“Do something today that your future self will thank you for.”
Sean Patrick Flanery
quolira
quolira.com
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
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About this quote
Meaning
Jobs is making a direct claim about the relationship between belief in your work and the experience of a satisfying life. Because work takes up so much of a person's waking hours, spending those hours on something you consider genuinely worthwhile is not a luxury but a condition for feeling that your life is being used well. Settling for work that feels meaningless, he suggests, makes lasting satisfaction essentially unavailable.
Context
This passage comes from the same 2005 Stanford commencement address as quote 440, and the two lines are close together in the original speech. Jobs was speaking to graduating students at a pivotal moment in their lives, encouraging them to be deliberate about the direction they chose rather than defaulting to whatever seemed safe or practical. He acknowledged that finding work you believe in is not easy and may take time, but insisted that the search itself is worth pursuing. His own career gave him credible standing to make that argument.
About the author
Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and a central figure in shaping modern personal technology. He played a leading role in developing products that combined technical sophistication with accessible design, influencing how computing, music, and communication evolved for everyday users. He was also instrumental in the growth of Pixar Animation Studios before it became a major force in the film industry. Jobs was known for his high standards, his skill as a communicator, and his conviction that technology and the humanities could reinforce each other. He died in 2011.
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