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 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
