Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobssays
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of AppleComputer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of thefinest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth betold, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today Iwant to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just threestories.
The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayedaround as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So whydid I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwedcollege graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She feltvery strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything wasall set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except thatwhen I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted agirl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle ofthe night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that mymother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduatedfrom high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She onlyrelented 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 thatwas 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'tsee the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no ideahow college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all ofthe money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out andtrust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, butlooking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I droppedout I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begindropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floorin friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy foodwith, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get onegood meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what Istumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to bepriceless later on.
Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instructionin the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on everydrawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn'thave to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learnhow to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varyingthe amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makesgreat typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in away that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. Butten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it allcame back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computerwith beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course incollege, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionallyspaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that nopersonal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I wouldhave never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers mightnot have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible toconnect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, veryclear 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 connectin 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 thedifference 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 hiredsomeone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for thefirst year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began todiverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board ofDirectors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What hadbeen 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 itwas being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried toapologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I eventhought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawnon 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 Idecided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple wasthe best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of beingsuccessful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sureabout 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 companynamed 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, ToyStory, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In aremarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and thetechnology 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 firedfrom 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'mconvinced 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 isfor your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and theonly way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And theonly 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 whenyou find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and betteras 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 liveeach 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 havelooked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today werethe 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, Iknow I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've everencountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everythingall external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment orfailure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only whatis truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way Iknow to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are alreadynaked. 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 themorning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know whata pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancerthat is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to sixmonths. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which isdoctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everythingyou thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. Itmeans to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy aspossible 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 myintestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. Iwas sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed thecells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to bea very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had thesurgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closestI 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 purelyintellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to dieto get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has everescaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely thesingle best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the oldto make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too longfrom now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be sodramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don'tbe trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people'sthinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own innervoice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else issecondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole EarthCatalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by afellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought itto life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personalcomputers 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 neattools 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 themid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was aphotograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourselfhitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as theysigned off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that formyself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.
