Steve Jobs: "You Can't Plan to Meet the People Who Will Change your Life"

Nugget by Steve Jobs (personal story)

Jan 03, 2025

Hey friend!

🎉 Happy 2025 🎉

These days I’ve been revisiting my book highlights, and there was a particular passage that made me pause and reflect for a while.

It’s from the (free) book Make Something Wonderful, which compiles all the letters and speech transcriptions of Steve Jobs.

In the passage, Steve shares a personal story which illustrates why you can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.

You can read the full passage below 👇

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Steve Jobs:
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.
I am invited to speak at Stanford’s business school once or twice a year, and I always try to do it. I had accepted an invitation to speak one Thursday late in the afternoon, and I wasn’t feeling very well and I had a dinner later that evening with some important customers up at a winery on Page Mill Road.
The room for my talk wasn’t large enough, and all the seats were full so some of the students were sitting in the aisles. One of the professors asked them to clear the aisles in case a fire marshal should appear, and one girl who was being evicted quickly sat down in one of the four seats they had left vacant in the front row for me and whatever entourage I might be bringing.
When I arrived alone and sat down in the front row, it didn’t take me long to notice this really cute girl sitting next to me. I think she was stunned when it was me that got up to speak. And I knew something was up when I was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence.
After my talk, I stayed around to speak with some students, and she stayed too.
But then she left.
I didn’t know who she was, and thought I might never see her again.
So I wound things up and left too, and I caught up with her in the parking lot.
I asked her if she would have dinner with me on Saturday.
She said yes and gave me her phone number.
As I was walking to my car, I asked myself: “If this was the last day of my life, would I rather have dinner with the important customers or her?”
I raced back to her car, just as she was about to drive off, and asked her “How about dinner tonight?”
She said: “Sure,” and we were married 18 months later.
Yea, it might have worked out if I had waited until Saturday night, and those customers might have given us a few more orders if I had shown up.
But who knows, maybe she had a hot date Friday night and things would have turned out much differently…
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life. It just happens. Maybe its random, maybe its fate. Either way, you can’t plan for it. But you want to recognize it when it happens, and have the courage and clarity of mind to grab onto it.

This idea deeply resonated with me, because it’s something I learned this year… from experience! And it proved even more true whenever I:

1. Followed my genuine interests
“Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.”
- Naval Ravikant

2. Lived a more adventurous life
“You have calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”
- Nassim Taleb

And as Steve Jobs said, courage is a very important ingredient...

Some of my other favorite quotes (on courage):

"Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake."

- Nassim Taleb


"Courage is grace under pressure."

- Ernest Hemingway


"Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."

- Peter Thiel


"If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid."

- Robert Greene


"Churchill never allowed mistakes, disaster (personal or national) accidents, illnesses, unpopularity, and criticism to get him down. His powers of recuperation, both in physical illness and in psychological responses to abject failure, were astounding. To be blamed for the dreadful failure and loss of life in the Dardanelles was a terrible burden to carry. Churchill responded by fighting on the western front, in great discomfort and danger, and then by doing a magnificent job at the ministry of munitions. He made a fool of himself over the abdication and was howled down by a united House of Commons in one of the most savage scenes of personal humiliation ever recorded. He scrambled to his feet and worked his way back. He had courage, the most important of all virtues, and its companion, fortitude. 

These strengths are inborn but they can also be cultivated, and Churchill worked on them all his life. In a sense his whole career was an exercise in how courage can be displayed, reinforced, guarded and doled out carefully, heightened and concentrated, conveyed to others. Those uncertain of their courage can look to Churchill for reassurance and inspiration."

- Paul Johnson (author of the book: Churchill)

I found this passage by revisiting highlights and notes on my personal database of nuggets.

So, if you got value from this letter, you will likely also get a ton of value from this database — as it allows you to quickly search any keywords (e.g./ “sales”, “courage”…) and give you lessons and advice from 2,400+ timeless nuggets!

I’m also running a 30% discount for 24 hours! As as my 🎄 Christmas / New Years’s contribution 😂 Just use the code Y5NJK5NQ on the check-out.

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