Commencement Address at Stanford University, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement addressdelivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios,on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to bewith you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in theworld. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’veever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three storiesfrom my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

 

The first story isabout connecting the dots.

 

I dropped out ofReed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in foranother 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

 

It started beforeI 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 shouldbe adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adoptedat birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decidedat the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on awaiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have anunexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biologicalmother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and thatmy father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the finaladoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promisedthat I would someday go to college.

 

And 17 years laterI did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensiveas Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent onmy college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had noidea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to helpme figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had savedtheir entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all workout OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of thebest decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking therequired classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the onesthat looked interesting.

 

It wasn’t allromantic. 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 walkthe 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at theHare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by followingmy curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give youone example:

 

Reed College atthat time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, wasbeautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have totake the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how todo this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying theamount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes greattypography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a waythat science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

 

None of this hadeven a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, whenwe were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And wedesigned it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautifultypography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Macwould have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. Andsince Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer wouldhave them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on thiscalligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderfultypography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dotslooking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear lookingbackward 10 years later.

 

Again, you can’tconnect 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. Youhave to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Thisapproach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

 

My second story isabout love and loss.

 

I was lucky — Ifound 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 justthe 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, andI had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from acompany you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought wasvery talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so thingswent well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventuallywe had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adultlife was gone, and it was devastating.

 

I really didn’tknow what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generationof entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed tome. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwingup so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running awayfrom the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved whatI did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had beenrejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

 

I didn’t see itthen, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing thatcould have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replacedby the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. Itfreed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

 

During the nextfive years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, andfell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on tocreate the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is nowthe most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn ofevents, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developedat NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I havea wonderful family together.

 

I’m pretty surenone of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It wasawful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hitsyou in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the onlything that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find whatyou love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your workis going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be trulysatisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do greatwork is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’tsettle. 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 rollon. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

 

My third story isabout death.

 

When I was 17, Iread a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was yourlast, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, andsince then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morningand asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to dowhat I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for toomany days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 

Remembering thatI’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help memake the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all externalexpectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these thingsjust 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 trapof thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is noreason not to follow your heart.

 

About a year ago Iwas diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearlyshowed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. Thedoctors 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 doctoradvised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code forprepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’dhave the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sureeverything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for yourfamily. It means to say your goodbyes.

 

I lived with thatdiagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck anendoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put aneedle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, butmy wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under amicroscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rareform of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery andI’m fine now.

 

This was theclosest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a fewmore decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bitmore certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

 

No one wants todie. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. Andyet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And thatis as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention ofLife. 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 graduallybecome the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quitetrue.

 

Your time islimited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped bydogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t letthe noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And mostimportant, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehowalready 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 oneof the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brandnot far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetictouch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktoppublishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras.It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google camealong: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

 

Stewart and histeam put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it hadrun its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I wasyour age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an earlymorning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if youwere so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Itwas their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And Ihave always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, Iwish that for you.

 

Stay Hungry. StayFoolish.

 

Thank you all verymuch.