Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

The greatest entrepreneur speech ever:

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.

After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. 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 all 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 dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes,

I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. 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. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, 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.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

So at 30 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. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened 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.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. 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.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me 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.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

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. It is 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. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Steve Jobs,
Stanford University Commencement address,
June 2005

Steve Jobs’ Top 10 rules of thumb

Great entrepreneurs don’t use rule books, but they do use rules of thumb:

Rule books are fixed. Rules of thumb are flexible.
Rule books put you in a box. Rules of thumb point you on a path.
Rule books instruct you. Rules of thumb inspire you.

All the ingredients of fast-growing companies - Creativity, culture, talent, team and trust - grow with the guidance of the right rules of thumb.

Here’s Steve Jobs’ Top 10:

Rule 1 - “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Rule 2 - “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Rule 3 - “One of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.”

Rule 4 - “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

Rule 5 - “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

Rule 6 - “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

Rule 7 - “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Rule 8 - “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Rule 9 - “Overthinking leads to negative thoughts”

Rule 10 - “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

When you throw away the rule book, and write down your rules of thumb, you’re writing down your guiding principles. They give you a simple compass to follow instead of a complex map to remember. What are yours?

Keep at it, because you’re leading the world’s 5th wave of exponential economic growth

A message to entrepreneurs: Keep at it, because you’re leading the world’s 5th wave of exponential economic growth:

Up until 1780, world economic activity was relatively flat, with the Gross World Product (all economic value creation worldwide) under US$200 billion for over 5,000 years.

The world then went through exponential growth over 200 years from 1800 to 2000, doubling every 20 years, with Gross World Product growing from US$200 billion to $40 trillion.

The four waves of exponential growth have been:

1. The Industrial revolution
2. The race for oil
3. Corporate capitalism
4. Financial markets

Each wave grew and fell in power over around 50 years each.
Each wave led to a global transfer of wealth.
Each age changed all the rules.

In the 15 years from 2000 to 2015, despite a dotcom crash and global crisis, Gross World Product has doubled again, from $40 trillion to over $80 trillion - We continue to add value to each other at an accelerating rate.

What is this fifth wave we’re in now? Entrepreneurial start-ups.

The rules have changed again:

It’s no longer about economies of scale, but economies of speed.
It’s no longer about getting money but giving value.
Today collaboration beats competition.
Today David beats Goliath.

This wave has only just begun, and as with any wave, you can sink or swim.

Or you can take the entrepreneurial 3rd option, and surf.

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” ~ Chinese Proverb

 

Top 10 Commandments of Entrepreneurship

#1 - Don’t start a company for the money. Start a company for the mission and the money will follow.

#2 - Don’t think small and start big. Thing big and start small.

#3 - Don’t sell to people you don’t love, products they don’t need. Find people you love, and serve them what they need.

#4 - Don’t ask “how can I make money”. Ask “how can I help others make money”.

#5 - Don’t find a team to work for you. Find a team you want to work for.

#6 - Don’t ask “what to I need to do”. Ask “What do I need to help others to do.”

#7 - Don’t measure your wealth by quantity of money. Measure it by quality of time.

#8 - Don’t have an “exit strategy” where you win when you end. Have an “enter strategy” where you win when you begin.

#9 - Don’t set a goal to achieve a goal. Set a goal so you can be the person you need to be to achieve that goal.

#10 - Don’t climb mountains so the world can see you. Climb mountains so you can see the world.

“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Richard Branson’s Top 12 Tips for Entrepreneurs:

Richard Branson’s Top 12 Tips for Entrepreneurs:

This week, Richard is selling Virgin America to Alaska Airlines in a $2 billion deal - less than 10 years after he launched the airline. Even after selling it, he will still keep getting income by licensing the Virgin brand to the company.

This is yet another billion dollar deal that Richard’s Virgin Group has achieved while he spends eight months of the year on his Necker Island, where I’ve spent a few weeks with him over the last few years (here dressed as Pirates on his super-yacht, the Necker Belle).

What does it take to think more like Richard? Here’s my list of his Top 12 Tips that I’ve used - and recommend you use - to be a smarter entrepreneur:

Tip #1 - Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

Tip #2 - Three steps to success: Hire great talent, give them the tools to succeed, and get out of the way.

Tip #3 - Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.

Tip #4 - It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside. The brave may not live forever – But the cautious do not live at all.

Tip #5 - Have courage. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Tip #6 - I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

Tip #7 - You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over. One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

Tip #8 - There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy.

Tip #9 - Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I've done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin's success.

Tip #10 - If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!

Tip #11 - I have always believed that the only way to cope with a cash crisis is not to contract but to try to expand out of it.

Tip #12 - For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.

Which one or more of these could you start practicing today?

And to end, I’ll add my own tip to this list - take the time each year to connect with the role models who inspire you and, in the words of Richard, “Listen. It makes you sound smarter.”