I am honoured 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 third story first.
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 tumour 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 tumour. 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.
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 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 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 $2bn company with
over 4,000 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 apologise 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.
---------------------------------------------
--------------------------------
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me… Going to bed at
night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me." (In
interview with Wall Street Journal, 1993).
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 third story first.
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 tumour 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 tumour. 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.
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 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 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 $2bn company with
over 4,000 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 apologise 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.
---------------------------------------------
--------------------------------
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me… Going to bed at
night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me." (In
interview with Wall Street Journal, 1993).
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