“Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”
– Steve Jobs
The reason why you create something tells you a lot about the quality of the product itself, and the impact it has on greater society. Those who develop products and businesses for the sake of money end up making money, but not a great impact – just consider all those smaller electronics companies who were trying to jump aboard the wave of the personal computers in the ‘80s. Only a few of them made the impact that changed the technological landscape as we know it.
Only one was, and could ever be, Steve Jobs, who reached his financial promise early on in his career and and continued to make great products for the sake of making great products. His vision was not just for electronics, but for how electronics would inevitably fit into our lives, and he was obsessive about maintaining that vision.
In the end, as it was in the beginning, money is not the thing that should validate your intelligence; one’s vision for the future, and her place within it, validates her intelligence.
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