Commencement Address by Steve Jobs

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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, it's 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 parent's 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.

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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 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 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.

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One of the best commencement speeches I ever read, so much truth in there.