Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve
Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, 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, its 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. 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. (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 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.
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 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, andthe 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
externalexpectations, 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 its 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 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.
5W1H
Who:
Steve Jobs
Why:
Tell graduates about life and encourage them to pursue what they want.
What:
Sharing three stories from Steve Job’s life with Stanford University graduates.
When: June 14, 2005
Where:
Stanford University
How:
Via a speech which was given by successful businessman - Steve Jobs
Voc
1. relent: 變溫和.變寬厚.心軟
(allow someone to do something that you had previously refused
to allow them to do.)
2. dorm: 宿舍(abbreviation of “dormintory”)
(a large bedroom where
several people sleep, for example in a boarding school.)
3. diverge: 分開.分歧
(If one opinion or idea diverges from another,
they contradict each other or are different. You can also say that two opinions
or ideas diverge .)
4. faith : 信心
(someone or something, you feel
confident about their ability or goodness.)
5. diagnose : 診斷.判斷
(someone or something is having a particular illness or problem,and
their illness or problem is identified)
6. dogma
: 教條.信條
(a belief or a system of beliefs
that people are expected to accept that it is true, without questioning it.)
7. notion : 觀念.理念
(an idea or belief about
something.)
Info Resource: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
