You know, I was thinking about Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple.
This is one of the most well-documented stories in business history, so I’ll keep it short. Jobs co-founded Apple. Built the Macintosh. Got into a power struggle with the CEO he himself had recruited. Lost. Got fired from his own company in 1985.
He was 30 years old.
What happened next is the part that matters. Jobs started NeXT (a computer company that mostly flopped as a product but produced technology that would eventually become the foundation of modern macOS). He bought Pixar (which became the most successful animation studio in history). He grew up. He learned to manage people without terrorizing them, or at least he got better at it. He developed patience, something the 25-year-old version of himself didn’t have and didn’t want.
When Apple brought him back in 1997, he wasn’t the same person. He was better. Not because he’d been studying leadership or meditating on mountaintops (although he did some of that). He was better because getting fired had taught him things that success never could.
Here’s the line Jobs used in his Stanford commencement speech: “I didn’t see it then, but getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”
I think about that sentence all the time.
Not because I’m comparing myself to Steve Jobs. I make documentary films about families in their living rooms. He reinvented six industries. Slightly different scale. But the principle is the same. The worst thing that happens to you is often the curriculum you need for the next thing.
I was in the Army for four years. Got out with no real plan. Bounced around. Did things that looked, from the outside, like a guy who couldn’t figure it out. But every one of those detours taught me something I use today. The Army taught me how to be uncomfortable and keep moving. The bouncing around taught me that I needed to build something of my own. The failures taught me what didn’t work, which is just as valuable as knowing what does.
Heritage Films exists because of every wrong turn I took before I found the right one. If you removed any single failure from the timeline, I don’t think I end up here.
Jobs needed to get fired. Disney needed to go bankrupt. Ford needed to fail twice before the Model T. The biography always looks like a straight line when you read it backwards. Living it forward, it looks like chaos.
If you’re in the chaos right now, I won’t insult you by saying “everything happens for a reason.” I hate that phrase. But I will say this: the worst thing that’s happening to you might be building the person you need to become. You won’t see it until later. Nobody does.
Jobs didn’t see it at 30. He saw it at 42.
Give it time.
Heritage Films produces personal documentary films across the United States. Every story has a chapter that didn’t make sense until later.