Steve Jobs — The Exiled Founder and His Dots

The chapter of Steve Jobs's story I find most important is not success but exile. Founding Apple in a garage at twenty-one and changing the world, he was thrown out of his own company at thirty.

From that humiliation he never stopped: he founded NeXT, grew Pixar, changed cinema with Toy Story — and twelve years later returned to a failing Apple to fire off the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.

At Stanford's 2005 commencement he summarized those years: you cannot connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward; so you must trust that they will somehow connect — famously recalling how a calligraphy class he audited after dropping out surfaced a decade later in the Mac's beautiful typography.

Without the twelve years of exile, perhaps no Pixar, no iPhone: the worst event of his life was the setup for its finest chapter. No one knows where your current dots lead. You can only keep placing them — and only those who trust will later see the beautiful line.

What do you work for?