"Transcript of Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement fromone of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to acollege graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No bigdeal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but thenstayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before Ireally quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decidedto put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should beadopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to beadopted 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 ofthe night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had nevergraduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promisedthat I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go tocollege, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were beingspent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see thevalue in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and noidea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. SoI decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It waspretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the bestdecisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop takingthe required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in onthe ones that looked far more 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 five-centdeposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles acrosstown every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the HareKrishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless lateron. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphyinstruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I haddropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided totake a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned aboutserif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle ina 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 Macintoshcomputer, 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 neverdropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and sinceWindows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computerwould have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderfultypography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when Iwas in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can onlyconnect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dotswill somehow connect in your future. You have to trust insomething--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidenceto follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well- worn path,and that will make all the difference.

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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple hadgrown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion companywith over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I gotfired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, asApple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to runthe 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 wehad a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him,and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. Ireally didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had letthe previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped thebaton 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 verypublic 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'd 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 Applewas the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heavinessof being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginneragain, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of themost creative periods in my life. During the next five years I starteda company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on tocreate the world's 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 and I returned toApple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart ofApple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful familytogether.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't beenfired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess thepatient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head witha 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 youlove, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your workis going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to betruly 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 ityet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart,you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it justgets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don'tsettle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that wentsomething 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, andsince then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror everymorning 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 theanswer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need tochange something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the mostimportant thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choicesin life, because almost everything--all external expectations, allpride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fallaway 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 avoidthe 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'teven know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almostcertainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expectto live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thoughtyou'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will beas 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 intomy intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells fromthe tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that whenthey viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying,because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer thatis curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am finenow.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's theclosest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I cannow say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was auseful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, evenpeople who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, andyet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escapedit. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears outthe old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. Butsomeday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old andbe cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don'tbe trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of otherpeople's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown outyour own inner voice, 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 WholeEarth Catalogue, 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 thelate Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so itwas all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it wassort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Googlecame along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and greatnotions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the The WholeEarth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the backcover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morningcountry road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if youwere so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stayhungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, andnow, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.