Joanna Schieble was ashamed of the coming baby. Her tyrannical father was convinced it would be a useless child with no purpose in life. He had forbidden her from marrying the child’s father, a Syrian Muslim boy called Abdulfattah Jandali.
Joanna had met and fallen in love with Abdul at the University of Wisconsin and was pregnant with his child. Terrified of her father’s wrath, Joanna went away secretly to San Francisco to have the baby. Even Abdul wasn’t told.
Joanna put the baby up for adoption at once, and chose an educated, wealthy and Catholic family. But they decided to adopt a girl child instead, so the infant ended up with Paul and Clara, definitely not a wealthy couple. He repaired cars for a living and was handy with garage tools. They named the baby Steven.
Steven was a difficult child, too easily bored, too clever for his age and not interested in school. He resisted authority figures, frequently misbehaved and was suspended a few times.
By his senior year of high school, he had begun trying out hallucinogens like LSD, which he described as “the most wonderful feeling of his life up to that point”.
His parents, wanting to ensure his education, put him into Reed College after he finished school, but to no one’s surprise, Steve soon dropped out without telling his parents. He was more interested in the calligraphy course, which he attended religiously.
During this time, he slept on the floor in friends’ dorm rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money and got weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.
He seemed to be stumbling through his days with no purpose in life. In the years that followed, Steve traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, dabbled with Zen Buddhism in Japan, shaved his head bald and began wearing Indian clothing, and joined a hippie commune called All-One Farm in Oregon. He was searching for something, perhaps meaning, perhaps a deeper purpose, perhaps a passion, but even he didn’t know what it was.
To people who knew him, it may have seemed that Mr Schieble’s prediction about Steve Jobs was correct — he did seem to live as though he had no purpose in life except doing whatever random thing came next.
Then one day, he and his nerdy friend Steve Wozniak, working in a backyard garage, put together a computer that was simply unlike any computer the world had ever seen before. It came with a hand-held gadget called a mouse with which users could move a pointer around a screen and click to access menus.
They decided to call the computer Apple. For a logo, they chose an apple with a bite taken out. After that, no one in the entire world had any doubt what Steve Jobs’ purpose in his life was.
The purpose of a purpose in life
Everyone feels better with a purpose. Everyone should look for a purpose in life. This is what we learn, at home, in school, in business school, from our peers. Opinions begin to diverge when you ask the next question: how should one go about finding one’s purpose in life? Now it can become genuinely confusing, because some will say, “Follow your passion!” and others will say, “Make a plan!”
What would be the advice of Steve Jobs, a man who clearly achieved one world-changing, game-changing purpose in his life?
In the commencement speech he gave to Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005, Jobs, in slacks and sandals under his robe, said, “You’ve got to find what you love… The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
In today’s competitive world, this happens to be just about the most popular and significant bit of advice that career coaches and motivational speakers give to people starting out in life and wanting to achieve success whether as manager, businessmen or consultants.
First figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.
We create icons out of those who do this — whether they are Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Richard Branson. Their lives seem to be living proof that if you follow your nose, the money will not be far behind.
There’s just one slight problem here — when we dig a little deeper, sometimes we find this black and white advice becoming a little blurred, and start wondering which came first: the activity or the passion for it.
What Bill found without searching
For example, Bill Gates never intended to be either the richest man in the world or one of its greatest philanthropes. He had no plan to create the world’s largest and most respected software company. He was in awe of the power and precision with which programming languages could control computers and make them do things. He loved nothing more than tinkering with computers and writing code.
He was also undeniably brilliant, almost a prodigy. He scored 1690 out of 1700 in Scholastic Aptitude Test and entered Harvard University in 1973. While there, though, Gates did not seem to have any definite study plan. They say he spent a lot of time tinkering around with the school’s computers. When he was in his second year there, he and his friend Paul Allen saw an ad in Popular Electronics magazine asking for a programming language for the newly released MITS Altair 8800, based on the Intel 8080 CPU.
Gates saw opportunity. Together with his lifelong buddy Paul Allen, he wrote to MITS claiming they had already written a language for the Altair (they hadn’t). They spend the next few weeks working helter skelter into the wee hours to develop it. Their code was a hit and Gates dropped out of Harvard set up a small company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called — well, Microsoft.
Microsoft would have remained an unknown company and Gates just an average businessman if not for the pure chance of the contract they negotiated with IBM in 1980, best described as luck with a dash of happenstance. Gates agreed to provide IBM computers with his MS-DOS operating system — on the condition that IBM agree never to compete with Microsoft in licensing the operating system. IBM, betting that the future would continue to be in hardware, signed happily, thinking it had the better of the deal.
History tells us that that gamble changed the trajectory and fortune of Bill Gates’ life — and the way we interact with computers today.
No one doubts that Gates was passionate about Microsoft, and the oft-quoted vision of “a computer on every desk and in every home”. However, his work did not come out of his passion; rather, his passion grew as Microsoft itself grew into a global behemoth.
Researchers have identified four problems with the advice to “follow your passion”.
- It seems to suggest that passion is all you need. In fact, an architect could land a job in a prestigious firm of architects and still be miserable because he doesn’t get on with his colleagues, or is not paid enough.
- Many people feel they don’t really have a passion relevant to a job. The advice to “find your passion’ makes them feel a little inadequate. If you’re not passionate about anything, can you still find purpose in life? And what if you’re passionate about more than one thing?
- It makes it sound like passion is something you can figure out by thinking a lot. Not everyone has a ‘true calling’, nor are ‘gut feelings’ always the best way to figure out what work will bring you a sense of purpose and fulfilment. Sometimes, the best thing to do is what Steve Jobs did — try out a number of seemingly random things.
- It can make you limit yourself needlessly. You may be passionate about painting, but perhaps it is your organizing skills that people admire and respect you for, and your ability to bring about major changes cooperatively. You might find that as you focus more on this area, you develop a passion for it.
Random evolution of purpose in life
When you take a microscope to Jobs’ life to see how passion developed, you may be surprised. Around the 1970s, Jobs got tired of being poor and took on a night job at Atari Computers, attracted by an ad that said, Have fun and make money. He divided his time between Atari and the All-One Farm, the country commune he had joined. In between, taking breaks from Atari, Steve went looking for the light in India and began flirting with Zen Buddhism. In between these spiritual forays, he would dabble in electronics whenever he needed some quick cash.
In this time, he noticed that local ‘wireheads’ were excited by do-it-yourself model-kit computers. Jobs told Wozniak that if he could design computer circuit boards for these kids at $25, he could sell it to them for $50. He thought he could sell about 100. But when he took the circuit board to the Byte Shop, its owner Paul Terrell wanted fully assembled computers, and was willing to pay $500 each if Jobs could put 50 together really quickly. Jobs, excited at the prospect of making a small pot of money, began to borrow start-up capital to help assemble computers.
That computer became Apple’s first computer. There was no grand vision at that time. Steve Jobs just wanted to make a little quick money.
Shortly before he died, Steve Jobs, being interviewed by Walter Isaacson, his biographer, revisited his own earlier advice to “find your passion”. Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, who recalled an exchange he had with Jobs shortly before he passed.
“We’re always talking about following your passion,” he reportedly said, “but we’re all part of the flow of history. You’ve got to put something back into the flow of history that’s going to help your community, help other people so that 20, 30, 40 years from now people will say, this person didn’t just have a passion, he cared about making something that other people could benefit from.”
finding my purpose in life 