STAY HUNGRY ,STAY FOOLISH
"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. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition."
Such a
great thought . Isn’t it! You may regard him as an entrepreneur but to me he
was a magician. Steve Jobs may have died 5 years
ago, but he seemed to have left nuggets of wisdom for us to discover.
Steve Jobs was a computer designer, executive and
innovator, as well as an all-around role model for many people in both their
businesses and their personal lives. As the cofounder of Apple Computers and
former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, he revolutionized the computer and
animation industries, amassing a fortune worth $10.2 billion at the time of his
death. Jobs passed away on Oct. 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, Calif., at age 56 after
battling pancreatic cancer for eight years.
Born in San Francisco, Jobs was adopted by an
encouraging and loving family. He developed an interest in computers and
engineering at a young age, inspired by his father's machinist job and love for
electronics. Growing up south of Palo Alto, Jobs was bright beyond compare —
his teachers wanted to skip him ahead several grades to high school, which his
parents declined. In high school, Jobs met his future partner, Steve Wozniak,
whom he bonded with over their love for electronics and computer chips.
After dropping out of college in the first semester,
Jobs explored his spiritual side while traveling in India. It was with this
spiritual enlightenment that Jobs' work ethic and simplistic view toward life
was developed.
Jobs
began his revolution at age 21, when he and Wozniak started Apple Computers in
the Jobs family garage. To fund their venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and
Wozniak sold his scientific calculator. This ended up being a good investment.
Prior to Apple's rise, computers were
massive, expensive, and not accessible by the everyday American. With Jobs
heading up marketing and Wozniak in charge of technical development, Apple sold
consumer-friendly machines that were smaller and cheaper, at only $666.66 each.
The Apple II was even more successful than the first model, and sales increased
by 700 percent. On its first day of being a publicly traded company in 1980,
Apple Computer had an estimated market value of $1.2 billion.
But this success was short-lived, even with the
praise for Jobs' latest design, the Macintosh. IBM was Apple's stiffest
competition, and they began to surpass Apple sales. After a falling out with
Apple's CEO, John Sculley, Jobs resigned in 1985 to follow his own interests.
He started a new software and hardware company, NeXT, Inc., and he invested in
a small animation company, Pixar Animation Studios.
Pixar
became wildly successful thanks to Jobs' tenacity and evolving management style.
"Toy Story," Pixar's first major success, took four years to make
while the then-unknown company struggled.
At the same time, Jobs knew that he had to be the
best leader possible to his teams. According to Jobs' work mantra and ethic,
innovation is what distinguishes a leader and a follower.
While
Pixar succeeded, NeXT, trying to sell its own operating system to American
consumers, floundered. Apple bought the company in 1997, and Jobs returned to
Apple as CEO. Working for an annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs revitalized
Apple, and under his leadership, the
company developed numerous innovative devices — the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes
and the iPad. They revolutionized mobile communications, music and even how
numerous industries, including retail and healthcare, carried out their
everyday business operations.
Jobs used his experiences, such as growing up in
the San Francisco area in the '60s and his world travel, to shape the way he
designed the products that made Apple synonymous with success. In 2004, Apple
announced that Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer. It was
this brush with death that helped Jobs focus his energy on developing the Apple
products that rose to such popularity in the 2000s. Though he was ill, it was
during this time that Apple launched some of its biggest (and successful)
creations. iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in America, the
MacBook Air revolutionized laptop computing, and the iPod and iPhone broke
sales records, while changing the way users consumed content and communicated
with each other.
Before his death, Jobs commissioned a $138 million
yacht, named Venus. Designed to be minimalist, much like Jobs' technological
creations, Venus offers structural walls of glass designed by the chief
engineer of the Apple stores.
Jobs, who once
memorably described death as "very likely the single best invention
of life",
departed this world with a lingering look at his family and the simple, if
mysterious, observation: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
“Here’s
to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs
in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of
rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the
only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push
the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see
genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the
world, are the ones who do.”
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