| You've got to find what you love .Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. "Steve Jobs" |
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'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says Idropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around asa drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I dropout? 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 everything wasall set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except thatwhen I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted agirl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle ofthe night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that mymother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduatedfrom high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She onlyrelented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go tocollege. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a collegethat 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'tsee the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no ideahow college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all ofthe money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out andtrust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, butlooking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I droppedout I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begindropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. Ididn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returnedcoke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 milesacross town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishnatemple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosityand intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: ReedCollege at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in thecountry. 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 san 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 had evena hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when wewere 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, its 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 lookingbackwards 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 dotswill 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 hasmade all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. Iwas lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Applein my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple hadgrown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - ayear earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you getfired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who Ithought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year orso things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge andeventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided withhim. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of myentire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know whatto do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation ofentrepreneurs 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 upso 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'tsee it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thingthat could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful wasreplaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure abouteverything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Duringthe next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company namedPixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixarwent 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 remarkableturn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology wedeveloped at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laureneand I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this wouldhave 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 abrick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me goingwas that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is astrue for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a largepart of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what youbelieve is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what youdo. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with allmatters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any greatrelationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keeplooking until you find it. Don't settle. My third story is about death. WhenI was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each dayas if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It madean impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked inthe mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day ofmy life, 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 tochange something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most importanttool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Becausealmost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear ofembarrassment 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 isthe 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 ayear ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, andit clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreaswas. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that isincurable, 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'scode for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything youthought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. Itmeans to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy aspossible for your family. 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 the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope itsthe closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can nowsay this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful butpurely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to goto heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination weall share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, becauseDeath is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's changeagent. 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 becleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. 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. WhenI 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 namedStewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life withhis poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers anddesktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroidcameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Googlecame along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and greatnotions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole EarthCatalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. Itwas the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issuewas a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might findyourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as theysigned off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that formyself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. StayHungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much |
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