I was just reading in the June Success magazine about Steven Jobs. They ran a little time line on him. Listen to this:

• Born in 1955 – adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
• 1970 – 1971. Meets future business partner Steve Wozniak. Works at Hewlett Packard. Graduates in 1972, starts college and drops out.
• 1976 creates the rudimentary Apple 1 computer.
• 1977 introduces Apple II, one of the first successful personal computers.
• 1984 releases the Macintosh with graphical user interface.
• 1985 a power struggle with John Sculley, CEO of apple results in Jobs’ departure.
• 1986 Jobs founds NeXT computer hardware. Buys Pixar from George Lucas for less than $10,000,000.00.
• 1990 Apple buys NeXT and Jobs returns to apple at the helm.
• 2001 releases the iPod.
• 2005 video iPod and iPod shuffle are released.
• 2006 Disney buys Pixar making Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.
• 2007 Apple unveils the iPhone, an internet and multimedia enabled smartphone. The iPod Touch music player comes out.
• 2009 Apple releases the iPhone 3GS, the newest, fastest and most powerful iPhone to date.
• 2010 Apple launches the iPad tablet computer (by the way, they sell 2,000,000 of these things every two months.)
• 2011 – ??? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we.

Do you get the picture? Look at all of the opportunities he had to “quit” or to give up. I mean, how would you like to be pushed out of your own company? He could have gotten a lot of sympathy mileage out of that. He was also adopted. He certainly could have felt bad about that if he had chosen to. What did he do instead? He never stopped doing what he was created to do – create and invent. He let nothing stand in his way. When the chips seemed down he saw a new way to create something better. Truly an inspirational life. Here are a few of his favorite quotes:

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”.

“He sees what should be before others”.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new”.