Steve Jobs was one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, and his success has been attributed to more than just business acumen. As a young man, Jobs developed his own set of rules to live by, rules he later claimed to live by every day as an adult. These rules were published after his death in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder and CEO, but they have endured because of their simplicity and common sense. As an entrepreneur or employee, you can always find great value in following these seven rules of success from Steve Jobs.
Rule 1: Don't settle
Risk is not a four-letter word, he told Stanford University's graduating class in 2005. You can't just ask what I would do, you've got to figure out what you're going to do. Never settle for second best or even with doing something simply because that's what everyone else does, he said. Always push forward. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do, Jobs said in a commencement speech at Harvard University in 2005.
Rule 2: Know yourself
The mark of a mature person is knowing that you can't change certain things and being able to live with them. Acknowledge that there are certain things about yourself that you do not like, cannot change, and will not change. Spend more time around people whose lives revolve around their strengths, not their weaknesses. Ask yourself if your life revolves around your strengths or weaknesses. Steve knew himself well; he was honest with his own weaknesses and accepted that they were true for him. By acknowledging them, he could work around them or accept them as limitations in some areas of his life. Know what you are bad at so you can hire someone who is good at it!
Rule 3: Think different
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 my successes possible.
Rule 4: Persist
In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. I would never have found Apple if I had listened to my dad, who was a chemist at Dow Chemical and wanted me to follow in his footsteps. As he put it, If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person. He didn't know what a computer was; he thought microprocessors were mini-computers. But he understood how important it was for me to get an education. And he took me down to Reed College and walked into that admissions office and said, He's not coming here unless you let him drop out in three months. And they did!
Rule 5: Know what you love, then love it.
What you love to do is going to change your life, so it's important to remember that. Keep reminding yourself about why you're doing what you're doing. Make a list about why you love what you do: all those little reasons that make it worth getting up every morning, and keep it somewhere visible at work. It'll be a great reminder when things get tough, as they always will. The best way to stay motivated is by remembering how lucky we are, and how cool what we do really is. (Source: Business Insider)
Rule 6: Everything is copied.
One way to look at your product is as a story you're telling. Everything you do—the design, marketing and selling—is part of that story. And who is telling that story? You are. So think about what message you want to convey about yourself and your product through all your interactions with people: advertising, marketing, selling and support. It's important to think about those messages in advance so you don't have to worry about them when you're busy being interviewed on TV or giving a presentation or writing code late into the night.
Rule 7: A Boring Life is an Unsuccessful One.
If you live each day as if it was boring then you're doing it wrong. If you expect everything to be exciting and interesting, chances are you'll soon be very disappointed. Finding a balance is key: Challenge yourself while keeping it fun. Because in your search for success, there's one thing that matters more than anything else: remembering why you decided to get out of bed today in the first place. And no matter how challenging, how difficult things may get, always remember...it's all worth it because life is too short to not enjoy every moment of it.
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