Standford Commencement Address
Delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios
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 i...t. 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, 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 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 returned 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 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 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 others' 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.
Steve Jobs
Pablo Picasso
