Thank you.
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the
world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and 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 six 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 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've got
an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out
later 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 go to college. This was the start in my life.
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 okay. 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 far more 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 five cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven
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 that
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 10 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 --- because believing that the dots will
connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you
off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky --- I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz1 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 two billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. We'd 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.
And 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 world's 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, and 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. Sometime life --- Sometimes life going to
hit 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 --- and 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
--- 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've 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 and 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. I 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 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,
thankfully, 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's 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's 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 60s,
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, 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've 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.