Steve Jobs - Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steven Paul Jobs the co founder and CEO of Apple, an idealistic figure in the computer and entertainment industries is known to have had a meager beginning in life. Quite surprisingly Jobs is a College dropout. He continued in Reed college for six months and dropped-in for a calligraphy course for another eighteen months, before he finally quit.

There were some unavoidable reasons contributing to his drop out. He was born to an unwed graduate student who decided to put him up for adoption. His adopters – father had never graduated from high school and mother never graduated from college. Jobs biological mother signed the adoption papers only after his parents promised to send him to college.

Jobs did get into Reed College seventeen years later, however just after six months Steve lost interest in it. He was all but dubious about what he wanted of his life. He was also spending all his parents’ money that they had saved their entire life. Steve realized that there could be no better way than to drop out, with the hope that everything would work well. This decision proved to be a boon in disguise for him. Steve could now concentrate on the classes that interested him.

Life wasn’t easier for him now. He had lost his room and had to sleep on the floor in a friend’s room. He had to return Coke bottles for five cents deposits to earn his food. Every Sunday he walked seven miles to have a good meal at the Hare Krishna temple. He carried on with his intuitions and curiosity that turned out to be valuable assets later on.

His instincts were of great help in future. For instance, after dropping out Steve pursued a course of calligraphy in Reed College which was known to offer the best calligraphy instruction. He was fascinated with the historical, beautiful, artistically subtle serif and sans-serif typefaces. This learning had no applications in his life until after ten years when he was designing the first Macintosh computer, it came back to him. He designed multiple typefaces with proportionally spaced fonts for Mac. Thus it was the first computer with attractive fonts.

It is hard to predict the future, however Steve weighs instincts on trust. According to him,

“You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever”.

He feels once the assets in past are realized, confidence to follow the heart would automatically grow and this would generate a great difference.

A significant part of Steve’s life confronts love and loss. At twenty he stared Apple with Steve Wozniak in his parents’ garage. They worked hard to take Apple to new heights. However, to much wonder and awe, Jobs got fired; he had just turned thirty. Loosing to a power struggle with the Board of Directors, Jobs resigned from Apple.

He was out and out very publicly. The entire focus of his adult life had been choked and it was devastating for him. He realized that he was a public failure and thought of leaving the Valley. Still there was his love that drew him back. He still loved his work.

Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to Jobs. He was a beginner again - free to indulge into one of his most creative periods in life. The next five years were great moments in his life. He founded a computer platform development company NeXT. He ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection which was reflected in the NeXT Cube’s magnesium case. Soon he founded another company named Pixar, which shares the credit of creating world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and continues to be a successful animation studio in the world.

With the turn of events Apple bought NeXT and Jobs made a remarkable comeback with a technology developed at NeXT that served as the core of Apple’s current renovation. Steve realized that such hard-hits are required to bring out the best. He never lost faith for he did what he loved.

One of the execrable lows in Steve’s life has been the moment of realization that he was on the verge of death. He was suffering from a tumor in the pancreas. The doctors told him that he should expect to live no longer than three to six months. It was the time to button up things to make it easy for his family. It was his closest experience to facing death.

Once in his commencement speech at Stanford he described his feelings of those moments of death -

“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.”

In his inspiring speech Steve added:

“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, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

His journey to the heights resembles an adventurer on a country road struggling with hitch-hikings, Whatever comes his way. Steve’s philosophy of life seems decipherable in the words

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

Watch Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

How do you feel about Steve Jobs? You Love Him Or You Hate Him?