Steve Jobs said 5 timeless principles create lifelong success (and happiness)

Fifteen years after his passing, Steve Jobs’s thoughts on innovation, entrepreneurship, design, and leadership still make a meaningful impact. Since there’s a Jobs quote for many situations, winnowing it down to five isn’t an easy task.

Still: Here’s my attempt. Here’s Steve Jobs on starting your own business, perseverance, leadership and responsibility, intelligence, and money.

Jobs’s thoughts on starting a business

Maybe you don’t want to start your own company, much less build a thriving business. Even so, Jobs felt everyone should dip a toe in the entrepreneurial water, even if it’s just a side hustle. Why?

As Jobs said:

I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where you have the chance to take responsibility for your recommendations, where you have to see your recommendations through all action stages, and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, and pick yourself up off the ground and dust yourself off . . . you learn a fraction of what you can.
Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implications, [provides] a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn to be better.
Without the experience of actually doing it, [you] never get three-dimensional.

Start a business or a side hustle and you get to chart your own course, make your own decisions, make your own mistakes, be responsible for your own success: and learn from those decisions, mistakes, and successes.

And add another dimension to your skills, your personality, and your life.

Jobs’s thoughts on perseverance

If talent is the ability to learn a subject or gain a skill more quickly than most, I definitely lack talent.

But that’s OK since, as Jobs said:

I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing.
There are such rough moments . . . that most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough.

While Jobs was referring to startup founders, the premise is broadly applicable. For most of us, success is based on showing up, day after day, even when we don’t want to.

While that might sound too simplistic—perseverance is just one factor in achieving any worthwhile pursuit—science says showing up every day carries outsize importance. A meta-analysis published in Review of Educational Research found that college students who consistently go to class get better grades.

While that might sound more like correlation than causation (maybe the smartest people tend to go to class more regularly?), there’s more to it.

As the researchers write:

Not particularly talented? Not particularly smart? As long as you show up, and keep showing up, you’ll likely do well.

If you don’t have a talent for sales, sales skills can still be learned. If you don’t have a talent for leading people, most leadership skills—giving feedback, building teams, setting expectations, showing consideration for others, seeking input, focusing on meaningful priorities, etc.—can be learned.

Success in most pursuits doesn’t require talent. Success simply requires skill and experience you can gain.

As long as you’re willing to keep showing up.

Jobs’s thoughts on responsibility

No one ever does anything truly worthwhile on their own. That means we’re all, whether formally or informally, at times in a position to lead.

And to take responsibility.

Here’s a story from John Rossman’s book Think Like Amazon:

Steve Jobs told employees a short story when they were promoted to vice president at Apple. Jobs would tell the VP that if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, Jobs would naturally demand an explanation from the janitor. “Well, the lock on the door was changed,” the janitor could reasonably respond, “and I couldn’t get a key.” The janitor can’t do his job without a key. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses.
“When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs told his newly minted VPs. “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.
“In other words, when the employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter what you say.”

Many people feel success or failure is caused by external forces, and especially by other people. If I succeed, other people helped me, supported me, and were “with” me. If I fail, other people let me down, didn’t believe in me, didn’t help me—other people were “against” me.

To some extent, that’s true. But also not totally within your control.

The only thing you can control? Yourself. So act as if success or failure is totally within your control: If you succeed, you caused it. If you fail, you caused it. As Jobs would say, “Reasons stop mattering.”

Never make excuses. Never list reasons. And never point fingers.

Unless, of course, you point them at yourself, and resolve that next time you’ll do whatever it takes to make sure things turn out the way you wish.

Jobs’s thoughts on intelligence

Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of intelligence, if only because it’s hard to surround yourself with smart people if you can’t identify smart people. So what did he feel was the best indication of high intelligence?

According to Jobs:

A lot of it is memory. But a lot of it is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B, reading these stupid little maps, you can just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.
And you can make connections that seem obvious to you, because you can see the whole thing.

No matter how much information you’re able to retain, memory doesn’t necessarily help you make decisions. (I know plenty of smart people who sometimes struggle to make simple decisions.)

Jobs felt the smartest people excel at making connections. But you can’t make connections unless you collect a variety of experiences you can connect. As Jobs said:

One of the funny things about being bright is everyone puts you on this path. To go to high school, go to college . . .
[But] the key thing that comes through is they had a variety of experiences which they could draw upon in order to try to solve a problem, or attack a particular dilemma, in a unique way.
What you have to do is get different experiences. To make connections which are innovative, to connect two experiences together, you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else . . . or you’ll make the same connections.

Try new things. Learn new things. Do things that aren’t comfortable; that’s a sure sign the experience—and what you may later draw from the experience, and be able to connect it to—is unique to you.

Because it’s easy, even comforting, to learn more about something you already know. But then you’ll have the same “bag of experiences” and make the same street-level connections as everyone else.

Jobs’s thoughts on money

Wealth isn’t a proxy for intelligence. And definitely not for success.

As Jobs said:

When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money.

Easy to say when you’re worth $100 million, but still. While money does a lot of things (one of the most important is to create choices), after a certain point research shows money doesn’t make people happier.

To Jobs, the goal was to make a living by doing what he loved. How you define a “living” is up to you, but once you’ve reached that level of financial success, make sure you also work hard to include at least a little of the “love what you do” part.

Because then you’ll be living the life you want to live.

On your terms.

—Jeff Haden

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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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