Transcript of YouTube Video: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

this program is brought to you by

stanford university please visit us at

stanford.edu

thank you

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 18 months or so

before i really quit

so why'd 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 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 the money my

parents had saved their entire life

so i decided to drop out and trust that

it would all work out okay

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 hari 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 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

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

waz 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 two billion dollar company with

over four thousand employees

we just released our finest creation the

macintosh a year earlier and i 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

and 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'd 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 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 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 it

next is at the heart of apple's current

renaissance

and laureen 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 sometime

life sometimes life's gonna 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've 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 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 everything is

buttoned up so that will be as easy as

possible for your family

it means to say your goodbyes

i live 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 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'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'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

drowned 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 stuart

brand not far from here in menlo park

and he brought it to life with his

poetic touch

this was in the late 60s 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

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've 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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