This is the text of the
commencement address by steve jobs CEO of Apple computer and of Pixar Animation
Studios, delivered on june 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest
university in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. This is
the closest I have 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 the reed college
after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another
eighteen 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 dropped 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 got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” they said: “of course.”
My biological mother found later that my mother had never graduated from college
and 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 go to college. This was the start in my life. And
seventeen 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 parent’s
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 dropped out and
trust that it would all work out. It was a pretty scary at the time, but looking
back it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. The minute I dropped
out. I could stop taking the required classes that did not interest me, and
begin dropping in on the ones that looked for more interesting. It was not all
romantic. I did not have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friend’s rooms.
I returned coke bottles for the 5$ deposit to buy food with, and would walk the
seven 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 did not have to
talk the normal classes. I talked to 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 the 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 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. The Mac would
have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since
Window 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 cannot 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 something? Your gut, destiny, life,
karma, whatever. Because believe in the dot connect down the road will give you
the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn
path that would make all the difference.
The 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 twenty.
We worked hard, and in ten 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 realized
our finest creation? The Macintosh? a year earlier, and had just turned 30. And
then I got fired. How can you get fired from accompany 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 did not 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 very public failure, and I
even thought about running away from the vally. But something slowly began to
down on me. I still loved what I did. The turn at 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 did not 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 women who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world 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 in NEXT is at the heart of Apple’s current
renaissance. And laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I am pretty
sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. It
awful tasted medicine, but I guessed the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits
you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I am convinced that the only
thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You would 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. The only way to do great work
is to love what you do. If you have not found it yet, keep looking and don’t
settle. As with all matters of the heart, you will know when you find it. And,
like any great relationship, it just get better and better as the years roll on.
So keep looking. Don’t settle.
The third story is about death. When I was seventeen, I read a quote that went
something like:
“if you live each day as if it was your last, someday you will most certainly be
right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty three
years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “if today
were the last day of my life, what 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 will be dead soon is the most important
tool I have 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 did not even know what a pancreas was.
The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that incurable,
and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctors
advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor code for
prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything. You thought you
would 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 in to 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 thankfully, I am fine now. This was
the closest I have 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 do not 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 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 life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other
people thinking. 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 last 1960s before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters,
scissors, and polaroid camera. 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 isssues of the whole earth catalog, and then when
it had runs its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and it
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 a new, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all very much