Steve Jobs (1955–2011, 56), founder of Apple Inc, gave this amazing and
inspirational speech to Stanford University graduates on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of
the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.
Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college
graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s
it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I
dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So
why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological
mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to
put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted
by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at
birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they
decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my
parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the
night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They
said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother
had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated
from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She
only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would
someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But
I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and
all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college
tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no
idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going
to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust
that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but
looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I
dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t
interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It
wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor
in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy
food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night
to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And
much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition
turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed
College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction
in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every
drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out
and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a
calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san
serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different
letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was
beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t
capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope
of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we
were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And
we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in
college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never
dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,
and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they
do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward
when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten
years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward;
you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that
the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has
never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I
was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10
years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2
billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our
finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned
30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you
started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very
talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things
went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and
eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors
sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been
the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I
really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob
Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very
public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.
But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The
turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been
rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I
didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of
being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started
a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love
with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create
the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now
the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn
of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we
developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And
Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure
none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It
was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes
life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced
that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as
it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe
is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So
keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When
I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each
day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It
made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the
last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know
I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is
the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big
choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall
away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid
the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I
was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it
clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a
pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of
cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer
than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10
years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure
everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for
your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that
diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck
an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines,
put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was
sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the
cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned
out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with
surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest
I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few
more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a
bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual
concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven
don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all
share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because
Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s
change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now
the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually
become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is
quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone
else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the
results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’
opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know
what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I
was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth
Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by
a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s,
before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made
with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like
Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was
idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart
and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and
then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the
mid-1970's, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might
find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were
the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message
as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished
that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for
you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Original Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Steve Jobs Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
