The following is a bit long but worth reading it,I would advice you to read it fully..
(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 other's 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.
P.S: TM'IANS PLEASE POST YOUR COLLECTION OF INSPIRIN SPEECHES, QUOTATIONS ETC,. THAT SERVE TO PROVIDE AN IMPETUS WHEN WE ARE DOWN! COZ as we know...
"MANY THINK BUT A FEW ACT" - TM'ian Dhruv:)
