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Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

2009-08-07 14:40 253 查看

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.
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 Ð 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 screw
ing 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 Ð 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 retuned 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
Ð 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 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 other's 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.

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