Find What You Love
“Don’t settle.”
Steve Jobs’ prescription to living a full, satisfying work life is simply stated: “You’ve got to find what you love.” That’s what he told Stanford graduates. He never worked just to make money; instead, he shaped a career.
It’s a working philosophy that others advocate, notably the late Joseph Campbell, who popularized the phrase “Follow your bliss.” As he explained, “There’s a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income.”1
In Jobs’ case, his hobby—dating back to high school—was electronics. As he told his official biographer, “My friends were the really smart kids. . . . I was interested in math and science and electronics.”2
The Great and Powerful Woz
Those interests led his friend Bill Fernandez to introduce him to another Steve—Steve “Woz” Wozniak, a fellow electronics geek. Woz recalled Bill telling him, “Hey, there’s someone you should meet. His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he’s also into building electronics like you are.”3
The difference between the two was that Jobs was a hobbyist compared to Wozniak, an electronics wizard who knew he was “meant to be an engineer who designs computers, an engineer who writes software . . . and an engineer who teaches other people things.”4
Woz recalls, “Steve [Jobs] didn’t ever code. He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs.”5
So what was Jobs’ calling?
Jobs was a visionary who, like Walt Disney, envisioned the big picture to make things happen. Disney, in an observation that Steve Jobs might have made himself, said:
I’m just very curious—got to find out what makes things tick—and I’ve always liked working with my hands; my father was a carpenter. I even apprenticed to my own machine shop here and learned the trade. Since my outlook and attitudes are ingrained throughout our organization, all our people have this curiosity; it keeps us moving forward, exploring, experimenting, opening new doors.6
A Productive Life
Steve Jobs’ career spanned thirty-four years. It formally began when incorporation papers were filed for Apple Computer on January 3, 1977 and ended on August 24, 2011, when Jobs hand-delivered a letter to the Apple board of directors stating that he was immediately stepping down as its CEO, albeit reluctantly.
During that long trip, Jobs’ passion carried him through the good times and the bad times; the ups and downs in business cycles characteristic of business life.
What fueled Jobs was the pleasure he had in creating great consumer products—not merely making money. When asked by an interviewer “What’s it like to be rich?” Jobs responded, “It wasn’t that important, because I didn’t do it for the money.”7
A Wasted Life
Jobs didn’t want to live what Joseph Campbell called a “Waste Land” life. Campbell said:
[My impression] is that the majority of my friends are living Waste Land lives. In teaching, you have [students] who haven’t come into the Waste Land yet. They’re at the point of making the decision whether they’re going to follow the way of their own zeal—the star that’s dawned for them—or do what daddy and mother and friends want them to do.8
Campbell’s observation enjoys renewed currency today, because of the emphasis placed on college students to find a practical major, such as accounting, math, computer science, or the sciences in general.
In today’s tight job market, and with the high cost of college tuition, does it make economic sense for students to “follow the way of their own zeal”—or are they best advised to be practical and get a well-paying job?
Had Jobs followed conventional wisdom to travel a well-trod road to success, would we have ever seen the fruits of his creative labor? Unlikely.
An artist with a positive genius as a business visionary, Edwin Land of Polaroid believed that his company had to stand at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Jobs, who ensured that Apple had a similar ethos, said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”9
Knowledge versus Imagination
As Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Case in point: Knowledge gave us MS-DOS, Microsoft’s operating system, but imagination gave us Apple’s intuitive Mac OS, which was possible only when Jobs made an intuitive leap after seeing a computer demonstration at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Recognizing a good idea when he saw it, Bill Gates copied Mac’s graphical user interface to create Windows, which was better than MS-DOS, but clearly inferior to Mac’s elegant interface. But it was Jobs who recognized the importance of the GUI when he first saw it at PARC. Later he said on PBS: “The germ of the idea was there, and they did it very well. Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. You couldn’t argue about its inevitability, it was so obvious.”10
“Talent,” wrote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see.”11
Simply put, Jobs was a business genius.
Pixar
Most people know about Steve Jobs’ lifelong interest in
computers—the Apple II, the Mac, and the family of “i” products,12 such as iMac, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad—but far fewer know the story behind his involvement in Pixar, which clearly spoke to his belief that you had to love your work because you’re going to spend a lifetime doing it, and you may as well enjoy it instead of simply enduring it.
Lucasfilm’s Computer Division would prove to be a dark horse, one that George Lucas was looking to put out to pasture. Faced with a costly divorce from his wife, Marcia, Lucas had no interest in funding a fledgling operation whose not-so-hidden agenda was to create full-length computer-animated motion pictures. Lucas recalled, “I couldn’t really start another film company—I was already in the middle of one. We just didn’t have the resources to try to put together an operation like that.”13
Lucas put Lucasfilm on the market in 1985 and asked for $15 million, which Jobs felt was too high, so he waited Lucas out. Needing cash, Lucas sold it to Jobs for $5 million. Jobs immediately put in another $5 million for operating capital and eventually sank $55 million into the company between 1986 and 1991.
Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull said that Jobs “saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films.”14
Jobs was in it for the long haul. He had tried unsuccessfully to get Apple to buy the company earlier, because of its graphics capabilities, but Apple wasn’t interested. So he made the investment himself.
In November 1995, nearly ten years after he bought the company, Pixar released Toy Story—the world’s first computer-animated feature-length film.
Computer scientist Alan Kay was the person who suggested that Jobs buy the Lucasfilm computer division.15 He was pleased Jobs took his advice, and observed: “Steve just hung in there and hung in there and hung in there until they got into the sweet spot where everything that they knew suddenly was applicable in a way that made commercial sense.”16
A practical businessman would have cut his losses long before the ten-year mark, and even Jobs had second thoughts: “There were even a few times where I thought about selling it or getting another investor in. I got married, and my wife, Laurene, and I had started a family. When you’re raising a family, you realize that at some point you’ve got to be sensible.”17
But in the end, Jobs’ persistence paid off. He stayed the course, and Toy Story went on to become a critical and financial success, grossing $361 million worldwide. It spawned two moneymaking sequels: Toy Story 2 ($485 million worldwide gross) and Toy Story 3 ($1 billion worldwide gross).
Apple, Inc. made Jobs a multimillionaire, but Pixar made him a billionaire. He sold the company in 2006 to Disney in exchange for stock, and with 50.1 percent, he became the company’s largest stockholder. As reported on CNET.com:
Jobs said Pixar’s main choices came down to selling out to Disney or working with another studio under a deal like Lucasfilm has with Twentieth Century Fox, in which the larger studio gets only a distribution fee. The latter option was somewhat attractive, Jobs said, but would still result in an arrangement with “two companies with two separate sets of shareholders and two different agendas.”
Disney is the only company with animation in their DNA, and the only company that we think has this incredible collection of unique assets like the theme parks, that are very attractive to us as well,” Jobs said on a conference call with investors. “They’re the only company who has Bob Iger, who we like a lot and have grown to trust.”18
In an introduction to an official history of Pixar, Jobs wrote: “It’s a great gift to be able to support yourself doing work that you love, and all of us have been honored to see our characters and stories find a place in the world outside our studio.”19
Find the work that you love—and then relentlessly pursue it. That’s where you will find your fortune.