Off Topic Steve Jobs at Stanford speech

William Wagner · medicine forum Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 809

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Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech (Score:5, Informative)
by trudyscousin (258684) on Tuesday June 14, @02:27AM (#12810404)

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 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 navely 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.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long. -- James Thurber
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Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD · medicine forum Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2005 Posts: 8540

Thanks, Bill. Enjoy reading this :-)

In Christ's love and service,

Andrew

--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Board-Certified Cardiologist

**
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