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Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me ?

I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

And so I decided to start over.

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.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

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.

And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

My third story is about death.

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