"Find And Do What You Want"
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.
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 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 – 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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