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Steve Jobs Commencement Speech at Standford University 2005:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Thank you.

I'm honored to be with you  today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.  Truth be told, I  never graduated from college, and 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 did 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 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 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  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 returned  coke bottles for the five 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 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 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, it's likely that no personal 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  loved to do early in life. Woz¹ 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 two billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. We'd 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. 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 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, and 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. 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 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 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 lived with that diagnosis  all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down  my throat, through my stomach 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, thankfully, 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'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 Stewart Brand not far  from here in Menlo 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  idealistic, 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've  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.

helpwanted

most powerful speech I've ever listened.
"you're already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart".