STEVE JOBS

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

(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.