Jobs to Grads: Love What You Do

Apple and its founder and CEO Steve Jobs have been in the news a lot lately. But whether you've been salivating over the possibility of collecting $50 thanks to a class-action lawsuit involving faulty iPod batteries or worrying about what the company's shift to Intel chips will mean for your Power PC, you should certainly check out the commencement speech given by Jobs a week ago at Stanford University.

In addition to telling grads where he got the idea to include pretty fonts in the first Macintosh operating system (he had taken a calligraphy class), Jobs recalled dealing with two traumatic experiences: getting fired and getting cancer.

After starting Apple in his garage and growing it into a $2 billion dollar business, Jobs remembered the shock of being let go by his own company. "I really didn't know what to do for a few months," said Jobs. "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." In a way, Jobs said, being thrown out was a blessing in disguise because it let him to unleash his creative energy, founding NeXT and Pixar. But what really allowed him to retake the reigns at Apple was his love for computers. "[T]he 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."

Jobs learned a similar lesson from the death sentence he received when he was misdiagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Though the cancer turned out to be curable, it taught him not to take life or work for granted. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," he said. "Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

Senior contributing writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. @chafkin