“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,” Jobs said during his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. 

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking—and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Many Gen Zers are apprehensive about what career to choose. Some are taking whatever gig they can get in today’s labor market, as roles are quickly being disrupted by AI, and once-lucrative jobs have fallen out of favor. But Jobs’ story is a reminder to young professionals that chasing a long, passionate career in what they love is the recipe for sustainable success. After all, they have a nearly 50-year career ahead of them.

The many jobs that Steve Jobs had and loved

Jobs’ has a diverse lineup of successful ventures under his belt—including Pixar Animation Studios, and software company NeXT—but Apple was his ultimate brainchild. Leading the company through its many iterations, Jobs helmed the creation of generation-defining products for decades. Baby boomers waited in line to snag the Apple II computer back in 1977; by 2001, millennials were flooding their music collections onto the iPod classic; and all throughout the 2010s, Gen Zers were gifted their first iPhones.

Apple may seem like an unmovable force today, sitting at number four on the Fortune 500 and having sold more than three billion iPhones. But its come-up was anything but sunshines and rainbows; despite cofounding the titan of industry, Jobs was forced out by then-CEO John Sculley in 1985, throwing his career into flux. 

The entrepreneur recalled making the most of the bad situation, entering one of the “most creative periods” of his life by launching NeXT and revamping Pixar Studios. But even he couldn’t resist the gravitational pull back to the “best thing that ever happened to [him],” Apple. He returned to the fledgling company as CEO in 1997, and remained in the role until just two months before his passing in October 2011. 

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith,” Jobs said. “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.”

Jobs’ love for his work turned him into a billionaire

Despite leaving behind a fortune estimated to be worth $10.2 billion at the time of his passing, Jobs made it clear that his ambitions weren’t tied to his bank account. A part of why Apple became a trillion-dollar innovator may be thanks to his devotion for the products—a life-long love for technology he first discovered as an eager tween, hungry for opportunity. 

“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

The iPhones sitting in millions of back pockets and MacBooks scattered across swaths of desks may not even exist if it weren’t for Jobs’ devotion to the craft. At just 12 years old, he took a leap of faith to put his passion into action; Jobs hunted down the phone number of the founder of Hewlett Packard (HP) cofounder Bill Hewlett’s in the yellow pages, and called him up for a favor. The tween needed spare parts needed to build a frequency counter, but he got far more than some nuts and bolts. 

Hewlett offered Jobs a gig at the iconic tech company—a launchpad for his future successes dominating the same industry. Jobs set himself on the path for greatness, all because he mustered the courage to try. 

“I never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up,” Jobs said in a 1994 interview, archived by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. “I’ve never found anyone who says ‘no,’ or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.”

“Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask…You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

That reality is showing up on a campus. A growing share of college students are seeking medical evaluations for ADHD, anxiety, and depression—and requesting academic accommodations such as extended time on exams and papers. At some of the country’s selective universities, the numbers are striking: more than 20% of undergraduates at Brown and Harvard are registered as disabled. At UMass Amherst, it’s 34%; Stanford, 38%, according to data analyzed by The Atlantic.

While it’s clear that many students requesting accommodations do so for legitimate medical reasons and that increased diagnoses may reflect greater mental-health awareness, some experts have raised concerns about overdiagnosis and whether universities are making it too easy for students to qualify. And the debate has set off a wildfire on social media this week, catching the attention of high-profile business leaders, including Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder.

Lonsdale’s response offered no sympathy. “Loser generation,” he wrote in reaction to a graph showing the rising number of undergraduate students reporting disabilities.

“At Stanford it’s a hack for housing though and at some point I get it, even if it’s not my personal ethics. Terrible leadership from the university.”

He argued that families have been slowly using disability accommodations to give their children an academic advantage—when they might not actually need it.

“Claiming your child has a disability to give them a leg up became an obvious dominant game theoretic strategy for parents without honor in the 2010’s,” Lonsdale wrote earlier this month on X. “Great signal to avoid a family / not do business with parents who act this way.”

And while it’s unclear how many students, if any, are trying to game the system, Lonsdale has made his broader view clear: he doesn’t think universities are preparing young people—or evaluating them—in ways that matter.

“No great companies are interested in the BS games played by universities,” he added.

Fortune reached out to Lonsdale for further comment.

Lonsdale’s complicated history with higher education

Though a Stanford alum himself, Lonsdale has a complicated history with the institution and higher education more broadly.

In the early 2010s, while serving as a mentor in a Stanford tech entrepreneurship course, Lonsdale was accused of sexual assault by a student—and banned from mentoring undergraduates for 10 years and from campus entirely. The assault charges were later dropped, but Lonsdale acknowledged violating a rule prohibiting consensual relationships between mentors and students.

Less than a decade later, in 2021, Lonsdale cofounded his own school—the University of Austin—with Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, and others. The institution prides itself on freedom of speech and overcoming the “mediocrity” of traditional higher education. It welcomed its first group of undergraduates last fall and remains unaccredited.

The school has drawn support from Lonsdale’s fellow Palantir cofounder and Stanford alum Alex Karp, who has also criticized the college system.

“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp, Palantir’s CEO, told CNBC earlier this year.

Instead, the 58-year-old said Palantir is building a new credential “separate from class or background,” that is the “best credential in tech.”

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian,” Karp said during an earnings call earlier this year. “No one cares about the other stuff.”

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