It follows the "prepared text"
transcript of the commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs on June
12, 2005, at Stanford University.
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, 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 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 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 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.
