Off Topic: Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

June 13, 2007 · 💬 Join the Discussion

Source: Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

This is the translation of the address to graduates at Stanford University, by Steve Jobs on June 12, 2005. Coincidentally, I came across this video again exactly two years later. We all know Steve Jobs makes excellent speeches, but this one is particularly interesting. It may seem sentimental and dated on the surface, but it contains some of the lessons I myself learned. The irony is that the only people who will appreciate this text are those who already know what it means.

I also recommend watching the video, available on YouTube!

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. To tell the truth, 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. Nothing more. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

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. But 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-educated people, so everything was set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I showed up they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a middle-of-the-night call asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother never graduated from college and that my father never finished high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that someday I would go to college.

And 17 years later I went 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 that out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire lives. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. From the moment I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin taking the classes that I found interesting.

It wasn’t all so romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for 5 cents to buy food and I walked 10 miles through town every Sunday night to get a good meal once a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled upon by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be of great value 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 locker, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the regular classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do that. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what made 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 any hope of practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, all of it 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 into that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would not have multiple proportionally spaced fonts or typefaces. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s possible that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would never have dropped in on that 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 10 years later from behind.

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’s made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

Love and Loss

I was lucky — I found what I loved early in my 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 greatest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I was 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 for 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. Then, our joint board of directors sided with him. So, at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my 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. It was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something began to grow in me — I still loved what I did. The apple didn’t fall very far from the tree at Apple. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. So I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but the fact was 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 called NeXT, another company called Pixar, and I fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now one of the most successful animation studios in the world. In an unbelievable twist 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 a terrible bitter medicine, but I think the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. But don’t lose faith. You have to find what you love. And that is true for your work as well as your love. 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. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

Death

When I was 17, I read a quote that was something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll certainly be right.” It made a deep impression on me, and 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 was “No” for too many days in a row, I knew I needed to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just die 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 that it was almost certain to be a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no more than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor-speak 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 it will be as easy for your family as possible. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. That evening I had a biopsy, where they stick an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestine, put a needle into my pancreas and took some cells from my tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they looked at 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 for quite a while. Having lived through it, I can tell you this now with a little more certainty than when death was useful but purely an 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’s 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 far in the future, you’ll gradually become the old and be cleared out. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s 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 incredible 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 done with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paper form, 35 years before Google was born: it was idealistic, and overflowing with cool tools and big notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it ran its course, they put out a final issue. It was in the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of the final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you’d find hitchhiking on if you were adventurous. Below it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they were signing off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin the new, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.