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Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address (with intro by President John Hennessy)
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[Music]
this program is brought to you by
Stanford University please visit us at
stanford.edu
it now gives me great pleasure to
introduce this year's commencement
speaker Steve Jobs
[Applause]
the chief executive officer and
co-founder of apple and Pixar Animation
[Applause]
Studios Stanford University has been
characterized since its founding by a
willingness to be bold and to strike out
in New Directions and this is a
characteristic very much shared by
today's speaker a Pioneer and Visionary
for almost three decades his name and
the companies he has founded have been
synonymous with Innovation and
creativity as a young boy growing up in
Los Altos Steve Jobs came of age at the
same time as Silicon
Valley while still in school he attended
lectures informally at Stanford as well
as at ulip Packard where he spent his
summer
working after graduating from high
school he left California to attend Reed
College a a trek through India and a
short stint as a video game designer for
Atari
followed soon after his return to the
valley in
1974 he became a regular along with
Steve WN at meetings of The Homebrew
Computer Club held at the Stanford
linear accelerator
Center it was not long before the two of
them had built the prototype for the
Apple One the apple one was was very
fast at the time reading and writing 4
kilobytes in about 20
[Applause]
seconds about 20,000 times slower than
we do so
today the Apple 2 was faster still but
more importantly introduced color
monitors into the Home
Market in the mid 1980s the Macintosh
became the first truly userfriendly
personal computer you didn't have to be
an expert to set it up or to load
software or to transfer information
between
applications and the mouse offered point
and click convenience and opened the
door to computer Literacy for
everyone I still remember the amazed
faces of onlookers as they saw a
computer that was completely different
from the personal computers of that
day Steve also co-founded Pixar
Animation Studios which has
revolutionized the film industry in its
Short history with brilliant use of
technology and produced two Academy
award-winning films Toy Story and
Finding
[Applause]
Nemo since his return to Apple eight
years ago Steve has reinvented the
company once again extending its Vision
to music and new digital media
iPod and
iTunes have changed the way we listen to
organize store and purchase our music
and in my case the way I often read
books now songs we love are just 99
Cents and a completely legal click
away I photo and iMovie revolutionize
the ability of consumers to organize
edit and display digital photography and
video putting capabilities that once
cost thousands of dollars into the hands
of every Mac
User Steve is also widely recognized for
his ability to create an Innovative
environment inside apple as well as an
external company image that is equally
Innovative just think about Apple's
marketing campaigns over the past three
decades a promotional flyer in 1976 six
showed Isaac Newton sitting under a tree
just as an apple was falling by with the
catchy exhortation to bite
byte into an
apple there was an iconic Super Bowl
commercial techy
humor an iconic Superbowl commercial
telling us that the Macintosh was on the
horizon and assuring us that we would
see why
1984 wouldn't be like
1984 and in the late 1990s we saw
banners and billboards featuring Pablo
Picasso Albert Einstein Martha Graham
and mahat m Gandhi all urging us to
think
different Steve Jobs understands that
creativity and Innovation start by
thinking
differently he has a deeep rooted belief
in the power of Education to train
transform lives coupled with the desire
to make the world a better
place from the earliest days of apple he
worked to develop Partnerships with
Educators and get computers into
schools for almost three decades he and
his companies have provided invaluable
technology and support to schools and
communities increasing accessibility to
information for Learners of all
ages more than 100 years ago in
describing his vision for a new
University Leland Stanford wrote the
imagination needs to be cultivated and
developed to assure success in
life Stanford clearly understood that
technical knowledge was only the
starting point for creation and
Discovery Steve Jobs understands that
the computer is a very powerful tool in
a technical sense but that it true power
lies in the ability to unleash the
imagination and creativity of the
user as he explained to the New York
Times in a 1997 interview the Macintosh
turned out so well because the people
working on it were musicians artists
poets and historians who also happened
to be excellent computer
scientists and last fall a business week
reporter asked how he manages for
Innovation his answer was deceptively
simple we hire people who want to make
the best things in the
world Steve Jobs personifies the spirit
and creativity that have characterized
this University since its founding 114
years ago and we are pleased to have him
here today please join me in warmly
welcoming this year's commencement
speaker Steve Jobs
thank
you I'm uh honored to be with you today
for your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the
[Applause]
world truth be
told uh I never graduated from college
and uh 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 six months but then stayed
around as a drop in for another 18
months or so before I really
quit so why' I drop out
it started before I was
born my biological mother was a young
unwed 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 and in the middle of the
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
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 go to college this was the start
in my
life 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 workingclass
parents savings were being spent on my
college tuition after 6 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 the money my parents had
saved their entire life
so I decided to drop out and trust that
it would all work out okay 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 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 return Coke
bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy
food with and I would walk the seven
miles across town every Sunday night to
get one good meal a week at the Hari
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 type faces
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 typ faces
or proportionally spaced fonts and since
Windows just copied the Mac it's likely
that no person computer would have
them if I had never dropped out I would
have never dropped in on that
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 10 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 because believing that the dots
will connect down the road will give you
the confidence to 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 love to
do early in life was 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 just released
our finest creation the Macintosh a year
earlier and I 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 and 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 noise 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'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 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 5 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 and I returned to
Apple and the technology we developed at
next is at the heart of Apple's current
Renaissance and Loren 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 sometime life sometimes life's going
to hit 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 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 and 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 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've
looked in the mirror every morning and
ask 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 3 to 6
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 and 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 live 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 doctor 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 thankfully I'm fine now
[Applause]
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's 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's 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 Stuart brand
not far from here in Meno Park and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch
this was in the late 60s 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 idealist istic
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 mid1 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
a new I wish that for you stay hungry
stay foolish thank you all very much
[Music]
the proceeding program is copyrighted by
Stanford University please visit us at
stanford.edu
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