Apple’s Steve Jobs told students to never ‘settle’ in their careers: ‘If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking’

More than four decades since Apple’s IPO, the company is now worth $4 trillion—but its rise was anything but a straight shot to the top. The business’ late cofounder Steve Jobs weathered near-bankruptcy, and was even ousted from the company he had built, before returning and setting the stage for Apple’s resurgence. But what kept him going, he once told students, was a simple career lesson: doing the work you love. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and 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,” Jobs said during a 2005 Stanford commencement speech . “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking—and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” Many Gen Zers are apprehensive about what career to choose. Some are taking whatever gig they can get in today’s labor market, as roles are quickly being disrupted by AI , and once-lucrative jobs have fallen out of favor . But Jobs’ story is a reminder to young professionals that chasing a long, passionate career in what they love is the recipe for sustainable success. After all, they have a nearly 50-year career ahead of them. The many jobs that Steve Jobs had and loved Jobs had a diverse lineup of successful ventures under his belt—including Pixar Animation Studios , and software company NeXT—but Apple was his ultimate brainchild. Leading the company through its many iterations, Jobs helmed the creation of generation-defining products for decades. Baby boomers waited in line to snag the Apple II computer back in 1977; by 2001, millennials were flooding their music collections onto the iPod classic; and all throughout the 2010s, Gen Zers were gifted their first iPhones . Apple may seem like an unmovable force today, sitting at No. 4 on the Fortune 500 and having sold more than 3 billion iPhones. But its come-up was anything but sunshine and rainbows; despite cofounding the titan of ind…