Bubble Up: The Exit to Life Is Clearly Marked

Steve Jobs talked eloquently at his famed Stanford University commencement address about fear being removed when one faces death. It's a lesson other entrepreneurs can take to heart.

Image: Stanford University

In life, Steve Jobs gave the world exquisite products. In death, he’s been a never-ending fount of inspirational quotes to mainstream media, bloggers, the Twittersphere, business professors, and moms and dads around kitchen tables the world over.

Some of the quotes we’ve read landed with a thud, but the following quote, served up by Steve Blank, is one of the better ones we’ve seen on how Jobs viewed life’s challenges.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Blank, something of an entrepreneurial Yoda, uses Jobs’ words to set up a wonderful cautionary tale about Bob, a former student of his who launched a startup company with a great product concept for a new class of enterprise software but, ultimately, not the right quota of grit and determination.

What makes the story fascinating is that Blank operates both as a detached observer of events and a quasi insider. The result is a 360-degree yarn about a guy and a product who “coulda been a contender.”

“I followed Bob [sic] progress in bits and pieces from updates from the CIO, the VC, and his emails and blogs,” Blank writes. “He seemed to be on the fast track to startup success. But pretty soon a few worrying warning signs appeared.”

Those warning signs included second-rate hires, a desire to sacrifice good for great, and an inability to trust gut instincts—all this from a startup that was “sitting on a gold mine” in Blank’s estimation.

In the end, Bob couldn’t overcome his fear of failure, or as Jobs may have put it, death.

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