How Steve Jobs used Adaptability
Steve Jobs may be one of the most, if not the most influential person of all time. However, he may have never reached the amount of success he had without constantly adapting. He turned failures into a massive success story. As Steve Jobs once said “if I try my best and fail, well, I’ve tried my best”, and in the early stages of Apple, this was nothing but the truth.
One example, of what many people at the time considered a failure for Steve Jobs, was when he dropped out of Reed College. In fact, Steve Jobs only made it through 6 months of college before deciding to drop out. He still had a love for learning, and happened to drop into a calligraphy class, which ended up inspiring him to integrate some of the beautiful fonts we see and use in technology today. This also shows that you never really know where you can pull influence from, even if it is something not so relatable like calligraphy and technology.
One of Steve Jobs most notable failures was when he was fired from Apple, the company that he created. Steve Jobs stated that he felt humiliated, and at a point in time even considered “running away from Silicon Valley”. Jobs stated that after some time, this made him feel like a beginner again and freed him from the complacency of being successful, which ended up inspiring Steve Jobs to enter one of the most creative periods in his entire life. During, Steve Jobs time away from Apple, he worked at Pixar. At Pixar, Steve Jobs achieved great things that possibly go unrecognized just because of his later successes with Apple. Pixar ended up revolutionizing animated movie making and was eventually bought out by Disney.
Again the main idea is that Steve Jobs used adaptability to overcome these failures. Jobs may have felt education wasn’t what was right for him at the moment and chose to go a different path. Steve Jobs may have been fired from the very company he created, but instead of dwelling on it, he used it as a fresh start.
