HPers - this speech was so beautiful and right on I wanted to post it here - it fits right in with the spirit of innovation ---

Bill

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Subject: FW: Steve Jobs'Commencement Address at Stanford


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 A2 
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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