At the risk of contributing to the Steve Jobs information overload, I want to pass along this post on Forbes.com from contributor Eric Jackson: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/10/05/the-top-ten-lessons-steve-jobs-taught-us/
It’s worth a quick read and nicely condenses the lessons all entrepreneurs and business owners can learn from Steve Jobs and his incredible life and career. It quotes extensively from Jobs’ now-famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech, http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/ which is also worth reading if you haven’t already done so.
My favorite lesson from that speech is this: You can’t connect the dots forward, only backward. Most of us would like to meticulously plan our futures through a series of well-thought out pathways, but in reality, life throws us lots of curve balls. By trusting your instincts, doing what you love and following your "inner voice," you can forge a successful future in spite of those curve balls.
Another lesson is that
to achieve success, you cannot fear failure. Steve Jobs was publicly ousted by the company he started.
He dealt with the humiliation and disappointment by continuing to follow his passions and taking chances.
Connecting those dots backwards, he later realized 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…It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
Jobs apparently didn’t even fear death. Jackson’s post quotes again from the Stanford commencement speech, where he so eloquently said:
“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 undefined 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.”
Words of wisdom indeed!