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Again, 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. 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 (ed. Note-apple computer co-founder, Steve
Wozniak) and I started Apple in my parent’s 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 4000 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. It 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 worlds 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 retuned 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

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