This is yet the most celebrated speech
made by Steve Jobs. It was the 114th Commencement Address to graduating
students of Stanford University on June 12, 2005.
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| Steve Jobs |
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, its 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 its 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
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. Thank you all very
much.
Jobs, before his death last Wednesday,
resigned as CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios earlier in the
year.
