The brick, and the years after it

The brick, in the speech Steve Jobs gave to Stanford graduates in June 2005, was his removal from Apple. In 1985, after a boardroom struggle with the chief executive he had recruited, Apple’s board sided against him and he left the company he had co-founded, at the age of thirty. He told the graduates that it was devastating, and also that it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to him.

What followed is the substance behind the line. He started NeXT, which built expensive, admired computers that few people bought. He bought a small computer graphics group from Lucasfilm that became Pixar, and in 1995 Pixar released Toy Story. In 1996 Apple, by then in trouble, bought NeXT, and Jobs returned. The software developed at NeXT became the foundation of the Mac’s operating system.

The faith he described was specific. He said what kept him going was that he still loved the work, and that he had been rejected but still loved it. That is a narrower and sturdier thing than faith that everything will work out. It does not promise a return to Apple. It says the reason to continue is still there.

That matters, because the NeXT years also show where faith misleads. NeXT spent years and a great deal of money on hardware the market did not want, and it stopped making computers in 1993. Faith in the hardware plan was wrong. Faith in the work, and in the software, was right. A founder hit by a brick needs to keep the faith in the work and keep questioning the faith in any particular plan.

The story also carries survivorship. Jobs could tell it in 2005 because it had ended well. Many people who kept faith after a setback did not get their company back, and the line reads differently from where they stand. Its lasting advice is about the next step, not the ending: keep doing work that is worth doing, and let the rest be decided later.