When you think of the best business minds of all time, the likes of Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and Bill Gates will likely spring forward. However, there's a lot to be said for Steve Jobs.
How many of you are reading this very article from an iPhone right now? As a pioneer of the personal computer and co-founder of Apple, the tech scene has a lot to thank Steve Jobs for.
While the entrepreneur's tragic passing in 2011 means he's not around to give us sage business advice anymore, he gave us plenty words of wisdom over the years about how you could also become successful.
Just look at Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, where the brilliant businessman left us with some powerful advice. According to Jobs, there's one crucial difference that sets the successful apart from everyone else.
Advert
In his now-legendary Stanford University address, Jobs said the following toward the end of his speech: "And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Although some take this to mean Jobs was saying 'follow your passion,' others have noted that he showed no real love of tech before he co-founded Apple Inc. in 1976. In fact, Jobs dropped out of college in 1972, before going on a trip across India to seek enlightenment in 1974, and later studying Zen Buddhism.
Instead, it seems Jobs was arguing that as your success grows in whatever form, you should fight against being dragged along by convention.
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli argue this in their Becoming Steve Jobs biography, with the pair writing: "By 2005 intuition had come to mean a sense of what to do that grew out of entertaining a world possibilities.
"He was confident enough now to listen to his team as well as his own thoughts and to acknowledge the nature of the world around him." Going with your gut is an important part of making decisions from the bottom rung of the ladder right to the top, and looking at Jobs' success, it seems this was a mantra he kept with him.
Instead of following someone else's path, Jobs was determined to carve his own legacy away from what others before him had done.
It's not as simple as throwing your papers off the desk and sending your boss a snarky email saying, "No, I'm going to write my own report instead of the one you asked for," but Jobs' words ring true even 19 years after he told us to 'follow your heart.' Then again, having co-founded one of the most successful tech companies of all time means it's probably a little easier to dish out golden nuggets of advice and have people hang on your every word.