A colleague of mine here at CNET is leaving soon to take on his own startup venture with a friend. He's very excited, and in an email message to the group explaining his reasons for leaving, his memories, and his hopes, he attached Steve Jobs' speech from this year's Stanford graduation. It's pretty exceptional.
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This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Stanford Commencement 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 patents 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 retuned 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 your
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, 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 other's 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.
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I've got to do that more, myself.
