Fill - Free fillable Stanford University C ommencement Address Steve Jobs June PDF form

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the nest

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 rst story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the rst 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

Stanford University

ommencement Address

Steve Jobs

June 12, 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Lexile Measure: 880L

commencement

graduation, in this case from a

university

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school. She refused to sign the nal 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 gure 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 oor 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 oered 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 dierent 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.

relented

naively

calligraphy

gave in; yielded

innocently and unwisely

the art of producing decorative

handwritten lettering with a pen

or brush

serif typeface

san serif typeface

typography

style of typeface with decorative

lines on the letters (e.g., Times)

style of typeface with simple lines

(e.g., Arial)

the style and appearance of

printed matter; the art of arranging

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None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years

later, when we were designing the rst Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the rst 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 dierence 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 nest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just

turned 30. And then I got red. How can you get red 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 rst 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

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karma

diverge

good or bad luck, seen as resulting

from one’s actions (from Hinduism

and Buddhism)

differ; move away from each other

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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 red 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 ve 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 rst computer animated feature lm, Toy Story, and is

now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events,

Apple bought NeXT, I returned 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 red from Apple.

It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits

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entrepreneur

renaissance

a person who sets up a business,

taking on financial risks to make

a revival or renewed interest in

something

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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 nd what you love. And that is as true

for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to ll a large part of your life, and

the only way to be truly satised 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 nd it. And, like any great

relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you

nd 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.

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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 aairs 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 ne 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.

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105

110

115

120

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125

pancreas

biopsy

endoscope

a large gland behind the stomach

which aids in digestion (and can

be affected by cancer)

an examination of body tissue to

discover the presence or cause of

disease

an instrument used to give a view

of the body’s internal parts

Page 7

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. 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 overowing 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 nal issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was

your age. On the back cover of their nal issue was a photograph of an early morning

country road, the kind you might nd 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 o. 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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130

145

135

140

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dogma

intuition

idealistic

a principle or idea presented by an

authority as unarguably true

the ability to understand

something immediately and

instinctively

aiming or hoping for perfection,

sometimes unrealistically

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