Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech:
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 clost 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 eighteen 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 t 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 cour." 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 refud to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promid that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And venteen years later, I did go to college, but I naely cho 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 e the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of 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 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 class 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 ven 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. Becau I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal class, I decided to take a calligraphy class to l
earn how to do this. I learned about rif
and sans-rif 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 cour 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 personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of cour 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--beca
u 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 cond 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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just relead our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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 thirty, 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 pasd 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'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't e it then, but it turned out that get
ting 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 in 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 returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lo 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 ttle. 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 ttle.
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 mylf, "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 thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, becau almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--the 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 lo. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnod 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 advid me to go home and get my affairs in order, which
is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 dated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, becau it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the clost I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the clost 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 uful 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, becau 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 s
omeday, 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 el's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noi of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything el is condary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, 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 Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out veral issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its cour, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 yourlf hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath 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 mylf, and now, as you gradua
te to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
很荣幸今天能和你们一起参加毕业典礼，斯坦福大学是世界上最好的大学之一。我从来没有从大学中毕业。说实话，今天也许是我生命中离大学毕业最近的一天了。我想向你们讲述我生活中的三个故事。没什么大不了的，只是三个故事而已。
第一个故事是关于如何把生命中的点点滴滴串连起来
我在里德大学读了六个月之后就退学了, 但是作为旁听生还继续在学校听课，十八个月后才真正离开学校。我为什么要退学呢？?
故事要从我出生前讲起。我的亲生母亲是一个年轻的未婚大学毕业生。她决定让别人收养我, 但收养人一定要大学毕业。在我出生的时候，她已经安排好了一切，使我能被一对律师夫妇收养。但是她没有料到, 当我出生之后, 这对律师夫妇突然改变决定，坚持想要一个女孩。于是我的养父母（他们当时在我亲生父母的收养人候选名单上）突然在半夜接到了一个电话:“我们这儿突然有一个男婴可以收养，你们想要他吗？”他们回答道:“当然！”但是我亲生母亲随后发现，我的养母从来没有上过大学，我的养父甚至高中没有毕业。她拒绝签署正式的收养文件。过了几个月, 我的养父母答应她一定要让我上大学, 我的生母才签字同意将我交给他们。?
十七年后, 我真的上了大学。但是我很幼稚的选择了一所几乎和你们的斯坦福大学一样学费昂贵的学校。我的父母属于工薪阶层，他们几乎把所有积蓄都花在了我的学费上。六个月后, 我看不到这样上学的价值所在。我不知道今后将怎样安排我的生活，也不知道大学能怎样帮我找到答案。而现在，我几乎花光了父母一辈子的积蓄。所以我决定退学, 抱着一个信念，一切都会好起来的。我当时确实非常害怕, 但是现在回头看看, 那是我这一生中最好的一个决定。从我做出退学决定的那一刻开始, 我就可以不必去上必修课程，而是去选修那些我更感兴趣的课程了。?
但是这一切并不全是那么浪漫。我没有了宿舍, 只能在朋友房间的地板上睡觉。我靠捡可乐瓶子来填饱肚子，每个瓶子当时可以换5分钱。每个星期天晚上, 我都要走七英里的路程，穿过城市去印度克利须那神庙，只是为了能吃上一个星期唯一一顿好一点的饭。但是我喜欢这样的生活。在好奇心和直觉的引导下, 我跌跌撞撞地前进，学到的很多东西以后被证明非常宝贵。让我给你们举个例子吧：?
里德大学当时开设了也许是全美最好的美术字课程。学校里的每张海报, 每个抽屉上的标签，都用的是漂亮的手
