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

Five of my favorite Steve Jobs perspectives.

Steve Jobs [Photo: Getty Images]

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?

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.

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.

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