Steve Jobs: Advice For Young People

Unleashing the Genius Within

Author

Galt Inspired
July 12, 2024

Steve Jobs sitting in his home in California

Steve Jobs sitting in his home in California

Thank you for joining our first-ever newsletter from Galt Inspired!

We’re excited to launch this bi-weekly journey with you, packed with advice from successful entrepreneurs and insights from our own team. As fellow entrepreneurs building mobile apps and digital solutions for businesses around the world, we understand the challenges and triumphs you face. Our goal is to share motivational and inspiring thoughts to help you grow alongside us.

In this newsletter, you can expect to find practical advice, valuable lessons, and life hacks tailored for entrepreneurs. To kick things off, we’re drawing inspiration from one of the greatest minds of our generation, Steve Jobs.

Below, you'll find advice and lessons from Jobs that we believe will resonate with you.

We hope you enjoy this first edition and find it valuable. Don't forget to share it with others who might benefit from this kind of information.

Let’s dive into it!

Steve Jobs: Advice For Young People

Don't be a career.

The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the "Career." A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life.

There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can't be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one's life.

The risk factor quotient goes down as you encounter the real world.

Many people find what they believe to be safe harbors (lawyers and accountants), only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the price they paid.

Make what you love your work. The journey is the reward.

People think that you've made it when you've gotten to the end of the rainbow and got the pot of gold. But they're wrong. The reward is in the crossing the rainbow. That's easy for me to say-I got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get to the pot of gold, you already know that that's not the reward, and you go looking for another rainbow to cross.

Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world.

You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. The two endpoints of everyone's rainbow are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone. And yet, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, much less even seen them in others. For me it's the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.

Steve Jobs on his strengths and weaknesses:

My strength probably is that I've always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I've always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields. An example of that would be-with the Macintosh-desktop publishing: its proportionately spaced fonts, its ease of use. All of the desktop publishing stuff on the Mac comes from books: the typography, that rich feel that nobody in computers knew anything about.

I think that my other strength is that I'm a pretty good judge of people and have the ability to bring people together around common vision. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I'm not smart enough to have ever found any.

In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I'm too idealistic. I need to realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for "best" when I should go for "better," and end up going nowhere or backwards. I'm not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better.

In the end, it's the environment you create, the coworkers, and the work that binds. The Macintosh team, if you talk to most of them-a dozen years since we shipped the product-most will still say that working on the Mac was the most meaningful experience of their lives.

That's why it's so important to pick very important things to do because it's very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal. It takes something that's worth doing.

Thank you for reading our first newsletter!

We hope Steve Jobs' wisdom has inspired and motivated you. As we continue this journey together, we look forward to bringing you more insights and tips from successful entrepreneurs and our own experiences.

Stay tuned for our next edition, where we'll delve into more entrepreneurial wisdom and practical advice. Remember, your growth is our mission. Keep pushing boundaries, stay inspired, and let's achieve greatness together.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with your network. Your feedback and support mean the world to us. Until next time, keep innovating and striving for success!

Warm regards,
galt.inspired