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 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 10 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 backward 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can
only connect them looking backward. 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 4,000 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 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, 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 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 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 1960s, 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.
1. The
First Story: "Connecting the Dots" (Existentialism and Trust in
Life’s Unpredictability)
Jobs’
first story reflects the existentialist idea that meaning is often
found retrospectively, not prospectively. This echoes Søren
Kierkegaard’s famous notion:
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived
forwards."
- Uncertainty and Faith in the
Future: Jobs suggests that one cannot predict how experiences will shape
the future, but looking back, the dots always connect. He
encourages trusting one’s instincts—whether it is destiny, karma, or
an internal guiding force.
- Freedom in Learning: His
decision to drop out of college and study what he was passionate about
(calligraphy) rather than what was prescribed follows Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existentialist belief that individuals create their own
essence through choices rather than adhering to externally imposed paths.
- Serendipity and Creation of
Value: Jobs' story implies that knowledge and experiences can manifest
into something meaningful later, even when they seem useless at the time.
His learning about calligraphy, for instance, became a defining feature of
the Macintosh computer.
Philosophical
Takeaway:
ü One must embrace uncertainty and
take risks.
ü Life is unpredictable, and meaning
often emerges in hindsight.
ü The pursuit of curiosity, rather
than rigid planning, can lead to innovation.
2. The
Second Story: "Love and Loss" (Stoicism, Resilience, and
Self-Discovery)
This part
of the speech is a testament to resilience and finding meaning in
adversity. Jobs being fired from Apple, the company he founded,
parallels Stoic and Buddhist perspectives on detachment and
impermanence.
- Adversity as a Teacher: His
experience of being ousted from Apple became the “medicine” that freed him
to embark on new creative endeavors (NeXT, Pixar). His response
reflects Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic idea:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” - Work as Love: Jobs expresses
a quasi-Aristotelian idea that excellence in work is tied
to love and passion. According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the
highest fulfillment (eudaimonia) comes from engaging in meaningful,
virtuous activity.
- Rebirth Through Failure: His
journey after being fired mirrors Nietzsche’s concept of amor
fati (love of fate), embracing difficulties as part of life's
necessary transformation.
Philosophical
Takeaway:
ü Failures are often disguised
opportunities for personal growth.
ü True success comes from doing what
one loves.
ü Adversity fosters innovation and
self-discovery.
3. The
Third Story: "Death" (Memento Mori & the Authentic Life)
This
section of the speech presents a profound meditation on mortality and
authenticity, deeply influenced by Stoicism, Buddhist impermanence, and
existentialism.
- Death as a Catalyst for
Meaning: Jobs embraces the concept of memento mori ("Remember
that you must die"), an ancient Stoic practice reminding people that
life is fleeting. In his words:
"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life."
This echoes Seneca’s insight:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” - Overcoming Fear: His
near-death experience with cancer reshaped his perspective on life,
reinforcing the existentialist view that awareness of death intensifies
life’s urgency.
- Authenticity and Inner Voice:
Jobs emphasizes listening to one's own inner voice rather than
external expectations, resonating with Heidegger’s idea of
"being-toward-death"—that facing mortality helps one live
authentically.
Philosophical
Takeaway:
ü Mortality should inspire people to
live more intentionally.
ü Fears and societal expectations
fade in the face of death.
ü Authenticity is the highest
pursuit—one must follow their inner calling.
Relevance
in Present Context
- Encouraging Non-Linear Careers
- Jobs’ philosophy of trusting
the process is even more relevant today, with rapidly changing industries
and career paths.
- Many successful people take
unconventional routes, and his speech validates non-traditional learning
and career experimentation.
- Resilience in the Face of
Setbacks
- With economic uncertainty and
technological disruptions, setbacks in careers and personal lives are
common. Jobs’ story teaches persistence and adaptability.
- Embracing Passion Over
Conformity
- Many people live according to
societal expectations rather than personal fulfillment. Jobs’ call to
authenticity urges individuals to pursue passion, not external
validation.
- Mortality as a Motivator
- In a world consumed by
distractions, Jobs’ memento mori approach reminds us to
focus on what truly matters. His words are especially relevant in the age
of burnout, digital addiction, and the rat race.
- The Intersection of Humanities
and Technology
- Jobs’ emphasis on calligraphy
influencing Apple’s design highlights the importance of arts and
humanities in technological innovation, a message often ignored in
STEM-dominated narratives.
Final
Reflection: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
Jobs’
closing words—“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”—are a powerful call
to continuous learning, curiosity, and risk-taking. This aligns
with Socrates’ idea that wisdom begins with recognizing one’s own
ignorance (“I know that I know nothing”). It also
reflects Nietzsche’s idea of becoming rather than simply
being—constantly evolving and challenging oneself.
Steve
Jobs’ speech is more than just a commencement address; it is a philosophical
guide to life. It draws from existentialism (freedom and authenticity),
Stoicism (resilience and memento mori), and Aristotelian virtue ethics (doing
what one loves). His words remain profoundly relevant in an age where people
struggle with purpose, fear failure, and conform to societal expectations.
Ultimately,
Jobs urges us to embrace uncertainty, follow our passions, and live each
day as if it were our last—a timeless message that continues to inspire
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