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Society
Steve
Jobs
Stanford Commencement Address
Steve Jobs delivered
his commencement address to Stanford University Graduates. The address
was very inspiring and thought provoking. It a glimpse of the Ups and
Downs and the troubles, one has to face in life. It is very important
for the young people who graduate from a University, become conceited
and boastful that there is no one who can equal them and that they have
something special which others do not possess. They are not able to
grasp that Life is a vast field of action in which a graduate is only a
co-sharer and a partner. They are not able to understand that in this
arena, every partner has equal rights and responsibilities. The secret
of success lies somewhere else. The creator has sent every person into
this world with unlimited possibilities. Steve Jobs’ life is an
excellent example of this point of view. After hearing him one should
not feel disappointed on failures but face them with courage, following
one’s own inner voice and continue the dictates from there.
STEVE JOBS: 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 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 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 okay. It was pretty scary at
that 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 Hari 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 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—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 two billion dollar company
with over four thousand 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 seventeen 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 thirty-three 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 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
seven-thirty 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
good-byes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy
where they stuck an endoscope down by 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 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 clear 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 drowned 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It
was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo
Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
last ‘60s, 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. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stuart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth
Catalogue, 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.
– Arya Bhushan
July 10, 2005
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