Speaker 1: I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement
Speaker 1: from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth
Speaker 1: be told, I never graduated from college. This is the
Speaker 1: closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I
Speaker 1: want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it,
Speaker 1: no big deal, just three stories. The first story is
Speaker 1: about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Read College
Speaker 1: after the first six months, but then stayed around as
Speaker 1: a drop in for another eighteen months or so before
Speaker 1: I really quit. So why'd I drop out? It started
Speaker 1: before I was born. My biological mother was a young,
Speaker 1: unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up
Speaker 1: for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be
Speaker 1: adopted by college graduates. So everything was all set for
Speaker 1: me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and
Speaker 1: his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided
Speaker 1: at the last.
Speaker 2: Minute that they really wanted Earl.
Speaker 1: So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got
Speaker 1: a call in the middle of the night, asking, we've
Speaker 1: got an unexpected baby boy.
Speaker 2: Do you want it? They said? Of course.
Speaker 1: My biological mother found out later that my mother had
Speaker 1: never graduated from college. And that my father had never
Speaker 1: graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final
Speaker 1: adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when
Speaker 1: my parents promised that I would go to college. This
Speaker 1: was the start in my life, and seventeen years later
Speaker 1: I did go to college, but I naively chose a college.
Speaker 1: It was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of
Speaker 1: my working class parents savings were being spent on my
Speaker 1: college tuition.
Speaker 2: After six months.
Speaker 1: I couldn't see the value of it. I had no
Speaker 1: idea what I wanted to do with my life, and
Speaker 1: no idea how college was going to help me figure
Speaker 1: it out. And here I was spending all the money
Speaker 1: my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided
Speaker 1: to drop out and trust that it would all work out. Okay,
Speaker 1: it was pretty scary at the time, but looking back,
Speaker 1: it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Speaker 1: The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the
Speaker 1: required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in
Speaker 1: on the ones that looked far more interesting.
Speaker 2: It wasn't all romantic.
Speaker 1: I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on
Speaker 1: the floor in friend's rooms. I returned coat bottles for
Speaker 1: the five cent deposits to buy food with, and I
Speaker 1: would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night
Speaker 1: to get one good meal a week at the Hari
Speaker 1: Krishna Temple. I loved it, and much of what I
Speaker 1: stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out
Speaker 1: to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Speaker 1: Meet College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
Speaker 1: instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every
Speaker 1: label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I
Speaker 1: had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes,
Speaker 1: I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how
Speaker 1: to do this. I learned about seraph and san serif typefaces,
Speaker 1: about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,
Speaker 1: about what makes.
Speaker 2: Great typography great.
Speaker 1: It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that
Speaker 1: science can't capture, and I found it fascinated. None of
Speaker 1: this had even a hope of any practical application in
Speaker 1: my life. But ten years later, when we were designing
Speaker 1: the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me
Speaker 1: and we designed it all into the mac. It was
Speaker 1: the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
Speaker 1: dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac
Speaker 1: would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
Speaker 1: Since Windows just copy the Mac, it's likely that no
Speaker 1: personal computer.
Speaker 2: Would have them.
Speaker 1: If I had never dropped out, I would have never
Speaker 1: dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might
Speaker 1: not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course,
Speaker 1: it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when
Speaker 1: I was in college, but it was very very clear
Speaker 1: looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can't connect the
Speaker 1: dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.
Speaker 1: So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
Speaker 1: connect in your future. You have to trust in something,
Speaker 1: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever, because believing that the
Speaker 1: dots will connect down the road will give you the
Speaker 1: confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you
Speaker 1: off the well worn path, and that will make all
Speaker 1: the difference. My second story is about love and loss.
Speaker 1: I was lucky. I found what I loved to do
Speaker 1: early in life was and I started Apple in my
Speaker 1: parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and
Speaker 1: in ten years Apple had grown from just the two
Speaker 1: of us in a garage into a two billion dollar
Speaker 1: company with over four thousand employees. We just released our
Speaker 1: finest creation with Macintosh a year earlier, and I just
Speaker 1: turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you
Speaker 1: get fired from a company you started well? As Apple grew,
Speaker 1: we hired someone who I thought was very talented to
Speaker 1: run the company with me, and for the first year
Speaker 1: or so things went well. But then our visions of
Speaker 1: the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a
Speaker 1: falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided
Speaker 1: with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and
Speaker 1: very publicly out. What had been the focus of my
Speaker 1: entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I
Speaker 1: really didn't know what to do. For a few months,
Speaker 1: I felt that I had let the previous generation of
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it
Speaker 1: was being passed me. I met with David Packard and
Speaker 1: Bob Noys and tried to apologize for screwing.
Speaker 2: Up so badly.
Speaker 1: I was a very public failure, and I even thought
Speaker 1: about running away from the valley. But something slowly began
Speaker 1: to dawn on me.
Speaker 2: I still loved what I did.
Speaker 1: The turn of events at Apple had not changed that
Speaker 1: one bit. I'd been rejected, but I was still in love,
Speaker 1: and so I decided to start over. I didn't see
Speaker 1: it then, but it turned out that getting fired from
Speaker 1: Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened
Speaker 1: to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by
Speaker 1: the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
Speaker 1: It freed me to enter one of the most creative
Speaker 1: periods of my life. During the next five years, I
Speaker 1: started a company named Next, another company named Pixar, and
Speaker 1: fell in love with an amazing woman who would become
Speaker 1: my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first
Speaker 1: computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and his now the
Speaker 1: most successful animation studio.
Speaker 2: In the world.
Speaker 1: In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and
Speaker 1: I returned to Apple and the technology we developed it
Speaker 1: Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and
Speaker 1: Loreena and I have.
Speaker 2: A wonderful family together.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if
Speaker 1: I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine,
Speaker 1: but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life Sometimes
Speaker 1: life's going to hit you in the head with a brick.
Speaker 1: Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that
Speaker 1: kept me going.
Speaker 2: Was that I loved what I did. You've got to.
Speaker 1: Find what you love, and that is as true for
Speaker 1: work as it is for your lovers. Your work is
Speaker 1: going to fill a large part of your life, and
Speaker 1: the only way to be truly satisfied is to do
Speaker 1: what you believe is great work. And the only way
Speaker 1: to do great work is to love what you do.
Speaker 1: If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.
Speaker 1: As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when
Speaker 1: you find it, and like any great relationship, it just
Speaker 1: gets better and better as.
Speaker 2: The years roll on.
Speaker 1: So keep looking, don't settle. My third story is about death.
Speaker 1: When I was seventeen, i read a quote that went
Speaker 1: something like, if you live each day as if it
Speaker 1: was your last, someday, you'll most certainly be right. It
Speaker 1: made an impression on me, and since then, for the
Speaker 1: past thirty three years, I've looked in the mirror every
Speaker 1: morning and ask myself, if today were the last.
Speaker 2: Day of my life, what I want to do?
Speaker 1: What I am about to do today, and whenever the
Speaker 1: answer has been no for too many days in a row,
Speaker 1: I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll
Speaker 1: be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
Speaker 1: encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Speaker 1: Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear
Speaker 1: of embarrassment or failed, these things just fall away in
Speaker 1: the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Speaker 1: Remembering that you are going to die is the best
Speaker 1: way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you
Speaker 1: have something to lose. You are already naked. There is
Speaker 1: no reason not to follow your heart.
Speaker 2: No one wants.
Speaker 1: To die, even people who want to go to heaven
Speaker 1: don't want to die to get there. And yet death
Speaker 1: is the destination we all share. No one has ever
Speaker 1: escaped it, and that is as it should be, because
Speaker 1: death is very likely the single best invention of life.
Speaker 1: It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to
Speaker 1: make way for the new. Right now, the new is you,
Speaker 1: But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually
Speaker 1: become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be
Speaker 1: so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited,
Speaker 1: so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be
Speaker 1: trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of
Speaker 1: other people's thinking.
Speaker 2: Don't let the noise of other's.
Speaker 1: Opinions drownd out your own inner voice, and most important,
Speaker 1: have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They
Speaker 1: somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything
Speaker 1: else is secondary. Stay hungry, stay foolish,