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. 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 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 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 10 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 backward 10 years later. Again,
you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking
backward. 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 4,000 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
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, 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 1960s, 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.
