Steve Job Speech in standford
> 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, 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 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 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.
> 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, 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 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 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.
