Steve Jobs On Being Laid Off
[From his Stanford Commencement address]
My second story is about love and loss.
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 had just 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 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 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 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 retuned 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.
::
And to help you look for your own path, here’s Entrepreneur Journeys (Volume One) designed to be a scalable mentoring device for entrepreneurs and aspiring ones.
I have only one word about this post: thanks! I’m about to undertake some big changes in my life, the kind of change that makes your stomach uneasy, and it’s always a good idea to drink from “the pool of experiences” when feeling doubtful. Although people like Steve Jobs seem millions of ligh years away from regular mortals such as myself, I fell a little braver after reading about their successes and failures.
Good luck Federico, you can do it. If it is a mistake you will know soon enough, I bet. It is possible for us to make an uncomfortable change and survive… even thrive. I am a regular working level guy (unlike Steve Jobs), and although I am not comfortable yet, I would not trade what I have learned from jumping ship into an entrepreneurial experience for any degree of comfort or complacency. Frankly, we in the US are all living in a bubble, or are too complacent anyway… so go ahead and drink the kool-aid, however unsettling it is at first!
Inspiring words.
But Mr. Jobs forgot to tell us that when he had been laid off… he was already a multi-million dollars man.
Life’s challenges take a different perspective when you have a fat wallet.
Simone, True, but it is very difficult for people who are successful in one thing to quit their safe, proven platform and start over. That’s the phenomenon that Jobs describes here.
Now, the population of technology professionals who are facing difficult times today may not have the “fat wallet” that Jobs did, but the psychology is the same. They had a monthly paycheck coming into their bank account, and the security of that is what they could not abandon.
But if you get fired, the security is gone. You can start with a blank slate. No?
Really good piece ! I am inspired… That’s why people always says “Love what you do or do what you love”.
Nishant
[...] Steve Jobs On Being Laid Off From his Stanford Commencement address. (tags: career personal b) [...]
Nice post… Keep writing.
Gets even worse (I guess) when you:
1) have a fat wallet
2)are a public figure.
expectations arise from not only oneself but from people around you
.
Cheers..
[...] Listen to what Steve Jobs has to say about being laid off from Apple: “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.” (You can read more from Jobs here.) [...]
Excellent post. I have just decided to jump from a very secure corporate executive life of over 20+ years into the unknown world of being an entrepreneur and the last 4 weeks have been the most exhilarating time that I have had for a long time. I am learning something new quite like my start as a software engineer in my early days. I know I will be successful and this article is a true inspiration. Thank you, Sramana.
[...] I happened to read this post at Sramana Mitra’s blog – http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/11/16/steve-jobs-on-being-laid-off/ [...]
With lay offs left and right, all of us need jobs. This is a very helpful post. Great article!
i dont understand how one can be fired from their own company…. wouldnt he have rights? like someone cant kick you out of your own house… you own the house.. your names on it…