Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Watch this
famous Steve Jobs Speech. Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate and
investor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of
Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt
Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the
founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Enjoy our Speeches with big English
subtitles and keep your English learning journey.
“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.
Steve Jobs
