Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

0:07 This program is brought to you by Stanford University.

0:10 Please visit us at stanford.edu Thank You.

0:23 I am honored to be with you today at your commencement

0:30 from one of the finest universities in the world.

0:35 Truth be told I never graduated from college and this is

0:42 the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

0:47 Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.

0:51 That's it.

0:52 No big deal.

0:53 Just three stories.

0:55 The first story is about connecting the dots.

1:01 I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months,

1:03 but then stayed around as a drop-in for another

1:06 18 months or so before I really quit.

1:09 So why did I drop out?

1:12 It started before I was born.

1:15 My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student,

1:19 and she decided to put me up for adoption.

1:22 She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,

1:26 so everything was all set for me to be

1:28 adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

1:31 Except that when I popped out they decided

1:34 at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

1:37 So my parents, who were on a waiting list,

1:40 got a call in the middle of the night asking:

1:43 "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said:

1:48 "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never

1:54 graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.

1:59 She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

2:03 She only relented a few months later when

2:05 my parents promised that I would go to college.

2:09 This was the start in my life.

2:12 And 17 years later I did go to college.

2:16 But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford,

2:22 and all of my working-class parents' savings

2:24 were being spent on my college tuition.

2:27 After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

2:30 I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life

2:32 and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

2:36 And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.

2:42 So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

2:46 It was pretty scary at the time,

2:49 but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

2:54 The minute I dropped out I could stop

2:56 taking the required classes that didn't interest me,

2:59 and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

3:04 It wasn't all romantic.

3:06 I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,

3:10 I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits

3:13 to buy food with, and I would walk the 7

3:16 miles across town every Sunday night to get one

3:18 good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

3:21 I loved it.

3:23 And much of what I stumbled into by following

3:26 my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

3:29 Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps

3:35 the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

3:38 Throughout the campus every poster,

3:40 every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.

3:45 Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes,

3:49 I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

3:53 I learned about serif and san serif typefaces,

3:56 about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,

3:59 about what makes great typography great.

4:03 It was beautiful, historical,

4:05 artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture,

4:09 and I found it fascinating.

4:12 None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

4:17 But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,

4:21 it all came back to me.

4:23 And we designed it all into the Mac.

4:25 It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

4:29 If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,

4:32 the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

4:37 And since Windows just copied the Mac,

4:39 it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

4:47 If I had never dropped out,

4:51 I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,

4:54 and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

4:58 Of course it was impossible to connect

5:00 the dots looking forward when I was in college.

5:02 But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

5:07 Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward;

5:10 you can only connect them looking backwards.

5:12 So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

5:16 You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

5:22 Beleiveing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence

5:26 to follow your heart Even when it leads you off the well worn path,

5:31 and that will make all the difference.

5:38 My second story is about love and loss.

5:44 I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life.

5:48 Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20.

5:51 We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two

5:55 of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

5:59 We had just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier,

6:04 and I had just turned 30.

6:06 And then I got fired.

6:09 How can you get fired from a company you started?

6:12 Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I

6:15 thought was very talented to run the company with me,

6:18 and for the first year or so things went well.

6:20 But then our visions of the future began

6:22 to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

6:25 When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

6:29 So at 30 I was out.

6:31 And very publicly out.

6:32 What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone,

6:35 and it was devastating.

6:38 I really didn't know what to do for a few months.

6:41 I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down-

6:44 that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

6:47 I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce

6:50 and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

6:54 I was a very public failure,

6:55 and I even thought about running away from the valley.

6:58 But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did.

7:03 The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

7:07 I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

7:12 And so I decided to start over.

7:14 I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was

7:18 the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

7:21 The heaviness of being successful was replaced

7:23 by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

7:27 It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

7:31 During the next five years,

7:32 I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar,

7:35 and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

7:39 Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film,

7:43 Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

7:49 In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple,

7:55 and the technology we developed at NeXT

7:57 is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

7:59 And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

8:03 I'm pretty sure none of this would have

8:05 happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

8:08 It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

8:12 Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.

8:16 Don't lose faith.

8:18 I'm convinced that the only thing that kept

8:19 me going was that I loved what I did.

8:22 You've got to find what you love.

8:24 And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

8:28 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,

8:30 and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

8:35 And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

8:38 If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

8:42 Don't settle.

8:43 As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

8:47 And, like any great relationship,

8:49 it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

8:52 So keep looking.

8:54 Don't settle.

9:05 My third story is about death.

9:09 When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:

9:12 "If you live each day as if it was your last,

9:15 someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me,

9:22 and since then, for the past 33 years,

9:25 I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:

9:27 "If today were the last day of my life,

9:30 would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

9:34 And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row,

9:37 I know I need to change something.

9:40 Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool

9:44 I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

9:47 Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride,

9:52 all fear of embarrassment or failure- these things

9:55 just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

10:00 Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I

10:04 know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

10:08 You are already naked.

10:09 There is no reason not to follow your heart.

10:13 About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.

10:16 I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,

10:20 and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

10:23 I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

10:26 The doctors told me this was almost

10:28 certainly a type of cancer that is incurable,

10:30 and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

10:35 My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order,

10:40 which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

10:42 It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd

10:48 have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

10:51 It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so

10:54 that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

10:56 It means to say your goodbyes.

11:01 I lived with that diagnosis all day.

11:04 Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat,

11:08 through my stomach and into my intestines,

11:11 put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

11:14 I was sedated, but my wife, who was there,

11:18 told me that when they viewed the cells

11:20 under a microscope the doctors started crying because

11:23 it turned out to be a very rare

11:25 form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

11:29 I had the surgery and thankfully I'm fine now.

11:40 This was the closest I've been to facing death,

11:43 and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.

11:46 Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more

11:50 certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

11:55 No one wants to die.

11:58 Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

12:02 And yet death is the destination we all share.

12:06 No one has ever escaped it.

12:08 And that is as it should be,

12:10 because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.

12:15 It is Life's change agent.

12:16 It clears out the old to make way for the new.

12:19 Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now,

12:24 you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

12:28 Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

12:32 Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

12:38 Don't be trapped by dogma which is

12:40 living with the results of other people's thinking.

12:42 Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

12:46 And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

12:51 They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

12:55 Everything else is secondary.

13:09 When I was young, there was

13:12 an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,

13:15 which was one of the bibles of my generation.

13:18 It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,

13:22 and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

13:25 This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing,

13:30 so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.

13:34 It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along:

13:39 it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools, and great notions.

13:45 Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,

13:48 and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.

13:53 It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.

13:58 On the back cover of their final issue

14:00 was a photograph of an early morning country road,

14:04 the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

14:08 Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry.

14:12 Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.

14:17 Stay Hungry.

14:18 Stay Foolish.

14:19 And I have always wished that for myself.

14:23 And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

14:28 Stay Hungry.

14:30 Stay Foolish.

14:31 Thank you all very much.

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