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 adoptedby 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 decidedat 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 thatmy 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 whenmy 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 itwould 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 takingthe 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 foodwith, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good mela 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 labels 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 type faces,about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about whatmakes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artisticallysubtle in a way that science can’t capture, andI found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practicalapplication in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designingthe 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 type faces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’slikely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have Nevers dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderfultypography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect thedots 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 ithas made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to doearly in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garagewhen 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 4,000employees. We had just released our finest creation — theMacintosh — 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 thingswent 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 sidedwith him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adultlife was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a fewmonths. I felt that I had let the previous generationof entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce andtried 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 — Istill loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changedthat 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 outthat 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 creativeperiods of my life. During the next five years, I started a companynamed NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who wouldbecome my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world’s firstcomputer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studioin 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’scurrent renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful familytogether. I’m pretty sure none of this would havehappened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guessthe patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with abrick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that keptme 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 isfor your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part ofyour 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’llknow when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it justgets 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 somethinglike: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainlybe 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: “Iftoday 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 themost important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all externalexpectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall awayin the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is thebest 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 itclearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than threeto six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairsin order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everythingyou 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 theystuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needleinto 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 becauseit 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 facingdeath, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say thisto you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectualconcept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’twant 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 Deathis very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for thenew. Right now the new is you, but someday nottoo 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 itliving someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is livingwith the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinionsdrown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to followyour heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly wantto become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publicationcalled The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brandnot far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personalcomputers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroidcameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form,35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat toolsand 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 finalissue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue wasa photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhikingon if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signedoff. 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.
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