Learning from the legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
“If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” That quote made Steve Jobs focus on what he loved to do.
Jobs, co-founder of Apple and founder of Pixar Animation Studios (think Toy Story), died last week of pancreatic cancer.
In June 2005, he addressed graduating students at Stanford University (Palo Alto, California, USA). He referred to discovering the quote and said, “Since then, for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror and asked myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m 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.”
This has been his guiding philosophy through a life of highs and lows. He went from working in a garage at 20 to leading a $US2 billion organisation with 4000 employees at 30. Then he was sacked—it was public and highly humiliating.
But it led to “the most creative period of my life.” That’s when he started another computer company, NeXT, and Pixar.
“Sometimes life is going to hit 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.”
Apple bought out NeXT and called Jobs back as chief executive officer to turn a then-failing company around.
By the time of his graduation address, he’d had surgery for pancreatic cancer. Death had become more than a “useful but purely intellectual concept.” “Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
And to help us know how to live before we die.
Tags: Bruce Manners