Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s iconic co-founders, was known for his groundbreaking innovations and unique vision for the world of technology. In 2005, he delivered a memorable speech at Stanford University, where he shared what he considered to be the most important lesson of his life. Before this speech, Jobs had already made history with his contributions to personal computing, digital music, and much more. Sadly, he passed away in 2011, leaving behind an immense legacy. His Stanford speech remains an inspiration and thought-provoking moment for many.
" It is an honor for me to be with you today at the graduation of one of the best universities in the world. I have never graduated from college. In fact, this is the closest I have ever had to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. Nothing special. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but I stayed there as a student for about 18 months before I actually dropped out. So why did I drop out?
It all started before I was born. My birth mother was a young, single college graduate who decided to put me up for adoption. She was convinced that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was set up for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except when I got 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, “Sure.” My birth mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and 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 one day 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 went into my tuition. After six months, I didn't see the point anymore. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and how college was going to help me get there. And here I was, spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire lives. So I decided to drop out of college and trust that everything would work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but in hindsight, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. As soon as I dropped out, I was able to stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and start taking the ones that did interest me.
It wasn’t all that romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor of a guest room, returned Coke bottles to get the 5 cent deposit back for food, and walked the seven miles out of town every Sunday night to eat one great meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I discovered by following my curiosity and intuition has proven invaluable in later years. Let me give you an example:
At the time, Reed College had perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed all over campus. Since I had dropped out of college and didn’t have to take the regular classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do it. I learned about serif and sans serif fonts, how to vary the spacing between different letter combinations, what makes a 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 any chance of being applied in my life. But ten years later, when we designed the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we put all of this into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never taken that class in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, probably no personal computer would have had them. If I had never dropped out of college, I would never have taken that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the beautiful 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 back ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots by looking into the future; you can only connect them by looking into the past. So you have to trust that the dots will connect somehow in your future. You have to trust in something: your instincts, your destiny, your life, your 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 on. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple grew from the two of us in a garage to a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our greatest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How do 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, things went well. But then our visions for the future started to diverge, and we ended up 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 center of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
For a few months, I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs, 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 my mistakes. I was a public failure and even considered fleeing the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I was doing. The turn of events at Apple hadn’t changed that. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. So I decided to make a fresh start.
I didn't realize it at the time, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me. The heaviness of success was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. It freed me up to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Over the next five years, I started a company called NeXT, then another company called Pixar, and fell in love with an extraordinary 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, 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 bitter medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you over 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 have to find what you love. And that's as true for your job as it is for your lovers. Your job is going to occupy 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 for what you've found. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know it when you've found it. And like any good relationship, it gets better and better as the years go by. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle for what you've found.
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 were your last, one day you will surely be right.” That quote stuck with me, and 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 every time the answer is “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’m going to die soon is the most important tool I’ve ever used to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—those things fall away in the face of death, leaving only what’s truly important. Remembering that you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You’re already naked. There’s 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 it was almost certainly an incurable type of cancer and that I shouldn’t expect to live more than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is medical code for preparing to die. That means trying to tell your children everything you thought you would tell them in the next ten years in just a few months. It means making sure everything is in order so that it’s as easy as possible for your family. It means saying goodbye.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that night, I had a biopsy, where they inserted an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas, and took some cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when the doctors saw the cells under the microscope, they started crying because it was a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and now I am fine.
It was the closest I have ever come to death, and I hope it will be the closest I will get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now tell you with a little more certainty than when death was a useful but purely abstract 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's as it should be, because Death is probably Life's greatest invention. It is Life's agent of change. It eliminates the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you, but one day not too far away, you will gradually become the old and be eliminated. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's absolutely true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t get caught up in dogma – living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was growing up, there was this incredible publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a guy 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 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so everything was done with typewriters and scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in print, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic and full of clever tools and great ideas.
Stewart and his team did several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when that was finished, they did one last issue. This was in the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their last issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find if you were hitchhiking and being so adventurous. Underneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” That was their parting message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I’ve always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to start a new life, I wish that for you.
Stay insatiable. Stay reckless.
Thank you all."
Steve Jobs