Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a business and creative genius. But he was not generally known for being a particularly nice guy. The internet abounds with stories of him being rude, manipulative, and demanding. Tales that portray the Apple founder in a warm and fuzzy light are much rarer.
But a recent release of some of Jobs’s old emails is very much the exception.
The Steve Jobs Archive recently published notes Jobs sent to himself while preparing for his iconic 2005 Stanford commencement address. They contain snippets of ideas and anecdotes he was considering including. One relates in surprisingly sweet detail the story of how Jobs met his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.
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The story will most definitely change how you see Jobs, adding human dimension to an entrepreneur famed for his hard-charging approach. But it will also probably change how you think about success and the best way to chase it.
One speech Steve Jobs didn’t nail
Steve Jobs’s 2005 appearance at Stanford’s graduation wasn’t the first time he spoke at the school. In one email, dated June 7, 2005, he explains that Stanford regularly invited him give talks at the business school. Apparently, they were popular. On one occasion the crowd was so large that some students had to squeeze in by sitting in the aisles.
Fearful of angry fire marshals, administrators shooed the students to clear the aisle. One enterprising young woman grabbed one of the seats in the first row that had been left vacant for VIPS. When Steve Jobs arrived for his talk he sat next to her.
“It didn’t take long to notice this really cute girl sitting next to me,” Jobs relates in the email.
Soon he got up to speak, but he found his attention was still stuck on the woman in the front row. “I was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence.”
It’s adorable to imagine Jobs, master of the polished keynote product reveal, stumbling over his words because of a pretty woman. But Jobs isn’t just trying to humanize himself with this story. He goes on to make a larger point.
Steve Jobs cancels his dinner plans
After the speech Jobs was due to have dinner with an important client, but he stuck around to chat with students, hoping to talk with the woman in the front row again. But she left before he got through his schmoozing. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, but he didn’t lack decisiveness.
“I didn’t know who she was, and I thought I might never see her again. So I wound things up and left too, and I caught up with her in the parking lot. I asked her if she would have dinner with me on Saturday,” he writes. She agreed—a happy result for Jobs. But something was still nagging him.
“As I was walking to my car, I asked myself: ‘If this was the last day of my life, would I rather have dinner with the important customer or her?’ ” He raced after the woman, who was getting in her car, and moved the date to that evening.
“We were married 18 months later,” he reveals. The woman was, of course, Laurene Powell Jobs.
“You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.”
You might take this anecdote as just another example of Steve Jobs’s well documented obsession with imagining his own death as a motivation tool. This is a guy who later claimed he asked himself “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” in the mirror every morning.
“Seize the day” is definitely part of the message. But the email’s 12-word subject line captures Jobs’s main point: “You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.”
“You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life. It just happens. Maybe it’s random, maybe it’s fate. Either way, you can’t plan for it,” he declares. “But you want to recognize it when it happens, and have the courage and clarity of mind to grab onto it.”
Steal Jobs’s serendipity mindset
This is clearly good advice for bashful daters. But the idea that success depends a little on luck and a lot of being able to recognize luck when it comes knocking is an insight that goes beyond romance. Science and other entrepreneurs suggest that accepting the role of serendipity in life and opening yourself up to it is key for many kinds of success.
Studies show that people who are lucky aren’t just mysteriously blessed by the universe. They are more alert to good fortune and quicker to act on it when it comes calling. They are not so obsessed with how things “should” go that they fail to seize opportunities that don’t fit perfectly within those plans—things like a pretty blonde in the front row immediately before an important client dinner.
Researchers at USC Marshall School of Business call this ability to spot, understand, and respond to lucky opportunities the serendipity mindset. They claim that if you understand how your mindset influences your luck, you can train yourself to be more open to happy accidents and life-changing chance encounters.
“Once you look at serendipity as a process rather than as an event, you can create more serendipity ‘triggers,’ learn how to connect the dots, and then, you can actually influence the outcome,” explained USC’s Christian Busch.
Entrepreneur Jason Roberts calls this process, increasing your “luck surface area.” By putting yourself out there more (publicly writing about things you’re working on is a great way to do this), and being more sensitive to opportunities that might pop up thanks to your efforts, you increase your chances of getting lucky.
When luck comes knocking, open the door
So remember, “You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.” In fact, sticking too closely to your plans might prevent you from meeting them. You can, however, push yourself to be more sensitive to when fate knocks and be brave enough to open the door.
You might not score yourself a spouse like Steve Jobs did. But if you think about serendipity this way, you will open yourself up to greater success of all kinds.
