Steve Jobs Commencement Speech: I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the best universities in the global. I ne'er graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've always gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just 3 stories The 1st story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College later the 1st 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so earlier I really quit. So why did I drop out? It began earlier 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 actually desired a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the nighttime 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 ne'er graduated from college and that my father had ne'er graduated from high school. She refused to sign the last adoption papers. She only relented a few months after when my parents promised that I'd someday go to college and seventeen years after 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. Later 6 months, I could not see the value in it. I had no idea what I desired 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 jolly scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the finest decisions I ever made.
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that did not interest me, and start dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It was not all romantic. I did not have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I came back coke bottles for the five¢ deposits to buy food with, and I'd walk the seven miles across town every Sunday nighttime to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I enjoyed 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 maybe the finest calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on all drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and did not 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 other letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cannot 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 1st Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the 1st computer with attractive typography. If I had never dropped in on that exclusive course in college, the Mac would have ne'er 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 ne'er 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 10 years after. Again, you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you've to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You've to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, and karma, whatever. This approach has ne'er 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 parent’s 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 what had been my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really do not know what to do for some months. I felt I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was over for me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing so bad. 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 five years I started a company named neXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would be my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated film, Toy Story, and now the most successful animation studio in the world. A significant turnaround, Apple bought NEXT, I returned to Apple and the technology we have developed the first renaissance in the center of Apple. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family. I'm sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. It awful tasted 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 in all matters of the heart, you know when it was found. And like any good relationship, it is getting better and better as the years roll. So we're looking until you find it. Do not settle. The third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like this: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll certainly be right." I was impressed, and from that moment, the past 33 years, I looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, I would like to do, what I'm about to do today?" And whenever the answer is "No" too many days in a row, I know that 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 take the right things, which is the code of medical Prepare to die. It means everything to try to tell your children that you thought you'd be in the next 10 years to tell them just a few months. This means ensuring that all the buttons so that it is as easy as possible for your family. It means saying goodbye really. Living the diagnosis all day, later that evening I had a biopsy, which stuck an endoscope down the throat, through my stomach and 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 do not waste it living someone else's life. Do not be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Do not let the noise of the opinions of others to cover their own inner voice and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Somehow already know what you really want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, 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. Underneath were the words: "Stay Hungry Stay foolish." It was their farewell message to his signature. Stay Hungry. Stay foolish. And I've always wanted for myself. And now, when you go to start over, I hope for you.
He does keep inching closer and closer to supporting gay marriage, without ever quite doing so. Zeno’s Gay Marriage Paradox. He warned today against those trying to turn back the clock, “who, as we speak, are looking to enshrine discrimination into state laws and constitutions,” which can only mean bans on gay marriage, but I guess he wants credit for supporting marriage equality without saying words that would be used in attack ads. Sigh.
Evidently progress in America “happens when a father realizes he doesn’t just love his daughter, but also her wife.” But not in a creepy way.
