3 Stories

Thursday
7:37 AM

I've written about Steve Jobs before.

In fact I think I sent you the video
of him giving this speech.

Take it to heart.

Listen.

Think about what he's saying.

In memory of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday here's
the speech.

Like I said, this was a graduation speech to Stanford University
graduates, delivered by Steve Jobs -- who was, at that time,
the CEO of Apple and of Pixar Animation Studios.

This speech was delivered on June 12, 2005.

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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.

Thank you all very much.

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that was Steve Jobs...

a real visionary

Don't settle for less.

Life is way to short, and you realize that more and more
the older you get.

Enjoy your day.

Dr. Carney