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'You've got to find what you love,'
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Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios,
delivered on June 12, 2005.
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, its 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 retuned 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 its 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.
Thank you all very much."
Special Thanks to DearYashar for his Email
