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.
