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 college graduation. Today I want to tell you 3 stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal, just 3 stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots
I dropped out of Reed college after the first six month, 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 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 final adoption papers. She only relented a few month later, when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.
And seventeen 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 6 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 in 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 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 5 cents deposits to buy food with. And I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hari Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I’ve 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 the 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 the 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 into that symbol course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple type faces 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 that wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forwards when I was at college, but it was very very clear looking backwards 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forwards, 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 God, Destiny, Life, Karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even if it leads you off the well-torn path. And that will make all the difference.
My second story is about the love and loss
I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started the Apple in my parent’s garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just two of us in a garage into a 2 billion dollar company with over 4 thousand employees. We just released our finest creation – The Macintosh – a year earlier, and I just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from the company you’ve started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented, to run a 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 a 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’d let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I’ve 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’d 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 a lightness of being a beginner again. Less sure about everything. It’d freed me to one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next 5 years I’ve 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 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 awfully-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life is 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 is 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, some day 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’m about to do today?“ And whenever the answer’s been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that all will be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make 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 affair
Когда мне было 17, я прочитал цитату вроде «Если ты будешь жить каждый день так, как если бы он был твоим последним, когда-нибудь ты наверняка будешь прав». Это произвело на меня впечатление, и с тех пор на протяжении последних 33 лет я каждое утро смотрел в зеркало и спрашивал себя: «Если бы сегодня был последний день в моей жизни, хотел бы я делать то, что я собираюсь делать? что делать сегодня? »И всякий раз, когда слишком много дней подряд я получаю отрицательный ответ, я понимаю, что мне нужно что-то изменить.
Память о том, что все скоро умрет, - это самый важный инструмент, с которым я когда-либо сталкивался, чтобы помочь мне сделать большой выбор в жизни. Потому что почти все - все внешние ожидания, вся гордость, весь страх затруднений или неудач - все это просто исчезает перед лицом смерти, оставляя только то, что действительно важно. Память о том, что ты умрешь, - лучший из известных мне способов избежать ловушки мысли, что тебе есть что терять. Вы уже голые. Нет причин не следовать своему сердцу.
Около года назад мне поставили диагноз «рак». Мне сделали сканирование в 7:30 утра, и оно четко показало опухоль на моей поджелудочной железе. Я даже не знал, что такое поджелудочная железа. Врачи сказали мне, что это почти наверняка неизлечимый вид рака и что мне не придется жить дольше трех-шести месяцев. Мой врач посоветовал мне пойти домой и заняться делом
