On your mission in life
After being dismissed from leadership at Apple, Steve Jobs passed through a period of despair, doubt and loneliness. His ideas were rejected by the company he had founded nine years before when he was twenty-nine. The new CEO John Sculley was ruling the whole company ruthlessly without considering Job’s ideas and with complete support from the company’s board.
Steve Jobs lost interest in Apple, he finally resigned and went through a period of wondering and questioning what he had done wrong, what his mistakes had been and most importantly, what his mission in life was. He was just 21 when he founded Apple, he had had very short experience and time for asking that sort of difficult questions.
He travelled to Europe where he was still recognized as a revolutionary figure while he felt humbled for being dismissed from the company he had founded. It’s even said in the book Becoming Steve Jobs that he was near suicide; now he didn’t have a purpose in life. Why continue living?
After meeting with great scientists and people who told him that they needed a powerful easy-to-use computer, he recovered his initial purpose: To change the world giving people access to technology and empowering them to think differently.
He came back to the U.S. willing to give the next big step. He founded NeXT.
Most of us have felt this way: desolated, depressed, surrounded by the same negative thoughts, indifferent to society. But we can benefit from these situations. As Steve Jobs said during a speech at Stanford: “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; I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple.”
We can always get the best from the worst.
Most people usually live without thoroughly thinking what they would like to do in their lives. They live driven by what the crowd considers correct doing, following tendencies and common life-patterns. They can continue living the same way, but something will thwart their plans and it will make them wonder about their aim and place in the world.
Still, I don’t know for sure what I will be doing in ten years, what is the job I must accomplish or the activity I’m destined to do. Nowadays we have more responsibility on our decisions and most importantly: In most of the cases we are able to choose what we would like to do in life: if we would like to get married, have children, live in Asia, Europe or elsewhere.
We have the great opportunity of deciding by ourselves. An opportunity people in medieval times didn’t have. If you were born as a lady you were to take care of children and marry with a convenient spouse; you didn’t have other options, nor the power of choosing. Now we have a harder job in our hands: we have to decide between a wide variety of choices; we have the responsibility of forging our own future. An idea that immediately overwhelms us; we feel afraid of failing.
We aren’t destined to anything in particular. Apart from the economic and cultural situation we are born with, the luck we have in life, or people we meet, we can thrive despite obstacles and difficulties. We are all placed equally, it’s only that we have different problems to deal with in different circumstances and conditions.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter what activity we choose to do. We are capable of changing, learning and adapting to a new environment. We shall only focus on the amount of happiness our job gives us and on the benefit we can get from it.
If what we do doesn’t make us happy, what kind of benefits equals the amount of happiness we might get elsewhere?
We all come to this place nude, we come alone and we are mainly equals. The things we have as kids and the family and place we come from are not part of what defines us; we didn’t decide to be brought up by a royal family, or by a family in extreme poverty. Thus, we only have control over our actions, what we do determines what we are, not what we possess or our current situation.
Although we can intervene on how our future will be, we don’t control fate, nor we decide what our fortune will be like, neither what our children will accomplish in their lives. Fate still has an important role; we must accept it and love it as it is. We shall practice Amor Fati — the concept mainly developed by Nietzsche — but direct our actions to improve.
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science.
So, if things don’t make us worse or better people, why should we work for them?
Although our income and possessions don’t determine what we really are, they are tools that can help us make something bigger; they can help us accomplish a greater mission in life. If we want to help people in poverty, we can help more if we had a million dollars to spend than if we were in bankruptcy. Thus, we must obtain the best profit from every situation and difficulty we might have to face.
Sometimes we have to work on something we don’t like in order to achieve something greater. Although you don’t like what you have to do, always do your best, act as if you were someone you admire.
What is the role of happiness in all of these?
What makes our life good or bad are the emotions we feel on our journey. Emotions play a big part in what we are and do. They are the inner fuel of our life; it’s the power that makes us want to achieve and accomplish things. If we didn’t have emotions, there wouldn’t be a purpose for living.
Most of the times we can control our feelings. If you want to be on a happy state, you should surround yourself with happy people and motivate yourself thinking about something greater. Achieving happiness isn’t as difficult as we think; we just sometimes feel trapped inside a jail and that feeling confuses our mind and makes it want to stop working, learning and gathering with people. That feeling isolates you. You only have to break the pattern.
Remember this: “We are more often frightened than hurt; we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” Seneca
We desperately want to live happily, we desire to feel complete and loved, yet we often underestimate the value negative emotions have. We cannot remain happy forever, we’ll have to face despair, treachery, desolation and sadness. Thus, we must be prepared. Negative emotions have the power of being our fuel; they make us want to change something in the world; they help us determine our greatest mission in life, what we would like to change and what you want to live in the world for future generations.
At the end, we die as we start: lonely and without possessions; only with the remembrance of having done something great that could change other people’s lives.
So what we must do?
There’s a strong tendency of knowing what we’ll exactly do in life and of having a clear idea of how we want our future to be. Yet, I think we must be patient and always do our best until the time comes when we know what we would like to leave in this world and what is the reason of our existence.
We all have a common mission: leave a place without the things we didn’t like; leave a better place for future generations.
For me, the time when I discovered what I would like to do was earlier this year. I shall be a leader who fosters people to thrive and who brings hope to people in despair. A leader who maximizes the opportunities newer generations have, especially in my home country: Mexico, a place with a deep need for leaders and opportunities for people with great potential. The way to achieve equality is to increase people’s alternatives and let them decide which kind of life they would like to live.
If I change other people’s mindsets and inspire them to create something that could improve human condition, in the future they’ll also inspire others to do great things for all of us, and leave a good change in the world.
On an interview for CNBC, former Apple CEO John Sculley said: “They [Jobs and Bill Gates] said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to empower individuals with tools for the mind. we’re going to change the world one person at a time.’ And it was so different from anything I’d ever heard about a business before, coming from a highly competitive industry — someone wins someone loses — to now where two geniuses were saying they’re going to create an entirely new industry, they were going to change the world.”
To conclude: Once you find your mission, your actions should be guided towards it; that’s the purpose of civilization: achieve common wellness.
“We are members of one great body, planted by nature… We must consider that we were born for the good of whole” Seneca
Thanks for reading!
Sergio Carballido.
