What Steve Jobs said ... Cañí I have the honor to be here with you today at your commencement from one of the best universities in the world. I never graduated. Indeed, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Nothing special. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I left Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So, why I left?
started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set 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 the waiting list, got a call at midnight asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy, do you do you want? "" Of course "they said. My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school, so he refused to sign the 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 went to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all savings of my working-class parents were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I could not see any. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, let alone how college was going to help me find out. And I was spending all the money my parents had throughout his life. So I decided to drop out and trust that things would work out. At the time I was scared, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. At the time I left, and I've never been to the required classes that did not interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
was not idyllic. I had no room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, returned coke bottles for the 5 ¢ deposits to buy to eat, and I would walk 10 km Sunday evening to eat well once 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.
I will give one example: Reed College that time offered perhaps were the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphy. Because I had registered and had no classes, I decided to attend a calligraphy class to learn how to do. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes a great typography great. It was subtly beautiful, historical, artistically, in a way that science can not 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, turned 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 type. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have. If I had never decided to quit, would not have entered this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography they possess. 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: can not connect the dots looking forward, you can only back. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it made a difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I learned early in life what he loved to do. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a company valued at 2 billion dollars and 4,000 employees. It was just one year we had released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And 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 during 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. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
really do not know what to do for a few months. I felt that it had set aside the previous generation of entrepreneurs - who had dropped the baton at the time that passed me. I met with David Packard [Hewlett-Packard] and Bob Noyce [inventor of the integrated circuit, Intel], and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. It was a very public failure, and even thought about running away from the valley [Silicon Valley]. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The result of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. Had been rejected, but was still in love. So I decided to start over.
not see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing I ever could have happened. He changed the weight of success 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.
Over 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 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.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. I think it was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life gives you over the head with a brick. Do not lose faith. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You have to find what you love. And this is true for your work as it is for your lovers. The work will 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 have not found it yet, keep looking. Do not settle. As with everything that has to do with the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years pass. So keep looking until you find it. Do not 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 were your last, someday you'll be right." I checked, and since then, for the past 33 years, every morning I looked in the mirror and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I do today?" And if the answer was "No" for too many days in a row, I knew I needed 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 - is away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remember 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.
almost a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor in the pancreas. Did not even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of incurable cancer and that my life expectancy is three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. Means try to tell your kids everything you'd tell the next ten years in a few months. Means to make sure everything is buttoned up and well tied to that is as easy as possible for your family. It means saying goodbye.
a day I lived with that diagnosis. Then late in the afternoon, I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down the throat through the stomach and duodenum, pancreas pricked with a needle to get some tumor cells. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started to mourn because they proved to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had surgery, and I'm fine.
This is 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 with more certainty than when death was a useful concept, but purely intellectual
Nobody 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 so it should be, because Death is possibly the best invention of Life . It change agent Life. Remove the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long, gradually, you may go become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else's life. Do not be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of the thinking of others. Do not let the noise of the views of others drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you really want to be. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog [catalog all Earth ], one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and brought to life with his poetic touch. It was the late 60's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so they made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was 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 when his time out a final issue. It was the mid 70's, and I was your age. On the cover of their final issue was a photograph of a country road early in the morning, the kind of road you might find yourself hitchhiking if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. " It was his last message of farewell. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that.
Follow hungry. Follow crazy.
(Stanford University. 2005)
