What Steve Jobs Taught Us About Turning Failure Into Success

I am always fascinated by people who turn their setbacks into life and business success. For me it’s not about the fame, power or financial success but truly the hope that real life transformation stories offer to everybody; in that no matter where you come from or what your circumstances are, you can work around them and succeed in your own life if you want to.

The legendary Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs recently passed on and much is being written about his life and personal journey. We all know about Apple’s products and his work – iPad, iPod, Mac and so on but how much do we really know about the personal side of the man behind it. Not much, until just now.

There are many ways to describe him: Innovator, genius, inventor. But did you know he was also a college dropout and a fired technology executive. He wasn’t always the darling of the Wall Street or California’s Silicon Valley. And neither did he come from a rich, influential family, instead an average regular middle class one.

So how did he manage to become what he did and what can we learn from his journey?

Degree isn’t everything – Do you stop yourself from pursuing your dreams because you feel it’s too late for you to get a degree or go back to school? Steve Jobs didn’t think so. He didn’t have a degree, just like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates of Microsoft, but that didn’t stop them from having ideas and pursuing them. Now I am not saying education is not important. It certainly is, but if you don’t have it and can’t get it, it shouldn’t hold you back from trying.

Getting fired shouldn’t put an end to your dreams – Its’ easy to feel like you’ve been dealt a blow if you are a hard worker and you find yourself let go. And you are fired not because there is an economic recession and thousands are getting laid off but because of a power struggle or performance and so on. Imagine being fired from your own company that you founded. Well that’s what happened to Steve Jobs.

“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 said in the Stanford commencement speech.

Instead of running away and getting beat down in his self-confidence, what does he do? He buys Pixar and starts a new computer company called NeXT. We all know the work Pixar produced.

Success follows Failure – If you have the right attitude and you pursue, you will be successful. I am not promising becoming rich and famous, maybe that will follow too but more in your character. See even those born lucky get the wheel of misfortune. Nobody stays on top all the time, it’s just the way life works – what goes up must come down and in the same token what is down must go up.

The beauty of learning from trailblazers, those who have already walked the path is that you don’t have to re-invent, you can simply observe, absorb, implement and move ahead.


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