'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, 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 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, 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 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. |