Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
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.
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