresting i was worth about over a million dollarswhen i was 23 and over 10 million
dollars when i was 24 and over a hundredmillion dollars for those 25 and it's it wasn't that important because i neverdid it for the money i i think money is wonderful thingbecause it enables you to do things enables you to in investing ideas thatdon't have a short-term payback and things like that but especially at thatpoint in my life it was it was not the most important thing the most importantthing was the company the people the products we were makingwhat we were going to enable people to do with these products so i didn't thinkabout it a great deal and i never sold any stock just really believe that thecompany would do very well over the long
term our goal is to make the best personalcomputers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and would recommendto our family and friends and we want to do that at the lowest price as we canbut i have to tell you there's some stuff in our industry that we wouldn'tbe proud to ship that we wouldn't be proud to recommend to our family andfriends and we can't do it we just can't ship junk so there'sthere's a thorough thresholds that we can't cross because of who we are but wewant to make the best personal computers in the industry slice of the industrythat wants that too
and what you'll find is our products areusually not premium-priced you go what you go and price out our competitorsproducts and you add the features that you have to add to make them useful andyou'll find in some cases they are more expensive than our price x the difference is we don't offerstripped-down lousy products you know we just don't offer categories of productslike that but if you move those aside and compare us with our competitors i think we compare pretty favorably anda lot of people who have been doing that and saying that now for the last 18months
yes mr. jobs you're a bright an important man your tongue add and clear that i'm several countsyou discussed you don't know what you're talking about i would like for example for you toexpress in clear terms how is a java any of its incarnationsaddress that the idea is embodied and open . and when you're finished withthat perhaps you could tell us which you personally have been doing for the lastseven years
yeah you know you can please some of thepeople some of the time but one of the hardest things when you'retrying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in someareas i'm sure that there are some things opendoctors probably even more than i am not familiar with that nothing else outthere does and i'm sure that you can make some demos maybe a small commercial app thatdemonstrates those things the hardest thing is what
how does that fit in to a cohesivelarger vision that's going to allow you to sell eight billion dollars 10 billiondollars of products a year and one of the things i've always found is thatyou've gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to thetechnology you can't start with the technology andtry to figure out where you're going to try to sell it and i've made thismistake probably more than anybody else in this room and i got the scar tissueapprove it and i know that it's the case and as we have tried to come up with astrategy and a vision for apple it started with what incredible benefitscan we give to the customer where can we
take the customer not not starting withlet's sit down with the engineers and and figure out what awesome technologywe have and then how we going to market that and i think that's the right pathto take i remember with the laser writer we built the world's first small laserprinters you know and there was awesome technology in that box we have the firstcanon laser printing cheap laser printing engine the world in the united states here atapple we had a very wonderful printer controller that we designed we haveadobe's postscript software and there we
have apple talking they're just awesometechnology in the box and i remember seeing the first print out come out ofit and just picking it up and looking at thing you know we can sell this becauseyou don't have to know anything about what's in that box all we have to do ishold of something you want this and if you remember back to nineteeneighty-four before laser printers was pretty startling to see that people want wow yes and that's that's where apple'sgot to get back to and you know i'm sorry that open dr.casualty along the way and i readily admit there are many things in life thati want defense that is what i'm talking
about so i apologize for that too but there'sa whole lot of people working super super hard right now at apple you know ah be john green oh fred i meanthe whole team is working burning the midnight oil trying to anend and people you know hundreds of people below them to execute on some ofthese things and they're they're doing the best and i think that what we needto do and some mistakes will be made by the way some mistakes will be made alongthe way that's to it because at least somedecisions are being made along the way
and we'll find a mistake affects themand i think what we need to do is support that team going through thisvery important stage as they work their butts off they're all getting callsbeing offered three times as much money to go do this without the valleys hotnone of them are leaving and i think we need to support them and see themthrough this and write some damn good applications to support apple on themarket that's my own point of view mistakes we made some people will bepissed off some people will not know what they'retalking about but it's i think it is so much better than where things were notvery long ago and i think we're gonna
get there i mean marketing about values this is a very complicated world is avery noisy world and we're not going to get a chance to get people to remembermuch about us no company is and so we have to bereally clear on what we wanted to know about us now apple fortunately is one of the halfa dozen best brands in the whole world right up there with nitin disney coke sony it is one of the great's of thegreat not just in this country but all
around the globe and but but but even agreat brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its relevanceand vitality and the apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in thisarea in the last few years and we need to bring it back the way to do that is not to talk aboutspeeds and feeds it's not to talk about myths andnegatives it's not to talk about why the better than windows the dairy industrytried for 20 years to convince you that milk is good for you to lie but theytried anyway the sales are going like this and thenthey tried got milk and the sales are
going like this got nothing to talk about the part thatfocuses on the absence of the product but but but the best example of all andand one of the greatest jobs of of marketing and the if the universe hasever seen as nike remember 90 sell the commodity this is shoes and yet when you think of90 you feel something different than the shoe company and their ads you know theydon't ever talk about the product it will never tell you about the air soilsand by the better the reeboks their souls was not you doing advertising theythey honor great athletes and they on a
great athletics that's who they are that's what they areabout apple spent a fortune on advertising you'd never know it you never know so when i got here apple just fired the agency doing thecompetition with 23 agencies that you know for mr. naylor pick one and we blewthat up and we need higher child day the ad agency that i was fortunate towork with years ago we created some award-winning work including thecommercial both of the best out of a
maid 1984 by advertising professionalsand we started working about eight weeks ago and what was the question we askedwas our customers want to know who example and what is it that we stand for wheredo we fit in this world and what more about isn't making boxes forpeople to get the job done although we do that well we do thatbetter than almost anybody in some cases but apples about some more than apple atthe cool its core value is that we believe thatpeople with passion can change the world of the day that's what we believe and wehave the opportunity to work with people
like that we have an opportunity to workwith people like new with software developers with customers who have doneit in some big and some small ways and we believe that in this world people can change it for the better andthat those people are crazy enough to think they can change the world are theones that actually do and so what we're going to do in ourfirst brand marketing campaign in several years is to is to get back tothat core value a lot of things have changed that would market two totallydifferent place than it was a decade ago and apples totally different applesplace in it is totally different and
believe me the products and thedistribution strategy and manufacturing totally different we understand that butvalues and core values those things should change the things that applebelieved in at its core are the same thing that apple really stands for them and so we wanted to find a way tocommunicate this and what we have is something that i am i'm very moved by ithonors those people who have changed the world some of them are living some of them arenot at the ones that aren't as you'll see you know if they ever use thecomputer it would have been
in the campaign is think different it's the people honoring the people whothink difference and who move this work forward and its it is what we are aboutit touches the soil of this company so i'm going to have a wallet and i hopethat you feel the same way about it here's to the crazy ones mr. its rebels round pegs in the square holes ones who see things
you're not from who respect stands you can quote them disagree with you we were fine and vilified the only thing you can change for and while some may see them as the crazy because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
want to do thank you i'm honored to be with you today foryour commencement from one of the finest universities in the world truth be told i never graduated fromcollege and this is the closest i've ever gotten to a college graduationtoday i want to tell you three stories from my life that's it no big deal just three stories the first story is about connecting thedots
i dropped out a reed college after thefirst six months but then stayed around as a drop in for another 18 months or sobefore i really quit so why did i drop out it started beforei was born my biological mother was a young unwed graduate student and shedecided to put me up for adoption she felt very strongly that i should beadopted by college graduates so everything was all set for me to beadopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife except that when i popped out they decided at the last minute thatthey really wanted a girl so my parents who were on a waiting list
got a call in the middle of the nightasking we've got an unexpected baby boy if you want him they said of course mybiological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated fromcollege and my father had never graduated from high school she refusedto sign the final adoption papers she only relented a few months laterwhen my parents promised that i would go to college this was the start in my life and 17 years later i did go to collegebut i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford and allof my working-class parents savings were
being spent on my college tuition after six months i couldn't see thevalue in it i had no idea what i wanted to do withmy life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out and here i was spending all the money myparents had saved their entire life so i decided to drop out and trust that itwould all work out okay it was pretty scary at the time butlooking back it was one of the best decisions i ever made the minute i dropped out
i could stop taking the required classesthat didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked farmore interesting it wasn't all romantic i didn't have adorm room so i slept on the floor and friends rooms i return coke bottles for the five-centdeposits to buy food with and i would walk the seven miles across town everysunday night to get one good meal a week at the hari krishna temple i loved it and much of what i stumbledinto by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be pricelesslater on let me give you one example
reed college at that time offeredperhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country throughout the campusevery poster every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calla graft becausei had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes i decided to take a calligraphy class tolearn how to do this i learned about serif and sans seriftypefaces about varying the amount of space between different lettercombinations about what makes great typography great it was beautiful historical artisticallysubtle in a way that science can't
capture and i found it fascinating none of this had even a hope of anypractical application in my life but 10 years later when we were designing thefirst macintosh computer it all came back to me and we designed it all into the mac itwas the first computer with beautiful typography if i had never dropped in on that singlecourse in college the mac would have never had multipletypefaces are proportionally spaced fonts and since windows just copy themac
it's likely that no personal computerwould have them if i had never dropped out i would have never dropped in on thatcalligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typographythat they do of course it was impossible to connectthe dots looking forward when i was in college but it was very very clearlooking backwards ten years later again you can't connectthe dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards so youhave to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future
you have to trust in something your gutdestiny life karma whatever because believing that the dots will connectdown the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart evenwhen 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 doearly in life was and i started apple in my parent's garage when i was 20 we worked hard and in 10 years appletgrown from just the two of us in the
garage into a two billion dollar companywith over 4,000 employees we just released our finest creation themacintosh a year earlier and i just turned 30 and then i got fired how can you get fired from a company youstarted well as apple grew we hired someone whoi thought was very talented to run the company with me and for the first yearor so things went well but then our visions of the future began to divergeand eventually we had a falling out when we did our board of directors sided withhim and so 30 i was out and very publicly out what had been the focus ofmy entire adult life was gone and it was
devastating i really didn't know what to do for afew months i felt that i let the previous generation of entrepreneursdown that i dropped the baton as it was being passed to me i met with david packard and bob noiseand tried to apologize for spring up so badly i was a very public failure and i eventhought about running away from the valley but something slowly began todawn on me i still loved what i did the turn ofevents that apple has not changed that
one bit i've been rejected but i was still inlove and so i decided to start over i didn't see it then but it turned outthat getting fired from apple was the best thing that could have ever happenedto me the heaviness of being successful wasreplaced by the lightness of being a beginner again less sure abouteverything it freed me to enter one of the mostcreative periods of my life during the next five years i started acompany named next another company name pixar and fell in love with an amazingwoman who would become my wife
pixar went on to create the world'sfirst computer animated feature film toy story and is now the most successfulanimation studio in the world in a remarkable turn of events apple bought next and i return to appleand the technology we developed it next is at the heart of apples currentrenaissance and loreen and i have a wonderful family together i'm pretty sure none of this would havehappened if i hadn't been fired from apple it was awful tasting medicine but iguess the patient needed it sometime
life sometimes life is going to hit youin the head with a brick don't lose faith i'm convinced that theonly thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did you've got to find what you love andthat is true for work as it is for your lover's your work is going to fill alarge part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what youbelieve 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 lookingand don't settle as with all matters of the heart you'llknow when you find it
and like any great relationship it justgets better and better as the years roll on so keep looking don't settle my third story is about death when i was17 i read a quote that went something likeif you live each day as if it was your last someday you'll most certainly be rightit made an impression on me and since then for the past 33 yearsi've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were the lastday of my life
what i want to do what i am about to dotoday and whenever the answer has been no fortoo many days in a row i know i need to change somethingremembering that all be dead soon is the most important tool i've everencountered to help me make the big choices in life because almosteverything all external expectations all pride all fear of embarrassment orfailure these things just fall away in the faceof death leaving only what is truly importantremembering that you are going to die is the best way i know to avoid the trap ofthinking you have something to lose
you are already naked there is no reasonnot to follow your heart about a year ago i was diagnosed withcancer i had a scan at seven thirty in themorning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas i didn't even know what a pancreas wasthe doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that isincurable and that i should expect to live no longer than three to six months my doctor advised me to go home and getmy affairs in order which is doctors code for prepare to die
it means to try and tell your kidseverything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a fewmonths it means to make sure everything isbuttoned up so that will be as easy as possible for your family it means to say your goodbyes i livewith that diagnosis all day later that evening i had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down mythroat through my stomach and into my intestines put a needle into my pancreasand got a few cells from the tumor i was sedated but my wife who was theretold me that when they view the cells
under a microscope the doctor startedcrying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer thatis curable with surgery i had the surgery and thankfully i'm fine now this was the closest i've been to facingdeath and i hope it's the closest i get for a few more decades having lived through it i can now saythis to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purelyintellectual concept no one wants to die even people who want to go to heavendon't want to die to get there
and yet death is the destination we allshare no one has ever escaped it and that isas it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of lifeits lights change agent it clears out the old to make way for the new rightnow the new is you but some day not too longfrom now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away sorry to be so dramatic but it's quitetrue your time is limited so don't waste itliving someone else's life don't be trapped by dogma which isliving with the results of other
people's thinking don't let the noise of others opinionsdrown out your own inner voice and most important have the courage to followyour heart and intuition they somehow already know what you truly want tobecome everything else is secondary when i was young there was an amazingpublication called the whole earth catalog which was one of the bible's ofmy generation it was created by a fellow named stewartbrand not far from here in menlo park and he brought it to life with hispoetic touch this was in the late sixties before personal computers anddesktop publishing
so it was all made with typewritersscissors and polaroid cameras it was sort of like google and paperbackform 35 years before google came along it was idealistic overflowing with metools and great notions stuart and his team put out severalissues of the whole earth catalog and then when it run its course they put outa final issue it was the mid-nineteen seventies and iwas your age on the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an earlymorning country road the kind you might find yourselfhitchhiking on if you were so adventurous beneath it were the words
stay hungry stay foolish it was theirfarewell message as they signed off stay hungry stay foolish and i've alwayswished that for myself and now as you graduate to begin a new i wish that foryou stay hungry stay foolish thank you allvery much i made this video because card games tvone asked me to so there's a famous entrepreneur thatyou want me to profile leave it in the comments below and we'll see what we cando thank you so much for watching continueto believe we i don't see you soon
