Why Getting Fired Was the Best Thing for Steve Jobs

You may think you know everything about the failures and comebacks of the late, great Steve Jobs.

But I uncovered some new ones in this solo episode.

I give them all to you, in quick and bite-sized form. Enjoy the bite out of this apple!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Fail Your Way to Success, the podcast that is obsessed with failure because it, it knows–it, the podcast knows–that it leads to success. So this is a solo episode that is actually about the patron saint of failing your way to success. He is the person mentioned in the introduction. He is the man who was known for wearing black turtlenecks among many other things. Yes, we are breaking down the failures and successes of the one and only Steve Jobs.

So, if some of this you may already know some of this, you may not. What he talked about in this very famous commencement speech that he gave at Stanford, he talked about how he dropped out of college, he dropped out of Reed College. And this was significant for a number of reasons. Primarily, he’s adopted, and his birth mother had one condition for the birth parents. And that is that the birth parents had to have graduated from college. That’s how important this fact was to her. All good. She found the birth parents, then–back then they didn’t know the gender before the baby was born. It was a boy, obviously. They wanted a girl and so it all fell through. And the, Steve Jobs mother found another family. But they not only hadn’t graduated from college, the dad hadn’t even graduated from high school. But they swore up and down this kid would graduate from college. So it was a big deal when he dropped out. But unlike many ne’er do well, dilettante college dropouts, Steve Jobs did not leave campus after dropping out. But rather than hanging around like that eighth-year senior–you know that one–that, that hung around and played hacky sack and got high all day. Maybe that was just, that was just Trinity College. But he didn’t do that. What he did is he stayed. He slept on friends’ couches, he ate meals at the Hari Krishna center. And without the constraints of having to fulfill a major, he was able to take the classes he was interested in. Like calligraphy, a completely impractical choice. I mean, what are you going to do with that? Well, what he did with that is he learned about fonts and spacing and sans serif and all of these things. And he created the first personal computer that cared about beautiful typography. And, as he famously said in that commencement speech at Stanford, since Windows copied everything that Mac did anyway, the entire personal computing industry is based on that decision.

So, you could call dropping out of college a major failure, but he turned it into a success. So then, he, he, he, you know, partners with his neighbor, Steve Wozniak, Woz he’s called. And, and by 23, he has amassed a net worth of over a million. Who knows what that is today? A trillion, billion? I have no idea what the equivalent is today. There’s been a lot of inflation. It estimate, it skyrocketed to an estimated 250 million by the time he reached 25. Again, success.

So he’s building Apple. But just some, he brings in, he brings in a CEO, and it goes awry. And basically this guy, he brings in the board of directors. Lee leads the board of directors for requesting Steve Jobs’ resignation from the company he started. So he goes and he starts, another computer company called NeXT. And he builds these computers. But they were really, really expensive, like, even by our standards today, like $10,000. So they were totally impractical. Nobody was, that was never going to take off for the masses. And it took eight years, but the, the company did become profitable. So then he, he goes, it seems like a major departure and in many ways it was. He becomes the executive producer of a movie at this brand-new company called Pixar. That, that movie turns out to be Toy Story, which is incredibly successful. And then Disney acquires Pixar. And so he’s back. He’s very successful again.

But then Apple is completely not thriving in his absence. And so they acquire NeXT computer, NeXT computers, his company, and basically bring Steve Jobs back to Apple. So, there he is. He’s back. He, you know, it’s thriving again. And then of course in 2009, turned out he needed a liver transplant. And he, in 2011, he resigned because of the discovery of a terminal pancreatic tumor. And he passed away six weeks later.

So one of the, one of the many interesting things about Steve Jobs is how much his personal belief system created a company legacy that was all about innovation. It was very, Apple is very clear about who its customer is. It’s a consumer that will pay more for high quality products. And he has, he has said so many things about failure. He, there is this great interview that I will link to in the show notes, where it’s like completely, like janky computer equipment in terrible lighting. It looks completely random and completely off the cuff and completely not, not rehearsed and not, and very, very honest. And he talks about how, when he was 12 years old, he called up Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard, and he, apparently, Bill Hewlett was listed in this thing called the phone book, and he called them up. And he’s like, “Hey, I want to build a frequency counter,” whatever the hell that is. And apparently, Bill Hewlett thought that was cool and cute, and helped him and then hired him. So in this interview, he talks about how the reason people don’t succeed is that they’re not willing to try and how he says, basically, you know, he’s never, he has found when he picks up the phone and asks people things–he found before he was the name brand he was, that people were for the most part really receptive and he tried to sort of pay that forward. He also said, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments that most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really, really tough. And so he, of course, is, you know, an emblem of pu-, pure per-, perseverance. Try to say that fast very many times.

In the Stanford speech, he has this other amazing quote, where he says, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect 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 that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference. I never liked the Robert Frost poem, I Took the Road Less Traveled, but that has made all the difference. Certainly, leaving the company you founded it is not the well-worn path. Going into, you know, working at an animation studio in Northern California, not the well-worn path. Dropping out of college, not a well-worn path, but the one that made all the difference. And he also said, “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. All fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” And of course, that’s all the more poignant because he died young.

He also said in that Stanford commencement speech, “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.” And I think that is really the most significant contribution Steve Jobs made to the concept of failing your way to success. That one of the great benefits of failure is that it takes all the air out of the balloon. And suddenly you have a beginner’s mind again. Because of course, I think you know what can happen and if you look at someone like Elon Musk, trying to, you know, taking over Twitter and at the point, at the time of this recording, seemingly not doing a terrific job with that, is you know, you start to drink your own Kool-Aid. You start to think that you’re brilliant at everything. You start to not listen to people and failing is the great humbler. And as we tumble, we humble. God, that is a great catchphrase. I have no idea if someone else said it already. But, um, but I think that that is one of the great lessons that Steve Jobs taught about failure, which is use it. Take advantage of the failure as an opportunity to go, “Okay, I’ve got a fresh slate. Let’s start again,” and, and embrace that humility, because of course, getting fired from Apple was not his only failure. He had Apple products that failed. And, and he continued to bounce back.

So there you have it, my breakdown of how Steve Jobs failed his way to success. I’ll see you next time.

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