Steve Jobs: Achieve Lifetime Success and Happiness with These 5 Principles

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Editor's note: Steve Jobs talked about entrepreneurship, perseverance, responsibility, wisdom, and money. This article is from a compilation, hoping to inspire you.

Steve Jobs [Image source: Getty Images]

It has been 15 years since Jobs passed away, but his thoughts on innovation, entrepreneurship, design, and leadership are still extremely influential. You can find a suitable quote from Jobs in almost any situation, so it's no easy task to distill them into five. But I still made this attempt. Here are Jobs' core thoughts on entrepreneurship, perseverance, leadership and responsibility, wisdom, and money.

Jobs on Entrepreneurship

Maybe you don't want to start your own company, let alone build a thriving business. Even so, Jobs still believed that everyone should have a taste of entrepreneurship, even if it's just a side business. Why?

As Jobs said: I think if a person doesn't truly own something for a few years, take full responsibility for their own suggestions, follow every step of the decision, get scars from making mistakes, and pick themselves up after a fall, then what they learn is less than one-tenth of what they could really learn.

Just coming in to give suggestions without being responsible for the results or bearing the consequences, the value you learn and the growth opportunities are minimal. Without the experience of really doing it, you'll never become well-rounded.

By starting a business or doing a side business, you can set your own direction, make decisions, take responsibility for mistakes, be accountable for success, and learn from these choices, mistakes, and achievements.

Your abilities, character, and life will all gain an extra dimension because of this.

Jobs on Perseverance

If talent means learning a piece of knowledge or a skill faster than most people, then I definitely don't have much talent.

But it doesn't matter, because Jobs once said: I firmly believe that about half of the difference between successful entrepreneurs and failures lies simply in pure perseverance. This path is too difficult, and you've invested a large part of your life in it. There will always be extremely difficult moments, and most people give up at this point. I don't blame them; it's really too hard.

Jobs was talking about startup founders, but this principle applies widely. For most of us, the foundation of success is to do it day after day, even if you don't want to persevere. This may sound overly simple. Perseverance is just one of the factors in achieving something, but science has proven that the importance of persevering every day is seriously underestimated. A review analysis in the Review of Educational Research found that college students who attended classes regularly had significantly better grades.

This may seem like just a correlation rather than a causation (maybe smart people are just more likely to attend classes?), but there's a deeper logic behind it. The researchers wrote: Not talented enough? Not smart enough? As long as you keep attending classes and keep investing, you're likely to do well.

You don't have a talent for sales, but you can still learn to sell; you don't have a talent for leadership, but most leadership skills (giving feedback, building teams, setting expectations, showing empathy, listening to opinions, getting to the point, etc.) can be learned later.

Most things don't require talent to succeed. You just need to be willing to keep persevering to accumulate skills and experience.

Jobs on Responsibility

No one can achieve something truly valuable on their own. This means that whether formally or informally, each of us will play the role of a leader at some point. At the same time, we also have to take on the corresponding responsibilities.

John Rossman told such a story in his book Think Like Amazon: When Apple employees were promoted to vice presidents, Jobs would tell them a little story. He would say that if the trash in his office wasn't taken out, he would naturally question the cleaner. The cleaner could reasonably reply, "The lock on the door was changed, and I don't have the key." Without the key, the cleaner really couldn't do the job. As a cleaner, he had a reason to make an excuse.

"When you're a cleaner, reasons are important," Jobs said to the newly promoted vice presidents. "But at some point between being a cleaner and being a CEO, reasons no longer matter.

In other words, once an employee becomes a vice president, they must give up all excuses for failure. The vice president is responsible for any mistakes that occur, and it doesn't matter what you say."

Many people think that success or failure is caused by external factors, especially by others. When they succeed, it's because others help them, support them, and stand by them; when they fail, it's because others let them down, don't believe in them, and don't help them, and are all against them.

To some extent, this is true. But you basically can't control these things. The only thing you can control is yourself. So, you might as well view success and failure like this: You create your own success, and you also cause your own failure. As Jobs said: Reasons no longer matter.

Never make excuses, never list reasons, and never blame others.

Unless, you point the finger at yourself and are determined to do your best next time at all costs.

Jobs on Wisdom

Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about the essence of wisdom. After all, if you can't recognize people, you can't gather smart people. In his opinion, what's the most obvious sign of high intelligence?

Jobs' answer was: Part of it is memory, but more importantly, the ability to step back and see the big picture. It's like standing on the 80th floor overlooking the whole city. While others are still stupidly looking at the map to find out how to get from point A to point B, you can see the whole picture at a glance.

You can easily find various connections because you see the whole. No matter how much information you remember, memory may not help you make decisions. I know many smart people who often struggle with simple decisions.

Jobs believed that the smartest people are good at making connections. But to make connections, you must have a wide variety of experiences. He said: The strange thing about smart people is that everyone will put you on a set track: go to high school, go to college... But what really matters is that they have diverse experiences and can draw inspiration from them when solving problems or facing difficulties and break the situation in a unique way.

You must go and get different experiences. If you want to make innovative connections, you can't have the exact same experiences as others, otherwise you'll only come to the same conclusions as others.

Try new things, learn new things, and do things that make you uncomfortable. These experiences, and the thoughts you extract and connect from them in the future, are unique to you. It's easy to stay in your comfort zone and repeat what you already know, but then you'll have the same "experience package" as others and can only come to the same shallow conclusions as everyone else.

Jobs on Money

Wealth is not equal to intelligence, let alone success. Jobs said: When I was 25, my net worth was about $100 million. At that time, I decided that I would never let money ruin my life. You can't spend all this money, and I don't think wealth can prove my intelligence.

The things I cherish most in life don't cost a single cent.

This may sound like it's easy to say when coming from a billionaire, but the truth still holds. Money can indeed do a lot of things (the most important thing is to bring choices), but research shows that after a certain amount, money doesn't make people happier.

For Jobs, the goal was to make a living doing what you love. The standard of "making a living" is defined by yourself, but once you achieve basic financial stability, you must strive to keep at least a little "love" in your work. Because only then can you live the life you really want.

Translator: Teresa