9 Lessons from Steve Jobs on How to Change the World

Steve Jobs was a boy abandoned by his birth parents, raised by loving and caring adoptive parents, and despite the demons that accompanied him throughout his life, he changed the world on his own terms. What a wonderful legacy to leave the world with. He demonstrated to humanity that regardless of how you come onto this planet, you can choose to have your own impact. You do not have to accept your current reality and be a victim. At the end of the day, Steve Jobs teaches us that everything originates from within – the world is not coming at us, it’s coming from within us.

Below are nine insights that I’ve learned from his life story that have helped me in my personal journey.

1. Know Who You Really Are

Steve Jobs was an authentic, passionate and purpose driven individual. He said that “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 other’s 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.” 

He was a very complex individual, and for me, the most revealing story of his essence was by his sister Mona Simpson when she delivered this eulogy for her brother on Oct. 16, 2011, at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out. With any job, there are aspects of work that are frustrating and difficult—even with the greatest dream job in the world, but being passionate about it will make you able to hold on when things get rough. He warned, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” And you should choose a job that you love, then you will never have to really work a day in your life. Remember that Steve Jobs was worth 100 million dollars when he was 25 years old, but he didn’t do it for the money. He did it because he wanted to change the world, he was an innovator.

And part of your authenticity is to be true to your life’s calling, your purpose. Your why? Have the courage to design your life for yourself because you might not receive a second opportunity to do so, so you either do it now, or you will regret it on later in life.

2. Focus on the Positive

Steve Jobs was an adopted child. He could have easily hated his life (and his parents – both biological and adoptive) and started to get involved with negative things during his teenage years.

However, young Steve Jobs kept focusing on the positive: he was thankful for his loving adoptive parents, he also found a positive channel to pour his energy into things like technology and computers. In the end we all know what he achieved, and you too, can benefit from the power of positive thinking. If you are the kind of person who often sees the glass as half-empty, try to start focusing on the positive things in your life, and you will surely reap lots of benefits from it.

3. Welcome Failure as a Learning Tool

Everybody fails. It’s how you respond to those failures that make all the difference. In 1984, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.

At Stanford’s 2005 commencement address, he had this to say about it:

“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.”

Jobs and Wozniak ran out of money while developing the first Apple computer. Instead of giving in, Jobs sold his van and Wozniak sold his graphing calculator. When there’s a will, there’s a way. Learn to see obstacles as opportunities in disguise. Once you do that, there will always be ways to overcome those obstacles. 

The lesson that we can learn from Steve’s story is: we should not fear failure, because failure is not the end of the road. We must take failure as the opportunity to learn and improve ourselves, and success is inevitable.

4. Broaden Your Horizons

The year before he founded Apple, Jobs journeyed to India. Travel has a way of broadening a person’s perspective and expanding their sense of what’s possible – those are both traits an entrepreneur needs. The trip to India taught him how to meditate to expand his minds potential, to quiet the chatter, and allow him to intuitively see what was possible.

Travelling doesn’t have to cost you lots of money, or lots of time. A simple weekend getaway to another city nearby might be enough for you to experience new things and broaden your horizon.

Be a lifelong learner not only by traveling, but by reading and by watching videos that stimulate your learning on a wide varied of subjects. This will help you think and visualize the possibilities in your future.

Note the five favorite books of Steve Jobs, three were influenced by his travels to India.

5. Surround Yourself with Great People

The people you surround yourself with, are the people that will shape your future. If you surround yourself with smart and positive people that share your vision, well then, you have a bright future ahead of you. Remember that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so choose wisely.

There's always "one more thing" to learn! Cross-pollinate ideas with others both within and outside your company. Learn from customers, competitors and partners. If you partner with someone whom you don't like, learn to like them – praise them and benefit from them.

Steve Jobs didn’t start Apple alone. He had a great partner in the form of Steve Wozniak, who complemented Job’s skillset very well. Likewise, you need to pick the right partner in your life so that you can be successful. The people who you surround yourself with, might make or break your life. So, choose wisely and it will help your way to success.

6. Learn how to anticipate the future

Steve Jobs once quoted Wayne Gretzky, saying: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Steve Jobs has been a living proof of this quote all of his life. Apple has reaped the benefits from Steve’s ability to anticipate future trends.

Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56, he transformed five industries.

(1)  Personal Computing

Steve Jobs did not invent the Macintosh, it was Jeff Raskin who was largely responsible for the initial concept, specifications and even the name of the first widely successful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). So where does Jobs fit in? How can we say that he revolutionized personal computing? It’s simple: Jobs was the leader, the orchestra conductor. When he saw the Macintosh project he realized its mass potential, but he disagreed with Raskin over a lot of the fundamentals. This led to Raskin leaving in 1981 and Jobs appointing someone else to lead the project, someone who could make it more like Jobs’ vision.

(2)  Music

Steve Jobs did not invent digital Music or MP3 players. However, Jobs was largely behind Apple’s push to “go digital.” It was decided that music was an obvious target. Both the hardware and the software in the industry was horrible from a design and usability perspective. Jobs oversaw the project and gave Jon Rubinstein the green light to put together a team of people, including the now legendary Jonathan Ive.

As a key step in the iPod’s success, Apple preceded its October of 2001 release with the free application iTunes in January. This is a classic example of Apple’s strategy to prime the market for a release of a major product. First, they got people addicted to the wonders of digital music with a free product, then they followed it up with the must-have magic box that allowed them to bring their newfound musical freedom everywhere. Today, the term “iPod” is synonymous with “MP3 Player” and around 300,000,000 iPods have been purchased. Apple dominated the digital music sales (shrinking the market of CD music sales). iTunes went on to redefine digital content distribution, expanding beyond music and shaking the worlds of movies, television and books.

(3) Computer Animation

Steve Jobs did not invent computer animation. In fact, Jobs likely knew less about animation than any other venture he invested in. However, once again, we see someone with a gift for knowing what the world wants before they know it themselves.

Jobs saw in Pixar a mass amount of potential. In 1986, Jobs purchased the highly talented team of individuals from Lucasfilm for the price of $5 million. His company Pixar took computer animation from a niche business to a multi-billion-dollar industry that eliminated hand-drawn animation. He later sold the company to Disney for $7.4 billion. 

(4)  Phones and (5) Mobile Computing

Steve Jobs did not invent mobile computing, cell phones or even touchscreen smartphones. However, he did play a large role in changing these products forever. In fact, they were transformed by a single product: the iPhone.

We all expected a great telephone with iTunes-like ability, but what we got was a personal computing device that literally changed the way we access and use the Internet. It’s nearly impossible to find a smartphone design today that hasn’t merely served to build on the archetype that the iPhone established.

The iPhone evolved and added third party applications, thereby starting the “app” craze that is currently in full swing. It also led to the development of the iPad, yet another device that was by no means the first of its kind but has ultimately defined a genre and created a thriving market that had previously drawn little interest.

The ability to anticipate the future is very important if you want to be successful. An example of how we can apply this to our life is by visioning what we want to be in one year (or three years, ten years, and so on) from now. By having the vision, we can anticipate future roadblocks and prepare to overcome them. For example: if you are currently working as an employee, but see your future self as an entrepreneur, you can start learning the skills that might be beneficial for the future you. 

7. Build Your Life's Purpose or Your Organization Around Serving Others

Steve Jobs knew that to be a successful company, you must start with the customer and work backwards to the technology. He said that, “The biggest mistake I made in his early days of his career was to start with the technology and try to figure out where you can sell it. Strategy and vision should start with what incredible benefits can we give the customer. You should not sit with the engineers and see what great technology you have and try to figure out how you are going to market it.”

Customers tend to trust individuals who are serious about what they do, and willing to take the time to achieve a deep understanding of their craft. Take the time every day to learn more about your customers, their industry and their challenges. 

Needless to say, gaining trust is only part of the equation. You must also have a product that customers want and need, and the ability to show how you’re adding value, solving problems. Companies who place improving people’s lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by a huge margin. 

Whether you are an organization or an individual, you will be happier and more successful if you are contributing to make someone's life easier.

8. Understand that Marketing is about Values

It took Steve Jobs coming back in 1997 to get the Apple brand back on track after years of neglect. This seven-minute clip is from an internal presentation that Steve gave in Cupertino to his employees not long after he returned to Apple in 1997. 

Steve says that marketing is not about touting features like speeds or megabytes or comparing yourself to the competition, it's about identifying your own story, your own core, and being very, very clear about what you are all about and what you stand for ... and then being able to communicate that clearly, simply, and consistently. As Steve says, people want to know who you are and what you stand for. 

In the case of Apple, the brand's core value is not about technology or "making boxes for people to get their jobs done." Apple's core value, said Jobs, is this: "We believe people with passion can change the world for the better....and that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who actually do."

The lessons in this talk obviously can be applied directly to the art of communication, something Steve did very well in all his presentations, big or small. Good presentations are about a story; just as good branding is about a story. Clarity and simplicity are key, and the way to achieve these is by being relentless in abandoning the superfluous and identifying the absolute core of your message.

Clarity and simplicity are not easy—they are hard, very hard. If it were easy to be simple and clear then everyone would do it, but few actually do. It is indeed a very noisy world, and it's getting noisier seemingly by the day. It is those people—and those organizations—who do the hard work to clarify and simplify that will be the ones who are able to rise above the noise, get their messages heard, and hopefully make a difference in this world in their own way.

Steve Jobs said when he came back to APPLE in 1997 that “Marketing is about values! This is a very complicated world, a very noise world, and we are not going to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be very clear about what we want them to know about us. A great brand needs investment and caring to retain its relevance and vitality. The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area over the last few years. And we need to bring it back. And the way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about bits and megahertz. It’s not to talk about why we are better than Windows.”

He discusses how the milk industry tried for twenty years to convince people of all the benefits of drinking milk, and they failed miserably. “The best example and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is NIKE. Remember that NIKE sells a commodity, they sell shoes. And yet when you think of NIKE you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product. They never tell you about the air soles, and why they are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does NIKE do in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. This is who they are. That’s what they are about.” Have you ever seen a Nike advertisement where they share why they are better than Adidas and Puma? No, I know you haven’t, because what they do is they honor great athletes like Michael Jordan – that’s what they are, that’s who they are. So make sure your customers know what your company stands for.

Jobs then talks about how APPLE had spent millions on advertising that didn’t work over the years he had been gone from the company. He hired back a firm he had worked with in the 1980s and spent several months working with them. ““The questions we asked was: our customers what to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit into this world? And what we are about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple is something more than that. Apple at its core, its core value (it’s why?) is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. And those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.”

And so what we are going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years is to get back to that core value! A lot of things have changed. The market is in a total different place than where it was a decade ago, and APPLE is totally different and APPLE’s place in it is totally different. The products and the distribution and manufacturing strategy is totally different, and we understand that. But values and core values, those things shouldn’t change. The things that APPLE believed in at its core are the same things APPLE really stands for today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is something that I am very moved by. It honors those people that have changed the world. Some of them are living, and some of them are not. The theme of the campaign is ‘Think Different’. It’s the people honoring the people who think different and move the world forward. And it is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company.”

9. Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying

When you are confused, scared, embarrassed, or anything, just remember that you’ll be dead soon. Life is short; so make sure that you make it count. Don’t be afraid to take risks. Most of the time, we need to take risks in order to move forward. Just be careful and make sure that the risk that you took was a calculated risk. Think thoroughly, weigh the best and worse scenarios of an action against each other, and then you can decide whether the risk is worth taking.

Steve Jobs 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. 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.”

Never be satisfied, and always push yourself. Do the things people say cannot be done, and be at least willing to try. If you want to know more about Steve Jobs I would suggest you to read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.