[IP] Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech
Begin forwarded message:
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 14, 2005 11:01:25 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Institute of Data Center Professionals <IDCP2002@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech
From the Mac Lawyers Group via johnmacsgroup
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Begin forwarded message:
This was sent to me by a friend. I assume it is accurate.
Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech:
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 naïvely 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 Stewart 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. Stewart 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.
--
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
"Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic"
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)
John F. McMullen
johnmac@xxxxxxx johnmac@xxxxxxxxxxxx johnmac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
johnmac@xxxxxxxxx johnmac@xxxxxxxxxxx
jmcmullen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx johnmac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13
http://www.westnet.com/~observer
BLOG: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/