Love your Jobs

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple computer, gave the Commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.

The title of the text of his speech on the Stanford news website is: “You’ve got to find what you love.” Jobs shared 3 stories with the graduates: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death.

He felt he was lucky to find what he loved early in life — working on computers. Yet he was fired from Apple just one year after creating the Macintosh.

Demonstrating a high level of resilience, he said…”I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replace by the lightness of being a beginner again.”

Here is a little more from Jobs on love and loss:

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.

Do you love leadership?

Will your love sustain you and enhance your resilience when you encounter the inevitable bumps, falls, and bruises in leading?

I encourage you to click here to read Steve Jobs entire Commencement address. Learn how Jobs connected the dots and responded to his personal death threat with cancer. Share this speech with a new graduate or leader. This may prove to be a bigger gift to them than an iPod nano.

Steve Jobs concluded his address with the words from the back cover of the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog: