Starting again without knowing the ending
In his Stanford address, Jobs described being forced out of Apple as a public and painful failure, then said the loss of certainty freed him to begin again. He started NeXT and became involved with the company that became Pixar, but neither venture came with a promise that Apple would ever need him again.
A return built through the detour
Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, bringing Jobs back and carrying NeXT’s software into Apple’s operating-system future. That sequence is documented; the claim that dismissal was simply ‘the best thing’ remains Jobs’s later interpretation of a path whose value was unknowable when it began.