Steve Jobs'
2005 Commencement Address
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.
Fired From Apple
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.
Diagnosed With Cancer
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 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 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. "