Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth and raised by a working-class family in California. He enrolled at Reed College but dropped out after six months, unable to see the value in the tuition his adoptive parents were straining to pay, though he continued informally auditing classes that interested him, including a calligraphy course that would later shape Apple's obsession with typography and design. In 1976, working out of a garage with Steve Wozniak, he co-founded Apple Computer.

Apple grew explosively through the late 1970s and early 1980s, but in 1985, following internal power struggles and disagreements over the company's direction, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, the very company he had co-founded, by the board and CEO he himself had helped recruit. It was, by his own later account, one of the most painful experiences of his life, a very public professional failure playing out in front of the entire industry he had helped create.

Rather than disappear, Jobs founded NeXT and acquired what would become Pixar, which went on to redefine animated filmmaking with Toy Story. In 1997, Apple, struggling badly without him, acquired NeXT and brought Jobs back, initially as an advisor and soon after as CEO. He led one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history, launching the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad in succession and transforming Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

Jobs's life is one of the most public examples of being fired from your own creation and returning to build something even larger. His own account of the experience, delivered in his well-known 2005 Stanford commencement address, was that losing Apple freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life. For young people, the lesson isn't that failure feels good, it clearly didn't, but that a very public, painful setback doesn't have to be a final verdict on what you're capable of building next.