“You Have to Trust Your Intiotion ” by Steve Jobs
After I read this book I sat half an hour just thinking about it. And I would recommend everybody to read it. It is timeless, simple and has several powerful messages. It blew my mind (not literally).
The book is actually a speech held by Steve Jobs at Stanford University the 12th of June 2005. It was the day when hundreds of Stanford’s students should graduate. Steve Jobs is the founder of Apple and was part of creating Silicon Valley.
In his speech he doesn’t choose to talk about business, marketing and entrepreneurship. No, he chooses to talk about his life and three important lessons it has taught him.
“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories”
The first story starts with his birth, the second is about him being an adult and the last about his near death experience.
1st Learning: “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.”
As a newborn, Steve was put up for adoption. His biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student. She wanted him to be adopted by college graduates. But it turned out that Steve’s adoptive parents had never graduated from college, and they had to promise that Steve would someday go to college. So his parents saved every penny for his college tuition. Luckily, Steve didn’t let it influence his decision to drop out of college:
“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 work out OK. 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 to drop in on the ones that looked interesting.”
Steve started following his interests. While some things were better, he also talks about sleeping on the dorm room floor of friends and walking to the Hare Krishna temple to get one good meal a week. Which is another way to say that sometimes you have to offer yourself or work hard to be okay in the future. It wasn’t comfortable, but now he had the time to follow his curiosity and intuition.
It’s not easy to be indifferent about what others expect of you. Just imagine yourself quitting school, work, or contact with a friend or family member. This takes confidence and courage but may also lead to an open door. He tells a story about taking a calligraphy class, which ten years later helped him design the typography of the Mac.
“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.”
If he hadn’t followed his intuition, he wouldn’t have had the time back then to start following his interests and slowly building Mac. Everything he needed to offer as a student, he later won twice. In ten years, he went from being an entrepreneur working in a garage to being the owner of a million-dollar business. And it’s not about the million dollars, but it’s about listening to your gut and taking action from the feeling to get better. And that could be little things such as some unspoken problems or being uncertain whether to quit or start something new, or learning a skill you’ve always wanted. It may be frightening, but eventually it will feel better. And if your intuition is wrong at least you’re smarter now and it has helped you to grow. If you don’t try to do what feels right, you never know…
2nd Learning: “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don´t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only things 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 Apple grew bigger and bigger, Steve and his mate decided to hire someone to run the company with Steve. Through time, their visions grew apart, and there had to be a decision about who should run the company. The board of directors sided with the other one.
“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… But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did.”
And so he decided to start over and created a company named NeXT and another one named Pixar. And he found the love of his life.
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever happen 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.”
At first, everything seems to be working against us—but also just at first. Steve lost something, but he found even greater things. Steve still loved what he did. He didn’t let the loss change who he was.
Sometimes we need to listen to our intuition when making decisions. Other times, we need a setback to get on the right path, even though it may seem hopeless at the beginning. Another lesson he gives in his second story is:
“Don’t settle.”
A lot of people associate work as a trade-off with money. Money they have to earn to pay the rent, food, and other bills. Just imagine work being something you want to do as much as meeting your best friend or spending time with your family. This mindset is very hard to reach if society and the school system teach us otherwise.
As students, we get a lot of pressure to adapt. Public schools were founded during industrialism and were designed to support the factory culture. We’re set into classrooms where we have to be a homogeneous group that fits into the same structures, time schedules, rules, and areas of knowledge. We’re all taught the same. To be alike is better than to be diverse. But the problem is no one is 100% alike. We’re all different. From childhood, we’re set to be submissive adults who are not able to listen to their own intuition.
If you were asked, “Who are you, and what’s important to you?” – What would your answer be?
Therefore, Steve Jobs says:“Don’t settle.”
Make your own decisions. Don’t do what you’re told to do because there’s a chance that what you’re told isn’t what you want or love to do. It is important to take responsibility for your life. Don’t live your life to satisfy anybody other than yourself and what feels right for you.
“It is crucial to get closer to the fire that heats us; otherwise, our bodies—and especially our hearts—will end up being ice cold.”
3rd Learning:
“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.”
Or, like Siddhartha Gautama aka Buddha said:
“When people see someone who is aged, they should think: ‘I, too, am subject to aging; I have not gone beyond aging.’ When people see someone who is sick, they should think: ‘I, too, am subject to illness; I have not gone beyond illness.’ When people see someone who has died, they should think: ‘I, too, am subject to death; I have not gone beyond death.’”
Have you ever asked yourself why you live now? Why are you the person you are right now? You can choose to see it as a coincidence and treat life as something that comes to you. Or you can let your life be meaningful. Choose to take responsibility for why you’re here and who you are/become.
The universe has given you this time slot. So why not use it to live a life that feels right? Your life. Of course, we can’t control everything that comes into our lives, but we can control how we react to it and what we do next. Steve Jobs’ point with this book is to say:
“Your life 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 the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
And he ends his book with:
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
If someday you are in doubt or feel stuck in society’s structures, which prevent you from growing, and when you hear voices wanting you to shut you up, stay hungry. Stay foolish. Dance, sing, and follow your joy. It’s your life you’re constructing.
