Scrolling down Ted
Talk's most watched videos today on YouTube, and bumped into this one inspiring
video. He is such an inspirational! Steve Job's in sight is mind-blowing!
'You've got to find what
you love,'
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.
