Jobs's line points at a question — and the question is harder to answer than the people who quote it usually let on.
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." Steve Jobs said it at Stanford in 2005, and the line has been quoted ever since.
It is a clean, satisfying sentence. It is also harder to use than it looks.
The trouble starts with the assumption underneath it. "Don't live someone else's life" implies you know what your own life is or should be. That the version of you who picks a path freely exists somewhere, separate from the people around you and the books you've read. It implies "your life" is a thing that has a clear shape, if you can just clear away the noise long enough to see it.
I'm not sure it works like that.
Consider the people we usually point at as proof. The friend who quit finance to live in Bali. The accountant who walked out at 32 to open a small coffee shop. The classmate who left the firm to write online. They will tell you, often happily, that they got out. That they stopped living the life that wasn't theirs. They are mostly right. Their lives are theirs in a way the default career was not.
But they are also reading from a script. There is a script for leaving finance and going to Southeast Asia. There is a script for the small coffee shop. There is a script for going freelance and writing about it. The script is fifteen or twenty years old now, and millions of people are following it. It is not the script their parents were on. But it is a script.
I left Irish finance in my mid-twenties. I went to Vietnam. I ended up staying nine years. I ran a small business. I'm a freelance writer now. By the time I was 30, I was an intern at a venture capital firm — a long way from the partner-track life my classmates were on. From the outside, the move was off-script. You don't realise you're on a different path until someone at a wedding asks you what you do and you watch their face try to hold the answer.
From the inside, though, it wasn't off-script in the way I'd assumed. I had read Tim Ferriss. I had read most of the "leave the corporate job, build something on your own terms" books I could find. The decision to leave finance felt like mine — but it was also, in fairness, exactly what the people I was reading were telling me to do. I was off one script and onto another.
This is the part that makes the Jobs line hard. If you stay in the default, you might be living someone else's life. If you reject the default, you are usually picking up the alternative most people in your situation pick up. Both can be lives borrowed from somewhere.
The research on regret, oddly, points in a similar direction. Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich studied what people actually regret toward the ends of their lives, and his blunt summary is one I think about often: "the failure to be your ideal self is usually an inaction." The interesting bit, for this question, is that the inaction he means isn't only the failure to leave the desk job. It is the failure to do the thing you, specifically, hoped to become. Reading the books and following the genre — going to Bali, opening the café, writing online — is action in one sense and inaction in another. You moved. You may not have moved toward who you were trying to become. You may have moved toward who that genre was trying to make you.
So what is left? Probably not a clean answer about which path is yours. The default and the anti-default are both available off the shelf. Choosing the anti-default doesn't, on its own, get you to your own life. It just gets you to a different aisle in the same shop.
What I have come to think the question really asks is something quieter. Not "are you on the standard path or the alternative one?" but "can you say why you chose this one?" Not the inherited reason. Not the book reason. The reason that holds up when you ask yourself a second time. If you can answer it, the path is probably yours. If you can't, the path is borrowed — no matter how unconventional it looks from the outside.
What does a real answer look like, in practice? It tends to be specific to you in a way a borrowed one isn't. "I wanted to build something with my hands" passes the test if you actually spend years building things with your hands and the building matters to you when nobody is watching. It fails if it sounded right in a book and the rest of your life doesn't follow from it. The test is not the action. It is whether the reason for the action survives translation back into the texture of your particular life. The borrowed answer usually sounds like a chapter heading. The real one usually doesn't sound like anything you would post.
The version of me who stayed in finance might have been living someone else's life. So might the version that left. The difference, if there is one, sits in whether either of them could give a real answer for the choice.
Jobs's line is good. It is just less of an instruction than it sounds. It does not point at a path. It points at a question — and the question is harder to answer than the people who quote it usually let on.
