You've got to find what you love!

You've got to find what you love!

September 21, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 others' opinions 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.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150
.html