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#Post#: 110--------------------------------------------------
Inspirational Speech by Steve Jobs
DIR By: Admin
Date: June 13, 2013, 4:48 am
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Steve Jobs (1955–2011, 56), founder of Apple Inc, gave this
amazing and inspirational speech to Stanford University
graduates on June 12, 2005.
Watch or read below his wise and thoughtful words.
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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.
Submitted by Ketki
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