For Stanford grads, Jobs's commencement speech in 2005 was life-changing
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
As far as I can tell, this advice only applied to people who weren't in the same room as him.
(I'm hesitating to hit submit on this comment - please regard this as a criticism of Steve Jobs the force of nature not Steve Jobs the person.)
I started working for Apple at the Apple store. I later moved to Server Engineering. When I first arrived in Cupertino, the one thing that struck me was that the engineers at Apple were leveling harsher criticism at OS X and the rest of Apple's software than I had ever heard before. Even the most ardent Windows or Linux fanboys couldn't hit as hard as these engineers.
So many people seem to talk about "Steve the task-master". In reality, his true talent was picking people that would be as obsessed with perfection as he was. I suspect that the random report you hear from a "former Apple employee" complaining about Steve as some sort of tyrant were the result of the handful of times that the hiring process didn't go according to plan (it happens). My experience was largely that, as you went up the chain of command at Apple, managers weren't demanding more work from their underlings, but less. In other words, it was much more common to hear "if you're not happy with that feature then cut it and move on" than "I'm not happy with this feature, you need to refine it some more"...
In real life, there are people still lost and others who think they've found it, but who won't find out until later that something else is what they were meant to do. And some who never will find it.
But none of that makes for an article that puts everything in a pretty box and ties it up with a shiny ribbon.
Learning to trust your gut and your self is critical.
Or perhaps, it is learning not to trust it is probably why people get lost.
We start out in life trusting ourselves. But we are taught and conditioned to not trust it.
Please avoid doing that if you're raising a child. Allow your child to explore and make mistakes, to train their own gut with experience.
That doesn't mean you never make demands upon them. Life makes demands and you can't prepare them for it without doing the same.
But you can't make every decision for them and spare them of consequences of mistakes. You have to protect them from permanently hurting themselves to a degree while they develop, but at some point, you have to push them out of the nest and let them fly.