Money and Happiness | Steve Jobs: “Think of your life as a rainbow”

It was January 2007. I walked slowly through a packed crowd of men (there were hardly any women) to enter the huge auditorium of the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco.

Steve Jobs had summoned Apple employees, tech enthusiasts and journalists there. Rumor has it that the CEO and co-founder of Apple is announcing some kind of cell phone with a touchscreen.

Correspondent for La Presse in California at the time, I went to cover the announcement. I was surprised to find myself in the darkened auditorium: I thought the journalists were going to follow the event in a secondary room. But no. Steve Jobs liked to put on a show for the media, and the media paid him back.

“Every once in a while a new product comes out and that changes everything,” Jobs proudly said onstage, where he appeared dressed in his traditional black turtleneck and Levi’s 501 “dad jeans.”

He had taken an iPhone from his pocket. The crowd erupted in shouts and applause.

The iPhone was awesome. But it was expensive. The device retailed for US$500 (equivalent to $940 in 2023 Canadian dollars), three times more than the most popular cellphone models at the time. “How many people are really going to want to pay the equivalent of a Montreal-Paris plane ticket for a phone?” I thought.

Answer: lots of people. As of 2023, Apple has sold over 2.2 billion iPhone units – by far the most popular product in history. Apple has so far sold four times as many iPhones as J.K. Rowling has sold Harry Potter books.

Steve Jobs died four years later, in 2011, of cancer at the age of 56.

This month, his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, launched an e-book about Steve Jobs called Make Something Wonderful 1. Available free on the internet, the 194-page book brings together an unpublished collection of excerpts from emails, speeches and job interviews. He talks about his childhood, his life, the difficulty of finding his way.

Here are some of the passages that I particularly like, translated into French:

“Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and hunches, and one of the most dangerous and suffocating concepts ever invented by humans, is “career”. A career is a concept that describes how one is supposed to progress through the stages of training and working life.

“There are big problems with this concept. First, the idea that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, it may not be so. They will become one. It’s a much better way to live your life. »

“I’ve always tried to train myself not to be afraid of failure. When something doesn’t work, people’s reaction is often to protect themselves and never want to fall on their heads again. I think this is a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your head several times along the way. I’ve tried not to be afraid to fail, and in fact, I’ve failed a lot since leaving Apple. »

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an action, but a habit. —Aristotle

“Over time, my way of digging during a job interview has become more and more precise. For example, I often find myself, during an interview, deliberately upsetting the candidate by criticizing his previous work. I do my homework, find out what he’s been working on, and say, ‘God, that turned out to be a flop. This product turned out to be a failure. Why did you work on this?” I shouldn’t tell you this, but the worst thing anyone can do at this point is agree with me and bend over backwards. »

I grow little of the food that I eat, and the little that I grow, I have not selected or perfected.

I did not select or perfect the seeds.

I don’t make any of my clothes.

I speak a language that I neither invented nor perfected.

I haven’t discovered the math I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws that I did not design or establish, and that I do not enforce or judge.

I am moved by music that I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was unable to help myself survive.

I didn’t invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technologies I work with.

I love and admire my species, living or dead, and I am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is to live with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And above all, have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. Somehow they already know what you really want to become. Everything else is secondary. »

“Think of your life as a rainbow looming over the horizon of this world. You appear, you have a chance to shine in the sky, then you disappear. »

“The two ends of the rainbow are birth and death. We both live completely alone. Most people your age haven’t given much thought to these events, and it’s like we’re shielding you from them, lest the thought of mortality hurt you in some way. For me, it’s the opposite: knowing that my bow is going to fall makes me want to ignite while I’m in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trace that I know how to leave. »