Remembering Steve Jobs' liberating advice about death

Steve Jobs was an inspiration to many, so it’s no wonder his talk about pursuing your dreams has been watched more than 26 million times.

The video shows Jobs addressing an audience at Stamford University in 2005.

He got off to a somewhat unpredictable start given the setting; talking about how he dropped out of college so he could stop attending the classes that didn’t interest him.

Instead, he slept on a friends’ floor and attended the classes that genuinely interested him.

He attended a typography class that later inspired the typography that was designed into the first Mac computer.

Then, Jobs spoke about how he was fired from his own company ten years after starting Apple, by the board of directors.

He said:

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 then went onto create NeXt and Pixar, which was later bought by Apple; and went back to work for Apple.

He said:

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple.

Don’t lose faith.

I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You’ve got to find what you love.

Jobs goes on to say that he asks himself every morning: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life.

It is life’s change agent.

It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Jobs advised the audience to not let the noise of others’ drown out their inner voice, but to follow their intuition.

Here's the full video:

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