As I replied in another comment, I didn't mean to come across as dismissive of Jobs — if anything I am trying to make the case that Jobs rose to the occasion when others in the same "lucky seats" did not.

But just to be pedantic with your list, NeXT's success is debatable and not likely to have happened at all if Apple had not happened first. And from what I've read, Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way and let them do what they wanted to do: make films, not hardware, not software as Jobs imagined.

> Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way

he got out of the way and became disney's biggest shareholder in the same deal...

when talking about Job's nose for success that's a big detail skip around.

the deal with NeXT left him with control over the board of directors on Apple.

I don't like him and I don't like how Apple operates in the developer's landscape, but I HAVE to acknowledge that what Jobs touched turned into gold.

Yes, NeXT was in fact a notorious failure by 1997, which had a lot of us scratching our heads at Amelio paying $400M for it. (And that the x86 version of the OS was slow and fragile. But, yes, unlike BeOS, you could print. And that still mattered at the time.)

The lessons Steve learned at NeXT enabled the huge success of his second tenure at Apple.

Don’t forget NextStep which in its Cocoa incarnation is a very important pillar under Apples success.

I don't think you got the right idea from his message. Tons of people had smart friends. Hell, I do have some smart friends. Yet I, and most other people with smart friends, don't end up doing even close to what Steve Jobs did.

Luck, skill, hard work, grit, vision.

You still need luck to discover opportunities with the correct growth slope in the market gradient landscape, funding landscape, etc. Some of this is intelligence, but it's also "right place, right time" and "who you know".

But you also need the skill and hard work to execute, grit when facing headwinds, and vision to see the gradient landscape as it ascends and unfolds into the stratosphere. You have to be adaptable. Future thinking, but realistically grounded in implementable plans with a pragmatism for building things the market will want, avoiding the traps your biases may set up for you.

Jobs had all of this.

In short, luck is necessary, but not sufficient.

Bingo.