In his Commencement Speech to Stanford, Steve Jobs said:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. 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.

I think Steve was fortunate enough to live up to this ideal. He set out to change the way we did things, and he succeeded: first with the personal computer, Macintosh and iMac, then with Pixar, the iPod and iPhone.

Steve’s passion was to make technology easy to use for the consumer. He was fired from Apple in 1985 by Apple’s Board of Directors. For the next 11 years Apple lost its way under the direction of CEOs from business and the computer industry. They all lacked the vision and passion of Steve Jobs. After he left Apple, he started NeXT Computer and bought what would later become Pixar.

Steve later said his being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him, “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Maybe this is why he got into so many different industries (computers, movies, music, cell phones)- by getting into a new industry, he was a beginner again.

In 1996, with Apple floundering, Apple announced it would buy NeXT and bring Steve back to Apple. Steve became the de facto CEO after then-CEO Gil Amelio was fire in July 1997. Under Steve’s guidance and passion, Apple went from a company on the verge of bankruptcy to the largest corporation in the world.

If that doesn’t show you the power of one’s passion, I don’t know what will. What’s your passion?