'You've got to find what
you love,' Jobs says
Stanford Report, June 14,
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 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 10 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
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
backward 10 years later.
Again, you can't
connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
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 4,000 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 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, 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
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 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 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 1960s, 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.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Structure of the Lead：
WHO: Steve Jobs
WHEN: June 12, 2005
WHAT: make a speech
WHY: He was only going to do one commencement speech," says Laurene Powell Jobs, "and if it was going to be anywhere it was going to be Stanford."
WHERE: Stanford University
HOW: didn't mention
Keywords:
1.
relent: 變溫和、動憐憫之心
2.
calligraphy: 書法
3.
typography: 印刷術
4.
proportionally: 成比例地
5.
diverge: 分岐
6.
entrepreneurs: 企業家
7.
renaissance: 復興、復活
8.
external: 外部
9.
pancreas: 胰腺
10.
biopsy: 切片檢查法
11.
endoscope: 內診鏡
12.
intestine: 腸
13.
sedated: 鎮靜的
14.
dogma: 教理
15.
intuition: 直覺
16.
hitchhiking: 搭順風車
