World Changers

“I think you’re bad for Apple and I think you’re the wrong person to run this company. You really should leave this company. I’m more worried about Apple than I have ever been. I’m afraid of you. You don’t know how to operate and never have.”

The words came out of Steve Jobs’s mouth slowly, almost quietly, in a tense but controlled voice. It was May 24, 1985, and the most celebrated entrepreneur of our time was addressing his handpicked CEO, John Sculley, in the company’s boardroom at an executive staff meeting.

With the enthusiastic encouragement of the board of directors, Jobs had brought Sculley into Apple two years earlier from PepsiCo, where he had been president. But the partnership that had been heralded in the media as “The Dynamic Duo” had fallen apart.

“John,” Jobs went on, getting more wound up, “you manage by monologue! You have no understanding of the product development process. You don’t know how manufacturing works. You’re not close to the computer. The middle managers don’t respect you. In the first year, you helped build the company, but in the second, you hurt the company.”

For Jobs, it was the beginning of the end. His attempt to turn the company’s executives and then the board against Sculley backfired. Instead, they backed the man who had become his adversary and supported the decision to remove Jobs from his day-to-day management role. Jobs would be relegated to the position of chairman, moved out of his office into a different building, to work on “new product innovations and strategies.” Within four months, Jobs would resign.

What happened to Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s is every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare. The company you pour your best sweat, blood, and tears into is stolen from you because the “professional manager” recruited to help build your organization wants you out—or perhaps the investors you counted on for vital capital in the early days believe the company has grown beyond your ability to manage it.

It has been said that it is easy to do anything in victory. It’s only in defeat that a man reveals himself. Pushed aside in his own company, Jobs understandably showed himself to be a highly bitter person, but also a remarkably resilient one who threw himself into his work.

At the time, a devastated Jobs told an interviewer: “I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I had spent ten years working for, starting with me, but that wasn’t the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple had turned out how I wanted it to. I feel like somebody punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I am only thirty years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things.”

From the sidelines, at other companies he formed from NeXT Computer to Pixar Animation, he watched as Apple fell apart. “What ruined Apple wasn’t growth,” Jobs said. “What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple, and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones, and then collectively paid themselves tens of millions of dollars. [They] cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place—which was making great computers for people to use.”

Yet Jobs’s departure from Apple in 1985 set the stage for one of the most unlikely comebacks in the history of business. The arc of this narrative ranks with any story ever put to paper by Shakespeare. It is literally the stuff of dreams, an entrepreneurial journey that is as improbable as the sun setting in the east.

It would take eleven years before Jobs would return, years in which a long accumulation of bad decisions by a succession of chief executives would nearly bankrupt the company. It was only when Apple barely had a pulse left that Jobs was invited back as interim chief executive in 1996.

“It was on the rocks,” recalls Jobs. “Apple was about ninety days from going bankrupt back then. It was much worse than I thought when I went back. I expected that all the good people would have left. But I found these miraculous people there, these great people. I tried to ask this as tactfully as I could: ‘Why are you still here?’ A lot of them had this little phrase. They said, ‘Because I bleed in six colors.’ Which was the old six-color Apple logo. That was code for ‘I loved what this place stood for.’ That just made all of us want to work that much harder to have it survive and bring it back.”

The rest is, as they say, history—and very public history at that: the reemergence of the Mac in both desktop and laptop forms, the unprecedented successful launches of the Apple retail store, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Apple has gone from a floundering enterprise losing $1 billion a year to one of the most profitable, admired, and most valuable corporations in the world, with more than $100 billion in annual revenue.

Steve Jobs, meantime, has become the quintessential American entrepreneur, worshipped all over the world as a visionary, a genius, and a business savior. He had been worth over $1 million when he was twenty-three; over $10 million when he was twenty-four; and over $100 million when he was twenty-five and said it really didn’t matter to him at all. Now Jobs, who works as chairman for only $1 a year at Apple, is worth more than $8 billion. In August of 2011, Jobs shocked the world when at the age of fifty-six he resigned his role as CEO after years of health problems. He had been diagnosed in 2004 with pancreatic cancer, which later spread to his liver and required a liver transplant. Though Jobs did not elaborate on his reasons for stepping down, many worried that his health had taken a turn for the worse. “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” Jobs wrote in his resignation letter to the board of directors. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

For Jobs, it has been a long and endlessly fascinating journey. A child of the sixties, he vividly recalls spending restless nights, tossing and turning, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. “I was afraid that if I went to sleep I wouldn’t wake up,” he said. And he clearly remembers walking across the grass of his schoolyard in Mountain View, California, all of eight years old, when he heard someone shout that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed.

His father Paul, a machinist who never graduated from high school, sectioned off a portion of his workbench in the garage to allow his son to tinker with things. But it was a Hewlett-Packard engineer who lived just a few houses down the street who eventually turned Jobs on to electronics. Jobs would eventually work as a summer employee for Hewlett-Packard, where he would meet the geeky but tech-savvy Steve Wozniak, who would later become the cofounder of Apple. Jobs was just sixteen years old at the time; Wozniak was twenty-one.

In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but quit after just one semester. He stayed a bit longer, however, auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in the apartments of friends, returning Coke bottles for food money, and going to the local Hare Krishna temple for free meals. In the fall of 1974, Jobs returned to California, landed a job as a technician at video games maker Atari, and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak.

It wasn’t until 1976 that the pair founded Apple based on a crude personal computer mashed together by Wozniak. They previewed the hand-built machine at the Homebrew Club in May of that year and quickly landed an order for fifty of them from the owner of a local computer store who agreed to pay $500 for each machine.

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out 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 someday go to college.

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 of 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 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. 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, 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 ten 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 this 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 backward ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Part of what made the Macintosh great was the people who were working on it were musicians, poets, artists, historians, zoologists, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

My model for business is the Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person; they are done by a team of people.

One might sometimes say in despair no, but I think yes. And the reason is because human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true. I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young. It didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We’re not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We’re dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

One of the things that happens in organizations as well as with people is that they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with things and the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises but these people who are settled in don’t see it. That’s what gives start-up companies their greatest advantage. The sedentary point of view is that of most large companies. In addition to that, large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions.

There may be people at lower levels of the company that see these changes coming, but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it, it sometimes takes ten years. Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow. I mean IBM and the personal computer business is a good example of that. I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a worldview, after a while there will always be opportunity for young companies (and) young people to innovate. As it should be.

A lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur.” And I go, “Oh, that’s great, what’s your idea?” And they say, “I don’t have one yet.” And I say, “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work.” I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.

It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen-hour day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to 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. I think that’s half the battle right there.

Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you that there is 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 are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And there is a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too. What you’ll find is that our products are not premium priced. Go out and price our competitors’ products and add the products you have to add to make them useful and you’ll find in some cases they are more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products.

We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my ten years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple’s retail stores]. But we never hire consultants per se. We just want to make great products.

When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had plans to redefine the music industry. I mean, it just seemed like writing on the wall, that eventually all music would be distributed electronically. That seemed obvious because why have the cost? The music industry has huge returns. Why have all this [overhead] when you can just send electrons around easily?

When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe five thousand-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the metadata.

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 twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over four thousand employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. 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 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. So at thirty 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 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 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 to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five 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, 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 hits 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 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. 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 until you find it. Don’t settle.

When I was seventeen, 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 thirty-three 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.

[In 2004] I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at seven thirty 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 to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten 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 good-byes.

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 doctors 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 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 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.