STEVE JOBS: TOP 10 RULES OF SUCCESS

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Stephany Jennings
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STEVE JOBS: TOP 10 RULES OF SUCCESS 1. DON T LIVE A LIMITED LIFE. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

1 STEVE JOBS: TOP 10 RULES OF SUCCESS 1. DON T LIVE A LIMITED LIFE. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. 2. HAVE PASSION. If you don t love what you do, how will you find the motivation to persevere when things (inevitably) get tough? If you re not having fun doing it, you re gonna give up. That s what happens to most people.

2 3. DESIGN FOR YOURSELF. The two people it was designed for was Woz and myself, because we couldn t afford to buy a computer kit on the market we showed some of our friends and immediately everyone wanted one. gradually the whole thing began to build momentum. At that point in time we had some feeling that we were on to something, but the feeling is so different than the experience of actually seeing it happen right now. It s entirely different. Sometimes people ask if we knew it would mushroom into this phenomenon, and you could say yeah we planned it out but it s different than seeing the experience of 500 people working at Apple computers, it s very different than the experience of seeing a 5 year old kid who really understands the tool he s got in front of him 4. DON T SELL CRAP. When speaking to Mark Parker, President & CEO at Nike, Jobs offered Mark some advice: Nike makes some of the best products in the world but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.

3 5. BUILD A GREAT TEAM. I consider the most important job of someone like myself, is recruiting. The greatest people are self-managing. They don t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they ll go figure out how to do it. What they need is a common vision. And that s what leadership is. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that, so the people around you can understand it and getting a consensus on a common vision. At Apple, they wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but those who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion, the latest understanding of where technology was, what we could do with that technology, and wanted to bring that to lots of people. When you get a core group of ten great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. When Apple hired professional management, it didn t work for them at all because they knew how to manage but they didn t know how to do anything! If you re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can t learn anything from? The best managers are the great individual contributors who never ever wanna be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good of a job as them.

4 6. DON T DO IT FOR THE MONEY. I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23, over 10 million dollars when I was 24, and over 100 million dollars when I was 25 and it wasn t that important, because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things, it enables you to invest in ideas that don t have a shortterm payback but especially at that point in my life it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were gonna enable people to do with these products. 7. BE PROUD OF YOUR PRODUCTS. Our goal is to make products we re proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. There are thresholds that we can t cross because of who we are. We don t offer stripped down, lousy products. We don t offer categories of products like that. If you move those aside and compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty favorably. 8. BUILD AROUND CUSTOMERS. You ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can t start with the technology and try to figure out where you re gonna try to sell it. When coming up with a strategy and vision for Apple, it started with what benefits can we give to the customer, where can we take the customer? Not starting with: let s sit down with the

5 engineers, figure out what awesome technology we have and how we re gonna market that. some mistakes will be made along the way and that s good! Because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we ll find the mistakes, we ll fix them. 9. MARKETING IS ABOUT VALUES. This is a very complicated world. It s a very noisy world. And we re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us. Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it s going to retain its relevance and vitality. The dairy industry, for over 20 years, tried to convince the world that milk was good for you and the sales decreased. Then they changed their marketing to Got Milk? and their sales went up. In Nike s ads, they don t ever talk about the product. They don t ever tell you about their air soles and why they re better than Reebok. In their advertising, they honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That s who they are. That s what they re about. When working on their advertising strategy, they approached it by recognizing: Our customers want to know who is Apple and what it is we stand for. Where do we fit into this world? Apple s core value is not that they make the best boxes. It s that they believe that people with passion can change the world for the better and that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world for the better, are the ones that actually do.

6 10. STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH. Steve dropped out of college, having no idea what he wanted to do with his life, but trusting that it would all work out. He still attended classes this time, those that interested him. Much of what I stumbled into, following my curiosity and intuition, turned out to be priceless later one. For example, he took calligraphy classes, without there being any hope of any practical application. Yet 10 years later, when designing the first Macintosh computer, all that learning was put to use. You can t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connecting them looking backwards. 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, because believing the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even if it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference. 10 years after creating Apple, Steve Jobs was fired from the very company he started. What had been the entire focus of his adult life, was gone. Considering many alternatives, including running away from the valley, something dawned on him he still loved what he did. Once he left Apple, as a public failure, he decided to start over. He realized that the heaviness of being successful replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again freed [him] to enter one of the most creative periods of [his] life. Being no longer involved with Apple, over the next 5 years, he started Next, Pixar, got married, and created the world s first computer animated feature film. Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick, don t lose faith. I m convinced that the only that kept me going, was that I loved what I did. You ve got to find what you love. That is as true for work, as it is for lovers.

7 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. And 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. Don t settle. When Steve was 17, he read a quote that made an impression on him: If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you ll most certainly be right. Since then, Steve has looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do, what I am about to do today? Whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, he knows he has to change something. Remembering that he would die soon, is the most important tool [he s] ever encountered to help [him] make the big choices in life, because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 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. Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that s how it should be because death is the very best invention of life. It s life s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old, and be cleared away.

8 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 other s opinion drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know, what you truly want to become. Everything else, is secondary. Stay hungry. Stay foolish I have always wished that for myself. And now I wish that for you. Stay Hungry: - Stay ambitious. Don t get comfortable with your first success. Keep your passion alive. Continue challenging yourself even after you succeed. Don t become satisfied. Remember that good is the enemy of great. Never stop learning. Always look out for the next big thing. Don t become a standstill in a world that is always moving. Stay Foolish: - Take risks. Don t listen to those who say to play it safe, follow the traditional road, etc. Dropping out college is considered foolish. Yet where would our world be without some of those who did drop out? When you don t acknowledge the limit, then you have no limit. Challenge the status quo. Be crazy enough to think that you can change the world because those are the ones who do. Click here for more FREE Top 10 Rules of Success PDF downloads. (Including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, Oprah Winfrey, and more ) Click here to watch the full video on YouTube.* *Special thanks to Evan Carmichael for creating these valuable videos.

If you don t build your dreams, someone will hire you to help build theirs. Tony Gaskin

If you don t build your dreams, someone will hire you to help build theirs. Tony Gaskin This is just one author s point of view on her Rules to Live By THE BLOG 06/17/2014 05:57 pm ET Updated Aug 17, 2014 10 Rules to Live By By Mo Seetubtim RULE 1: FOLLOW YOUR HEART Your time is limited,