Source: Smart Investors

Jobs' speech at the Stanford graduation ceremony

2005/6/2

I am so honored to be with you today at the graduation ceremony of one of the best universities in the world. I never graduated from college. To be honest, this is the most recent time I've “graduated from college.”

Today I'd like to tell you three stories from my life. That's it, it's not a big deal. It's just three stories.

01. The first story is about “connecting the dots into a line”

I dropped out of Reed College after only six months, but I was still attending school a lot, and it took about 18 months before I actually left school. So why am I dropping out of school?

I'll start talking about this before I was born. My mother was still a young unmarried graduate student when she became pregnant with me, so she decided to give me to someone else for adoption.

She really wanted someone who graduated from college to adopt me, so everything was arranged for me to be adopted by a lawyer and his wife as soon as I was born.

But as soon as I was born, the couple suddenly changed their minds; what they really wanted was a girl.

Just like that, my foster parents (who were on the list of registered applicants at the time) suddenly received a phone call in the middle of the night: “We have a baby boy who was unexpectedly born, do you want him?” They answered, “Of course it is.”

But my birth mother later discovered that my foster mother didn't have a college degree, and my foster father didn't even graduate from middle school. She declined to sign the final adoption documents.

But after a few months, my foster parents promised that they would send me to college in the future, and my birth mother relented.

After 17 years, I actually went to college. But I naively chose a school that was almost as expensive as Stanford University, and my working class foster parents used all of their savings to pay for my college tuition.

Six months later, I don't see the value of going to college. I don't know what I want to do in my life, and I don't know what college can do to help me find answers.

At this point, I'm spending all the money my parents had saved throughout their lives.

So I decided to drop out of school, and I believe it was a good decision. At the time, I was somewhat unsure about doing this, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

From the moment I dropped out of school, I didn't have to take the required courses I wasn't interested in; I could attend the ones that seemed interesting.

Things weren't as good as they were at that time.

I don't have a dorm room, so I can only sleep on the floor of my friend's room; I recycle Coke bottles for 5 cents to buy something to eat; every Sunday night, I always walk seven miles through the city to the Hare Krishna (Hare Krishna) chapel and eat a big meal once a week.

I love that. Most of what I did with curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless.

Let me give you an example:

At that time, the calligraphy classes offered by Reed College were probably the best in the US.

The characters on all the posters and drawer labels on the campus are beautifully written.

Since I dropped out of school and didn't need to take a regular course, I decided to take a calligraphy course and learn how to write good handwriting.

I learned about serif (serif) and san serif (non-serif) fonts, learned how to adjust spacing for different letter combinations, and understood why letterpress printing is amazing.

The calligraphy class is really wonderful. It's historic and artistic subtlety that cannot be captured by science. I think it's extremely interesting.

I never thought the things I learned would make any difference in my life, but ten years later, when we designed the first Macintosh computer, everything I learned in calligraphy lessons came to my mind. We incorporated it all into the design of Mac computers.

This is the first computer ever to have a beautiful font layout.

If I hadn't attended that course in college, Mac computers wouldn't have such rich fonts or such proper font spacing. Also, if Windows computers hadn't copied Macs, then PCs probably wouldn't have such beautiful fonts.

Of course, when I was in college, it was impossible to pre-string these bits and pieces together, but looking back ten years later, it was very clear.

You can't see the future bits and pieces of the present; you can only see the ins and outs when you look back.

So you have to believeWhat you've learned now will more or less be connected together in the future. You have to trust something, whether it's your instincts, your destiny, your life, or your karma.This practice has never let me down, and it has made a difference in my whole life.

02. My second story is about “love and gain and loss”

I'm lucky because I discovered what I love to do early on. I started Apple in my parents' garage with Steve Wozniak (Steve Wozniak) when I was 20.

We worked very hard. Ten years later, Apple grew from just the two of us in the garage to a company with more than 4,000 employees and a market capitalization of 2 billion US dollars.

In our ninth year, we just released our best product — the Macintosh computer, and I just turned 30, and then I got fired.

How can you get fired from the company you founded?

That's right, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and everything went smoothly during the first year.

But then our views on the future began to diverge, and in the end we got into a fight. At this point, our board of directors took his side.

As a result, I left when I was 30, and it became known to everyone. The loss of the focus of my entire adult life was a devastating blow to me.

For a few months, I really didn't know what to do. I think I let down my forefathers in the business world—I lost the baton that came to me.

I went to see David Packard (David Packard) and Bob Noyce (Bob Noyce) to try to apologize for messing things up.

This failure made everyone aware of it, and I even thought about fleeing Silicon Valley.

But gradually I began to have a clear idea - I still love everything I've done. What happened to Apple didn't change that in the slightest. I've been evicted, but I still love my career. So I decided to start over.

I didn't realize it at the time, but later it turned out that getting fired by Apple was the best thing that happened to me.

I let go of the burden of my achievements and replaced it with the ease of starting a new business and exploring the future. It took me lightly and entered one of the most creative periods of my life.

Over the next five years, I founded NeXT and Pixar (Pixar), and I fell in love with an amazing woman who later became my wife.

Pixar produced the world's first computer-generated animated film, “Toy Story,” which is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

Next, the peak turned. Apple bought NeXT at a special opportunity, and I went back to Apple. The technology we developed at NeXT was the core technology that brought Apple back to life now.

Also, Laurence and I share a happy family.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

It's a bitter pill, but I think it's good for patients.

There are times when life takes the lead in your favor, but don't lose faith.

I believe that the only thing that keeps me moving forward is that I love everything I do. You must find what you love. This is true for a loved one, and the same is true for work.

Your job will take up most of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you think is great. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven't found something you love to do, keep looking. Don't stop.

Use all of your mind and body to search, and when you find it, you'll be aware. And, like any good thing, it lasts forever. So keep searching and don't give up. Don't give up halfway.

03. My third story is about “death”

When I was 17, I read a proverb that was almost like this:“If you live every day as the last day of your life, you'll feel at ease.”

I was deeply impressed by this sentence. For the 33 years since then, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:“If today were the last day of my life, would I still do what I'm about to do today?”

When the answer was “no” many times in a row, I knew I needed to make some changes.

“Remember you'll die” is the most important motto I've ever heard, and it helped me make the most important decisions in my life.

Because, almost everything — including all the expectations of the outside world, all the pride, all the fear of embarrassment or failure — comes to nothing in the face of death, leaving behind something that really matters.

Sometimes you think you might be losing something, and “remember you're going to die” is the best way I know to escape this mindset.

If life doesn't bring it, death doesn't bring it, there's no reason not to do whatever you want.

I was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago. I had a scan at 7:30 that morning, and the results clearly showed that I had a tumour in my pancreas.

I didn't even know what the pancreas was at the time. The doctors told me that it was almost certain that it was an incurable cancer, and my life expectancy was estimated to be three to six months away.

The doctors recommended that I go home and finish everything. This is doctors' jargon, meaning to prepare for the future.

This means that in the next few months, you have to say what you want to say to your kids for the next ten years ahead of time, which means you have to make sure everything is arranged so that your family can have the best time in the future. It also means you have to say goodbye to this world.

This diagnosis haunted my mind all day long. That night, I had a biopsy exam: they stuck an endoscope into my throat, passed through my stomach all the way into my intestines, and used a probe into my pancreas to get some tissue cells.

I was anesthetized at the time, and my wife who was there told me that the doctors screamed after putting these cells under a microscope because they discovered that it was a very rare pancreatic cancer that could be cured through surgery.

I had surgery later and I'm recovering now.

This is the most recent time I've died, and I hope it will also be my closest to death for decades to come.

Having experienced this, death is no longer just an abstract concept for me, so I can tell you more with confidence what I think about death:

No one wants to die; even if people want to go to heaven, they won't die to go there, but death is our common end, and no one has ever escaped it.

And that was predestined, becauseDeath is probably one of life's best inventions. It is the agent of life change. It erases old age and paves the way for new generations.

You are a new generation now, but one day soon, you will gradually become old and removed from the stage of your life. I'm sorry to be exaggerating, but it's true.

Your time is limited, don't waste it living in someone else's life.Don't be bound by dogma; to blindly follow dogma is to live in the results of other people's thoughts. Don't let other people's different opinions weigh over your own inner voice.

Most importantly,Be brave enough to follow your heart and instincts; they actually already know what kind of person you want to beOther than that, everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was a wonderful publication called “Whole Earth Catalog” (Whole Earth Catalog), which was considered one of the books of the Bible by our generation.

It was founded by Stewart Brand (Stewart Brand) in Menlo Park (Menlo Park), not far from here. He brought poetry to the magazine and brought it to life.

It was in the late 1960s, and this publication was made entirely of typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It's a bit like the paperback version of Google, but 35 years before Google came out.

This is idealism, full of novel tools and great ideas.

Stewart and his team published several issues of the Global Overview before publishing a discontinued issue.

It was the mid-1970s, and I'm your age. On the back cover of the last issue is a picture of a country road early in the morning, the kind of country road you would go through when you go hiking.

Below the picture is a line of text:Asking for knowledge is like hunger, humility is like foolishness. It was their handwritten farewell message, and that's what I always expected of myself.

And now, as you graduate and are about to embark on a new life, I wish you the same.

Asking for knowledge is like being hungry; being humble is foolish. Thank you all.

Editor/jayden