From Failure to Success
For two years in the late 1990s, I worked with a consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Near the end of my tenure, I attended a staff meeting during which the company’s IT specialist told a group of graphic artists and designers, “Apple is dead.” I never heard a room become so quiet so fast.
This morning, as I typed away on my MacBook Pro—one of three Apple laptops I own—I recalled that meeting and smiled.
That someone once predicted the demise of Apple is not surprising. The company sold only a few hundred of its earliest computers, the Apple I and II. In 1983, Apple released the Lisa. That computer cost $10,000 and bombed in the marketplace. Even the Macintosh, introduced to the world in 1984 via a much talked about Orwellian Super Bowl ad, failed to gain much traction. Though Apple founder Steve Jobs had predicted sales of one million Macs within one year of its introduction, by March 1985, the company had sold only one-tenth of that target.
In May of 1985, Apple's board of directors fired 30-year old Steve Jobs in a very public way. Jobs, however, never stopped creating.
Last week, when Jobs announced his resignation as CEO of the company he had founded and returned to, Apple’s value topped $300 billion. Despite the company's rough beginnings, virtually all business analysts now agree that Steve Jobs engineered the personal computer industry and completely reshaped the music, movie and mobile phone industries.
If you are starting work as an intern, summer associate or new hire, the next time you touch an iPad, iPhone or MacBook, just remember that the person who imagined these instruments was once considered a failure. The greatest lesson we can learn from Steve Jobs just may be the importance of never giving up. He proved that successful entrepreneurs don't fear failure. Instead, they see failure as as an opportunity to learn, and they never, never give up.
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