I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of thefinest 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 stayedaround as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.So whydid I drop out?It started before I was born.My biological mother was a young, unwedcollege graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.She feltvery strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everythingwas all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.Exceptthat when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they reallywanted a girl.So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in themiddle of the night asking: \"We have an unexpected baby boy; do you wanthim?\" They said: \"Of course.\" My biological mother later found out that mymother had never graduated from college and that my father had nevergraduated from high school.She refused to sign the final adoption papers.She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that Iwould someday go to college.And 17 years later I did go to college.But I naively chose a college that wasalmost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-cla parents\'savings were being spent on my college tuition.After six months, I couldn\'tsee the value in it.I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and noidea how college was going to help me figure it out.And here I wapending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.So Idecided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.It was prettyscary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I evermade.The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required claes thatdidn\'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 infriends\' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with,and I would walk the 7 miles acro town every Sunday night to get onegood meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.I loved it.And much of whatI stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to bepricele later on.
Let me give you one example:Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction inthe country.Throughout the campus every poster, every label on everydrawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.Because I had dropped out anddidn\'t have to take the normal claes, I decided to take a calligraphy cla tolearn how to do this.I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, aboutvarying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.It was beautiful, historical, artisticallysubtle 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 tenyears later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it allcame back to me.And we designed it all into the Mac.It was the firstcomputer with beautiful typography.If I had never dropped in on that singlecourse in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces orproportionally spaced fonts.And since Windows just copied the Mac, itslikely that no personal computer would have them.If I had never droppedout, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy cla, and personalcomputers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.Of courseit was impoible 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 connectthem looking backwards.So you have to trust that the dots will somehowconnect in your future.You have to trust in somethingthe Macintoshthat I had dropped the baton asit was being paed to me.I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce andtried to apologize for screwing up so badly.I was a very public failure, and Ieven thought about running away from the valley.But something slowlybegan to dawn on me – I still loved what I did.The turn of events at Applehad not changed that one bit.I had been rejected, but I was still in love.Andso I decided to start over.I didn\'t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was thebest thing that could have ever happened to me.The heavine of beingsucceful was replaced by the lightne of being a beginner again, le sureabout everything.It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of mylife.During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, anothercompany named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who wouldbecome my wife.Pixar went on to create theworlds first computer animatedfeature film, Toy Story, and is now the most succeful animation studio inthe world.In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned toApple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple\'scurrent renaiance.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 fromApple.It was awful tasting medicine, but I gue the patient needed it.Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.Don\'t lose faith.I\'mconvinced 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 isfor your lovers.Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and theonly way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.Andthe only way to do great work is to love what you do.If you haven\'t found ityet, keep looking.Don\'t settle.As with all matters of the heart, you\'ll knowwhen you find it.And, like any great relationship, it just gets better andbetter 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 eachday as if it was your last, someday you\'ll most certainly be right.\" It made animpreion on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in themirror every morning and asked myself: \"If today were the last day of mylife, would I want to do what I am about to do today?\" And whenever theanswer has been \"No\" for too many days in a row, I know I need to changesomething.Remembering that I\'ll be dead soon is the most important tool I\'ve everencountered to help me make the big choices in life.Because almosteverything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrament orfailurewhich is living with the results of other people\'sthinking.Don\'t let the noise of other\'s opinions drown out your own innervoice.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 WholeEarth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.It was createdby a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and hebrought it to life with his poetic touch.This was in the late 1960\'s, beforepersonal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made withtypewriters, sciors, and polaroid cameras.It was sort of like Google inpaperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, andoverflowing with neat tools and great notions.Stewart and his team put out several iues of The Whole Earth Catalog, andthen when it had run its course, they put out a final iue.It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.On the back cover of their final iue was aphotograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might findyourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.Beneath it were thewords: \"Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish.\" It was their farewell meage as theysigned off.Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish.And I have always wished that for myself.And now, as you graduate to begin a new, I wish that for you.Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish.Thank you all very much.Steve Jobs
