Rhetorical Analysis: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, an American entrepreneur, business magnate, inventor, and industrial designer, offered a speech at Stanford University to recently graduated students. During his speech, Steve Jobs shares personal experiences, in which, he successfully uses emotional appeals to demonstrate why we must enjoy our life doing what we love. However, his argument that the only way you are going to succeed and feel satisfied is if you love your work makes his reliability questionable, therefore he ethically fails. During his story, Steve Jobs uses emotional appeals to give the audience a sense of calm and prosperity for the future letting them know that everything happens for a reason. Jobs explains how at his young age of 20, he began the company Apple, now one of the biggest companies in the US valuated in over $700 billion dollars, in his parent’s garage which had such success that in only 10 years the company grew and became into a 2 billion dollars company

An ethical failure is made by having such an imposing and successful business figure as Steve Jobs since a normal person cannot easily identify with his experiences of creating billionaire companies. In the same way, an ethical misperception is often made by society, as in this case, selling us that realization stories are always possible and since someone else had success then everyone can do it likewise. Therefore, if Steve Jobs tells us that if he created several billion-dollar companies, we can do it as well. A thing that we must understand is that not because we love something, we are going to be able to make a living. Of course, we must try, but sometimes we have to accept that it is not going to work. A clearer example of this may be a person who loves to sing opera, but does not have the ability to do so, even though he loves to sing, his voice and his ribcage does not allow