'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs
says
This is a prepared text of the Commencement
address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation
Studios, 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, 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.
