Powerful stories by Steve Jobs at
Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
I am preparing the
Signature Story workshop for a college. I listened to this the first time when
I was in California, when Steve just released the speech. Since then I have
been listened to it times and times again, can't help to say it is one of the
best material to show our students how to use story to make an influence in
life.
Stanford
Report, June 14, 2005
'You've
got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is a prepared
text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer
and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
Video of the Commencement address.
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 sans 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 10 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
backward 10 years later.
Again, you can't
connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
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 4,000 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 world's 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 1960s, 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.
2 2 2016
