One of the best inspirationals I have read in recent time
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-1970s, 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.
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