Loving the work, and the years it can take to find it
The famous advice was told as part of a story about being fired. In that setting it makes a narrower and stronger claim.
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.
A month ago Steve Jobs handed the chief executive’s job at Apple to Tim Cook, which makes this a natural moment to look again at his advice about work. These lines come from the commencement address he gave at Stanford in June 2005, which Stanford published in full. He followed them by telling the graduates to keep looking if they had not yet found such work, and not to settle.
The setting matters. The passage sits inside the second of three stories in the speech, about being forced out of Apple in 1985. Jobs said the rejection turned out to be good for him: he founded NeXT, bought what became Pixar, and came back to Apple when it bought NeXT at the end of 1996. What carried him through, in his telling, was that he still loved the work. So the advice is partly a claim about resilience. Love for the work is what lets a person start again after losing the job.
As a general rule, the sentence is a chain with two links, and they are worth testing one at a time.
The first says satisfaction comes from doing what you believe is great work. That holds for a great many people, and it is the more useful half because it can be checked. Someone can ask whether they think their current work is good, and the answer is usually clear.
The second says great work requires love. Here the evidence is mixed. Love helps in the obvious way: it sustains the long hours and the attention to details nobody else will notice, the sort Jobs was famous for when he insisted the inside of the first Macintosh be laid out neatly. Yet plenty of people do excellent work in jobs they would not say they love. Surgeons and pilots often describe pride and competence more than passion. For many, love of a field arrives after they become good at it, not before.
The advice also travels badly. Told to Stanford graduates with good prospects, “keep looking” is reasonable. Told to someone with debts and a family, it can become a reason to quit steady work in search of a feeling that may never come on schedule. The line comes from a man who, by the time he gave the speech, could choose any job he wanted, and it is worth remembering that the story he told included ten years of hard work at NeXT that looked like failure for most of them.
There is a practical way to use it that respects both his point and the objections. Treat the first link as the test: aim for work you can honestly call good. Treat the second as something to build, by getting skilled at a field and picking problems within it that you care about. Love, in that order, is often the result of great work as much as its cause. Jobs’s own career fits that reading at least as well as it fits the famous version.