Posted on 06/18/2005 7:12:20 AM PDT by FreeKeys
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 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.
Thank you all very much.
This is neither PC nor a lie. Kids that love engineering will become engineers, kids that love nursing will become nurses, and kids that love plumbing (I know!) will become plumbers. And because they love their chosen field, they will be very successful (and able to pay the bills).
I strongly recommend all young people choose a career path that will allow them to love what they do, lest they become stuck in job they hate!
I think this was a very inspirational and refreshing commencement speech, and I commend Jobs for not using the occasion to take a cheap shot at our President (or Republicans in general)...so many people seem to be too weak to resist that temptation!
If Jobs thought his college tuition was too expensive at the time, why didn't he try a state college? Nothing wrong with a state college...it worked for me.
Then it was fit for its audience: young (albeit intelligent) skulls full of mush. Tripe like that is for the young. Reality is the better teacher, but we have to impart a bit of that foolish dreaming into them, cuz life will steal it away pretty quick regardless.
Of course,it's easy for him to say silly things like this to the young people once he's had the advantage of life and hard knocks and happy fortunes...now that he's in the money. Other folks have the same dreams and setbacks and it leads nowhere. Hardships and setbacks don't entitle folks to happy endings.
But intelligently foolish dreaming (not the lazy dillitante type) is a very necessary part of life; it gives us important things like space shuttles and Charmin.
I'm not clear as to why you disagreed with my thought on the Jobs quote. As I understood his comment, it was an encouragement to seek out ones passion. I agree with this, as do some highly successful people such as Limbaugh and Trump.
If what you love also leads to be financial success, so much the better. But continually doing something which causes stress and unhappiness solely for the financial benefits generally leads to an early grave.
With Fathers Day upon us, that truth is brought to the forefront for me once again.
Give it a run on Ebay prior to trashing it. Someone may consider it a collectors item.
Typical 'from the heart' PC mush - I'll guarentee that no one who works at Apple or Pixar that 'follows their passsion' in a way that doesn't directly contribute to company profits is out the door very, very quickly. One doesn't make it to the top of ANY corporation without a lot of personal sacrifice - if they are married - their kids and wife pay the price, if they are single - the price is paid in personal relationships - financial and professional success doesn't come easy, anyone claiming otherwise is lieing. That said, everyone has the opportunity to decide what is most important to them - just don't pretend that there are tradeoffs - yes, Rush says he loves his work - whick I don't doubt. His career has paid off for him tremendously in terms of wealth and influence but at least part of the personal price has been three marriages. Jobs is just massaging the mush in those skulls to make sure there are plenty of corporate employees to choose from.
The most successful people I know all love their jobs.
How big is your sample set? I've worked closely with a significant number of extremely successful (financially and professionaly) folks in a range of positions - I could NEVER make such a statement. Some of the successful ones I know are driven by fear of failure, the need to be the best at any cost, the need to demonstrate to themselves their own ability in whatever field, fear of poverty, the desire to please an audience/family member, the desire to 'do good, etc. I'm not saying all of them hate their jobs - I'm saying depending on an essentially transient 'emotion' to select a career makes as much sense as doing the same for a life partner.
My sample set is fairly large and over a large segment, say from cops to wall street types. I'm not saying they go around like grinning idiots or that they are not driven by inner demons, but they do love their jobs and can't imagine another life.
It's always the less successful, people who hate their jobs you find spouting the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" lines.
Life's a tale told by idiot.
The speaker did not address all those levels of responsibility, but told of a typically, classically American rise from nothing to success along with a lack of preparation for the responsibility that comes with success.
A lot of people don't know what they are really good at and really like to do for work until they have been around a while. Some don't even start their true life's work until they are retired.
Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are college dropouts. Interesting.
And Michael Dell. There are more smart people outside of colleges than there are inside.
Stephen Jobs is a lot of things, but I wouldn't call him an idiot. You may not agree with his opinions and his statements but calling him an idiot is inaccurate. He has shown multiple times that he has ideas which are ahead of his time. He has also shown the ability to turn his ideas into reality.
The interesting thing about this speech (which I liked) is that I have heard from many employees that have worked for him throughout the years that he is a slavedriver. Demanding, unforgiving and lacking of compassion and understanding are just a few of the comments that I hear over and over. Even if you are doing what you love, its kindof hard to love what you are doing, when you work for a boss like that.
I partly agree with Jobs. In lieu of saying "Find the job you love"; I would say, "Know God's will for your life; find your calling."
It helps if kids aren't left sorting all of this out on their own. Our six-year-old has shown a fascination with and proclivity towards science and natural phenomena. He questions everything and then makes me "prove" it to him. For a while, that drove me crazy; my six-year-old not believing me until I can show him evidence. But I now appreciate the intellect God has graced our son with and hope to encourage him more in this area.
That's the how, but omits the why; it's a prescription for making a living, not having a life. I've seen plenty of teenagers consult the books and magazines to find a field that pays, then lock themselves into it. They're old before they're 30. And we've all known people who are so dead-set on providing for their families, who spend so many hours at the office that they hardly know their children's names.
Choosing a career, like anything else, can't be summed up in duelling platitudes. Passion and pragmatism both count. Sure, you can decide at 18 to be an engineer. But if you don't care about it, don't want it, you won't be very good at it. No matter how well-designed a car is, it don't go without having a spark.
Sure, most of us have had jobs at one time or another that put food on the table but left our souls starving. It's possible -- and even normal -- to be competent without being inspired. But that's a recipe for mediocrity. It's an old wives' tale that the world is divided between dreamers and doers. Any individual who is remembered by history was a combination of both. You don't quit the safe job to take up navel-gazing, but you keep your eyes and mind open for a next move most folks don't see.
The most important decision any 22-year-old can make is to be adaptible. To be prepared to veer from the planned path in pursuit of something that's lucrative or interesting or novel. I've talked to massively successful people, and very few of them thought, in college, that they'd be where they were. They moved to new industries or invented them.
That's the central message I took away from Jobs' speech -- he's a billionaire from a few different industries, none of which existed when he was in college. If he'd set his path early and never strayed, if he'd taken the safe choice and become an accountant on Wall Street, he wouldn't be where he is.
I didn't call him an idiot.
Whether I think him an idiot is another matter.
I was agreeing with Shakespeare's Macbeth about life, is all.
sorry, I misunderstood. I didn't recognize the reference to Shakespeare. (Kind of makes me the idiot this time)
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