forstudents苹果CEO乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿
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史蒂夫乔布斯2005年6月在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲 You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest 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 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 college 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, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.And 17 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 six 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 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 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¢ 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 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. 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 serif and san 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 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 course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible 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 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second 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 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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. So at 30 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 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 had 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 the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of 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 worlds 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, I retuned 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 awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose 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 your 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
史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs,1955年2⽉24⽇—2011年10⽉5⽇),出⽣于美国加利福尼亚州旧⾦⼭,美国发明家、企业家、美国苹果公司联合创办⼈。
乔布斯被认为是计算机业界与娱乐业界的标志性⼈物,他经历了苹果公司⼏⼗年的起落与兴衰,他深刻地改变了现代通讯、娱乐、⽣活⽅式。
下⾯带您看⼀下他在斯坦福⼤学毕业典礼讲话。
乔布斯斯坦福⼤学毕业典礼演讲稿 I am 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 Ive ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Thats it. No big deal. Just three stories. 今天,我很荣幸能和你们⼀起参加毕业典礼,斯坦福⼤学是世界上的⼤学之⼀。
说实话,(虽然)我从来没有从⼤学中毕业,但今天是我⽣命中离⼤学毕业最近的⼀天了。
今天我想向你们讲述我⽣活中的三个故事。
不说⼤道理,就是三个故事⽽已。
The first story is about connecting the dots. 第⼀个故事是关于如何把⽣命中的点点滴滴串连起来。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? 我在⾥德学院读了六个⽉之后就退学了,但是在⼗⼋个⽉以后,我还经常去学校。
苹果CEO乔布斯在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲稿I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest 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 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 college 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, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?“ They said: “Of course.“ My bi ological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 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 six 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 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 interest ing.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¢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 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. 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 serif and san 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 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 course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personalcomputer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible 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 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.My second 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 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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. So at 30 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 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 had 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 co uld 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 of 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 worlds 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, I retuned 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 awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose 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 your 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 lovewhat you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know whe n you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better 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 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 myself: “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 tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the 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 wha t 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 affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure 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 and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest 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 useful 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, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. 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 gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’sopinions drown out your own inner voice. 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 Whole Earth Catalog, 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 1960’s, 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, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, 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 yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it 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 myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.Thank you all very much.。
乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲稿(中文优秀6篇乔布斯英语演讲稿篇一camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. and on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. and it went like this: r-o-w-d-i-e, that#39;s the way we spell rowdie. rowdie, rowdie, let#39;s get rowdie. yeah. so i couldn#39;t figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (laughter) but i recited a cheer. i recited a cheer along with everybody else. i did my best. and i just waited for the time that i could go off and read my books.but the first time that i took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, why are you being so mellow? -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of r-o-w-d-i-e. and then the second time i tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.and so i put my books away, back in their suitcase, and i put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. and i felt kind of guilty about this. i felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and i was forsaking them. but i did forsake them and i didn#39;t open that suitcase again until i was back home with my family at the end of the summer.now, i tell you this story about summer camp. i could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that i should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. and i always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that i had always longed to be -- partly because i needed to prove to myself that i could be bold and assertive too. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. and i made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that i wasn#39;t even aware that i was making them.乔布斯励志演讲稿篇二只上6个月大学就退学为什么还能成功?被自己创办的公司开除为什么没被击垮?经历死去活来之后对人生又会有何改变?我荣幸地在世界上最好的大学的毕业典礼上讲话,但是我从来没大学毕业。
这是苹果公司和Pixar 动画工作室的CEO Steve Jobs 于2005年6月12号在斯坦福大学的毕业典礼上面的演讲稿。
谢谢大家。
很荣幸能和你们,来自世界最好大学之一的毕业生们,一块儿参加毕业典礼。
老实说,我大学没有毕业,今天恐怕是我一生中离大学毕业最近的一次了。
今天,我想告诉大家来自我生活的三个故事。
不是长篇大论,只是三个故事而已。
第一个故事,如何串连生命中的点滴。
我 在里得大学读了六个月就退学了,但是在十八个月之后--我真正退学之前,我还常去学校。
为何我要选择退学呢?这还得从我出生之前说起。
我的生母是一个年 轻、未婚的大学毕业生,她决定让别人收养我。
她有一个很强烈的信仰,认为我应该被一个大学毕业生家庭收养。
于是,一对律师夫妇说好了要领养我,然而最后一 秒钟,他们改变了主意,决定要个女孩儿。
然后我的排在收养人名单中的养父母在一个深夜接到电话,“很意外,我们多了一个男婴,你们要吗?”“当然要!”但 是我的生母后来又发现我的养母没有大学毕业,养父连高中都没有毕业。
她拒绝在领养书上签字。
几个月后,我的养父母保证会让我上大学,她妥协了。
这 是我生命的开端。
十七年后,我上大学了,但是我很无知地选了一所差不多和斯坦福一样贵的学校,几乎花掉我那蓝领阶层养父母一生的积蓄。
六个月后,我觉得不 值得。
我看不出自己以后要做什么,也不晓得大学会怎样帮我指点迷津,而我却在花销父母一生的积蓄。
所以我决定退学,并且相信没有做错。
一开始非常吓人,但 回忆起来,这却是我一生中作的最好的决定之一。
从我退学的那一刻起,我可以停止一切不感兴趣的必修课,开始旁听那些有意思得多的课。
事情并不那么美好。
我没有宿舍可住,睡在朋友房间的地上。
为了吃饭,我收集五分一个的旧可乐瓶,每个星期天晚上步行七英里到哈尔-克里什纳庙里改善一下一周的伙食。
我喜欢这种生活方式。
能够遵循自己的好奇和直觉前行后来被证明是多么的珍贵。
让我来给你们举个例子吧。
、管路敷设技术通过管线敷设技术,不仅可以解决吊顶层配置不规范问题,而且可保障各类管路习题到位。
史蒂夫乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿我坚信让我一往无前的唯一力量就是我热爱我所做的一切史蒂夫&S226;乔布斯(Steve Jobs)'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs saysThis is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Comp uter and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, th is is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to t ell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three storie s.很荣幸和大家一道参加这所世界上最好的一座大学的毕业典礼。
我大学没毕业,说实话,这是我第一次离大学毕业典礼这么近。
今天我想给大家讲三个我自己的故事,不讲别的,也不讲大道理,就讲三个故事。
The first story is about connecting the dots.I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed aroun d as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?第一个故事讲的是点与点之间的关系。
乔布斯在斯坦福的演讲稿尊敬的听众朋友们:大家好!今天,我很荣幸站在这里,与大家分享一场关于追求梦想、创新和人生价值的演讲。
这场演讲的灵感来源于一位伟人——乔布斯,他在斯坦福大学的演讲中,分享了他在人生道路上的心得体会。
让我们一起来回顾一下乔布斯的演讲,希望他的经历能给我们的生活带来启示。
让我们回顾一下乔布斯在斯坦福演讲的开头。
他提到:“我一直相信,如果我把人生看作是一场旅行,那么我在乎的是沿途的风景以及看风景的心情。
”这段话传达了一个观念:人生就像一场旅行,重要的是欣赏沿途的风景,体验不同的心情。
这告诉我们,要珍惜人生的每一个阶段,不断寻找自己的激情所在。
乔布斯在演讲中强调了创新的重要性。
他说:“创新是区别领导者和追随者的唯一方式。
”这句话提醒我们,要勇于创新,敢于突破。
在现实生活中,我们往往害怕改变,害怕失败。
然而,正是这种恐惧束缚了我们的手脚。
只有勇敢地尝试新事物,才能实现人生的突破。
在演讲的乔布斯说:“死亡是生命的一部分,如同昼夜更替,岁月流转。
我们应当接受它,而不是恐惧它。
”这段话让我们意识到,生命是短暂的,我们要珍惜当下,勇敢地追求自己的梦想。
不要让恐惧和犹豫阻碍我们前进的脚步,要勇敢地去追寻心中的理想。
回顾乔布斯的演讲,我们可以得出以下结论:人生就像一场旅行,我们要学会欣赏沿途的风景,珍惜每一个阶段。
人生的每一次经历,无论好坏,都是我们成长的宝贵财富。
我们要学会从中汲取经验,不断丰富自己的人生。
创新是推动我们前进的关键。
我们要勇于尝试新事物,勇敢地追求梦想。
谢谢大家!。
乔布斯——斯坦福演讲全⽂(中英⽂对照)You've got to find what you love,' Jobs saysJobs说,你必须要找到你所爱的东西。
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO ofApple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12,2005.这是苹果公司和Pixar动画⼯作室的CEO Steve Jobs于2005年6⽉12号在斯坦福⼤学的毕业典礼上⾯的演讲稿。
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one ofthe finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a collegegraduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.我今天很荣幸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,今天也许是在我的⽣命中离⼤学毕业最近的⼀天了。
今天我想向你们讲述我⽣活中的三个故事。
不是什么⼤不了的事情,只是三个故事⽽已。
The first story is about connecting the dots.第⼀个故事是关于如何把⽣命中的点点滴滴串连起来。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but thenstayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I reallyquit. So why did I drop out?我在Reed⼤学读了六个⽉之后就退学了,但是在⼗⼋个⽉以后――我真正的作出退学决定之前,我还经常去学校。
苹果CEO乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿'You've got to find what you love',Jobs saysThis is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.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 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 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 set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when Ipopped 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 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 the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months 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 six months, I couldn't see 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 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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. 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 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 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 course 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 course 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 lookingbackwards, 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--because 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 second 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 released 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 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 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 lose 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 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, 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 myself, "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 encounter ed to help me make the 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 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 sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because 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 closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest 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 useful 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, because 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 someday, 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 else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, 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 Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart 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 personalcomputers 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. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, 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 yourself 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 myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.Thank you all, very much.。