Steve Jobs' Commencement Address

A dear friend of mine sent this to me.

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 other's 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.