A LESSON OF TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY
TODAY WE PAY TRIBUTE TO STEVE JOBS, A MAN WHO CHANGED THEWORLD AND CREATED THE WORLDS MOST VALUABLE COMPANY . DEAD AT 56. LIKE IT OR NOT, HE HAS IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER TOUCHED THE LIVES OF MOST PEOPLE ON EARTH TODAY.
HE WAS A VISIONARY, A PAINTER, AN ARTIST, AN INVENTOR ALL IN ONE, LIKE MICHAEL ANGELO, LEONARDO DA VINCI, THOMAS EDISON, JOHN LENNON ALL ROLLED IN ONE.
Steve Jobs, who stepped down as CEOof Apple Wednesday after having been on medical leave, reflected on his life,career and mortality in a well-known commencement address at my Alma Mater, Stanford Universityin 2005.
Here, read the text of of that address:
Iam honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finestuniversities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, thisis the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tellyou three stories from my life.That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
Thefirst story is about connecting the dots.
Idropped out of ReedCollege after the first 6months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so beforeI really quit. So why did I drop out?
Itstarted before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed collegegraduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt verystrongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was allset for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when Ipopped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. Somy parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the nightasking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said:"Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother hadnever graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from highschool. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a fewmonths later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that wasalmost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savingswere being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see thevalue in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea howcollege was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of themoney my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out andtrust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, butlooking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I droppedout I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begindropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, soI 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 everySunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I lovedit. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuitionturned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
ReedCollege at that timeoffered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout thecampus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully handcalligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normalclasses, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. Ilearned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of spacebetween different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can'tcapture, and I found it fascinating.
Noneof this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten yearslater, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back tome. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer withbeautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course incollege, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionallyspaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that nopersonal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would havenever dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might nothave the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible toconnect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, veryclear looking backwards ten years later.
Again,you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them lookingbackwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in yourfuture. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma,whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all thedifference in my life.
Mysecond story is about love and loss.
Iwas lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I startedApple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Applehad grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company withover 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — theMacintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I gotfired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew wehired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, andfor the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the futurebegan to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board ofDirectors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What hadbeen the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
Ireally didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let theprevious generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as itwas being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried toapologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I eventhought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawnon me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had notchanged that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so Idecided to start over.
Ididn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was thebest thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of beingsuccessful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sureabout everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of mylife.
Duringthe next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company namedPixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixarwent 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 remarkableturn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology wedeveloped at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laureneand I have a wonderful family together.
I'mpretty 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. Sometimeslife hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced thatthe only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got tofind 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 betruly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to dogreat 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 yearsroll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
Mythird story is about death.
WhenI was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each dayas if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It madean impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked inthe mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day ofmy life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever theanswer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need tochange something.
Rememberingthat I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to helpme make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all externalexpectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these thingsjust 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 trapof thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is noreason not to follow your heart.
Abouta year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what apancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancerthat is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to sixmonths. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which isdoctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everythingyou thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. Itmeans to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy aspossible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
Ilived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, wherethey stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into myintestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour.I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed thecells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to bea very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had thesurgery and I'm fine now.
Thiswas the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I getfor a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you witha bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectualconcept:
Noone wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to getthere. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escapedit. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single bestinvention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make wayfor the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, youwill gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, butit is quite true.
Yourtime is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trappedby 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. Andmost important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Theysomehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else issecondary.
WhenI 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 namedStewart Brand not far from here in MenloPark, 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 wassort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: itwas idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewartand his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then whenit had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and Iwas your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of anearly morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on ifyou were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. StayFoolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as yougraduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
StayHungry. Stay Foolish.
Thankyou all very much.