https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/
I’m honored to be with you today for your
commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I
never graduated from college and 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 six months but
then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want
him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later 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 go to
college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen 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 of how college was going to help me
figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits
to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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 that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give
you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the
well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just
the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d
just turned thirty, 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, and so
at thirty, 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’d 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 in
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 world’s 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 and I returned
to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s
current renaissance, and Lorene 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’s going to hit 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
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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell
your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in
just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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’s 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’s 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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
thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with
neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the
The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a
final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
