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Stanford Commencement Address by Steve Jobs

Speech worth reading

Key learnings in this blog are:

  • Connecting Dots: Jobs shares his journey, highlighting how diverse experiences can unexpectedly shape one’s future.
  • Love and Loss: Stresses the importance of pursuing work you love and finding opportunities in life’s setbacks.
  • Mortality as Motivation: Encourages embracing mortality as a tool for making courageous choices.
  • Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish: Advocates for maintaining curiosity and willingness to take risks throughout life.
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Stanford Commencement Address by Steve Jobs

At a junction where academic regalia meets the casualness of Silicon Valley, you find yourself immersed in the wisdom delivered by Steve Jobs during his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

As a titan of innovation, Jobs recounted his own journey of remarkable highs and devastating lows, weaving a narrative that both captivates and challenges you. His words, a blend of poignant life lessons and unconventional wisdom, strike a chord within, making you pause and ponder.

You’d think the speech ends there, however, the true essence of Jobs’ address unfolds as you begin to reflect on its implications in your own life.

Now, wouldn’t you want to delve deeper into this intersection of life’s complexities and simplicity?

Background

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios, delivered a transformative commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford University. Jobs’ speech was a culmination of his remarkable journey as a visionary leader in the tech industry, known for his groundbreaking innovations and unwavering commitment to excellence.

With a unique blend of creativity, passion, and resilience, Jobs shared profound life lessons drawn from his own experiences, captivating the audience with his unconventional wisdom and unconventional approach to life. His speech resonated deeply with listeners worldwide, not only for the timeless insights it offered but also for the speaker’s remarkable tech-savvy acumen that continues to inspire generations.

Jobs’ legacy as a pioneering entrepreneur and innovator added a distinctive weight to his words, making this address a lasting source of inspiration and guidance for individuals seeking to make a meaningful impact in their own lives.

Key Takeaways

Here are 4 key takeaways from the Stanford Commencement Address by Steve Jobs that encapsulate the essence of following your heart and intuition in the journey of life:

  • Steve Jobs emphasized the significance of loving what you do and trusting one’s journey, even in setbacks.
  • Jobs underscored the value of time and pursuing meaningful work and relationships, urging graduates to follow their passion.
  • Jobs’ personal anecdotes highlighted the importance of connecting life’s dots, stressing the transformative power of facing mortality.
  • His speech encouraged graduates to keep exploring, stay hungry, stay foolish, and remain true to their hearts and intuition.

Story

In his iconic Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs meticulously weaves together personal anecdotes that offer profound life lessons and reflections on mortality.

These narratives serve not only as a unique insight into Jobs’ life trajectory and his philosophical underpinnings, but also as a testament to his remarkable ability to connect disparate life experiences into a cohesive, impactful message.

Through this exploration of Jobs’ stories, we can glean an understanding of the transformative power of passion, intuition, and the inevitability of death in shaping one’s life and career.

Jobs’ Personal Anecdotes

Delving into the personal anecdotes shared by Steve Jobs illuminates the profound impact of his life experiences on his visionary approach to technology and business. Jobs’ early years were marked by curiosity and a strong inclination towards the unconventional, seen in his decision to drop out of Reed College and later audit a calligraphy class.

This experience, seemingly unrelated to his future career, remarkably influenced the aesthetic design of Apple’s Macintosh. Furthermore, Jobs’ dismissal from Apple, a company he co-founded, exemplified resilience and innovation that led to the creation of NeXT and Pixar.

These anecdotes, integral to Jobs’ narrative, underscored his unique perspective, transforming personal setbacks into opportunities, thus shaping his innovative approach to technology.

Lessons From Life Choices

Exploring further into Jobs’ narrative, the profound lessons drawn from his life choices significantly shaped his career and the tech industry. Opting to drop out of Reed College, for instance, led him to enroll in a calligraphy class. This unexpected choice would later inspire the distinctive typography of the Macintosh computer.

His firing from Apple, the company he co-founded, was another pivotal episode. This setback, while seemingly disastrous, gave birth to NeXT and Pixar, both profoundly impactful in the tech and animation industries.

Jobs’ life experiences reiterate the potency of passion, intuition, and resilience in driving innovation. These lessons from his life choices serve as a compelling narrative on how unconventional paths can lead to groundbreaking accomplishments in the tech world.

Influence of Mortality Reflections

Reflecting on mortality played a pivotal role in shaping Steve Jobs’ approach to life and work, profoundly influencing his decision-making process and driving him to create meaningful, lasting impact in the tech industry.

His daily routine included contemplating death, a practice he started at age 17. This constant reminder of life’s ephemerality enabled Jobs to prioritize meaningful work and relationships. It fostered an urgency to innovate, leading to ground-breaking products such as the iPhone and iPad.

His mantra, ‘live each day as if it were your last’, echoes throughout the tech industry, reminding us that time is a non-renewable resource. Jobs’ reflection on mortality served as a catalyst for his extraordinary contributions to technology, embodying his belief in the transformative power of facing mortality.

Learnings

In Stanford Commencement Address by Jobs, there are 3 key learnings. Let’s delve into these:

Life’s Dot-Connecting Journey

Jobs’ narrative on connecting the dots in life provides a compelling framework for understanding how past experiences shape our future:

  • Power of retrospection: Emphasizing the unforeseeable value of diverse experiences, Jobs encourages a reflective approach to life’s journey, trusting that the dots will somehow connect in the future.
  • Influence on innovation: This perspective fosters innovation by allowing past insights and experiences to inform current projects and technological advancements.
  • Strategic compass: Jobs’ approach serves as a strategic guide for navigating personal and professional decisions, suggesting that every experience holds potential value for future endeavors.

The concept of connecting the dots reassures us that while the future might be uncertain, our past experiences provide a valuable foundation for making informed choices.

Embracing Passionate Pursuits

Jobs’ emphasis on pursuing what one loves highlights the critical intersection between personal fulfillment and professional achievement:

  • Passion as a driver of innovation: By advocating for alignment between personal interests and professional work, Jobs illustrates how passion can fuel groundbreaking innovations and significant contributions to one’s field.
  • Iterative approach to life: This mindset parallels the tech industry’s culture of continual improvement, suggesting that life, too, can be optimized through passionate dedication.
  • Educational implications: It underscores the importance of an education system that encourages exploration and supports students in discovering and pursuing their passions, cultivating a future generation of innovators.

Jobs’ narrative on passion and work challenges us to rethink our approach to careers and creativity, advocating for a life driven by deep interests and love for what we do.

Mortality’s Transformative Power

The contemplation of mortality, as articulated by Jobs, offers profound insights into living with purpose and intentionality:

  • Mortality as a motivator: Understanding the finite nature of life encourages a focus on pursuing meaningful work and making the most of the time we have.
  • Clarifying priorities: Facing mortality helps to strip away the inconsequential, urging us to concentrate on what truly matters—our passions, values, and the impact we wish to make.
  • Innovation under the shadow of mortality: Jobs’ own experience with facing death informed his approach to leadership and innovation, pushing him to take bold risks and pursue visionary projects.

Reflecting on mortality invites us to live more authentically and purposefully, challenging us to make choices that reflect our true values and aspirations.

Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech

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 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.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address encapsulates significant life lessons rooted in his unique experiences.

His emphasis on connecting life’s dots, following one’s heart, and embracing mortality provides a profound perspective on personal and professional fulfillment.

This narrative offers valuable insights and prompts deeper reflection on individual journeys, thereby affirming its enduring relevance and global influence.

 

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